At the moment Winwin heard the sound of the gun, he didn’t stay down just like any other people in the crowd. Instead, he ran towards where the sound came from. Once he arrived, he saw it. Someone lying on the floor, with two men looking down at the body. This was precisely just like what Hansol had seen in his vision.

“No.”

With that realization, he realized that the body lying on the floor was Kyunghyun. He covered his mouth, trying to hold off the tears that were about to burst and the feeling of wanting to run to her body straight away, because he didn’t want to face Doyoung, or basically anyone involved with NCT at this moment.

No, this can’t be happening, he thought. There was no way she was dead.

Then he thought to the time Hansol received the vision. He had also seen a stranger’s face, which Winwin later found out to be Jaehyun.

He noticed one of the men was looking up towards a spot at the second floor, so he followed his line of vision and found the shooter. He could only see the shooter from his side profile, but when he put down the gun, Winwin couldn’t be even more shocked than at that moment.

No, that couldn’t be Jaehyun, he thought again. But it was clearly Jaehyun that he was seeing, the one holding the gun, the one who probably had killed Kyunghyun with his own hands.

And so he ran towards the nearest stairs that he could see that would lead him up. As he reached the second floor, he saw someone else holding a gun aimed at Jaehyun, in which the latter just stared at with a cold look in his eyes.

“Hansol hyung?” Winwin called as he eventually recognized the man holding the gun. Hansol looked behind him slightly before focusing on the culprit in front of him.

“You’re late,” was the only thing he said, but the words spiked into his heart, making him feel so much guiltier, as if he was the one who had been holding the gun and shot it at Kyunghyun.

“Now, prepare to die, you bastard,” he said towards the boy in front of him, who kept his fearless gaze at him. That gaze gave goosebumps all over Winwin, because he had never seen Jaehyun look like that. The Jaehyun he knew was just ordinary, aside from his clairvoyant ability. He was just a college student struggling with his studies and occasionally weird dreams, nothing more than that.

Perhaps it was also Winwin’s fault that he got Jaehyun into this mess. He was living a perfectly normal life before Winwin came and told him he had the ability to see the present through his dreams. If he never came to tell him that, all of this would probably never happen.

“Sleep.”

A new voice suddenly came and right at that moment, Hansol fell onto the floor, giving more shock to Winwin. He turned his back right away and met with another familiar face, but this time he was sporting white hair.

“Taeyong hyung,” Winwin said with almost no power in his voice.

Taeyong smirked at him before getting one step closer to him, in which Winwin responded with one step backwards.

“Why are you doing all of this?” The year-old question finally came out of Winwin’s mouth.

“Sicheng,” Taeyong said Winwin’s real name with such a sultry voice that gave another chills down Winwin’s spine. “This is all part of the 7th Sense Mission, don’t you know that?”

Winwin could only shake his head in response. The 7th Sense Mission was confidential, only known to people involved in the NCT project. His friends had dug around the project though, and that was how he knew of the 7th Sense Mission. But since he was not supposed to know, he should say he didn’t.

“You don’t know?”

Suddenly Taeyong stopped walking, and that made Winwin stop stepping back as well. He dreaded the look that Taeyong gave to him next.

“Too bad for you, because I don’t like people lying to me.”

In the next second, Winwin felt someone from behind grabbing his arm roughly and then twisted it, making Winwin wince in pain, but the next moment made him even more shaken.

He was thrown from the second floor, across the safety fence, into the ground on the first floor.

As his body crashed onto the floor below him, everything turned black for him.

After managing to run away from the station without anyone chasing after them, Taeyong and Jaehyun entered an abandoned car located not too far from the station. Taeyong, sitting on the driver’s seat, started the car and left the station.

Not too long after, a vibrating phone could be heard on the dashboard.

“Take a look at the phone, Ten,” Taeyong said. As if his name was called, Jaehyun took the phone and checked the message that just came in.

“Mission success. See you in the headquarter in 15 minutes,” he read out in an accented voice.

Taeyong looked at the other boy and noticed something.

“You probably want to change back to your real form. It is weird hearing you speak in someone else’s voice like that.”

At the next moment, the boy sitting next to him was no longer using Jaehyun’s face. Instead, an equally youthful face took place, but not characteristically Korean.

“Right, that’s more like it,” Taeyong commented again. “Just put the phone back on the dashboard, Ten. Or maybe just put it in your pocket.”

Ten pondered for a while before deciding to put the phone in his pocket. With that, both of them sped up back to their headquarters, mostly in silence.

“...and so, after entering the morgue, some of our officers will fetch Han Kyunghyun’s body for our further experiment as soon as possible. The rest of you can start preparing for the Augmentation Project.”

The people wearing the white lab coats in the room nodded to each other before finally being dismissed from the meeting. As they left the room one by one, the last scientist who was left in the room, an elderly man who had been leading the meeting, noticed someone standing near the door.

“Doyoung?”

The red-haired turned to look at the elderly man, sorrow evident on his eyes.

“What’s wrong with you, Son?”

“Why are you doing this to Kyunghyun?”

The elderly man looked at him with a fatherly gaze, his hand reaching out to his son’s head.

“It’s for your sake. It’s also for the sake of this project. It’s all for the better.”

Doyoung looked away from his father and put down the hand that caressed his head, before leaving the man in slightly angered step.

“You’ll realize this is all for the best,” he spoke into the thin air.

Taeil looked at the box he had fetched from the warehouse that Kyunghyun had told him to go. It was a beautiful box that seemed more like a music box, but it was in fact, an ordinary box. Kyunghyun kept something in it, she said. Most of them were childhood memories stuff. He opened it, and indeed, some of their favorite toys were inside. Small little figures, small cars, small houses, everything was in there.

He then noticed at the bottom of the box, a blue envelope was placed there. He took out the envelope and looked at the inside, where he found a letter.

When he started reading it, he realized the letter was recently written.

Dear my childhood friend Taeil,

The moment I saw you, I felt like my power reacted to you a little bit. Don’t you know that ever since we were kids, you would tell me how you saw visions of the younger me with my family, playing and having picnics on the grass happily? That’s because you have the ability to see people’s past, which I have realized after I got to know the world of people with superpowers, which includes me as well. I don’t think you realize you have that power as well, and I don’t know how to tell you, so I’m writing it here. Seeing people’s past sometimes wouldn’t be pleasant, so I hope you’ll be able to cope with it.

From your loving friend,

Kyunghyun

He folded back the letter and put it back in the envelope before putting it back in the box again, realizing that what she said was true. He even remembered those times when he saw glimpses of her past when they were still kids.

That said, the realization of losing a dear friend suddenly hit him, and it was only then that he finally felt the tears blurring his vision, rising to his throat, threatening to come out in a broken sob.

After three days, Winwin finally opened his eyes. Of course, the first thing he saw was the white ceiling of the hospital, but he was also relieved to see some of his partners by his side.

“Winwin! You finally woke up!” Yuta exclaimed in both excitement and relief.

“Sicheng, are you okay?” Kun asked with worry painted on his face.

Winwin wasn’t sure if he was okay or not, because he felt like a few parts of his body was numb, mostly his limbs.

“What...what happened?” he asked instead.

“You fell from the second floor, Winwin-ah,” Johnny explained kindly. “Your left limbs are broken, so you can’t move them yet. But everything else is fine, at least your head didn’t hit the floor.”

“Ah...” was the only thing he could say as he looked at his left arm and leg, both wrapped in thick bandages.

“How about Hansol hyung?”

At the question, everyone started avoiding eye contact with him, looking unsure of how to tell him. Looking at the reaction, he held Kun with his good hand and asked the same question again in Chinese.

“Kun-ge, what about Hansol-ge?”

Kun looked at him with even more worries in his face, seemingly hesitant to tell him about it.

“Hansol-ge is captured by the police, under the accusation of Kyunghyun’s murder.”

Winwin read the headline on the TV news he was watching at the moment. “Betrayed, a man shot his ex”.

Surely he knew that Kyunghyun betrayed his love for her, but Hansol was not the type who would do it. Besides, he knew who actually did it... but then when he thought about it, he still couldn’t believe it. There was no reason for Jaehyun to do it, unless he was actually part of NCT. And for whatever reason NCT might have done so, he didn’t know. He probably would never know until he got picked up for the project, just like how it had been for Taeyong, Ten, and also Mark. Looking at Hansol’s blurred face in the TV made him think if NCT was never going to use him anymore and just get rid of him. The thought brought horror to himself.

But then again, he thought, Jaehyun wouldn’t become so void of emotion that fast even if he really joined NCT. He would never had done it, unless someone was controlling him like what Taeyong was capable of, or maybe someone like Ten, who could mimic other people’s physical appearance, actually disguised himself as Jaehyun to kill Kyunghyun.

The fact that Kyunghyun died dawned at him again. Even though he wasn’t particularly close, but Kyunghyun had been taking care of the boys most of the time, like cooking and doing laundry for them. She was pretty much the mother in their group, especially since she was the only girl among them. The thought of never seeing her anymore made him sad, but not enough to make him angered. If he had been in love with her just like Hansol did, he probably would. But he just felt a hole in his heart, like something had been missing there. His other friends must be having a hard time too, but they chose to show their smiley sides to him.

“Sicheng.”

Kun came back into the room with a bottle of water in his hand. “Do you want to drink?”

Winwin nodded at the offer. Kun pressed the button next to the bedside table to help Winwin sit on the bed.

“Here,” Kun offered the opened bottle, and Winwin took it with his good hand before drinking the water.

“How can they capture Hansol-ge though? Is there any way for us to set him free?” Winwin asked as he gave back the bottle to him.

“The bullet in the gun he was holding matched with the one that hit Kyunghyun. He said it wasn’t his though, it belonged to that guy you had been watching this past few days.”

“Jaehyun.” Winwin sighed, still in quite disbelief. “So did they search for him?”

“No. There was no record of Jung Jaehyun. At least not the one we know. So the police now think Hansol-ge is trying to get away from the accusation by putting an imaginary suspect. That’s why they’re still holding him for their investigation.”

Winwin let his eyes wander at the TV again, now showing commercials. Now that he thought about it, it couldn’t be anyone but NCT’s doing. Just like how they erased Taeyong, Ten, and also Mark’s identities from the record after they joined NCT, they also did it to Jaehyun. There was no denying he was under NCT’s clutches right now.

“What’s going to happen to us now, Kun-ge?” Winwin asked weakly, his eyes still trained on the TV.

“I don’t know,” was Kun’s very honest reply.

Hi everyone! If you have already got to this point, then it means this story will end soon. Only one more chapter is left after this, and I do realize this story might have made some of you confused and all, so if there're a lot of you who want it I'll make a little bonus chapter to explain the fic in general. If not then I guess I'll just answer any question in the comment section ^^ Thank you for all of you who have read, subscribe and comment on this fic as well! I hope you'll still look forward to the final chapter! ^^