ᴘᴀʀᴀɴᴏɪᴀ | ꜱᴋᴢ

illusions

It was the next day, and the sun had just risen a few minutes earlier before Seungmin woke up to the sunlight shining on his face through the small opening of his window curtains across the room. He sluggishly reached for his phone on the nightstand to check the time, it was only 8:39 am so he hadn't slept in too late.

He sat upright on his bed to collect his thoughts for a quick moment, but certain images, visions even, came to his mind that were quite disturbing, nothing he would usually think of. He then remembered a dream he had that seemed so realistic, he thought the dream could've been something that actually happened. Seungmin tried to remember what the dream was mainly about, and it was all suddenly coming back to him in small pieces. It didn't seem like too much to him at the moment, so he decided to get up from his bed and walk downstairs to the living room where he hoped someone would be. But right as he walked towards the door, he had recalled seeing his friend Jisung in the dream.

Scenes of what happened rapidly flashed in his brain, making what the dream was actually about seem more important to him, and finding out why it felt so real. Too real to be unreal.

Seungmin saw flashes in his mind of an excessive amount of blood pouring down from a lifeless hand into a pool of blood that was partially dried from being there for an extremely long time. The owner of the defunct hand, who looked strangely familiar, laid on a hospital bed with multiple gruesome stab wounds all over, and one very long slash starting from deep within the throat, all the way down to their lower torso in a wide diagonal line. And their raw pink stomach flesh that seemed to be starting to rot and decompose smelled absolutely terrible. There were many bones broken in half sticking up from inside the corpse, along with their esophagus being ripped out from their throat by someone's bare hands, obviously covered in blood, and placed right next to their head with some ligaments and other things still attaching the organ to the inside of the neck, and mutilated lungs that were recklessly shredded wide open with what looked to be a circular saw of some sort, revealing the bloody, spongy interior.

It was in fact Jisung who laid there presumably dead in his dream. Just as Seungmin had actually processed the sight of his own friend pretty much slaughtered to death, he remembered what he saw the night before when he heard the scream and opened Jisung's door to see what happened.

When he opened that very door, everything Seungmin had seen in his 'dream', he witnessed right before him for a split second taking place there. He honestly thought he could've been hallucinating at the time, which could possibly from sleep deprivation or something, but then again the moment felt too realistic for him to not be curious and have questions about it.

But he shook the subject off for the time-being, and continued walking to the stairs.

Seungmin made his way downstairs to find everybody except Minho all together in the living room, and casually greeted them. He was obviously still concerned for Minho considering what had happened the day before, slightly more now with not seeing him in the room with everyone else.

"Hey, does anyone know where Minho is at all?" Seungmin nervously asked. "Yeah, he's in his room right now, so he'll be here soon." Felix had responded hurriedly as he was too focused on the game he was playing on his phone to make a better reply to him. "Oh, alright then. I guess i'll just go get coffee.. or something."

Seungmin had stepped into the kitchen to get some coffee and something quick to eat as he did have quite a few errands to run that day, so he didn't have enough time to have a larger meal. As he opened the cabinet to grab a coffee mug, Minho walked into the kitchen, but he seemed off. Like really off. Minho was looking a lot worse than when he did yesterday. There were severe dark bags under his eyes that almost made him look like a raccoon, his skin oddly paler than normal, and crimson bloodshot eyes, really showing how much Minho was lacking sleep. And his attitude... was completely the opposite of that? Why, Minho acted as optimistic as one could ever be, as if it was the best day of his life!

"What the...how is he even upbeat or energetic at all..? He literally looks like he hasn't slept in the past decade," Seungmin had thought to himself. "Is Minho even okay? He seems way different since yesterday."

"Good morning Seungmin! How are ya feeling today?"

"Oh, I'm just..dandy. Uhm, not to offend you or anything, but you seem quite too full of energy considering that you kinda look the opposite of that..did you have a good dream or something?" Seungmin slowly regretted what he had just said, afraid of the malevolent glance the older one had shot him.

Minho froze for a moment before responding to his remark, but calmly continued after.

"Well, what do you think? Honestly, I find it very odd of you to ask that when you've just seen my dream a few minutes ago," he stated while giving Seungmin a perplexed look. "I thought you would remember. You do recall it, don't you?"

"......what did you just say to me-? No, no, no, no, no, no, this can't be. It couldn't. You're lying. Yeah, that's right, you're just lying! I wouldn't fall for that, you know that won't happen. Right?"

"You do recall it, don't you?"

Seungmin wanted to be in denial of it all, but the images of what was done to Jisung kept coming back to him, making him hesitantly accept the truth. Jisung was alive and well though, he was just sitting on the couch with the others, how could it possibly be real?

"I said, you recall it all, don't you?"