The shock on his face is wiped clean and morphed into a serious, almost intimidating look. His once soft orbs are blank and his aura has drastically changed from heart fluttering to heart racing (in a bad, bad way). He chuckles lowly and flips his bangs out of his eyes. ‘Has his hair and eyes been black all this time? I could’ve sworn they were both brown,’ Hera says in her mind, her brows furrowed in confusion. The man extends his hand out to her, a smirk playing on his lips. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. My name is Wang Eun,” he says. Hera’s brows furrow deeper as she stares at his hand.

She had no idea why she wanted to yell at him and accuse him of thinking she was stupid because she’s sure as hell that he is Baekhyun, the demon that keeps appearing in her dreams! The girl sees him wiggling his fingers as if coaxing her to shake his hand. She looks up at him, her eyes widening a little because he looks as if he’s glaring at her. Hera shakes her head slightly. What is she doing? She must seem so rude right now. Despite her confusion, she chuckles nervously and bows her head. Timidly, holds her hand out as well to shake his. “I’m–”

Then she gasps. The moment their hands touch, his fingers turned into slimy black tentacles. She gulps loudly when they wrapped around her entire hand. She shakes in fear. She wants to scream but no sound came out of . The tentacles start to slither up her forearm until it reaches her shoulder. Her head turns away when she feels them starting to crawl further up to her neck. Hera attempts to scream for help but like before, no sound came out of her desperately opened mouth. The slimy black tentacles use that as an advantage to slither into .

She shuts her eyes, tears slipping out of them without her even knowing they had formed. Her whole body feels numb now, paralyzed and she could no longer open her eyes. burns and the taste on her tongue is beyond bitter. She doesn’t feel the tentacles on her anymore though. They seemed to have evaporated into thin air, leaving her skin like smoke.

Her eyes shoot open and she gasps in as much oxygen as she could. She didn’t even notice how much her lungs clenched until then. Her breathing is heavy, her eyes wide with horror. She is no longer in the café. This place didn’t even look like its on earth to begin with.

All she sees is red flames that are as high as buildings. The floor is burning coal and the sky looks like an abyss of darkness. What’s more frightening is seeing a dark shapeless figure having Baekhyun’s neck in its clutches. His mouth is wide open, his soul practically dangling from of it. His head is lulled to the side with his skin pale and cracked. His blank and lifeless eyes are staring at her, making Hera shiver in fear. He doesn’t only look dead to her…

“Oh my god…” she whispers, her hands flying up to her gaping mouth. Her tears form in her eyes again. What is this? Is this another dream? “You wish,” the thing says. Hera drops to her knees all of a sudden. Her hands fly up higher to clutch her hair and opens wide in a silent scream. Her head is drastically throbbing painfully.

“Tell me, are you a ing drug? Why are my demons so drawn to a mere mortal like you?!” the thing yells inside her head. “Especially this useless !” it yells again, shaking Baekhyun’s body like he was some rag doll. Hera feels hot tears streaming down her face when she saw that. She whimpers, writhing at the excruciating pain in her head. Her brain feels like it’s going to explode. She can feel the veins on her temple bulging out. “W-What are you?” she stutters out, finally able to force her voice out.

The dark figure laughs. It’s so loud, so sinister that Hera feels the hairs on her neck stand, her spine tingling in the most unsettling way possible. “I am someone you shouldn’t mess with. I will get my way. Just you wait.” The figure extends another tentacle and grabs Baekhyun’s waist. She sees it bending Baekhyun’s body until she hears an earsplitting crack, his body split into half.

“Baekhyun!”

“Hera, wake up!”

The girl shoots up from the bed, screaming. Her father holds her shoulders to stop her from thrashing while her mother is desperately trying to calm her down. Kangju grips on his mother’s dress, crying seeing her sister like this. She’s sweating bullets, her lips cracked and bleeding. She’s breathing heavily and deeply like she has been drowning all this time.

When she starts to calm down and get back to her senses, she realizes that she isn’t home. She’s in a hospital right now. Her brows furrow. “What happened?” she whispers as she turns to her mother for explanations. “You suddenly fell unconscious at a café, dear. Your friend brought you here and contacted us immediately.”

“Friend?” she repeated suspiciously. As if on cue, a figure stepped inside the room. Hera’s breath hitched. She’s only staring at his shoes but her heart is already raging and her stomach flipping wildly. Slowly, her eyes travel from the man’s shoes up to his face.

Then, her shoulders sag when she finds out that he isn’t who she thought he is. “Hera! Are you feeling any better?” the man says as he walks deeper into the room. The girl only stares at him. She has no idea why he even knows her name. Who is he? Where’s Baekhyun?

The man frowns when she didn’t reply. “She had a nightmare, Jinyoung. We… We don’t know what’s going on,” her father says worriedly. Her brows furrow again. She doesn’t know anyone named Jinyoung. His face isn’t even familiar. How could her mother say he was her friend?

“Noona! What’s going on with you? What happened to your voice? Who were you talking to in your dream?” her little brother suddenly says in between his sobbing. Hera turns to him, her brows in an even tighter knit. What is he talking about? She wanted to ask him that but her mother suddenly shushes the little boy.

She looks up at her husband and the man tips his head to the door. Her mother holds onto her brother and tells him that they have to step out for a while. She looks so nervous as the boy stares up at her with his terrified eyes. “Is noona okay, omma?” she heard him say before the door closed.

Hera is beyond confused right now. She’s having a hard time wrapping her head around all of this. Just what is happening? What was all this about? She looks up at her father for answers but the look in his eyes is distracting. There was pity, pain, sadness, worry. She didn’t understand what those emotions are for.

“Dad, w-what was Kangju talking about?” The man looks away immediately. He takes a deep breath then squeezes her shoulder. She sees him open his mouth to say something but he closes it and shakes his head. “We’ll fix this,” is what he says instead before walking away and leaving.

Hera’s fists ball without her even knowing it. Why won’t they tell her what’s happening? Is it really that bad? What’s wrong with her? “Hera…” Jinyoung calls out softly, reaching over to put a hand on her fist. He rubs circles on it with his thumb in an attempt to soothe her.

The girl retracts her hand right away. “Who the are you?” she snarls. The man frowns at her. “Don’t you remember?” he replied with the same soft tone earlier, reaching out for her other hand. Hera hides her hand away before he could touch it and raises an eyebrow at him.

“Remember what?” She’s glaring at him. She doesn’t even know why she’s acting like this. She’s just… so mad at him. There’s something about this guy that makes her feel uncomfortable. She feels like he’s someone she couldn’t trust, like she has to keep her guard up with him around.

Jinyoung stares at her for a long time then he sighs and closes his eyes in distress. He folds his arms over his chest as he started to open his eyes and search her orbs. “You bumped into me while you were trying to get your phone out of your purse. You didn’t only waste my cup of coffee but you ruined my shirt with it too. You felt guilty so you offered to buy me a new cup of coffee.”

Hera scoffed right after he finished. ‘No ing way! That was Baekhyun. I’m damn sure it was!’ she countered in her mind. Her teeth grit and her eyes seem to narrow again. “Then? What happened? Why’d I end up here?” Jinyoung looks at her with an irritated expression. “Are you deaf? Your mother just told you! You fell unconscious.”

“Why?!” Hera shouted without even meaning to. Jinyoung blinks at her in shock and she does the same. Why is she so hostile? It’s so odd. She shouldn’t be acting like this. “I-I’m sorry–” She’s cut off by his chuckling. His dark, mysterious chuckling that just made her stomach flip in a very unpleasant way.

That low, wicked chuckle slowly turns into laughter, loud laughter. It sounds sinister almost and so is the smirk that’s stretching on his lips, that horrid, horrid smirk that can mess with her mind and make her heart thump uneasily. Hera feels the hairs on her neck stand, goosebumps running up her arms. This felt so familiar. Hera’s gulps nervously. She feels like she knows what’ll happen next. And she does…

Jinyoung flips his bangs, his eyes pitch black and empty. He extends his hand out to her, taunting her as he wiggles his fingers. Hera starts screaming. The IV line she’s attached to gets ripped off her skin and the stand topples forward when she lunged forward to attack the man.

Her hand’s tightly wrap around his neck in a desperate effort to strangle him. “ing bastard! What are you really, huh?! Do I have to kill you for you to leave me alone?!” Jinyoung chokes and coughs. Tears start to rim his eyes as he holds onto Hera’s wrist to try and pry her hands off of him. She screams again, tightening her grip even more with every intention to end the man’s life.

But then the door bursts open. Her parents start running in along with a doctor and a nurse.They frantically grabbed Hera and pulled Jinyoung away from her. Things start to move in slow motion. She’s screaming at them, thrashing and crying at the same time. She remembered pleading them to get Jinyoung out of the ing room. Her breathing wore thin as if she was drowning when she saw him staring at her with that crazy smirk, his eyes completely black and his shoulders shaking with laughter.

Don’t they see him? That look on his stupid face?! He’s toying with the girl, playing with her sanity. Slowly, gradually, her vision starts to blur. She can see black creeping up the edges of her sight.  It’s consuming all she could see. Her vision zeros in on Jinyoung’s stupid face until the darkness turns the light into only a spec and she passes out.

It has been about a month since that incident happened. Hera is beyond pissed that her parents think she’s ing mental. She has therapies every week and honestly, she didn’t find them necessary. She’s fine. There is nothing wrong with her at all.

Her life is back to normal. In fact, it’s so normal it’s almost unsettling. There is always fear at the pit of her stomach. She feels as if there’s something worse coming for her, like that stupid black figure is just waiting. Waiting for the right time to strike and ruin everything for her, destroy her.

Some nights, she wakes up completely drenched in her sweat and she had no idea why. She didn’t remember any dreams or nightmares. There are none, not of that thing, not of Jinyoung and not of Baekhyun either. It’s a little sad. Her dreams are the only way she could see him but now a days, she didn’t mind as much because he seems to appear in person. It was better than in dreams, Hera thinks.

She sees him almost everywhere. During lecture when she’s writing notes, she thought he saw him in the back, staring at her then someone blocks her view for a millisecond and when they’re gone, so was he.

When she takes her brother to school sometimes, she either sees him sitting by the window in that café they went to or inside one of the parked cars along the sidewalk. When she’s running errands, he sometimes falls in step with her and she’d gasp. She’d turn to him, calling his name out, only to find out that it was an entirely different person.

Everywhere. The girl almost sees him everywhere. The only place she probably hasn’t seen him yet is at home which is weird. Isn’t he supposed to appear here the most? But no, Hera didn’t want to delve into this. Maybe she’s just imagining him. He can’t really be around. He was dead… She saw it happen with her own two eyes but then again… that may have been a dream too. What if there was no “dark figure” in first place? Hera felt so conflicted. She truly had no idea anymore and the more her thoughts swallowed her up, the more she became numb and unaffected by them.

She sees Baekhyun buying ing shampoo while she just so happens to be in small