Someday when you leave me
These memories will follow you around

-wildest dreams,
Taylor Swift

The room was dark, two silhouettes looming in the gray. The stiff air was tightly shut in the cramped place, a mist of dread wafting around even in the palpable and thick atmosphere.

Not a single space was there to let out a breath, a drop of the needle could be heard in the agonizing silence.

Then I saw something shine in the dark, a dagger.

The dagger swished around, cutting through the thick air.

Cutting through the other silhouette, the other man.

Shownu.

A gunshot was fired, piercing the silence in a loud shrill that shoot through my body but I wasn't the one injured. It was the other man who fell on the floor.

Dark and red liquid splattered fast, juxtaposed with the pitch black of the room and pooling around my feet. The other colors around started to become visible, coming out of their shells.

Close to me, Shownu and Ryujoon laid, dead. It was the room in the clan club. And only I survived, watching it happen with horror in my eyes, agonizing pain in my chest.

Then I woke up from the recurrent nightmare.

Sweat trickled down my throat, my nightgown sickly stuck to my trembling body. Gripping on the soft material of my bed I tried to breathe. Only, if this nightmare wasn't entirely true. Only if it was all just a mirage, an illusion in my head.

It wasn't, I was living in a nightmare myself.

Quickly I scrambled for my phone over to the desk beside my bed, checking to see if there were any missed calls, anything. Nothing.

Nothing for two weeks.

Yet it felt like an eternity.

The boys had cut off any means of communication with me. Their numbers were out of reach, the clan club- was out of reach. As if it did not exist in the first place. As if the months I had spent there, finding friends, family, and myself was only a fever dream.

Choked up sobs left my mouth for the pent up sorrows I had buried deep in my heart. It was hard to restrain it all throughout the day so my mom wouldn't see how much I was breaking apart, and the cries I'd let out at night would be muffled and silent in pain. Only I knew how much I was going through. Yet I only cared for the boys.

I only wanted to know if they were okay. Because God knew what had happened to Shownu, or any of them.

Bringing my knees closer to my chest I stared at the screen of my phone that was lying by my side in the bed. Kihyun's contact name on it, nothing else.

***

As if it was a miracle, or someone had heard my yearning, Kihyun called me the next day around the same time when I had just woken up from a harsh nightmare to face even harsher reality.

For an entire few seconds, I could not believe my phone was buzzing in my hands with Kihyun's ID popping up on it, the lit-up screen illuminating the dark corner of my room.

When I finally managed to press it against my ear after a swipe of the button, I was shaking in anticipation and fear, my guts tangling and making knots inside my stomach. Please don't let this be a dream.

And if this is a dream, then please don't wake me up from this.

There was a long pause after I received the call. The other end silent like the very lone night that had engulfed the city. Then there was a short sound of breathing out. "Daisy."

A silent tear fell from my wide eyes. I clasped on the phone like my life depended on it. Because I'd already realized, that nothing could ever be taken for granted. Just the second we were so happy in the cafeteria, something had happened. And our whole world fell apart as if it was nothing but a house of cards.

Kihyun's voice too, all the time I had heard it before but only in his absence, I realized how precarious even the slightest adoration was, this could be my last time hearing his voice.

"Can you meet me outside? At the end of the street." Even though there was nothing out of tone in his soft voice, I just knew that wasn't the case.

"Yes." I got up from my bed immediately. In the dark, I looked around for a warm coat as I wiped off my tear stricken face. Before I left I only had one look in the mirror of my bedroom, a sliver of moonlight seeping through the curtain of the window, making my reflection visible.

The girl in the mirror did not look like me. Wearing a white nightgown and a long, black overcoat on top of it, barefoot. Dark circles around her eyes contrasting with her pallid face, long hair askew and rough around the ends.

Before I had worked so hard to make a living, months before I met the boys. And never had I looked so soulless.

There wasn't any time to waste on my appearance, Kihyun was waiting for me. finding myself a pair of shoes in the dark I left my house and ran for the end of the street with my hair flying by my sides, chilly air seeping through my coat. Only the moon above was accompanying me.

And the boy who sat in a car at the road ahead, street light reflecting on the black of the car's hood itself.

Huffing for breath I took in Kihyun's face. Fourteen days felt like fourteen months. After meeting Minhyuk that night it was Kihyun I was seeing, after so long.

His wide eyes were drinking me in as he was staring at me from behind the rolled down windows of the car. There was no one else but him in the driver's seat.

I raised up a hand and clutched on the material on my chest tightly, not knowing if it was because of the lack of air after running here or because it hurt, so damn much.

"Get inside." He didn't need to instruct because the next thing I did was that, I sat beside Kihyun and closed off the door. He rolled up the windows and turned the heater on.

A silence befell us.

There was so much to ask, talk about yet nothing came out as I was afraid I'd break apart, shatter into millions of pieces the second I'd try to speak. I wanted to stare at his face for longer but even that was a hard task. From the first glance, Kihyun looked very calm and collected but the sickly pallor in his face told me otherwise.

And the poignant stench of cigarettes inside the car told me he was smoking again to calm his nerves.

"Y-you must have gotten your driver's license," instead, all I could say was that.

"I did. A while ago," he answered cutting in the silence.

"So..., how's Shownu?" I finally managed to croak out, surprised that I could be calmer than I thought, "And the others."

He wasn't so quick to answer this time. The pause in his voice told me he was articulating how to say it, how to break it to me in a simple manner when things had already gotten so complicated.

"Shownu is going to jail, isn't he?" I meekly voiced out.

After what Minhyuk had told me the other night I thought about it a millionth time. I had nothing else to do as I was skipping university most of the days. The dark thoughts shrouded my brain every second I was awake and showed up in the forms of nightmare when I was asleep.

The boy next to me let out a deep, excruciating sigh. "Ryujoon hyung... has watched over Shownu ever since he was little. There was a brotherly bond between them we never pried into. Ryujoon was older than all of us and a close man of Shownu's father. I think it pained him to see Shownu bear the burden of his troublesome father. That's why he killed him, perhaps. I don't want to analyze him yet I keep asking myself why."

For the first time in a while, I looked at Kihyun to find him gripping on the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles were turning white. His jaw was clenched, a vein popping on his throat.

It was alarming but I did not know what to do.

"Few days before the incident I told you we could sense things between us. Why couldn't I sense Shownu then? If I knew he was going through it alone..."

There was so much regret in his voice, so much anguish in his face. The same of what I had seen on Minhyuk, and I knew the rest was feeling it too, me included.

If only I could do something.

"There is nothing to do but to leave for good now."

The words hung in the nicotine and grim filled air inside the car for a few seconds before it hit me.

"Where are you going?"

"There was a new branch of clan club opened in Japan if you remember. That was the only one that is clean since it's new. The authority did not shut it down."

I could see where this was going, he continued as he stared in my eyes, searching for something he could not find.

"I suggested Wonho that we start there, not right now but slowly until things can get better. Shownu's mother has gotten hysteric again and no one is there to look after her now other than Wonho. Japan could be a good change for her."

His voice was careful, weaved with so much thought and practice, as if he knew already it would throw me off. Of course, he knew.

Bad guys never stay.

"What about the rest?"

"Only Wonho and I are leaving, for now."

Because they always leave.

A lump was forming inside my windpipe, making it harder for me to breathe. Who knew what I once told Kihyun at a silly afternoon of coming autumn would come back to me, exactly like that.

I was met with the same hurtful fate like my mom. Being enticed by someone I shouldn't have, only to be left alone at the end.

Before I knew it I had gotten out of the car and stood outside in the cold night air. "Leave then." My voice was harsh, I was raging and trying to hold back the anger inside of me.

This was only the storm before the drizzle.

Kihyun stared at me with incredulous pair of eyes, soon the expression into something else, as if he was pleading for me to understand. "Daisy, I...," he trailed off for a second and we just stared at each other, him inside the car and me outside.

"I want you to be happy. Don't let the innocence in you get tainted. Stay just like you are, Daisy."

With that, the storm inside was vanquished by the cloud heavy with rain. Daisy meant innocence and purity, I remembered once I had told him the meaning of my name.

"Don't smoke too much. It will give you cancer," I said back, biting down the lump that was threatening to spill out.

I could not see what expression he was giving me as tears had started to well up again. Our parting, I did not want him to see me crying alone with no one to lean on by my side. So I took a step back and again, I told him to leave first.

Just so I could see him for a little while longer.

And I only cried by myself when I was on my way home after our meeting. It was over, like that.

The next day, Wonho left. Giving me a message of farewell and apologizing for not reaching out sooner. Obviously he was not okay, out of them all he was always the most sentimental.

Kihyun followed Wonho next. They were gone from my life.

---
A/n: the characters has grown on me way too much.

It's so hard to write the last few chapters god damn it. I'm so proud of myself for finally being able to reach towards the ending but I'm so sad at the same time.