The pharmacist stared at the drop of water trickling down Kazimir's throat while she gulped an entire water bottle in one go. He eyed the drop until it disappeared in the neckline of her shirt and looked up to meet her closed eyes and furrowed eyebrows while she forced a pill down her throat with a full bottle as instructed by him.

He spoke only when she removed the rim of the now empty bottle away from her lips and took a sharp breath.

"You need to keep drinking lots of water daily for as long as you take these pills," he said gesturing to the bottle of pills in her hand with his eyes, "They're heavy on the stomach so nausea and vomiting may occur quite frequently."

Kazimir nodded placing the lid back on the bottle for later use before throwing it inside her bag.

"Thank you," she said putting the pills beside the bottle in the bag before looking up and extending her hand for her prescription and ID card.

"Get a new prescription the next time you need to buy these. Not every pharmacist is going to let an outdated one pass," he said giving her the paper dating back a few months and her card back.

"I will keep coming here then." Kazimir flashed him a tired smile knowing well enough her face did her more favors than her fabricated story of how she had lost her latest prescription.

"I hope not," he said returning the smile, "I hope I never see you here again. Not even for paracetamol, let alone for methotrexate."

Kazimir nodded and took her leave. A warm breeze greeted her when she stepped outside the pharmacy doors and she started walking to the doors of the adjoining hospital. Though she was quite familiar with the hospital, she hadn't ever been inside the pharmacy before.

She knew her way all too well and it didn't take her much time to make it to the rooftop of the building. She walked to the railing and placed her arms on the iron bar and rested her chin on it and looked down at the city.

The memory of an exam left hanging stopped haunting her as soon as she walked out of the campus gates but now her mind was clouded with something else. She couldn't tell if the ache in her chest was another pleurisy attack or her heart was breaking apart for real this time. The presence of the cracks was so loud that she could tell they sounded like one single name; Minho.

She stared at the city and the scene played in front of her reminded her of how much it had slowly but surely changed over the past years, the draft of a few buildings now skyscraper novels. She looked at the few building that hadn't changed and thought about all the times she had stared at them whenever she had an appointment and had decided to wait it out staring at the city instead of the waiting room walls. She wondered if the old buildings would be able to recognize her smiling face after getting used to always seeing her frowning.

She climbed up over the railing and spread her arms wide as if she had wings and looked up at the sky; the same one from a few years ago, unchanged. She wondered if the sky would be able to forget her crying face after getting used to only seeing her tears so often.

The wind hit her face and she breathed it in, her chest rising and falling with the motion making the ache in her chest worse but she ignored the pain. Her eyelids dropped over her eyes and she felt her toes curling subtly reminding her of the concrete beneath her feet. At least the ground remembered her presence.

It was a freedom, in a sense, to be able to stand this close to physical death and not let it devour her. To be in control, even. The bag weighing down her shoulder carried both the problem and the solution all in one bottle but now she was in control over it and the thought almost made her laugh.

She downed the first drop of bad memories already, the contents of the pill now spreading into her bloodstream and probably healing her, knowing nothing about the fact that to heal her, they needed to be forgiven for the grave sins they had committed.

The packaging of the bottle had changed over the years but Kazimir was no fool. How could she not recognize the medication she had been fighting years to avoid because they were the reason her parents turned her into who she was.

The venom and the antidote all in one.

She took in a sharp breath to dismiss the thoughts and the memories but the feelings lingered as they have been for as long as she could remember and the need to hear Naomi's voice one more time forced her to take a step back.

She climbed down from the railing because seeing Naomi slit her wrist had scarred her enough to never even think about harming herself. It was just another freedom that Naomi had robbed from her.

She dug through her bag for her phone but when she couldn't find it, she pulled out a marker pen she carried around everywhere and sat down with her back against the railing, against the city. She wondered if the city would ever forgive her for turning her back on it, for forgetting to acknowledge its beauty on so many occasions, for forgetting that the city did nothing wrong but to give a place for all her misery to begin years before she was born. For giving her parents their first encounter. She was in love with Prague the same way she was in love with everything else, poetically, for the pain, for the memories, for the first encounters and reasons to always keep a pen nearby.

She took out the pill bottle and placed it in front of her on the concrete and bent her leg and started doodling on the fabric covering her thigh just above her knee. The gray color of her pants provided her with the perfect blank space to put down a few lines but when she ran out of space, she leaned forward and started writing on the concrete.

Be grateful, she told herself, repeating the phrase for the thousandth time since she left the exam hall in an attempt to make her heart slow its beats and her head slow her thoughts.

There was too much going on in both her heart and her mind but reminding herself to be grateful was her little trick to fool them both into thinking that she had something to cherish and hold dear.

Be grateful for your life, others have it much worse than you do, she told herself, the thought of putting a stop to her heartbeat being pushed aside for the time being.

Be grateful for your family, she told herself thinking about Naomi and her family.

A subtle movement made her look up and she saw Yoongi walking out of the stairway door onto the rooftop but just like last time, he didn't notice her yet. Kazimir looked away to give him personal space because he looked like he was struggling to pull his oxygen cart behind him through the door.

Kazimir didn't know when he finally looked up and saw her but he didn't acknowledge her. Instead, he came to stand beside her and leaned against the railing and looked at the city and Kazimir let him be. They stayed silent, not acknowledging each other's presence until finally Yoongi sat beside her and looked towards her face.

She looked at him too and he stared back.

Kazimir was the first one to look away and Yoongi did the same after a second, moving his eyes to where she was scribbling.

"English," he noted looking at the alphabets.

"Yeah. Do you speak?" Kazimir asked in English while underlining some words and crossing out others.

"No. Small English, small Czech, big Korean," he explained making Kazimir chuckle which in turn made him uncomfortable and he looked away awkwardly.

"How old are you?" Kazimir asked out of curiosity, deciding to use English as their middle ground rather than Czech or even Korean. She didn't have any problem speaking Korean but she had a feeling she could get away with pretending she didn't understand it just for fun.

"Nine. Ten." He held up nine and then ten fingers to represent the number nineteen, "You?"

"Two. One." Kazimir did the same by holding up two fingers and then one for twenty-one.

"Old," he commented, "Two years."

"Yeah, two years older," Kazimir noted looking down at the little poem she had just jotted down.

They both fell silent again and stared at it. Kazimir wondered if Yoongi knew enough English to read the words but she didn't ask.

"Is it sad?" Yoongi asked a few minutes later looking at the words.

"Huh?" Kazimir blinked looking up at him.

"This," he said pointing to the poem, "Is it sad? You write it because you are sad? And now, sad is there and not... here?" He pointed to her chest.

Kazimir shrugged. She didn't have an answer to his question but the thought nonetheless took her off guard.

"How can you ask such a quote-worthy question when you can barely speak the language? It's not fair to the rest of us who worked hard for our vocabularies."

Yoongi looked at her open-mouthed as if he had no idea what she said and Kazimir smiled. Who knew you didn't need the fancy vocabulary to say things that hit the heart.

"Do you want me to read it for you?" She asked.

Yoongi waited for a second to let her words sink in and finally nodded.

"My skies are sinking under your foreign love, father.

Why must my land not do the same?

Your homesickness is what stains our blood,

And we carry it well,

She is home

And I,

The sickness."

Yoongi let the words sink in for a minute before speaking.

"I don't understand," he said.

Kazimir looked at her poem and back at him and down at the poem again. She sighed and capped her marker pen before tapping the word father with it.

"It's a poem about my dad," she said moving the pen and tapping the word blood now, "And mom. He was from here and he fell in love with a pretty tourist and they got married and moved to her homeland where eventually when all the high wore off, he couldn't handle it anymore. It broke my mom's heart for all the wrong reasons because she thought just because he couldn't love the culture, he couldn't love her. The last part is about my sister and me," she finished tapping home and sickness consecutively.

Kazimir could tell Yoongi was lost but she didn't care. She loved narrating stories whether someone was listening or not which suddenly made her think of Jimin and the little contract he made her sign. It was like a bolt of lightning that hit her brain and she decided just like that that she couldn't stop her breathing because she had made a silly promise. Not like she needed a reason to keep breathing, but Jimin had made her realize there was still a writers ink running through her blood and she couldn't bring herself to let it go to waste. She decided to see where the contract leads herbefore quitting the tiring job of breathing and living.

"How do you and Jimin know each other?" She asked.

"Jimin hyung?" Yoongi asked, his ears perking up the familiar name.

"Hyung?"

"He... he uh- he chingu? No, wait, he uh-" he stammered awkwardly looking for the correct word in English, "small friend?"

"Small friend?" Kazimir chuckled trying to understand and secretly decided to always ask him questions in English for his cute responses.

"Small, we small friends, now we big. And friends," Yoongi explained gesturing two different heights with his hands and it clicked with Kazimir what he was trying to say.

"Oh, you mean you were childhood friends?" She asked.

Yoongi stared at her for a second and finally shrugged.

"Can we please just not embarrass me any further?" He asked in Korean, following his shrug with a nod.

"Cute." Kazimir smiled and leaned her head back to rest it against the railing wall. She partially turned to look at him and extended her arm and pointed at the cannula across his face with her forefinger.

Yoongi looked up at her and understood the unuttered question immediately.

"Uh- I-" he began in English but decided mid-sentence to switch back to Korean because he felt more comfortable that way, "I have a lung infection thing called cystic fibrosis, not that you would understand but it's a bitch sometimes."

A chuckle escaped Kazimir's lips followed by fits of laughter.

"Sometimes? Yoongi, right?" She asked and continued when he nodded, "Listen Yoongi, we got cheated out of basic body functions," she said amid laughter, "Not that you would understand but it's a bitch a lot of the times. And you know what we feed the bitch? We feed it ourselves and our dreams and our love and our hate and our time," she continued without noticing that her laughter was slowly turning to dry sobs, "and our luck out of all. We're the unluckiest people in the world because we know what went wrong and we get to see it every day, every fucking day."

Yoongi backed his head a little away from her as if to avoid rays of her hopelessness from hitting him and tried to understand her words. He didn't comprehend most of what she was saying but he knew exactly what emotions she was trying to convey because he briefly saw himself in her. His little angry moments at life appeared in front of his eyes as he listened to her body language and he realized that even if he didn't know what was wrong, he could tell something wasn't right.

"Hey," he said gently when her words ceased to let way for more tears and sobs, "Look, let me tell you something."

Kazimir looked up at the Korean words wondering why he was saying things when he thought she didn't understand. But regardless of it, she waited for him to finish.

"If you're sad because you are sick, because that's normally why I get sad sometimes, but anyway, if you are sad, just imagine tiny versions of yourself working inside you. Imagine them singing and humming while they work and pushing blood cells around and imagine them having cutesy encounters like bumping into each other and then blushing and running away onto their ways. Or imagine them having pillow fights with bacteria. Imagine your cells having so much fun trying to keep you alive. You gotta push away the sadness for these tiny versions of you. Because they're putting in the work to keep you whole, to keep you, you," he said and looked away.

A subtle hue of a blush bloomed on his cheeks and Kazimir's heart swelled at the sight.

"You're so full of good stories," she said wiping away her tears and thinking back to his witch theory, "You make them sound like they're not fabricated at all."

Yoongi kept looking down at his feet, the English words flying over his head but he tried to read her body language to understand her thoughts and realized she had calmed down.

"Tiny versions of you must be tired of carrying so much water to your eyes," he said running his hand through his hair, "Give them a break."

"Oh, don't worry about that. My tear ducts are quitting the job. No more crying for me," she admitted softly, "Maybe I did overwork them."

Yoongi finally looked at her and his eyes moved between both her eyes while his mind processed her words.

"I wish I could understand," he said.

"I wish I did too."

Minho stared at the front door, his back enduring the weight of the hour he had been sitting straight on the couch waiting for it to open. But it didn't. And he remained waiting.

Time was playing tricks on him and his eyelids drooped lower over his eyes making him believe he had been up for days because the exhaustion felt too real for him to believe it was only as old as the hours after his phone call to Kazimir.

The past six years pressed down on him again and again and again but his mind always stopped at the same point down his memory lane; the same car ride; the same Kazimir and the same bloodied hands resting on her lap while she drifted off to sleep in his passenger seat on their way back from the hospital.

He remembered being hesitant about his destination, about where to drive a seventeen-year-old after she had just lost her parents, about where her home was now that she had no one to go back to.

He knew the right thing to do was to take her home with him, to his family and Naomi but his knuckles had tightened over the steering wheel.

He had wanted to ask her if she was okay, or where she had wanted to go first but the hesitancy took over his tongue and he never said anything.

The unsaid words accumulated over the next few years and here he was six years later with more unsaid words taking up his mind but this time he knew his silence was not one-sided.

They had both been playing this silly game of who can keep the other in the dark the longest and Minho knew Kazimir had won by a fair margin. She had managed to keep him confined within his definition of who she was well enough that he had started to believe she was always twisted in the head for hating on him.

He looked down at the ring in his ring finger and imagined what would it have been like if he had never met Naomi or married her. But he dismissed the idea all too quickly before the 'what ifs' plagued his mind further.

But the idea returned just as quickly as it left.

What if, he thought looking down at the ring again, What if this ring really is the cause of her illness? What if it's all my fault?