A week went by, and things started to calm down. The constant talk about the murders faded. No more worries, no creepy notes, no police always around. School was getting back to normal.
Yeonjun and Beomgyu were always together. They'd laugh easily, hold hands whenever they could, and look at each other with soft eyes that everyone noticed. Life felt like it was going back to how it used to be for their friends.
After the physics test, the whole group was in the cafeteria. Soobin and Lee Know were arguing about something silly, as usual.
"You guys are blind," Lee Know said, shaking his head with exaggerated disbelief. "Yuna's boots are actually kind of cool."
Soobin choked on his juice. "Cool? They look like they escaped from a medieval torture chamber!"
"No, no, you're not seeing the vision," Lee Know insisted, waving a dismissive hand. "It's a bold statement. A rebellion against boring footwear."
Taehyun, ever the pragmatist, chimed in. "They do look pretty sturdy. Probably good for walking in the rain."
"Exactly!" Lee Know exclaimed, pointing a triumphant finger at Taehyun. "Practical and edgy. You guys just don't get high fashion."
Yeonjun, a soft smile playing on his lips, watched the familiar argument unfold, his leg subtly bumping against Beomgyu's under the table. Beomgyu leaned slightly closer to Yeonjun, a small smile mirroring his own.
"He has a weird definition of 'high fashion,' doesn't he?" Beomgyu whispered to Yeonjun, a playful glint in his eyes.
Yeonjun chuckled softly, his gaze meeting Beomgyu's for a brief, warm moment before turning back to the ongoing debate. "Well," he murmured, a hint of amusement in his voice, "at least it gives them something to argue about other than... you know." His eyes flickered briefly towards the empty seats that still felt too present in their absence. yeji and wooyoung.
The lively argument over Yuna's boots abruptly stalled as soobin suddenly shoved his chair back with a loud scrape and lurched to his feet. He stood rigid by the table, one hand clutching the front of his shirt just below his throat. His face, usually bright and cheerful, was pale, his eyes wide and unfocused. He looked less like he was standing up and more like he was desperately trying to escape a trap.
The change was so sharp, so wrong, that all conversation died instantly. Yeonjun, whose attention had been solely on Beomgyu moments before, stared. Soobin was normally so relaxed, so glowing—this strained, suffocated look was completely unlike him.
"Soobin, hey, what happened?" Yeonjun asked immediately, concern sharpening his voice. "Are you okay?"
Soobin swallowed hard, his breathing ragged. He didn't meet anyone's eyes. "Uh... something got stuck," he mumbled, his voice a strained whisper. He didn't elaborate, didn't make a move to clear his throat, or take a sip of his juice. Instead, he just spun on his heel and quickly walked away from the table, weaving through the crowded cafeteria without a backward glance.
The group watched him go in stunned silence.
"Well, that was weird," Lee Know finally muttered.
Taehyun frowned, already analyzing the quick retreat. "He looked genuinely freaked out."
Yeonjun didn't say anything, but his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Something felt deeply off about that, it wasn't just a simple choke. As Soobin's retreating figure neared the cafeteria exit, Yeonjun glanced at Beomgyu, only to find Beomgyu's eyes fixed intently on Soobin until he completely disappeared from view. There was a look of deep, unsettling concentration on Beomgyu's face.
The awkward silence Soobin left behind didn't last. Lee Know, recovering first, broke the tension with a loud sigh. "See? This is what happens when you don't appreciate proper fashion, you get physically ill from the sheer wrongness of it all." He nudged Soobin's abandoned juice. "Bad vibes."
Taehyun, though still frowning slightly, picked up the thread. "I think the test stress is finally hitting him. Physics always makes Soobin weird."
The conversation quickly resumed, pulling Lee Know and Taehyun back into the trivial safety of complaints and jokes. But beomgyu remained unnaturally still, his sandwich forgotten. His eyes, fixed on the doorway where Soobin had vanished, held a distant, cold concentration, a level of focus entirely alien to his usual scattered energy. He was present in body, yet wholly absent in mind, locked onto some unseen, internal calculation.
Yeonjun, watching him, felt a prickle of unease, a sharper anxiety than even Soobin's strange exit had provoked. This vacant intensity on Beomgyu's face was wrong. Slowly, Yeonjun reached out, his hand settling flat and firm on the center of Beomgyu's back, a grounding pressure intended to drag him back to the moment.
Beomgyu flinched, a slight, involuntary tremor running through him. He turned his head slowly toward Yeonjun, and for that single, horrifying split second, the eyes that met Yeonjun's were not Beomgyu's.
They were wide, vacant, and alarmingly cold, staring not at him, but through him, stripped of all warmth and recognition. It was a terrifying, momentary glimpse of something empty, something utterly foreign, before the light snapped back, and the familiar, startled confusion of Beomgyu's eyes quickly returned, replacing the grotesque emptiness that had briefly taken hold.
"Huh?" Beomgyu finally mumbled, shaking his head slightly, the phantom trace of that chilling disconnect lingering like a bad taste in Yeonjun's mouth.
Author's note: so finally it is here!, new chapters every sunday! this chapter reveals kind of a new angle to story, if u can see it...
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Doodlebug | Beomjun, yeongyu |
Fanfiction"your stupidity is going to be the end of me"(18+)
