Five minutes later, Haechan was still sat on the floor, staring at the blurry whorls and grooves that had to have been carved into the wood panels over time. He knew he couldn't sit here forever, because there was the small matter of waking up in a strange room and being shouted at by a woman he didn't know to deal with, but he just couldn't bring himself to move just yet.
The feelings and emotions from the previous night were still fresh in his mind, in his soul, even if his roommate didn't appear to have made the leap into this unknown place with him. Haechan knew that, even without being able to see beyond the end of his fingertips. He didn't know how he knew, but the cool air around him seemed to scream loneliness. No. Wherever he was right now, and whatever was going on, Johnny was not here. He was alone.
Nobody cares.
His final thoughts from last night slipped unbidden into his mind, and he almost laughed out loud. He still carried the feelings of abandonment he'd unearthed, and his insides felt like they'd been rubbed raw, but he knew that he'd be able to fix things with Johnny and the others eventually. He'd talk to Mark, tell him everything--like he always did--and they would figure out a solution together. It would all be fine.
Mark Lee would know what to do.
"Lee Donghyuck." This time he didn't jump at the interruption. The voice sounded closer now, but he didn't make any move to get up off the floor. "Don't tell me you're still in--" The door crashed open behind him, or he assumed that was what the sound was, and then he felt a shift in the air that meant he was no longer alone. "What are you doing?"
The voice sounded irritated, at Haechan he would guess, but he couldn't figure out why. Was this a new dorm aunt, whom he'd not met yet? None of them ever called him Donghyuck anymore, but he guessed it was possible... but it still didn't explain where he was. Or why she thought he was somehow late for school, a place he hadn't been in a very long time.
"I fell out of bed," he answered honestly, when it became clear that the woman wasn't going away. "And I can't find my glasses."
Another frustrated sigh broke the silence, one that stirred up an involuntary twinge of guilt in his gut, but then a pair of glasses were being slid into his hand and warm fingers were ruffling his dark hair softly. A soft, fluffy strand of black hair flopped down into his eyes and he pushed it away instinctively, before realising that it was entirely the wrong texture to be his.
"What is going on?" he muttered, shoving the glasses up his nose and blinking quickly as the world suddenly became a whole lot clearer. "Where am I?"
"Darling, are you okay?" The voice sounded concerned now, and Haechan looked up to meet the keen gaze of a kind-looking woman, who looked to be about the same age as his mother. She had strength and warmth in her eyes, and he got the impression that he was meant to feel something fierce for her but, instead, there was only confusion and the start of a stress headache.
"Who are you?" As he spoke the words, he knew they were a mistake, even as the woman's face fell and disappointment replaced the affection and worry.
"You promised me you wouldn't drink any alcohol last night," she said quickly, pulling away and straightening stiffly. Crossing her arms over her chest, she frowned down at the boy still folded on the floor. Haechan hadn't realised how comforting her hand in his hair had been until it was suddenly gone, and he shivered as he pulled his arms around his torso. "You drove home! What were you thinking? Your dad will be so disappointed when he finds out."
"My dad?" Haechan was aware that he was asking a lot of questions, and getting almost no answers, so he tried to focus his thoughts and concentrate. Whatever was going on here, he could figure it out. "You're...my mom?" It came out as another question, but he knew it to be true as he said it, even if he was pretty sure he'd never seen this woman before in his life.
"Oh, Donghyuck. What am I going to do with you? It's the first day of 11th grade and you're hungover. I always knew your brother was determined to make your father and me age before our time, but you've always been such a good boy." Her eyes traced his face quickly, emotions flickering by too fast for him to decipher them, and then she was pulling him to his feet. "Well, hungover or not, you're going to school. You have ten minutes to get downstairs, or I'm leaving without you."
With that, she left. For a heartbeat, Haechan considered curling back up under the covers and waiting until he woke up in his own bed next to Johnny--who would, inevitably, be snoring or muttering in his sleep about new video ideas--but instead he took a quick look around the room and then headed towards the door.
It looked a lot like how he remembered his childhood room looking before he'd moved into the trainee dorms at SM, but the colours and positions were all just a little bit off. The lamp on the bedside table--which was apparently on the other side of the tiny single bed--was blue, where he could have sworn the one in his bedroom at his family home was green. The window was set into the wrong wall, and the paint on the walls was a shade darker than he thought it should have been.
All in all, it was as if someone had tried to reconstruct his childhood bedroom from a fuzzy memory, or a single photograph, but everything had come out just a little bit wrong. That continued into the hallway, where he could have sworn the carpet was meant to be peach instead of cream, and into the bathroom. Although it wasn't until he was stood in front of the sink, in a situation eerily similar to the previous night, that he realised that it wasn't just the house and the parent that had been put together wrong.
His hair was black, darker than he'd seen on himself in years. It reminded him of the last time he'd looked into a mirror, as a trainee, before the stylist-noona had dyed it for the first time. And it was fresh and clean too, soft to the touch and flopping into his eyes. He needed a hair cut, he thought to himself, even if this version of himself wasn't real.
He wasn't real, he'd decided, on the short trip from the hallway to the sink. The only logical explanation was that he was dreaming, although he'd never had a dream quite this lucid and vivid before, and he'd wake up when his alarm went off in the dorm. At most he had two or three hours, he reasoned, since they had an afternoon dance practice every day in the run-up to the new album release. He'd wake up then, and this would fade into nothing.
"Might as well enjoy it," he muttered, as he found a toothbrush he hoped was dream-his and started to clean up. He wasn't keen to face the uncomfortable truths that would need to be dealt with when he woke up so, for now at least, he'd seen what else his mind could conjure up. Maybe, since he was lucid dreaming, he'd be able to fly, or breathe underwater--or finally pluck up the courage to kiss dream-Mark, without irreparably ruining their friendship in real life. Wouldn't that be something? After all, anything was possible in a dream.
"Two-minute warning!" Realising he'd been staring into space, Haechan quickly turned off the tap and dried his hands. Hurrying back to dream-his room, he stumbled as he entered and stubbed his toe on the bed frame, which protruded out into the middle of the room. He winced, hopping from one foot to the other, but quickly found some clothes he assumed were his on the floor by the window and pulled them on. They looked clean and were neatly folded, despite having been discarded on the floor, and the uniform trousers and collared shirt were in neutral shades of white and grey.
Haechan considered finding something truly outrageous to wear, considering this was a dream and there were basically no rules, but the sting of his toe and the steadily increasing headache gave him pause. For a dream, it sure hurt more than he'd have expected. He considered for a second that there might be something else going on, something far more worrying, but he shoved those thoughts aside. Boring clothes for a boring dream, that was all.
A grey hoodie that felt three sizes too big. A grey blazer with an embroidered pocket that looked to be part of the uniform. The first matching pair of black shoes he saw in the closet, and he was done. He ran out into the hall and stomped down the stairs, scooping up a backpack that was swinging from the bannister at the bottom. If nothing else, dream-him was efficient, he mused. He must be more ready for school than the real Donghyuck had ever been. In real life, Mark and Jaemin had dragged him out of bed every day, even on the days he had training and was technically not required to attend. He'd complained the whole time, but they'd made him go with them anyway. He smiled at the memory.
"Mom?" The word sounded tentative, even to him, but the response was instantaneous.
"In the kitchen."
After a false start that led him into the living room--he blamed on the whole lower floor of the house for being a mirror image of what he remembered-- he found the woman in a small, semi-familiar kitchen unit, searching through a small fridge beneath the wide countertop. He knew that there ought to be a deep wobbly groove in the mica surface somewhere near the fridge, from when he was six and he tried to cut vegetables without his real-mom's help for the first time, but he couldn't spot it. That made sense, considering all the other details that his brain seemed to have messed up his dream, but it made him a little sad with its absence anyway.
"Ready to go?" Dream-mom closed the fridge, tucked something into a bag on the counter and handed it to Haechan without looking back. He stared down at it for a moment, before he recognised the brown paper bags his mother had used to pack his lunches in before he left home for the dorms. Taking it from her, he tucked it into the bag dangling from his elbow. It was typical that he'd remembered that detail perfectly but had neglected to include his real mom in the dream, he thought with a small grin. His stomach would be very proud. As would Johnny, when he...
"I'm ready," he replied, ignoring the hint of a tear that threatened to prick at the inner corner of his eye. He'd worry about Johnny later, when he woke up. For now, it seemed, he was going back to high school. "The first day of," he tried to remember what she'd said upstairs, "11th grade?" That made him 18, he'd guess, or thereabouts. He'd lost a couple of years--and a few centimetres if dream-him was anything like real him--but he could cope with that. Eventually, his alarm would go off and he'd be dancing for ten straight hours on almost no-sleep. Urgh!
High school for a few hours would be a breeze in comparison.
--
Fifteen minutes later, after driving through a maze of streets that Haechan thought he should recognise but didn't, they pulled up in the parking lot of a very nondescript-looking high school. It was brown brick, with a few pitiful trees scattered across the dying lawn outside, and it looked like every school he'd ever seen in the movies. Nothing like the schools he'd attended in Jeju or Seoul, but the building wasn't what caught his eye.
A large rectangular sign was fixed to the front of the building, above the smaller sign that declared itself the main reception, in the same shades of grey and white as the uniform he currently wore. The lettering was black and elaborate, the font simultaneously familiar yet not, but the aesthetic wasn't what held his attention either.
'Welcome to Neo City High School'
"You have got to be kidding me."
The fantasy high school his brain had created was not kidding, apparently, and neither was the ludicrously named Neo City in which the school and his home resided. His dream-mom reminded him, with a bemused look on her face when he asked, that it wasn't really a city at all. It was a town, but the name had been popular with the locals and it had stuck. No one knew why.
"I've told you this before, Donghyuck-ah," dream-mom had told him, before shooing him out of the car. She'd left the keys with him, since it was apparently his car, and had headed off towards the bus stop on the opposite side of the street. She'd get a ride home from a work colleague, she'd told him with a pat on the cheek, but she hadn't wanted to leave him to drive hungover. Oddly, he missed her once she was gone, but then the parking lot started to fill with cars and starched uniforms and he was swept into the building with the mass of students arriving for the first day of school.
--
It took a lot longer to find his homeroom classroom that it probably should have.
On the one hand, he'd never set foot in the building before this morning, he was in the middle of the most immersive dream of his life and he wasn't really a student here.
On the other hand, he had the same homeroom teacher as last year and, as the overly helpful girl on the reception support desk informed him, her best friend had sat next to him in said room every single day last year. After rebuffing the girl's enthusiastic offers to walk him to the door and to help make him 'comfortable'--his brows had almost disappeared into his hairline at the thinly-veiled innuendo lacing that last word--he took the new copy of his timetable from her and made his way to the second floor. After that, the room wasn't hard to find and he slipped inside, trying not to disturb the teacher who was in full flow at the front.
"Mr Lee," he froze in the doorway, "nice of you to finally join us. It should not surprise me that you are late on the first day of the school year, and yet somehow you continue to amaze and astound."
"Sorry." Oddly, the tall, thin man at the front of the classroom actually seemed to be taken aback by the quiet apology, but he recovered quickly and nodded curtly.
"Well, you know where your seat is." The teacher gestured to an empty desk in the corner at the back next to Haechan. He moved towards it, meeting the gaze of several students as almost every eye in the room watched his every move. He felt like he was on display, like an animal in a cage. Only one person wasn't looking, a shorter boy near the middle of the crowd, whose gaze remained fixed on the board at the front as though the disturbance behind him wasn't worth a second of his time.
Abandoning the desk the teacher had pointed to, Haechan made a beeline for the only other empty chair in the room, which was to the immediate left of the slim figure pointedly not looking his way. Dumping his bag and hoodie at his feet, Haechan sat down with a loud thud and turned to catch the boy's eye. Smiling as their eyes met, ignoring the many eyes on him from the rest of the class, he felt a comforting flutter in his belly as he laid eyes on the first familiar face he'd seen in his dream so far.
"Renjun-ah."
The boy in question turned his head slowly, shifting just barely enough to meet Haechan's eye. The younger boy thought he saw a flicker of something like pain cross Renjun's face before he spoke, and Haechan's heart sank.
"I'm sorry. Who are you?"