Something like anger welled up inside Eunhyuk as he stared at Donghae’s stricken face, tasting foul on his tongue. Throughout everything, Donghae had made it seem like Minho was perfectly healthy, and all that had occurred was a breakdown of a good friendship. Or maybe that was simply what Eunhyuk had come to believe. Donghae had never confirmed those suspicions. Regardless, it wasn’t like it had been his business to know why the hell Donghae wanted these memories gone.

It didn’t change the fact that he knew Donghae had lied to him when he’d claimed these were just trivial memories. And he felt like taking that very, very personally.  

“What is going on?” he bit out. The area around them was changing, shifting – Donghae’s subconscious was reacting to the confrontation. If he’d been professional about this, he should’ve noticed and done something, but Eunhyuk was past caring. Donghae had lied. The shorter man retreated, raising his hands as though afraid Eunhyuk might hit him. “I’m not going to beat you up, just tell me what’s going on!”

The world around them was shaking. Eunhyuk reached out, found nothing. Ceilings and walls sprouted up around them, boxing them in and slamming shut with a frightening crack. Then everything began to spin. They were thrown off their feet. Eunhyuk crashed into one of the walls, groaning out in pain, feeling bruises ripple across his back. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to sit up. Strands of his hair were floating upwards. Lights dotted the floor. They were lying on the ceiling.

At that thought, both men fell downwards, flopping down heavily on the sofa below. A gasp escaped Eunhyuk’s lips. Donghae let out a similar grunt of pain. Looking up, he saw the front door open, and another Donghae walked in. He was holding a phone to his ear, brow furrowed in confusion. In the other hand he clutched a white plastic bag bulging with groceries. From outside the window, Eunhyuk saw the first few flurries of snow – this was a recent memory, extremely so.   

“Huh? Uh, hold on, Jonghyun, I can’t understand you! I haven’t spoken to Minho since our fight, wait, wait, I’m putting you on speaker,” he was saying. Pulling his phone away, he swiped at the screen.

Another voice, hoarse from tears, poured around the front room of the apartment. “Donghae, Minho was in a car accident.”     

“W-what?” This Donghae went absolutely still. His grip on the bag slackened. It bounced on the wooden floor. A few lonely apples spilt out and rolled beneath the sofa. Eunhyuk’s eyes slowly travelled to his Donghae, who looked like he was going to be sick. His mouth opened and closed, repeating the words this Jonghyun was saying.

“Some guy…some guy was speeding – smashed right into him. He was, was DOA – he must’ve… died on impact, or… when they were bringing him to the hospital. The funeral’s tomorrow. Minho’s dead, Donghae,” Jonghyun choked out, “Minho’s dead.”

The phone fell out of Donghae’s boneless grip. It hit the ground screen first, shattering. He seemed to stare at nothing, hand coming up to cover his mouth as a sob escaped his lips. A painful, keening noise. Body shuddering, he bent over, as soundless tears racked his frame. Then he whirled around, throwing the door open, and sprinted off, not even bothering to lock the door after him.  

Eunhyuk looked over at the real Donghae. He was sitting perfectly still, tears trickling down his cheeks. He looked absolutely gutted. For a moment, the anger left Eunhyuk, and he asked, “How long ago was this?”

Donghae swallowed, rubbing his face with his hands. Taking a deep breath, he tried to collect himself. “A…A month,” he managed. “H-he…he was j-just gone. Just gone.”

“Minho’s dead,” Eunhyuk repeated, pressing his hands against his cheeks. He stared at the ceiling, trying to process this information. As though voicing aloud his thoughts, he continued, “And you’re…you’re erasing him. All the memories where you did something wrong to him, even if he didn’t know it.”

“Yes,” Donghae whispered.

Eunhyuk punched him in the face.

Donghae’s head snapped back sharply. He choked, hand coming up to clasp his rapidly swelling cheek. Gasping, he stared at Eunhyuk’s trembling form. “What the –”

“Your friend is dead, and you’re erasing him!” Eunhyuk snarled, looming over Donghae’s shorter frame. An overwhelming, sickening feeling of pure rage enveloped him, and suddenly Donghae was Ryeowook, Mrs Kwon, Yesung – they never cared – why he did he bother – the dead cat, his dog, his mother, Junsu, Hyoyeon, the unbearable loneliness, everything, everything –

“You couldn’t live with the guilt, could you?” Eunhyuk continued, feeling the world shake around them, “For some reason in that stupid brain of yours, you felt like all the times you screwed him over - that his death was your fault! So you tried to build some kind of perfect world where your friendship was sunshine and rainbows and a cute moral at the end!”

“The last thing I told him was to go to hell!” Donghae shouted back, hands into the sofa, “He died and I said… I didn’t… I didn’t know how…”

“Sometimes you screw up, okay?” Eunhyuk snapped, “Sometimes we say stupid to the people we love or we do something dumb or we them over because that’s what life is like! And sometimes they hate us or they leave us or they die and we can’t tell them we’re sorry, but that’s life, okay? And sometimes life is just boring or has bad days – a hell of a lot of bad days – and things go wrong and you know what? You just have to live with that!”

He in a breath as Donghae stared at him in growing consternation. “Christ,” he muttered, running a hand across his face, “Every day, every goddamned day, I have to make people’s white-picket-fence dreams come true. I have to meet all the Ryeowook’s and Yesung’s of the world. Who can’t stand the fact that their lives aren’t perfect and keep coming back to slice off more and more! All you guys who don’t realise – maybe your life’s not broken. Maybe it’s just not made the way you want it to!”

“I’m not trying to build a perfect world!”

“You’re trying to create a reality of your friend where you never did anything bad to them,” Eunhyuk stated through his teeth, “You think real life is like that? You think bad things don’t happen? Grow up! I’m sorry if your life wasn’t great but you’re all idiots trying to fool yourself into thinking otherwise!”  

“Okay, I know you’re upset…” Donghae began, lifting his hands up cautiously.

Eunhyuk sneered. “Gee, what clued you in?”

“But…you’re kind of taking this more personally than you should,” Donghae finished, leaning very far away from him.

Eyes narrowing, Eunhyuk’s voice grew dangerously soft. “Than I should?” he asked, stepping towards Donghae and grabbing his arm. He was through. It was too much. It was all too much. Jessica was right - he'd never let it go. “Do you want to know why I’m so upset? You want to know?”

“What are you doing?” Donghae yelled as Eunhyuk began to pull him, the world shattering into brightly coloured sparks around them, intermixing and entwining like the broken pieces of a kaleidoscope. “I’m not doing this!”

“Don’t you get it? This is a neural link-up! I’m here too!” Eunhyuk cried, “And doors…open both ways!”

*

“They’re in Eunhyuk’s mind,” Zhou Mi managed, staring dumbly at the computer monitor as though it had betrayed him somehow. He reached up, and with sweaty palms, took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. But the screen told the same story when he put them back on. His heart was racing, and his stomach lurched. He needed to do something, but he didn't know what. 

“That’s not possible,” Kyuhyun said with a shake of his head. He reached over and adjusted various knobs. Then he examined all the equipment with growing fear. Zhou Mi had by this point reached over and grabbed Kyuhyun’s box of snacks and was making a very sizeable dent in it. “How did he do that? How – are you stress eating?”

“Leave me alone; I’m panicking here,” Zhou Mi muttered through a mouthful of candy bars. “What if they’re stuck there? What if Eunhyuk’s gone mad? What if they die? What if they’re forced to live as mindless vegetables for the rest of their life? What if –”

“If you say ‘what if’ one more time, I’m going to take those candy bars away from you,” Kyuhyun snapped. Zhou Mi clutched them tighter to his chest and clamped his lips shut. “Look, whatever happens… At this point, we have to ask ourselves if we should tell Leeteuk about this, or at least Siwon or Victoria. We’re just technicians. If we try to do something, we might really make them brain dead.”

“I suppose – wait!” Zhou Mi fumbled around Kyuhyun and pushed one of the buttons on his monitor. Sound poured into the room as they looked on at the memory playing across the screen. “Is this the clinic? From two years ago?”

“Why’s Siwon there?” Kyuhyun murmured, sitting back in his chair as they watched, entranced, the memory play out.

*

They were watching the memory, they were in the memory – for Eunhyuk it was like he was living through it all over again. Was this how all his patients felt? Did they cry because they couldn’t bear to go through it twice? Or because they were glad it was gone?

He remembered this morning: cold, crisp, trudging through the slush; he was wearing a brown sweater pulled over his hands, head swimming. All the fluorescent lights of the clinic seemed to blur into long streaks of colour. As he’d walked through the winding corridors, he felt like one of those lab rats trapped into a maze, staggering a little until his side hit on the walls. His forehead pressed against the cool walls, and he breathed in sharply. Stayed there for a long moment. Wanted to crumple into a little ball against it. Told himself to get up and keep going. 

He was aware of how swollen and puffy his face must look, how red his eyes were, the way his hands shook as they typed on his keyboard. He hadn’t wanted to be here, wanted to be at home, but he was forced to go work, trying to pretend everything was okay. Everything was okay. He was okay. He could get through this.

His quarterly performance report – I have worked hard and I think I have tried my best…

The cursor flickered, waiting, the sentence trailing off. 

Nothing else. He stared at the single sentence, fingers unmoving. Dropping his head into his hands, Eunhyuk rubbed his palms over his eyes. Barely any sleep last night – shouldn’t he have gotten over things by now? But yesterday, he’d been awkwardly moving out his belongings from the apartment, and it'd all come crashing back. At first he’d expected the process to be awkward, but they’d spoken so mechanically to each other, as though nothing had ever happened and ever would, dividing things quietly between themselves. For Eunhyuk, it was like seeing her fall out of love with him all over again. “Do you want these?” she’d asked, holding up a stack of DVDs.

“Those are yours. I just bought them for you,” he mumbled, dumping a series of old yearbooks into his box.

“Oh yeah.” He watched her out of the corner of his eyes. She’d stared at them a moment, selected two, and then tossed the rest in a black trash bag. Eunhyuk winced.

Beanie pulled down low over his hair, tucked into his coat, boots clacking on the stairs, he'd walked down the apartment block’s stairs, cardboard boxes in his arms. These he’d glumly stacked into his sister’s car. His sister had just looked at him with an expression of such unbelievable pity.

“Hyukjae, y