Chapter Text
Blood.
His first thought when he wakes up is focused on the overwhelming smell of blood.
It’s as if he is swimming in it. There’s a metallic smell in the air that settles directly on his tongue, half choking him. And if that isn’t enough the dull ache in his bones just makes him want to sink deeper into the grass and let it swallow him up.
Grass?
With all the force he has, Minho pushes up from his stomach with his shoulder and rests on one elbow. He opens his eyes and the world spins. With a wince, he closes his eyes once again, hanging his head. What the hell happened?
He would have gladly stayed like that forever if he didn’t hear shuffling and a groan to his right. He turns to it, and the scene takes his breath from him. Lying there is Felix, and he looks like he’s been through Hell and back. Felix’s hair sticks up in every direction, except for the parts that are covered in dried blood. More is dotted across his face, covering his signature freckles. And it doesn’t end. It is on his lips and teeth as well. His body is mostly spared, only thanks to the clothes he wore the night before that were now torn nearly to shreds. Where there isn’t blood, there’s dirt.
Suddenly, Minho isn’t so exhausted. He musters up all the strength he has and crawls over to Felix. In seconds, he reaches him, and puts his hand on his shoulder to shake him.
“Felix?” Minho half chokes out. He notices his voice is hoarse. “C’mon Yongbokkie, it’s me. Wake up for me please.” He pleads.
After some time, Felix seems to come to. His eyes flutter open and settle on Minho, but immediately they fill with fear.
“Minho, oh my God…” Felix’s voice trails off. He reaches a shaking hand out to touch his cheek, and tries in vain to wipe something away. Minho can only imagine he looks something like Felix.
“Are you hurt, Felix? Where is the blood coming from?” Minho asks.
Felix shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m not in any pain. I’m sore , but there’s no pain.” Minho nods. “You?”
Minho echoes his sentiments. “Same. I’m not hurt, and…” He looks down at his arms and hands. Like everything else in the area, it’s splattered with blood. He notices it dried under his fingernails, and he starts to think he might be sick. “This isn’t mine.”
The pair struggle into a sitting position so they can make sense of where they are and what happened. The sight could not be more horrifying.
On any other day, he’s sure this would’ve been a beautiful spot. Today? Today it was haunting. They were in a small forest clearing, with a much larger break in the trees visible off in the distance. The trees soared high enough to shade the entire area in broad daylight. Birds chirped in the distance and flew overhead in their flocks. That would have all been lovely, if the rest of their bandmates weren’t strewn across the forest floor, passed out and in similar conditions to the two of them. They were evenly spread out in a circle of sorts just smaller than the size of the clearing, but mirroring its shape. But the most gruesome thing of all was what was in the center of it all:
The majority of a few deer carcasses.
Nope, Minho is actually sick now.
Without warning, he turns over his shoulder and away from Felix and loses the contents of his stomach. Felix rubs circles into his back while he recovers. Minho wipes his hand on the back of his mouth as he notices what he just threw up; blood, fur, and miscellaneous other body matters. In a panic he turns to Felix, who also seems to have noticed judging by the fear in his eyes.
“Dude…” He starts, but Minho cuts him off.
“Let’s just help the others.” He says. He doesn’t want to complete the train of thought he started.
Slowly, the duo are able to rise to their feet and take a few uneasy steps and make it to each of their friends one by one. Slowly, each of them wake and repeat the same process of realization as the other two. There’s a moment of grace where all they know is they are so tired, then their eyes open and the panic sets in, and then maybe if they are oh so fortunate, they will get to throw up their very own nightmare concoction.
After they assure each other that, yes, I’m really fine , they all slowly gather at the edge of the clearing. They want to be as far away from the deer as possible.
Minho scans the faces of the seven other men around him. A few others do the same; Jeongin in particular flits from person to person just trying to make eye contact with anyone at all. He’s looking for reassurance, Minho presumes. When their eyes finally meet, Minho spares him a nod and a tight smile. Anything beyond that wouldn’t have been convincing, he decided. He figured Jeongin could tell if Minho was trying to feed him false hope if he said anything. It certainly wouldn’t have been believable coming from a man who he assumed looked just as confused, just as helpless as he did, despite the strong image he so strongly tried to maintain for himself. Jeongin returns the smile with an insecure sense of urgency. Minho always tried to look out for the younger members, and evidently in some chain of events from the night before he had failed them. He feels his stomach tighten again at the thought. Something happened just hours before and evidently he hadn’t been enough to protect any of them. Minho feels sick at the thought that not only was he not enough, but that those memories were fuzzy or wholly removed. He is spared from thinking about this when he realizes Jeongin has broken eye contact and is once again bouncing from member to member, now hoping for someone to speak up.
Other members are quite the opposite. There’s Changbin for example, who was seemingly much more interested in the patch of dirt he was nudging with his foot than anyone else around him. To Minho, Changbin was an excellent leader at times, so long as he felt he knew what he was doing. When he was out of his depth, he tended to close in on himself a bit. It was never in an attempt to leave any one of them needing him. He was just afraid of misguiding someone when he wasn’t even sure what to do with himself. At the moment, the leader side of Changbin had been neatly hidden behind the frame of a man trying to fade away himself. Minho took in the loose threads that had once been Changbin’s clothes, his hair that was plastered to his forehead, and his-
Minho crumbled. Changbin’s face was smudged with dirt here and there like everyone else’s but there was a thin dry line that was a bit more clean than the space around it. Changbin, who Minho had rarely seen cry in their several years of friendship, had shed one single tear in his sleep.
A shaky voice spared Minho from thinking about that any longer.
“Guys?” Felix spoke faintly, with a croaky voice. But nothing came after that. He certainly tried to get words out but only managed a sigh and an inquisitive shrug that silently said what do we do?
Once again, Minho surveyed the group. He had no answer for Felix’s unspoken question, because he had the same one if he was feeling perfectly honest. Never before had he felt so lost . Thankfully, Chan did what he always does best.
“We need to get home first.” Chan said, cutting the silence, “We don’t need to stick around in the middle of the woods for no reason. Let’s just get back to the cabin and clean ourselves up and then we can figure all of this-” he vaguely gestures around with his right hand “-out.”
The cabin . Minho remembered. The group had been sent on a “vacation”, which was their management's nice way of saying they would be sent to a bougie cabin without staff for a week to make semi-scripted content. The cabin was nice enough, and there were enough rooms for each member to have their own room with spares to boot. And that’s not to mention the game room and pool. However, it was a bit grating to Minho that it was proposed to them as a vacation when they were being made to shove cameras in each other’s faces. It just felt less authentic that way. But that’s neither here nor there at the moment, because Minho is cold, scared, and desperate for anything that looks even vaguely familiar. He would give anything to be at that cabin right now.
But then he remembers, they weren’t at the cabin last night . After the group had finished filming, they decided to enjoy each other’s company without the pressure of filming it just to prove it happened. They wanted to go to a club together, and got ready and left to head into town just as it was getting dark. The cabin was surrounded by woods in the middle of nowhere, so he remembers piling into two company cars and heading into the nearest city. It took about a twenty minute drive to finally get there, as the cabin was quite secluded and out of the way. After that, it gets a bit fuzzy for Minho, but he’s certain they never made it back to the cabin.
So how did they get all the way out here without a car?
“Does anyone still have their phone on them? For directions?” Jisung asked warily from next to Minho. Everyone patted what was left of their pockets to check, but had no luck.
“Alright, let’s just survey the area and see if they’re maybe around here somewhere? Or look for anything else that would be useful.” Chan spoke once again. He was a born leader, Minho thought. He always took charge in times of crisis, and unless you really knew him, it seemed like he was unfazed by the situation at hand. However Minho does really know him, so he caught Chan’s self soothing lip purse at the end of his sentence. He was just as shaken as anyone else, if you knew what to look for.
Slowly, silently, the group split off to shuffle around the clearing. With a sigh, Minho turned on his heels to return to the far side of the clearing he and Felix had come from. Before he made it too far, he felt a tug on his sleeve. He looked over his shoulder to see Jisung looking up at him.
“I’m walking with you.” He said plainly. It wasn’t a demand or an instruction, just a statement. They were comfortable with each other and knew that things could go unsaid and still be heard. In this instance, Jisung was saying do not leave me alone . And of course, Minho heard.
“Of course.” He replied simply, and that was enough for the two of them. With content nods, they set off together.
They walked in silence for a moment, and slowly shuffled to a hollow fallen tree. The pair gave their investigation a half hearted attempt. Their minds were elsewhere; where they were, how they got there, how they would get home, if the other was okay…
Truthfully, what Minho wanted was to ask Jisung how he was doing, but he already knew the answer. Still, he needed to hear Jisung’s thoughts. However, he had no idea what to say. What do you say to someone at a time like this? It’s not every day you and your friends wake up half naked and puking blood in a forest. Realistically, he knew Chan was right and their first priority was getting home safely, but he needed to talk about this at least a little bit right now. He would go crazy otherwise.
“What do you remember about last night?” came out as a whisper. He slowly looked up to gauge Jisung’s reaction. He seemed to tense a bit, but otherwise seemed thankful to have some conversation.
“Not much to be honest.” Jisung started, and shook his head. He kicked the underside of a bush in a lazy attempt to find a phone. “We just headed to the club and then we woke up here. But there’s some fuzzy stuff in between.” The last part seemed forced out.
“Like what?”
“It’s odd. The memories seem like they’re not mine in a way? Like, obviously they are, but they seem like I’m just observing someone else.” Jisung paused to puff his cheeks out and sigh while he thought. Minho found comfort in the fact that this situation had not taken Jisung’s quokka tendencies. “I remember us here, or at least around here. In the woods. And we’re running, but not away from anything. Not from whatever did all of this. I don’t remember seeing any of you, just the feeling of you guys being somewhere around me. But no one seems scared.” He finished and scanned Minho’s face for a reaction.
Minho took this in. He trusted Jisung more than anyone, but that just didn’t make sense. Surely they were afraid of whatever did all of this?
“Guys, over here!” Hyunjin’s excited voice broke through Minho’s thoughts.
The pair looked at each other in surprise. They really didn’t expect to find anything, but if Hyunjin found something that could help them make sense of all this, or better yet get them home, they welcomed it.
“Well come on.” Jisung said with a grin, and the first Minho had seen all day. The duo broke into a light sprint to once again cross the clearing and meet up with the rest of their friends on the other side. Minho was puzzled at how naturally the effort came to him. He was sore from head to toe, but the jog didn’t take much effort at all. In a way it almost felt invigorating.
They reached the rest of their group, which had gathered in a circle. The focus was on Hyunjin who held an unassuming plastic bag in his hands. Once everyone was there, he untied the knot at the top and peered inside. Grinning, he pulled out some of the contents.
Two cell phones.
“It looks like they’re all here! Here Channie, this one is yours. Oh, and this one is Yongbokkie’s…” Hyunjin took his time returning everyone’s phones to them. Minho gladly accepted his own and looked it over. It was just as it had been yesterday. Nothing was even missing from the small wallet attached to the back of his phone. Whoever left this here for them certainly had good intentions.
“Does anyone have a charge?” Chan asked, “We can use someone’s GPS to get home.” Always the diligent leader, moving quickly , Minho thought proudly.
“Yeah, it's low but it works.” Felix exclaimed, and showed off his glowing screen.
“Excellent! Put in the address to the cabin and let’s get out of here.” Chan said.
“Wait wait, there’s something else in here.” Hyunjin fumbled with the now mostly empty bag for a second before he pulled out an envelope. It didn’t look like anything remarkable, but potentially held the answers they were all looking for. Minho was dying to open it.
“We can read that later. Can we get out of this area before whatever did that, ” Seungmin gestures toward the deer, “comes back?”
“Ah, good point Seungie.” Minho said, hiding his own disappointment. He had never been patient a day in his life, so waiting to read whatever was inside that envelope would be agonizing, but it just made sense. “Felix, do you have those directions yet?”
The blonde nodded, “Yeah, and we’re actually not far at all.” Felix said, “We’re, like, remarkably close to the cabin. Maybe a 10 minute walk.” Minho noticed that this perplexed everyone, even Felix, who was looking directly at the proof. They shouldn’t even be a ten minute drive from this place right now.
“Alright then, lead the way Yongbokkie.” A skeptical Changbin said.
The group of eight started heading towards a less densely populated break in the flora, following Felix’s lead. Finally, they were on their way out of this forest. Whatever had happened, they were all unharmed and on their way home. Most importantly, they had each other, and that was more than enough for Minho. He had fallen towards the back of their small group, and took the opportunity to look at each of his members. His eyes settled on Seungmin, whose eyes were trained to the forest floor. Minho quickened his pace to match Seungmin’s, and offered him a light nudge with his elbow. Seungmin looked up and gave him a sincere grin in response. After that, Minho noticed Seungmin standing a little taller and looking ahead.
Yeah, we’ll be alright
, he thought.