survival games!au

*

idk wut this is gonna be, but dowoon's face in this picture is worth it, man...

and WOAH, is hero actually on time for once?! yaaaaayayaya

***

Day 6. AKA the end of three more people from their lot of now 6, originally 17, the last day to chance a survival in the cruel game they had been forced into against their will. "It can't be us this time," Wonpil muttered beneath his breath, grabbed his partners' hands. "It won't be us. We've come this far -- we've got to keep going."

Dowoon nodded along. Sungjin just stared ahead, determination sharpening his calculating eyes. Both hands squeezed back. Wonpil's mouth twitched, slipped up a tad at the corners, just enough for his lips to arch into a secret smirk, then let go. They had to rely on each other to survive yet another day in this jungle of doom: best they each had two hands to use than only two hands between the three of them.

"Wonpil-hyung... Sungjin-hyung... I'll protect you." Dowoon's nervous grin was followed by the game masters' cue to begin that day's game. It was time to go.

Sungjin sent a signal with his swiveling heel and they began to run -- the oldest man up front, Dowoon in the back, Wonpil between them with one hand at the ready, the other reaching into his saddle bag. His fingers twitched over the bigger weapons they had stored there, felt around to calm his racing heart while his feet worked on their own, floated him along the more or less level path Sungjin was so carefully laying out for them with his steady feet and searching eyes. Thump, thump, thump, and then they were stopping unexpectedly, Wonpil crashing into their leader's back, Dowoon crashing into the brunette's. "What's up?" Wonpil stammered into his hissing hyung's ear.

"Cliff."

"Fuck."

"Now, now... Nunathat."

The man carrying their prized possessions dragged a jittering hand over his face. "But... But it's kind of fucking inconvenient, isn't it? It's scaring me... I don't know what's going on, exactly... But something's off. Something's fucking off..."

"It's only the start of the day, hyung," Dowoon reminded him, hand already reaching outwards to grab the bag so as to alleviate the pressure and the stress Wonpil was feeling at the moment. "What's a cliff gonna do to us?"

This did not stop Wonpil's anxious shaking, however. He didn't feel relieved -- not one bit -- and even Sungjin's uncharacteristic press of a warm kiss to his freezing cheek did nothing but bring a slight red hue to his ears. "I-- I just have a really bad feeling about it..." In fact, ant trails were appearing around the base of his shoulders, goosebumps raising his arm hair in their prickling gaggles, and he could feel himself slowly sinking deeper and deeper into some kind of void of despair which he hadn't fallen into in a long, long while.

"Jagiya--"

Sungjin's hushed words of reassurance were cut off by a bone-chilling screech closing in on the trio from behind. Wonpil's back stung with a stupefying shock, fear coursing through his body and jutting his hair out, spreading a deadly stillness through his mind; he couldn't move, he couldn't talk -- all he could do was perceive, to wait for their inevitable end. His eyelids dropped enough for his lashes to graze his cheeks, for them to let tears loose onto the mud-streaked skin. 

"I love you--" 

And it was all gone.

Wonpil's eyes flew open together with his mouth, gasping for air, searching for a sign of Sungjin and Dowoon. All he could see were the familiar blurry surroundings of his dorm room, the tousled covers on his roommate's anime-themed bed -- that's right, Younghyun had gone out drinking with his boyfriend's friends -- and his heartbeat slowly began to calm down. He was sweating a puddle onto his sheets, his forehead doused in an ocean of droplets. The brunette's fingers found his glasses on his bedside table, eyes caught the time on Younghyun's bedside clock -- 3:00 am -- and he heaved out a heavy sigh. It had all been a dream.

"I have to go see them," he told himself after some time had passed. Despite his usual coldly chic or overly aegyo reactions towards his close ones in front of others, Wonpil was the type of guy who worried too much and didn't trust himself to keep his beloved boyfriends safe. So that's how he found himself wandering down the hall barefoot, all ashiver within the winter chilled walls of the corridor leading to Dowoon and Sungjin's dorm room, which was just down the hall from where he lived with Younghyun. Two more meters to their door and his flashlight flickered, faltered. Died out. A sound of pure terror ripped from his throat -- he stifled it with his hand so as not to wake anyone up -- as he remembered his nightmare, the loneliness and fear he had felt when everything had gone dark.

"Hey! Is anyone out there?!"

"Dowoonie!!" Wonpil staggered forward, his thick-lensed glasses sliding a bit down his nose in protest. 

"Wonpil-hyung?!?"

A light appeared, a phone flashlight illuminated the concerned face of a familiar dongsaeng, and slipper-clad feet swiftly flashed over to him like doves flying to end a war. Sturdy arms tightened around the sobbing brunette and he warbled out into a well-built chest, "Dowoonie, I had the most terrible dream..."

"It's okay, Pil-ah, it's all okay now." The young man stroked his boyfriend's hair, twiddled his thumb through a tangled piece which snagged it. "Why don't you come tell me and Sungjin-hyung about it?"

"Can I-- Can I just stay? No talking?"

Dowoon nodded and led the brunette in. There lay Sungjin in his night mask, his mouth wide open in a snore. The other bed was all undone -- sheets scattered everywhere -- because the roommates/boyfriends usually slept apart; Sungjin was quite picky about bedtimes, and Dowoon didn't appreciate the hoarse sounds he heard ripping from his hyung's throat each night, so earphones it was 'til sunrise. "Hyung still snores, though. Just so you know."

"I wouldn't expect anything else." 

Not ten minutes later, Wonpil allowed himself a smile, because now, laying between his two favorite people apart from family, half-squished underneath a certain snoring man's heavy arm and half-bent over a pajama-clad leg sliding beneath his own (belonging to a younger man who had surprisingly quickly fallen back into a deep slumber), he finally felt at ease. "Sweet dreams," he told himself and his two lovers and with that finally allowed his eyelids to drop for the rest of the night.