Meridian ◈ Seungjin

7 ◈ Intoxicated

"Do you have any plans this weekend?"

"I'm taking the idiots out to the city for a while. Would you want to join us?"

"Sure, if your friends don't mind."

"They'd be fine with it. That's a cool necklace by the way."

"Oh, thank you."

Hyunjin threw an arm over his eyes to block out the burning light of the early morning sun flooding into their dorm room, the intrusion managing to melt his retinas down to smelter when he quickly discovered the soreness had no escape even with the kind wall of his elbow. He shifted on the mattress, limbs flopping around like a drunken fish in a vat of acid sand, feeling the slightly scratchy material of the woven bedsheets pooling around the old shirt he wore as his pajamas. As he attempted to awaken his conscious from the pleasant dream world he found himself bouncing around in, the other two hushed voices filled the room with their white noise of daily plans, oncoming homework assignments that would fit better as a torture method than a way to grade, and complaining about teachers the tired boy had never met. Or dreamed of meeting. None of them seemed exactly, 'nice'.

Gingerly, he found his arms beneath him as he pressed off the bed to sit up, a weary hand immediately flinching to rub at the pounding in his throat. A scratching, almost as rough as the bedsheets collected around his hips and covering his legs as they folded in, that sandpaper grinding viciously along the inside of his throat to the point he could feel the swarf crawling into his lungs and strangling any hopes of breathing. Grime lined his insides, and no matter how many times he tried to cough up the liquid or peel it from his skin, it oozed until it could coat the bare areas with it's vile sludge. Hardly thick enough to notice, or to be terribly concerned, but the weight lingered on the back of his mind and on his stomach. A frown formatted on his face, It's been a few days, and yet that feeling keeps coming back.

"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty," Chan's sarcastic voice cut through his thoughts as he let go of the top bunk he was leaning against, slicing past the dreamlike haze clouding his mind with a sweet intoxication. Though, at this point in time, Hyunjin wasn't entirely sure where that addicting haze originated from. Was he still waking up? Should be be concerned? Seeming to sense his pensiveness, and the way the younger's lips were permanently locked into their downward spiral, Chan dropped the slight smirk and tilted chin parading his cockiness. Instead, he fretted in a way that reminded the younger of a father, "What's wrong?"

Hyunjin dropped his hand from his throat, his eyes coming to stare at the cracks and lines as if they held every secret buried in the deepest depths of the universe, and returning half surprised when there was not any remnants of filth trailing between the two locations, "My throat feels weird."

"Does it hurt?" Chan asked. Again, that worried tone about him that sounded less like a concerned friend, and more like a Dad caring for his child. He continued to watch the younger, his friend, and mapped the way he moved, the way he behaved. Upon receiving a still silence from him, Hyunjin too busy searching his own mind for a hint of understanding of why he couldn't scrape the feeling off no matter how far his nails dug into the skin on his forearms, he pressed towards the desk their roommate sat at and snatched a small plastic water bottle from a stash under the desk. He carefully stepped over, passing Hyunjin the bottle as it crinkled and gave under the oppressive touch of their fingers.

Never before had Hyunjin been so thankful for the foresight of Chan, a skill both him and Minho usually poked fun at. Being 'over prepared'. As he roughly snapped the lid of the bottle open, slugging every drop of it's contents down for a hint of relief as it flushed out the silt building up an empire inside his throat, he mentally bowed to any and every deity he knew for allowing the older to have the idea to sneak water bottles into their dorm room. Whatever it was that was layering in his throat, it wasn't exactly happy to leave either. He felt it tearing into his vocal chords, into his esophagus, into his trachea as it clawed anything it could and held on as the cool water washed the majority of it's scorching reach away.