“Is he awake?”

“. What if he’s dead?”

Taehyung thrashes around, hands flying around trying to hold onto something as he feels his body falling down. He can’t see anything, except darkness, but he can hear voices; people talking and laughing around him.

His eyes are shut, - he can’t see any faces, and he can’t seem to be able to open them.

“I told you not to bring him!” Someone yells. The voice sounds familiar, but he can’t put a face to it.

He feels hands wrap around his neck, fingers digging deeper into his flesh. Someone is choking him, he tries to grab the hands away, but his hands are tied behind his back. Taehyung tries to scream for help, but there’s a cloth inside his mouth and his pleas only come out in muffled groans.

“Hush, little one, I won’t hurt you,” the person whispers into his ear and Taehyung feels tears trickle down his cheeks.

He tries to trash out of the person’s arms, but they’re stronger. The hands around his neck tighten and Taehyung feels the wind knocked out of his lungs. He tries to take deep breaths and ends up choking; his chest constricts and he feels his whole body shaking.

He wants it all to end, everything to stop.

The person choking him seems to read his mind because his hands tighten even harder and he starts smashing Taehyung’s head against a wall or glass –Taehyung would never know.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Every time Taehyung’s head collides with the hard surface, he feels a part of him slipping away.

Thud! Thud! He expects another thud to follow but it never does. Instead, he feels water enter his mouth and suddenly he’s drowning. His legs and hands are both tied and he can’t do anything except accept the excruciating pain forcing itself down his lungs.

THUD.

This time, Taehyung does fall down. He falls down from his king size bed and lands onto the beige carpet, legs still tangled inside bedsheets.

He feels around his nightstand until he finds his remote and presses a button. The TV in his bedroom goes on and lights the room bright enough for Taehyung to pick himself off his carpet and wander to his connected bathroom.

Once there, he takes his time dumping whatever he had eaten and not eaten down the toilet. When he’s done he flushes the toilet and proceeds to brush his teeth; he does all this while he avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

He’s been doing that a lot lately; waking up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and throwing up down the toilet. That’s why he sometimes avoided falling asleep because he knew what was awaiting him.

He feels his heart throb rapidly and saliva collects inside his mouth and rushes back to the toilet. He knees down and hovers over the lead and waits, however, nothing comes out. His heart is still throbbing, his head feels dizzy and he feels like he’s about to pass out and he wishes that he does.

He sits back on the ground near the toilet and waits a few more moments, but after a few minutes, his hearts calms down and his vision returns.

He picks himself off the cold ground; - he has to hold himself on the toilet lead to actually get up, and staggers over to the sink again. He still feels nauseating and sick, but he manages to open one of the cabinets and pulls out a small bottle containing his anxiety pills.

The bottle is now almost empty with two, three or four pills and Taehyung’s disturbingly aware of how often he’d had to take his meds the past few days. He leans on the sink and supports his upper body with one hand on the sink, while his other hand looks for his second bottle.

When he finds it, he slumps back down to the floor, not caring if his hurts in the process. He crawls on all fours over to the toilet and pulls the lead down. He unscrews the small bottle hastily, ends up failing miserably due to how his hands are shaking and he almost screams out of frustration, but he manages and hastily pours a small content atop the toilet lead.

He searches through his pajama pants and pulls out his credit card. He quickly remembers to close the small pill bottle and he tucks it into his pants before he gets back to the white powder lying on the toilet lead.

He can feel his body tingling with excitement at the thought of what he was about to do. He swipes the credit card through the white powder and makes two lines. He puts the card back into his pants and leans over to sniff the first line through his left nostril, while he covers his left.

At first, he doesn’t feel anything, so he decides to sniff the second line through his right nostril. He sniffs around the lead for any remnants and then shifts to lean his back on the wall beside the toilet.

He throws his head back, eyes shutting as he waits for the effects to reach him. It takes the drug a little longer to kick in, but when it does, Taehyung is a giggling mess in his bedroom bathroom.

He can’t seem to stop giggling to himself and although he doesn’t know why he’s laughing, he just finds it funny, so he continues.

His headache is gone, his chest no longer hurts and although his hands are still shaking and his heart is still pounding through his ears, he thinks he hasn’t felt any better lately.

He crawls back to his sink, - he finds crawling easier than walking since he’d have to use a lot of energy, so he decides to preserve it when he has to get off the floor and places both of his anxiety bottles back to where they’d been in his cabinet.

He catches his face in the mirror and laughs at how ridiculous he looks; his pupils are blown, the tip of his nose red, eyes fenced with dark eye bags and hair messy. He looks a mess, but he bets Jungkook would still find him pretty.

His heart picks up again at the thought of Jungkook and Taehyung smiles to himself. He really misses Jungkook. Although they’re sharing the same confines, Jungkook has somehow managed to avoid Taehyung; the model hasn’t gotten a glimpse of Jungkook for four days.

Jungkook stopped talking to him and whenever Taehyung stuck up a conversation, the younger male would cut him off or just mute him out. Taehyung had pretended not to notice, but he did and it ing hurt.

It hurt so ing much that it scared him; it scared him that Jungkook going back to pretending he didn’t care about Taehyung hurt more than when Minjae had rejected him back then.

His smile falls when Minjae’s face crosses his mind.

Minjae had been everything beautiful Taehyung could find in life, but at the same time he wasn’t.

He switches off the lights in the bathroom and stumbles back to his bedroom. The TV was still running, but Taehyung couldn’t understand what was being shown; it was too loud, too bright, too everything.

He staggered out of his bedroom into the dark hall; leaning against the wall for support as his feet carry him to a certain door, knocking down a few things here and there, but he didn’t care.

His mind was still sensible enough to make him knock on the door as he waited impatiently, bottom lip caught between his teeth. He knocks frantically on the wooden door, only to stop in midair when a confused and sleepy Jungkook opened the door and stared at him confused.

“Taehyung?” he asks, rubbing at his eyes.

Taehyung’s hand that was still in the air unclenches and he waves gingerly at the younger. “Hi, Jungkookie!”

Jungkook matters something under his breath, but Taehyung is way too far gone to catch it, so he lifts his brows and asks him what he just said.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” The younger male asks, fatigue in his voice, as he takes in the state of the model. He can’t see much due to Taehyung leaving the lights off throughout the apartment and Jungkook hadn’t been awake enough to think about switching the lights on in his bedroom, - he’s glad that he had somehow forgotten to shut the curtains and that the moon was providing him with some light to see Taehyung’s face.

It wasn’t like he hasn’t been hearing Taehyung stumbling through God-knew-what and breaking things throughout the apartment at night. When it had first happened, Jungkook had grabbed the first thing he could find—which was a glass water bottle—on his nightstand and silently tiptoed to the door to take a peek, but when he saw that it was Taehyung, he quickly shut his bedroom door and didn’t come back out till in the morning.

He would listen at the elder male stumble through furniture until he reached his own bedroom and close the door with a loud bang. It happened a few more times after that and Jungkook wondered whether he should do something about it, but figured that it was none of his business as long as Taehyung stayed away from him.

Guess it was his problem tonight.

Taehyung sniffs and shrugs nonchalantly. “Yah, I’m ya Hyung…should shower some res-pect…” Taehyung slurs and Jungkook’s eyes widen in alarm.

His heart picks up and he starts to panic; his mind goes back to the night when Taehyung was out of it. His eyes immediately search the model for any dangerous item in his hands, but Taehyung is not holding anything that could potentially harm him or the younger male.

He sways sides to side and then throws Jungkook a sheepish grin when the younger frowns at him.

“Hyung,” Jungkook calls carefully. “Did you take anything?” He doesn’t know why his voice is so soft.

Taehyung nods and then closes his eyes as if the movement has made him dizzy. He blinks, once, twice and then smiles back at Jungkook.

“Had a nightmare; took anxiety meds,” each word comes out heavy and strained. Jungkook now notices that Taehyung is shaking and doesn’t know what to do.

He decides to go with his gut feelings. He reaches out and pulls the model inside his bedroom and into his arms. Taehyung’s arms come around his shoulders immediately as if he was just waiting for Jungkook to reach out first and the younger almost wants to believe so.

“Tae?” Jungkook calls the older male after a while. They’re now lying on the younger’s bed, under the covers and Taehyung hasn’t untangled himself from Jungkook. It had taken Jungkook a lot of maneuvering to get them both on the bed without letting go of Taehyung since the older had pleaded for him not to let go.

Taehyung looks up from where he has been staring, index finger continuing to draw patterns on Jungkook’s chest. At first, Jungkook had laid them both beside each other on their back, but Taehyung had shifted and hooked one leg around Jungkook’s hip and tangled his other between the younger’s.

Jungkook hasn’t had enough time to think of the compromising position as his mind was elsewhere. He was too busy following Taehyung’s breathing rhythm, making sure that the older male didn’t pass out on him or worse die.

“What is it Jungkookie?” Taehyung asks, off mindedly.

The room isn’t lit, but Jungkook swears he can see Taehyung’s eyes shining through the dark.

“These nightmares…have they been happening often?” he asks.

Ta