Chapter Text
Minho comes to in a blindingly white room with a pounding headache and a seemingly undying dryness lining the passage from his nose to his throat. Sucking in a tiny breath, as if to sate the dizziness stirring his brain into shreds, Minho’s eyelids flutter shut in a vain attempt to block out the lights overhead. It does little to mitigate the sheer strength of the fluorescent lights, but he still opts to peek his eyes open.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand where he’s at. There’s only ever one kind of place that looks and smells so sickeningly sterile so consistently across the planet. A hospital.
Which means that he survived.
Which means he's alive.
Minho can't begin to parse the cocktail of emotions that he's feeling—a bitter disappointment at the fact that he survived, forced to relive the events that put him in that hospital, mixed with a strange, dizzying relief that he was alive. Even if those delusions he'd seen when he was in that half-alive, half-dead state were all that he ever dreamed of, it simply felt wrong. Off-putting, liminal, unnatural. Almost like looking at a photo where all the components seem hauntingly familiar at a glance but aren't remotely recognizable when you take a closer look.
It would be delusional to die dreaming of something like that, of a life he wished he'd lived as an accomplished writer with a loving girlfriend. It would be lonely.
It would be pathetic.
Compared to dying such a pitiful death, perhaps being alive—even if barely—would be better. That was all Minho could hope for.
Minho lets his gaze drifts listlessly from the ceiling of the hospital down to the door across from him, but no matter how slow the movement, a sharp throb still drills into his eyes, his temples, the back of his head. He sucks in another shallow breath, licks his lips—fuck, they’re so chapped, he thinks—and this time, he twitches his fingers experimentally, as if to test how far down his body his consciousness has traveled. He carefully brings his hand up to the tubes trailing into his nostrils and lets out a shallow rasp of a sigh.
Then, all at once, a massive figure at his bedside shoots up, sending Minho’s heartrate racing.
He’s so disheveled that Minho almost doesn’t recognize him, with scraggly strands of hair sprouting along his upper lip and his jawline, with dark circles forming beneath puffy, reddened, near manic eyes, with hair slick with a sheen of grease.
Cha Wookyung has never looked worse.
“Hyung,” Wookyung whispers, a breath of disbelief, then, reinvigorated with a new sense of urgency, his voice rises like a boom of thunder. “Minho-hyung! Are you okay?!”
Wookyung is all hands in an instant, a crushing pressure against both Minho’s shoulders. His hands tremble, desperate and terrified, but it doesn’t make his grip any less painful. Minho screws his eyes shut as Wookyung frets, as if it’ll dullen the sound of his voice even a little.
It doesn’t, of course.
“Do you remember who I am? Do you remember anything? Does it hurt anywhere?”
Remember you? Minho thinks amidst the worsening headache and the rapid-fire questions tiredly, a touch cynically. How could I not? After all you’d done to me?
Minho wants to bite out some witty quip to shut Wookyung up and buy him some peace and quiet, wants to yell at him to just shut up for one goddamn second, but he’s too tired to really think of anything other than the pain building behind his eyes. His thoughts are all clipped and scattered, and he can just barely recognize that his mind isn’t what it used to be yet.
After all you’d done to me? his brain repeats uselessly, and his scrambled thoughts run together so heatedly that they begin to mix and merge. How could I not remember you? You ruined me. You nearly killed me. I was going to end what I started. Don’t you remember what you’ve done to me?
Do you remember?
Remember?
…But what if Minho didn’t remember?
It’s a thought that flits into Minho’s mind and disappears in that same breath, but once it materializes in his head, no matter how briefly, its presence never entirely lifts. What if Minho didn’t ‘remember’ Wookyung or any of the things that had happened within the past few months? What if he could just feign ignorance under the guise of a medical condition? What if it could lift that heavy pain in his chest somehow?
What if Minho's supposed memory loss could force Wookyung to grow tired of him and let him go?
What if it could finally give him a way out?
Minho sucks in a small breath.
But Wookyung is babbling like a maniac still, interrogating Minho on things of all manners, his fingers digging into Minho’s tender, aching shoulders as if letting him go for even a second moment will cause him to disappear into thin air. Minho parts his lips to speak, but the fuss that Wookyung is kicking up, all the trembling and shaking and desperate interrogating, the thoughts accumulating in the back of Minho’s throat—it ends up making him choke on a breath before he can even eke out a single word.
It’s a near ripping pain, rough hacking in a recently unbound neck made only more painful by a dryness untreated for however long. Minho coughs and coughs, and he gasps for air, a tight pressure building up behind his eyes. A faint flush of red spreads along his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and with it, a light-headedness soon follows. The sound of Minho coughing so violently silences Wookyung almost immediately, a pang of pain rippling in his haunted eyes.
Wookyung slowly backs up, averts his gaze, and lowers his voice, mumbling some sheepish apology and promising a doctor would be there soon.
The next ten minutes slip by in a tense silence made only tenser by the way that Wookyung unabashedly and intently stares at Minho, picking at the skin bordering his nails until they bleed.
Minho can’t stand the sight, so he stares down at his own hands, folded weakly in his lap.
(What if I didn’t remember? Minho thinks still.)
The doctor is an unsmiling, matter-of-fact man, curt with his words and even more so with his actions.
He steps in with a sparse and painfully unenthused greeting to Minho before he goes through the motions of checking on Minho’s vitals. He keeps his speech fairly polite and respectful, but the tone at which he grits out his words screams a brash disinterest in Minho or his status as a patient, funnily enough. The doctor moves with practiced ease, jotting down notes here and down on a laptop he'd brought in on a rolling stand, only occasionally stopping to take a stuttering sip out of what little dregs are left of a massive, iced Americano, sucking forcefully to get to the espresso pooled at the bottom of the cup among the tiny ice cubes. The sound of him tapping away at the keys of the laptop are oddly soothing, but it's immediately nullified by the intense look that the doctor levels his way. Minho opts not to make the situation any more uncomfortable and keeps his mouth firmly shut unless prompted to speak.
After the doctor conducts this initial check-up, he begins questioning Minho in a manner only marginally less demanding than Wookyung’s near delirious interrogation.
First, simple subjectivities like any pain or symptoms. When this yields nothing particularly noteworthy, the doctor continues with a slew of other questions. Things about the current world—what year is it? and who’s the president of South Korea right now? and where are you right now? Assorted commands—write me a sentence about how you feel, or circle the shape on my left, or draw an octagon with a triangle inside it.
Everything is easy. It's tedious and almost condescending, yes, and his head still throbs dully when the doctor speaks a little too quickly or too loudly, but completely doable. The doctor seems utterly unimpressed with all of Minho’s answers, but to expect any reaction other than a terse nod would be unrealistic. Not that Minho is particularly vying for his approval anyway.
Meanwhile, Wookyung lingers in the corner of the room like a misplaced shadow, watching Minho with such intensity that it’s almost impossible not to notice him.
The doctor then proceeds with questions about Minho himself.
“Do you remember who you are?" he drawls, now idly clicking a pen and intermittently tapping the tip against a notepad. "What’s your name?”
“Byun Minho,” Minho recites, and before the doctor can prompt him, he offers his birthday, his age, his profession—or, rather, what his profession used to be before his life fell to shit and placed him so cruelly in Wookyung's hands. Wookyung pointedly looks away, his expression dark, when Minho provides the doctor that information specifically. The point is, they're objective questions that Minho should have no issue answering.
And then:
“What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?”
And this is where Minho falters—and not for any true fault in his memory.
A willful, exaggerated front.
In actuality, Minho’s memory is indeed a little hazy, but he knows what he’d intended to do that night, knows the exact, miserable pit he'd fallen into, his body sore not just from Wookyung but from the weight of living. He can only assume that he’s where he is now because Wookyung had pulled him free from that noose and brought him here, which only serves to be a harrowing reminder that Wookyung is hellbent on tormenting him for the rest of his sad, little life, that he won’t let go of Minho even now.
But if Wookyung won’t let him die, Minho reasons, then he'll just have to kill the Minho that Wookyung so dearly ‘loved’—that Wookyung so dearly loathed, given how he’d isolated him and kept him in such pain—and start anew with hopes that Wookyung will grow uninterested and let him go for real.
What Minho does with his miserable life after that is up to whatever deity is out there. If Minho tries to end things once again, well, at least no one would be there to stop him.
Minho keeps his gaze glued squarely on the doctor and draws his eyebrows in a show of deep thought. He deliberately lets a beat of silence slip into their conversation before finally verbalizing an answer. “I… don’t remember anything.”
And this soft admission finally draws some sort of reaction from the doctor, who furrows his eyebrows and hurriedly scrawls something onto his notepad.
“Anything?” comes a meek voice from the back of the room. “You really don’t remember anything, hyung?”
Minho shakes his head against better judgment, only to be met with an immediate dizziness that makes him feel like the world is lurching forward. He reaches up a hand to rub his temples, to steady his vision. Nausea briefly roils through his insides, but after taking a deep, steadying breath and centering himself, he feels a little better.
“At all?” Wookyung tries louder, and the doctor raises a hand in a silent gesture to try and stop him.
It doesn’t work.
Wookyung comes closer and closer. “Do you remember me, hyung?”
"Mr. Cha," the doctor says, a tired warning in his voice. It's glaringly obvious to Minho that this isn't the first time that the doctor has had to deal with an unruly Wookyung and that the poor guy is less than happy to put up with him again. But his little warning does little to stay Wookyung's worries.
"Hyung?"
Minho doesn’t reply, but he lets his silence speak a thousand words. A curious glance over at Wookyung reveals a tortured look, his eyes blank with disbelief and his mouth turned downwards in a stark frown. His lips flap in an unproductive attempt to say something, anything, but instead, a soft keening noise gets caught his throat, a bit like the sharp whine of a dog. He meets Minho’s eyes, and in that moment, Minho sees Wookyung swallow, the whites of his eyes reddening briefly, as if he’s going to cry.
He sheds no tears, but tears aren’t needed to see that Wookyung is braving an ocean of grief and guilt, merciless waves that dive in at him over and over.
There’s an odd, vindictive twist in Minho’s heart, the same kind of bittersweetness that he’d very faintly felt watching Wookyung cry after his assault while a blend of other painful emotions drove him to an almost dissociative apathy.
This should feel good. It should make Minho relieved, happy, hell, even hopeful to see Wookyung in such a state of disarray. Wookyung will realize how much of a hassle it would be to be with someone who didn't remember him or hold any emotions for him, someone who was borderline a stranger, and he would be more inclined to let Minho go. Perhaps the guilt at inadvertently giving Minho amnesia would drive him to let go of Minho once and for all. Minho inches towards freedom in some way, infinitesimal step after infinitesimal step.
…But why does he feel so torn up about it?
“Do you know why you’re here?” the doctor prompts, breaking the heavy silence settling between the three of them.
Minho hesitates.
“No.”
The silence only grows heavier in the wake of that simple, monosyllabic answer. Minho can’t fault them for it. Reminding someone of their attempt at taking their own life—and its subsequent failure—couldn’t possibly be easy for anyone. Still, this stone-faced doctor manages to pull together a little bit of humanity and sympathy to explain to Minho how he’d ended up there. It’s a quick, bare-bones story, but Minho doesn’t need to know the whole of it. He remembers up until he’d lost consciousness.
According to the doctor, Minho had been rushed into the emergency room two weeks prior—I’ve been out for two whole weeks, Minho muses inwardly, shocked—for an attempted hanging. And since then, Wookyung had been visiting each day for as long as he was allowed.
(Given Wookyung’s wealth and social status, Minho supposes dryly, he could have been there through all hours of the day. A quick onceover of Wookyung in this horrible state practically confirms this fact.)
The doctor makes no attempt to explain why Wookyung had been the one waiting for him, but he offers a glance over at Wookyung, as if waiting for him to jump in.
And now that Wookyung has been given a chance to say something, anything, it seems that every one of his thoughts has come to a crashing halt and getting jumbled in his throat. His lips open and shut, clearly floundering for words and drowning in his thoughts.
Minho watches Wookyung evenly. He doesn’t dare prompt the man. He doesn’t want to risk saying anything that could possibly give away what Minho is intending. It’s far better to stay silent.
“It’s me, hyung,” Wookyung tries when he finally finds his voice, scratchy and shaky. “Wookyung. Your junior? We met at Hanguk University?” His voice lilts up, as if he’s asking a question instead of stating simple facts. His lips pull up into a nervous smile, but his eyebrows are pulled together in a tight knot, his expression overall visibly apprehensive.
Minho can’t bear to look at him.
There’s surely a lovely, twisted irony in how Wookyung, calm and composed and unapologetically heartless, had become such a sorry, miserable mess of a man at something that he’d caused, but he’s such an eyesore. Just looking at Wookyung makes Minho uneasy, though Minho can’t quite tell whether it’s because of this niggling and misplaced sense of guilt or because of the jarring juxtaposition between the handsome Wookyung he knew just mere weeks ago versus the haggard Wookyung he sees now.
Minho pulls his eyes toward the door across the room.
“Sorry,” he says flatly, trying to inject the same, cold distance that he would have in his voice when speaking to a stranger. He takes a page out of his doctor's book and even tacks on a bit of polite speech into his words. Sounding detached really doesn't take much effort. Minho's too tired to put any life behind his words anyway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Wookyung takes a few steps closer, now at Minho’s bedside, his desperation becoming clearer by the second. “How do you not remember?” He sounds distressed, but more worryingly, he sounds angry. “How? You—you said you remember where you went to school, and where you used to work. We lived together. We spent months together!”
A familiar dread starts to seep into Minho, drip by drip.
“I don’t know,” Minho bites out defensively, squaring his shoulders. But now that he’s started, he can’t help but to mouth off. “I just don’t remember. What the hell am I supposed to do about that? I just woke up in the hospital after trying to fucking kill myself, and now I’m being interrogated like I committed a crime?" Though all he’d done was speak, it winds Minho enough to make him lie back against the pillow propping him up. He sucks in a small breath and shuts his eyes for a few seconds.
He dully remembers that he might be conscious, might be alive, but he’s in the hospital for a reason. He needs to heal.
When Minho recovers a bit of his sanity and strength, he looks back at his two guests. Wookyung’s expression flickers from that unbridled hurt and rage to something a little more muted but still just as wounded.
“Sorry, I—that’s not what I…” Wookyung takes in a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m not angry at you, hyung. I just don’t understand…”
The doctor stuffs his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “He might have sustained slight brain damage.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Wookyung snarls, whirling around to glare at the doctor.
The doctor fires a stern look at Wookyung, who has the decency to look at least a little sheepish at his own outburst. “Amnesia after a hanging attempt is rare," continues the doctor, wisely choosing not to verbally acknowledge Wookyung or his vitriol, "but not unheard of. Nor is amnesia after a particularly traumatic event.” At this, Wookyung winces a bit like a beaten dog, the same hurt look that he’d worn after he and Minho had returned from that bar.
…No. No matter what, Minho really doesn’t want to think about the bar. Even the allusion to that bar brings a violently sickening feeling to Minho, makes him want to claw at his violated flesh and tear it off his bones, like it'll free him from the gross, heavy feeling left on his skin. Minho hurriedly crams that traumatizing memory into the back of his head and hopes that with enough desperation, it'll simply shrink and fade out of his life.
Minho inhales slowly and hopes his tormented expression can pass as an appropriate reaction to the news.
“We won’t know just how serious it is unless we run more thorough tests, of course, but from how I see it, it doesn’t seem too serious." The doctor flicks his gaze down at his laptop screen. "His motor function is perfectly fine, and his other cognitive functions seem intact for the most part.”
Wookyung lets out a small breath of what sounds like relief.
“That isn’t to say we’re in the clear. His retrograde amnesia could be a symptom of some greater, underlying issue, and it may even end up being permanent. Again, we just won’t know until we run some actual tests to figure out what exactly is wrong.” The doctor pauses. “But something is kind of odd about this…”
Minho’s heart freezes.
“Odd?” Wookyung prompts.
The doctor gives Minho a quick onceover. His eyes meet Minho’s. The doctor’s eyes are cutting and analytical, studying every part of Minho with that simple look. Minho tries his best to school his expression into something that doesn't scream guilt and deceit.
The doctor narrows his eyes.
He doesn’t look very pleased with whatever he sees in Minho.
Minho doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath until the doctor speaks next.
“…No. It’s probably nothing.” The doctor straightens his posture. “Mr. Byun's memories may just come back naturally as he recovers so for the time being, don’t put too much pressure on Mr. Byun to remember anything. Just let him rest.” He gives Wookyung a very pointed look. "In other words: no yelling, no excessive questioning, no generally overbearing behaviors. You know what I mean, yes?"
Wookyung ducks his head.
The doctor turns to Minho and nods. “Rest well. There is a button to call a nurse should you need one for whatever reason. Painkillers, food, whatever. Don’t hesitate to use it.” At Minho's nod of acknowledgment, the doctor unplugs his laptop charger from the nearest outlet and begins rolling up the cord. "For attempted suicides, our protocol requires a mandatory 72-hour observational hold and a visit from our psychologist before we can formally discharge you," says the doctor quickly, clearly a practiced speech. How bleak. "If they deem you a concern, we'll have you held here longer."
The doctor's gaze briefly slides over to Wookyung. Minho can't quite read what that expression means, but it's a touch different than his earlier apathy. He looks irate, frustrated, but a little worried—but it doesn't feel like a good-willed worry. It feels selfish somehow, like he's more worried for himself than he is for Minho, though Minho can't possibly fathom what Wookyung could do to the doctor to make him feel that way.
Or perhaps Minho holds himself in such low regard that he thinks that even the doctor in charge of his health doesn't give a shit about him.
Maybe a chat with the psychologist wouldn't be so useless, Minho thinks wryly.
"Any further questions?"
Minho flicks his gaze elsewhere.
"No? Great. I will you see sometime later. Rest well." The doctor begins to wheel his laptop stand out of the room.
The sudden realization that the doctor is going to leave him in a room with Wookyung alone makes his stomach turn violently. It isn’t like Wookyung is going to hurt him—Minho can’t see a reason why Wookyung would want to, and he definitely intends not to give him one—but the awkwardness that is sure to linger in the air isn’t very appealing. And who knows if Wookyung would actually adhere to the doctor's demand that he stay civil about the situation?
In a pathetic attempt to keep someone other than Wookyung around longer, Minho stops the doctor with the first excuse that he can think of.
“Wait," he blurts out clumsily, his voice embarrassingly loud. He tempers his voice a touch when the doctor turns a pained look of resignation and exasperation to him. "I’m thirsty. Can I get some water?”
(Well, that much isn't a lie, Minho admits. Even a drop of water would be stellar right about now.)
“Water?” Wookyung butts in. “I can get it for you, hyung—”
The doctor shakes his head. “I’ll send in a nurse with a glass of water in a few minutes, but for now, Mr. Cha, you need to come with me. Someone would like to talk with you.”
A stormy look clouds over Wookyung's expression, with the most visible emotion being a potent dread, but he gives in with little resistance despite it all.
“I’ll come back, hyung,” he promises. “Get some rest. We can talk later.”
Minho waits to hear the click of the door shut before he relaxes, sitting against the soft, limp pillow on his bed. Now, left in the peace of quiet of his room without any pronounced surveillance, Minho can be true to himself, let himself have a moment to think and rethink everything that happened and will happen if he continues with this ruse of his.
Minho will need to be clever with how he goes about this. He needs to remember everything that happened to himself and pretend that he doesn't. Wookyung is unfortunately astute, not because he's a smart man but because he is an obsessive, smart man. With the added gravity of a suicide attempt, there was no doubt that Wookyung would be breathing down his neck, watching every single move that he made.
Minho just needed to lie and survive. He could do that much, couldn't he? If he could just deceive Wookyung enough to tire him out and agree to set him free, Minho would finally be free. Free to do what, he isn't quite sure himself, and it turns his stomach to make him think of how grim his future could be—flat broke on the streets with no job lined up and no family or friends to look out for him—but it had to be better than being locked up alone in Wookyung's house again, waiting for him to hit him and rape him all in the name of whatever he thought 'love' was.
Hell, if I got desperate enough, maybe I could even sell my body to get by, a nasty voice in his head sneers, and Minho suddenly feels that painfully familiar pit of despair swallowing him whole. No matter how dirty and used I am, there's always gonna be someone who wants to try me out and break me down even more, right? I'm just good at bringing that kind of attention to myself, aren't I? Might as well make a living off that. I'm a whore, and that's all I'm good for. That's why all those things happened to me. It's all my fault. It's all my fault. It's—
Enough, Minho chides himself angrily, unaware of how hard he's squeezing his fists until he looks down at sees a few droplets of blood lining the shallow, crescent-shaped cuts in his palms where his nails were once digging into. Now's not the time for that kind of self-deprecation.
That awful, taunting voice retreats into the back of his mind, somewhere distant but not far enough for Minho to stay comfortable. It lingers. It lies in wait.
For now, Minho exhales a sigh of relief and rubs the blood from his palms onto the undersides of the sheets, just somewhere to wipe the blood without having it be immediately noticeable. He's sure that a nosy nurse—or Wookyung—will come by and interrogate him about the dried blood, but for the time being, this will have to do. He sinks down until his head is against the pillow and throws an arm over his eyes.
Lie and survive.
Lie to stay alive.
But it's only now that Minho even gives a second of thought to the repercussions of this choice. If Wookyung were to find out that Minho was lying to him in some pathetic attempt to evade him again, if he found out that Minho was knowingly putting him through oceans of emotional grief just for the slimmest chance of escape—
Minho grimaces and thinks of the jagged scar in his head from the glass bottle that had been smashed over it, thinks of the persistent pain in his broken ankle that caused him to hobble from time to time, even now.
It wasn't going to be pretty.
With that dread weighing heavy on his soul, Minho shuts his eyes.
He can do this.
He had to.