Title: drenched, drownded

pg-13, adventure, hurt/comfort
(MAMA!AU) After a mission on earth gone horribly wrong, EXO-K is missing and feared dead. EXO-M is tasked with the impossible; to bring the 12 back together and come out of Earth alive. What makes it worse - EXO-K's powers are now corrupted, and they would stop at nothing to kill EXO-M. 

Poison that runs wild in the screams
Poison that I am already used to

-Jaejoong, Mine

Jongin bent down in front of the medicine cabinets that lined the walls of the infirmary room. Only Kyungsoo and Suho were reasonably trained in medicine, apart from Lay. The complicated labels just made Jongin dizzy. (ch3)

Chapter 7

Jongin jumped up and down the balls of his feet, his piercing gaze sweeping the white shelves anxiously. Rows of multi-coloured bottles were lined neatly, arranged in a classification that evaded him. Jongin glanced back down at the squiggly ink in his palm. Acetaminophen. He grimaced. Kyungsoo’s handwriting was getting bad, from a trembling hand and unfocused gaze.

He snatched the bottle near the end of the top row, his fingertips just grazing. It felt cold and plastic in his hands, but it would save his friend of some pain in the meantime. There was no money. He glanced around furtively. This was the third pharmacy he had been to. He might as well go all the way, since he was never coming back.

It felt oddly domestic, carrying the plastic red basket in his arm as he browsed through the healthy snacks on display. He piled on the bottles of water and the baked potato chips, ignoring the nagging voice at the back of his mind that sounded like Kyungsoo and Lay combined, to eat better. Jongin had stolen a belt just yesterday so that his jeans wouldn’t fall off his waist at the most inappropriate time.

When he felt he had enough supplies for at least a week – enough time for suspicion to die down, he had learnt from experience – he casually looked up at the ceiling. He was trained for this. In his mind, he could trace the invisible beams of the camera to find a blind spot.

There were not many people in the small town’s pharmacy. Good; it had taken him nearly an hour to shoo away an inquisitive two-year-old who kept tugging his leg and refused to move away from his blind spot. Jongin closed his eyes and cleared his mind. Teleporting was getting harder; somehow, his body seemed to feel heavier and more solid as time went by.

Black enveloped him, and he vanished in a blink of an eye.

Jongin brought them to a new motel room every few days in the dead of the night. After living like street rats for one measly, cold night – and watching Kyungsoo turn several shades paler as the clock ticked on – he had dragged the both of them to the nearest human dwelling to get their bearings. This was their third crash-in.

Kyungsoo shivered under the thick brown blanket they had found in the motel room cupboard. He was in an upright position, pulling the top of the blanket to cover his mouth.

It hadn’t taken long for Kyungsoo to diagnose himself of the poison administered. He hadn’t spent most of his life around the botanic gardens in the campus for nothing.

It was called the angel’s trumpet.

Jongin had laughed at the name, until he cried, and he hadn’t stopped crying since.

XXX

There was a flutter of soft caresses down his rough skin. Kris lifted his head from his light stupor. He was sitting on the narrow bed, his back leaning against the wall and his long legs hanging off the edge. He looked down at his shoulder. A mop of brown hair leaned against his arm.

“Lay…?”

The younger boy had his eyes squeezed shut, blinking hard and frequently in the span of a few seconds, but never opening. A soft moan escaped from cracked lips. Kris shifted in his seat. He wanted to pull away from the touch, but then the moan turned into a whimper and the fingers gripped harder on his biceps.

“Wake up, Lay.” The shaking of the boy’s shoulders became more forceful, vigorous, but the grip kept tightening to the painful digging of fingernails into flesh. A flash of anger ripped red under Kris’s eyelids, and a dragon’s roar echoed in his mind. The dragon didn’t like being touched, yet alone manhandled. Kris growled back under his breath.

“Lay.”

For one last time, the fingers curled in. For the first time, there was no imprint. The rough skin had hardened into snake scales. Before Kris lost any remaining control, he grabbed Lay’s hand – his fingernails had turned grey and long – and hurled the healer off the bed.

The hard crash onto the floor made a resounding thud sound on the rotting wooden floorboards. It didn’t take long for Lay’s eyes to snap open. He looked exhausted and confused, turning left and right for some clue as to how he ended up on the ground. Using the back of his hand, he wiped away the non-existent drool from his mouth.

“Sorry,” muttered Kris, rotating his neck until the crack of a tense muscle being relieved was heard. “The dragon is stressed.”

Lay took one glance at the threadbare blanket bunched under Kris’s hands. His fingernails were pink, but the blanket was shredded to pieces as if from claws. He looked silently at Kris, his eyes innocent and enquiring. Kris averted his gaze first, defensively unwilling to admit his shame. It wasn’t as if he could control his actions.

“You had a nightmare,” Kris explained. His tone was gruff, unnaturally loud in the otherwise quiet building, “and… held me.”

Understanding flooded Lay’s face. He reached out, to offer comfort, but Kris scooted further back into the bed immediately.

“Not now,” he told Lay stiffly. “And don’t apologise,” he added.

“I wasn’t going to,” Lay mentioned. The solemn face had yet to leave, and the dark smudges under his eyes were not tricks of the light. That must have been one hell of a nightmare, thought Kris. Lay stayed on the floor, choosing to curl into himself. It was a pathetic hug of sorts; wrapping his bruised arms – Kris must have shoved him harder than he thought – around his thin waist. “Did you have nightmares too?” Before the reply came, Lay answered himself. “No. You didn’t even go to sleep.”

“I never remember my dreams anyway,” offered Kris, ignoring the last statement.

At that, Lay gave a small smile. “Hnn. Lucky.”

They lapsed into silence. It wasn’t uncomfortable, because there was nothing to be said, but it wasn’t good. It didn’t take much to guess that Lay was thinking a lot more than he was letting on. He always did that.

“Was it a bad one?” Kris probed finally, the sore feeling in his gut, that felt too much like concern (“What a weak emotion,” his Trainer had sneered.) not leaving him.

Lay pouted his lips, looking too much like a small child. “I don’t remember –”

“Liar.”

This prompted a laugh. It held a sad tune, and Kris hated it, he hated this, he hated everything that happened since earth. He leaned against the dirty wall, sighing.

“Did you know that an average adult gets one to two nightmares a year?” Lay said, changing the topic. Kris turned his head to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “The scientists classify dreams that jeopardize the dreamer’s personal safety as nightmares. If it is recurring, it becomes a disorder, associated with dissociative disorders that are used as defence mechanisms to escape from a traumatic event. ”

Kris watched as colour slowly flooded back to Lay’s face, as he recited his textbook learning. He drew parallels to Xiu Min. While Xiu Min digested the information until it became part of his common knowledge, automatically putting what he learned into real life scenarios, Lay was more inclined to match real life scenarios to his textbooks. Reality became just another example to learn from, a form of detachment to what was happening in front of his eyes.

It was a genuine indifferent voice that asked the next question. “So what traumatic event are you escaping from?”

Lay his lips nervously. “I’m scared. For Suho.”

Kris lifted his chin. “I didn’t know –”

“No, not like that,” Lay refuted hastily, waving his hands in front of his face. He told Kris about the evening in the basement, and Suho’s discovery of the contaminated containment site. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Suho, or if the effects will spread. All this second guessing has been frustrating me since he got pulled out of the medical examination room.”

The uncharacteristic frown remained etched on Lay’s face, and it was superimposed on Kris’s face as well. Lay turned to Kris, not expecting an answer, but he still felt the drop of disappointment anyway when no immediate reassurance came forth.

“Do you think it’ll be fatal?”

“Who knows?” The answer was said in a maddeningly calm manner. “I don’t even know how long it has been since EXO-K crash-landed on earth. They did crash, right? The camera on the spaceship stopped working after that heap of earth broke the lens and stopped the feed.”

“They survived,” Kris said firmly.

It was Lay’s turn to be surprised. “How would you know?”

“Tao told me.”

Lay accepted the explanation, thought it wasn’t much of one. He trusted Kris explicitly, and he was distracted. “Speaking of the EXO-K spaceship landing, where’s Luhan?”

XXX

It tugged at the dragon heartstrings, seeing Luhan sitting down on the dried, brown grass patch behind their makeshift house alone. The afternoon made the sun look old, weary of its duty to provide warmth and light. Cold and darkness seemed to seep from the picture of the forest in the background to permeate the setting. Luhan was shivering.

“What are you doing?” Kris asked, striding forwards. He checked himself, flatly refusing to run towards his friend, instead slipping his hands in his jeans pockets. “Come back into the building.”

“It’s might as well be a ‘shed’,” Luhan corrected, without turning. “It’s small, single-storey and probably used for storage. Actually, it’s bigger than a typical one, since four of us can fit in there.”

Four?

Kris started. Luhan continued, though his thin voice was breaking. “You and Tao were out here last night, weren’t you? It must have been nice, with your backs against the wooden walls, looking at the human sky.” Luhan pulled up the dead grass with a viciousness that did not match his words. “Together.”

Oh.

“Luhan.”

Luhan lowered his head. His deft fingers played with the grass, tearing them apart. “Go check on Lay. His leg, probably,” prompted Luhan, still feeling Kris’s presence at his shoulder. “It’s healing slower than usual. You know as much about phoenix burns as Chanyeol did-”

“-does-”

A shockwave of power rippled through the air. Kris had encountered it before, and caught himself as he stumbled back so he would not fall, but there was something odd about it. It was wavering, like a splash of water instead of a block of air.

Luhan’s power was weaker.

Luhan didn’t bother to spare Kris a glare. He flexed his fingers, frowning at them.

Then something went wrong.

Nobody heard the creaking of taps turning, because it didn’t, but all of a sudden a gush of water sprayed out from the tap behind the shed. Kris turned around at the same time as Luhan at the sound. Water already started overflowing from the small cemented square area, absorbing into the grass bed.

“What was that?” Kris asked sharply. “Did you do anything?”

Luhan’s mouth was shaped in a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. He was already shaking his head before the sentence ended.

XXX

When Jongin teleported into the room, he stumbled out of the darkness. Then he slipped onto a puddle of water, knocking over Kyungsoo so that they tumbled to the floor together.

“What’s wrong with the water?” Jongin shouted, sliding the basket onto a dry patch. Kyungsoo pushed Jongin aside and crouched against the bathroom door, tucking a rolled-up mat from under his arm against the sliver of space under the door. Then he looked up Jongin, wide-eyed.

“It’s boiling hot,” Kyungsoo replied, not without any trepidation in his voice. “It won’t stop flowing. It’s already filled the sink, and the bathtub was half-filled.”

Jongin wiped his face. He looked scared. “It’s only us again, isn’t it?”

“No other room has this problem,” confirmed Kyungsoo. “It’s not as if we can tell the manager; we’re illegally using this place.” He leaned his head against the door, sighing. Steam was starting to escape from the corners of the doorframe already.

Jongin eyed his friend pensively. Kyungsoo’s pallid face was starting to discolour blue-black, creeping from his neck to his jawline. His breathing was uneven as well, exhausted from the mere exertion of moving around.

“Something’s happening to Suho,” Kyungsoo muttered, repeating what the two of them had long ago concluded, when the series of strange events that involved water somehow started to occur.

He rubbed his eyes, which had begun to spin the furniture in the room to a mosaic vision. Strong hands gripped him from under his arms, and around his side, and helped him to the bed.

“Whenever this happens, you get worse,” Jongin said quietly. “I think it’s co-related, Kyungsoo. Shut up about Suho for the moment, we’ve been trying to find the others for ages – focus on getting well.”

“There isn’t a cure for this,” came the tired, practiced reply. “And you have no basis for that assumption.”

“You also said you couldn’t last more than twenty-four hours,” snapped Jongin, in an uncharacteristic burst of ferocity. “So there’s hope, alright?”

Kyungsoo looked down at that, in an almost sheepish way, scratching behind his right ear. He had panicked Jongin into a fit, eventhough he had been feverish and vomiting as soon as they crash landed. In the time they weren’t spending trying to track down the other four EXO-K members, Jongin had been meticulously learning all the names of medicines and other titbits of information that he prayed would never come in handy one day.

There was a startling pop sound, and a bag of potato chips was waved under Kyungsoo’s nose. “Here.”

Kyungsoo gave Jongin a petulant look. “This stuff isn’t good for you.”

Jongin rolled his eyes. “Stuff it, and eat.”

XXX

A/N: I had this in my computer for two weeks, anticipating the HunHan scene-- but I was anxiously waiting for exam results so it never came out right. This fic is supposed to be nitpicky in quality, so no update on that yet. In the meantime here's a bit of what's happening simultaneously in Chapter Six. On an unrelated note, I do talk about this fic to a friend. I was stuck for words and came up with "There's four chapters of prologue, and people get bruised and injured in every other paragraph. Someone drowned in the first paragraph to be honest." Her: O__O

any comments are loved.