READ CHAPTER >>> 32 <<< PRIOR.

( Onew's Theme: Ages )

The teenager slammed his red fists against the cold locked door again, “Let me out!” he would scream, pounding with all his might, “I’m not insane! I’m not like these people!” his voice echoed in his empty room.

Months had he been in this place and suffered among people he couldn’t stand. He wasn’t like them; he couldn’t be. He screamed the same things they had, acted the same way out of emotion, and sounded insane, but he was not like these people. He was only brought here against his will even though he was as sane as ever. He was crowded in the lies of bad people and only wanted to escape from the terror he’s endured the past months. He had no challenges or disabilities, but the lies on the paperwork proved to the workers otherwise. He was completely normal but the workers never saw it; too clouded with the judgment that once someone is enlisted in here, they could never be normal. The teen fell to being that victim of judgment.

He fell into the routine of a patient. Specific times he was visited, fed, checked up on, and some times even let out. He refused to act like a patient but no one saw the difference in him. No matter how much he tried to prove it, no one listened. He had no friends here. He had no guidance here. He only had himself.

He slammed his fists on the door again when he heard people walking by, “I’m not crazy!” he shouted desperately. He believed himself—he was the same person as always. No one changed him. His determination to get out and prove himself was too strong to let go. It wasn’t his fault he was here, “I’m normal!” each pound growing weaker as silenced ensued, “Please . . . please . . . I need him. I need to protect him . . . Taemin needs me.”

The teen broke down once again, sliding to the floor and turned, leaning against the door. He drew up his knees together and curled up, starting to cry out once again. He couldn’t be here and he wasn’t supposed to be here. He needed to go back home to those people.

Those people.

Never could he call them his parents ever. Selling him off to a strange man and put him in the hell of despair. There was always a broken link between him and his parents since the day he could remember. There was always something irritating about him that his parents grew to hate even though he did nothing wrong. Those people didn’t deserve to be called parents or be entitled to the benefits that came with it. They were disgraces as people. Abusers, neglectors, liars. He hoped the world gave them Hell.

The anger towards that diminished easily when the single factor of his existence would break him down to his core. His vision kept blurring in tears and his body grew languid at the thoughts. When Taemin had accidentally come around into all of their lives . . .

The teenager sobbed in guilt. He left his baby brother behind without a thought. He only thought about escaping and surviving on his own. Maybe it was because he was too blind in anger and shock that he forgot Taemin in just that moment. But he left his baby brother to torment, or even worse, and it was his job to protect him from all of it. No matter how annoying or tiring it was to have to be his brother’s real parent, he still loved taking that role. His brother’s happiness was the cure to numbing his hard life and learn to appreciate it. The bright smile, jumbled words, broad imagination . . .

He failed him. He left him with them.

  “I’m so sorry,” he apologized, his sobs echoing in the room, “Taemin . . . I’m so sorry.”

It was hard to think about how Taemin was, right now. Would he be okay? What would those people do? They never wanted him in the first place, so they’d just cast him out, wouldn’t they?

The more the boy thought about it, the more his heart clenched. If Taemin grew up to be a teenager with his parents, he didn’t think Taemin would make it. Before Taemin was born, the teenager was in a debate with taking his own life just to rid himself of the neglect. They barely cared for him or anything sharp in his hand. They would let him do it. But once he saw that woman showing, he had to stop himself. He couldn’t let someone else suffer as much as he had.

But Taemin had no one to live for. He knew Taemin was a fragile child; he would grow older and wouldn’t be stable. He couldn’t doubt what Taemin would be capable of because he would never know. But he did know this was an option.

The teen hoped he would be the first to go before Taemin would even think about it.

  “Oh god,” he sobbed again, running his hands down his face, “Please don’t do this to him. I need to save him . . . Someone help me . . . please . . .”

Never did the door open.

The teenager lost track of time after the next couple of months. During the time, his health began deteriorating quickly to the point he became debilitated. Never did he bother to get out of the barred bed again. He never moved from his spot, despite and itch or ache. He never ate the food put next to his bed; it began to pile up quickly and nurses took note of it until he was being force fed through a tube. He stared out the window countless days and countless nights with time lost. Thoughts gone. Mind erased. His depression put him over the edge that he basically had given up on trying to prove something he wasn't. He was never going to see Taemin again and he would never be free. His tears dried up and if he couldn't cry about it no longer, he wanted to lay still and never feel.

He paralyzed himself, barely able to move his half-lidded eyes or turn his head. His routine then ditched the window and only looked up at the brown encrusted ceiling. The nurses would come in and check him, absolutely nothing said. Nothing shouted. No crying or outbursts. The teenager lost his purpose of reasoning and never bothered again. His lips were basically sealed shut and never opened.

The only sound in the room was the beeping of his monitor, showing he was still alive when he wished he wasn’t. Months, and this is all he lived as. Soon enough the nurse’s hooked him up to different drugs and an automatic feed machine that would dispenser the products into his blood. Their routines changed for him to the point they barely even saw him once a day because they were no longer needed. He was being left to himself and die on his own.

At least he would go before Taemin.

But at an unusual time for a nurse to enter, the door opened. He noticed heavy boots impacting the floor but he never moved his frozen gaze at the ceiling. Whoever it was would come and leave.

  “Tell me,” a gruff man’s voice demanded shortly. He could feel the man by his feet.

Quieter footsteps followed into the room and shut the door without a sound. Papers on a clipboard began flipping and another man began to talk, “Well, the first half of the year he spent it defiantly. He banged on his door nonstop and shouted, begged and screamed at nurses to believe him, and even hit someone,” the clipboard hit his dresser, “But the rest of this year and on, he just started . . . stopping.”

  “As in?” the gruff voice demanded again.

  “Like he gave up. He just laid in bed and stared out the window. He stopped eating a week in, stopped moving, and his body has grown stiff enough to seem paralyzed. It could take him years just for his joints to get rolling again. They’re easily breakable now because, after all, his nutrients come from a tube and it isn’t significant amounts.”

Dog tags hit against each other as the man with heavy boots walked next to the boy’s side, but he still couldn’t see him, “Don’t you see this as defiance, boy?”

The nurse stumbled with his words, “Excuse me?”

  “Defiance,” the gruff voice huffed, “His way to say he’s given up but silence proves he’s not meant to be here. No evidence to prove he’s as crazy as the others in here. Silence offers nothing contrasted to these others that scream and holler. Smart, boy.” He paused for a moment, “. . . Now get the other one in here.”

The nurse sighed, “Look, sir,” steps followed, “I don’t think we’ve succeeded on this one. Just look at him. He’s completely gone, can’t you see the blankness in his eyes? We’ve gone too far, he shows signs of being incapable of recovery—”

  “Boy, I’m not asking you to get the other one, I’m telling you to get him. You don’t do it, then I’m allowing authorities all over your while covering mine,” he sternly warned, “Go. Get. Him.”

The nurse stood there for a moment before slowly taking his clipboard and exiting out of the room, “I wish I never knew you.”

The door quietly closed and the main exhaled a laugh from his nose. He hovered over top of the teen, covering his sight of the ceiling. His dog tags hit him on the nose once before he pulled back a little. A rough smirk on his unshaven face, “I wonder. . .

  “What will happen when I leave you here?”

Onew, clad in the soft grey uniform of a patient, quietly snuck his way through the halls, scratching his wrist under his wristband with the wrong name. He was going into check up in half an hour and the unfamiliar nurse said to stay in his designated room. But with the door unlocked, Onew couldn’t obey.

Onew looked for the room he needed to get into, the name of the person burned in his head as he looked for it marked beside the doors. His socks softly patted on the floor and hopefully he wouldn’t slip like he always would; busting his head would ruin the whole operation.

He found the right door, opening and quietly shutting it behind him. He looked at the familiar room out of what he could see. The same, single dresser with an empty vase on top. The dents in the white walls never repaired. The ceiling never cleaned of the brown.  The large window far from him still cracked on the left. The slight ability to see the end of the bed with the right wall in the way. It a silent room, but if it weren’t for the beeping of the heart monitor, no one would’ve known the patient was in the room of broken hope.

Onew breathed out slowly, hesitantly moving himself into the cold room that lacked life. The barred bed slowly came into sight with a person Onew vaguely remembered, but out of what he could, it was clear.

The patient laid there unmoving under his thin blanket, his eyes lids drooped and faced the ceiling, never moving an inch of his eyes. He laid there rigidly, attached to numerous tubes in his arms and sides to keep him alive, an air mask over his face, just barely a fog coming and going to show he breathed so little. His mattress and pillow were sunken in as if never replaced since day one. And he looked as though he hadn’t been touched or moved from his spot since Onew last saw him about fourteen years ago.

Onew stood beside the man. He was never offered a shout, plead, or scream to announce the unwanted company he brought. The man hadn’t physically acknowledged  Onew’s presence at all, but Onew already knew that wasn’t how it was. The man knew Onew was there.

He kept still and watched his chest just barely rise and fall in the midst of his difficulty breathing. He watched the drugs flow from their bags into his body. He watch the significant heart monitor that offered a beep for each cycle of his heart beat. The man could do nothing to change what he was doing for the rest of his life or change the fate he’d been damned to. Onew held his head low quietly.

It was his fault this man faced this life. If he hadn’t been so stupid or saved him, he could’ve prevented this from happening. He could’ve saved another innocent soul instead of let it waste. But he never did anything to help him. Even when he got the chance, the man’s fate could not be changed.

Onew drained himself from emotion and held his head back up. He lifted the dead-weight arm, taking a gander at his wristband and sighed internally. This man went through so much for nothing and it will always be his fault.

Onew took off his own wristband carefully and placed it on the bed beside the man.

  “Lee Jinki,” he carefully tore the wristband off of the man and replaced it with his own. He put down the man’s arm to take the band he ripped off of him and put it around himself. Staring at the name on his new, but old wristband, he spoke softly, “You don’t exist like this anymore.”

The heart monitory skipped one beat until it resumed again, and Onew looked at the man. He wanted to do something and the heart monitor was the clue. Maybe Onew could unhook everything he was attached to and let his life end right there instead of suffer years into his elderly age to die. To rid him of wasting time sitting in a bed officially paralyzed forever. Maybe that’s how Onew could redeem himself, possibly earning a silent thank you from the man before he would pass on and hopefully be happier with the after life.

But Onew couldn’t do that. He couldn’t know if that’s what the man wanted and Onew couldn’t afford to be selfish. Of course, he thought no one would want to waste life like this, but who knew if the man was afraid of facing death—especially so early on. Death may be a look towards this man’s happiness, but Onew couldn’t ever be the judge of that. He never knew the man personally to even give himself debate. He couldn’t unhook the man and send him away.

He knew the man would always hate him whether he did him the favor or not. It was still his fault he was condemned into this place without a family member, a friend, or friendly visitor to make his bed rest easier. If only Onew came back fast enough to break him out of the asylum, would this man lead a better life. Then he wouldn’t be hated.

But that was only playing with a wish.

Onew wanted to apologize to him, but he knew that would make no difference. It would change nothing. It wouldn’t heal this man. It wouldn’t change his life. The apology was insulting.

Glancing back at the blank face for the last time ever, Onew composed. He turned and walked away from the room he would never set foot in again.

  “You don’t exist like this anymore,” he repeated . He held on to the door knob and looked back, seeing only the end of the bed and no movement coming from it.

He looked away and opened the door to the empty hallway. Entering outside and shut the door quietly, he saw the nametag ‘Lee Jinki’ next to the door again. Onew slid it out from its place and replaced it with a nametag he pulled from his pocket that matched the man’s new wristband.

He walked away from the room for the last time and broke Lee Jinki’s nametag in half, throwing it into a nearby trashcan as he walked back to his designated room for this check up he was scheduled for.

Onew rubbed his wrist under his new, but old wristband.

The name now labeling the right person.

----Note~-----

Did I proceed to confuse you?

I rewrote it the best I could last night and today, and I've basically got every subject I mentioned in the original, but still not the same as the first. The original is probably better, but we'll never know.

Now, if you need clarification, here you go:

-- Yes, the teenager in the beginning IS Onew.

-- No, Onew never went insane, but throughout paralyzing himself, he does become mentally unstable/incapable for a while as he went into the prison.

-- Yes, Onew was really paralyzed at the time the man (It's SangJung) came to see him.

--SangJung works with said nurse "under the table" you could say. The asylum is to either rid people from the normal world and/or for the unstable people after witnessing a creature.

Now to the confusing part.

-- Onew in chapter 30 (Overwhelm) held up his wristband saying he went to the asylum right? He went for his "check up" because like before, Onew was unstable when he entered the prison, and they keep tabs on his mental health when he's normal now.

-- Onew snuck out of his private room to go to his OLD room that was still labelled Lee Jinki. The man inside is an actual paralyzed person (a drug he was connected to kept him paralyzed), in which is the "Get the other one," that SangJung told the nurse to get.

-- This man was then labelled as Lee Jinki in case anyone went looking for him and thus prove, the man they look at in the bed is not the one they know, keeping the real Lee Jinki 'Missing'.

-- Onew went back to the aslyum with the name of that patient being framed as him. He switched out their wristbands, labelling them as the right people. Onew was mainly talking to himself when he said "You don't exist like this anymore." because, well, Lee Jinki is a perfectly normal person now.

-- Onew knew the name of the person and completely rid Lee Jinki from the asylum while giving the man his identity back. So he replaces that wristband and nametag with the man's real name. Onew felt he owed at least that much to him.

AND THERE WE GO.

This is one of my favorites because despite the misleading and confusing part of it, that was really intentional. I DON'T KNOW WHY BUT I LIKE IT.

Did anyone even think Onew was Taemin's brother? AT ALL?

I left subtle clues. xD

Next chapter is gonna be about Jonghyun. You might wanna reread chapters here and the main story about Jonghyun because I put foreshadowing in there too about this next chapter. I think it's the next chapter in the main story too!

Juuuuust wait for it!

Alright guys, that's enough for now and I hope you have a nice week either if you're out of school now, or still in it for a week more (like myself).

SEE YOU SOON AND NOT A MONTH LATER.

I love all of you guys, seriously. I saw the main story hit something like 3420 and I was just like "WE MADE IT TO 420 BLAZE AGAIN."

Disclaimer: I'm not a druggie.

But the story hit 3500! Despite it's really only people viewing the foreword, it still makes a difference to me!

But yeah, bye!

~FlaMinhoe