Taeyeon doesn’t know what kind of painkillers they gave her, but they’re working a little too well. She’s not in any pain, but she feels—fuzzy, her thoughts blurring into a dull haze, like there’s a fog swimming in her skull. She can neither fall asleep nor stay awake; she’s trapped in limbo, in that halfway land between dreams and waking. The one time she got up and left her room, Tiffany had marched her right back, so now she doesn’t even try. She just lies there, silent, still, stuck.

At one point she must have fallen asleep, because she wakes up with the sense that she’s lost something, her chest throbbing with a hollow ache and her arm stretched out, reaching for that elusive, missing, precious thing.

She spots her phone lying on her bedside table – Juhyun or Tiffany probably put it there – and picks it up, fingers hovering over it, tracing a long-familiar pattern. A sequence of numbers that is forbidden now. Taeyeon had erased that number from her contacts, but she couldn’t erase its owner from her mind.

Her fingers tighten around her phone, as if that will bring her closer to her, even though she knows they couldn’t be farther apart now. Taeyeon tosses the phone aside. She closes her eyes, but she can’t stop seeing her. She presses her fingers against her temples, but she can’t stop thinking about her. She tries to return to sleep, but she can’t stop missing her.

Fragments of the dream come back to her – it was about her, of course – but she wishes that they hadn’t. Wishes that they would have stayed away. Wishes that she never had the dream at all. Wishes that she could return to it. Wishes—

Her chest hurts again. She wonders if it’s time for more painkillers. She presses her face against the pillow and wishes for rest, for peace, for her.

A/N: The line "halfway land between dreams and waking" is from Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. I just finished rereading The Hunger Games trilogy and I really liked that line, it kind of just crept in here.