Mad As A Hatter | bl | ORV

23: the Nameless, Binna (5)

Eun-Byeol's tired and helpless voice spoke through this tranquility. So soft and weak, so tired of his life.

"Binna is such an important name to me. I don't know why, it just is, so stop mentioning that name. Please. Let me just spend the rest of this day in silence."

Dokja stared at his sunbae, unmoving and hurt. He wanted to embrace this frail and lonely version of him, to chase away the gloom invading his heart. The reader was not used to such a Eun-Byeol. He missed his smiles, all versions of it. Whether it was his sunbae's default tenderness to his spine-chilling grin.

Just not... this. Where his lips formed a straight line. Neither sad or happy.

Just... lonely.

Was that why his sunbae acted clingy towards him? Why his sunbae showed such bold familial affections to Binna? Was that the reason why his sunbae pampered Binna, why he accommodated Gilyoung's wants? Because his sunbae didn't want children to experience this loneliness that pushed him to the brink of death?

Why couldn't he have met his sunbae sooner?

That way, Dokja would have chased his loneliness away and his sunbae would have found an excuse to continue living much sooner.

Hurt and bitter, Dokja slowly climbed onto Eun-Byeol's laps. He stood there, looking at his sunbae's face, and stepping forward to bury himself into his sunbae's sweater. This brought another bout of stillness in the living room.

"Say," after a few hours of silence, with the clock slowly ticking to midnight, Eun-Byeol spoke in the dark. "What's your name? That's the least you could do, after annoying me earlier, noh?"

Dokja wiggled in the sweater, holding tightly on the fleece. "Squeak." My name... is Kim Dokja.

"Kim Dokja," Eun-Byeol repeated the hamster's name under his breath. "It's a pretty name." It's familiar. Where have I heard it? When I said it just now, my heart seemed to hurt. Did I know any Kim Dokja in the past? I don't remember.

"Squeak?" What's yours?

"My name, it's—" Eun-Byeol's tone changed all of a sudden. The teen sat straight in abrupt, almost causing the hamster using his sweater as a blanket to fly off him. "—what's my name?" Disbelief was written all over his face.

"I clearly heard my name being cursed by my neighbors when I was out yesterday, so why can't I remember?"

There was something obviously wrong.

"Squeak?" Your name is Ahn Eun-Byeol, isn't it?

"No, no," the anxious Eun-Byeol began biting his lower lip. "That's not it. My name, it's not Ahn Eun-Byeol. What is it then? What's my name? Why can't I remember it?"

Dokja wanted to tell his sunbae to stop biting his lip when the ground began to rumble. An earthquake shook the house, and the sky outside began to crack. The lines crawled across the sky, covering every inch. Fragments of the sky began falling down, revealing a vast expanse of space, millions of stars burning in the wide outer space.

The world conjured by the Hidden Scenario was gone, leaving Eun-Byeol's house the only one intact, floating in this unknown space. Meteoroids of varying sizes flew past them, one of them grazing upon the window ledge.

However, these magical things did not register in Eun-Byeol's mind. Instead, he began repeating the same questions over and over again, until his voice became hoarse.

Dokja did not know what to do.

He clung onto his sunbae's clothes, trying to get his attention, but the words what's my name kept echoing in his ears.