drink & scars!!!
[ tw: slight mentions of violence and blood, alcohol ]
sunggyu’s house has become a safe space for yebin. she’s gotten used to going there after a stressful battle, to letting his wife patch up her wounds and make her food, which yebin can’t decline but doesn’t really have the appetite to stomach.
she’s long since given up on even picking at her noodles, the thought of the monster’s screams as she shot it twisting her stomach unpleasantly. she looks up when sunggyu sits next to her, and her chair is already turned to face him, leftover from when she was sitting allowing his wife to treat the new gash on her right arm. he’s in his wife’s vacated seat -- she went to put the kid to bed a while ago -- and he reaches out to set a hand on yebin’s knee.
“how are you doing? you still look really pale, you know. you lost a lot of blood before, didn’t you?”
yebin only shrugs, looking away from him at her abandoned, untouched plate of food. she hears sunggyu sigh a bit, then turns back when he stands up. she watches him move into the kitchen, and within two minutes he’s returning, a glass in one hand and bottle of beer in the other. he sets the glass on the table in front of yebin, then takes a sip from the bottle as he sits back down.
“i can’t in good conscience give you alcohol, but you probably need water more anyway. drink up, i’ll tell you about the time i got a scar like what you just got.”
glad that he doesn’t seem to expect her to talk ( yebin doesn’t trust her voice, doesn’t even know if she still has it after the loud chaos of the battle and her own screams when the dying monster lashed out and wounded her ), she picks up the glass and starts drinking, managing to down half the cold water before she sets it down.
sunggyu has removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal his left shoulder, where there’s a huge scar that spans from just above his elbow to the top of his shoulder, and clearly extends under his shirt and onto his back. what’s more is that instead of the skin being pale white and smooth like most scars, it’s darker than his other skin, and seems to have a rough texture.
automatically, yebin reaches out to touch it, and sunggyu only shifts slightly to allow her better access as she runs her fingertips over the rough skin, her eyes wide and her mouth open. “we were against a fire user,” sunggyu says, and yebin looks over to his face before focusing back on the movement of her own fingers over the scar. “nasty card. outnumbered and desperate to get away, he hit me with flames while i was looking away, giving orders. taking down the leader distracted the team enough that he was able to get away, but we caught him later.”
yebin finally leans back, her gaze traveling down sunggyu’s arm to his hand, then back up to spot several scars littering his neck as well. some of them look like they’re from the same burn, while others could be anything.
she looks down at her own hands ( they’re clean, but she can still see the blood, can still imagine it staining her skin ) and wonders when, exactly, her body became like that as well: a map of memories, a collection of battles and a record of her own sacrifices for her duty as a hero.
she wonders how much farther she’ll be able to go before she’s nothing but a conglomeration of scars, until she won’t even be able to see herself under them.













