The light that hit my eyes made me grumble and frown at the sound of my own voice. It sounded as if my throat had been coated with cotton, the sounds being muffled and reduced almost to nothing. But even so, the wince of pain managed to escape my lips when the light hit my eyes.

“Can you hear me, miss?” A gentle voice asked from the right side, to which I could only nod. “That’s good. Do you remember what happened to you, miss?” The voice was heard again after the sound of a pen scribbling down on something hard stopped.

Keeping my eyes closed I saw everything in a flash of light: me meeting Chaelin and getting in her car, her anxious expression when speaking about her boyfriend, her frowning later when we fought and then the terror of the metal bending so that it caged my body, the pain and then nothingness.

A tear slipped down my cheek, drawing the pity of the person inside the room. “It’s alright, miss, you are alright now,” that person assured me, a hand touching my skin for a second long. Whether it touched my hand, my arm or my palm, I couldn’t quite say. “Miss, can you please try look my way?” The voice continued not long after as I was getting acquainted with the ceiling above.

Trying to move my head, I realized for the first time that it was heavier than I recalled. It was probably from all the bandages that could have been wrapped around it. So I had to move slow, with every muscle that flexed bearing a pain equal to a thousand needles piercing my skin. But in the end I did it, I managed to move my head so that I could see the person that had spoken to me earlier. It was a woman dressed in baby blue clothes and a white coat.

“That’s great!” She smiled, checking something on the chart she was holding. “Now, if you could say something it would be awesome, darling.”

I frowned, trying to get over the buzzing inside my head and that of the machines surrounding my head. I actually had a lot of questions to ask. I wanted to know what exactly happened to me, why I couldn’t really feel my body, why it was so hard for me to gather my thoughts, what day it was or if anyone announced my boyfriend that I was in the hospital. But when I opened my mouth, something entirely different came out:

“The… other girl… there was another… girl… how is… the other girl?”

×  ♣ ×

Park Chanyeol was as tall and skinny as I could remember. Only that his face had turned paler and he had purple bangs under his, otherwise, big and sparkling eyes. His lips usually twirled up in a silly smile were now trembling with worry and fear, while it was crystal clear he was having a hard time keeping his hands away from touching me in fear that maybe a wrong move of his could break me to tiny pieces as I was laying there, all surrounded by wires and all sorts of strange machines.

“I thought,” he paused for a second, swallowing hard, “I thought you were going to die,” he whispered, terrified by the sound of his own words in the silence of the ward. “When they called me to announce me, I thought the sky crumbled down upon me, Seon Yul,” he continued, his eyes watery. “And when I got here and they explained to me what happened and what was going on – I thought I lost you, love.”

I stretched my arm a little to take his hand into mine and stop his hand from destroying the metallic edge of the bed. “I’m a fighter, remember?” I could only smile crookly thanks to the pain I felt through every part of my body.