Oneiric Tryst

1. Morpheus

'Trust in your dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity' - Khalil Gibran.

The shiny silver platter outside of the building was wet with the cold dew of an autumn morning still clinging to it. Orange leaves littered the ground like the carpet a noble fairy would favour, and stung stubbornly to the three stone steps leading up to the wooden door.

With a coffee in one hand and his bag pinched under his arm crookedly since he had left the car in a hurry, Hongjoong made his way through the front yard. His long strides created a dangerous path on the slippery ground beneath him. Any moment, an untimely end created by the hidden trap of wet leaves might dawn upon him.

In the early morning fog that still hustled in the trees and clung to the grey skies of November, the man challenged death to get to work only five minutes too late instead of six. Not that his boss cared much about the difference. But in his many years of arriving late because he hit snooze on his alarm just one time too often, Hongjoong had learnt that Choi Jongho was far more irritable at 7:37 than at 7:36. Most likely because Hongjoong's colleague San showed up at 7:37 most times.

With a shudder in the brisk air, Hongjoong stepped inside the building. The corridor was barely warm, saving on heating costs. Why use the heating system when the employees could just jog up the creaking stairs? Jongho always advised them to keep fit through morning workouts. Subsequently, he forced them through one with his impatience and economic ways of living.

Hongjoong wondered if their pipes were even still up to standards after so long of no use. Their work building was old. He doubted they had seen much maintenance in the past decade.

Huffing, Hongjoong arrived at his floor. They had needed long discussions and complaints for Jongho to move it from the third floor to the second. After all, their priced equipment deserved the safest place on the topmost level. Their sport-loving chef had agreed begrudgingly.

With the artificial cheerful smile of an adult arriving at work at an hour he wanted to sleep, Hongjoong pulled the door open. Mingi, their intern, looked up from the coffee machine when he entered. He was the only one who used that thing. Their grounds deliciously tasted like a demon's butt hole. (San's words, not Hongjoong's.)

"Good morning, my dearest coworkers!" Hongjoong chirped on his way in. In a gesture too grand and hysterical to derive from eight hours of sleep, he waved his coffee around.

"Morning, Hongjoong."

For a guy straight out of university, Mingi's voice was unfairly deep. It was the voice one would expect to hear from an eighty-year-old chain smoker or someone who voiced Arnold Schwarzenegger in the twelfth Terminator movie. When the lanky redhead had greeted the team on his first day on the job, they had written it off as another coworker who got out of bed super late and forgot to put on his voice before he left. But no. Mingi, the youngest in their team and the tallest - though Hongjoong liked to deny that whenever they were seated - actually spoke how Hongjoong imagined coal to sound like if it had a voice.

Not when he laughed, though. Never when he laughed.

"Here so early?" Hongjoong threw him a sympathetic smile as he marched over to the bureaus. He shared a room with San, and he was surprised to see the man's shoes kicked on the ground at the entrance carelessly as he approached. Like any sane office worker, San hated wearing his shoes all day long.

"Yes! The boss called me on a quite vivid case of a devil sighting yesterday and even if it's my late day, I couldn't resist checking it out as soon as possible!"

Poor guy. Hongjoong admired his flame of passion, still burning so brightly. But once Mingi would finish his dissertation on sleep paralysis demons, he would likely become a shoe-less office worker just like San and Hongjoong. Capitalism robbed people of their fire.