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vocab_drabbles2023-05-26 11:16 am
[Challenge #62: Existential.] ENIGMA: An Illusion Named Family. "Garden of Eden."
Fandom: ENIGMA: An Illusion Named Family.
Author:
luminiousRating: T
Word Count: 885 Words
Characters/Pairings: Yoo Minghuk, Yoo Minho, Yoo Samoon, Yoo Cheun, Yoo Minwoo, Yoo Yun-a, Minghuk’s mother, Minghuk’s father, Chief Choi, Mr. Steward
Warnings: Brief but graphic depictions of violence and death, depictions of mental illnesses and depression/suicide, medical malpractice and wrongful experimentation, and spoilers for ENIGMA: An Illusion Named Family, in case this troubles anyone.
Summary:
Yet, despite this, while dreams and the real world were preferable to nightmares for most people, for Yoo Minghuk nightmares were preferable to anything else—
Preferable to the red apple in his hand in reality.
I.
FOR TEN LINGERING, EXCRUCIATING YEARS, Yoo Minghuk has never dreamed, with nightmares being the only fantasies and visions that embrace him and whisper foreboding and eerie words once he slumbers—two nightmares, to be exact.
In the first one, he’s surrounded by almost pitch darkness the whole time.
With only matchsticks at his disposal, he wanders within the many hallways and staircases, and rooms of the Yoo Mansion, the company he passes by or runs into the most always being that shadow, that obscurity.
With sounds similar to meat being minced up and sliced, the eerie half-mutterings of a madman’s fury and promises of misery, and the barely visible sightings of an umbra figure covered in pure obsidian, that shadow at the start always pops up out of nowhere for small chases and soon starts unnerving pursuits for minutes on end all around the gigantic estate, thirsty for the blood of Yoo Minghuk, and quenching for the flesh of his siblings as well, and soon that shadow gets its fill of the latter group.
Minho is stabbed and Cheun is disfigured—Samoon and Minwoo are put down and even the youngest Yun-a is eliminated—their mother deceased on the ground with the left side of her face and upper body drenched in cruor that soaks the floor under her, all of them coated in the darkness that since his childhood has haunted and tormented him.
Then, there is one, and at first, what used to only be on his mind was that with each sibling found deceased all that would happen would be his surviving siblings pointing the finger at him either subtly or directly.
“You were the only one close to Minho at the time!” Yun-a always argues.
“There’s something severely wrong with you,” Samoon always tells him to his face in stoic disgust, “and I do not think anyone in their right mind would believe the excuse you just gave.”
“If you’re as innocent as you say you are”—Cheun always stops doing her makeup by that point of her short but strong rant to make sure Minho sees her glare—“then you’ll have no problem giving us any sharp object you might possess.”
Even Minwoo, the kindest of them all and the closest to Minghuk, always mutters out, “Maybe something must’ve happened to make him forget what he just did…?”
It used to get him mad, get him infuriated to the point where he’d run away into the darkness that he’s feared for years, and in some versions of the nightmare he’d only hang around with matchsticks and candlesticks as a source of vision and a type of comfort.
In one version of the nightmare, however, when Minghuk managed to stumble his way into the intricate church area of his home where marble statues of divine angels stood and stained glass showing events from both the Old and New Testament now dull in color due to the obscurity of the night were planted—Yun-a’s cold corpse at the center of the baroque and embellished red carpet—out of nowhere all the lights were turned on and as bright as the glaring sun, and with that change that shadow was a fusion of horrors lacking light no more.
Instead, it was a bloody-eyed Minghuk.
“You were so excited slashing and cutting away at those so-called ‘phantoms’,” that shadow had taunted with a cruel smile and between a merciless laugh, his appearance so identical to Minghuk it was sickening, “acting as if you didn’t hear the sobbing of forgiveness from Yuna or screams of agony and confusion from Minghuk.”
In anger, the surviving Yoo jabbed any weapon he could find into that shadow—that pretender—until nothing was left, and he was left by himself with no corpse to confirm his greatest enemy’s death, a single matchstick by his side. Minghuk traveled around the mansion to see if perhaps his siblings and mother were resurrected with that shadow’s departure, but he found that their bodies also vanished, and yet the doors to the outside were still locked.
There was no way out and no way inside, and slowly but surely Minghuk came to the realization that if that shadow was truly him and he had truly killed his family, that in itself was an illusion, a hallucination, for there was no one but himself in the lightless, eerie mansion, and that version of the nightmare had haunted him so much it ended with him igniting the final matchstick in his disposal.
The entrance and soon other sectors of the Yoo Mansion began to slowly but surely be engulfed in hot and deadly flames, and as those same bounds of fire began to touch Minghuk himself, he only stood with a dazed face as his skin started to char and melt and his vision turned dark.
Since that iteration of the first nightmare, the accusations from his siblings in newer versions of it begin to hurt his soul more, and soon they repeat in his mind so frequently that whenever he wakes up he often spends his whole time with cotton in his ears if only to not hear any type of sound, with the only visible change being that his fear of the darkness grows more with each passing day—
As well as his questioning and understanding of the illusion that is family.
[FIN.]
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