When I woke up, the first thing that popped into my head was Ryeowook.  I stared at the ceiling above me and blinked a few times, wondering how he was doing.  Was he out of the ER now?  Surely he wasn’t in critical condition anymore.  What ward was he in?  Maybe if he was doing better, I could convince Sunny to let me visit--

Sunny.  And Tzuyu and Yeri.

A jumble of images raced before my eyes and I tensed up in fear, remembering what I had done the last time I had been conscious.  I suddenly felt very nauseous.  Swallowing hard, I tried my best to sit up.  As I brought my hand up to my head in an effort to quell the sudden rush of dizziness that came over me, I realized that my hands were loosely cuffed to the sides of the bed I was in.

Even though I was no longer trying to move my head, my head began to spin faster and faster.  My vision was blurry now, and white spots kept appearing out of nowhere.  The urge to vomit grew stronger.

“I--,” I managed before I slumped back to a lying position.  My head lolled off to the side and I blinked a few times, trying to process where I was.  All I could see was white.

“Let me-- let me out, I didn’t mean--”  I groaned out before I felt myself blacking out again.  Through my closing eyelids, I saw the door open to reveal two nurses dressed in the same, blinding shade of white.

I had no idea how much time passed before I woke up again.  This time, within a minute after I opened my eyes and looked around the hospital room, a nurse appeared in the doorway before I had the chance to try and sit up.  Her face was chalk-white to match the walls and floors, and her lips were a bright red.  She whipped out a clipboard and stood at the foot of my bed.  For the first time, I noticed the two machines I was hooked up to.  I had idea what either of them were.  I watched the nurse-- her nametag read Suzy-- glance at them and take readings.  After she finished that, she looked up and pursed her lips together as her large eyes swept up and down my entire body.  I stared back with equally wide eyes as this went on for about two minutes.  It was making me very uncomfortable.

“Uh, e-excuse me?”  I plucked up the courage to ask at last.  “Where am-- mmph!”

Suzy had pulled a digital thermometer out of the pocket of her nurse’s uniform and stuck it under my tongue in a flash.  She held it there for a few minutes so the device could get my temperature, and in the meantime, she continued to survey me up and down, looking straight into my eyes, holding eye contact for several long seconds before turning away to write down her observations.

I felt like a rat in a science lab.  Luckily for me, Suzy left the room a minute later without uttering a single word.  A sigh of relief was just escaping my lips when another man walked in.  From the authoritative aura he gave off and the confidence in his stride, I assumed that he was someone important on staff.

“Hello there,” he said in a bright voice as he pulled up a chair and sat down.  He too was holding a clipboard and several file folders in his hands.  As he sat, I noticed how the flimsy plastic chair sank a little under his weight.  He was a stocky man with a wide build, and even though his body was clothed by a long white coat and a shirt and tie underneath, I could practically see the muscles of his arms rippling every time he moved.

He was big and clearly very strong, and just looking at him was starting to make me panic.  Did they purposely get me psychiatrist who was big and strong so he could tackle and restrain me if they thought I was going to do something again?  My eyes darted back in forth in fear and I felt my heart rate beginning to speed up.

“Sungmin-ssi?  Sungmin-ssi?”  I heard faintly.  My head jerked up as I met the doctor’s eyes again.  I struggled to control my breathing before it got too out of hand.

Pull yourself together, control it.  Calm the down.  I blinked rapidly and tried to stop and think.

“Sungmin-ssi, my name is Kangin, and I’m going to be your psychiatrist during your stay in the violent ward.  It’s a pleasure to meet you.”  He spoke slowly and deliberately.

Not in front of the psychiatrists.  Not in front of him, especially him.  Don’t up, if you up, then he’ll--

“Sungmin-ssi?  Are you with me here?”

DON’T YOU DARE UP YOU LITTLE--

Come on, what was that thing they taught you a while back?  Was it Ryeowook or Sunny, or someone else?  But that doesn’t matter, now’s not the time.  Let’s go.  List five things you can see: Kangin, hospital room, walls, floor, handcuffs.  I breathed out.

LIst four things you can touch: bed, blankets, needle in my arm, handcuffs.

“Sungmin-ssi.”  Kangin’s tone of voice had changed, and so had his facial expression.  He sounded concerned now, but also slightly annoyed.  “Are you alright?  Do you need anything?”  He spoke even more slowly than he had before.

Three things you can hear: Kangin, heartbeat, rattling handcuffs.  I breathed out again.

“Can you please get these off of me?”  I asked, the desperation in my voice showing a little more than I had intended.  To my dismay, Kangin shook his head.

“I can’t do that yet, I’m sorry.”

“Why?  I’m not going to do anything.  I promise I won’t.”

“And I’m sure you won’t,” Kangin said in what was supposed to be a reassuring voice, but it didn’t have any calming effects on me whatsoever.  In any case, it made me even more nervous.  “But there’s certain risks we can’t afford to take.”

“I promise I’m not dan--”

“Sungmin-ssi.”  Kangin’s voice was quiet.  “These are regulations that apply to everyone in the violent ward, regardless of what they’ve done.  As a psychiatrist here, I’m required to uphold those regulations whether I like it or not.  I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.  We’ll take those off after you get through your first day here without any incidents.”

My breathing had subsided and I was left with a hollow feeling in my chest.  I hung my head and looked away from Kangin, resigned.  Kangin shifted his weight on the chair and cleared his throat.

“So, how are you?”

“I’m doing okay,” I mumbled out without really thinking about the answer.  Of course I wasn’t okay.

“Before we begin, do you have any questions for me?  Do you know where you are and why you’re here?”

I shook my head dumbly.  I forced myself to look up because I knew from previous experience that the psychiatrists and social workers didn’t like it when patients spoke without making eye contact.  Either they were hiding something or something was wrong with them.

“That’s funny.”  Kangin scratched his head and readjusted his framed black glasses.  “I thought Suzy would have said something.  Oh well, I guess she was just a bit nervous.  But that doesn’t matter.  You’re on the seventh floor of Incheon Psychiatric, also known as the violent ward as I previously mentioned.  You arrived here last night after having… assaulted Intern Chou and Intern Kim.  Sunny, your regular psychiatrist sedated you, and we brought you here.  You woke up early this morning, but fell back unconscious.  It’s been ten minutes since you woke up for the second time and it is currently…”  He squinted at the clock on the wall.  “Fifteen minutes before twelve.  Say, seeing as it’s so close to lunch and you skipped breakfast this morning, what do you say we bring your lunch in right now?  Are you hungry?”

I was feeling too sick and too worried to be hungry, but I shrugged and went along with it.

“I guess.”

“How meals work here in the violent ward is we bring your food to you.  A lot of our patients on this floor are high-risk patients, and we don’t do as many group activities as you might be used to in the general psych ward.  There’s still group activities, just not as many.  Eating isn’t a group activity in this case.”

“Okay.”  I hated that term.  The violent ward.  I wasn’t a violent person.  Yes, I knew that I had kicked and punched Yeri and almost ripped out Tzuyu’s throat.  But I wasn’t a violent person.  I wasn’t a criminal.  I wasn’t…

“I’ll have a nurse bring a meal over, and I’ll drop by after lunch and then we’ll start.  Sounds good?  I think it’s better if we talk on full stomachs.  After all, you can’t function right when you’re hungry.”  Kangin stood up, bowed to me, and left the room.  He smiled happily as he walked out and closed the door.

I wasn’t sure if I could ‘function right’ after lunch.  I wasn’t sure whether I would ‘function right’ ever again.

Going through therapy in the violent ward was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.  I was in no place to judge anyone’s sanity or anything about them for the matter, and doing so was very hypocritical of me.  Whenever I looked at the patients in my ward, however, I truly felt like I was in the type of mental asylums they pictured in movies.  There was an orange-haired boy named Yoongi.  He told me the day I first met him that he had been admitted because he had nearly set his school and one of his teachers on fire.  After telling me the story, he flashed me a terrifying-looking smile.  Maybe it was the wild look in his eyes, but I felt like it was also the way his teeth were sharpened to tiny points.  There was Leo, a tall boy who never smiled and always looked like he wanted to murder someone.  There was also a child named Sulli who looked like a doll-- a doll with with dark circles under her big eyes and blood-colored lipstick smothered all over .  At first I wondered someone as young as her could end up in this ward, but the reason why became clear to me after she cheerfully struck up a conversation with me during our first group therapy session.  She said whatever was on her mind and did whatever the she wanted to, regardless of what everyone around her thought.

I remember very clearly the first thing she said to me after she introduced herself:  “Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought about what Hwasa’s thighs would taste like after I cook them?”  Hwasa was one of our social workers.  “They’re so thick and meaty and they look so good that I would love to rip her legs off and grill them or fry them and smother them in ketchup and eat them up.  Ketchup looks a lot like blood, don’t you think?  On a second thought, maybe I should just eat her legs raw.  After all, humans started out as wild animals, right?  We ate raw meat and stuff instead of cooking it.  Yep, that would be really interesting.  Sometimes, I wonder what raw meat tastes like.  Don’t you ever think about what it’s like to eat something that’s still bleeding?”  She giggled loudly as she raised the rag doll she was holding and pretended to bite off its leg.  I could only stare at her in shock.  Normally, I tried my best not to judge people or reinforce the stereotypes of mental hospitals.  But I had heard enough to confirm that the ten-year-old girl really was insane.  And if little Sulli was this bad… I didn’t even want to think about the others.  After that conversation with Sulli, I was too afraid to talk to anyone there.

That was my second day in the violent ward, a little bit before lunch.  Like the first day, I had no appetite at all, partially because we had chicken legs that day and I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sulli had said about Hwasa and her legs.  For the rest of that day, and the days that followed, I wanted nothing more than to throw up my insides.

I missed my old ward and everyone in it.  Everything about this one was absolutely horrible.  Every time I talked to the psychiatrists or other patients, I felt panic rising and tears welling up in my eyes.  By the time it was the end of my fourth day in the ward, I was ready to drop dead.  Throughout my stay so far, I had spoken to Kangin a total of twelve times.  I had met with Hwasa and the other patients three times.  Suzy had poked and prodded at me twice every day.

Whenever Kangin or Hwasa spoke to me, I felt like I was being talked spoken to like a criminal.  They talked about how to manage my anger and how to identify what triggered me to become violent and made sure I knew the consequences of such violent behavior.  Whenever the other patients spoke to me, despite how I didn’t want to judge them, I felt like I was in a room full of lunatics where I was the only one who was sane.  Whenever Suzy was around me-- she never once said a word to me-- her hands shook and she seemed to always be on edge.

In fact, the entire staff seemed to be on edge around me and the other patients-- Kangin, Hwasa, the security guards posted at various locations in the ward.  They just hid it a little better than Suzy did.  What really got to me was my fifth morning, when Leo’s family came to visit him.  I was in the hallway when they came out of his room because I had grown tired of staying in bed and I wanted something to do, but wasn’t allowed outside the ward.  I looked away when they walked by me and pretended to be busy picking at my fingernails.  But even though my eyes were down, I couldn’t help but notice that when his parents and three sisters passed me, they walked by as if the floor was made out of eggshells and broken glass.

What really got to me was the way they deliberately formed a single-file line and clung tightly to the left side of the hallway, staying as far away from me as possible.  They kept their heads down.  Two of the sisters pulled out their phones and began staring at them as if their lives depended on it.

I looked up when after they had passed by me and watched them arrive at the front door of the ward.  They exited one by one.  The last of them happened to be the mother.  I watched as she nodded to the father, silently thanking him for holding the door open for her.  Then something seemed to strike her, and she suddenly looked back at me and met my eyes.  The father did the same.  Their eyes locked with mine for a long, terrible second before they tore their gazes away and left the ward.

A single drop of moisture fell to the floor as something stabbed at my heart.  It had only been for one second, but it had felt like an eternity and I had seen the looks in their eyes.  They were afraid of me.

I took a few steps so I was in the middle of the hallway instead of all the way to the right.  At this point, I didn’t even know what to feel.  What could I feel?  Had they not known that I was a human being and I was capable of feeling emotions too?  The way they gaped at me, the way they deliberately avoided me back there.

I heard a loud sniffle and I realized that I was crying and there were more tears falling from my face and dripping onto the ground.

I didn’t commit some sort of horrible crime.  I wasn’t insane.  I just… I just went a little out of control that day, that’s all.  I wasn’t crazy.  I wasn’t an abusive person.  I wasn’t the monster they thought I was.

Never would I have thought I would miss the stupidly happy and upbeat surroundings of the general psych ward I had stayed in all the way up until this moment.  Never would I have thought I would want to go back there.  I would have given anything to see someone from my old ward just so I could remind myself that I wasn’t mad like the patients in the violent ward were.

I just wanted to get out of this place before it killed me.

I covered my face with my hands and cried silently, right there in the hallway.  It was the first time I had cried in the violent ward.  God, I hated that term.

I stood there for a few minutes, sobbing my heart out and feeling… not even resigned anymore, that wasn’t enough to describe this feeling.

I was so, so lost.

“Sungmin-ssi!”  Kangin’s slow, booming voice made me jump.  “What a coincidence, I was just about to find you.  As I might have told you a few days ago, all patients in the violent ward need a parent’s visit for them to be able to check out of this ward and return to their previous ward.  Maybe even leave the hospital, if they’ve made enough progress.  So--”  Kangin then stopped and seemed to notice my tears for the first time.  “Sungmin-ssi, what happened?  Are you alright?”

“OF COURSE I’M NOT ING ALRIGHT!”  I screamed at him at the top of my lungs as loudly as I could, too tired and frustrated and sad to remember to censor my language.  “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I’M ING ALRIGHT?!”  My voice was a shrill screech.

“Sungmin-ssi, I understand you’re upset about certain things, but may I remind you that swearing is not allowed in here.  Does that make sense?”  Kangin’s voice was gentle, but firm.

My sobs had been mostly silent up until now, but they escalated to full-on wailing in a matter of seconds.

“Do you want to come with me into my office so we can talk about what’s bothering you?  Is it okay if I give you a hug or touch you?”

I shook my head violently and cried harder.  After all, even if I wanted to talk to him, what could I possibly say when everything about this ward and my entire predicament was bothering me?

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, Sungmin-ssi,” I heard Kangin say quietly.  “And I want to help you.  You’re a smart kid, you should know that.”

I’m smart enough to know that I don’t need your help because I don’t belong here.  I’m not the criminal all of you think I am.

A few minutes later, Kangin was still standing in front of me and waiting.  I was still crying hard with no sign of stopping, and I didn’t want to stop either.

“What do you need most right now, Sungmin-ssi?”  Kangin sighed at last.  “What can I do for you that might help you in any way?”

Kill me.  Get me out of this ward.  Get me back to the general psych ward.  Get me back home-- no, don’t get me back home, I don’t want that.  The few possibilities I had ran through my head.  I sniffled loudly several more times and wiped my runny nose with a sleeve.  Through blurred vision, I looked up at Kangin, pleading with him.

“I want to talk to Ryeowook.”

Hi my readers/subscribers ^^

First of all, I just wanted to say that I'm so, so sorry... I know I promised all of you I would try my very best to finish this fic before the end of April, but unexpected things came up a few weeks ago and I couldn't bring myself to write because I was so stressed.  I'm really sorry, but I don't think I'll be able to finish DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD; OTL I wrote this chapter in a few hours just now because I had a sudden moment of inspiration... I honestly shouldn't even be writing right now because I have a Spanish test tomorrow that I'm nowhere near ready for... I shouldn't even be on aff because I'm ed over for school and I desperately need to focus on schoolwork and studying for AP tests and finals and everything... but I wanted so badly to update on my 2-year aff anniversary (4/20/16), and I couldn't because I was busy that day and didn't have time to write until now ._.

I'll try my best to finish within a few months (seeing as there's only two chapters left now) but I can't guarantee anything... once again, I'm really sorry ._. for not only not meeting my deadline and not updating for over a month, but also for this short (and kinda ty honestly) chapter.  There's not really anything that exciting and it's relatively short compared to my other chapters?  A bit more than half as long... ugh ._. I know length doesn't matter, but I just like my chapters to be a certain length and this one seems a little short...

But in any case, I hope you still enjoyed it and I apologize for any grammar mistakes and things like that... I'll go back and edit this later on if I find mistakes or plot holes.

Thank you for reading, comment, subscribe, and upvote if you haven't already, and have a lovely day everyone ^^