Blob... Blob... Blob…

Again and again the bright yellow tennis ball bounced back into Sehun's hand. Almost every second he threw it against the bare, dreary wall in front of him, only to catch the ball again the next moment. He threw and caught. Threw and caught. And his dark eyes stubbornly fixed the wall. Sehun played this game for several weeks now - mostly when the sun had already set outside. 

Hardly a night went by without him lying in his bed, with an arm behind his head and a tennis ball thrown repeatedly against the ceiling while he stared seemingly lost in thought. Thoughtlessly, however, it wasn't exactly true, because Sehun actually didn't think of anything at all at those moments. It was as if a deep abyss had opened up in his mind to plunge every emerging feeling and memory into this cold, meaningless darkness beyond the abyss so that he could be intoxicated by an unexpectedly calm silence himself. 

A numbness that wrapped him in a thick layer of fluffy soft cotton wool, shielding him from everything and everyone. And that was a good thing, if he had his way, because that way he was at least spared these painful, annoying sensations. He knew, of course, that they were there - somewhere. How could it have been otherwise? Minho was dead, after all. Ripped from life like a piece that had been arbitrarily removed from a puzzle and lost for all time. 

And Sehun knew that this certain part had been the most important of all, for without it the puzzle was not complete, it would never be again - just as Sehun could not be without his brother. He felt incomplete without Minho. Imperfect. He missed his brother - so much. And it was exactly this loss that could cause him the greatest and most intense pain of all. So he banished him. Displaced him behind the protective layer of cotton wool, because otherwise he could not have endured it. 

Everything else would have eaten him up sooner or later, he was sure of that. It happened only rarely and fleetingly like a fraction of a second that small fragments of thoughts crept through the cotton wool into his consciousness. Most of the time, however, they were always the same. The memories of his brother. The smile, for example, that Minho had given him as the very last, final goodbye. Or his eyes that had lost their brightness from one moment to the next as the last breath of light had faded - and with it, the existence of an individual.

It had been over so quickly - so quickly. And there had been so many unsaid words, but time had been merciless. The sand had long since run out, the last grain had already fallen. Yes, it had all been over far too quickly. And yet that last moment with his brother had happened in slow motion. Shortly after, silence had returned. A silence that carried the last breath away like a rough whisper in the wind. Sehun forced himself to close his eyes and throw the ball against the wall again.

Blob…

He was not allowed to remember - not now and not later, he kept telling himself that. This pain - it was just not worth feeling. And his grief was not worth bearing.

Blob...

Even if that meant feeling nothing at all. If he could not get rid of this pain in any other way, it did not matter to him that he could not even feel pleasant sensations in return. To be honest, he did not want them at all. For he could keep them where the pepper was growing - how could he ever be happy, exuberant or at least satisfied again if he was sure the next moment that his brother was no longer here? No, not even the desire for a nice feeling was worth it to break out of the thick layer of deafness voluntarily. He preferred to feel empty - like now and forever.

Blob...

»Sehun?« Suddenly his father's voice came through very faintly. He stopped in the middle of his movement, but didn't dare look up. Jiyong had awakened from his sleep late at night by the noise caused by the loud bouncing of the tennis ball, as he had done so often in the past few weeks, and was now dressed in a robe and standing barefoot on the threshold of his room. 

He had opened the door only a crack wide, just enough to get a glimpse inside, but apart from the cool glow of light from the hallway, it was pitch black inside. Had he not known where his son's bed was, he might not have discovered it in the first place. »Sehun, don't you want to get some sleep.«, he asked - and although his voice was a little bit sharp, he knew that his father spoke to him unusually gently. He'd been doing that for weeks, ever since the thing with Minho...

»No.« Sehun answered curtly and threw the ball against the wall again. He simply didn't feel like getting involved in an uncompromising discussion, after all he knew that he could only fall asleep when the feeling of fatigue grew stronger than this prevailing numbness. And who knew when this would happen? Besides, his father was probably one of the last people by whose voice he wanted to be dissuaded from his senseless activity. No, Sehun really did not want to listen to anything more from his father!

Blob...

Jiyong felt an icy cold creeping over his skin through his son's cool voice. Higher and higher along his narrow calves, until they reached the warming fabric of his satin red robe. The muffled sound of the tennis ball when it hit the wall also gave him unusually eerie goose bumps. »Sehun, it's three o'clock in the morning and I, for one, want to sleep..« Jiyong said again and shook himself once barely noticeably. He sounded almost desperate. »Then piss off.« Sehun growled gruffly.

Blob...

»Sehun!«, his father rebelled. »What?«, his father hissed and caught the ball with his right hand. »You say you want to sleep? Then don't let me stop you. Close the door behind you.« With that, he turned away again and turned his eyes once more to the wall in front of him, which was shrouded in a deep shadow by the darkness. »We talking later.«, his father now warned sourly and was about to leave. 

Jiyong knew that his son could be as stubborn as he was, and since he had no head for a quarrel at that moment, he decided to postpone the discussion to a later date. For him, postponed did not mean immediately cancelled. He paused briefly, however, and muttered a »It can't go on like this.«, shaking his head, before finally pulling the door shut behind him with a soft creaking sound and walking back to his bedroom on quiet soles.

Blob...

Sehun sighed ponderously and ran his fingers spread through his hair, which already reached up to his neck. Couldn't once, really just once, everyone around him stop getting on his nerves? Sehun here - Sehun there, no one could stand it! Once again, he pushed his breath noisily through his nose and weighed the tennis ball in his hand, turned it and let it bounce for a short time before his long fingers enclosed it strongly. If he had been the same person he was six months ago, he would have thrown the ball against the wall with more force and much louder than before - only to make his father in the next room furious. 

And he probably wouldn't even have been able to wipe off a spiteful, smug grin. But now? Now he lowered his arm and closed his eyes. The tennis ball rolled out of his relaxed grip and fell to the floor. No, he was not the same man, certainly not. Neither he nor all the other things were as they had been before. Everything, just everything had changed for him after his brother left him. But at the same time, everything seemed to stay exactly the same. The world kept on turning, incessantly, and the people around him tried to live their insignificant lives. 

They laughed and cried, hated and loved, learned and celebrated. And the sun alternated with the moon in a steady, constant rhythm. First dark, then light - dark and light. Over and over again. Every day and every night. Yes, basically nothing had changed after Minho left. The only thing that had really changed for Sehun was the beat of time in which normality passed him by. That time seemed to pass by arbitrarily and unpredictably. For him it was as if the sun and moon no longer alternated regularly, no, but only when it suited them - just like the people around him. 

Sometimes he thought that everything and everyone threw themselves from one situation into the next much faster than usual - and sometimes he thought that everything went much slower and often more leisurely than before. Every now and then, when a new day came and another sheet of paper could be removed from the calendar, Sehun wondered how the past hours had passed so quickly. Where had the time gone? On the other hand, he couldn't believe how a single minute could feel like a goddamn half eternity. 

Like now, for example - or generally in those dark and lonely moments of the night. It was gruelling, this thing with time. Just too tangled up to understand it and Sehun had felt like a motionless object for weeks because of it. Something that existed but wasn't alive while everyone else rushed past him at different speeds. Like a highway in time lapse - he was the motionless road and the others were the cars dancing across the asphalt in the form of red lights. 

Sehun laughed bitterly. Strange how quickly a once unimportant trivial matter could become the most central one of all, isn't it? After all, hadn't he always seen time as something unimportant? Something he thought hardly needed any attention anyway, because life itself was a game anyway? Tze, how foolish of him. After all, it wasn't the time that was insignificant. And it wasn't life itself that was a game. Rather it was the living that had no value. All of us who, from the moment of our birth, served merely as puppets for the perfidious game of time. 

And all of us who stupidly believed we knew the rules and were naive, as humans are, and thought we were safe as long as everything went according to structure and plan. However, only time was pulling the strings, nobody else. Neither money nor fame nor brains. For with the breath of a single moment, time could make incredible happiness possible, heal wounds, but it could just as easily bring about great misfortune. Most of the time, even when it was least expected. So it didn't matter how much or little wealth one was blessed with or how high the opinion of others was. 

Everything happened the way time wanted it to happen. Sooner or later it certainly did. Well, some may speak of coincidence, others of fate. However, Sehun was certain that it was neither one thing nor the other when his brother was torn from life much too early and for no reason. When from one second to the next all life had been drained from him. Sehun shook his head and rolled over to his side to banish the reappearing images of his dead brother from his thoughts and to get rid of that disgusting pulling pain in his chest. 

He tried to concentrate on his breathing. On the steady beating of his heart, until he was sure that the longed-for numbness in him would return and drive away this unpleasant, oppressive feeling. Did time really heal all wounds, as they used to say? Even if it had been time itself that had once inflicted them?

Sometime in the early morning hours Sehun finally fell into a dreamless sleep. A few hours later, however, he was rudely awakened again by his father Jiyong, who had strangely stormed into his son's room and rushed to the other end of the room with thumping steps to push aside the drawn curtains with a jerk. Mercilessly, the sun's glaring light flooded his room, so that he turned around humming and threw the blanket over his head to shield himself from it. 

Unfortunately, however, his father remained stubborn and tugged at the ceiling, shook him and shouted "Wake up!" over and over again until Sehun could no longer stand it and opened his eyes in resignation. »What's wrong?«, he growled sleepily and drove himself nervously through his face. »It's about time - we have to leave in two hours.«, his father, however, only gave cryptically and tried... he tried to grin? Sehun, who felt alarmed by this untypical behavior of his father, flinched slightly. Something was wrong. 

Damn it, something was very wrong. First of all, since when did his father come into his room to pull the curtains aside and wake him up? Sehun could not remember a single time. Second, when did his father become so.. so nice? Jiyong and nice? No, it just didn't go together. And three, what the hell was he talking about?! Leaving in two hours? »Going where?«, he hesitantly asked. His confusion was hard to ignore. »You'll see soon enough. Let's go.«, came another meaningless answer from his father. With a last slap on Sehun's arm, Jiyongs finally turned away and left his son partly sleepy and with an uncomprehending expression on his face.

Sehun wrinkled his forehead overstrained and was sure that a huge question mark hovered over his head. Had his father forgotten to take his pills or what had suddenly got into him? Well, it must have been the devil himself - Sehun could not explain it any other way. His father had had another one of his great ideas. Unfortunately, as he had to add, because these great ideas were far too often anything but that - Sehun knew that only too well. How could some people be so presumptuous and ruthless like his father?

But somehow he could have imagined that once again decisions would be made over his head and Sehun would become the victim of the whole thing. Jiyong had brought his son to Tokyo of all places. To Tokyo - to the family's vacation estate. Of course, many thoughts and memories rushed into Sehun's head at the same time, leaving the first deep crack in his th