fireworks || kyunyu

-1-

*:・ﾟ✧

1:56 AM.

it was 1:56 AM on a cold saturday in october, and chanhee's body had no intentions on letting him fall asleep.

sure, he was tired. exhausted, even.

but the fear that overwhelmed his body the moment he shut his eyes was not letting him rest one bit. he couldn't tell if he were being paranoid or if there really was something to be afraid of — he had always thought that he was just a little bit less sane than anyone else he had grown to know, but this was a whole other level of anxiety.

everything was amplified; his fear, his hearing, the feeling of his blanket against his skin. everything.

even his own breathing sounded too loud.

that is why he lay awake, at the cusp of 2:00 in the morning on a sunday. realistically, he should be getting as much sleep as possible, for if he does not, he will be extremely tired at his shift in the morning; he worked at least twice a week, and he just so happened to be called today.

he heard many sounds; he could hear voices looming in the back of his mind, chanting his name as if it were some ritual or spiritual saying. he could hear footsteps outside of his closed door despite the fact that he lived alone, and had been doing so for the past year.

he was afraid to turn around in bed, knowing that there was a possibility that he'd turn to be faced with some monster, real or not. another thing that was stopping him from doing so was the idea that his bed would let out an ungodly loud creaking noise. his amplified senses would only make such a noise ten times more annoying, so he refrained.

he stared out of his fully open curtains, gazing out at the starless night sky that lay in front of his eyes. he had an urge to get up and close the blinds, but that risked two things; one, he would have to get up, sacrificing the two drops of bravery that he had left to the entity that would surely grab him by his ankles, and two, he would be getting rid of the only other source of light in the half-dim room. this would make his paranoia impossibly worse, as nothing could shake him out of his senses like the dark void could.

he left himself to suffer in silence, waiting for sleep to overcome his senses, or for his nightly paranoia to pass away. he couldn't stand the fact that even the slightest noise was as loud as a strike of thunder to him — gosh, he didn't even want to think about how loud thunder would be for him in this state.

the second the thought of thunder ran through his mind, chanhee began panicking. what if it suddenly began raining? what if the loudest strike of lightning struck the tree planted just outside of his house? what if—

a gunshot.

or was it a gunshot?

was it thunder? or maybe an electrical outage?

did someone upstairs drop something?

no, wait, chanhee lives alone... and his house only has one floor...

so what on earth was that severely noisy boom that erupted from just outside of his house? and what were the small zaps that slowly dissipated into nothing right after it?