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You are healthy.
Or at least, you had always thought so, in the steady rhythm of your days, in the mundane details that make up the hours and the moments, until that phantom—the one you can't see, but feel, like a hand hovering just above your skin—begins to press more insistently into your mind.
You feel it at first like the gentle breath of a ghost trailing behind you. A curious thing, a thing you brush off as silly paranoia, the kind of absurdity that creeps up on a person too invested in late-night thrillers, or perhaps, if you're honest with yourself, one too many sleepless nights.
But soon, it no longer feels like the innocent remnants of poor sleep. The feeling grows heavier, sinking into your bones, blooming behind your eyes in long hours of hypervigilance that leave you restless and agitated, constantly glancing over your shoulder, wondering if the air behind you has really shifted or if the eyes boring into your back are real.
It follows you everywhere—the sensation that there is something, someone, just at the edge of your awareness, observing you with an intensity that makes your lungs constrict. You carry it with you to work, on the train, through the streets bathed in the pale morning light, and even to your home, where the walls that once felt safe now seem too thin to protect you from whatever it is that haunts you, watches you.
And it's absurd, surely, it's just stress—life, after all, is an insidious thing that wears you down in invisible ways. You're certain of it at first, convinced you can rationalise it away, as though it's merely a fleeting anxiety that will dissipate if you ignore it long enough.
You tell yourself this is nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps an accumulation of fatigue, of too many restless nights and too little time to catch your breath. But the feeling doesn't leave, and no matter what you do—how many times you lock the doors or close the curtains tightly at night—there's always a part of you that is aware of it.
Eventually, your concerns lead you to doctors who listen to you with patient faces and half-hearted nods, while you describe the sensation that gnaws at your peace. They wear the professional masks of sympathy, of understanding, and yet their dismissals are almost clinical in their detachment.
They tell you it's just stress, just the byproduct of modern life, their voices smooth and rehearsed. They offer suggestions—meditation, yoga, perhaps a temporary prescription, all the usual platitudes that barely touch the surface of your growing unease. You leave their offices feeling no lighter, no more reassured, and the burning of that gaze—always unseen, always just out of reach—remains.
But then, on a rainy Saturday, when the grey skies press low and the city feels submerged in a kind of melancholic stillness, you stumble across a flyer. It seems unremarkable at first, just another sheet of paper stuck to a lamppost among hundreds of others—of lost cats, of yoga classes, and of flatshares. But something about it catches your eye. It feels...personal, somehow, as though it has been placed there just for you, amidst the drizzle and the low splashes of the streets.
YOU ARE READING
Prompt Game (BTS)
FanfictionSend 1 - 4 emojis, one BTS member and a sentence/scene you would like to be included and I'll write a small prompt as soon as possible about it 💕 Before we start, there are some things I'm not comfortable to write: smut, but also non sexual non-con...