[HIATUS] gift of the sea • woosan + seongjoong

t h r e e

There's a throbbing pain in his head, somewhere near the back and it feels like his skull is about to burst— it's the first sensation he gets when he awakes. He stirs when he comes to, a groan leaving his lips as his eyes crack open heavily. The black of his vision shifts to brightness of a swirl of different colors, blurred from his sleepy eyes. He blinks the haze away and slowly everything becomes clearer.

He first sees the ceiling, a dark reddish wood that spans out but not by much. The room is dimly lit by a nearby candle lantern. Wooyoung slowly raises from the bed, the warm quilt he had been wrapped up in sliding off and pooling around his waist. Across the bed he stares back at his own reflection. He's still in his torn clothes, but someone had cleaned his face of dirt and had somewhat attempted to fix his hair a bit.

A particularly sharp pounding in his head causes him to wince and bunch into himself, already tired of the throbbing sensation. He stays like that for a while— until it dulls into a soft ache and he's able to raise his head once again. Slightly lightheaded, he slips out of the covers and finds his boots waiting for him at the foot of the bed. Slipping into them, he laces them up as he looks around— trying to recall what exactly happened.

This place is completely unfamiliar to him, and he has no clue where he could possibly be. It was an odd room, not something that he usually saw at home but more western like he's seen in newspapers or pamphlets some of the travelers brought along with them whenever they visited. He stood from the bed, grabbing onto his head with a grimace at how much it hurt.

The room, although tall in height was not that wide, with the bed on one side of the room and a desk across it where the candle lantern was sat. He stumbles over, hoping to find something that could give him some sort of clue as to who's house this was. He's not sure if the sway of everything is his mind playing games on him. His eyes scan over the desk, finding more obvious things such as parchments and ink with a quilt. There's some sort of bottles of herbs and liquids neatly organized in a box, along with some little notes all over with words that look like medical prescriptions.

It's only when he looks at the edge of the desk, does his breath hitch in his throat. There's a stack of posters— WANTED posters, to be exact. But what causes his blood to go cold is that the drawing of the person in question is him. His name isn't listed, but that's definitely his face and there's a mind blowing 100 gold piece prize for his capture alive and 50 for him dead.

Suddenly it all comes crashing back to him— waking up, going home, the Creep Officer, escaping, running into San.

San.

Wooyoung's breathing suddenly increases ten fold in panic, fingers clenching around the poster as he frantically heads towards the door to his right. He throws it open and walks out, looking around wildly. There's a narrow hall to his right that's a complete dead end, but towards his left there's a set of stairs, one leading up above and one leading down below.

He doesn't hesitate to climb quickly up the stairs, needing to leave as fast as he possibly could. He's met with another narrow hall when he reaches the top, but at the end there's the bright sunlight of the outside and he practically sprints down the hall. Wherever he was, wherever the hell San was, he needed to get as far as possible from here.

However, outside was something he was not expecting at all. He freezes on the middle of the deck abruptly— yes, deck. A ship's deck to be more specific. A tightness grows in his throat as he looks around at the sails and wooden floors narrowing out meters in front of him. Wooyoung's too afraid to look past the wood, afraid of what he'll see and what it means.