The blaring music reverberated against his eardrums, and fumes of alcohol swirled around him in the tipsy Seoul nightlife. He leaned on his elbow and surveyed the scene, a scowl perched on his upper lip.

His best friend Baekhyun had already ripped off his shirt and thrown it into the crowd. Even Sehun, with whom he had spent all of winter break studying for finals, forfeited his usual glare and squeezed himself into a circle of scarcely dressed young women without invitation. They lived their youth to the fullest, and in turn wasted it away.

Kyungsoo was the designated driver, doing his homework in the car and working two jobs by day. He pined for the warmth of a blanket and the intelligence of a novel, not the drunk woman murmuring in his ear, her lips smudged red. His friends had whined at him to let loose every so often, but the complaints quickly died out, since nobody wanted to be the awkward one on the sidelines. Even the bartenders had long since learned to ignore the young man drumming his fingers at the corner of the bar. The stranger to his left gave his shoulder a friendly tap.

“Hey, are you gonna have anything to drink? You could almost be a statue, get up and move around!” the young man shouted, his voice thin and high with a slight gravel to it. Kyungsoo firmly shook his head, theories of the stranger’s motives already forming.

“Come on, let’s drink! I’ll treat you. What’ll it be?” the stranger pressed. Feeling snarky, Kyungsoo replied with “tea,” and stood up to leave. A careless elbow collided with his head.

“Watch where you’re going,” Kyungsoo muttered through clenched teeth, his temper lost with his manners.

“I’m so sorry,” an airy voice breathed. Kyungsoo could just barely make out the outline of the man. Tendrils of smoke brushed past his ears and curved around his head. The aggressive music drilled into his skull, and a faint whiff of something illegal violated his sensitive nose. His head throbbed in complaint.

“I’m just kidding, I’m not sorry one bit."

A burning joint grazed his ear, and Kyungsoo whimpered. Poring over his textbooks in the car by his lonesome beckoned to him like paradise. But he had barely made his escape when a short, frantic looking man with a childish face ran into him at full speed, knocking both of them over in a jumble of limbs.

“I don’t have time for this, oh gosh, my date’s waiting, I’m already so late…I’m so sorry,” the man stuttered out an apology. He brushed imaginary dirt off his pants, giving no attention to Kyungsoo’s bleeding lip. He responded with a bloody smile as shallow as the apology, and made his way towards the crosswalk, silently praying for the collisions to end tonight.

Out of the corner of his eye, the man stepped a foot off the sidewalk as he hesitantly assessed the flow of traffic.

“Hey!” Kyungsoo hollered, his eyes widening, “Are you crazy? There are four lanes of traffic! Would you rather show up to your date late or dead?” But the man couldn’t hear him, and stepped onto his other foot. Kyungsoo sprinted over to pull him back onto the sidewalk, but he had already made his way past the first lane and teetered on the dividing line.

He let out another “hey,” the roar of traffic engulfing his voice. Kyungsoo’s stomach turned as a large truck skimmed his face, and the resulting wind nearly sent his small frame tumbling back onto the sidewalk. Gathering himself, he placed one trembling foot onto the road, and then the other.

His hand reached out to grab the man’s shoulder, but his quivering legs lost their balance. He shot into the night air, and the city lights spun around his vision. He could feel himself falling. But he never felt any contact with the ground. He let out a yelp as he spun further and further into a dark opening. He flailed his limbs to grab on to something, anything. His eyes refused to see his own two hands in front of his face, and his queasy stomach refused to retch. The stifling dark was pierced by the whistle of a siren.

~~~

His heart was a wild animal trapped in a cage, trying to pound its way out. He had no idea where he was. Time passed slow and thick like molasses. He knew for certain that he was plummeting down a deep hole. But all holes must come to an end. Right? Kyungsoo couldn’t decide which possibility was worse.

“What’s happening? I don’t want to die, please, not now…” His short life flashed past his eyes, a pathetic blurb of loneliness.

As a child, he was teased that he probably had night vision because his eyes were so large. The dimness lifted, and he thought that maybe his supposed skills were finally coming to use. He wiggled his now visible fingers with an absurd sense of achievement.

He thought for a moment that he’d fallen through a crevice in the road, and was now hurtling towards the center of the earth to be burnt to a crisp. Or perhaps he had somehow become intoxicated through all the fumes at the club? Anything was plausible at that moment.

He decided that the man at the bar had persuaded him to drink, and he was currently passed out in Baekhyun’s bedroom. Yes, he nodded, that was simply what had happened. Content with this idea, he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes, waiting to reopen them in a dingy apartment with a pounding headache and listen to Baekhyun list off everyone he had locked lips with that night.

The whistling noise trailed off into silence, and Kyungsoo became excited to awaken. He could see red and blue lights flashing through his eyelids, and for a second he thought he was still in the club.

He slowly opened his eyes to the sight of honey jars. The walls were lined in shelves of them, and lanterns from different time periods and countries flickered at random intervals. Feeling resigned to his fate, he muttered a feeble plea to his mother and made his way over to the jars to investigate the contents.

The first jar escaped his reach. Ignoring the laws of physics, it tumbled straight to the bottom. A crash resounded not too far below. Excited at the discovery, he grabbed another jar, determined to see what was inside, hoping with his being that it was not someone’s kidney.

But his emotions were unprepared for the kimchi spaghetti, smelling just like his mom’s kitchen when he had come to visit last weekend. He closed his watering eyes and was about to bury his face in the jar when he felt a shock go through his spine and out to the rest of his body. The wind around him stopped, and he didn’t move, lying in a stupor on what felt like solid ground.

Oh my god. I’m dead. I’m dead. I can’t be dead. But he could still smell a light waft of kimchi spaghetti, and opened his eyes. The honey jar lay smashed in his outstretched hand, with no sign of blood or injury…or kimchi spaghetti. He painlessly wiggled all of his limbs, brushed off the debris, and rose from the floor.

Before him, a ceiling rose high into nothingness. There was a black and white spiral pattern on the floor, and he had fallen right in the center. Mirrors covered every inch of the walls, distorting his tiny body into large figures and making him feel uncomfortable, dwarfed, his own big, deer-in-headlights eyes staring back at him. He could hear a faint beeping noise echoing throughout the hall like the pulse of a heart. All at once, he felt a heavy weight drop on him, and he sprawled back onto the floor.

“Oh my god. I’m late. I’m late. I can’t be late,” someone muttered to themselves in a panic, as they got up off of Kyungsoo and stepped on his hand. Kyungsoo winced, but before he could glare, the short, orange-haired person had already scurried down the hallway in a rabbit-like manner. He disappeared just twenty feet away.

Kyungsoo’s pursuit failed when he collided into something solid. He tried to blink away his confusion at the reflection staring back at him – a tall figure in a dark cloak and hat, holding out his hand. Kyungsoo blinked, and the person disappeared like a wisp of smoke before he could catch his face.

He cracked the weak glass with his fists, hollering to “let me in.” He had been falling for what felt like hours, and these people might lead him to his escape. The dull thuds of his attack were lost in the threateningly gargantuan hallway.

“How the hell am I going to get out of here?” he panicked aloud, his thoughts tying together with his fear. A tear rolled down his cheek and he slumped against the mirror to the floor in defeat, his head hung between his knees. Before he could heave out a sob, a gentle touch rested on his shoulder. He glanced over to see a smooth, tanned hand with clean-cut fingernails. But when he looked to identify the owner, he was only met with his own, tear-stained reflection, the hand jutting out from some anonymous entity on the other side.

He stood up in shock, but the hand beckoned him back towards the mirror. He placed his shaky hand onto the stranger’s upturned palm. The fingers clamped down, and once again, he was pulled back into darkness.

~~~

Screams and pools of red colored the streets, an accompaniment to the tragic duet of sirens and prayers.