❝the suicide of your friend was not a suicide. it was an escape attempt.❞
⤷in which the lives of ten boys become nothing more than games and something is hiding among them.
[a pentagon au]
{completed}
(#153 in horror 1/13/18)
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Kino had no idea what to do. He had somehow made it out of the woods and into his house unscathed and unquestioned; neither of his parents were home. His fingers were locked in a death grip on his camera. He didn't want to look at those pictures. He felt like he had to, like they were whispering to him. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the corpses. With every blink he saw straight into hell, and his friends were there and it made tears threaten his eyes. Shinwon and Yanan. Yuto.
Yuto.
One of his friends had committed suicide, and now there was a death tally. Three of his friends were dead. Kids are supposed to be invincible, he thought with the desperation of a rabid animal. Kids aren't supposed to die when they're still kids!
A half hour later, he had uploaded the pictures to his laptop and he wished he hadn't; flushing the anxiety and fear down the toilet and wiping its taste from his lips, he wondered what he was supposed to do.
Then he noticed something in one of the pictures that made his entire world narrow to a tiny pinprick and then he found himself wondering if he was going to live through this trauma. His hands began to shake. He called Hongseok because this wasn't the kind of thing you told just anyone; it was the kind of thing you told the person who'd be able to handle the collapse of the whole world, and that was funny because Kino's whole world had collapsed. So fast. A tiny detached part of his brain marveled at how fragile a human's life is.
The phone rang until it went to voicemail.
"Hongseok, please pick up your phone, I've found something..." Kino trailed off, wondering with a sick revulsion how he was supposed to describe what his eyes were glued to. "Please call me back soon. Please." He forced himself to hang up before he could devolve into a stuttering, crying mess.
Hongseok knocked on Hyojong's front door. Several times, and with no answer each time. He knocked louder, louder, until - it opened.
Hyojong's little brother.
"Hey buddy," Hongseok said, trying to smile and look okay, "is Hyojong home?"
Hyojong's brother nodded, letting Hongseok in.
"He's in his room," he said in his quiet voice. Hongseok tried to smile again, tried to say thank you, but the words died in his throat.
Hyojong's bedroom door was closed. He didn't bother knocking, just turned the handle and entered. Hyojong's room was a mess. Dirty clothes covered the floor, his shade was pulled, blankets heaped at the foot of his bed, and only his desk lamp was on. Despite the poor light, Hongseok still saw the bottles of alcohol in their old hiding spots: insidious gleaming from behind the bookshelf, inside the half-open desk drawer, hiding behind a pile of books.
