maybe it hurts more
because I thought it would be easy

I dreamed of a river of blood.

What I saw was bizarre—they weren't nightmares, but they certainly weren't dreams, either. The land I stood in was a place of knives of glass and bullets of bone, of monsters with shimmering faces and eyes that spoke better than mouths did. No, they weren't nightmares—at least the monsters didn't pretend to be someone they weren't.

Scenes flashed in my mind's eye like undeveloped photos in a reel, unconnected and mismatched, not all there, like I could recognize the locations and places but not well enough. Lay with a glass of ecstasy in the Dragon's Tail. Baekhyun with a wolf tattoo splayed on his shoulder blade. Seulgi in a shimmering gown, a wearing a mask over her bloodstained face. Vernon, a butterfly sitting atop the bullet wound on his shoulder.

They came one by one, stayed long enough for me to comprehend but not enough for me to remember. Strangely enough, I was at ease even when I saw my hands blackened and burnt on the wheel, and for the first time, the car I drove didn't have flames closing in from all sides. Somehow, my mind was at peace—not the perfect kind, but the one where turmoil lived just beneath the glossy calm of the ice, deceptively solid. Waiting for one false step so the icy water could claim you in its arms.

"Wake up," murmured a voice in my ear, and I shifted restlessly. A hand rested on my forehead, brushing away a strand of hair sticking to my face with sweat. Warm and nurturing. "Honey, wake up."

"Dad," I mumbled, squeezing my eyes shut as I turned away from the hand and snuggled into the pillow, trying to catch the retreating waves of the pleasant, dreamy feeling that still lapped at the shore of my consciousness. "Five more minutes."

The hand froze on my cheek, and the coherent part of my brain caught on to that detail and held it tight. The inner eye closed, and I opened my senses to reality—the dark corner of my pillows, which weren't soft like I'd thought. The mattress was hard. My eyelids felt glued together, and I imagined tearing off a band-aid as I opened them.

"Y/N?" Taeyong asked, hesitant.

I gave myself ten seconds to pull myself together, then got up, sitting up on the bed with a blank look on my face. He was seated on the mattress beside me, a distraught and guilt-ridden look on his face, like I'd caught him doing something he shouldn't do.

"Did you call me 'honey'?" I asked, still feeling a bit out of it.

"No," he replied, then frowned. "Why? Did you hear—"

"Never mind," I said, cutting him off, and swung my legs over the side of the bed, making to get off, but stopped at the last minute. There was a tightness in my throat, but I didn't want to acknowledge the feeling, which was like discussing an embarrassing past with a total stranger. "What time is it?"

"Almost twelve," he said, getting up and pulling apart the curtains so that daylight, harsh and unwelcome, flooded the room. I pressed my hands against my face, feeling the roof of my dry mouth with my tongue. "You've been asleep for quite a long time."

Neither of us acknowledged the fact that I had mentioned my dead father, and I was glad of it, but it wormed a hole in my heart. There was a thinly-veiled tension in his voice, like he was trying to keep it light with difficulty, and the walls felt like they were getting closer.

"Did the others get back safely?"

"The others?" he asked, sounding alarmed. "I—oh. Yeah. Last night, around an hour after you did."

I dropped my hands and looked up at him. He had a hand on the windowsill and was looking down at it, giving off the air of someone lost in thought, but his eyes were alert. I narrowed my eyes, weighing the possibilities—it couldn't have been about last night, because he had been perfectly normal when it had happened.

He was hiding something else, something I didn't know yet, but I had to be careful about what I asked him. I had to know if I could handle knowing the truth before I asked about it.

"What?" I said, finally, gritting my teeth, and Taeyong's hand stilled on the windowsill. He was still wearing the jacket, and the bandages were missing from his head, though the wound still hadn't healed fully. "What is it?"

Taeyong looked at me with troubled eyes. He moved towards the bed and sat down on it next to me, as if he couldn't bear to look me in the eye while answering.

"Your brother is here," he said in a low voice, and I flinched, as if slapped. I hadn't been expecting that. "Thought you might need a warning before you..."

I was quiet for a few moments, processing his words. The thing I wanted to do the most at that moment was curl up into a ball and let dreams carry me away again, but I knew that they wouldn't come to me now that I was wide awake, hit in the face by the news which worked like a bucket of cold water.

"When?" I asked hoarsely, then cleared my throat. "When did he arrive?"

"A few hours ago," Taeyong answered. His fingers were playing with a chain in his lap. "With Taehyung and Jinyoung. He's safe, physically, but..."

My voice felt choked, almost like I didn't want to ask the question. "But what?"

He bit his lip, measuring his words. I could hear birds outside, and the smell of sunlight, and Taeyong as he slipped a hand into mine and turned it over, tracing the lines of my palms.

"You'll see," he said, gravelly.

──────

And see, I did.

I paused at the threshold, my hand on the doorknob, hesitating unlike I had ever done before. When I glanced up, my expression was painted over with uncertainty, but Taeyong gave me a reassuring look.

He was leaning against the wall next to the door with his uninjured shoulder, arms crossed over his chest. The gesture would be meaningless, but it told me that the wounds on his chest hurt him less. I seemed to be aware of everything around me, more than I needed be, like my brain was looking for an excuse to stay.

"Can you come with me?" I asked Taeyong, looking at him with pleading eyes, but he was unyielding.

"No."

"Can Vernon come with me?"

"He almost died half a day ago and is sleeping it off, so no. I don't think so."

"Can anyone else—"

"Just go." Taehyung, who had been standing on my other side, rolled his eyes and pushed open the door. I stood frozen, afraid to step through, but he raised his eyebrows, coercing, and gave me a tiny push.

I stumbled through the door rather than walk through it, and almost flinched when it shut behind me with a bang. The room I was in was the same one in which Jungkook had tried to get answers from me, though the atmosphere seemed completely different. The table had been pushed to one side, and though magazines still littered it, there were no weapons. In fact, there were close to no sharp objects in the room, the furniture having been covered with tarpaulin or plain sheets.

There was a boy standing in over the table, examining the bullets on the map unfolded over the table. His fingers were floating millimeters away from the surface, as if he wanted to know more but was afraid to touch it. His face was turned down, but I could see his profile. Black hair, still wet at the nape, full lips, jaw soft but defined in the way children transitioning to adulthood had.

"It's a nine by nineteen parabellum," I said shortly, like I wanted to get the statement done with as soon as possible. My voice sounded choked and oddly fearful.

The boy had frozen, but didn't look up. I watched his jaw set, lips thin, and resisted the urge to flee.

"Si vis pacem, para bellum," he whispered. "'If you seek peace, prepare for war.'"

I blinked at him, surprised. "Yeah," I murmured. All the joints in my body had tightened like corkscrews, and I felt rigid and inflexible. "How did you—"

"I was homeschooled for ten years," he answered, and looked up. His eyes were slitted, muted emotion fighting to get out. There was a mark under one eye, and his mouth was rigid and inflexible too, but in a way that was unforgiving. "The history lessons were mostly war and weapons."

I opened my mouth, but nothing came. I closed it.

He traced the line of the edge of the map, and when he brought his fingertips up, they were coated with dust. "Where were you?" he asked in a low voice, barely-suppressed hostility in his tone. "All my life, where were you?"

A tiny explosion resounded in my chest. I sucked in my breath through my teeth, feeling my thoughts pound in my head like a second heartbeat. "Hyunjin—"

"Don't say my name," he said in a hissing breath, upper lip peeling back in a snarl. "You've never tried before, so why start now? After all, I'm sure you would love to walk out of the room right now and forget that this pathetic excuse of a conversation ever happened."

"I—"

"Why are you even trying to speak, when you know you have nothing to say?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. I had misread him, thinking of his rage to be something as minor as pain. "You don't care about who I am or what my life has been like, right? If you've never bothered to show any interest before, why do it now?"

"Hyunjin," I tried again, more firmly this time. "I didn't know you existed. For the past three years, I've been on the run—knowing the answers isn't my thing—but it isn't my fault that you—"

"Ask, and ye shall receive, seek, and ye shall find," he quoted in an almost bored voice. "You didn't find out about me, because you never looked. Even our father, who must have known, never tried to tell you about me. I guess he was just too embarrassed about me."

His words were like a slap to the face. I waited for the anger at the mention of my father to come, but it didn't—probably because I knew, deep down, that the anger wasn't just mine to bear. Our father. Not 'my'. Our.

"You know who actually found me?" Hyunjin asked. There was a drunken sort of humor in his voice now, bitterness and regret and rage. "A friend of yours, three years ago. Not you, not my father, but someone who had absolutely nothing to do with me. But you know why he did it?" he asked, lips curling up at the corners like he knew a secret I didn't. "Because he knew you. Because he, a total stranger, dug into your past to find out about me when you didn't even care to try!" His voice rose to a yell, and I flinched.

"There was no way for me to know," I whispered.

Hyunjin took a deep breath, and hung his head, shaking it deliberately slow. "If there was no way for you to know," he started, voice an echo of what it had been a moment ago, "then there was no way for him to know, either. But he looked for me, and he found me, and you didn't. We both know that the only reason you didn't was because you didn't care to. You were so focused on yourself and on your problems that you never asked him what he knew."

I clenched my jaw. "Who?"

"Byun Baekhyun." My shoulders tightened. "He came and took me and hid me away, and you really expect me to believe he never mentioned it to you?" Hyunjin's voice was dry. "Tell me, sister mine, why didn't our father tell you about me?"

My throat was rough. I stood rooted to my spot, suddenly questioning everything once again. Baekhyun, again, had lied. And so had my father. "I don't know."

"That's what I thought." Hyunjin slightly raised an eyebrow, eyes never leaving mine. "These words you throw around, protection and safety, they mean nothing. Not really. All of your little group, no matter how hard they might try to act like saints and saviors, are at the end of the day nothing more than common criminals. No matter how you swear you would've looked for me, you probably haven't even thought of me once in the past few days.

"You know nothing about me and nothing about what I know." He gave his head a shake and strode across the room towards me, stopping next to me for a brief moment. "I mean nothing to you, and you mean nothing to me," he said. "So when you're done with your little game, don't try pulling me into your hell. I'm done playing."