Butterfly Effect || BTS Universe

Pills

The Boy Who Swallowed Dreams

Blood trickled down the side of his head as he sat panting in the middle of the room. Puffs of translucent air pressed out of his lungs with every sharp exhale. The warmth only descended further—to his cheek, then to the bottom of his jaw. It was a tiny trail, nothing big. Nonetheless, it was still blood.

He tried desperately to not let his legs collapse in on themselves, the inevitable shut down of his nerves and consciousness happening more times than he allowed himself to admit. And yet, here he was, awake from another episode, the sun gone from before. The bitter cold and sticky residue of sweat on his body let him know he had been there for quite sometime. It could've been the exhaustion that mixed in with his rapid depletion of motor functions that caused him to clock out for so long.

Regardless, he still wasn't as cured as he thought. Or rather, as he had told everyone.

He lied. It was a trait he learned from his time at the hospital. From his time with his friend. In fact, he was the one who told him to lie. And look where that got him, separated and alone.

Did he hold a grudge? No, it wasn't the younger one's fault. All he could wish was that he wasn't receiving any of the type of pain anyone else had endured from the outside.

. . .

Oh how desperately he wished he could go back with him. The place where Jimin was, Hoseok felt secure. There was nothing to worry about. Just a set schedule of physical therapy, medications, and regular hospital things. They never had visitors, never really disclosing their location to the other five. Jimin had pleaded to Hoseok a million times over to not let them know. And the shameful look the younger always gave him had Hoseok doing as he wished.

Overtime, the pills stopped working, and Hoseok's condition continued to plague his daily life. If it weren't for Jimin, he was positive he would've had several more concussions under his belt.

And yet, he still had to take those pills, on top of many more. There was no cure for Narcolepsy, they told him, so they wanted to figure out what could help the disorder from constantly eating at his nerves. He was sick constantly, the side effects bubbling the acid in his stomach and gripping at his senses. Nothing seemed to work, but the influx of pills had Hoseok continuously wonder if something else was wrong with him.

He came up with conditions. Anything to help put a picture to the definition of what he was feeling. Narcolepsy was always in the back of his mind, new disorders and diseases popping up in a pitiful attempt to help mask the true reason why he wanted to swallow the ridiculous amount of pills he had grown to consume.

Who's fault was it? The hospital's? Hoseok's? He didn't know. But as he had learned, lying was the only way to get him through.

Eventually, it got him free.

Jimin's melancholy words of "Say hi to the sun for me," always rang in his ears. When he packed his bags—all filled to the brim with feathers from their mischievous shenanigans—, to when he was finally shoved back out into the world.

It wasn't welcoming.

The sun burned boils on his skin, the tacky air suffocated his lungs, and the bitter loneliness grabbed at his chest and tore it wide open.