After Dark 》Minsung

9 》Talk To Me

"Wow, you don't know? This is why you're the second favorite."

"This is why you have slonked shit silly style like sloppy swag."

"Now, see, me, personally, I think the fact my brain is gradually degenerating, is my most enticing character trait," Minho recoiled with a slight simper pulling his lips up at him, the joke on his tongue coming across strong despite the bitterness of it's twinge lingering on his tastebuds.

A fetid aftertaste jolting through his nerves like a shock of electricity bolted through him, the twitching balks jittering the tips of his fingers uncontrollably in the lengths of their dying ends. Like branches off a dying hedge bordering the flourishing entrance to a hidden harden beyond the waiting hands, their stretching reach yet to be pruned from overgrowing into the brick path they covered up. Sealing the garden of his throbbing heart off from anyone who wished to travel farther than his mangled fingertips. Anyone who wished to walk down that path, hacking the blocked road less traveled back bit by bit, tangled in thorns and roses he swallowed down to satiate the uncomfortable churning of an anxious stomach. As long as those branches kept the rest of the world out.

As long as he could continue to keep that grin on his lips wide, glancing at the clock as it slowly ticked the seconds down. Counting indefinitely, frozen in a chronostasis as those numbers thawed out. Minutes until those hedged lost their foliage and reduced to nothing but dead branches rattling in the wind. Hours until the wonders of the underground world collapsed to shards. Days, maybe. Months, years. Decades away. But eventually, it would. Eventually, he would be running to the edge of the breaking world, teetering off the edge until the pieces broke underneath his feet.

Minho tried to shake the crawling feeling off, shrugging his shoulders a few times and picking up the cat to set her back in his lap. The touch of the soft fur underneath him fingertips bringing him home. Back to the cushions of his desk chair, to the glowing screens propped up with the coding from a job he was laboring away at before Felix intruded on the sacred space, to the cat stepping on him and trying to crawl up onto his shoulders to cling to her owner, busying himself with trying to pull her kneading paws off of him, back to the scrunching of the headphones against the nape of his neck. And to his brother standing in the doorway, Felix's phone in his hands as he seemed to be checking something on the bright screen.

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say. I have to head out," His younger brother waved him off, pocketing his phone as he turned and neglected to close the bedroom door behind him. He shouted from down the hallway, "I love you!"

Minho hollered back, "Close my fucking door!"

The front door of his apartment banged close, a slight whirring noise from the electrical mechanism announcing he was securely locked in.

"That shithead," Minho scoffed to himself, moving to pick Gummy up as her paws splayed out. Staring back to those yellow eyes as he wondered in bafflement, "Can you believe him?"

The cat blinked at him, tail whipping silently.

"I know. The audacity," He answered her wordless gaping with his own teasing eye roll. Was talking to his cat strange? Maybe. But it would be even stranger if she answered back.

Scooping her up in his arms, Minho stood from the desk chair on shaky legs. The strain of aching muscles pinching him as he moved on those underutilized joints for the first time since he nibbled on a banana for breakfast that afternoon. Movements coming cautious as the stiff fibers threatening on tearing apart at their twisted links bounding them into stone, stretched themselves out with every step. Every padded shuffle taking him closer to the edge of the bed and the tangled up mess of comforting sheets he had yet to make proper atop the mattress. He set the cat down there, abandoning her there as he stretched his hands out. More of those threads which tangled up, knotted together, pulled taught as their filaments alarming sirens that he was imperiled.