genre: angst, fluff, slow burn, mythology au, reincarnation au warnings: alcohol use, cursing, sexual content (m.), smoking word count: 26.6k summary: maybe he was glad you could never remember his face. maybe it was the cause of his melancholia. he’d watched you forget hundreds of times before, yet something about this version of you seemed deadset on holding onto the past.
It was another rainy afternoon, another autumnal drizzle bringing down the colored leaves, releasing the true essence of the season into the air. There was something nostalgic about the way that decaying leaves smelled, maybe it was from his childhood? Probably not, no- it couldn’t be because it reminded him of the day he first met you, the first day he met the real you. A scowl now, as he gazes towards your visage, standing in front of him as you toyed with your phone case. The plastic around the edges worn away and discolored from endless use, you never used to be this unkempt. Dejun preferred thinking of anything but the past, yet nothing ever felt as satisfactory as it. The neon lights of the shops lining the street reflected off the pooling water on the road and sidewalks in long stripes. It was only four o’clock, but the night crept ever so surreptitiously into the fall air. You were wearing a yellow raincoat, bright and outstanding as you waited outside of the small coffee shop, backpack in tow as you’d presumably just come from the nearby campus.
Whenever a storm rolled through, Dejun thought of you. Not because of the turbulent winds and gales that washed over the sidewalks like they were trying to rip up the concrete from their homes. But of the calmness and petrichor that invaded the area like a witch’s spell. Watching you walk like a phantom wisp through the onslaught of rain that wept from the heavens, lamenting some loss that was yet unbeknownst to you, he feels a mourning pang reverberate around his rib cage with every step you took. Remembering or envisioning, he wasn’t sure if you were real or not this time. Although, it was you who was standing at the bus stop as he took his first step into the dimly lit shop, it was you that started a short conversation in the café as the rain puddled outside, it was you who approached him first and it was you who sat in front of him now asking, “Do I know you from somewhere?” These copies of you haunt him from time to time, figments of an imagination left alone for far too long. At times he played with the idea of this divine punishment, was he meant to atone for the sin of loving too much? Of loving too little?
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