Eunhyuk whirled around to see Donghae’s grim face, lips set in a firm line of determination. Something like fear – or was it anger? Shock? – welled up inside him, and he whispered hoarsely, “What did you do?”

Lips pulling up into a weak smile, as everything around them began to shake and shatter, Donghae stated, “You really never should have taught me about all those loopholes.”

“Donghae, what did you do?” Eunhyuk demanded, hands shooting out to grab hold of one of the waiting chairs as the room rocked and flung him sideways, “I didn’t say all those things to you if – it doesn’t matter! Tell me what’s going on!”

“Why do you care anyways?” Donghae fired back, stepping backwards as the corridor began to lengthen. Eunhyuk cursed, feet sliding out underneath him as the corridor behind him began to shatter into a thousand glittering pieces. “I thought we weren’t friends, because you don’t give a about other people!”

“Where did you put that memory?” Eunhyuk yelled, trying to ignore Donghae’s words. He pushed himself to his feet and beginning to run. Far ahead, he saw Donghae clutching his memory-self’s wrist, tugging him away from where he was supposed to be. He'd removed the memory and put it somewhere else - he'd taken it out and Eunhyuk'd never even suspected. Past-Eunhyuk glanced back and looked right at him, staring at him with such sadness and confusion that he felt like the wind had been knocked right out of his body.

Eunhyuk chased after them. He passed by Leeteuk, Sungmin, Jessica, staring at him with blank faces as the corridor spun under his feet. Suddenly he was running on the ceiling, the walls, up and down and left and right becoming meaningless as he sprinted down the endless pathways, screaming at Donghae to stop. His head spun, grabbing light fixtures and chairs and door knobs to push himself off as he chased the rapidly disappearing pair. His feet slid out, body slamming into walls with each sickening spin. The corridor stretched on infinitely, growing paper-thin as walls, ceiling and floor squeezed towards him and threw him around like a scrap of cloth in a washing machine. The memory was collapsing.

Then the tiles under his feet shattered, and Eunhyuk fell –    

*

He was standing in a bedroom the size of a closet, floor covered in dirty laundry, notebooks, and more junk than Eunhyuk could care to categorize. The mess made him scowl. The sudden halt sent him stumbling, and he slammed down hard, stomach-first, onto the thin bed. Donghae – teenage, face dotted with pimples, hair a mess, glossy magazine spread of Lee Hyori in a bikini in hands – stopped reaching for his belt buckle as his bedroom door opened. “Mum! Knock first!” he screamed in humiliation, voice cracking on the word.

“Oh my God, were you going to – I did not need to see this!” Eunhyuk cried, jerking away from the cheap Batman bedsheets in horror. “Why am I even here?”

Teenage-Donghae stared at him curiously for a moment, and then said, directly to him, “Because the memory’s somewhere it’s not supposed to be. Somewhere you’d never think to look. Oh wait, should I be telling you that? .”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t have picked your teenage days as a starter,” Eunhyuk muttered to himself. Then it twigged that a memory was interacting with him. He stumbled backwards, pointing a shaking finger at teenage-Donghae. He half-expected blood to start pouring out of its eyes or something, because this was not right, or normal, and oh dear God, why did Donghae do this to him? “That’s not supposed to happen!”

The teenager shrugged. “It’s my head, remember? You taught me that if I tried hard enough – and if you didn’t try to stop me – I could make anything happen.”

“I feel like I just created Frankenstein’s monster – just give the memory back, Lee Donghae!” Eunhyuk yelled, seizing the teenage-Donghae by the shoulders. “Why are you even doing this? You wanted this erased! All of you did! You signed the forms! You knew what you were getting yourselves into - you were just too selfish to think about the consequences!”

“I changed my mind!” he cried, “I don’t want this anymore! Please just let me keep this one!”

Eunhyuk’s mind went utterly blank. “What?” he managed, but then the teenage-Donghae flickered and disappeared, and everything was tearing apart –

*

A small kitchen space, the floor tiles decorated with garish green-and-yellow flowers. Unsteadily, Eunhyuk glanced around, seeing the cheap wooden table covered with a plastic tablecloth of little red cherries, and a variety of cutlery and plates. On the road outside, he could hear cars passing by - they could have been in any apartment block in Korea. Two women were standing by the stove, talking to each other. One wore a tight black dress, dyed brown hair done up with far too much hairspray, that told Eunhyuk that he’d gone pretty far into the past. She held a cigarette in one hand. The other appeared a stereotypical Korean housewife, dark hair in a bun, wearing a pink apron over a dowdy floral dress. She looked tired. From their similar features, he guessed they were Donghae’s mother and aunt.

But where was Donghae?

Eunhyuk’s stomach churned; he didn’t like this, he was beginning to see Hyoyeon and Mrs Kwon in the faces of all the women around him, he wasn’t supposed to care, and for the love of God, could all those stupid voices whispering that about answers to what was happening and what he needed to do, that sounded like everyone he’d ever known, just shut up already because this was seriously not the time to demand he have an epiphany?

“He’s not doing well in kindergarten,” Donghae’s mother was saying, as she washed a bowlful of rice. “The teachers are saying maybe he needs to be taken out and put in specialized classes…”

“Oh, don’t tell me you believe in all that special learner rubbish,” her sister responded, the Seoul accent clinging to her speech sounding tacked-on to fool others that she was higher up in the pecking order than she really was. “It’s a waste of money, is what it is. So the boy gets held back a year. So what? You’ve got to focus on your husband’s treatment.”

There were faint murmurings from under the kitchen table, someone calling for their mother. Wordlessly, Eunhyuk walked over and lifted the tablecloth, moving one of the chairs aside. A chubby-cheeked four-year-old in a little pair of blue overalls blinked back at him with droopy, perplexed eyes. Then the toddler said, in adult Donghae’s voice, “I can’t believe I remember this! The feeling’s like this was only yesterday. I kept wanting my mum to look over at me…”

Eunhyuk covered his face with his sweater paws. “I am way too young to have this many surreal experiences.”

“She never did though,” Donghae continued, on his fingers, “I just wanted her to play with me. Mum, pay attention to me for just one second; I swear I’m not a burden! Why didn’t she?”

Now Eunhyuk understood why he’d ended up in these memories – Donghae was searching frantically for memories that he knew had no connection to Minho or Eunhyuk, somewhere they wouldn’t think to look because they were too personal or embarrassing or painful to Donghae. Emotional memories always jumped to the foreground first, and they were often the ones people remembere with the greatest clarity, even if they weren't always accurate – that was why surgeons favoured erasing them.

Donghae was literally going through all sorts of things he probably never wished to dredge up again, just to hide a memory of Eunhyuk. The thought left him reeling, and he gripped the table top for a second. No. Be a professional. Be the guy with the insincere smile and the meaningless pleasantries and the distant words – Donghae was not his friend. He couldn’t allow someone to get under his skin again.

It was just nice –

“It’s not!” he snarled, causing Donghae to jump and stare at him. He crouched down and glared at the toddler – at Donghae – at whatever the hell was going on. His head hurt. “Look, Donghae,” he said through his teeth, “You have to get those memories erased, or else the entire process is going to be null and void, do you understand me? You will remember what you did to Minho. You will remember telling him to go to hell –”

“Then I guess I’m just going to have to live with that,” Donghae hissed back, tears in his large, watery child’s eyes.

For a second, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Why?” he pleaded, throat closing around the word, “Why do you want to keep that memory of me? You don’t even know me!”

“I’ve known you for four days!” Donghae threw back at his face, “You know practically my entire life story! I know yours! Why won’t you just admit –”

“Because it isn’t true!” Eunhyuk cried back, not even certain what Donghae was trying to get him to admit, but forcing himself to deny everything. So maybe he was just as bad as the rest of them – maybe he was out to lie to himself about what was going through his head. It didn’t make an ounce of difference. The fact was that he and Donghae were strangers who’d thought they’d bonded through unlikely and unreal circumstances – it was just situational. It was not friendship.

Tomorrow, life would return to what it had once been. He would lie on his bed at home, staring at the ceiling, listening to the playlist his sister had downloaded for him years ago. Donghae would give up in the end. They always did, even those that tried to fight back. It never meant enough to them.

Donghae glared at him, a disturbing look on a child’s face. “You still don’t get it.”

Water from the kitchen sink overflowed through the apartment’s kitchen, and Eunhyuk was swept away –

*

The world had gone perfectly, absurdly flat. His feet slid out from under him, and Eunhyuk’s tailbone hit the ground with a thump. Ice. Cold bit into his skin, his sweater wasn’t thick enough, and his pawed hands scrabbled at the rough surface of the blue-white world. Everything was surprisingly bright; the moon was huge overhead. A row of trees seemed to observe him from afar – quiet, cold skeletons. Gasping out, breath coming in white puffs of smoke, Eunhyuk tried to stand.

He heard something crack beneath him.

Ahead of him was a couple – Donghae, in a dark coat with shiny buttons, and a girl with dyed blue hair cut asymmetrically under a beanie, his arm around her waist as she shrieked. Cracks were spider-webbing across the ice under her high-heeled boots. They were all standing on the surface of a frozen lake. “Donghae, the ice is breaking!”

“We need to get down – don’t stand up, Dara!” he responded, voice shrill, pushing her forcefully towards the ice. Eunhyuk could practically taste their fear in the air: what had started out as a romantic evening had turned into this life-or-death moment. Searching desperately for a way to survive, afraid of the water below and the end it would bring. Donghae's face was pale, and he bit his lip so hard, Eunhyuk saw a little bubble of blood. 

“I don’t want to die, I don't want to die,” Dara whispered frantically, wrapping her hands around Donghae’s with a vice-like grip. “Donghae, are we going to die?”

“I’m right here, okay?” Donghae insisted, clasping her tight, “I’ll follow you, no matter what happens.”

The tears on Dara’s face were frozen. The pale, slender girl’s face was contorted horribly. She rasped out suddenly, “But what if we go to different places?”

Confusion slid across Donghae’s face for a split second, overtaking his fear. “Why would you say that?”

“I’m cheating on you with Jiyong,” Dara whispered hysterically, “I mean, we’re going to die. What’s the point in hiding it now? I love you. I’m so sorry.”

Pain flashed across Donghae’s face, greater than even the thought of death and what came after. Dara let go of his hands. “W-what?” he stuttered. Eunhyuk reached forward with a hand, unthinkingly – what if that had been Hyo? Why was no one there to tell me it was okay? What did I do wrong? – unwilling to see Donghae look so utterly wretched, so betrayed, because no one deserved to feel like that, no one deserved to hold someone’s hands only to find out that it’d all been a lie, and then Donghae looked right at him and said, “But it wasn’t all fake.”

Eunhyuk froze in place, shocked. The sickening crunch of ice beneath his feet grew louder. A series of cracking sounds, like gunshots – multiple fissure hacking apart the blue-white world.

Cold shot through his body, as if ice water had suddenly been injected into his veins and poured into his skull. The shock of plummeting down, down, down into a world without air; he gasped for oxygen and inhaled icy water, lungs feeling like they were crushed in a black hole –

*

Head bursting out from beneath the water, Eunhyuk in deep, greedy gulps of air, heart jackhammering in his chest. He’d been drowning, he’d been dying – he was sitting in a bathtub, utterly drenched, dark hair plastered to his forehead, clothes translucent and hanging off his thin frame. Head spinning in fear and confusion, Eunhyuk dragged himself out of the tepid bath water, trembling as his cold fingers clutched onto the blue-tiled bathroom walls for support. The cheap plastic clownfish-print curtain seemed to laugh at his state.

“Leave me alone!”

A teenage boy, small, skinny, dark hair falling over his eyes, curled into himself beside the bathroom sink. It took Eunhyuk a heartbeat to realise that it was Donghae, far frailer and unhappier than he’d ever seen him. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, dressed in a tank-top and shorts. Sobbing, Donghae pulled his legs closer to himself. And then Eunhyuk saw what was in Donghae’s hands, eyes widening in horror, he leapt forward, jerking Donghae’s wrist…

The razor blade hit the tiles with an audible clink.

Donghae stared up at him, a confused and bitter teenager, and then he said, bewildered, “This is a memory. What are you trying to stop something that isn’t real?”

Hand still enclosed around Donghae’s wrist, Eunhyuk stared at him, excuses dying in his throat. Hadn’t he told that to himself? There was nothing you could to change what had already happened. You could erase it or pretend it never happened, but these memories we