The blindingly white walls feel like they are closing in on him, as if they are moving towards him inch by inch, suffocating Taekwoon way too slowly, waiting for his oxygen level to decrease enough for his heart to finally find it useless to pump his blood into the rest of his body.

He forgot to breathe.

He takes a small, shuddery breath that feels like a knife in his chest, the sound of his inhalation hurting his ears. A tear slides down his face, hot and wet, running over the same path the previous drops travelled along: down his cheek, dampening the corner of his mouth and arriving to his chin from where it falls on his icy hands in his lap.

The corridor is so long and so quiet and the floor he’s sitting on is so cold.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting here—it may have been hours, but he can only guess. Time has stopped a while ago and his phone isn’t buzzing in his pocket anymore the way it had: vibrating several times for several long minutes, until it ultimately ceased to bother him. It’s still dark outside—a sharp contrast to the sterile lights of the hospital building. Taekwoon doesn’t think the sun will ever come up again. It has no reason to.

He should probably go back and face… the consequence of all this. He should man up and take the lead, offer support to those who now depend on him as if he is their oldest brother, to hold their hands and console them, show them how to proceed from here. Because there must be a way to move on, there must be a next step, even if it feels like he’s reached the edge of the world and can’t go back and the only way to quit this static moment would be to disappear into the bottomless abyss that is only waiting for him to stumble. He’s not ready to take that step yet and he’s not ready to imagine a different world where there is a path ahead.

The foul, cruel, ineradicable sliver of hope that nestled into his mind after he’d got the tragic phone call is still there and he can’t find it in himself to fight it. He can’t chase it away, even though it’s useless now.

Hope is a strange thing. They say hope is positive, that it can make miracles happen if one treasures it enough, but nobody talks about what comes together with it: worry. Worry about the what ifs, about the opposite of those miracles that no one wants to really think about. Once you have nothing to worry about though, hope becomes an illusion, a drug that drags you into an alternate reality you can’t quit and it stays until your thoughts waste away and render you unable to move forward.

Worry is what keeps hope pure and healthy and Taekwoon has nothing to be worried about anymore.