It was hard to separate reality from a dream.

Jaejoong hadn't completely come to his senses when he opened his eyes in the morning. No one woke him up, and he did not even hear the usual alarm clock go off, so he must have fallen asleep very deeply. When he got up, the first thing he did was go to the bathroom and stare into the mirror.

It must have been two minutes before he was able to focus his vision and finally take a look. His reflection seemed pretty healthy. It seems that he was even able to gain enough weight, as the doctor advised, before...

Pain shot through his head and, unable to stand it, he groaned and pressed his palms to his temples, sinking to the floor.

Before everything went down. Before his mother...

"D-damn it..." he moaned. As soon as the first spasm of pain had passed, the guy stood up carefully, holding on to the wall, then coughed - his throat suddenly closing up as if he hadn't had anything to drink for a week. He the faucet and washed his face with cool water, looking at himself in the mirror again.

This time, however, a small note taped to the mirror caught his attention.

"When you finally come to your senses, don't be afraid. It's hard to explain, but I've been taking care of you for the last one or two months. I'll come back from work tonight and tell you everything in detail. You're not being held hostage, the key to the door is on the table near the exit. Just wait for me, okay?"

Jaejoong read it twice.

What the hell had happened to him?

He definitely felt that enough time had passed since the destruction of his entire life. He understood that this did not happen yesterday, but a period of "one or two months", as it was written in a neat handwriting, and it really was.

Jaejoong really did remember someone. Fragments, as if in a mist: hands bringing food, a man's voice, still very young, he remembered the sea - it seems they were there yesterday. There was also a mole above his lip that he saw in his memory... maybe it was before falling asleep? And that voice told him something... if only he could remember.

There was a calendar hanging above the table in the room - October fifteenth. Almost two months... Breakfast was on the table. Kimbap - he must have eaten it yesterday. Just in case, Jaejoong checked the key - it was lying peacefully in the place indicated in the note. He tried to open the door, pushed the handle, looked out: the apartment was on the roof of a two-story building. No one had locked him in. He could leave at any time.

Resolutely slamming the door, the boy returned to the table and began to eat, turning on the television.

He was asked to wait.

He wanted to wait.

*

With the onset of evening, no one returned home.

Even with a slightly clouded mind, he could remember that as soon as it got dark outside the window, someone came.

It was almost midnight when he excitedly went out on the roof to look around. Leaning over the side, trying not to touch the flower pots, he looked down: emptiness. No one. The city was asleep.

He stood there for about half an hour, completely frozen, then returned to the house. Lay down on the blankets, which had not been touched after last night, and tried to fall asleep.

"You should have come by now," he whispered, tossing and turning restlessly. His rapidly beating heart pounded against the veins in his temples, and it was only after several hours that he finally managed to close his eyes.

In the morning, everything was the same as yesterday.

He was all alone. There was no sign that the man had even looked in his house for a minute.

The clarity of mind with which Jaejoong suddenly met the morning hit his head again with a sharp pain: vivid memories from the recent past surfaced in his memory as if they had happened the day before. The pain was so intense that tears welled up in his eyes.

It took him a while to lie down with his eyes closed, trying to calm himself and let his heart do the same. The worst had already happened. He had cried over the most impossible, terrible emotions before, so why did they still resonate so strongly in his chest? It's as if they were cutting him.

On the second day of his lonely stay in a remotely familiar apartment, he checked all the few shelves and cupboards - no information was found. On the shelf by the TV there was only a small box of money - there was a lot, he did not count it. Nearby was a pile of much smaller bills. "For food," he read.

But the fridge was still full.

By evening, the hope that the owner of the house would return began to fade. Tormented by pain and overwhelmed by emotions, Jaejoong could barely sleep. Growing fear squeezed his fingers around his neck, making it impossible to breathe fully, the walls grew before his eyes, and he felt insignificant and lonely, completely disoriented. This could not last for long, but he waited stubbornly, hiding his head under the blanket when the confined space became unbearable.

The third day was like the first two.

The fourth - like the third.

The fifth...

By this time, consciousness had cleared enough to soberly assess the situation. The person who took care of him will not come. Jaejoong mentally ran through the possibilities that could have happened, and they were all hopelessly frightening. Did he leave him, was he tired, did something terrible happen...

"I hope you're just tired," he muttered to himself and pulled on a sweater that still seemed to have the smell of its real owner on it. Cozy, warm... homey, so much so that Jaejoong wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed his cheek against the collar. "I can't just sit here anymore. But I'll be back. Really, I'll come and find you."

No documents, no photos. It is unclear how long the apartment has been rented, and whether the house owner, with whom there is also no contact, will show up here sooner or later. Or maybe this room on the roof was the property of his mysterious Human?

And even if the money in the box would have been enough for at least a year in advance, Jaejoong did not take it - he only took a few bills for a taxi from the pile "for food", because he still did not know in which part of the city he was, and his phone was probably left at home. Or maybe lost. And what to do with all that? Well, actually...

He was all alone now. All by himself. Not to mention the fact that he was out of his usual life for almost two months.

In the beginning, of course, it was worth going home.

*

The apartment was greeted with the coolness of the open windows left from the summer, which he had forgotten to close once. There were traces of dried puddles on the floor under the windowsill - rain, apparently. It was a good thing he had chosen the right code for the door lock so he wouldn't forget it.

He used to like it here: not a very big apartment, it seems, but there is plenty of space. It was given to him by his own father before he died, when Jaejoong was still a child. Until his eighteenth birthday, his mother would not allow him to move here when he wanted to disown everyone. Not bothering them with his presence. But then she lost all legal control over him, and since February he has been legally living in his own apartment.

The apartment was double or even triple the size of the one he had left that morning. A small kitchen, but a spacious living room, a bedroom with two beds. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he went straight there, swallowing the tears that came. Empty, everything remained as he remembered it - it was foolish to hope. The picture frame they had taken in the spring was still on the nightstand. Unable to bear it, the boy came up and turned it the opposite way - it still hurt too much to see.

In any case, no matter how much he used to love it, he felt out of place here now.

His phone was in the living room. Without putting it off, Jaejoong found the right contact and called the only person he could count on - now all he had to do was wait.

He couldn't find a place for himself.

Too many thoughts were poking holes in his head, as if he was standing at a crossroads, not knowing where to go to find the right path and what to grab first. He disappeared for an unacceptably long time, whether he wanted to or not, and even if it was less than two months, it was a real luxury to lose so much time that he could not afford.

And coming back to the present, he kept thinking: how to find the suddenly missing person? The viscous sadness did not let any fresh air into the room, it only forced the closed windows to open again - better to freeze than to suffocate.

An hour later the doorbell finally rang.

Yong Haeson was a tall man in his early forties. As his mother's former lawyer, he had handled her cases throughout Jaejoong's life, for as long as he could remember. He was the only person who could help sort things out and give some direction. They had seen each other many times before - it seems that he once liked his mother a little more than business relations allowed. But when the rose-colored glasses fell from the man's eyes, revealing the ugly truth, he lost all warmth for her, but not for her son.

Maybe it was because he didn't have any children of his own. Maybe it was because Jaejoong himself was attached to him as a child. Were they close due to circumstances - rather no than yes, and yet it was a small relief to see him.

After leaving the bag of groceries at the door, Yong Haeson hugged him tightly without even taking off his coat.

*

"...honestly bad, but at least she took care of it. And I'm terribly sorry that I can't help you with..."

"I understand."

The lawyer fell silent and looked at his former client's son with empathy in his eyes.

The boy had seen so much in his eighteen years that senile old men had never seen in their lives, and there was no money in the account to protect him. Before his mother's death, however, there were still grains of that money left - she must have lost a decent amount in the casino.

"Jaejoong-ah, where have you been for so long?" the man asked sympathetically, putting his hand on the young man's shoulder. "I called you a hundred times, I came here - it's like you fell through the floor."

"In a way, I did. Nothing special... sorry about all this. I needed to rest."

Oh, if it had only been true. He himself would be glad to know what exactly was going on in his head, so that it would eventually shut down, depriving him of the opportunity to think and perceive what was happening. Whether it was a psychoemotional disorder, a reaction to events, maybe he was ill at all - who knows, there was no time to deal with it yet.

And it's not going to present itself in the near future while there are more important things to do.

"As for your request... The advice I can give you is this: try to get back on your feet first, otherwise there's nothing we can do.  Deal with what your mother left you. Give yourself at least a few years to get stronger, and then we will come back to this issue.

"How can I wait that long?" the guy whispered, trying to swallow a lump in his throat that made his eyes water. "And it would be fine if it was just me, but..."

"You can handle it. Believe me, I promise to help. But first you have to prepare the ground. Speaking of which," the man opened the folder and flipped through the documents, "while you were away, I took care of the cafe, your mother gave me the right to do that temporarily until you want to take the place of the director. Things are not going well over there, you know. The employees were on the verge of being fired, I had to spend all of the income on salaries, and last month I could not even fully cover them."

"Cover the rest from my bank account. And take your own as well."

"Jaejoong-ah..." the lawyer sighed. "You are not a millionaire. With what's left, you'll have to arrange properly..."

"You said I should get back on my feet first," he interrupted. "If there are no employees, the cafe will be closed, right? As far as I remember, they don't get much anyway."

"If you insist," the man nodded, pursing his lips. "There's only two left. Not bad guys, keeping them would be a good start. Maybe that will be the right decision. But I won't take any money from you."

"No, it's not-"

"You will pay for my work when we put an end to this. When things get better. Jaejoong-ah... focus on yourself. You're only eighteen. I understand your goals, but you must achieve them. One step at a time. Invest money and effort since it will be difficult. It's going to be a long road, but you know the importance of it. And when it all works out, I hope you'll forget this time and everything that happened for ever".

He doubted that, although the rest of the lawyer's words were true. It was just that the man didn't know exactly what happened after his mother's death and everything else that Jaejoong didn't dare to think about. He did not know that the foggy days he had spent next to a stranger, some of which had been completely forgotten, some of which had been preserved - he did not want to forget them anyway. He desperately didn't want to.

When he left in the morning, he carried the key to the apartment on the roof with him. Now it lay on the shelf, waiting for an hour until its new holder decided to return. Tomorrow, most likely, if he could control himself without breaking down before then.

Until recently, the walls had confined him there, but now he could not sit still, he wandered from one corner to another. Lawyer Yong had left a long time ago - on weekdays, no one canceled their work. The day was coming to an end. It was time for his evening meal, but he couldn't even look at the food.

Once, it drove him to complete exhaustion, the doctors swore, persuaded him to eat first, then go to the hospital, offered help - he didn't care what would happen to him if the only meaning of life was uprooted, his soul, his heart, everything was trampled on - he couldn't even think about food. As it is now, but...

"You have to eat well so you don't look so pale, Toadstool," suddenly appeared in his thoughts, and this flashing sentence made him sob. And again. A new wave of longing washed over him, a wave of emotion he could not resist. He slid down the wall on his back, all broken, all worn out.

Jaejoong pulled his knees up and buried his face in them, suddenly bursting into bitter tears without holding back.

He couldn't remember when he started or when he stopped, completely drained, but it seemed like an eternity before he got up, wiped his eyes, sniffed. He grabbed a small bag of groceries that Lawyer Yong had brought and put everything on the shelves of the refrigerator. He turned around, critically examined the food with swollen eyes, and sniffed again. His gaze fell on a box of restaurant food - he had neither the strength nor the desire to mess with homemade cooking.

Minutes later, Jaejoong chewed his food stubbornly and thought: When they see each other again, his Human will be happy to know that he continues to eat normally.

He will not let his efforts disappear without a trace. Jaejoong will not lose a single ounce.