The rain was shattering against the windows, the ground, everywhere it touched. Every minute or so, the air would be split with light, and the crack of lightning would light up the dreary outside for a mere second, and then again the world would be plunged into darkness again. And swiftly running after the lightning would be a boom of thunder, shaking the clouds and rattling in your head, becoming more frequent as the storm drew closer. 

I drew back from the wide windowpane with a sigh. The weather was the same when Mir had disappeared. Four months ago, gone, everything left behind, gone without a trace. This was the first storm since Mir had disappeared, and it was building a pit in my stomach. Something was going to happen, I could feel it. Something was wrong. 

"Byunghee," I heard Seungho shout from the kitchen, and I abandoned the window, walking into the brightly lit room. 

"Neh, hyung?" I asked him, and he turned around. His usual dark circles had grown in the past months, and his shoulders slumped, just a millimeter, but to those who knew him well, it was just another sign of what he had gone through lately. It had been hard on all of us: the endless searches, the calls in the night, and the weight of silence that answered our desperate calles. But he had took it very hard, I know. He's the leader, and leaders are responsible for their members. Seungho blamed himself, but we all did. We all did.

"Could you take out the trash, please?" Maybe, if Mir was here and we were still MBLAQ, I would have argued. I would have said that it's pouring outside, that someone else could do it and I could cook instead of him. But now, I just nodded, feeling cold all over, and took the offered trash bag.

I opened the door, wincing as the sheet of rain washed centimeters from my face, but I pulled on a hood, determined to do this quickly to go back into the warm house. I ran out, the trash bag gripped in my hand, jumping as another bone-rattling echo rung in my head. But I kept running to the trash can and throwing the bag in it. I turned around, feeling the soaking wet water soak into my jeans and jacket, wetting me to the bone. And then, I saw something. Moving slightly, black but not purely like the shadows. I rushed over to it, ignoring my rising fear that something wasn't right. It was a person, curled shivering into a ball on the pavement, completely and utterly alone. I managed to get them to roll over to see the face of the poor victim, when I froze. It was him. It was Mir. His golden locks long and falling past his eyes, dressed in a black sweatshirt that clung to his horribly thin frame like a second skin and ripped jeans, his face bruised. And even with the rain relentlessly pouring down, washing everything away the split second it appeared, I could still see lines of blood tracing his face and neck and every piece of pale skin uncovered.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.