"What are you doing?" Kai asked, placing a hand over Raine's wrist, stopping him from pushing the bathroom door open.

"Looking for a towel to wipe my hands," Raine answered.

"But Zen's still in there."

"Well, she wasn't responding, and the door was unlocked. I wanted to check if she's okay."

"Wait." Kai pulled Raine aside and knocked on the door. "Zen. You okay?"

"M-Mm, I'm okay." A weak response came from behind the door.

"Okay. Take your time." Kai turned to Raine and grabbed his arm. "We need to leave."

"I still need to wipe my hands."

"Do it downstairs."

"Why? Didn't you get the mop?" Raine asked.

"I dropped it on the floor right beside you. Your eyes won't see it in the dark. Now, let's go downstairs to pick up some food. We won't be able to sleep on empty stomachs."

"But we have to pay for food. And we don't have any money."

"Yes, we don't have any money. But we can beg. Let's go," Kai said, dragging an unwilling Raine forward and slamming the door shut behind him.

1 hour later...

It was exactly 10 p.m. when Zen read the time on her phone screen. A long candle burning atop the table illuminated parts of the room, and somehow it helped settle the uneasiness inside her chest. A minute later, she sensed Raine getting up from the floor and strutting towards Kai as he slept on the couch. Almost all people from her generation would agree ten o'clock was far too early for bedtime, but not Kai. He was knocked out cold on the couch; she had never seen anyone sleep so peacefully under a storm before.

"You'll catch a cold, idiot," Zen heard Raine say. Her eyes trailed his movements as he lay the blanket over a sleeping Kai. "Just a moment ago after dinner, he was saying how he won't be able to sleep from all the noise coming from the storm and now, look at him," Raine complained.

"Is he always like this?" Zen asked.

"Like what? Sleeping like a log in emergencies?"

Zen nodded.

"Yeah, that's Kai. His brain shuts down when he decides to sleep."

"He's not sensitive to noise or anything?"

"Nope, you could scream, and he'd stay asleep."

"What about an earthquake?"

Raine shook his head. "Not even that."

"What will make him wake up then?" Zen kept asking, partly because she was curious and partly to avoid an awkward silence. Her relationship with Raine was still far from stable. Maybe if she kept talking and tried to get on his good side, she could avoid another violent fistfight. Raine might view her as a fly, but she knew there was a hidden, softer side to him, somewhere deep and unreachable. It did occasionally reveal itself, like when he interacted with Kai, though it vanished just as quickly as it appeared.

"His alarm," Raine replied and then pondered for a bit. "Maybe if I beat him up with a stick, he might. Haven't tried that one yet."

Zen chuckled, and Raine felt a twinge in his chest as he witnessed her smile for the first time in his presence. That one expression caused him to reevaluate his initial impressions of her. He hadn't realized he had been observing Zen so closely that he even noticed the faint, almost imperceptible bruise on her lower lip, even through the dull luminescence that surrounded the room. That's why she was using that lip balm, he instantly thought. The bruise seemed more or less like a small parting gift he left her, and that wasn't something he was proud of. For a moment, he took in Zen's appearance and found that she was composed of mostly skin and bones. No wonder the injuries took time to heal. Unlike him, Zen was indeed very fragile.

"He won't be happy if he hears you say that," Zen joked, snapping Raine out of his thoughts.

"If he's awake," he replied.

Zen sighed. "Kai is so fortunate," she said, her gaze softening as she looked at his sleeping form. "Sleeping like that, he doesn't have to worry about insomnia. I wish I had that mechanism for sleep."

"No wonder you two seem to get along," Raine remarked with a snort. "Anyway, how well do you know him?"

"Kai?"

"Yes," Raine sounded slightly irritated.

"He's my classmate, but we're not close. I only started talking to him on the bus today, when we sat together."

"Is that so?" Raine responded, sounding almost relieved, though he couldn't understand why. "We should get some sleep too," he quickly changed the subject, gesturing toward the bed as his eyes met Zen's. "As soon as dawn breaks tomorrow, we're gone."

"Where are you going to sleep?" Zen still asked even though she already knew the answer.

"The floor," Raine replied without any hesitation.

"It's dirty," Zen said, giving a concerned look. It wasn't that she wanted him to sleep with her on the bed, especially after the unsettling bathroom incident that had fueled horrifying thoughts in her mind, thoughts she barely managed to suppress after assuring herself time and again that Kai and Raine were good, harmless people, but seeing how uncomfortably Raine was trying to sleep on the floor made her willing to share the bed for the night. After all, she was a petite woman, and the bed would still have some space left if she scooted near the corner. Plus, there were only two blankets, and Kai was already using one. No one deserved to sleep on the floor like this, and Raine was no exception.

"We mopped it earlier," Raine answered, flushing her thoughts away. He grabbed a spare pillow from the bed and placed it on the floor before settling down. "It's cold tonight. You should use the blanket."

"What about you?" Zen asked.

"I'm fine. My body has high tolerance for the cold."

Two hours in, Zen was startled awake by the sound of thunder. The candle atop the table had burnt to its last remains, and only a few flickers of its departing soul were left struggling in vain to shed some light. It was only a matter of time before it was fully extinguished.

Zen shifted her body to the side of the bed and that was when she saw it. In the dim lighting, she could hardly make out his appearance, but Raine was there, and he was shivering on the floor, right under her bed with his arms hooked tightly together as if to fend off the cold. Seeing that, she immediately, and out of instinct, pulled away the blanket she was using and gently placed it over his shivering form without getting up from the bed.

"Are you still awake?"

The voice startled Zen, causing her to retreat to the farthest corner of the bed in fright, leaving the blanket with Raine. There was silence. She said nothing, turned to the other side, and pretended to sleep.

"It's humiliating to admit, but I'm done with the floor," Raine confessed. "It's hard, cold and my skin is getting itchy."

Zen felt the mattress shift slightly as Raine climbed onto the other side of the bed. Thunder and lightning shot their rounds as he placed the same blanket over her small frame. She could envision him at the very edge of the bed, trying to maintain as much distance from her as possible. "We're sharing the blanket and the bed," he declared soon after. "This doesn't mean anything. Since we're both guys, what's wrong with sharing a bed?"

So wrong. So very wrong. Zen suppressed the urge to roll her eyes, feeling all traces of fear dissipate from her system. She couldn't muster the energy to explain herself anymore. If Raine insisted on thinking she was a man, so be it.

-~-

Have you ever wondered what it's like to wake up feeling like it's a special day? That was a common question many people thought of and wanted answers to. It wasn't as complex as physics; it was more like a gut feeling, or stumbling upon 11:11 by pure chance. It was that simple. And for Zen, auspicious days always seemed to occur almost never. But that day, she knew it was different; she witnessed a very rare phenomenon, something that could only have happened once in a blue moon. She had a dreamless sleep! And she was all the more certain something was definitely up when she was woken up very early the next morning without the help of her alarm.

Zen ignored the voices in her head as she gradually slipped into consciousness. This noise. The birds, do they always chirp this loud every morning? Eyes closed, half-asleep and still not fully concentrated, she tried to go back to sleep. The bed was too warm, too cosy, too inviting; every bed felt like heaven in the morning. But her sense of peace was shattered when she felt what seemed like someone's warm breath puffing against the bridge of her nose. She jolted awake even before she could think. Her eyes widened as she stared up at Raine's peacefully sleeping face, just centimetres above her own.

That was how Zen found herself waking up that morning: two bodies lying dangerously close to each other under the warmth of a shared blanket. And to make matters even worse than it already was, Raine opened his swollen, puffy eyes in semi-conscious mode. Another blink and his brain finally succeeded in connecting the dots. His pupils dilated as realisation dawned on him.

Both of them sucked in a sharp breath.

Zen's brain had once more switched to auto-pilot mode. A brief second was all it took. Raine had no time to react as Zen's monstrous kick to his abdomen sent him reeling down the bed, his impact on the floor causing a loud thud that surely awakened the other guests in the building. At that moment, the sound of an alarm pierced the air, and both of them turned their heads toward the source, and that was when they found Kai sitting up groggily from the couch. He rubbed his eyes and gave them a half-focused, half-confused look.

"You guys are up early," he croaked, his deep voice cracking mid-sentence.

"... Right. I'm going out to make some calls," Raine stuttered, his voice barely audible. And not once did he look up from the floor as he sprang to his feet and dashed out of the room, barefoot.