[ starter for @eclavigne ! ]
yeong had decided today was the day he tried to fight at least one of his problematic behaviors, such as avoiding people.
he had stood in front of his door for approximately four minutes before leaving. had put his gloves on, taken them off, put them on again. had told himself three separate times that he was going home, turned around, and then kept walking anyway because the part of him that was tired of being reasonable had apparently staged a quiet coup sometime around his third drink. it wasn’t graceful. it wasn’t the kind of bravery that looked good from the outside. but it was his, and somewhere underneath the anxiety and the elaborate justifications he constructed to make retreat sound like wisdom, there was a small and stubborn flicker of something that felt almost like pride.
he had gone out. alone. on purpose.
even though it was for his own safety, or maybe he was just talking himself into it. the way you always did when something was buried so deep that the real reason parted the earth you were standing on, swallowing you like quicksand. he hated being lonely. but he had also found a specific comfort in it over the years, the kind that stopped feeling like a compromise and started feeling like a preference. being alone meant there was no one to take into consideration, no tolerance needed, no careful parcours around the possibility of accidental contact. he had built an entire life inside that logic and it fit him the way things fit when you’ve worn them long enough that you forget they weren’t made for you.
but that was the contrast to everything he longed for. had always longed for, quietly, in the part of himself he didn’t examine too closely. the comfort of a person. the specific warmth of proximity that didn’t cost him anything. the touch of a person, as innocent as it could get. the kind that other people gave and received without thinking, without bracing, without the immediate and involuntary inventory of what was about to flood in. he wasn’t used to being this drunk. but courage had to come from somewhere, right?
he had made it inside. that counted for something.
the bar was warm and loud and full of people doing what people did when they were off the clock — drinking themselves softer, laughing too hard at things that weren't quite that funny, leaning into each other with the easy physicality of those who had never had to think twice about what skin contact cost. yeong had found a corner and stayed in it and nursed something amber-colored and told himself this was fine, this was normal, this was what people did on ordinary evenings when they decided to exist among other humans.
and then the sins had started arriving.
they always did in enclosed spaces. the air in bars was thick with it, not just alcohol and smoke but the specific residue of want and regret and the particular desperation of people trying to feel something different than what they felt at home. envy drifted off a woman watching her ex across the room. lust moved through the space in slow waves, attaching itself to nothing in particular, just ambient and unavoidable. wrath sat in the corner near the back, quiet and patient, wearing the face of a man who had decided something but not yet done it.
yeong had absorbed all of it before he'd finished his second drink.
by the third, his mouth tasted like a bar fight he hadn't been in and a longing that wasn't his and at least two varieties of grief. the noise had started to feel physical, not just sound but pressure, the concentrated humanity of it pressing in from every direction, and his ability running its inventory without being asked, the way it always did, reaching and finding and cataloguing and never once stopping for his permission.
he had picked up his glass and walked outside.
no announcement. no dramatic exit. he just left, the way you leave a room when the air has become genuinely unbreathable and staying would cost more than he had. the door swung shut behind him and the noise dropped and the cold hit him all at once and he stood there on the pavement with his back against the wall and his eyes closed and his mouth full of other people's worst selves.
he stayed like that for a while.
breathing. waiting for his own lungs to remember what they felt like without company. it took longer than it should have. the sins didn't leave cleanly, they lingered the way smoke lingers, clinging to the inside of his chest, and he could still taste the grief of the woman by the window and the wrath of the man in the corner and the particular flavour of lust that had no single source, just floated through enclosed spaces like weather. he pressed the back of his head against the brick and swallowed and waited and breathed.
this was what brave cost him.
this was always what it cost.
the night air was doing something to him, the particular quality of seoul after midnight, when the city stopped pretending to be civilized and just became what it was. neon bleeding into wet pavement. distant music from somewhere he couldn’t identify. a couple arguing half a block away in voices too low to make out the words but loud enough to carry the shape of the feeling. yeong leaned against the wall of the building he’d ended up outside of and tilted his head back and looked at the sky and let himself exist in it, just for a moment, without managing it. he was still doing that when something fell out of the sky.
not gradually. not with any particular warning. just… a figure ? dropping from somewhere above with the specific lack of announcement of something that had either jumped or been pushed and hadn’t bothered to negotiate with gravity on the way down. it landed in front of him with a sound that yeong’s brain initially filed under extremely bad before his eyes caught up and registered that whatever had just happened, the person responsible for it was… fine ? apparently. disturbingly fine, given the height involved.
yeong stared. his tongue registered something before the rest of him did. the air had changed in the half second before impact, a shift he couldn’t name the way he could name sins, this wasn’t wrath or greed or any of the seven he catalogued daily. it was something older. something that had been burning for longer than the words for it had existed. it sat at the back of his throat like the aftertaste of something ancient and slightly wrong, and his ability was reaching for it the way it always reached for things, trying to find the edge of it, trying to classify it. it didn’t classify. it just… existed. dense and warm and faintly luminous in a way that had nothing to do with light.
yeong looked down at the figure on the ground. looked back up at the building. looked back down. “are you…” he said, with the careful precision of someone who was drunk but not quite drunk enough for this, “alive ?”
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