Hi!! Unfortunately, I’ve only now watched and finished Reply 1988, and the series was so incredibly heart wrenching and amazing. I couldn’t help but fall for the pining between Deoksun and Junghwan, and your stories are so well-written and the way you describe the characters feels so true to the story that my heartache for the two is both intensified and appeased. Your writing is so beautiful. Thank you for tugging at my heartstrings with your gems of stories 💕
oh my
thank you! <3 i haven’t checked this tumblr in awhile so maybe you sent this 2 months ago or 2 years ago, but regardless my gratitude is timeless
Yoo Jung had always known that, rich or poor, everyone owned a rotating closet of personas. Personalities were just like clothes—customizable and seasonal.
Baek Inho punched, scratched, and slapped, but he never scarred. They would bruise a motley palette of purple and green, maybe swell a bit, but they would always return back to their unblemished state in a few days. His fingers never looked as defective as they were, and that made him want to fight all the more.
Selectively permeable—the concept summed him up very well. Except where nature was passive about it, he was certainly not. People pestered and prodded him, always itching to get through to him, but no one ever did, except for—
“Jung.” Seol’s voice floated through his earphone-earplugs.
“Swiper, no swiping.” The sass floated down from behind and above his seat on the stairwell.
“I don’t think Dora’s on Tinder, mi amigos.” His eyes never left the carousel of portraits on his smartphone. He briefly paused to contemplate a duck-pouting brunette. That one was a left.
“Amigo, it’s mi amigas. Maybe you should watch some Dora.”
“Che, whatever.”
“Keep swiping and you’ll get Carpal’s tunnel. Or STD’s, if you’re lucky enough to get laid.”
“Or I could fall love at first swipe with Trinity, age 22.” He intoned her pithy bio out loud and then waved her carseat selfie profile picture at Mia. “We can be daft together over Daft Punk.”
Mia quirked an eyebrow as her hands began to motion the choreography to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”.
Leon smirked, swiped left, and moved onto the next girl. “GoT Game of Thrones? Down to take you over. What a refreshing way to say we should Netflix and chill.”
“I know right, charming.” They lapsed back into silence. Right. Left. Left. “You know, I didn’t peg you as a Tinder boy.”
“Mom’s suggestion.” Mia’s face had incredulity written all over it, so Leon just jumped straight into the explanation. “She’s getting progressive. Said there’s fish in the sea, but there’s more in the ‘Net. Online.”
“Then why aren’t you on eHarmony.” He bumped his shoulder against hers. “Okcupid?” And then elbowed her.
“I can’t leave my romantic life up to an algorithm.”
“So you’ll leave it up to something as dumb as picking left or right?” His left hand went up to comb his hair as his right deposited the smartphone into his pocket.
“No comment.” He gazed out into the stairwell window, chin resting on his hand.
“I’ll have you know that there is a three-dimensional girl next to you.”
At this, Leon just hummed into his palm, and that sat in silence for a bit. Mia’s forearms rested on her kneecaps, and her hands were lazily mimicking Daft Hands.
“Yeah, you’re right for me.” He muttered, his words warbled and muffled.
“Hm?”
“I said you’re a right for me.” He repeated more confidently, batting her a cheeky wink.
There is something about the way the world inverts when Junghwan flies, when street lamps become artificial constellations and Earth becomes a patchwork quilt of soil and concrete.
The table that was set for four only sat one. Three pairs of chopsticks laid dormant over three untouched rice bowls. The sole pair in motion ferried vinegar-soaked eggplants and lukewarm spinach into a bowl. It was a leftover-of-a-leftover sort of dinner.
The dining boy exhibited a great deal of ambidexterity. As his left hand exercised his chopsticks, his right casually swiped across his phone screen. He went at his feed with more appetite than his food. It was the normal slew of selfies and hybrid junk food tutorials.
His infinite scroll down his infinite scroll feed was only interrupted by the nondescript ringtone of his phone and the wrinkled face that temporarily wallpapered his screen.
“Hello?” He asked, casting a glance at the vacancies around the table. It was the norm, not the exception.
“You guys can start eating without me. The commute is long today.”
“Okay dad.” His chopsticks reached for another piece of chili chicken. From the floor above him, his mother’s chair wheeled about. If he tried hard enough, he could pick up her faint yet focused mouse clicks over their backyard cicadas and imagine her hunched over her laptop, attention leashed to the graphs on the screen.
After he hung up his ten second phone call, he resumed with his food and feed. But somewhere, in between the cheesy group selfies and the sodium-heavy heat of the chili chicken, he swallowed a bitterness that would just not go down.
Selectively permeable—the concept summed him up very well. Except where nature was passive about it, he was certainly not. People pestered and prodded him, always itching to get through to him, but no one ever did, except for—
“Jung.” Seol’s voice floated through his earphone-earplugs.
Biology was never Yoojung’s forte, but it’s not like he would ever let anyone know that.
“Hydrophobic substances get in, hydrophilic things stay out. It’s selectively permeable, and that’s the beauty of the chemistry behind phospholipid bilayers.
He listened attentively, with his hands clasped in front of his lips and his eyes fixated on the blackboard. He was, in every inch of his posture, the model student. He was well aware of that.
He dutifully studied his professor’s doodles of phosphate groups and protein mosaic models, even though in actuality, he saw nothing but a chicken scratch of chalk. That did not worry him—the concepts were elementary enough. Out of the periphery of his vision, he saw Sangchul toying with his smartphone, flitting through some forum website. That was someone who should be worrying.
“Unconsciously, we filter things in every second, everywhere. Our channels take in what’s necessary, things like glucose, sodium, potassium. Everything else that is polar is essentially shunted. This is the idea of being selectively permeable.”
Ironically, Yoojung locked eyes with his professor for half a second as he did his cursory glance across the classroom. The old professor’s squinted gaze often boomeranged back to Yoojung; after all, it was hard to stare too long at his other texting or otherwise disengaged pupils.
As usual and precisely on the hour, the class jostled out into the hallways. As usual, Yoojung didn’t partake in the traffic, lagging behind instead to submit his paper early for extra credit and have some face time with the professor. There was an art to kissing up to adults, and Yoojung had all the techniques for it down pat. Life was all about technique—that much he learned from Baek Inho.
One pointed question on the connection between basal metabolic rates and sodium-potassium pumps and a letter of recommendation request later, Yoojung strolled out of the classroom, earphones in, music on mute. As he wound through the hallways, he took in the white noise around him. He let gossip go in one ear and out the other.
Selectively permeable—the concept summed him up very well. Except where nature was passive about it, he was certainly not. People pestered and prodded him, always itching to get through to him, but no one ever did, except for—
“Jung.” Seol’s voice floated through his earphone-earplugs. As he turned and tugged out his earphones, he saw her exit the stairwell he had just passed and jog to his side.
“Hey, where did you just come from?” He smiled by way of hello and at the way she was self-consciously hand-combing her frizzy, dyed waves.
“Office hours. Professor was all grouchy at first, because he thought I was going to point-grub—which, okay I was. He lightened up after we chatted a bit about the last lecture though.”
“How so?”
“Helps that I actually still come to his 8AM’s. Never have I felt more grateful that I have a morning class. Even if it means I have to rush to school with ramen noodle hair.”
He quirked an eyebrow, how ramen could be a figure of speech for hair he had no clue.
Seol sighed. “I’ll treat you to some instant ramen next time at the convenience store. Wait, what am I saying? What kind of date is that?”
Her hand instinctively went to pet down her bangs, in part because of habit, in part because of insecurity, but Yoojung took her hand in his instead, tugging her towards the building exit.
“My kind. Now why were you hustling the professor for points now?”
And as she explained the aftermath of another abomination of a group project (this time, at least she had not been blindsided by their lack of contribution—they were quite upfront about it), he realized that Seol was quite possibly the only person who had ever waltzed past all his barriers.
She had done it unwittingly, when she was unguarded and raw. When she couldn’t keep her inner alcoholic in check and vomited over his neat fabric sneakers. When he eavesdropped into her restrained tantrum with her mother, shouting-slash-pleading that her parents could really stop coddling Hong Joon and spare her a penny or a thought for once.
And ever since she had diffused into his life, she had been adding entropy to every corner of his life. But for once, he found the chaos welcome.
Gray stucco alleys, wet splintered patios, the odd littered newspaper—Ssangmundong never changed.
Yet, in its stasis, everyone else had—Deoksun included.
Seoul had noticed the area’s stagnation too, and that was why by the year’s end, Ssangmundong would be reincarnated into stiff, spiffy high-rises. Where ten families used to squat there could potentially be fifty, each one orderly stacked atop another. Neighbors would be closer than ever. Knocking at someone’s doorstep would take three steps rather than three minutes. Yet somehow, as the physical distance minimized, the social distance maximized.
Deoksun was fairly sure the very concept of neighbors was dying. So far the most she had seen of hers was their snow-crusted boots. Granted, in Ssangmundong, there had never really been neighbors either—everyone had been family.
neighborhood watch was originally romance, but this conclusion probably won’t be. sorry! what i’m writing isn’t necessarily on the happy side either, LOL
but i hope that what i write can provoke some thoughts? :) i’m exploring how we interact with nostalgia and how we can move on past it
Hi~ writernim :) I really love and miss your fanfic specially bout Jh/ds couple, I hope you will make one if you can >< ( as junghwan birthday present ) xD sorry if I Offend you ><
hello! this doesn’t offend me in the slightest, in fact it makes me smile :)
whenever i write, i release a few thousand words to the internet. and sometimes a few people will respond and say nice things. sometimes there’s no response at all, and it makes me wonder if anyone’s listening (well, reading). so messages like these always make me happy! and they never, ever offend me. ^_^
i’d love to write more. maybe i’d write something small between march 20-28, because that’s when i finally have a small vacation!
Baek Inho punched, scratched, and slapped, but he never scarred. They would bruise a motley palette of purple and green, maybe swell a bit, but they would always return back to their unblemished state in a few days. His fingers never looked as defective as they were, and that made him want to fight all the more.
He used to genuinely be afraid of the aftermath of his fights. He was never in juvenile court, but he still had a bench to climb on, a testimony to give, and a judge to answer to. His piano teacher always made Inho seem like a juvenile anyways. He had always been a wordy, exaggerated man, and he was just as prone to saying, “Baek Inho’s fingers were made for dancing on pianos”, as he was to saying, “You fight with your fists again, and I will make sure your fingers never touch anything again.” His teacher had never been able to look him in the eye during his scoldings. He had always been distracted by how ghastly the veiny greens and pimply purples contrasted with the black and white of his piano keys.
That was how it was even during his last visit to Inho. His eyes were fixated on his inflamed fingers and raw, red wrists. They stood out against the backdrop of white around him—his gauze bandages, his gown, and his hospital room—the same way they had always stood out by a piano. For the entire duration of his visit, their stares dodged each other’s.
Inho had thought of quitting piano for the first time then. Inha had always said that the clean black-and-white look of his tuxes looked confining on him anyways. He didn’t think he would ever camouflage in the atmosphere of refinery that was classical music. That was Yoo Jung’s domain.
So fuck rehab. Hands be damned, Inho would find a place where people listened to him and not just his fingers.
Hi do u still have plans on finishing Neighborhood Watch? I hope u continue writing more JH/DS fanfics because Love in the Air(?) was so lovely the last line made me tear up! :(
hello! i replied to this question on soompi forums but i hadnt replied here yet, sorry :(i probably will not write it soon, because i am back in college and swamped with work, dance, and research. it’s also hard for me to break canon, haha :’(
thank you though! it’s because of messages like these that always make me think, i should write something for them again :)
Yoo Jung had always known that, rich or poor, everyone owned a rotating closet of personas. Personalities were just like clothes—customizable and seasonal.
By the age of ten, he had noticed how grown men would commune like vultures in his father’s office. Every month, Z Enterprise would hold an executives conference behind closed doors, so the white-collar dogfights could begin in privacy.
“Why invest more in R&D? They just make our millions disappear. At this rate, funding his department should be considered legal extortion.”
“Did you just compare my research to a crime? What do you think drives this company, you bastard? What about your press release last quarter? You gave our stocks a heart attack.”
Whenever Yoo Jung eavesdropped, he always felt like he was watching a movie stuck in suspended climax, one with no denouement in sight. Or a game of corporate chess, but with sixteen players attempting to outmaneuver each other instead of two. They always spoke to each other as if they wished their words could be laced with mercury.
And yet, just hours later, they would trot out of his father’s chestnut doors, outfitted in new public personalities. Every one would take their turn to say a courtesy goodbye to Yoo Jung, squatting down to his height level to pet him. He assumed that they petted him the same way they hoped his father would pet them.
By the age of ten, Yoojung had witnessed how people could shimmy into new personalities as effortlessly as they could whip on different clothes. Pretend, judge, gossip, pretend, judge, gossip—this was the rhythm to which people climbed corporate ladders.
It was then when Yoo Jung decided that, while his elementary school friends could continue to poke and prod at rolly pollies, his specimen of choice for observation would be people.
Taek’s mind was a lot like a hot wire: never static and always on. It buzzed incessantly with moves and countermoves, with more moves and more countermoves. It was a mental landscape largely devoted to baduk, one that could be painted in grayscale. Black and white for the thousands of stones he had set down since the age of five. Shades of grey for the thousands of salt-and-pepper hairstyles he had encountered in his aged opponents.
Perhaps that was why Deoksun complemented him. She wiped away the white noise—the area optimization algorithms, the capturing tactics, the sacrifice strategies—with simple, uncalculated smiles. Around her, he finally didn’t need sleeping pills; his mind became a blank canvas on its own. And then she would unknowingly inject color back into his world. He would notice the Cinderella-blue dusting her eyelids. The sunburnt orange tone she caked on her face. The soft rose of her angora winter gloves. To Taek, Deoksun was a reprieve from the monochromatic world of baduk.
That’s why he couldn’t accept defeat when it came to her. Growing up, people had always prematurely comforted him, telling him it was okay to lose once in awhile. But for Taek, in baduk and in romance, victory had always been his history.
I'M SO HAPPY I FOUND YOUR BLOG! The ending of Reply 1988 burned me very badly, I desperately needed more of DeoksunxJunghwan closure/ending and your writing is wonderful, please keep writing more!
i am just as happy that i found a reader!!
thank you ❤ i hope my fic gave you more closure + happiness ^_^
but i’ve been hearing that my fic made people cry, so LOL
what would people like me to write? i’d love to put my imagination on paper too :) im open to prompts from reply, prompts from other fandoms too (try me!)
Your writing is so fun and lovely! So happy to find someone else that writes for AM1988!! And you have such a good sense of the parents characters too!
AHH thank you :)it’s really flattering to get a response from the writer that inspired me to write 1988fici would’ve probably let my writing hibernate in word otherwise
now what fandoms shall we write for next? ;)
and backspace @andbackspace - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
