New Chapter is up guys! I had to gather up a lot of emotion and listen to a lot of sad music in order to write this lol. Hope you enjoy! Sorry I had the story in Hiatus for so long. :D

He looked to me with puppy dog eyes, the tears swelling up in their corners. His words echoed through my mind…

“I did a bad thing…I did a bad thing.” But not from right now, from before.

Yes, he’s said these words before and as he shook my shoulders I couldn’t help but turn my eyes toward the tree and gaze upon it. I heard him calling me.

“Taemin, are you listening to me? I’m sorry.”

I could ask him what he was sorry for, but deep down I think I already knew. My gazed snapped and I brushed his touch away from me.

“What happened to my sister? When were we in the accident? What happened?” The questions rushed out of my mouth all at once.

I could tell by his questionable expression that it wasn’t the question he was expecting me to ask. He thought I was going to ask about the argument, but I felt these to be more important at the moment. His tears dried up from the corner of his eyes and he placed his hands to his sides.

“What?” He whimpered. His question only made me angrier.

“What happened to my sister Kai? It’s not a hard question.”

My anger was no surprise to him but from the look on his face, it still seemed somewhat shocking. He hesitated to answer, letting his thoughts linger.

“H-Her head.” He stuttered. “I-It was hurt bad. And you…you didn’t care about yourself, about what was happening to you, only that she was safe. Her head wasn’t the only thing that was wrong though, it was-“ I placed my hand in the air, covering my view of his face.

He quickly stopped talking. I settled on his words.

“You know, don’t you? What I’ve been seeing?”

Kai nodded solemnly.  

“Did you know, this whole time?”

Don’t say yes, don’t say yes, don’t say-

But he nodded.

I could feel my body boiling itself alive. The wind blew, softly, carrying the fragrance of along with it; It felt like an attempt to calm me down, but nothing…nothing could possibly do that in the moment I stood in now.

“And you just made me feel like an idiot when you saw me staring at stuff!” I screamed.

My arms lost control, flailing themselves about the air.

“I didn’t think you would want to talk about it, you never do.” He quickly intervened.

He walked towards me but like the first time we met, I stepped back, but this time, it was followed by a sudden wetness on my cheek. I touched it and found myself crying, an action I couldn’t control. The sky above us was becoming dark, clouds hiding the sun away from us. My lip began quivering, my eyes watering, my breath becoming inconsistent.

“Stop before you make yourself have an attack.” He placed his hand in the air and walked towards me again but this time, I made no movements.

There was this overwhelming feeling of dread and sorrow. Lost and pain. All swelling up inside of me like a water balloon about to burst.

“Why am I like this…” I said, looking down at my hands as if to find some sort of answer hidden in the lines of my palms.

“T-Taemin calm down.”

“What did you do?!” I screamed. “W-Wha...Wha…”

But the words couldn’t come out any longer. He gestured his hands up in caution, asking me to calm down. I heard him, I did but my body and emotions were on a thought process of their own. I shook my head, trying to signal to him that I couldn’t but when he stepped towards me, my body jerked back. Afraid. Afraid of him, his answers, his embrace. So afraid…

****

My eyes fluttered open. It took me only moments to realize that I was snug in a bed, covers coffining me as I slept. I almost closed my eyes back, feeling at peace with darkness for now, but there was a slump towards the end of the mattress. I leaned my head upward, just a bit and caught sight of his figure. Slender and elongated, his back craning over his knees. I looked up, finding myself in our room and by the dullness that came through the window, night was approaching.

“Kai.” There wasn’t much volume to my voice, but he heard me.

His head jerked up and his eyes met mines. A part of me believed he wanted to rush over to my side just by the urge in his expression but as if caution to me, he walked over in slow and careful paces.

“Taemin, you’re awake.” He was low, the tone in his voice, assuring.

He sat down next to me and without my permission, his hand through my hair. I had no objections, my body was too tired; strained itself on my actions today.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered.

There it was again. ‘Sorry.’ As if it were a word that could be easily passed around. Or perhaps he’d said it so much throughout our relationship that it was casual now. There was meaning behind it, I knew the way he spoke it but he’d also spoken it like it was a repeated phrase he’d learned to keep around. I strained my lips from quivering, feeling the built up of emotions rising in me once more and craned my head to the opposite side of him so he couldn’t see.

“What did Onew and Key say?” I murmured.

“I just told them that you had an episode and collapsed.” He answered.

There was a moment of silence shared between us. Lost lovers with too much love and repeated secrets. I dared not turn back around and look at him, for fear that my emotions would take hold of me once again.

“You didn’t want to believe that your sister wasn’t getting better.” He started.

It felt like minutes before he spoke, but it was better than this silence between us and I didn’t object to anything he had to say. In fact, I didn’t want to say anything, so instead, I listened.

“Besides hurting her head, her heart was damaged. They did surgery on her and physically, like you, her head was better but they had to do surgery on her chest as well. It didn’t matter though…her heart was too damaged. She had to go through so many surgeries….” There was a long sigh from his lips. His voice trailed off from that last outspoken thought.

I turned my head, slightly, and caught sight of him craning his neck upwards towards the ceiling. His eyes seemed lost to the wooden paneling that sheltered us. Instead, he was reliving the past, memory by memory. I saw it in the glisten from the corner of his eye. A tear?

“You were having your own problems, something you didn’t want to come to terms with. Your surgery was successful, but mentally, your mind was scrambled. Sometimes, you would forget simple things, like where you were going when you walked out of a room or what you were doing. It didn’t matter the number of things you’d forget because you’d never forget her. Your baby sister. Every day you went to visit her in her hospital room. She’d be drawing as usual and you’d her hair.”

I pictured it again. Rani sitting underneath the window, colored pencils in hand.

“She was distraught at first, to learn…she was…dying. But after a couple of weeks, she seemed fine with it. Content. She’d stopped worrying and would only draw but you weren’t okay with that. You kept telling the doctors to do something about it and eventually I yelled at you to let it go. Your constant worrying and trying to solve the problem was getting to her. She seemed distressed…when she would see you. She would tell you not to worry. That everything was going to be okay, but you kept…you kept breaking your own heart.”

Finally, the glisten became a full frontal tear. It slid down his cheek just as quietly as it was created.

“The day she was placed under life support was the day it rained and by then your condition had gotten worse. You called it some kind of sick joke.”

“Why?” My voice was low and a little scratchy, but I’d finally the mustered the courage to say something.

“Rani, that wasn’t her name.”

To this, my eyes widened, only slightly, but I did turn myself fully around this time, placing my full attention only on him though his eyes stayed glued to the wood.

“It wasn’t?”

“No. It was a nickname you’d thought up with your dyslexia. Her real name is Rain. It was years ago, before any of this accident stuff happened. You were writing her name but your dyslexia was acting up and you wrote Rani instead. Ever since then, that’s all you called her. That’s why you were so upset the day she was placed on life support. When it rained outside, you kept telling me how it was some cruel joke meant for you. To see your sister suffering. I told you otherwise, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Eventually, you started to forget about the life support too. You would only remember her as she was, sitting at the table underneath the window. So when you would have to see her on life support, it pained me the way you looked. I couldn’t take it…what it was doing to you. Officially, she was only on life support for two years.”

I snuggled myself deeper in the bed.

“What do you mean officially?”

He breathed in, closing his eyes and finally bending his head down towards the floor.

“This is what we’d gotten into an argument. It was something I’d kept from you for years after your sister’s death. I mean, you started to forget about her after she died, but it was when she died that you started having these hallucinations. That was the one thing you always remembered, your brain always repeated. These hallucinations. You would describe her to me, the girl you were seeing. I knew you were describing your sister. And every time I had to tell you who she was and that she was gone. Sometimes I would take you to the doctor so they could check up on you.”

I’d never thought about that before. Him having to tell me every time I brought up the matter. The way he spoke about the three of us, our relationship. He saw her as a baby sister as well and when she passed, it affected him twice as much, riddance with the fact that I made him tell me who she was every time. 

“I never left your side though.”

“What happened then, that made me walk away? The day of our argument?”

He grimaced, rummaging around in his thoughts.

“There was something I never told you in the few years that your sister’s been gone. But the day we had the argument…that was the day I told you.”

“If I forget every ten months, why haven’t you ever told me?” I scooted my body closer, inching my shoulders up to his only a bit.

“Because,” he sighed, “I knew you’d hate me.”

He took a moment before speaking again.

“Sometimes when your brain restarted, your hallucinations would be horrible, sometimes, not so much. Unfortunately, the time of our argument was the worst for you. You told me that everywhere you walked, you saw the girl. You started losing your head, going mad, asking me question after question. And even though I told you she was your sister, you kept at me, figuring there was something I was leaving out. You were suspicious. You said it was the way I looked when I told you who she was. You said there was…fear in my eyes, regret. I told you it was from losing her, but you were always a stubborn listener. A couple of hours before we technically had the argument, I took you to a hotel. You and me, nice rooming even though it was in the city. I told you when we went that I would tell you what I was hiding. That, you would agree to. And when I told you…you went ballistic.”

 “What was it?” I begged. There was a pull in my voice, a pleading urge for the answer.

He sighed again.

“Trust me, I’m getting to that part.”

“W-W-When your sister knew that she was going to have to be placed under life support…t-the doctors had to talk to us. She was the only kin you had left and since we were together, they added me in the convo…The doctors said you were in no condition to be added to the decision. Your mental state was too bad. We talked about whether or not your sister wanted to stay on life support. They were adding her to the conversation but there wasn’t much choice she had in the matter. It was the next of kin…but you were…well…unwell. We were…engaged, so that’s why they came to me.”

“We were engaged?”

He nodded.

“I looked at your sister and asked her what she wanted. At first she said to let her go and when she said it, there was so much relief in her eyes. She looked like it was the best decision she ever made. But then, she started thinking about you. And she said you would never like it if you weren’t able to see her again. It was like a burden in her eyes more than sorrow. So she told me not to. When the time came and she had to be placed on life support, you were so devastated. And in those two years she was on life support, twice I had to explain to you how long she’d been under and when it happened. You looked so relieved when you saw her. You would caress her hair, touch her cheeks. But I knew what she really wanted.”

“Three weeks ago, when we had our argument, I told you all of this.”

So it had been three weeks ago that we’d last seen each other.

“And I told you this as well: Years ago, when we went to go visit your sister, make sure her life support was going well, I counted the time left until you forgot again. I always kept track, so that part was simple. I counted that you had at least five weeks before you forgot everything again. So, on your last night, when you went to bed…I went to the hospital. I told them-“

“To take her off.” I finished.  

“And years since I’ve just told you that she died a little while after the accident. Her heart wasn’t strong. But I didn’t want to say anything three weeks ago because-“

“I only had three weeks until I forgot again…and-and when you told me, I got so angry that I left without telling you…didn’t I?”

He nodded…slowly.

A heat began to rise through my chest, treading along with it, a heavy feeling. Anger. Despair. Regret. Betrayal.

I looked at him with indignant eyes, pouring into his skin, seeping into his thoughts.

“Y-You killed her! She’s dead because of you!”

Kai abruptly stood up and turned towards me just as I lifted my body off the bed and stood myself on the opposite side.

“Taemin you had to let her go! It’s what she wanted!”

“It’s not what I wanted!” I screamed.

I could feel the heat from the tears welling up from the corners of my eyes, threatening to burn down my skin like seeping lava.

“All I do is see her as this-this haunting ghost when I could have been seeing what she really looked like! These horrible images of her could’ve been gone if I could just see her…”

There it was. The tears. My voice was skipping syllables, my heart skipping beats.

“You took her from me.”

I looked straight at him. His bottom lip was quivering, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

“You still have me.” He whispered, but audible enough for me to hear.

“B-But not her.” I spoke.

It was the last words I could muster before vacating the room and isolating myself with the night sky. I was angry at him, angry at myself, but the feeling I hated the most…I was angry at her. And that was a pining pain that clung to my chest.

 My necklace became an anvil around my neck.