People were walking toward the cabin, arms full of bags and boxes, voices overlapping in a messy chorus. Someone cursed about the weight, someone else laughed too loudly, and a stray plastic bag flapped uselessly at someone's side like a flag of surrender.
For a moment, they were just shapes.
Motion. Color. Noise.
Then their faces sharpened, like someone had adjusted the focus in his head.
Kevin, loud enough to count as a noise violation even in the middle of a forest.The short guy stuck to his side, hyping every sentence like he was paid to do so.The couple welded together on principle, moving as one two-headed being.The shy girl that always hovered just a little too close to his shoulder, as if caught between stepping away and staying near.
It felt familiar.
Comfortable.
Like plans made months ago, finally happening after too many "we should totally do it" messages.
Didn't we talk about going to Kevin's grandpa's cabin once…? Did we actually plan this? When?
His brain tried to flip through memories and hit static. He knew there should've been group chats, spammed emojis, arguments over dates and rides, one person nearly backing out then getting dragged back in.
When he reached for the details, all he got was a vague blur of "we said we'd do it someday" with no before, no after.
"Hey! You coming or just gonna stand there and stare?" Kevin shouted from ahead.
Hao blinked and realized he'd stopped walking.
Cold air hit his lungs again when he inhaled. Pine. Damp soil. Old wood. The kind of clean that didn't exist near roads or buses or apartment blocks.
It was nice.
Too nice.
The air didn't sting his nose, didn't feel thin or sharp the way cold usually did. It just slid in, smooth and easy, like the idea of fresh air more than the real thing.
He stepped forward, boots pressing into the frost-touched ground, following the others toward the cabin. Each step left a faint mark in the pale crust. When he glanced back, the earlier footprints were already softening, some of them fading faster than they should, like the ground was quietly wiping them away.
I'm forgetting something, he thought.
A faint itch bloomed in the back of his mind. Something important.
For a heartbeat, the feeling sharpened, bright and urgent, like a word on the tip of his tongue or a notification he'd just swiped away without reading.
Then it slipped out of reach, dissolving as if he'd never had it.
Up close, the cabin looked like it had grown out of the forest instead of being built in it.
Thick wooden beams, dark with age. A roof weighed down by slow-gathered moss. The windows were small, yellow light leaking out around the heavy curtains. The porch creaked when Kevin stomped up onto it.
"Home sweet fortress," Kevin announced, shouldering the door open.
"More like murder documentary material," the short guy muttered, still grinning.
The words sounded like a joke he'd made before. Or heard before. The tone, the timing, the way Kevin didn't even glance back before answering.
Hao couldn't remember when.
He followed them inside.
Heat swallowed him in one step.
The air was stuffy with woodsmoke and warm dust. The floorboards groaned under everyone's weight, but the cabin's bones felt solid. Old, but not fragile. Lived in.
It felt like a place they'd been to before, in memories he couldn't fully access.
Music crackled from a speaker already perched on a side table, someone's playlist jumping between songs like it couldn't commit. Bottles clinked on a low table. A couple of half-unpacked bags had been torn open, clothes and snacks spilling across the couch.
When he glanced away and looked back, one of the bags was a little more open than before, as if someone had touched it. He hadn't seen anyone move.
Hao drifted toward a wall, watching.
Kevin was in the center of it all, naturally. He'd barely put his bag down before he was already narrating something, hands moving, voice booming, smile bright enough to run on grid power like it had always been. The short guy beside him provided comments no one asked for, throwing in jokes, laughing too hard at nothing special.
The couple had claimed one corner of the couch and part of each other's air supply. They had the look of people who would vanish into a room the second the lights dimmed.
The shy girl hovered near them, close to the group but not quite in it. Her eyes ran from person to person, like she couldn't remember them clearly either.
What was her name again?
The question rose clear and sharp in his mind.
He frowned.
He'd definitely heard it before. He could see her face easily: the way she kept tucking the same strand of hair behind her ear, the soft sweater sleeves half-swallowing her hands, the way she smiled more with one corner of her mouth than the other.
His mind filled in everything except the one thing he asked for.
The music jumped a few decibels, someone laughed too loudly, and the thought broke apart. By the time he tried to catch it again, it had thinned out into nothing.
His brain supplied a comforting lie instead: You know her. You just forgot for a second. It happens.
Someone shoved a plastic cup into his hand.
"Here," the short guy said. "House special."
The liquid inside smelled faintly like pineapple. Hao took a tentative sip.
It tasted like warm vanilla. Too smooth. No burn. No cheap alcohol sting. No aftertaste curling up from his throat. Not even that faint chemical sweetness drinks usually had.
He pulled the cup away and looked at it.
Dream alcohol.
That was the only label that made sense.
He stared into it for a second, waiting for his brain to object, to call it out as impossible.
Nothing came.
For a moment, the room went a little distant, sounds turning softer, like he'd taken a step back from his own body. The edges of his doubt blurred, as if someone had pressed a thumb into wet paint and smeared it around.
His heartbeat stayed steady. No warmth in his face. No fuzzy head. Just the idea of drinking without any of the consequences.
He decided not to think too hard about it.
Time stretched.
Or maybe it skipped. It was hard to tell.
Conversations wove in and out, dissolving into background noise the moment he stopped focusing on them. People laughed. Someone argued with the speaker over music choices. The glow of his phone screen flashed from where he'd left it on the table. Cards slapped against wood in a game he only half followed.
When he tried to remember how the game started, he couldn't. One moment there had been nothing on the table. The next, cards were already in people's hands, piles of snacks moved aside to make space that hadn't been there before.
Whenever he let his attention drift, the whole scene felt almost too… clean.
No awkward pauses. No off-topic rambling that killed the mood. No one checking messages mid-sentence and derailing everything. Just a smooth loop of "good time with friends," moments stitched together without any of the usual mess in between.
Every time something felt off, the sensation slid away again, like his thoughts were hitting a padded wall and bouncing back.
It's just a normal night, he told himself. So what if I don't remember planning it? People forget stuff.
He tried to imagine the messages they must've exchanged. The invite. The "you're coming, right?" The directions. The stupid sticker Kevin always spammed when people took too long to answer.
Nothing came.
It wasn't like remembering something forgotten. It was like pulling at a rope that had never been tied to anything.
Eventually, Kevin climbed onto a chair.
He wobbled a little, arms out, soaking in the attention like sunlight. Someone booed half-heartedly. Someone else shushed them with exaggerated drama.
"Heeey! Listen up!" Kevin called, grinning wide. "This place is huge. Hide and seek?"
The words dropped into the room with weird déjà vu, like a line from a cutscene he'd already watched once.
A chorus of half-drunk agreement rose immediately.
"Bro, we're not five," the short guy said, already laughing.
"That's why it's funny," Kevin shot back. "We do it in the dark. No lights. Full horror game mode."
"That's how people die in movies," someone commented from the couch.
"So don't be a movie extra," Kevin replied, shrugging.
They laughed in the right places. The rhythm of it was almost too perfect, like somebody had timed the reactions for effect.
Hao felt all their gazes slide past him, expecting him to roll his eyes, to drift toward the couch and stay there, to do what he always did: exist at the edges of things.
"Sure," he heard himself say. "I'll be it."
The room seemed to blink with him, just once.
Like the scene had been waiting for that line.
He surprised himself more than anyone else.
"I'll be it," he repeated, firmer this time.
Kevin stopped mid-grin, then laughed and pointed at him like this had been the plan all along.
"See? Hao gets it," he said. "Alright, then. You're seeker."
For a split second, the chatter around them froze. Not completely, but enough that it felt like the room had held its breath. Then everything restarted in the same beat, conversations picking back up without a single wrong note.
Hao lifted the plastic cup to his lips again, tasting that fake, warm vanilla that never changed and never faded.
Something about his own voice felt different in his ears.
Like it belonged to someone who had finally stepped off the wall and into the center of the scene.
Or to someone walking right where something else wanted him.