Beep.

HR: 60 bpm

“Yeji-ah.”

“. . .”

“Hwang Yeji?”

A tug on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“. . . .”

“You’ve got fried rice on your hair.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Yeji is uncharacteristically slow when she straightens up, voice hoarse from her short, unintended nap. The spoon that she’s holding clatters as she puts it back down on the table, hastily trying to rub out every grain of sleepiness from her eyes.

Across the kitchen island, Jisu is watching her with a concerned frown.

“Are you okay? You can get some more sleep if you want to.”

“And miss breakfast with you?” Yeji’s eyes flutter open, combing back her long hair with her hand absentmindedly. The bits of food in her hair are brushed off with every . “Last Wednesday you were being all sulky with me just because I slept in without telling you.”

“I had a pretty good spread laid out.” Jisu shrugs. “Is it bad that I wanted to share it with you?”

Yeji shakes her head. Her roommate is quick to resume having her meal, shoveling a small heap of fried rice with her own spoon. Yeji’s own is barely touched, scrambled eggs that she always eats first scattered in her bowl, waiting to be eaten. Her stomach nags with pain at the sight. However, her thoughts remain preoccupied. In them, there’s something that she has tried to lift and throw away since last night. Something way heavier than a bus.

Yeji’s vision starts to alternatively flicker from the sight of her food to pitch black.

“Okay, I have an idea,” Jisu stands up so abruptly that it almost makes Yeji flinch, accompanied by the grating sound of her chair’s feet scraping hardwood floor.

Before Yeji can react, Jisu holds her by the arm and pulls her up, grip surprisingly strong. Yeji looks back at the food still on the kitchen island—all prepared by Jisu herself, like most Wednesdays. Sulky Jisu is a little cute, if Yeji were to be honest, but she didn’t seem like it today. Did Yeji not notice?

“Hey, what are you…” The girl trails off, letting herself be dragged along. They reach the threshold of Yeji’s quaint bedroom, Jisu opening the door gently. Yeji’s brows furrowed in confusion.

Jisu turns to her, patting the small of her back. “Go lie down. I’ll be right back.”

When Jisu leaves, Yeji is left standing there, looking at her mess of a bedroom. Clothes were strewn everywhere she looked. She barely cleaned up the mess of last night, or this morning, rather. Somewhere in the streets of Seoul at one in the morning, Yeji was still up and about, walking alongside Dahyun and Hyunjin.

Yeji glues her eyes shut for a moment. There’s nothing she wants more than to forget everything that happened last night.

She walks slowly towards her bed, placed in the center of the room. She makes sure to kick her bloodstained tee under the bed frame before finally laying down, slipping into her sheets. The sound of wheels rolling against the apartment floor makes Yeji crane her head towards the open door. Soon enough, Jisu emerges—pushing an overbed table narrow enough to pass through the doorway, carrying food.

“Wow,” Yeji sits up. “Should I be expecting a hospital orderly to knock at our door due to a missing table?”

“Very funny, but no,” Jisu chuckles, carefully navigating through the clothes-littered floor of Yeji’s room. “Saw this at a garage sale last week. Figured I would get it just in case.”

“Just in case your roommate might be too tired to eat breakfast with you?”

Jisu rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “Please don’t flatter yourself too much, Hwang.”

Yeji lets out a small chuckle as she keeps her eyes on Jisu. It takes the latter a few moments to properly position the table, adjusting the height accordingly. She then makes her way towards the bed after that, Yeji scooting over to make room for her. Once she rests the weight of her whole body onto the bed, Jisu sighs in contentment.

“Your mattress is way nicer than mine,” she comments, nudging Yeji with her shoulder.

The latter hums, reaching over to grab her bowl of unfinished food on the overbed table. “Probably because of how many guys my ex-roommate brought over.”

“I did not need to know that!” Jisu whines, looking at Yeji with wide eyes. “Now I’ll feel weird sleeping in that bed.”

“You can sleep on the couch since you used to sleep on it when you first came,” Yeji says before putting a spoonful of rice into .

“The only reason I hung around that thing until midnight is because I wanted to catch you outside and talk to you.” Jisu suddenly admits, hand reaching for her signature baby blue mug. “It didn’t make sense to not talk to someone who’s not a total stranger, you know?”

Yeji hums in agreement, continuing to eat silently. Talking to Jisu seemed like an alternate reality then, but now she was here, having an honest conversation. Eating breakfast with her. In bed. Fourteen-year old Hwang Yeji would pass out and fly off to the moon if she knew.

“So…” Jisu speaks up after a long yet comfortable silence, “did Tuesday game night burn you out that bad?”

Yeji stops eating entirely. The sight of Kim Yongseung’s bloody head under the bright hospital lights flashes in her mind, making her lose her appetite.

“No, it’s not that,” she mumbles, gently putting back her now half-eaten bowl of rice on the table in front of her.

“Then what is it?”

Yeji turns to Jisu and finds the latter staring at her, eyebrows furrowed slightly. Their proximity takes Yeji aback, as she can now see every minute detail of Jisu’s pretty face. Choi Jisu’s eyes, in particular, are incredibly dangerous. It makes Yeji want to reveal the entirety of herself. Every single truth she held. Every vulnerability.

It makes Yeji want to tell Jisu things that she shouldn’t know. The flying, the doorknobs, the true nature of her game night group. The bus. The junior currently in a coma. The reason why she barely got any sleep after one of the most tiring nights of her life.

(And maybe, her confusing feelings about Jisu. Luckily, she’s still too confused about it to say anything stupid.)

Yeji sighs. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched?”

Jisu shakes her head softly. “No. Do you?”

“Last night,” Yeji starts, looking down at the blanket draped over them both, “on my way home from game night with my friends…”

“This is all my fault,” is the first thing Dahyun says to Yeji and Hyunjin once they walk out of the premises of the hospital where Yongseung is, comatose from the severity of his injuries. The other Meta Alliance members on duty for night watch have went home earlier than the three, and some of Yongseung’s friends decided to stay a while to wait for his parents.

Yeji looks down at her pulse watch and reads the time. 1:30AM. Police questioning must have taken place inside the ER an hour ago. She lags behind her fellow metahumans, thoughtfully looking down at the specks of blood on her shirt.

“Did you know that this was going to happen?” Hyunjin asks, massaging his temples. 

“I’m a bird, Hyunjin, not an oracle,” Dahyun rebuts.

“But how is this all your fault?”

Dahyun lets out an exasperated sigh, ruffling her brunette hair. “Something like this has been happening in many universities in the country. I had known about this for weeks. I was foolishly convinced of our safety to not tell anybody. I didn’t think it would reach JYU this quickly but now… it just did.”

“W-what?” Hyunjin sputters. “Why wasn’t that on the news?”

Dahyun stops. She turns around to look at both Hyunjin and Yeji, who stop with her and watch her with curious eyes.

“You two might think I’m a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist,” she prefaces, “but hear me out. Do you two remember the publicized trial of the pyrokinetic who burned down a high-rise building in Ansan?”

“I do.” Yeji answers, glancing at a confused Hyunjin. “That was all over the news a few months ago. What does that have to do with this?”

“The company who owns that building is led by a metahuman-hating jerk.” Dahyun scoffs. “The SMU metahuman org already had a few of its members missing after interning there. No news coverage either. The jerk is powerful enough to cover anything up.”

Dahyun looks cautiously around the area. They’ve made enough distance from the hospital, now in front of closed shops and bookstores approaching the university grounds. However, she still leans into both Yeji and Hyunjin, as if anybody would hear them in the empty street.

“He’s spearheading a movement against our kind,” she whispers. “Spreading fear among insecure folks. Making them do the unimaginable. Sinister hate crimes.”

The thought of something so diabolical makes Yeji’s blood run cold.

“How do they know who to take?” Hyunjin immediately asks. “We look just like regular humans. No telepathic metahuman will want to side with them, right?”

“The org,” Yeji realizes. “There’s a list of members of MA in JYU student records. They could probably start from there.”

Dahyun silently nods in affirmation. “Metahumans are humans too. Remember that. Vulnerable to greed, to power, to circumstance. Right now, between me and you guys, I’d doubt who I’ll trust.”

“Does this mean we can’t trust you eith—ouch!” Hyunjin is stepped on by Dahyun even before he can finish his question. His grunt of retaliation falls on deaf ears as the president turns around, paying him no mind.

Yeji remains frozen as she watches her walk away. “What do we do now?”

“We stay safe. We stop meeting for a while, just until everything dies down.” Dahyun’s voice is calm, just like her footsteps. “We go about our lives, blending into society, just like before joining MA. We keep an eye out.”

The girl pauses. She turns to look at Yeji and Hyunjin, a small smile on her face.

“I’d hate to lose you two. Especially after tonight.”

In a flash, Dahyun shifts to her eagle form, silently flapping her wings to fly towards home. The bird leaves two confused people in its wake, left to digest the information given to them by themselves. Hyunjin’s silence is enough for Yeji to know that he’s taking this seriously.

“See you when I see you, I guess,” he says after a moment, patting Yeji’s shoulder. He walks away from her towards the direction of the university, almost dragging his feet.

Yeji sighs. Her apartment complex is twenty minutes away on foot. The only thing she hears now is how loud her pulse watch is.

HR: 105 bpm.

Although she isn’t in imminent danger now, the thought that she could end up just like Yongseung is getting the best of her. Yeji needed to sleep this off. Now.

With one hand removing her annoying watch, she crosses the road, headed for the nearest shortcut. The alley she enters is dark and musty, walls narrowing ever so slightly as she advances. The walls almost stick to her skin, like a flytrap capturing its prey. Yeji heaves. She needs to calm down. She doesn’t need to overthink things right now.

“Nothing else is going to happen tonight, alright?” She tells herself as she emerges from the alleyway, nearer to her destination. Yeji looks left and right, observing the empty street she’s on.

The warm streetlights show her nothing. 

To further ease the feeling in her chest, Yeji starts running towards the direction of her apartment complex. She tries her hardest to ignore the idea or sensation—Yeji isn’t really sure—of having someone on her tail, following her every move. On top of that, her brain is seemingly conjuring everything she’s been afraid of all at once.

Yeji decides to focus on the noise that her shoes make. Its squeaks, the sound of rubber hitting pavement. The rhythm they both make is regular, a contrast to her winding mind. When she finally sees the familiar gate of the complex right within her line of sight, Yeji slows down to a jog.

“Oh god,” she huffs out, talking to herself once more. “Why am I running away from something that isn’t even there?”

The sound of glass breaking makes Yeji stop. She turns around towards the direction of the noise.

Not too far away behind her, under the orange glow of a streetlight, is a person wearing a bunny mask, something shiny in their hand. It was a sensation, then. Of someone on her tail. They seem to be looking right at her. As if they were hunting her.

Yeji doesn’t want to stay here and find out.

With an erratic heart and an anxious mind, she runs away faster than ever.

“…I felt like someone was watching and following me home. Staring at me from far away.” Yeji sighs, leaving out chunks of the truth. “Before entering the street outside the apartment complex, I looked back to see a person standing a few feet away. It looked like they’d been following me ever since I left my friends near the campus. They looked so scary. I was up all night trying to forget them. Trying to make myself believe that they weren’t real.”

The silence that follows is deafening. Yeji wants to disappear for unloading her fears onto Jisu like that. “Sorry,” she clears , “that was stupid, I’m—”

“I don’t think it is.” Jisu grabs onto Yeji’s sweatshirt sleeve, tugging softly. “Someone you don’t know following you home is scarier than any horror movie will ever be.” The cool of her finger pokes at Yeji’s cheek, making the latter look at her.

“It’s okay to feel scared,” she continues, her smile incredibly reassuring. It makes Yeji flash a smile back, one that’s silently trying to portray gratitude in the best way it could. “Did anything else happen?”

Yeji shakes her head. The last thing she wants is for Jisu to feel the burden that she has. The burden of knowing that somewhere, someone is out to make people like Yeji and Chaeryeong suffer. It won’t do anything good to someone as caring and kind as Jisu. She didn’t deserve to know that.

Jisu suddenly gasps, grinning at Yeji teasingly. “Are you sure it wasn’t a ghost?”

Yeji snorts. “Are ghosts even real?”

“Well,” the younger girl starts, taking a sip from her mug, “those people who set fire to things with their mind and stretch their arms like crazy are real. I wouldn’t be that surprised.”

The comment doesn’t make Yeji respond like she usually would. She’s too focused on Jisu’s face and the way that she her lips in habit, every single expression she makes now committed to memory. Yeji knows that she’s staring at now, unabashed, but suddenly Jisu is too, enchanting eyes looking back at her like she’s all she sees. When did Jisu start looking at her like that? Does Yeji have something on her face?

Neither party seems to want to back down from their impromptu staring contest. However, Yeji’s eyelids betray her as they start closing on their own.

“You should really get some sleep, Yeji.” Jisu chides softly.

“I’ve been taking naps throughout breakfast today, so I guess that counts as some sleep?” Yeji opens her eyes as she reasons. Jisu puts back her mug on the overbed table for a moment before glaring at her, delicate arms crossed over her chest.

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“I think I’ve gotten ten minutes of sleep back there, which is better than nothing?” Yeji tries.

“Nope.”

“But I can’t fall asleep, mom,” Yeji whines jokingly, making the other girl crack a smile. The giggling that ensues makes Yeji’s heart feel a thousand times bigger, with Jisu burying her face in her hair, shoulders shaking as she laughs.

Jisu sighs fondly once they’ve sobered up, sitting up straight to look at a grinning Yeji. “You’re helpless. You’ve given me no choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to know what I do when I get scared?” Jisu smiles knowingly.

Yeji tilts her head. “I believe you’ll still tell me if I tell you I don’t, so…”

“Right.” Jisu lets out a chuckle. She lies down, dark locks splaying out on Yeji’s white pillow like paint splattered on canvas. She reaches out for Yeji’s sleeve to tug at it again, a silent invitation for the girl to lie down with her.

Although hesitant, Yeji follows, slipping deeper into her sheets, welcoming the sensation of another body being with her underneath. Her eyes automatically turn to the plain white ceiling above the bed, clean from her anxiety-induced scrubbing spree at four in the morning courtesy of her abilit