Desperate Lies | Jilix/Changlix/Chanlix

𝟙𝟙

He knocked on the front door and waited for a response if there would be one. After waiting for a minute, he knocked again and pressed his ear up to the wooden door to listen in and hear anything coming from inside. After not hearing a response, he brought his hand to the doorknob and twisted it. With a soft creak, the door opened.

I looked over Minho's shoulder to peek at the house's state before actually observing the area. When I noticed that the place looked relatively clean and tidy, I felt more comfortable. It didn't click in my mind that I should've been more cautious since everything looked untouched. That should've been what made me uneasy, but it didn't.

Minho walked into the house casually as if it were his own, and I just trailed behind him. I looked around at everything. This was the first time I'd actually been inside Chan's house. I had been here before, but I never went inside. It was nice. It wasn't my personal style with mismatched colors that somehow went together, but I could see how he would like it. It was definitely... interesting.

"He's home," I whispered to Minho. "I just don't know where he is."

"Well, considering that he didn't answer the door and he still hasn't come out, I don't think that it's a good sign for him. The door was also unlocked. He's probably dead," he explained nonchalantly. I couldn't help but be slightly taken aback by how calm he was. Throughout this whole day, he somehow didn't have a psychotic break. Changbin already had his, and I felt as though I was on the verge of one, but he didn't. He was serene.

"How are you not terrified right now?"

"It's not something that I need to be scared of. If Chan is dead, that means that Changbin is gone, and he isn't going to do anything since he can't. We're just here to bring him back to life and leave it at that. I don't know what's there to be scared of."

"But even earlier when you were fighting with Changbin, you only yelled like, once, but not out of anger. You only yelled over him so that he would hear you. He was literally threatening your and my life, and even then, you weren't scared. I don't understand it."

He was quiet for a minute, in thought about how to explain what happened. "Because I know Changbin. I've known him for a much longer time than both you and Chan have known him. I knew that he wasn't going to hurt me. It was you that I was worried about, that's why I told you to leave. But in all honesty, I think he was more scared than you were. He was probably terrified at that moment. Because that wasn't him, that was someone else, and that someone else has only come forward once before in a moment that he and I don't look back on fondly, and he didn't want to do the same thing again. He was scared that he was going to do something he was going to regret again."

"But if he killed Chan, wouldn't he regret that?" I asked. At this point, Minho had stopped walking and was facing me. I could see that he was as sincere as he could. His eyes were cold when talking about Changbin. But they didn't hold hatred or anger. They were sad and confused.

"No. He explained earlier why Chan is different. To him, Chan isn't innocent. He has marks on him that Changbin has deemed evil and unworthy of life. That kid was clean. That kid didn't do anything. He should still be alive, but because of Changbin's foolishness and carelessness, he's dead. Changbin doesn't want that to happen again."

"I don't know if this is okay for me to ask, but couldn't you have saved him with your potion thing?"

I looked down at his bag that currently held the bitter drink we were about to give to Chan. His eyes traveled down to the same object that I was looking at.

"I didn't make it yet," he explained quietly. I could hear the pain in his voice and knew that I shouldn't press on the topic anymore. He clearly didn't want to talk about it anymore. That last question was too far. I wasn't going to try to go any further.

I brought my gaze back up to him, trying to decipher what emotion he was presenting, but I wasn't able to. If anything, he looked emotionless. There was no glint in his eyes, no slight smile or frown. Everything on his face was completely neutral. But based on how he just spoke, I assumed that he was just hiding the grief and pain.

"Anyways, let's go find Chan," he said suddenly and turned around to continue our search. It took me a moment to follow his lead and start looking around for the dead body. I had been stuck in my thoughts. I was trying to figure out Minho. I wanted to understand him as a person, but now wasn't the time for that.

I walked around the building, going into the various rooms. They all looked clean, like he had hired a maid, and they had just left two minutes ago. There was barely any dust on the shelves, let alone dirty clothes or papers strewn throughout the house. That was what I expected of Chan. I didn't expect him to be so neat with his job and how he seemed to work.

There were more rooms than I had thought. On the outside, the house looked like an average-sized two-story house. I don't know why he needed a two-story for just one person, but apparently, he did. They were all filled, not a space left empty, whether it be with books, instruments, art supplies, or art itself. There was something in every corner of every room.

I walked up the stairs to get to the second floor. If Changbin had come and killed him already, he might've done it up there. I walked the halls, looking into each room, and there on the end was what looked like a master bedroom, and either he was sleeping on his red and white tie-dye bedsheets, or he was laying in a pool of his own blood, dead. I'm not sure why he had white bedsheets, but it made it easy to see all of his lost blood.

The sight was gruesome. Changbin did not hold back and wanted to make sure that Chan was dead. That was very clear. But it was even stranger that he would just leave it looking like this. Surely he wouldn't want to just leave the body and blood right there like that. Besides Minho and I, if someone had come through and found him and called the police, it would probably be effortless to figure out it was him.

For some reason, I didn't feel as anxious as I thought I would have when I saw him. Maybe I had already accepted the fact that he was going to be dead and bloody. I definitely wasn't expecting this much blood, though.

I called out to Minho to let him know that I found Chan. While waiting for Minho to come up, I continued to look at Chan's horribly mangled body. Changbin maybe shot him once or twice, which I'm sure killed him since there was a bullet hole in his head and one in his chest. But what was even worse was the number of cuts that littered Chan's body. I brought my hand to hover over the bed before placing it down on the sheets, feeling the blood that was soaking into the mattress stain my fingertips. I couldn't tell if it was recent or not with the amount of blood that was there. It was bound to take hours upon hours to dry completely.

"Holy shit."

I turned around to see Minho in the doorway to Chan's room. His eyes were wide, and his jaw had fallen slack when he saw the state Changbin had left Chan in.

"Yeah, I know."

I watched as he quickly started playing with his bag to try and open it, but I could tell that he was panicking. He was fumbling around, not seeming to be able to focus on his task. He eventually got it open and grabbed a small bottle. He walked over to me and brought his hand out, handing me the container. He wasn't looking forward, though. His head was turned away toward the door to the room. I understood what he wanted and took the bottle from him.

I turned around to face Chan again and heard Minho's footsteps behind me, walking away. His face was soaked in his own blood, but I had to stomach it when I brought my hand up to his jaw to open it slightly. I opened the tiny jar and poured the liquid into his mouth. My fingers stuck to his skin slightly from the blood when I tried to remove them. I stepped back in case he started thrashing around. I wasn't sure if everyone would've woken up as calmly as I did, but I didn't want to risk getting punched in the face with a bloody fist.