Darkness, a void.

But it is not dark here. It's is black. It's empty. It's...cold. 

There's a noise, monotonous and rhythmic, like a whirring or a droning or a delicate, piercing beep. Like the ear-curdling sound of chalk scratching against a blackboard.

"Seungwan?" she turns around, finding herself staring back at Bae Joohyun. But is it...her Bae Joohyun?

"It's me," she says, hesitantly reaching out but Seungwan noticeably flinches and this Joohyun-appearing person sighs, reluctantly keeping her distance. "Seungwan-ah. It's me, your Joohyun unnie."

"Where am I?" Seungwan asks, drifting her gaze around the limitless black around them. There's a faint smell that makes her wrinkle her nose. 

"You're with me," is all Joohyun says.

"Is this another part of that place?" Seungwan says, feeling a bitter taste on her tongue--suspicion perhaps, or fear. "I thought I won, but is this just my brain refusing to let me live?"

"Do you want to live, Seungwan?" Joohyun returns. 

The younger takes her time to think about that. Should she even bother humouring Joohyun, on the large chance that it's simply a figment of her imagination? Is this some sort of test?

"I do," Seungwan says. "I want to see you again. The real you. Out there, in the real world. With all of my real friends and my real life."

Joohyun hums shortly and starts walking in the other direction. "Okay. But it won't be easy."

"What do you mean?" Seungwan asks, following her. "Where are you going?"

Joohyun stops in her spot and tilts her head ever so slightly. "You're on the second trial, Son Seungwan."

"What?"

"He has high hopes for you."

Seungwan kicks into a run when Joohyun's figure slips into the contours of the darkness; she runs and runs, feeling a sense of deja vu from the first night of herself being transported into that fantasy. If she runs further will she end up in that same forest? Get chased by Sooyoung the dinosaur again?

At that possibility, Seungwan stops in her spot. She spins around, searching for any shape out of the vast blackness. She huffs, catching her breath and tastes something vile in the back of . The noise evolves then, a mix between the beeping and echoes of something Seungwan can't pinpoint. 

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she hears amidst the ominous sounds.

"What?" Seungwan utters as the darkness begin to tear apart, like pixels in a broken television screen.

"Sooyoung, this is all your fault!"

"Joohyun?" Seungwan blinks, just as the slip of light pierces through; moonlight pours through cracks in windows and shutters and doors, where eventually, the pitch black is replaced by the mere darkness of a hospital room.

The sound is from a heart rate monitor. The smell is the plain anesthetic typical of hospitals. The taste is blood because Seungwan almost died and she's--

She's alive and she's awake now.

“Me? You were the one with her shaking hands inside Seungwan’s chest. Best heart surgeon in the country, my !”

“You only had one job, Park So