Chapter Text
❄❄❄
This happens every day, and Yoongi has no idea how to stop it.
For months, he's been haunted by what he considers the worst moment of his life. It may sound dramatic, ‘cause, in fact, saying it's the worst thing is a bit too much even for him; anyone can come up with a ridiculously horrible story and outdo his.
But if they listened to his side first, maybe they would understand what he is going through.
Stupid or not, it all started on a random day late at night.
He was celebrating his promotion at work, at that company he wanted to leave so badly, finally becoming a partner, but he wasn't going to turn down such an important promotion. He had been there for ten years, pretending he had found something better at that point was foolish—and he knew it, so he accepted and celebrated with his colleagues until almost one in the morning.
Slightly drunk, not enough to have memory loss, hallucinations, or slurred speech, Yoongi was polite, accepting affection and ignoring the jealous looks.
He was used to dealing with all of this at once, although he maintained a fake smile. At that moment, he was legitimately happy and nothing could bother him.
Nothing.
When he asked permission to use the restroom, he walked all the way from the room to the door on the other side of the office. The bathroom was too large for single use. It had a stall, two sinks, and an unnecessarily huge mirror.
Yoongi felt both roomy and claustrophobic.
He splashed water on his face to wake himself up, not knowing when the small gathering would end.
It was the end of the year, vacation time, mid-December. All those people could think about was getting drunk and going home, knowing they wouldn't have to work again until January.
He was already a bit too old for those things.
He splashed water on his tired face for a few seconds. With his eyes closed, he felt around the wall behind the paper towels. The more he ran his hand over the cold tile, the more confused he became.
The paper compartment was located right above the sinks, ensuring that no water would be spilled on the floor.
So why the hell couldn't he find the compartments?
Neither right nor left, the wall was empty. Only the mirror was on it, nothing else.
Maybe he drank too much and just didn't notice.
He roughly dried his eyes with the backs of his wrists. It was more likely that they had switched places, and he didn't notice because of the autopilot of walking in so many times before and already knew where everything was.
Not to mention he was also high, sleepy, and tired. In such a familiar place, it was easy to overlook minor changes.
At the very least, that's what it should be.
Yoongi's eyes opened, and he was no longer sure what was happening.
The bathroom was empty. It wasn't the same place he remembered.
Suddenly, a faint blue light flickered, signaling abandonment. The open bathroom stall showed that there was no longer a toilet there. Dirty tiles are left to rot. The sinks were filthy, brownish, covered in dust and bits of paint that were slowly peeling off the ceiling.
Obviously, there was no paper compartment anywhere.
What the hell was going on?
He remembers hissing, “Holy fuck” or something similar.
Yoongi was skeptical of everything and anything. He never believed in ghosts, witches, or urban legends designed to scare children or traumatize adults. Even during the strangest events of his life, he would come up with the most plausible explanation—whether it made sense or not—just so he wouldn't have to think too much and end up scaring himself.
But that was a whole other level of craziness.
It seemed so unbelievable and so tangible at the same time that he didn't know how to feel, yet fear prevailed.
He didn't know where he was anymore, it was madness! He drank just enough to stay grounded. Besides, no drink could have made him delirious like that. He hoped his friends hadn't spiked his drinks with something extra.
So he walked toward the door he had entered through, taking long, hurried steps.
His walk was tireless, but the door was getting further and further away.
A sharp, ringing sound hit his ears, similar to the pressure you feel when changing altitudes or about to faint.
In the blink of an eye, the air seemed thin. He exhausted himself so quickly that anyone who saw him would think he had run at least ten miles without stopping. Drops of sweat trickled down his temples and across his terrified face.
The faint noise grew louder and louder, preventing him from walking, thinking, or doing anything else. In pain, he covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.
It was definitely a bad joke. Someone had slipped drugs into his drink, and now he was having a bad trip because the situation was unnerving and out of the ordinary.
He knelt on the floor and felt a tightness in his chest. The feeling that someone else was in the bathroom intensified. He couldn't see them, but he knew someone was keeping him company—and that it wasn't a good thing.
He tried to scream, but no sound came out. Likewise, he tried to get up, but his weak body refused to obey him.
Yoongi looked ahead and saw that the door was now just a few inches away. All he had to do was open the door and walk through it. However, the sensation grew stronger. He slowly lost his breath, and whispers kept him company.
Drawing on the last of his willpower, Yoongi raised his arm toward the doorknob.The heavy body was hesitant to carry out a basic routine task.
Hard, tricky, scary, but he managed to open it.
Everything would be over now. He would leave the stall, pick up his belongings, and leave without saying goodbye. That's what he wanted.
But as soon as the door started to open, he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard a whisper in his ear.
“Not yet.”
After that, his mind went blank.
He only remembered waking up in his bed, covered up, showered, and changed, as if he had returned on his own. But he doesn't know how. He doesn't recall what happened between him possibly fainting in the bathroom and going home. Did he go alone? Or did someone take him? He didn't know.
Yoongi asked his coworkers, who immediately denied it, saying that he had only warned them he would leave because he was tired. It was a jumbled mess of puzzle pieces scattered throughout his brain, with no final picture. That made no sense.
Everything was too real to be just a figment of his imagination, so he went straight to a neurologist for a full check-up to rule out any supernatural assumptions he might have had.
He underwent test after test, and the results were worse than expected: his brain was perfectly fine.
On the one hand, it was great news, but on the other hand, it could only mean that he was going nuts.
There were stories from his friends that work stress caused them to develop disorders. Sometimes, they had dreams so vivid that they couldn't tell the difference between reality and imagination. Yoongi wasn't at his most stressed time. In fact, he was doing very well. So, something must’ve been wrong.
Healthy brain, no recent stress, or anguish that could have upset him to the point of having such a strange moment.
He decided to ignore it, accepting that it was just one of those days when he didn't sleep well. A nightmare that never happened again.
He spent the two weeks after the tests peacefully, enjoying his vacation and arranging things for his future as the head of a company that he didn't know how had accepted him into that position.
Everything was going well. He extended his vacation until mid-February. January couldn't have started better.
One day, he woke up in the middle of the night and realized his room was completely abandoned.
The rain outside hit the broken glass and splashed onto the floor, an icy wind blew through his chest, and he had trouble accepting that this was happening again.
He didn't dare get out of bed, holding onto the sheets as if his life depended on it. Unlike the first time, everything was quiet. The only sound he could hear was the storm.
Yoongi tried to go back to sleep, closing his eyes tightly and breathing slowly. Repeatedly counted from zero to ten, but nothing could snap him out of his trance-like state.
Out of nowhere, he felt that eerie presence again.
It slowly approached the end of the bed, filling the entire room with its energy.
Eager to return to the world of dreams and end the lingering feeling of anguish, he kept his eyes closed. He could feel the presence wandering from one side of the room to the other as if mapping out an unknown place. It was terrifying; just madness.
Yoongi felt like crying, but he wasn't sure why. Even lying on a soft mattress, his body felt weak.
He needed answers, wanting to understand what was happening to him. He needed to get out of that nightmare.
He needed to wake up.
But before he could try, he felt someone grab his foot and slowly run their hand up his trembling leg and body.
He couldn't be crazy.
Yoongi bit his lip, fighting the urge to scream for help even though he knew no one would hear him. It wouldn't hurt to try, but his body refused to obey him.
The rain outside seemed to intensify with no intention of stopping, flooding Yoongi's ears in an almost painful way. His mind was a mix of cries for help lost in a void and constant despair over his inability to distinguish between dreams and reality.
He no longer knew what was real and what was fake, and that bothered him.
That… thing kept climbing up his arm and reaching his neck, squeezing it tightly. His body shivered with fright and dread.
Yoongi lost the little breath he had left and let simple tears bathe his reddened face.
He felt a breeze at the base of his ear so quickly that he almost didn't even notice it. Couldn't turn his neck to see what was tormenting him. Honestly, though, he wasn't sure if he wanted to see it.
With his heart pounding, he tried, but failed.
Squeezed his eyes shut, wishing it would all end.
For it to go away.
For things to go back to normal.
“Open your eyes.”
In a rush, Yoongi obeyed and saw the tidy room being lit up by the thunder of the rain.
Tranquility took over. He looked around the room, fearing that he would find something out of the ordinary. He wiped his sweaty forehead and controlled his breathing.
It must have been a case of night terror or sleep paralysis, but it felt more real than it should have been. That hand's lingering touch and the enigmatic voice in his ear were still vivid in Yoongi's mind.
The same thing happened in the company bathroom. He was tired, and his brain was exhausted.
Taking a deep breath, he cautiously got up and went to the bathroom.
He washed his face with cold water and dried it with a towel, allowing himself to see his reflection in the mirror. He was a mess. His hair was wild, and his shirt was damp with sweat from the feverish state he had been in minutes earlier. The look of despair was still present in the muscles of his forehead.
Seeing himself in that state was worse than whatever was terrifying him.
He put off assigning blame until the next day, returning to bed and trying to forget everything that had just happened. After all, it was all just a lapse of mistaken consciousness.
Yoongi wanted to believe that.
But it was challenging when he returned to bed and saw a small, red-sealed envelope on the empty pillow beside him.
The paper bore flawless handwriting that simply stated he was the recipient. His heart, which had been steady, began to beat fast again.
Without thinking twice, he opened it and pulled out a medium-sized piece of paper. It had the same handwriting as before, but there was no long letter.
Even so, what was written there was enough to send a chill down his spine.
“Hope you have sweet dreams tonight. Next time, keep your eyes open.”
❄❄❄
“I don’t know what to do anymore.”
With a casual gesture, he played with the armrest of the cotton chair in the doctor's office.
Exactly six months had passed since everything had started, and Yoongi was no longer sure what peace looked like in his life. After the letter incident, his periods of paranoia and paralysis increased, hindering his social performance at work and with friends.
The letters didn't stop either. They were rare. So far, he had only received three, but each new one seemed to be more unsettling than the last.
He was so afraid that it might be a stalker counting down the minutes to kill him or a parasite living in a secret passageway in his house who had decided to scare him that he even called the police.
As expected, nothing was found.
There was no intruder and no mini cameras monitoring his every move.
It wasn't enough for him. However, he listened to his friend's advice and did what anyone would do. He accepted his condition and learned to overcome the obstacles.
That was until one day when he nearly suffocated to death from the nasty energy that had taken over his room. He begged for mercy, even though he wasn't religious. He was sure he saw death there.
A huge shadow with visible eyes stared into the depths of his soul. He choked on thin air as the shadow entered his mind and laughed gloriously.
It was terrifying.
So he actually followed his friend's advice and now receives regular psychological treatment.
He even considered calling a priest to perform an exorcism on his home or himself, perhaps a healer, a shaman, things like that.
Still, as everything seemed to be getting worse, and his near-death experience was frightening enough to make him stay at Taehyung's house for two weeks, he was afraid that he would end up killing himself during one of these episodes if he let it go.
That's why he was at Dr. Kim's office, as usual.
“The meds are helping a bit, and Dr. Shin is really kind to me. But I don't know, it still feels like something's lacking.” He picked at his cuticles to distract himself from his internal struggles. “It seems that nothing we do actually solves the problem.”
“Is there something else that happened that you haven't told me about?” he asked.
Yoongi felt a lump in his throat.
He wasn't the most outspoken person when it came to personal matters, even with those closest to him. Some issues are better kept to oneself than spoken aloud and realize how serious or foolish they were.
It was easier for him to talk than to get it off his chest.
He looked out the window of the doctor's office, admiring the blue sky that seemed to smile down on him in derision, shouting that he was trapped between four walls and wouldn’t leave until he had revealed all of his vulnerabilities to a man in a white coat with thick glasses.
But that's why he was there: to try to resolve his difficult condition, which had begun to disrupt every aspect of his life.
Hiding wouldn't help him at all.
“I know this might sound strange, but…” He took a deep breath. “I received another letter.”
“Another one?” The doctor seemed interested in the strange situations that kept happening to Yoongi. His gaze was almost feline, yet serene and inviting. It penetrated the man's soul with ease and was quite intimidating, to say the least. “Is that, like, the fourth letter?”
Yoongi agreed, swallowing hard. He desperately needed water.
“This time was different from the others. You know, they all said something vague about the last time I experienced sleep paralysis, but this time… This one really freaked me out.”
“What was written in it?”
“This might sound crazy, I know I say this all the time, but I still can't believe it's happening. I have no idea who or what is responsible for the letters.” He laughed in disbelief, avoiding eye contact with the doctor. “You can call me paranoid, but the handwriting doesn't match anyone I know, nor any company employee. I checked them all, one by one.”
“That seemed a bit odd, didn't it?”
“Nothing more than living alone and finding creepy letters on your bed in the middle of the night.”
“Fair enough.” The doctor laughed. “For now, you don't have to tell me what was written in the letter. If you're not ready, we can leave it for later.”
“No, it’s fine. I feel like if I don't say it now, I'll never say it.” Yoongi shrugged. “There were coordinates handwritten ending with a ‘See you soon.’ I couldn't think straight when I read that. I think I fainted from being so scared. Later, once I felt grounded, I looked up the coordinates and found a hotel on the other side of the world. Wouldn't it be crazy to say that I really wanted to go just to see if I wrote this with a handwriting I didn't even know I had? Who knows.”
The room fell silent for a few moments.
The therapist took in what he heard and wrote it down. Yoongi felt lighthearted about sharing the details, but at the same time, he felt ashamed over the little joke at the end. Moreover, the doctor knew him well enough to understand his terrible timing when it came to comic relief and his inability to deliver it without appearing serious.
He was just exhausted.
After six months of therapy, there was still no definitive diagnosis. There were only theories and probabilities that could never be proven conclusively because something unexpected would happen, causing them to change course.
Maybe he was paying for a sin from a past life.
But he didn't believe in such things, so why would he be the chosen one? If they exist, he doesn't really want to go against forces greater than himself; ignoring them is his best defense mechanism.
“Do you really plan to go to that place?”
He was taken aback by the sudden question.
Yoongi looked at the doctor for the first time since entering the room.
“No, I don't know. Possibly?” he replied uncertainly. He hadn't given that possibility much thought; it was just a silly joke. The question caught him off guard.
“If you want to go, I'll need Dr. Shin to temporarily prescribe you stronger medication to ensure you don't harm yourself.”
“I'm not suicidal, I'm just not quite right in the head.” He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He understood the doctor's concern and care, but he didn't need that much supervision. His fear of becoming dependent on medication just speaking louder.
“You came to me after having a near-death experience. Since then, you've had two more. I just don't want to tempt fate,” Dr. Kim replied calmly.
Yoongi sighed.
“I don't plan on going, but I'll let you know if I change my mind.” He smiled slightly. “But please, tell Dr. Shin that it's best not to prescribe medication with insomnia as a side effect, as I'm already tired enough.”
“I'll make a note of that, even though she's already aware.”
They spent the last ten minutes of the consultation chatting. Yoongi disliked ending sessions by discussing his problems. He'd rather leave the room on a relaxed and positive tone.
He hoped that he wouldn't change his mind about traveling to the other side of the world to follow the coordinates in the afterlife letter.