Work Text:
Sometimes, the only way out is through.
+∞+
It’s not quite Halloween yet, still only creeping into the first few days of October, but Beomgyu insists this is the best time to come. The park may not have extended its opening hours past midnight, and the decorations may not be all out along the pathways yet, but the haunted maze has just opened for this year.
While not the biggest theme park Yeonjun has ever been to - but certainly the closest to their shared house - Eternity Park has a remarkable amount of money set aside for its annual Halloween celebrations, with the centerpiece attraction being its famed horror maze, “Eternal Frights”. It gets a total rehaul every year, new theming, new story, new layout, new props, new scares.
Last year’s maze had been zombie apocalypse, with rusted-out cars and fire effects around rubble and ruins. Before that, abandoned hospital, with bloodstained medical equipment and sketchy doctors. Before that, werewolf high school.
Kai had wanted to do it closer to Halloween, not at all swayed by Beomgyu’s ‘short lines’ argument. Kai says the lines will be short for a reason, that everyone else has more sense to wait and get that proper scare factor that only comes late in October. But Beomgyu insists they go now, today, on this evening when they’re all free after classes and work. He’s unapologetically desperate that they be some of the first to see the new design, and the rest of them find it hard to argue against that kind of passion. They can always go a second time at the end of the month, after all.
So that’s how Yeonjun finds himself in the dark, in the giant shipping container sort of building tucked down the side of the park, shuffling in a line with his best friends, the warmth of adrenaline thrumming through him while blaring noises and strobing lights brutally assault his senses.
He can hear Kai and Beomgyu shrieking from the front, screams that melt quickly into laughter, the two of them clearly finding huge amounts of joy in the disorienting haze of spooky stimulus and the braying actors that pop out at them from hidden doors. Soobin’s in the middle of the lineup, holding onto Yeonjun’s left hand tight enough it almost hurts - but Yeonjun is used to this type of treatment by now, having gone in so many of these mazes with him before. Soobin always insists on being in the middle because he claims it gives him the most protection (“Against what, hyung? The mannequins and rubber masks?”). Yeonjun can hear Soobin’s own quiet little yelps and squeals at the same scares that are making Kai and Beomgyu laugh, and he feels the urge to tease him for it but he knows how hypocritical that would be, when the maze has got his heart pounding just the same.
Then there’s Taehyun behind him, holding onto his right hand. At the back of the group, with no one behind him, Yeonjun is all he’s got to hold on to, so his other hand is wrapped around Yeonjun’s wrist too, body so close the tips of his shoes knock against Yeonjun’s heels every time their little line slows down, Taehyun’s chest bumping against his elbow with every jump scare. Taehyun is silent, but Yeonjun can feel him flinch every so often, grip tightening just for a second before he relaxes again, firm then light in a gentle sort of tide against his palm.
The story running through the maze this time is one of an old count and his grand, gothic castle hidden away in the forest, where any soul unlucky enough to cross the threshold rarely makes it out again. They had all huddled together in the loading room, Kai and Beomgyu practically vibrating with excitement as the attendant told them the story, explained the premise and ran through the familiar safety instructions with all the enthusiasm possible after repeating that same script a hundred times already. They had arranged themselves into their safety line, hands clasped tight together, then the light overhead turned green and they pushed through the thick black curtain into the maze.
The first section is the dark forest surrounding the house, wild woods recreated indoors. The path winds around thick tree trunks, a mess of rustling plastic leaves above their heads, with Blair Witch stick charms strung up in the canopies and a bloody axeman stalking around who pops out and surprises Kai so hard his high-pitched scream melts into a string of curse words Yeonjun wasn’t sure the younger even knew.
Then into a new room, through a doorway with edges painted like a wrought-iron gate, into a squat sort of courtyard leading to the old gothic manor. There are big bushes around the edges, fencing them in, and Edward Scissorhands style topiaries lining the path, shaped like gnarled monsters and pouncing beasts with way too many teeth. Soobin jumps quite fiercely at the marble statues who reveal themselves as actors up on plinths, suddenly twisting and shrieking at them as they pass by on their way to the main house.
The facade of the house is impressively imposing, a structure that wouldn’t look out of place on a theater stage, with its stone walls and pointed arches, dirty windows with flickering lights behind the lacy curtains. It’s a few short steps up into the house, through the heavy wooden door and into a foyer with cobwebs stuck to the walls, rubber bats flitting around at the top of a wide staircase. There are maids in torn dresses lounging on the stairs, their voices shrill as they call out, warning them about going further, telling them to turn around, get out, run.
The path turns here, leading to the side instead, down a corridor with banging doors and portraits with eyes that follow them, dizzying strobe lights so they can’t tell which of the doors is going to open for real, where the next scare actor is going to pop out from. Beomgyu’s hands come up like he’s ready to fight when a guy in vampire makeup springs out on their left, then he laughs so hard at himself that Soobin has to shove at him to keep him moving.
At the end of the corridor, it’s a right turn through another archway, into a new room - a library, maybe a study, somewhere with bookshelves that are filled with half antique books and half science experiments, little gross things preserved in jars and vials of bubbling liquids. There’s an ornate desk against the right wall with a tome open on it, lit by simulated lightning flashes to show pentagrams and ancient writing. The path sticks to the left wall, circling three actors in the middle of the room, performing some kind of mystery ritual surrounded by candles, with black cloaks and an eerie, droning chant that must be something Latin. The actors don’t acknowledge their presence in the slightest, but that somehow makes the whole thing even more unnerving.
They shuffle along through the room, crowding against the wall to put as much space between them and the creepy actors as possible, and they’re only a few steps from the exit when something glints to the side of Yeonjun’s vision. Then his heart leaps straight up into his throat as he gets caught by possibly the cheapest scare in the whole maze: a mirror.
It’s tall, with an ornate golden frame, mounted on the wall just before the exit, and all it does is show him his own reflection. Not distorted or morphed, nothing lurking in the background, just plain old him. But the shock of it, so suddenly, with all this atmosphere around, is enough to frighten a shout out of Yeonjun. He finds himself huddling tight against Soobin’s back before he has a chance to think, before the sound of Beomgyu cackling at him can reach his ears and he can feel foolish for having been scared by that, of all things. He’s busy berating himself for it as their group marches ever forward, out through the exit archway, toward a set of stairs that will take them down, down into the basement.
But it’s here, as they’re leaving the room - Yeonjun feels his hand tug backward, Taehyun slowing down, lingering just a step too far behind. Then Yeonjun crosses through the archway and his hand is empty.
He makes a motion of turning his head, not far enough to actually see behind him but enough to call out Taehyun’s name and expect a response.
Nothing.
Then they’re on the stairs, and the attendant at the start had said not to stop on the stairs, so Kai and Beomgyu keep going - and Yeonjun can’t turn around without risking breaking his neck, but he keeps his hand stretched out behind him, grabby motions beckoning Taehyun to hold on again.
He doesn’t.
At the bottom, the path turns immediately into the basement rooms, but Yeonjun drags behind long enough to get a look up the stairs they just came down.
Nothing. Taehyun isn’t there.
He rushes forward to tell Soobin, taps his shoulder and leans in close to his ear. “We lost Taehyun.”
Soobin doesn’t really turn around either, too busy being relentlessly pulled forward by Beomgyu. “What?”
“Taehyun’s gone, we left him behind.”
They’re in the dungeons now, a torture chamber basement, room after room of wailing victims in chains, fake blood and blunt buzzsaws, where the scare actors walk right up to them brandishing their weapons, boasting about their recent violent handiwork. Soobin is clearly distracted by the environment, flinching away with a yelp as an actor stalks toward him, but he still manages to squeeze Yeonjun’s hand somewhat reassuringly.
“He’ll catch up,” Soobin says, and Yeonjun’s got a pit of worry heavy in his stomach, but he tries to reason it away. It’s probably just the fear from the maze, heightened emotions that are twisting this into a bigger deal than it really is. Taehyun is still behind them somewhere, Soobin’s right. He’ll catch up.
Still, he can’t stop glancing behind him the rest of the way, looking back as much as he can without tripping, eyes straining in the dark to catch a glimpse of Taehyun trailing behind them, maybe jogging to catch up again...
He doesn’t see anything. Taehyun’s not there.
+∞+
When they get outside, finally stumbling out into the night air, Yeonjun can hear Kai and Beomgyu’s gleeful hollering at its full volume, no longer muffled by the ambient noise of the maze. It grates at that pit in his stomach, a twinge of annoyance, jealousy that he can’t join in with them right now, that he didn’t enjoy the attraction as much as they did.
But worry is still the strongest emotion there, slowing him to a stop just a few steps away from the exit. He turns around to stare at the black curtains they’d just pushed through, swallowing against the sick sort of churning in his gut as he waits for cherry-red hair to come out after them.
Soobin’s shoulder brushes his as he comes to stand beside him. He looks pale when Yeonjun glances over, and now that they’re outside, Yeonjun can feel how Soobin’s hand is shaking where they haven’t let go of each other yet. Soobin always gets like this, nerves from the maze that have yet to fizzle out, but there’s a familiar crease of concern between his eyebrows as he looks back at the exit too.
“Where is Taehyun?” Soobin says, frowning at the unmoving curtains.
“I don’t know,” Yeonjun replies. His tongue darts out, wets his dry lips. “He was behind me, then he let go. Or, I let go, I don’t know.”
“He’s still in there, then,” Soobin says.
The noises from Kai and Beomgyu settle down, probably as they notice they’ve been walking off alone. Their footsteps round back toward the two oldest, both of them still stood watching the curtains.
“Where’s-” Kai starts, but stops as the curtains move. Yeonjun hears his own breath hitch, anticipation surging up desperately, but something stabs cold inside him as a group of girls push through the curtains instead, laughing as it tangles their hair into their faces, jostling each other with their linked arms.
Yeonjun remembers them from the queue, the group waiting behind them. They’re the group that must have gone in after them. So that means-
“Where’s Taehyun?” Beomgyu asks, confused gaze flicking between the curtain, the girls, and his hyungs’ matching frowns.
It takes a few beats, but Kai is the first to pick up the meaning of their silence. His eyes widen, then he reacts fast, dashing to catch up with the girls. Beomgyu takes a moment longer, but with a soft “oh!” he’s figured it out too, and he hops forward to approach the attendant leaning on the low fencing at the other side of the exit, who has been eyeing them the whole time they’ve been lingering.
“Hi,” Beomgyu says, voice lilting and hesitant. “We- we’re missing our friend. We went in with him but he hasn’t... come out, yet? He’s about my height, uh, red hair, dark jacket? I don’t know if you’ve seen him?”
The attendant shakes his head, lips pursed. “Don’t think so. Past few have been school kids, tourists, ahjummas, girls, you guys, more girls-”
They all pause as the curtains move again-
“-and more kids. That’s it. I haven’t seen your friend. Sorry.”
Beomgyu’s got that little downturn to the corners of his mouth as he turns back around to his hyungs.
“So he’s still in there?” he asks no one in particular. Yeonjun can’t look away from the curtains, can’t even think of replying. Soobin’s hand is still hot in his.
“Is this the only exit?” Soobin asks the attendant.
“There’s the two here: the attraction exit and the backstage door.” He jerks a thumb at the solid door beside him, a few feet back from the curtained exit. “But that’s passcode-locked and no one’s come through that in the past hour. Hm, there’s a fire exit somewhere in the middle too, but that’s alarmed so we’d know if someone had left through that. Then there’s the attraction entrance, but that’s it.”
Beomgyu nods. “So he’s still in there.”
Kai has come jogging back by now, swerving around the next group to exit - a young couple in matching sweaters - and comes to a stop beside Soobin. His breath is slightly labored, but it’s probably nothing to do with the impromptu exercise.
“Those girls didn’t see him at all,” he reports, a disappointed grimace scrunching his nose. “They said they were too far behind to see any of us the whole way through. They didn’t see a single person other than the scare actors.”
Soobin lifts his free hand to push it through his hair. He shifts, just a slight move so he’s leaning more against Yeonjun, a reassuring weight at his side. Yeonjun feels his shoulders drop as he sighs.
“Maybe he turned around and came out the front again.”
Kai’s grimace becomes a little more pronounced. “But if the girls didn’t see-”
“Let’s go check,” Yeonjun interrupts, surprising even himself with the sudden volume of his voice. Soobin blinks at him, but then he’s agreeing without further hesitation, another tight squeeze to his hand.
The attendant - Jay, now that Yeonjun actually looks at him and his nametag - says they can go around again, if they want.
“Just cut straight to the front, I’ll tell them to let you in,” he says, fiddling with his earpiece and the radio on his hip. Soobin instructs the others to stay here in case Taehyun does make his way out, then he’s keeping pace with Yeonjun’s hurried steps as they head off, out onto the main pathway and back up again, back to the front.
Soobin starts for the queue entrance, but Yeonjun spots the ‘no entry’ gate that’s a straight line to the attraction door, and ignores Soobin’s scandalized sort of hiss as he leads them both through it instead. The attendant at the door looks over at them as the gate bangs shut, and he waves a hand to beckon them closer.
“You lost a guy, right?” he says when they’re within earshot. “He didn’t come back out this way, but yeah, just go straight in, have a look.”
Soobin shoots an anxious glance at the queue, the people they would be pushing in front of. Luckily, it’s late enough that the line is practically empty, save the group far away still weaving their way through the queue dividers, and the three boys waiting at the front, bickering passionately over which of them would be going in first.
“Just go straight in,” the attendant repeats with a shrug, and Yeonjun is so busy dragging the both of them inside that he can’t even think of joining Soobin in saying thank you.
The attendant in the loading area is similarly nonplussed to see them again. He doesn’t bother with the introductory spiel, just holds them there until the light turns green. He lifts the curtain aside for them.
“Don’t go through too fast,” he says, then as they duck past him, into the attraction, Yeonjun hears him speak again, voice soft enough to bring a lump to Yeonjun’s throat.
“Hope you find him.”
+∞+
It’s not scary, the second time. Places like this, they’re not inherently scary. There’s nothing dangerous in here, no real threats. Everything creepy-looking is all arts and crafts or painted plastic. But it’s the desire to be scared, the willingness to play along, get swept up by the atmosphere - that’s what gives it its power. It’s all pretend, so it only works if you pretend too.
But Yeonjun’s not in the mood to pretend, second time in. There’s unease burning in his chest as they walk through, sure, but the sticky sheen to it can’t be called fear - it’s purely desperation, a tightening need to find Taehyun, as soon as possible. Even Soobin, who is honestly still flinching at all the same scares, seems grimly determined as they walk through hand in hand, diligently scanning each of the rooms for any sign of their missing friend.
They stick to the path again, hesitant to disobey by stepping off it, even though Yeonjun knows they can’t search everywhere like this. He would feel better if he could peek around each of the trees, sweep every corner of the courtyard, climb that staircase in the hallway, check any of the ridiculous places Taehyun could be hiding.
But whenever he tries to imagine Taehyun crouched behind one of the statue plinths, tucking himself behind one of the slamming doors, hiding under a torture table, it just doesn’t make any sense. Why would he run off in the first place? Why would he hide?
Before he knows it, they’re back in the study, eyes sweeping the small room as they skirt around the edge of it, around the actors in the middle, past the bookcases, past the mirror. Then they step through the exit archway, and Yeonjun is shook by a shudder. His right hand tingles, an awful phantom prickle that has him clenching his fist shut against that reminder of his mistake, his failure. The spot where he lost Taehyun. Why had he let go?
Soobin doesn’t complain as Yeonjun grips him even tighter, empty hand coming to wrap around Soobin’s wrist too as they head down the stairs again.
+∞+
When they push through the curtains at the end, they have a perfect view of the hope that swells then abruptly drops off Kai and Beomgyu’s faces as they see the two of them coming out alone.
“Not there?” Jay says, still leaning back against the fence. Yeonjun feels a flare of irritation as he looks at him, how casual he is - how little he seems to care that one of Yeonjun’s best friends just disappeared into thin air. Like this is just another day on the job for him, another missing person that he’s going to forget about as soon as his shift ends.
“No,” Soobin replies, with none of the venom that Yeonjun would have had. “I mean, unless he was hiding somewhere really weird, or he was backstage, or wherever.”
“Okay, tell you what,” Jay says, picking up the wire dangling from his earpiece. He holds the mic up to his mouth. “Jake? Hey buddy, we’ve got a guy maybe lost in the maze - nineteen, tall, red hair, black jacket. Could you do a check for us?”
Yeonjun’s jaw clenches at his words. Even the tone of his voice is careless, flippant, going through a routine procedure. He makes it sound like this happens all the time, like he’s used to this. But this isn’t just a random missing person, this is their friend. This is Taehyun. It’s anything but routine.
There’s a pause while Jake replies, silent into Jay’s earpiece. “Mhm, yeah, everywhere,” Jay says, then, “Nice, thanks buddy.” And his attention turns back to them. “We’ll do a full search of the building, but if he’s not in there, it’s likely he snuck out somehow. He’s probably out somewhere in the park.”
“How could he get out past you, though? How could you not see?”
Jay shrugs. “I don’t know, man. I mean, I’m sure he didn’t, but you never know.”
Soobin whines softly, and Yeonjun realizes he’s been squeezing Soobin’s wrist so tight it’s started to hurt. He hastily lets go, lets his hand clench back into a fist instead, shoving it into his pocket.
“So what, we check the whole park?” Kai says, nose scrunched up again. Beomgyu is clinging to his side, frowning miserably.
“We tried calling him,” he says. “It just rang until it went to voicemail. He could be anywhere.”
“If Jake can’t find him, I’ll put out a full security alert. Get everyone keeping an eye out. But the park’s closing soon, so he’ll be flushed out then anyway.”
Jay’s plan sounds a little too much like just waiting, and that’s something Yeonjun absolutely cannot do right now. He’s thrumming with energy, high-wired, almost twitching with the need to be out there, looking, doing something. He can’t just stand by while other people search instead of him, people who don’t care about Taehyun the same way he does.
His voice is quiet, strained. “Soobin-”
“I’ll stay here,” Soobin says. “You guys go out and see if you can find him anywhere. Keep your phones on, meet back here in ten minutes.”
Yeonjun has never been more thankful for Soobin’s leadership skills. With clear instructions, the three of them rush out to the main path, then they barely have to coordinate as they each agree to split up and spread out, cover as much ground as they can.
Yeonjun breaks into a run, no care or courtesy for the other park guests - not that there are many still here, given the park hours are almost over. He could hear Kai calling out for Taehyun before they got too far apart, but his own voice is caught by that thick lump in his throat. He doesn’t trust himself to call out as well, doesn’t think he’d be able to.
So he searches silently, but as thoroughly as he can. He loops down side paths, ducks into buildings, scans the empty gift shops. He jumps to peer over fences, barges his way into the remaining queues, all the while looking for red hair, dark jacket, that familiar frame, that body that he knows so well, almost as well as his own.
Taehyun was wearing a scarf too, he remembers - the thick gray one they’d bought together at the street market last winter. Yeonjun had teased him at the time, saying the bulky scarf was massive, bigger than him, but Taehyun had replied that it was a good thing. It would make him easier to spot in a crowd.
Yeonjun can’t see a single glimpse of him anywhere.
+∞+
He’s the last to meet back with Soobin, all of them out of breath and looking impossibly more miserable than before. None of them saw anything.
There’s another guy standing with Jay now, hands up and placating as he tells them, “I didn’t see him, he’s not in there.”
Soobin, who has heard this before, pats Yeonjun on the arm as he moves past, a clap to his shoulder that’s a little too terse as he says to him, “I’ll go look too.”
Yeonjun feels his chest inexplicably constrict as he watches Soobin’s retreating form, but he pushes that tightness aside. He breathes in hard through his nose, shuffles half a step closer to Beomgyu instead, and tunes into whatever the attendants are trying to explain.
“We had the last guests come through while I was in there,” Jake is saying, gesturing with open hands, gaze flicking fast between the three of them. Jay is next to him, arms crossed, a sour sort of frown on his face. “Then when it closed, the lights came on, so I looked again. And I checked the backstage areas too, asked the actors, everything.”
“He’s not in there,” Jay says, then after a pause, “Sorry.”
“Are there cameras in there? Did they catch anything?” Kai asks, but Jay shakes his head.
“We checked. Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Yeonjun finds himself saying. He takes a step toward the attendants, eyebrows raised in disbelief, fists clenching at his sides. “The cameras saw nothing?”
Jake looks outwardly nervous now, his open hands turned defensive. “No, we couldn’t see him on the cameras.”
“What, did they break? Is every single camera in there broken?”
“No, they just didn’t see-”
“How did they not see him? What about us? Did they see us?” Yeonjun spits, another step closer. “We were in there, the cameras must have seen us, and he was with us.”
“Look, guys.” It’s Jay, finally pushing himself off the fence. He puts himself in front of Jake, chin raised, a motion of squaring up to Yeonjun. “I’m sorry you lost him. But he’s not in there.”
“No, what the hell is happening? Why was he not on the cameras, where is he?”
“Hyung...”
“Where the fuck is he?”
“Hyung!”
Beomgyu’s hand wraps around his arm, fingertips digging in hard, and just like that the anger is sapped away. He lets the younger pull him back, away from where he was practically chest to chest with Jay. With a sensible distance between them again, Jay just sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“The park is closing,” he says. “It’s closing, you’ve got to go.”
With the anger gone, Yeonjun finds he’s left with icy worry, a rising panic choking at his throat. He feels nauseous, raw, and the thought of walking away from the maze is only making it worse.
“Let us through one more time.”
He’s in no position to ask, he knows, especially not when he was seconds away from starting a physical fight. But he has to, he has to ask, he has to try. He has to get back into the maze.
“I can’t. It’s closed, they’re packing up. No more guests.”
Yeonjun looks to Jake instead, still barricaded behind Jay but peering over his shoulder, worrying his lip between his teeth as his gaze flits between the three of them. It takes a few tense seconds, but Yeonjun doesn’t miss when he finally reaches out to tap at Jay’s waist, a silent message.
Jay groans, fingers coming up to rub at his temples. “Okay. Okay, fine, go through one more time. But I’m coming with you.”
+∞+
Kai slips his hand into Yeonjun’s as they follow Jay through the side gate. Beomgyu had decided to stay behind at the exit with Jake and wait for Soobin, so it’s just the two of them heading through again.
The front entrance to the maze has already been blocked off by another low gate, but it hasn’t been locked yet. Jay holds it open for them.
“Don’t touch anything, yeah?” he’s saying as they enter the loading area, where the newly illuminated overhead lights are bright enough to make Yeonjun wince after coming from the dark outside. “And you can go off the path to look around but, god, be careful, please. Don’t break anything.”
Yeonjun resists the urge to roll his eyes. He wants desperately to tune him out, focus on the task at hand, the more important thing, why they’re here - but he’s still aware of Kai beside him emphatically agreeing to the rules, thanking Jay profusely for his help. Jay lifts the curtain aside, and they go in.
The light casts weird shadows on the ground as it shines through the leaves in the forest room. With the dimly-lit atmosphere completely shattered, replaced by harsh fluorescent lights, Yeonjun feels a little more capable. This is real, distinctly unmagical. This is doable.
Yeonjun walks them straight off the path, Kai trailing a step behind as they weave around the trees, circular routes around each of them, checking every inch of the room. On one turn around, he catches sight of Jay waiting at the end of the path, arms folded, leaning against the wall by the archway, eyes wearily tracking their winding path around. Yeonjun doesn’t let it distract him - he barely spares Jay a second glance as they move on to the next room.
“This is kinda cool, actually,” Kai mutters as they walk through the courtyard, admiring the clear view of the dark skies painted on the walls, the full shape of the plastic topiaries. Yeonjun wants to hit him, tell him to focus, take this seriously - but there’s something nice about it, still. The familiarity of Kai’s dumb comments even in this situation.
He squeezes Kai’s hand instead, and lets himself take a little pleasure from the hiss Kai lets out as his bones are crunched together.
Even with the lights on, they see nothing. The extra visibility reveals a few more doors tucked away, doors Taehyun could easily have slipped through - but Jay opens each one for them, shows them that they lead backstage, into the same giant hallway that runs the length of the container. These doors are for the actors and attendants to get around, and while Jay draws the line at actually allowing the two of them to explore backstage, he lets them step in far enough to confirm the only places to go from the hallway, other than back into the maze, are the break room, currently full of actors getting changed to go home, and down to that backstage door right at the end - the passcode-locked one by the maze exit, Jake and Beomgyu probably still waiting on the other side of it. Somebody would have seen Taehyun walking around back here, wouldn’t they?
The other exit, the emergency one Jay had mentioned before, is on the far side of the house’s entrance hall, the foyer. The staircase obscures the glowing green of the safety sign from anyone on the path, but Jay takes them over to it, points at the alarm box at the top, the blinking red light that shows it’s armed. No one in or out undetected.
They notice a few things in a different place, or removed entirely on their way around, but Jay says something about cleaning or fire hazard, reiterating that the attraction is closed, this is what happens at night. Things get packed away, tidied up, it’s not anything they should be concerned with.
In the study, the tall mirror has been covered up, a gray, thick cloth draped over it. Jay says something about real antique and dust, but looking at it sets something scratching at the back of Yeonjun’s mind. His fingers twitch toward it as they pass, but he curls them back, remembering Jay’s words. Don’t touch anything. He’s sure the attendant is looking for any excuse to kick them straight out, and he’s not going to give him one.
The dungeons are similarly empty, sparsely decorated and strikingly boring without any of the actors roaming around. Yeonjun’s heart sinks lower and lower as they pass through room after room of it. There’s nowhere to hide down here, nowhere to search, just this vast, bare emptiness. Taehyun isn’t here.
+∞+
Outside, Soobin has returned, arm linked with Beomgyu’s. The two of them seem to be making small talk with Jake, but it stops abruptly as the others arrive.
“Nothing?” Soobin says, lilting it like a question even though he already knows the answer. He tries a smile but it looks too ugly on his face.
“We caught some of the actors coming out,” Beomgyu starts, but Yeonjun already knows what he’s going to say next.
“They didn’t see anything,” he mutters, frustration huffing his breath out.
“One of them went back in to check too,” Soobin says. “So did Jake, again. They looked all around backstage for us.” Then he pauses, bites down on his bottom lip before he says, carefully, “He’s not in there.”
“Then where the fuck is he?”
The volume of his voice doesn’t surprise him this time - if anything, he’s surprised it wasn’t louder. But Beomgyu starts at the sudden outburst, burrowing closer into Soobin’s side, eyes cast downward. Kai shakes their entwined hands - a warning, support, Yeonjun can’t tell. All he knows is the anger has come right back, roaring in his ears, the helpless rage that he can’t do anything, and no one is helping him either.
“You’ve got to go now,” Jay says, like he knows exactly what Yeonjun is thinking and has made it his own personal goal to antagonize him. “I’m really sorry this has happened, but your friend isn’t here. The park closed a while ago, me and Jake have got to get home. You gotta go, now. Please.”
Yeonjun feels like snarling, biting, baring his teeth at Jay, and the aggression is so real, so unfamiliar that it scares him, actually terrifies him. He could fight. He knows he would fight, too, wouldn’t hesitate to knock Jay to the ground, remove any obstacle that’s keeping him from Taehyun, getting to him by any means necessary-
But there’s Kai’s hand gripping tight to his, the image of Beomgyu shrinking back in front of him, Soobin’s wary, concerned gaze keeping him miraculously pinned in place instead.
“Okay, we understand. We’ll go,” Soobin is saying, and the words rip right through Yeonjun, so sharp he gasps, flinches like he’s been punched in the gut. What is he doing?
“Sorry for keeping you so long. And thank you for your help, we appreciate everything you’ve done for us. Guys, come on. Let’s go.”
Beomgyu obeys immediately, untangling himself from Soobin and hopping toward Kai, holding his hand out - then Yeonjun can’t breathe with the sudden cold that comes as Kai drops his hand to take Beomgyu’s instead. It surges up fast and sharp as he feels Kai’s hand falling away, out of his grip, a sort of shell-shock freezing him in place, filled up with the acute sensation of being abandoned, of failing, of letting go.
But then there’s another hand in his, a warmth at his side again. It’s Soobin, fitting himself tight against Yeonjun, nudging their shoulders together and convincing him to move, start walking, come on.
He doesn’t want to look, but he still catches sight of the apologetic twist to Jake’s mouth as they pass by, the crease between his eyebrows, the tired sort of way Jay is rubbing at his cheeks. It doesn’t make him feel any better.
+∞+
Soobin gets them moving toward the park exit, but it’s as they walk away from the maze, when they’re deep on the main pathway and Yeonjun can feel the distance between him and the maze, between him and Taehyun - that’s when the anger comes back.
“Soobin,” he hisses, twisting in his grip, trying to shake him off. Soobin isn’t deterred, just holds on tighter, speeds up their pace.
“They were seconds away from calling security, hyung, what were we supposed to do?”
Yeonjun starts to splutter out an answer, wants to tell him, anything, Soobin, we do anything, everything we can to stay there, stay with Taehyun, but he can’t form the sentence, can’t get the words out. The anger is melting again as quickly as it came, leaving him whiplashed, exhausted. He’s tired. He’s just so tired.
As they reach the main gate, they can see Kai and Beomgyu up ahead, a group of kids beside them. The kids are peering at the phone held in Beomgyu’s outstretched hand, studying the screen before they stand back, shaking their heads. Then Kai and Beomgyu move to stop the next group walking past, hold out the phone again, and again, and again.
Soobin tugs at Yeonjun’s hand, a new sort of resolve in the action. Another plan to follow. “Us too, come on.”
So they wait outside the entrance, approaching every single person they see with their phones out, open on a picture of Taehyun taken earlier that same day, grinning beside Beomgyu as they waited in line for the maze, and they ask if anyone has seen him. No one has.
They stay long enough to see Jay and Jake and the other maze attendants leaving, bunched somberly together, none of them entirely surprised to see Yeonjun and his friends still hanging around, still searching. They offer apologetic winces when their eyes meet, but that’s it. There’s nothing else they can do, Yeonjun knows. Not now.
Jay breaks away from the pack, heading over with his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, a stark difference to his arrogance earlier. He looks smaller, younger than Yeonjun remembers, his perception back then warped from anger. He was viewing him solely as the enemy, but he’s not the enemy. He’s just a kid doing his job.
He tells them the guards are searching. They always do a full sweep after the park closes to make sure everyone has left, and they know all the places people hide. They’ll search every attraction top to bottom, every building, every inch of the park- but his words don’t settle right with Yeonjun. They can look, but he knows. They won’t find him.
Then Jay and the other attendants are gone, and eventually so is everyone else. The flow of people leaving the park slows and slows until it stops, then it’s just the four of them, standing helpless in the amber lights of the parking lot.
“This is my fault.”
Their eyes all snap to Beomgyu, hunched small in his hoodie, head lowered. His phone is still out, clenched white-knuckled in his hand. He flinches away as Kai tries to lay his arm around his shoulders.
“It’s not your fault,” Soobin says, but it’s a little too fast. It sounds like a reflex, not a sincere thought. Beomgyu shakes his head.
“It is, I- I made us come here,” he says, sniffling. “It’s my fault we were here in the first place. It was only me, I wanted to come here so bad, today, and you guys wanted to wait-”
“We all wanted to come, hyung,” Kai interrupts, and this time Beomgyu allows the arm around his shoulders, lets himself be tugged against Kai’s chest. Soobin reaches out too, shakes at Beomgyu’s sleeve, and sets his tone soft, reassuring.
“Gyu, there is no way on earth that this is your fault,” he says, and waits until Beomgyu nods before he spins round to Yeonjun, eyes wide, imploring. “And it’s not your fault either, hyung.”
But that doesn’t sound right. He’s the one who let go. Yeonjun was holding onto Taehyun, he was supposed to be holding on. But now Taehyun isn’t here, he’s gone and it’s all Yeonjun’s fault, isn’t it? It must be. It couldn’t be anyone else’s. Yeonjun saw him last, he was closest to him, he was supposed to be looking after him, protecting him-
“Hyung? Listen to me. This is not your fault.”
Soobin is in front of him now, and Yeonjun didn’t quite notice when that happened. He looks worn, washed out in the amber light. Tired, just like Yeonjun. And he’s trying to help, trying to ease Yeonjun’s mind, but words aren’t helping. There’s only one solution to this.
“I’m not leaving.”
Soobin’s shaky breath isn’t quite a sigh. His jaw is tight. “I know.”
“Not without Taehyun.”
“I know.”
“He’s here somewhere.”
“I know- look, I want to find him too. You know I want to find him. But there’s not much we can do right now. The park’s closed, we can’t-” Soobin pauses, takes that deep breath he’s been holding back on. “There’s not much we can do. And there aren’t many places he could be, anymore. We looked, didn’t we? We searched for him, and the park searched for him, and none of us could find him. He’s- wherever he is, I-”
I don’t know, Yeonjun can hear. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know what to do. He knows Soobin is doing everything he can to avoid saying it, avoid admitting that they’re all lost and scared and worried about Taehyun and horribly out of their depth here, because admitting that would feel like admitting defeat.
The hard lump is back in Yeonjun’s throat, but it won’t make him weak this time. He’s not going to give up.
“I’m not leaving,” he repeats.
Soobin nods, then nods again, over and over to himself, little staccato movements as his brain whirrs, trying to come up with a plan, a suitable course of action in this impossible situation. And Yeonjun is so thankful that he’s trying. He knows he’s making it difficult, asking so much of him, relying on Soobin to hold him together, hold them all together when none of them have any idea what they’re doing.
“Okay,” Soobin says finally, “Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. The park is shut, but Taehyun could still be in there- or, he could be out here somewhere. But it’s past midnight, and I want to find Taehyunnie but I have to look after the kids too.”
Here, Yeonjun looks past Soobin, behind him to where Kai and Beomgyu are still huddled together, shivering in the night air. They look small, exhausted, miserable - helpless and scared. All the things that Yeonjun feels but refuses to let show.
“I need to take them home,” Soobin says. “And what if- maybe Taehyunnie already left. He could be heading home alone, or could be there already. Then having us all out here won’t help. So I’m gonna take the kids home, and they’ll wait for him there, just in case. Then I’ll come back and help you look here, yeah?”
Yeonjun doesn’t trust his voice to come out, so he nods instead.
“Is that okay?”
Yeonjun nods again.
Soobin steps forward and Yeonjun closes his eyes as Soobin’s chest bumps against his, long arms wrapping around him and pulling him in tight.
“We’ll find him,” Soobin says. Yeonjun fists his hands in Soobin’s jacket and nods again.
“Hyung-” Beomgyu cuts in. His eyes are wide; he must have overheard the plan. “What are you saying, we’ll stay too, we can help-”
“No, I need you two at home, to be there in case Taehyunnie comes back by himself.”
“But if we’re here we could-”
“I need you two safe at home, okay?” Soobin says, firm, final.
“Yes, hyung,” Kai says, and Beomgyu still looks stern, stubborn like he wants to argue, but he soon relents too.
It’s cold, when Soobin lets go, moving to usher the younger two on, over to the car to take them home. Yeonjun wraps his own arms around himself as he watches the three of them walk away, heading away from the park, away from him. He clenches his teeth hard against the tears that threaten to well up as he watches the car pull out, drive through the gates, disappear out onto the road.
He’s left alone.
+∞+
It takes a few minutes for Yeonjun to get his mind straight. He forces himself to breathe, letting his emotions settle, or at least simmer down until he can get them fully under control again. He has to figure out his next move here - Soobin’s plan had detailed what he was going to do, but said nothing about what Yeonjun was going to do in the meantime. And he has to do something.
There are lights still on inside the park, but they’re dimmer than they were before, with only the occasional, faint sound of movement coming from inside - the staff packing things away, cleaning up, the guards on their patrols.
It grates at him, the idea that the park is closed but still so alive inside. Yeonjun can’t shake the feeling that he could be in there too, could be one of the people still allowed to roam the park after hours. He could be searching, but he’s stuck outside.
So maybe he should search where he can, then. It takes a moment to convince himself to move, to thaw whatever it is that’s freezing him in place, but as soon as he takes the first step he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop again, propelled forward by a frantic sort of energy he hadn’t known he possessed. The park is surrounded by a tall fence, stretching out either side of the entrance. Yeonjun picks a direction and starts walking.
He makes his way along the edge of the park, peering out into the parking lot, squinting out into the darkness of the field beyond it in case he sees a figure somewhere in the distance. He follows the path when there is one, then steps onto pebble and gravel when there isn’t, then onto soil and dirt, striding over shrubs and wading through thick swathes of foliage, the fence always there to his side. He doesn’t see anything.
Eventually the bushes become trees, the park backing up into a forest. He could keep going - it would be harder to navigate through all the plants, especially in the dark, but it’s not so dense out there that he couldn’t make it through if he tried.
Except, Taehyun wouldn’t be out here. He wouldn’t have gone this far from the park, wouldn’t be out there in the woods somewhere. There are other places Yeonjun should be looking, so he turns around and makes his way back to the front.
When he gets back onto the path, when he starts to see the familiar shape of the entrance area again, another thought occurs, one that seizes him with a renewed sense of panic. He’d been gone for a while - what if he missed Taehyun just now? What if the guards found him when Yeonjun wasn’t out there to meet him, what if Taehyun left out the main door while he was round the back? What if he’s gone, again?
His already rushed steps break into a run, tearing down the path, back around the corner to the main entrance. It’s still empty, but that doesn’t slow him down. He could still be out here, could be leaving this very minute, so Yeonjun jogs through the empty car park too, runs the length of it to get all the way out to the gates, out onto the main road. There’s no sidewalk out here, but he looks up and down the road anyway, desperate to spot a figure somewhere, a shape against the darkness that he recognizes. But he doesn’t see anything.
-bzzt! -bzzt! -bzzt!
The noise makes him jump, already high adrenaline reaching a new unpleasant spike- but it’s just his phone, a call from Soobin. He keeps his eyes out on the road as he answers.
“Yeonjun-hyung? Hey, I got them home safe. They’re pretty upset, well, we all are, you know. They said they’re gonna do a little lap of the neighborhood, see if they can spot him anywhere, and they’ll keep trying to call him, in case he picks up. I’m coming back to you.”
“Okay.” Yeonjun can’t say much else. His voice shakes when he tries, and he’s trying so hard to stay strong here, to not fall apart, but there are tears swimming at the bottom of his vision as he stares out into the empty road, into nothing. They’re hot, frustrated tears he hadn’t allowed himself to feel earlier, but now, when everything is so dark and so still, and he feels so alone, it’s getting so hard to hold them back.
“Good. Good, I’ll be there soon. Hold on.”
“Yeah,” he says, and he hears Soobin pause, a little catch to his breath like he’s about to say something else, but Yeonjun hangs up before he can. Words don’t help right now, after all.
He has a job to do. Taehyun needs him, needs him to be strong. Taehyun needs him to hurry up, to find him. So he turns, runs back through the gates, through the parking lot, back to the front entrance.
+∞+
It’ll take Soobin half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes to get to the park again. Yeonjun knows he should be patient. Having an extra person to help search would make it easier, give them a better chance of finding Taehyun.
But he’s not going to wait any longer. Back at the entrance, staring at the locked gates, the shuttered ticket booths, his panic is slowly focusing, turning steely, determined. He had the right idea, before. Following the perimeter is good, but not to search for Taehyun outside - to search for a way in.
The forest is his best bet. There’s bound to be something there that will get him in - another entrance, some kind of damage to the fence that he can exploit, maybe a tree he can climb and jump down from, anything. So he heads up that same side again, up the path, into the bushes, all the way to the point where he turned around before. Then he takes a deep breath and pushes on into the woods.
It becomes harder to stick to the fence out here, now that the thick shrubbery has been joined by tangled tree roots and his own blurry vision from the tiny amount of moonlight struggling through the gaps in the trees. But he pushes through, deeper and deeper, until he’s gone so far he can’t see where he came in anymore. Then he goes further.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking for, but it’s fast becoming long enough for the determination to fade, for worry and doubt to start creeping their way back in. What if he’s wasting his time, again? What if this time, Taehyun really is back at the entrance? What if he just walks all the way around the park, comes out the other side with nothing to show for it?
Or what if something happens to him, out in these woods? No one knows he’s here. Then he’d be missing too, and who would be left to find Taehyun?
The route ahead is blocked, fallen branches forcing him to continue to the side, almost ninety degrees from the fence to find another path through. As he ducks behind a particularly wide tree and the fence disappears from his field of view, he ignores the way his heart starts racing, shoves away the fear that the fence won’t be there when he looks back again. But he rounds the tree and something does stutter and grind in his chest as he looks and sees-
The fence isn’t there.
Except, no, it’s still there, a few feet back the way he came. Just after the pile of fallen branches, the tall wooden slabs he’d been following this whole way stop abruptly. He can’t quite make sense of it, doesn’t quite trust what he’s seeing - why would the fence end, out here?
But as Yeonjun stares, straining his eyes into the dark, he realizes the fence does continue, it’s just different. What’s in front of him now, is chainlink.
He stumbles more than once, tripping clumsily over the forest floor as he rushes toward the fence, desperate to gape through the links, see into the park, finally. There’s not much to see, truthfully - there’s more plantlife directly behind the fence, a tamer sort of version of the forest, but behind that, he can squint through the leaves to see buildings, a pathway, light.
He tries to shuffle closer, to get a better look, and the fence rattles as his foot kicks against something at the bottom, something protruding from it. Yeonjun can’t stop his gasp as he sees it’s the fence itself, torn open, blown out, a little hole where it meets the ground.
It looks like it was ripped by an animal, a fox maybe - but as he crouches down and looks closer, the break is too neat. It’s probably been cut, likely by kids looking to get in and cause trouble. And while the hole created isn’t particularly large, it isn’t too small either.
Yeonjun doesn’t think twice before crawling in.
+∞+
Eternity Park looks vastly different at night. Yeonjun almost doesn’t recognize where he emerges as he pushes through the bushes, blinking at the main path spreading out in front of him. The bright colors and pretty lights that define Yeonjun’s memories of the place are all missing, replaced by the cold air and the harsh safety floodlights beaming down, casting strange shadows on the buildings, distorting what used to be a familiar place.
The guards must still be in here, but he doesn’t know where they are. He’s near the back of the park, he recognizes, spotting a signpost by the side of the path - and there’s no noise here, no voices or footsteps that he can hear, but that doesn’t convince him it’s safe to step out of the shadows yet.
So he keeps to the grass, clings as close to the buildings as he can as he makes his way through the park. He’s trying to stay silent too, but his breath is coming out a little too heavy, the faint rustle of his clothes entirely too loud in his ears - when he can hear it over the pounding of his heart, that is. He startles, stops still at every noise he thinks he hears, holding his shaking breath until he’s sure it was nothing. No guards around.
He can’t get caught now, not yet. Not until he finds Taehyun. He doesn’t care about getting in trouble for this - he’ll take the punishment for trespassing, but only when he’s done. Only when Taehyun is safe beside him again. And that will only happen when he gets back to the maze.
Because of course that’s where he’s heading: the maze. He could search around the rest of the park, sneak around the places guests aren’t allowed during the day, look around the backs of buildings, climb over fences- but this whole time, he never thought Taehyun was somewhere out in the park. No, he’s always known. Even with all the time he’s spent searching elsewhere, there was never any doubt in his mind.
It’s the maze. Taehyun is still in the maze, he knows it.
There’s a single safety light on at the entrance of the maze when Yeonjun gets there, a dirty green beam illuminating the three steps up to it and not much else. The entrance itself is blocked by the gate, the one Jay had held open - but it’s only waist-high, easy to hop over. The loading room is dark, but Yeonjun’s been here enough times to know where the curtains are. His fingers close easily around the black fabric, then he takes another deep breath, and heads inside.
+∞+
The safety lights are on inside as well, dim green strips above the side doors and a few button-sized lights on the floor to separate the guest path from the sets. They only light up the couple inches around them though, nowhere near bright enough to illuminate the rooms, so Yeonjun pulls out his phone and taps on the flashlight - but on the dimmest setting, because there’s something about the place that makes his chest tight, muscles taut, hair raising on the back of his neck. Even though he’s alone in here, he doesn’t want to draw any attention to himself.
He makes his way through quickly, skin prickling with the knowledge that he shouldn’t be here, that he could still be caught any second. But he has to be here. He swallows against the fear bubbling in his stomach and pushes himself through the forest, the courtyard, up into the house. His chest thumps as he walks down the corridor, the ghostly image of one of the doors slamming open suddenly vivid and real in his mind, but he makes it to the end. His determined steps slow to a faltering stop just outside the study.
This was always the place. This was where it all started, after all - it’s where he lost Taehyun. He entered the study with him, but left without him. And in every walkthrough since, the study has seemed to be the most important place. It’s always had an energy to it, an uncomfortable aura that Yeonjun could never shake, could never figure out. And this energy has always been focused on one spot:
The mirror.
It’s still covered by that heavy cloth, that large drape of thick gray fabric. The mirror is technically out of sight underneath it, but its power is undeniable. Ever since that first scare, when it had made him yell, clutching onto Soobin, his attention has always been drawn to it. He seems somehow fixated on it - and this time is no exception. It’s the only thing Yeonjun can see as he peers into the room, even though it’s still obscured by shadow. He can’t quite bring himself to shine his flashlight directly at it.
Standing in the archway, he finds himself hesitant to step inside. The study is wide, at least compared to the corridor and the claustrophobic woods. The space in the middle of the room, previously filled by those actors chanting in their circle, now seems like a space Yeonjun shouldn’t be the one to fill. It feels dangerous, somehow, to be out there. Exposed.
But he looks over at the mirror, on the far wall, and it makes up his mind for him. He steps in anyway.
-bzzt! -bzzt! -bzzt!
His heart drops like a stone, landing solid and painful in the pit of his stomach. An alarm, the adrenaline coursing through him yells, have I been caught? He backs up frantically until he hits the wall by the archway, something above his head rattling from the impact, an ugly clang that has him flinching, pressing himself flat and still until the noise stops.
But the buzzing continues, and as the seconds tick on and his head starts to clear, it sounds like a phone. So, steeling himself, forcing breaths in and out again, he follows the noise.
It leads him over to the right side of the room, to the desk, the one with the ancient tome open on top of it. He creeps closer, scans the surface, then he peers down underneath the desk to see that there is, in fact, a phone, face down on the floor.
And he recognizes the case. It’s Taehyun’s phone.
It stops buzzing as he stares, and he’s frozen again, shaking hand outstretched toward it. How did this get here? Has this been here the whole time? Why didn’t they see it before? What does this mean?
Then he’s reaching out to pick it up, when he hears another noise. Footsteps.
They’re coming from ahead, from the exit of the room, down the stairs that lead to the dungeons. They’re footsteps, and they’re getting closer.
Abandoning Taehyun’s phone, Yeonjun scrambles to hide - his first and only instinct. Past the desk, there’s an armchair in the corner, placed at an angle. Yeonjun dives behind it, cramming himself into the slender space between it and the wall, knees tugged up to his chest, scrunching himself as small as possible. It’s bad, this position. He knows he won’t get up quickly if he needs to run, but he’s staking everything on remaining undetected, relying on his ability to stay hidden.
He has no time to reposition anyway - the set of stairs isn’t that big, the footsteps approaching rapidly. Then he hears the floorboards creak by the exit, the unmistakable sound of someone entering the room, and he realizes with an icy jolt that his phone flashlight is still on.
He’s panicking, muscles tight and uncooperative. There’s no way he’ll be able to navigate the screen to turn the light off, so he clasps the phone against himself, presses it down hard into his lap and hunches over it as best he can, heartbeat hammering against his knees.
He can’t get enough air in this position, but it’s not like he could breathe much anyway, with how tight his chest is, how unexpectedly and utterly terrified he is by these sudden footsteps. But what is he scared of, really? Who could it be, a security guard? An attendant working late, who saw him on the cameras? That’s all it’s likely to be, some authority figure come to flush him out of the park, send him home.
But he knows he doesn’t really believe that’s what it is. No, the fear invading his thoughts tells him one thing: Taehyun is missing, and this, whoever this is, is the person who took him.
The footsteps lose their purpose when they enter the room - hesitating, much like Yeonjun had, before they start moving again. He can hear breathing as well. It’s heavy, heavier than his, brash and labored, like an animal. After a few seconds, it becomes clear that they’re not passing through, like he’d hoped. Whoever it is, they’re staying in the room.
Behind the armchair, he’s hidden from immediate view, but that means he can’t see out either. He can only see the desk through the gap in front of him, Taehyun’s phone still tantalizingly there under it, but no sign of the rest of the room. He can’t see who it is in there with him, can’t tell exactly what they’re doing, or exactly where they’re going if they’re not leaving.
Their footsteps are casual, ponderous. They seem to move around the room, back and forth, pausing every so often before they start up again. It was the noise, wasn’t it? They heard the noise, heard him up here, and now they’re investigating. Searching. He presses himself back further against the wall, wills himself invisible.
-bzzt! -bzzt! -bzzt!
Yeonjun’s heart drops for a second time, but it’s worse. So much worse.
It’s his own phone.
He scrambles to silence it. It’s a call, and it’s not ringing, it’s not that loud, but the vibrations might still be heard in the silent room - and judging by the way the snuffling breaths come to an abrupt stop, they were heard.
Yeonjun fumbles as he tries to cancel the call blind, an awkward stretch to get his fingers around to the right spot to press the side button. And he tries, he really tries, but one slipped movement exposes the flashlight. It’s only a flicker of light, into his lap, the floor around him, but it’s clearly visible in the dark room, if anyone were looking. He slams the flashlight down against his clothes again, dampens it as soon as it appears, but he knows it’s been seen. The footsteps are moving, closer to him.
He has to clench his lips together, drop his forehead down onto his knees to stifle the terrified sounds that are threatening to escape, arms tight against his chest, hunching down smaller into himself, smaller like that will make him undetectable, make him disappear completely. Like it will make the footsteps stop approaching.
-bzzt! -bzzt! -bzzt!
Yeonjun knows he’s crying, can feel the tears hot down his cheeks- but this time, it’s not his phone. It’s Taehyun’s.
The footsteps divert. They turn away from the corner Yeonjun is hiding in and move over to the desk instead, to the ringing phone under it. Yeonjun stays frozen. They’re no longer heading straight for him, but he’s not out of danger yet. The desk was the only place he could see from behind the armchair, and now they’re over there… if they looked in his direction, at the right angle, he’d be plainly visible.
He doesn’t dare move. He can’t risk it, can’t risk drawing attention to himself now. He keeps his head down, holds his breath, and waits.
Taehyun’s phone stops buzzing. There’s silence, a few heart-stopping moments of nothing, then Yeonjun is choking on his tears as he hears the footsteps again - turning to walk away, back out the way they came, out of the room and down the stairs to the dungeons.
Yeonjun can’t calm his breaths, can’t stop the tears and the burning in his lungs. He makes a little noise, now that the person, whoever it was, has gone - just a little gasping sort of sob, but it’s still too loud for him, too obvious in the empty room. And he really can’t breathe, suffocating himself against his own knees, so he lifts his head, finally. His gaze lands straight ahead, right on Taehyun’s phone... and seeing it grabs all the fear, all the panic overflowing inside him and shoves it all down, pushes it aside, seals it up tight.
He doesn’t have time to fall apart right now. Taehyun needs him.
And Taehyun is here, he knows it.
So he crawls out of the hiding spot and picks up Taehyun’s phone. A list of missed calls lights up the screen, calls from all four of them, the most recent from Beomgyu, brilliant Beomgyu.
The phone must have been ringing with these calls constantly, on and off the whole time. Whoever it was that entered the room, it must have been because of the noise Yeonjun made, the clang. He looks up at the wall by the entrance - it was a metal shield above his head, some dumb prop with a nonsense family crest etched onto it. That new noise must have drawn them up, then the lucky timing of Taehyun’s phone must have confused them, convincing them it was only the noise they’d been hearing all along, always the phone and never anything else, so they went back down again.
It sounds unlikely, a little too perfect, but it worked in Yeonjun’s favor so he’s not going to argue.
With no further use for it, Yeonjun shuts Taehyun’s phone down, stashing it in his pocket. Then he checks his own - it was a missed call from Soobin that buzzed just then, probably saying he’s arrived, he’s back at the park but Yeonjun isn’t there waiting, where is he?
He shuts his own phone down too. Soobin will definitely call again, and he still doesn’t trust himself to be able to navigate to turn off the vibration, to silence it properly. The flashlight powers down with it, but that’s probably better too.
Then he forces himself to think, to remember what he was doing before he was interrupted, by the phone and the footsteps and the tears that haven’t quite stopped falling yet…
It was the mirror, of course it was. His attention snaps back toward it, there on the wall beside the exit.
The cloth has been disturbed since he last saw it, no doubt by his unexpected guest. The thick gray fabric is starting to slip off one of the corners, slowly sliding down, and Yeonjun sees that as an invitation to go over and yank it off fully.
The first thing he sees is himself. He looks terrified - pale, limbs shaking, tears still dribbling pitifully down his cheeks.
Then he looks past himself, out into the reflection of the room behind him, and has to clasp his hands over his mouth to muffle the gasp as he sees Taehyun, Taehyun, laid out on the armchair in the corner.
He spins around immediately, heart up in his throat as he looks over to the real thing-
But there’s nothing.
He snaps back to the mirror, crowds closer, squints into the dark glass to make sure he’s really seeing it… yes, that’s Taehyun. He’s sprawled out in the seat, eyes closed - passed out probably, on closer inspection. But he’s there. He’s there.
Yeonjun whips back around to the real thing, the real armchair he’d just been curled behind… still nothing. Then he looks again, whips back and forth between reality and the reflection, brain struggling to make sense of it.
But then he gets it. Taehyun is there, but he’s in the mirror.
“Taehyun,” he calls, whisper quiet. Nothing. If he’s passed out, or asleep, he needs to call louder - but he can’t, not with whoever right down those stairs.
So he gets an idea and taps the glass. Just with the back of one finger, gently, so gently it doesn’t make a noise loud enough for anyone else to hear. Just a soft thunk of his knuckle against the glass.
It works. Taehyun stirs in the reflection, scrunching his eyes before he opens them, blinking in the dark over at Yeonjun.
“Hyung?” he says, but it doesn’t make a sound.
Yeonjun turns around once more, a vain hope that maybe now that he’s awake, he might be really there. He’s not.
When he faces the mirror again, Taehyun is sitting up, standing up, walking toward Yeonjun - and the sight of it, in the mirror, makes Yeonjun’s stomach turn. He can see his own reflection still, the miserable specter of himself, but he can see Taehyun somehow behind it, walking up until they’re face to face.
“What is this?” Taehyun says, Yeonjun straining to read his lips in the dark, behind the shape of his own reflection. “What’s going on?”
“Where are you?” Yeonjun asks, barely voiced - not that Taehyun would be able to hear it, anyway. As expected, Taehyun blinks at the sound barrier.
“Where am I?” he parrots back.
“You’re in the mirror,” Yeonjun says. “You’re in the mirror, Taehyunnie.”
Taehyun takes a second to read his lips, squinting in confusion, but his eyes widen when he figures it out. Then he looks up, up and around the frame in front of him, this window that he’s looking out through, like he’s only just noticed it. He puts his hands on the edges of it, runs them up the sides, then puts his palms flat on the glass, right in the middle, like he could reach out to Yeonjun.
“Help,” he says. “Help me.”
“I’m trying-” -but Yeonjun has no idea, no fucking idea what’s going on. He puts his own hands on the glass, over Taehyun’s, but feels nothing. Just a chill seeping into his palms.
“Hyung, help,” Taehyun says, then his expression changes and his head turns, confused gaze moving past the frame of the mirror - and if he’s in a reflected version of the study, then he must now be looking to the archway, the exit. The stairs down to the dungeon.
Yeonjun can’t hear anything himself, but he knows exactly what Taehyun just heard.
“Taehyun,” he says, tapping the glass with his fingertips, desperate for Taehyun’s attention, but desperate to not draw the wrong sort of attention at the same time. “Taehyun, hide.”
Taehyun does turn back, doe eyes blown wide and panicked. “What is that?” he asks.
“Hide,” Yeonjun says.
“No, no,” Taehyun says. “Let me out. Break the glass.”
He slaps a hand against the glass, and Yeonjun startles as he hears the thump. Taehyun does it again, with his fist this time - he hits the glass, and Yeonjun hears it thud with his own ears.
“Break the glass,” Taehyun is saying, banging both fists against the glass, head constantly whipping between Yeonjun and what must be the approaching footsteps. “Hyung! Let me out!”
And Yeonjun has no idea what this is, how this works, what the fuck is happening, or whether this is even a good idea at all, but he knows he has to do it. He’s not thinking as he steps back from the mirror and starts scanning the room for any object he could use.
The room is a set, a decoration, designed for safety - not easily destroyed. The lamp on the table is bolted down, as is the table itself. The items on the shelves are glued in place, the books are just empty covers, and far too light and fragile to be of any use anyway.
Taehyun has changed tactic by now, crashing his shoulder into the glass like he’s going to ram it down. And he’s screaming, definitely, crying out with every collision - Yeonjun can see his mouth moving, but he can only hear the thumps. They’re louder, louder, so loud now that the thuds are shaking the room, sloshing the liquid in the jars, rattling the walls.
And Yeonjun’s ears pick out a particular metallic rattle back by the entrance. The shield.
Yeonjun almost cries out himself when he grabs it, when he finds it’s only loose-mounted to the wall, not bolted at all. It comes off easily, far heavier than he anticipated before he got it in his hands. A solid thing, real metal. Strong enough.
He runs back to the mirror, shield clutched in front of him. Taehyun spots the movement, stops throwing himself against the glass long enough to catch Yeonjun’s hurried instruction:
“Stand back.”
Then he’s raising the shield, preparing to smash it against the mirror, when something else changes in Taehyun’s panicked expression. It makes Yeonjun’s blood run cold. Taehyun had been scared before, but this is different. It’s fear - raw, undefined fear. Pure terror, unlike anything Yeonjun has ever seen on him. And he’s not looking at Yeonjun - his petrified gaze is stuck past the mirror, to the exit of the room. Where the footsteps would be, where they must be by now.
Yeonjun had been hidden away, when it happened. Too afraid to look.
But Taehyun... Taehyun can see.
Yeonjun won’t wait any longer, he can’t. He swings the shield forward, the exact same time Taehyun jolts back into action, rushing toward the glass again.
Yeonjun doesn’t have a chance to slow his movement. Taehyun makes contact, the shield makes contact, and the mirror shatters.
+∞+
There’s glass. A lot of glass, shards and shards and shards of glass. Yeonjun feels himself getting sprayed by it, buffeted and sliced, but then he feels something else - the warm weight of Taehyun crashing into him, fallen through the mirror and straight into his arms. He lands hard against Yeonjun’s chest, hard enough to knock them both to the ground, punching what little breath Yeonjun still had out of his lungs.
He thought all he could hear was the splintering glass - it was deafening, cacophonous, but now he can hear Taehyun, gasping, crying against him. He can hear his own voice groaning as he manages to sit them both up, hands on the floor for leverage, and he hears his own cries as the movement pushes glass into his palms, but he can’t focus on that right now.
Taehyun can’t get a word out through his sobs, but Yeonjun’s not sure what there is to say anyway. All he hears is a heartbreaking “hyung” before Taehyun gives up, pushing his face into Yeonjun’s neck, fists clenching in his jacket. And Yeonjun wraps his arms around Taehyun in return, pulls his body even tighter against his own, tight enough to feel his pounding heartbeat and know that he’s here, he’s alive. He did it, Yeonjun found him, got him back.
Then Yeonjun hears another noise - a deep, rumbling growl, far away but loud enough to silence Taehyun’s sobs like flipping a switch, both of them freezing solid, completely still.
Then they hear footsteps, thundering, and they know they have to get out.
They scramble to their feet, wailing as their wounds are jostled, the pieces of glass Yeonjun can feel embedded all over his skin grinding as he gets up, then he grabs Taehyun’s hand in his and they flee the room.
The thing, whatever it is, is fast. It’s at the top of the stairs by the time they duck out into the corridor, just a breath away from seeing them. It seems to stop in the room, probably caught by the shattered mirror, the glass on the ground, but it gives Yeonjun just enough time to think.
They can’t outrun it, he knows. So they need to hide.
The doors in the corridor. A lot of them are fake, unmovable facades, but some of them open, don’t they? Actors lurk behind them, come through them, jump out for the scares. One of them must lead somewhere, right?
Yeonjun tries the closest door - locked. It’s dark, still so dark in there, Yeonjun struggles to find the next. Dragging Taehyun tripping behind him, he moves down the corridor, palm slapping against the wall until he feels the shape of a door again, until his wrist knocks against the handle. Panic seizing his throat, he tries the second one. Locked. Which doors are real?
The footsteps start up again, and something glints in Yeonjun’s vision. Up above, a few feet down the corridor, the green glow of the safety light. An exit.
The door underneath it opens up, inward, away from the corridor, and he falls in after it, Taehyun close behind. He tries not to slam the door shut, and it’s so hard when all of his muscles are locking up in their haste, when his arms are shaking and his body is screaming at him to hurry.
But he does it - he closes the door, quickly, quietly, then drops his weight against it for extra security, barricading it shut. Taehyun does the same, huddling close to Yeonjun, both of them holding their breath as the footsteps come out into the corridor.
The heavy gait moves swiftly, carefully down the corridor, accompanied by these rumbling, snarling grunts, like an animal, a predator. A monster. Yeonjun bites down on his lip, presses his face into Taehyun’s hair as the noises get louder, the monster gets closer, closer to the door they’re hidden behind, closer-
Until it moves past them, footsteps retreating, down the corridor, away from them and out into the foyer on the other side. Taehyun is shivering against him, choked little whimpers breaking through as the thing moves out of earshot, as they escape, for now.
Yeonjun has no idea what’s out there, what’s coming after them - and he has absolutely no desire to find out. They need to get out of here, right now.
“Go, go,” Yeonjun hisses, and Taehyun picks up fast, untangling himself from Yeonjun and moving on instinct. Their grip on each other is slippery, slick from the hot blood covering Yeonjun’s palms, but that just makes Taehyun hold on tighter as he leads them away from the door, deeper into the darkness in front of them.
Turns out, the door has taken them through to the backstage area, the hallway the actors and attendants use. There are dim strip lights along the edges of the floor, like airplane lights leading down to the exit, to the passcode-locked door at the end. It’s not that far away, but Yeonjun doesn’t know how the door works, if it has an emergency release system that will get them out without the passcode or if they’d be stuck. And he doesn’t feel in a position to take a chance on it, not now. Not when there’s another door he knows will open.
The fire exit. It’s on the far side of the foyer, behind the fake staircase. They move up the backstage hallway as silently as possible, footsteps light, cautious but as swift as they can manage in the dark. Yeonjun is keeping his ears peeled for sounds of the monster - from what he’d seen before, on the walkthrough with Jay, all the actor entrances in the attraction lead to this same hallway. They could be running headfirst into danger, for all he knows.
Plus, the foyer is the last place they knew the monster to be. It could still be there, waiting for them. But it’s their best bet of getting out.
Taehyun has spotted the safety signs too, the green lights up above that point to the nearest exit, the fastest route outside. They’re pointing back, down to the passcode-locked door, but they follow against them until the direction changes, pointing somewhere new, to the other exit. Then they follow further until the lights come to stop, to a large sign hung directly above a door. The door into the foyer.
Yeonjun crowds in close behind Taehyun, wrapping his free hand around Taehyun’s wrist as the younger reaches out, grips the handle, and opens the door.
The foyer is... empty. They falter in the doorway, craning their necks out to scan left and right, look up to the balcony, search the stairs and the shadows around them for a sign of... anything. There’s nothing.
And it’s silent, too. Wherever the monster went after the corridor, it didn’t stop here. They have no idea where it is. That doesn’t mean it’s gone, but it does mean they have a clear shot at the exit. They have a chance.
He knows Taehyun can’t quite see where the door is, not from this angle. And it hadn’t been shown to him earlier, so Yeonjun shuffles forward instead, takes the lead again, and steps them both out into the foyer.
And it goes well. They cross the room, reaching the bottom of the stairs, then it’s as they turn to duck behind them, that’s when they hear that roar again - that ground-shaking rumble, startlingly close by, so near to them. It’s out in the courtyard maybe, or back down the corridor, and it’s getting louder, again-
“Go, go, go!” Yeonjun yells, and Taehyun breaks them into a sprint, skidding around the back of the staircase, slipping on the carpet until they see the door in front of them, that glowing green beacon above it.
Taehyun slams into the door, hitting the push bar with his whole weight, then they’re tripping and stumbling out into the night air, an alarm blaring behind them.
Taehyun falters, winded or injured, so Yeonjun runs faster for him, slinging an arm around his waist as he shoots ahead and praying Taehyun manages to keep up, keep his feet underneath him as they run, away from the horror maze, toward the floodlights of the main path. And they’re gasping for air, shrieking out into the night until Yeonjun sees the beam of a flashlight up ahead, a figure moving toward them - a security guard.
He gets them as close as he can, runs as far as he can before his knees give out, tripping him to the ground, Taehyun falling with him. The paving scrapes and burns underneath him as he lands - but it feels better than the glass, at least. And Taehyun is still there, still solid and heavy on top of him, still alive.
He barely registers the words the guard is shouting as he reaches them. It’s just more noise piling on top of the overwhelming chaos in his mind, the fear and adrenaline tearing through his veins.
He can’t do any more than this. Sprawled out on the floor, far away from the maze, the famed Eternal Frights, from the monster, he wraps his arms tight around Taehyun, tight as he can then tighter still. Then he doesn’t fight anymore as everything catches up to him, everything overflows, and it all turns black.
+∞+
When he wakes up, everything hurts.
He groans, tries to sit up - but he’s pushed back down, a firm but gentle voice telling him not to move.
So he doesn’t. He does open his eyes though, and he’s not entirely surprised to see he’s in an ambulance. He recognizes the shape of it from the TV - it’s a setting that’s simultaneously so familiar and so unreal, somewhere that he knows exists, logically, but that he never really thought he’d end up in real life… but that might just be shock talking, nonsense from the whole-body ache he can feel now that everything is calmer, the adrenaline almost all faded out.
Then against his better judgment, he tries to sit up again. The medic tending to him sighs, but lets him this time, even helps reposition him so he can see out. The ambulance isn’t moving, parked in a field with its back doors wide open - and it takes Yeonjun a moment to realize where they are. It’s the car park, they’re just outside the park entrance, and he’s-
“Taehyun,” he says, fidgeting to see further out the back of the ambulance. “Where’s Taehyun?”
“Stay still, please,” the medic says, trying their best to hold him in place. “You’ve got a lot of glass in your wounds, please don’t move.”
“Where’s Taehyun?” he says again, heart rate rising. This was supposed to be over, Taehyun was supposed to be here, but he’s-
“Hyung?” he hears, and it’s not Taehyun’s voice, but it’s-
“Soobin?”
Soobin appears around the ambulance doors, looking fraught, pale and tired and… angry?
“What the hell, hyung, where the hell did you go? What happened? I was so worried!”
He leans into the vehicle, fists clenched and raised like he’s going to hit Yeonjun, but he can’t find a clear spot to do it, not without actually hurting him even further. Yeonjun barely notices, wouldn’t have noticed if Soobin had hit him anyway.
“Where’s Taehyun, please-” -and Yeonjun’s not surprised to feel he’s crying again. It’s difficult to tell if he ever stopped.
“He’s here, hyung, he’s here. He’s okay, don’t worry.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s getting checked over too, in another ambulance. He’s-”
“Hyung?”
And that’s Taehyun. Yeonjun fights to his feet, pushing past the medic - and he’ll feel awful about that later on, truly regret being difficult when they’re only trying to do their job, but right now he just needs to see Taehyun.
His legs buckle again as he jumps down from the ambulance, but Soobin is quick to get an arm around him, propping him up so he can see past the open doors to another ambulance - and there’s Taehyun, there he is, just a few feet away, getting swathed in bandages but alive and okay.
The other medic just steps aside as Yeonjun staggers over, climbs up into the ambulance and flumps against Taehyun in a desperate sort of hug. They both groan as the action aggravates their wounds, but neither care enough to stop.
And he knows he just saw Taehyun, just left the maze with him - and before that, Taehyun was only missing for what, two hours, anyway? But he is so, excessively, bone-crushingly relieved to have the younger in his arms again. He’s feeling like he’s never, ever going to let him go again.
“Okay, come on, we need to get you two patched up,” the medics are saying, and Yeonjun lets himself be pulled off of Taehyun but he won’t be pulled away. He stays right beside him, Taehyun’s shoulder always pressed tight against his as the medics get back to work, side by side to clean them both up, wiping away the blood and dirt. Slowly removing the evidence that this night ever happened.
+∞+
No one believes them.
The park owners agree to not press charges for trespassing. They manage to get hold of the horror maze attendants, Jay and his friends, who confirm their story. Yeonjun was only looking for his friend, nothing ulterior, nothing evil. His actions were driven by desperation and love, definitely not a desire to mess around or cause trouble.
The explanation of where Taehyun was, what he was doing the whole time, is harder to sell. But it’s the truth, so they stick to it.
They know the owners don’t quite believe them - even Soobin, Kai, Beomgyu seem unsure, concerned, dubious when they hear the chain of events. It could all just be an elaborate story, a bizarre excuse they came up with to justify their misbehavior - and that would be far more plausible than the truth, Yeonjun knows.
But as they tell their story, share what happened to them, there’s no doubt the owners start feeling a little sorry for them, worn down by seeing how shaken they are, from hearing their babblings about a monster and a magic mirror.
And given how injured the two of them are at the end of it, the owners decide it’s better to just forget about the whole thing, sweep it all away. They’re strongly encouraged to never return to Eternity Park, but neither of them find that they mind, particularly.
They waive the fine for the broken mirror, too.
+∞+
“They thought we were crazy,” Taehyun says on the drive home. Yeonjun is in the backseat with him, stitched hands wrapped thick with bandages but refusing to let go of Taehyun’s hand anyway, not even for a second.
They spent the whole night at the hospital, getting shards of glass pulled out of them and being questioned by the police. Yeonjun had kicked up a fuss to keep the two of them together throughout it all, and the doctors and police alike had been swayed by the pitiful state of them and hadn’t pressed any further. Neither of them left the other’s sight the entire night, then before they knew it, it was all finished. It was all over, case closed, they were all patched up and released out into the world.
“It doesn’t matter. We know what happened,” Yeonjun replies. “You know what you saw.”
At their claims, the park had allowed the police into the maze to search for the alleged ‘monster’. They found the shattered mirror, and the trail of blood the two of them had inadvertently left behind. They found the thick gray cloth that had been covering the mirror - and returned it to Taehyun. His scarf, the massive one, from the market. Yeonjun knew there was something about it, had almost recognized it at the time - but it was only as he was sitting watching Taehyun on a hospital bed try to shake the glass out of it that it all clicked together.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. If he’d been paying attention, could he have solved it sooner, freed Taehyun sooner? When he first saw it there over the mirror, on the walkthrough with Kai and Jay - what if he had pulled it off then? Could they have witnessed it together, rescued Taehyun together, found an explanation for what was going on? Could they have discovered what that monster was?
As it stands, the police searched the attraction, the foyer, the study, the dungeons, everywhere, and they didn’t find anything else.
So it’s over. It’s finished.
Now, in the morning, with Soobin driving them back from the hospital, the memories already seem a little fuzzy, cleared away by the sun rising in the distance. The pain is still there, and the memory of the fear, but the actual events seem hazy, unreal.
“Feels like a dream already,” Yeonjun says.
Taehyun huffs. “A nightmare.”
He won’t say what it was like, in that mirror world. If it was cold, dark, dizzying, if it felt real or fake, magical or suffocating. He won’t say what it felt like getting pulled in, or coming crashing out. He just won’t say.
And he won’t say what he saw either. The monster. The police asked him to describe it, to get a clearer idea of what they were looking for, but Taehyun had refused. They asked again, kept asking, but he refused every time, adamantly and passionately refusing to say what it was, what it looked like.
Yeonjun doubts he’s ever going to describe it - and he won’t ask him to. His own impression of it was more than enough: the heavy footsteps, the awful sounds it made. He’s desperate to forget it as fast as he can.
He’ll listen, if Taehyun ever wants to talk about it. He’ll be there for him if he ever needs to work through it, but doesn’t need to know more. He doesn’t need to relive it, and he’s sure Taehyun feels the same.
“We made it out, though. We’re okay,” Yeonjun says, and squeezes Taehyun’s hand as best he can with his mitten-like paws.
In the back of the car, on their way home, safe, Taehyun smiles. It’s his first one since this whole thing started - small, just a little smile, but it’s genuine. It’s real.
He’s alive, he’s okay. He squeezes Yeonjun’s hand back.