(A/N: Bolded conversations mean they're spoken in Chinese. Also, there might be slightly mature content in this chapter. You have been warned!)

Jaehyun couldn’t wait to get himself to his favorite café. Although at this time he felt the need to fill his caffeine needs (because after he dreamed about Taeil and the girl last night, he couldn’t fall asleep properly) for he had to go to his night class later on, he also felt the need to assure himself that what he dreamed hadn’t happened for real.

So he came in to the café at the right time, right after Taeil was done serving a customer. He immediately went in front of the cashier and greeted the elder guy.

“Hi, Taeil hyung!”

“Jaehyun-ah! Americano for today?” There was a teasing tone in Taeil’s voice.

“No, just my usual latte, please.” The younger smiled sheepishly, while the other boy went to make his drink. Jaehyun noticed that Taeil seemed to be brighter than usual.

“Here it is! Today it’s on me!” The elder put the coffee on the counter table, and what he said made the younger looked confused.

“What’s going on? You look very happy today, Hyung.”

“It’s a secret~ but yeah, I’m happy for today!” Taeil proceeded to laugh a little like an embarrassed kid getting praised for winning a competition. Jaehyun felt anxious instead, because if his dream happened for real, he kind of could tell why already.

“Oh, Kyunghyun, Doyoung!”

Taeil waved at somewhere behind Jaehyun, which made the latter turn to look. It was indeed, his favorite couple. He knew Kyunghyun was the girl’s name, but he only knew about the boy’s name just now.

“Then I’ll get going, Hyung,” Jaehyun said to Taeil, feeling the urge to avoid the two at the moment. Well, it wasn’t like they knew each other, but it was rather awkward for him to meet up with them face to face, especially since he had only been seeing them in his dream.

“Hey, wait a— Jaehyun-ah—“

The boy was already going before Taeil could stop him, so he turned towards the couple in front of him and smiled at them.

“Hi guys. The usual?”

After finishing his night class, Jaehyun could finally let out a sigh of relief. He definitely didn’t sleep in class, which helped him in avoiding any weird dream that might distract him from the lesson, thanks to the latte. He thought about spending the night watching some variety shows on TV while being a couch potato, with some snacks in hand...

As the elevator opened revealing the tenth floor where his apartment was located, he could immediately see someone in front of his apartment door.

“Winwin?” Jaehyun called in disappointment upon seeing the familiar boy’s face turning to the sounds of footsteps. He had a duffel bag slung on his shoulder.

“I’ll be sleeping on your couch tonight,” he said. “I got kicked out of my house...”

“You got kicked out? How?” His disappointment turned into worry in an instant.

“I’ll explain it after you let me in.”

His worry turned into a suspicion, especially after he seemingly so insisted to get into his apartment before doing anything else.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Winwin asked in an offended manner. “I really got kicked out, thanks to you. Now let me in and I’ll explain everything.”

Hearing that he was the reason Winwin got kicked out, Jaehyun was moved. Just a little. He sighed before finally making a move to open the door to his apartment.

Unexpectedly, as they finally got in, Winwin looked around the apartment room in pure wonder.

“Wow, you’ve got quite a luxurious place here.”

He put down his bag on the floor and went straight towards the curtain-covered window. He opened the curtain slightly, seemingly enjoying the night view.

“You live in such a high place for someone who’s afraid of heights.”

The owner of the apartment threw the other a death glare, even though Winwin was too busy to notice it. He was immersed in enjoying the view outside, but not for long. He turned his head to where Jaehyun was, getting some drinking water in the kitchen for both of them to drink.

“You seem to have some high standard. I’m afraid by the time our business is over, our money won’t be enough for you...”

Jaehyun came back with two glasses in each of his hands, making a move to put them on the table where Winwin stood by in the living room.

“I don’t want money,” he said as he plopped into his couch. “Now sit down and explain.”

Again, Winwin feigned innocence at the demanding word. He let himself seated on the couch on the other side of where Jaehyun was sitting at the moment and grabbed the glass of water, sipping the water a little before putting it back on the table.

“Your dream was true. They were in the Han river last night.”

Hearing the straightforward news, Jaehyun sighed for the umpteenth time.

“Since your dream frequency is getting irregular, they told me to watch over you and they literally said I can’t come back before I’m done with my job. So you can say that as me getting kicked out, right?”

Jaehyun just closed his eyes tiredly while having one of his hands massaging his temple. The last thing he would expect at this moment was someone watching over him. He was not a baby, and he didn’t even have any thought of bailing against whatever organization Winwin was part of, so why would this happen again?

“Sorry about that.”

Those words made Jaehyun surprised. He never heard Winwin apologize before.

“I’ll try not to bother you too much. I’ll just go out more during the day, and be quiet during the night. I’ll invade your dreams too, but I won’t do anything much, just watching.”

The surprise slowly turned into amusement, and slowly, the amusement was starting to be apparent on Jaehyun’s face.

“You don’t seem the type who would say such nice things,” he mused.

Winwin’s serious expression turned into a confused and angry mix of look. “What do you mean by that? I’m a nice person.”

“If only you knew what I’ve been through because of you. Ungrateful brat.”

“Don’t call me that! You can’t be that much older than me!”

“Still, you should have said thank you when someone helped you or offered you some good stuff. Like the information I shared last night.”

“That— of course I’m thankful—“

“And I suppose I’ll let you stay here. So what do you have to say?”

Winwin bit his lips first, as if he was fighting with something within himself.

“T... thank you!”

Jaehyun smiled in satisfaction, because today he had won against the winner Winwin after all of those times.

The boy and the girl were lying on a bed in a dark room with only the moon as the only source of light. Doyoung’s arms wrapped around Kyunghyun’s shoulders perfectly, while she threw a loving smile at him.

“I wonder,” he started, “what you did yesterday without me.”

She pouted at the slight suspecting tone in his voice. “I’m just going around on my own. What do you think I was doing?”

He looked into her eyes, a ghost of smile on his face. “I just want to know what you’ve been through without me. Didn’t you miss me?”

“Of course I did,” she answered without any bit of hesitation.

“Why don’t I feel that you really missed me though?”

“I really did miss you, Doyoung-ah.” She propped herself on her elbow, his hand leaving her shoulder in the process. She then planted a quick peck on his lips.

“I miss doing this with you.”

Doyoung started showing a wide smile that he couldn’t hide any longer. She also smiled, until he pulled her into a deep kiss.

Seeing the scene made both of Jaehyun’s eyes widened. In his dream.

He didn’t wake up straight away. Instead, he stayed there, watching the two of them taking their clothes off pieces by pieces, until they were down to their underwear, their faces barely separated from each other.

As if he was watching a movie, he could feel his heart beating even faster, even in his dream.

Then the setting somehow started to change. It was not in a dark bedroom anymore, but somewhere bright and sandy.

Jaehyun realized that they were in a beach when he heard the sound of waves hitting the sand. And it made him even more surprised when he saw the couple lying on the sand, still on what they were doing without actually getting as shocked as he was right now.

They did break away though, as she started looking around the scenery, still with a smile on her face.

“You really got out of control, right?” she mused out loud.

“You always said that you want to do it on a beach once in a while. So here we are.”

They went back to kissing again, and Jaehyun felt himself stepping back, step by step away from them. He couldn’t comprehend what was happening at the moment, as he felt something invading his mind, and a loud ringing in his ears, creating an unbearable headache.

As soon as the pain kicked in, he fell onto his knees. He never imagined dying in a dream, but he sure felt like it right now.

While he was trying to fight the pain, he felt someone pulling his body away from the dream.

“Jaehyun-ah!”

The said boy finally opened his eyes to the reality. He saw Winwin’s face hovering over him, concern showing in the knits of his eyebrows.

“Thank God you’re awake,” he said as he sighed in relief.

He stared at the other boy for a prolonged moment of silence first, trying to sort his mind.

“Were you the one who pulled me out?”

Winwin nodded.

“You look like you were in pain in your dream. So I did what I had to.”

Jaehyun sighed, while Winwin looked like he still had something else to say.

“Anyway, I also looked into your dream from the beginning... so that you won’t have to retell what happened there.”

Right. What he had dreamed just now would be too embarrassing for him to retell. Still, it felt too much like a dream than what actually happened in real life, since a lot of things were so unrealistic. Like how the place changed from a bedroom to a beach. And that the two people in his dream actually talked about it as if it were nothing. As unrealistic as he even thought his power was, the dream was so farfetched from being an actual event.

“Do you want to sleep again?” came Winwin’s voice.

Jaehyun shook his head. “I’ll just take some long shower.” He then rose from his bed, and only then did he feel the stinging pain in his head, in which he reacted by holding his head while showing a pained expression.

“Are you okay?” Winwin asked again with even more concern in his tone.

“No. That’s why I need to shower.”

“Let me help you then.”

“No, thank you. You can just go your way. I’ll go to the bathroom on my own.”

Slowly, Jaehyun stood up from his bed and left the bedroom for the bathroom. Winwin could only look on with evident worry on his face.

Winwin was indefinitely worried. Not really because of what he saw in Jaehyun’s dream, but because someone else was intruding the dream. Although he couldn’t see who it was, but he had a hunch on who it might be. He kept turning on and off the light of his phone, considering whether to tell any one of his comrades or not.

After spending some minutes of worrying, he finally the light of his phone and dialed a number.

“Hello?” came an accented Korean from the other line, speaking very much like how Winwin did in Korean.

“Kun-ge? I need to report something.”

There was silence before the other line responded. “What is it?”

“I’ll say it to you, but not until you promise me not to tell anything to Hansol-ge.”

“Well.” Winwin could hear Kun making a clicking sound with his tongue before he started speaking again. “That depends.”

“Wait until I’m sure about it first then you can tell him.”

A sigh was heard on the other line. “Fine. I promise. Now what is it?”

Okay, this is it. Winwin took a deep breath first before spilling the beans.

“I think, someone, or some people have been watching over Jaehyun. And there is one group that is high on my suspect list... you know who.”

“Hey, don’t tell me...”

“Yeah. I think it might be NCT.”

Jaehyun almost wanted to give up on his class, seeing that the painful headache had barely gone away. He did take a small dose of medicine before attending his class, which usually worked for this kind of headaches, but it didn’t. As a result, he couldn’t concentrate at all, and he felt like it was useless staying in there for much longer. Luckily, the professor cut the class short and instead gave the students individual assignments due next week. With that, Jaehyun left the class as quick as he could manage and went to the café he frequented next to the campus.

When he came in, he expected Taeil standing behind the counter, but it was another guy instead.

For a moment, he was confused, wondering whether it wasn’t Taeil’s shift just yet. So he went to the worker and gave him his order, while tentatively asking about his favorite barista.

“Oh, I heard someone before me just quit his job yesterday. I don’t know who though.”

That wasn’t enough of an answer Jaehyun wanted. If he could, he wanted to find out if the shift was all noted in the whiteboard in the employee only room, now that he remembered he saw it before in his dream.

After buying his latte, he decided to go home right away. He somehow felt uneasy because Taeil was not present there, but his headache was demanding him to go to sleep. Preferably without any dream about the present.

It would be almost impossible for Jaehyun not to dream while sleeping now, because he did again.

He saw Kyunghyun, all by herself, in a tattoo shop, he thought, because he saw another guy holding that thing that can give marks to skin by using ink. For a moment, he saw her slightly shaking gaze, seemingly unsure of what she was about to do, but at the same time, she kept strengthening herself to just go for it.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Miss?” the tattoo maker asked, seemingly for the last time.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she answered after swallowing a lump in . The tattoo maker then started working on the tattoo when suddenly the dream started to blur, making Jaehyun surprised, although he hadn’t woken up yet.

The blur though soon started to fade, as another vision started to fill his dream. There was sort of a window, a really big window, and through the window, he could see another room filled with boxes and what seemed to be garbage. And when he turned around, he saw an unexpected someone.

“Taeil hyung?” he couldn’t help himself but call the elder man’s name, although of course it went unheard. Taeil’s gaze was instead fixated on the boxes on the other side of the window. There was an indescribable seriousness in his eyes. Jaehyun got the feeling that he was about to find out about something important.

With his gaze fixed on the boxes, Taeil jumped over the window.

He was about to chase the elder, but his vision started to blur again.

As he waited, surely, the blur faded away again, replaced by a scene of what seemed to be a lab.

There were a lot of people wearing lab coats around, each sitting at their own desk. A few meters in front of him though, he could see someone inside a glass tube. It was a man with red hair. He thought his face seemed familiar, so he tried to come closer to the glass tube. As he got closer, he started to recognize the face.

It was Doyoung.

As soon as he realized who it was, the same pain as the last time he felt in his dream came back again, this time even stronger. He could feel another force inside his mind, demanding to be given a place. The more Jaehyun tried to fight back the force, the more his pain grew.

“Jaehyun! Wake up!”

Through his slightly closed eyes, he could see Winwin in his dream, holding him down by his shoulders.

“Let’s go before you get stuck here.”

Without wasting too much time, Winwin held Jaehyun’s hand and pull the latter into a run. The dream with Doyoung disappeared, and now they were in the place where Jaehyun saw Taeil. After some more running, they were back in the tattoo maker’s place, Kyunghyun also holding her own pain of the tattoo ink piercing her skin.

After all of that running, Jaehyun finally woke up.

“Stay there,” Winwin suddenly warned as he left in a hurry, which created confusion in Jaehyun’s head. There must be something that he saw in his dream, and now that he thought about it again, could it be that he found out the unknown force that kept prodding his head in his dream?

As Jaehyun was busy pondering about it, he heard his doorbell ringing. Could it be Winwin? He probably left his apartment and wanted to go back in right away because he couldn’t find the one who kept bugging his dream, and now got locked. He sighed before pushing himself off the bed and went to the door.

As he opened the door though, he was surprised to find out it wasn’t Winwin. Instead, a boy with white hair and extremely handsome face greeted him with a piercing gaze and a slight smirk.

“Hello there, Jung Jaehyun.”