Do you ever feel like something’s going to go inevitably wrong?

Do you ever feel like the darkness is everywhere and it’s closing in on you, bringing that panic you feel when you’re running for the train and you see the doors sliding shut just as you reach them?

Do you ever feel like you’re stumbling through your life, like a small child or perhaps a fawn taking its first steps and its first glance of the world, except it’s different to that, isn’t it? You know all about this world, its bright lies and its dark truths, you know what you have to do and who you have to be, you know that none of it is what you really want. It all weighs down on you like something so heavy you can’t walk straight, so big you can’t see straight. Like grimy, blood tinted glass casting everything a deep, jagged red.

Crimson paint sludging down the walls, drowned in a filter of hyperrealism and hitting the floor fake and vibrant, nothing like you want it to be.

Drums beating softly into the distance to the rhythm of your heart, being twisted and re-run and re-played and re-mixed until it’s too loud and too fast and too big and too much, until it’s dribbling out your ears down your tongue up your throat, until you pass out drunk on affection and chills, until the heat wakes you up. Until the heat claws into your eyeballs and corkscrews your brain, until the heat drifts into your nose and makes you suffocate, until the heat hugs you so tight and warm like no one ever has and ever will and then constricts its limbs so you can’t breathe or talk or think, until the heat’s drowning out your tears and making the spit on your tongue evaporate, drinking it all in.

.

.

.

And then everything turns cold. You’re standing in darkness again, nothing but the sound of ticking to keep you grounded to reality. You can’t feel anything, you can’t see anything. All you hear is this constant, rhythmic ticking. It feels like it should almost be a lullaby, except it isn’t. It’s the type of ticking that crawls under your skin and sends your head spinning. It gets steadily louder and louder until it overflows your ear drums and makes you want to scream and you do, you can feel the burn rising up in your throat but you can’t hear anything, the ticking’s too loud. You can feel it there, between your skin and your muscles, scrabbling around and pulsing to push out in time with each tick, tick, tick, tick…..

You’re on your knees, blood dripping steadily onto your thighs as you clutch your ears and feel scarlet seeping past the gaps in your fingers. You’re screaming, the clock’s ticking, but under all of it you can hear someone whispering. As though they’re not real, as though it’s all in your head.

Baekhyun

That’s your name. Or is it?

Baekhyun, wake up.

But you’re tired. You don’t want to wake up

Wake up. Wake. Up.

So, so tired………

WAKE UP. NOW

 

 

[muffled thump]

I open my eyes and find myself staring at a vast expanse of a dull, peachy-yellow kind of colour.

It’s my ceiling.

It’s a stupid thing to think that but here I am, thinking it. That this ty colour of horizontal wall is indeed, mine. Which is isn’t, because I’m on rent and it really belongs to my landlord, who would kill me if I tried to change the colour to anything other than tacky, peachy-yellow. She has a thing for tacky colours that make me want to puke out rainbows just to make an improvement to the place. But there’s nothing much you can do when you’re struggling to pay for this hole of an apartment and you only just manage to scrape through every month. So here I am, staring at the ceiling of my land lord, mentally critiquing her choice of colour.

Wake up.

Baekhyun jerks as he sits up, untangling the sheets from his limbs. A wave of cool washes over him and I realises he’s covered in sweat, and probably, tears.

Shower, Baek. Go take a shower.

Trudging over to the bathroom and feeling the light switch on, he tries to hold down a yawn as he peeks over at the mirror. Pale, clammy. Dark rings running laps under two white spheres scattered with red-veined cracks. Pupils dilated, a thin layer of chocolate brown imprisoning it. Thin lips slightly parted, trembling ever so slightly. By now it’s a familiar sight. Turning away from the finger-stained glass, Baekhyun strips down and step into the shower, not even bothering to wait for the water to turn warm. For a moment he’s under a freezing stream but slowly the heat works its way in and within two minutes steam is blossoming up from the place that hot water meets cold, grimy bathroom tile. Sighing as he feels the tenseness in his muscles trickle down the drain, he picks up the loofah and soap and starts to scrub himself down.

Wake up.

He jerks and receives a faceful of water right in the face. Coughing and spluttering, Baekhyun shakes his head and continues scrubbing.

Baekhyun.

No reaction this time, except maybe scrubbing at his skin with a little more force.

Baek,

Ignore it, he tells himself, just ignore it. He presses down on his forearms and rubs as hard as he can, as though trying to peel off the voice, the incessant tickling at the back of his mind, as though rubbing soap onto his arms would get rid of his thoughts along with the grime and dirt.

Baekhyun

Ignore it

Baek

Ignore it

Wake up

Ignore it ignore it IGNORE IT.

He looks down and vaguely registers that he’s bleeding. Somewhere in his thought process he’d dropped the loofah and started scratching at his own skin. Baekhyun watches as the scarlet blood mingles with white soap suds and translucent water, winding together in an elaborate dance before disappearing through the holes in the floor.

Baekhyun, wake up.

He blinks. Pockets of soap bubbles, tainted in his blood, are floating against the bathroom wall.

He blinks again. Not soap, clouds. Not cold tiles, but an even colder sky. A sheen of ice melting into blossoming bruises over an open wound, gashing itself across an ocean of broken mirrors. Baekhyun used to like the sunset, the warmth of the pastel clouds against a furnace sky, but today it looks unusually cold.

Wake up

He shudders, clutching himself a little more tightly, thin fingers gripping bare skin. Everything’s cold.

Wake up

He shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It’s cold

Wake up

The sun drops suddenly, falling a few centimetres. He’s tired

Wake up

Baekhyun looks down to find that he isn’t wearing any clothes. Huh, that’s strange

Wake up

But I am awake, he thought, I can even feel the cold.

Wake up

He looks down again. The blades of grass by his feet have frozen over, frost making its way between his toes.

BAEKHYUN!

He whirls around at the sound of the scream.

BAEKHYUN WAKE UP. WAKE UP

But he doesn’t want to. It’s so nice here. Watching as the sun slips into the wound in the sky. So pretty…

BAEKHYUN

He opens his eyes.

Oh.

White plastic walls, blue plastic chairs, a windowsill painted a dull plastic yellow. Figure hunched over his lap, sobbing clear plastic tears. He reaches out a hand to touch the head of the figure. As soon as his fingers come in contact, Jongin stops crying.

Baekhyun tries to call out his name, but he can’t open his mouth. Fingers skip past his lips and he feels string, sewing the seam shut. He tries to make any sound, but his throat feels empty.

Jongin raises his head. Baekhyun stares. Plastic face, plastic hair, plastic eye sockets, hollowed out and empty with melting plastic blood trickling its way down plastic cheeks. Baekhyun stares. Jongin raises his arm to reveal two plastic eyeballs, nestled in his plastic palm, melting around the edges, as though they were sweating. Baekhyun stares. Jongin raises the eyes to Baekhyun’s lips, tries to push past the string that’s keeping his mouth clamped shut, and a strange gurgling noise escapes his throat. Baekhyun stares. Jongin’s staring at him, or at least he thinks he is. Blank cavities in his head boring plastic into his temples. His head hurts.  He looks up to find that the walls seem to be crying, plastic melting away slowly, crawling down the walls. Jongin drops the eyeballs and they land in Baekhyun’s lap, melting on the spot and sticking to his bare legs.

It burns.

Jongin’s hand is still suspended near Baekhyun’s lips, unmoving, seemingly unaware of everything melting around them. Instinctively, Baekhyun leans forward and kisses the tips of his plastic fingers.

BAEKHYUN!

Everything collapses. Baekhyun blinks.

Jongin’s face is mere centimetres away from his own, eyes closed and mouth slightly parted. Baekhyun stares at him. Plastic?

“Jongin.” He finds that his mouth is no longer sewn shut. Jongin doesn’t reply. Baekhyun reaches out his fingertips and pokes at his cheek, feeling the warm skin dip at his finger. Not plastic.

He closes his eyes and opens them immediately as plastic flashes through his eyes. Jongin’s nose twitches. Rolling to lay on his back, Baekhyun stares up at the ceiling, trying to breathe.

Breathe in, two, three, four, out, two three, four, repeat.

Three more times. Four. Seven. Twelve.

Jongin twitches again.

It’s too quiet, what time is it? Baekhyun turns his head to find that his alarm clock is missing. He pulls himself out of bed to look out of the window and falls over.

Baekhyun screams.

Jongin jolts awake and looks around in panic before his eyes land on Baekhyun, collapsed on the floor and screaming.

His legs are gone. Where are his legs?

Jongin stares as Baekhyun screams as he clutches and claws at the little stumps that have replaces his legs. Where are his legs?

Baekhyun.

A voice so soft he almost misses it over the sound of his throat being torn out of his chest.

Baekhyun wake up.

A little louder this time, but Baekhyun ignores it. Where are his legs?

Hyung.

His scream falters, and he glances up at Jongin. He’s sitting there, sheets bunched at his own legs, staring at Baekhyun with a blank look, face hollowed out with emptiness. His lips don’t move.

Hyung wake up.

But I’m not dreaming, Baekhyun thinks, where are my legs?

Baekhyun hyung wake up.

Baekhyun stops screaming and stares into the eyes of a dead man. He stares and stares as his vision starts to darken around him.

Hyung. Baekhyun hyung.

Jongin’s lips aren’t moving. Baekhyun’s hands are trembling.

Please,

Jongin’s lips aren’t moving

Hyung please.

Baekhyun’s body is shaking.

Wake up.

 

Baekhyun opens his eyes the same time as he in air, limbs flailing in all directions as he tries to get away from everything.

“Hyung shhhh, calm down.”

A voice. He knows that voice.

“That’s right hyung, it’s me. Jonginnie. Remember my name?”

Jonginnie. Yes, he knows that name.

“You can trust me hyung.”

He can trust him.

“That’s it, deep breaths, calm down.”

Deep breaths. Calm down.

A few moments later and Baekhyun can see clearly again. He’s curled in the arms of Jongin who’s holding him tightly, and he can feel sweat making his skin feel grimy.

“I’m sorry.” Baekhyun whispers into Jongin’s chest as they’re curled up together on the living room sofa, warm cup of tea clutched between his thin fingers.

“It’s okay.” Jongin answers, pressing his lips to the top of Baekhyun’s head.

“Do you feel better now?”

He nods.

“Finish the tea and let’s see if we can go back to sleep.”

Nod again.

“Jongin.”

“Yeah hyung?”

“Thanks.”

He can feel Jongin’s slight smile in his hair.

“You’re welcome.”

_________________________________________________________________________________

A/N

I don’t have schizophrenia, nor have I ever had it, nor do I know of anyone who has it. I have no idea if what I wrote was accurate in any way shape or form (if it isn’t please tell me and I will change it). Please do not use this as a source of diagnosis.

The beginning and the end was so ty but I got kind of lost :/

Thank you for reading <3