Until The End of Time | Wonho [√]

26: KUEBIKO

KUEBIKO: A STATE OF EXHAUSTION INSPIRED BY SENSELESS VIOLENCE

Wonho laid on the thin spread of ice in the dark, cold night. He laid motionless in all black, his hair sprawled, as pale and white as the moon in juxtaposition.

His eyes were stilled like stagnant water. They stared up at the dark veil of the night peering at him, and the cluster of the snow that fell on everywhere but his limp body.

Those eyes of his scared me the most.

There wasn't one bit of life left in them. They were void like the insides of two distant caves made out of hard rocks. He was not here anymore, but somewhere far away, where no one could ever reach him. His white hair mingled with the ice he was lying on. I wondered if he was a part of the frozen lake too.

"What are you thinking about?" Hyungwon's voice snapped me back to reality— back to my part-time, the age-old library with its distinct smell of ancient books, and comics, and coffee.

"What?" I asked him, fazed, still stuck in the imagery inside that head of mine. I blinked hard a few times and shut my eyes tightly for a few seconds and then I heard his quiet voice.

"You look like you're about to cry."

"I had a vivid dream last night," I said but the word 'dream' left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a nightmare, it definitely was. A dream so lucid yet so empty of any substance that it made me feel hollowed throughout the entire day.

Maybe because I thought of Wonho's death so much, and if it was to come, and I also thought about skating on the ice before— that it all mixed itself into one thought and crawled in the corner of my subconscious mind until it showed up in the form of a dream.

It was a dream no matter how hyper-realistic it seemed. In reality Wonho's hair was as dark as ink yet I saw it white as jasmine flowers, and snow.

"How do you get to know someone more without stepping inside their personal boundary?" I asked, almost without meaning the words. Before Hyungwon I could involuntarily say things without giving them any thought. In this world at least, there were only two of us sharing a big secret.

He sighed a little, looked up from the tattered Deadpool comic book on his hands, and mulled over it for a second. "I guess you can never know."

"And how do you save someone without even knowing them? Can you ever fully know someone? Is it in your hand to save that person?" I could hear the frustration in my voice. He could sense it too.

"You're talking about Wonho."

I averted my eyes from his and looked at the register before us, a wooden table beaten with time. "I don't see him a lot these days. He has his finals and graduation to worry about. I just... I'm lost."