˖ ⊹ ࣪ ˖ smau :: Cortis (korean: 코르티스; stylized in all caps) is a coed group formed by big hit music. The group consists of seven members: James, Juhoon, Helen, Martin, Y/n, Seonghyeon and Keonho. ˖ . ݁𝜗𝜚. ݁₊
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can we guess who yn likes? #veryunexpected 😂
taglist : @niszarra @bellesophiaa @nikilicious @crwazy @snowselle @shawtychoosinup @angelwings-fly @lcvehyeon @cookeyy @ilovegojosatoru13 (sorry if you didn’t wanna get tagged!)
˖ ⊹ ࣪ ˖ smau :: Cortis (korean: 코르티스; stylized in all caps) is a coed group formed by big hit music. The group consists of seven members: James, Juhoon, Helen, Martin, Y/n, Seonghyeon and Keonho. ˖ . ݁𝜗𝜚. ݁₊
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yeah it was actually keonho
I kinda hate this
taglist : @niszarra @bellesophiaa @nikilicious @crwazy @snowselle @shawtychoosinup @angelwings-fly @lcvehyeon @cookeyy (sorry if you didn’t wanna get tagged!)
ೃ࿐ Cortis (korean: 코르티스; stylized in all caps) is a coed group formed by big hit music. The group consists of seven members: James, Juhoon, Helen, Martin, Y/n, Seonghyeon and Keonho.
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true story I found these exact shoes at the thrift and I didn’t buy them and I’m still mourning them 😭😭
taglist : @niszarra @nikilicious @crwazy @snowselle @shawtychoosinup @angelwings-fly @lcvehyeon @cookeyy (sorry if you didn’t wanna get tagged!)
ೃ࿐ Cortis (korean: 코르티스; stylized in all caps) is a coed group formed by big hit music. The group consists of seven members: James, Juhoon, Helen, Martin, Y/n, Seonghyeon and Keonho.
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I lowkey wanna give some back story for the girls
like yn being a dream academy contestant
taglist : @niszarra @nikilicious @crwazy @snowselle @shawtychoosinup @angelwings-fly @lcvehyeon @cookeyy (sorry if you didn’t wanna get tagged!)
currently reading: textbooks (but i just finished hamlet !!)
currently watching: ohshc, saiki k, can this love be translated? (already planning my rewatch of sinners) (yes ik i just watched it for the first time last night)
currently craving: red velvet cake 🤤
last song: rocky road to dublin from the sinners soundtrack
currently reading: Percy Jackson: Chalice of The Gods
currently watching: honestly dont remember 😭 havent been watching any shows at all
last song: Talk To You - Yeonjun
HI MYKA BBY TYSM FOR THE TAG THIS IS SUCH A CUTIE IDEA!!! i lowkey want to start getting into percy jackson too!!🤭🤭🤭
currently reading: Normal People by Sally Rooney (still 💔💔)
currently watching: Abbott Elementary (my fav) 🩷🩷
last song: Squabble Up by Kendrick Lamar (one of my fav after school songs) 😻
no pressure tags!!! (pls lmk if you dont want to get tagged in these things, im always worried about that 😭😭) @saevss @aftermoontea @faseanz @yeppiz @ramenoil anddd anyone else who wants to join!! 🤗
thank u 4 tagging me cutest!!🫶 I luv things like this!!
currently reading: skip and loafer by misaki takamatsu currently watching: true beauty currently craving: crab & pasta last song: 10 minutes by lee hyori
warnings + info. angst, slow fade breakup, bad communication, bonfire party setting, open ending, summer before college, intoxication (alcohol + smoking from juhoon and reader), martin + james in passing, unresolved feelings, kissing mentioned
synopsis. you and juhoon were the same person in two different bodies. the cruelest irony was that the only person either of you ever truly talked to was each other... and you still managed to lose it.
wc. 6.8k
LISTEN TO... soccer practice + chemtrails by lizzy mcalpine ... self control by frank ocean ... great pretender by dom fike ... promise by laufey
maddy's note. wrote this the day heeseung left enha LOL..... can u tell i was genuinely in an awful state of mind... ik i should prolly drop something happy and joyful in honor of my return but whatever!!!!! ik u guys love angst anyway 🫰🫰
Something about Kim Juhoon was that he never lied to you.
He just... stopped talking. And you let him. It was weird because in the midst of two people who were supposed to know each other better than anyone, everything fell apart without making a single sound.
That was the part that still got you. It wasn't the ending at all. Endings had shape, had edges you could press your fingers against and feel.
What got you was the middle. The slow leak of it. It was the way you both watched the water drain out and stood there with your hands at your sides and neither of you said hey, I think we're losing. Neither of you went first. That was the whole goddamn tragedy of it, laid out flat. Two people who'd never had to explain themselves to anyone else in their lives, completely unable to explain themselves to each other when it actually mattered.
You were the same. This was another issue. You were two people so alike they mirrored each other's worst habits back in perfect clarity—the avoidance, the swallowing things whole, the smiling when you truly meant I'm scared and nodding when you meant please don't go.
Neither of you had ever learned how to say the hard thing first. You'd both just gotten very good at waiting for the other person to say it instead, and when neither of you did, you called it compatibility. You called it understanding each other.
You called it a lot of things that weren't quite honest, and you let those things carry you for a long time before they couldn't anymore.
You'd never had to explain a joke to him. Never had to preface a thought with okay this is gonna sound weird but. You could be mid-sentence and he'd finish it—not because he was showing off, but because his brain just went the same places yours did. Same rhythm. Same strange detours. Same habit of caring too much about the wrong things and not enough about the right ones, at least not out loud. You used to think that meant you were made for each other. Now you thought it just meant you were both equally, specifically bad at the same things, and for a while that had looked like love.
The irony was not lost on you. Of course, it still wasn't, standing at the edge of Minji's end-of-summer party with a lukewarm drink you'd barely touched, watching firelight move across faces you'd known since middle school. The irony being that the only person you ever actually talked to—the only one you didn't have to pretend for, didn't have to translate yourself for—was the same person you'd managed to lose through sheer collective silence. Two people fluent in each other, somehow unable to say the one thing that mattered.
It was almost funny. Some days it actually was. Most days it just sat in your chest like a lump you'd learned to breathe around.
You'd heard he was coming. Iroha had mentioned it in the group chat earlier, somewhat casual. Almost the way you dropped a live wire into water and called it swimming.
omg juhoon's coming tonight btw
Followed immediately by seventeen other messages so you couldn't respond without it being obvious that your stomach had just dropped clean through the floor.
You'd told yourself it was fine. It had been fourteen months. You'd seen him in passing—hallways, convenience stores, that one awful week in April where you'd somehow had the same free period and had to exist in the same library corner pretending to study. You knew how to do this. You knew how to be normal about it.
Although... you did not know how to be normal about it. You'd never known how to be normal about it. That was sort of the whole issue.
He arrived around ten, when the bonfire was already going properly and someone's speaker had bass loud enough to feel in your chest. You were standing near the back where the yard bled into the treeline—far enough from the main crowd that you could breathe, yet close enough that the music still reached you.
You watched him come through the side gate with James and Martin flanking him like they always did. James said something and Martin threw his head back laughing and Juhoon smiled. It was your favorite one. This one that went a little sideways, more in his eyes than his mouth, the one you used to think about when you were falling asleep—and your drink did something in your hand you had to actively correct.
He hadn't seen you yet.
You let yourself look at him the way you couldn't when he was looking back. He'd cut his hair since the last time you'd really had the chance to look—it was shorter now, less of it to fall into his eyes, which meant you could see the line of his jaw more clearly, the particular angle of it that you'd memorized without meaning to sometime in sophomore year and apparently hadn't unmemorized since.
He was wearing something dark and simple. He looked good. Of course, in the way that he always looked good without even trying at all. It was annoying but you'd always loved that about him and you still did, helplessly, which was inconvenient and also not remotely surprising at this point.
You watched him scan the party the way he always did. It was methodical, like he was taking inventory. Looking for people he knew, probably. Looking for a safe place to land. You knew that about him. He hated the first fifteen minutes of any party, the before-you've-found-your-people part. He hated floating. He'd told you that sophomore year, sitting in your car outside a party you'd both almost bailed on, his knee bouncing against the dashboard because he couldn't ever quite sit still. I just need to find one person I actually want to talk to and then it's fine. You'd been that person for years. You wondered who it was now. You wondered a lot of things you weren't supposed to when it came to him.
Martin spotted someone across the yard and peeled off with a wave. James got absorbed into a group near the drinks almost immediately, which tracked—James could make friends in a fucking doctor's office waiting room, effortlessly, how some people just could. And then it was just Juhoon standing there with his hands in his pockets, doing that thing where he looked relaxed but wasn't, and you knew the difference, you'd always known the difference, and god you really wished you didn't.
His eyes swept the yard again. This time they found you.
It was just a second. The briefest catch. It felt like like a skipped heartbeat, like the moment before something falls—before his face settled into neutral. He lifted his chin. You lifted yours back. And you both stood there on opposite sides of a bonfire pretending that was a normal interaction between two normal people who used to know everything about each other.
You turned back toward the treeline and breathed.
The first time you knew something was wrong, it was November of junior year.
You'd texted him about something small—a song you'd heard on the bus, something that reminded you of a bit you'd had together since freshman year, one of those stupid inside things that had no explanation outside of the two of you. He responded four hours later with haha yeah.
That was it. Haha yeah.
You'd stared at it for a long time. You told yourself he was busy, which he was. Told yourself it didn't mean anything, which it did. You knew it did. You'd known him long enough to know the difference between Juhoon-who-was-busy and Juhoon-who-was-pulling-back, and the difference was not subtle once you knew what to look for. The replies getting shorter. The initiating stopping. The conversations that used to run until two in the morning—you know, the ones where you'd be lying in your bed in the dark talking about nothing important, his voice low and unhurried in your ear, this level of tired where everything felt closer to honest—suddenly ending at twelve with I should sleep.
You let it happen. That was the thing in particular that you couldn't forgive yourself for, not really. You saw the fade blooming and you just watched it. You kept showing up to the version of him that was still there and willing yourself to believe that the rest would come back. That it was a phase, a season, something external that had nothing to do with you. You were good at telling yourself things. Or lying to yourself. Whatever. You'd always been good at that.
The truth—the real one, the cut and dry one you'd gotten to eventually at three in the morning a few months after it was over—was that you'd been scared.
You were scared of saying hey, are we okay? and hearing something that wasn't yes. Scared that asking the question would make whatever was happening more real than it already was, and somehow you'd convinced yourself that not asking was a form of protection. For both of you. Which was, in retrospect, completely insane, but grief and fear made idiots of people and you'd been both grieving and terrified for most of that winter.
You didn't ask.
This was how the issue crystallized into one sentence: you didn't ask. And Juhoon—who was exactly the same, who had the exact same fear wearing a different face—didn't offer it. So you both just lived in the gap between what was happening and what either of you was willing to say about it, and the gap got wider, and wider, and one day you looked up and couldn't see the other side anymore.
By December, the texts had a different quality. Polite, almost. They were stupidly careful in a way that felt worse than silence because it meant he was thinking about what to say before he said it, which meant he was no longer just talking to you. There was a version of him you used to get that nobody else did. He was unfiltered, unguarded, the one that sent voice memos at midnight because he had a thought that couldn't wait and couldn't be typed fast enough. The one that laughed too hard at things that weren't that funny and looked at you after like you get it, right, you get why that's funny. That version went quiet. You kept waiting for it to come back.
It didn't.
In January you stopped texting first. It was not as a test—or at least you told yourself it wasn't a test—but because you'd run out of the specific kind of courage it took to reach toward someone who kept reaching back a little less each time. And Juhoon, true to form, true to the exact same wiring that had made you feel so known when things were good, didn't close the ever growing distance between you either. He waited too. And neither of you moved. Two people standing on opposite ends of a rope, both holding on, neither pulling.
By February you were just two people who used to be everything to each other, sitting three rows apart in a class you'd chosen together and not acknowledging it. That was when you knew it was over.
Absolutely not when he stopped texting, not when the calls dropped off—it was the classroom. The way he sat down and opened his notebook and you watched him from across the room and he never looked up. There was nothing dramatic about it, nothing final, no door swinging shut with any ceremony. Just the ordinary devastation of two people who'd forgotten, somehow, how to find each other.
You went home that day and cried in the shower for twenty minutes and then got on with your life because what else was there to do.
Maybe it was a secret or maybe it was just that nobody told you about losing someone you'd been that close to was that it didn't feel like losing a person. It felt like losing a language.
You still had all the words. You still knew how to talk, how to form sentences, how to exist in a conversation. You just couldn't do it the same way anymore—couldn't say things in that fast easy shorthand where half the meaning lived in the spaces between words and the other person filled it in automatically because they already knew.
Every conversation you'd had with Juhoon in the fourteen months since felt a little like translation. A little like reaching for something in a pocket and finding it empty. You'd get halfway through explaining something to Iroha or Minji and feel this specific, stupid frustration—not at them, never at them—at the fact that you had to explain it at all. At the fact that you'd gotten used to not having to and that someone used to be able to take a glimpse into your brain just by looking into your eyes.
There had been a moment in March—a Daniel Caesar album dropped at midnight and your first instinct, your very first one before you'd even finished processing the notification, was to text Juhoon. Not even a thought-out text. Just his name in the search bar, thumb hovering, because that was what you did.
That was the whole thing you did—music dropped and one of you sent it to the other and then you'd end up either crammed into your basement with the lights off listening to it properly, or driving nowhere in particular with it playing loud enough to feel, getting In-N-Out and sitting in the parking lot after and taking the whole thing apart piece by piece.
Every production choice and every chord change. Every lyric that connected a dot in your brain. He was the only person you knew who listened to music the same way you did—not passively, not as background, but almost like it was a conversation you needed to be fully present for. You'd sat there with your thumb over his contact for an embarrassingly long time before you put your phone face-down and listened to it alone, and it was good, it was really good.
But it was also the loneliest you'd felt all year.
You missed him the way you missed a habit. It was constantly, in small ways, at inconvenient times. You'd discover a newsong and your first instinct was still to send it to him even though you had a hunch that he already knew it because that's just who he was—fourteen months later, still, your thumb would move toward his contact before your brain caught up.
You'd read something funny and think he'd fucking lose it at this before remembering that you didn't do that anymore. It wasn't the grand romantic missing, though that was there too. It was the smaller, more relentless kind. The everyday kind. The kind that lived in all the tiny moments where you turned to tell someone something and the someone wasn't there.
And then there was the other kind of missing. The feeling you tried not to look at directly.
The memory of the way he kissed you. It was unhurried in a way that had always undone you a little, like he had nowhere else to be, like you were the only thing in the room worth paying attention to. The first time had been so unsurprising and so completely terrifying all at once, sophomore year in November, standing outside after a party not unlike this one, and he'd looked at you for long enough that you'd known what was coming and still weren't ready for it.
His hands had been cold. You remembered that specifically—cold hands, warm mouth, and the way he'd pulled back after and looked at you like he was checking that it was okay, like he needed to make sure you were still you and he was still him and the world was still what it had been five minutes ago. And you'd laughed because you were nervous and he'd laughed too and then you'd kissed again and it was better the second time.
Everything with him had always been better the second time. Better the more you did it, the longer you knew him, like he was something you could keep understanding more of and never hit the bottom of.
You thought about that sometimes, late at night, in the way that you knew wasn't good for you but did anyway. The specific depth of his love. The way he'd absentmindedly run his thumb along your knuckles when he was holding your hand and thinking about something else.
The sound of his voice in the dark, slow and honest—the way he only ever got when it was late and quiet and he'd forgotten to guard himself. You'd been the only person who got that version of him. You knew that. He'd told you, once, in the middle of one of those late-night calls when he said things he probably wouldn't have said in daylight. You're the only person I don't feel like I'm pretending for.
You'd said me too and meant it completely and neither of you had known yet how badly you'd both waste it.
He came to find you at eleven-thirty.
You'd moved further toward the treeline by then, sitting on the edge of a weathered wooden fence post, watching the bonfire from a distance. The party had gotten louder—someone had swapped out the speaker playlist for something heavier, and there were more people now, faces you half-recognized from other schools, from the edges of social circles you'd never been fully inside. You had your phone in your hand but weren't looking at it. You were watching the fire do what fire did—all that restless motion going nowhere, burning itself down.
You heard him before you saw him. It wasn't his voice but just the particular rhythm of his footsteps, which you'd apparently memorized somewhere along the way without meaning to. The sound of someone who wasn't sneaking up on you but also wasn't announcing himself, which was so specifically him it made something ache behind your ribs.
He stopped a few feet away, close enough to talk, far enough to give you an exit if you wanted one. You noticed that and filed it away. That was so like him—the consideration you didn't ask for, the space he offered before you knew you needed it—and you hated that you still catalogued these things. Hated that fourteen months out you were still fluent in the language of his small gestures.
There was a blunt between his fingers, most of the way down. He held it out without saying anything, the way you offered someone a drink, casual, like it was nothing.
You looked at it for a second longer than you should have.
You remembered, distinctly, him saying once—junior year, someone's basement, the particular face he'd made—that he thought smoking was distasteful. That was the exact word he'd used. Distasteful. You'd laughed at him for it and he'd been completely serious and you'd filed it away as one of those specific Juhoon things, one of the hundred small facts you'd accumulated about him without trying to.
You lifted your cup in response—mostly empty now, the ice long melted into whatever Minji had been mixing earlier. He nodded once, understanding, and brought it back to his mouth.
But then again. You'd told him once that you hated the aftertaste of alcohol, the way it sat in the back of your throat, which was why you'd said you'd probably never actually be able to get drunk. You'd said it like it was a settled fact about yourself. And yet here you were, cup in hand, warm in the face in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
So. Neither of you were who the other one remembered. Or maybe you were both exactly who you'd always been—just with different edges now, edges the other person hadn't been around to watch form. That was somehow worse. Not strangers, just unfamiliar to each other. The specific disorientation of someone who knew your old blueprints trying to read the renovated version without a key.
He exhaled slowly, smoke dissolving into the dark above his head, and you thought that you were probably not in the clearest headspace for this conversation. You suspected he wasn't either. You also suspected neither of you cared enough to stop.
"Hey," Juhoon greeted.
"Hey," you returned.
He looked at the fire. You looked at the fire. The music from the party moved between you like weather, indifferent.
Up close he looked different than he had from across the yard—more tired, maybe, or just a little more raw. You could see the slight shadows under his eyes that the firelight caught. His jaw was sharper than it had been sophomore year, the angles of his face more defined, and you thought, not for the first time and not without a specific kind of grief: he grew up. You weren't there for it. He grew up while you weren't watching and you'd only get the finished version, never the in-between, never the incrementalness of it. That felt like a loss too. It kept feeling like a loss no matter how many times you told yourself it was just how things went.
"You've been out here a while," he hummed eventually. He didn't say it like an accusation—just an observation, the way he used to say things. Like he'd noticed and was letting you know he'd noticed, without making it something you had to respond to.
"I like it better back here."
"I know." And then almost to himself. "I know you do."
God. You turned to look at him because you couldn't not. He was in profile, jaw lit amber by the distant fire, hands back in his pockets now—the same posture he always defaulted to when he was trying to look easy about something he wasn't easy about. You knew that too. You knew all of it, still, every single tell, like none of the time had happened at all and you were just two people who knew each other in the complete and humiliating way you only got from years of proximity and too many late nights.
"Are you excited?" you asked, because you needed to say something and that seemed safe enough. "Um, for college."
He was quiet for a second. "I don't know. Should I be?"
"Everyone is."
"Everyone's pretending to be," he said. "Which isn't the same thing."
You looked back at the fire. There it was. That specific thing he did where he just cut straight to the actual truth of something without warming up to it, without cushioning it, just stated it plainly like it was obvious and he didn't understand why everyone was pretending otherwise. You'd loved that about him. You still loved it, which was its own specific problem probably.
"Fair," you conceded with a little nod.
"You?"
"I think I'm mostly just scared."
"Of what specifically?"
A moment passed before he spoke again, and it wasn't the question he'd been building toward. "I saw you talking to Ohuyl earlier."
You glanced at him. His eyes were still on the fire. His jaw wasn't tight and his posture hadn't shifted—he'd just said it the way he said most things. Like he was noting the weather.
"Yeah," you hummed carefully. "He helped me pass AP chem. Good at balancing equations, weirdly fast at it actually. Didn't stress me out because he's a pretty calm person. We just talked for a bit."
Juhoon nodded slowly. Just once. And you watched something move across his face that wasn't quite hurt and wasn't quite nothing—something weirdly smaller than both, this thing that settled quietly and stayed. Because calm and easy to talk to had been yours. Had been the specific thing you'd said about him once, sophomore year, when Iroha had asked what you even saw in him and you'd said he's just calm, I don't know, I can think around him. He knew that. You both knew that. Neither of you said it.
"Good," he said finally. "That's good."
He meant it. That was the thing—he genuinely meant it, and somehow that made it worse.
You turned the college question back over in your head. The honest answer was too many things—scared of being somewhere new where nobody knew you yet, scared of being the version of yourself that still had to introduce herself, scared of growing into someone the people who mattered wouldn't recognize. Scared of all the things about to change whether you were ready or not. Scared, somewhere underneath all of it, of the specific loneliness of doing the growing without anyone who'd known you long enough to notice the difference.
"Everything, kind of," you said.
He nodded once—not a dismissive nod, not the sure, totally nod that you got from every other guy here. A not that meant yeah, me too, I just didn't want to say it first. You'd learned to read the difference a long time ago. It was one of the first things you'd learned about him and apparently one of the last things you'd forget.
Another thing that nobody told you about losing someone you'd been that close to was that grief didn't check whether the person was still alive before it showed up.
Iroha had said you're grieving him back in spring with such matter-of-fact gentleness that it had completely undone you in the passenger seat of her car. Because that was it exactly. That was the word for it.
You were grieving someone who was still in your city, still showing up to parties, still walking around with the same face and the same laugh and presumably still thinking in the same weird specific rhythm that had matched yours so perfectly for so long. None of that made the grief less real. It just made it more embarrassing.
What you couldn't explain, even to Iroha, was the specific texture of what you missed. It wasn't the relationship in the abstract. It wasn't just him, or not only him. It was the particular thing that existed between you—the thing that was neither of you alone but some third being or space you'd built together without meaning to, out of years and jokes and five hour calls and all the times one of you had said something and the other had looked up and gone yes, exactly, how did you know that's what I meant.
That third thing was gone. You'd lost it in the fade, in the silence, in all the times you'd both chosen not to speak, and you couldn't get it back because it required both of you to exist and neither of you had known how to protect it when it started slipping.
You'd grown without him this year. You knew you had—new friends, new habits, a better sense of what you actually wanted versus what you'd been going along with. You were different in small ways that mattered. But the growing felt lonely in a way that still surprised you. Like there was a running commentary in your head with no one left to deliver to. Like the best version of the observation always needed a specific audience and that audience was gone.
You moved away and grew a few inches. What a shame. What a genuine, specific, infuriating shame.
"I heard that song the other day," Juhoon said.
You didn't have to ask which one. You knew which one—there was always one song, in every relationship, that became load-bearing without either person deciding it would. Yours had been something he'd played in the car in October of sophomore year, windows down, the particular quality of autumn light coming through the glass at that angle that made everything look the way things only look when you're young and don't know it yet.
could we make it in? do we have time?
i'll be the boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight
You'd said what is this and he'd said I don't know, it came on shuffle and you'd sat there in the parking lot of a convenience store for four extra minutes because neither of you wanted to go inside while it was still playing. You'd never made it a thing on purpose. It just became a thing.
now and then you miss it,
sounds make you cry
some nights you dance with tears in your eyes
That was how most of the important things between you had happened—without intention, without ceremony, just quietly becoming true.
"Yeah," you said.
"It was at the grocery store. Of all places."
"The universe has terrible timing."
"The worst," he agreed.
He'd shifted while you weren't looking—moved closer to the fence, close enough now that if you reached out your hand you'd find his arm. You didn't reach out your hand. You were intensely, exhaustingly aware of not reaching out your hand. Of the few inches of charged air between you. Of the fact that you could smell his jacket, something clean and faintly familiar underneath it, and that your body remembered things your brain had been trying very hard to file away.
"Do you think about it?" he asked. And then, like he needed to clarify: "Us. Any of it."
The question landed somewhere between your ribs and stayed there. You were quiet for long enough that a log shifted in the distant fire with a crack and a shower of sparks, and you watched them rise and dissolve into the dark, and you thought about how to answer something honestly without letting it crack you open at a party where people could see.
"Yes," you said. "Probably more than I should."
He exhaled through his nose—not quite a laugh, not quite not one. Something small and pained. "Me too."
"That's inconvenient."
"Really inconvenient." He turned to look at you, and you made yourself look back, and there he was—just Juhoon, the face you'd known since you were fifteen and had no idea yet how much it was going to matter. The same dark eyes. The same almost-smile that went sideways. The evidence written all over him that he was in the exact same place you were, had been the whole time, and neither of you had said so. That was the most infuriating part. You'd been standing in the same wreckage for fourteen months and you'd both been too proud or too scared or too stupidly, identically avoidant to admit it.
"I didn't know how to tell you it was happening," he said. His voice was lower now, careful. "When I was pulling back. I knew I was doing it—I knew it was wrong and I couldn't figure out how to stop it or how to talk about it, and every day I didn't say anything it got harder to say anything, and then so much time had passed that saying something felt—"
"Impossible," you finished.
"Yeah." He looked at you. "Yeah, exactly."
'cause i made you use your self-control
and you made me lose my self-control
"I know." You did know. You'd felt the same thing from the other side—every day you didn't ask, every day you chose not knowing over the risk of the answer, the silence compounding on itself until it was structural. Until disturbing it felt like it might bring the whole thing down. "I could have asked. I kept not asking."
"I kept waiting for you to."
"I kept waiting for you to say something first."
He laughed. It was short and a little broken, and ran a hand through his hair—god, that gesture, you'd seen it a thousand times, it still did the same stupid thing to your chest. "We're such idiots."
"We really are," you agreed, and the laugh that came out of you was real and also terrible, this giggle that lived right next to crying. "We are genuinely such idiots. Two people who talked about literally everything and somehow couldn't talk about the one thing that mattered."
"The most important thing."
"The most important thing," you echoed.
The music from the party shifted. It was something slower now, moving through the dark like smoke. You assumed James took over the aux or something. For a moment you just stood there in the particular silence of two people who'd said true things and were sitting inside the weight of them. The bonfire popped. Somewhere behind you someone laughed too loud. The ordinary texture of a summer night doing what it did, indifferent to the small devastation happening at its edge.
"I think about what we would've been like," he said eventually. "If we'd just—said things."
You knew exactly what he meant. You'd thought about it too, that alternate version—this version where one of you had been brave enough to say hey, something's happening, I don't want to lose you before it was already mostly gone. You thought about it the way you thought about most things you couldn't change: with a useless, precise clarity. To see exactly what the mistake was and exactly when it happened and completely unable to go back and make a different choice.
"I think we would've been good," you said honestly. "I think we were already good. We just didn't know how to keep it."
"I didn't know how to keep it," he corrected quietly, taking the weight of it rather than splitting it down the middle. Something shifted in your chest. "I think you would have, if I hadn't gone quiet on you."
"You don't know that."
"I kind of do." He turned to look at you, and there was something in the look that was very direct and very sad and very him. "You were always better at this than me. The saying-things part. You were getting there. I was the one who disappeared."
You wanted to argue. Part of you did—the part that had spent fourteen months cataloguing your own failures, all the times you hadn't pushed, hadn't asked, hadn't reached across the distance when you saw it opening. But you recognized what he was doing: not performing guilt, not making a speech. Just stating something he believed was true in that plain way he had, and you weren't going to take it from him. He could carry some of this. He'd earned it.
"Okay," you said and bit the inside of your cheek.
"Okay," he returned.
Neither of you said anything for a while after that, and it was different from the silences that had existed between you all year—the careful managed ones. The uncomfortable silences that meant you were both pretending not to feel what you felt.
This was the old silence. The comfortable sort you'd built between you over years, sitting in each other's presence without needing to fill it. You'd missed it so badly you hadn't let yourself know how much until right now, with it sitting here between you like something returned.
The fire had burned lower. The party had gotten quieter—the late-night thinning-out, people peeling off in pairs or disappearing inside. The sky above the treeline was the particular deep blue of almost-midnight, a few stars visible through the light pollution. The air had cooled enough that you could feel summer folding closed, the last weeks of a version of your lives almost over, college waiting three weeks out like a door you hadn't decided yet whether you wanted to walk through.
You thought about all of it—about growing up while someone wasn't watching, about how you'd changed this year in ways that mattered and that he'd never know, about how he'd probably changed too and you'd never know either. About the strange specific grief of that. Of all the little moments that had happened in the gap, happening on parallel tracks that didn't intersect anymore, the two of you accumulating separate experiences and separate inside jokes and separate versions of yourselves with no way to show them to each other.
You'd grown without him. Some days that fact sat fine. Some days a song came on somewhere and it didn't.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
"Time," you said. "How it's weird."
"Yeah." A second. "What else."
Not a question. This habit of his—the gentle push of I know there's more, you don't have to pretend there isn't. It came back so easily. Like muscle memory. Like the fourteen months hadn't happened at all and you were still two people who had permission to do this with each other.
"I was thinking that I'm going to miss you," you said. "Still. After everything. I'm going to go somewhere new and build something and there are going to be days when something happens and my first thought is going to be that I want to tell you about it, and I won't be able to, and I think that's going to be true for a long time."
His jaw moved. He probably didn't expect you to say that. To be so honest and transparent.
"I think that for me too," he admitted. "Has been true. Probably will keep being true for a while."
"That's really annoying."
"Incredibly annoying," he agreed, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face—that sideways smile—and you let yourself look at it for exactly one second before you looked away. One second was all you could afford right now.
You were not going to do something you'd regret. You were not going to reach for something just because it was the last night of summer and the fire was low and he was standing close enough that you could feel the warmth off him and your body remembered what it felt like to be held by him, specifically, in the particular way that nobody else had replicated because nobody else was him. You were going to stand here and feel all of it and not turn it into something that made the next stretch harder than the last one.
You were getting better at knowing the difference between what you wanted and what you were ready for. That was one of the things the year had given you, quietly, without asking permission. The ability to feel the full weight of something and choose not to follow it off a cliff. That was growing up, probably. it wasn't glamorous. Hard-won.
"I think we could have been it for each other," you said, and your voice came out steady in a way that surprised you. "In a different version. If we'd been braver or figured ourselves out a few years earlier or just—been slightly less exactly the same kind of stupid."
"I think so too," Juhoon said quietly.
"But we weren't."
"No." He exhaled. "We weren't."
The truth of it settled between you. It wasn't a slap in the face or a sugarcoated lie. Just honest. Just the shape of what had happened and what hadn't, with nothing softening the edges. You'd loved each other in the imprecise way of people who didn't yet know how to love without losing things, and you'd lost things, and here you were on the other side of it, still tethered in the way you suspected you always would be. Not together. Not over it. Somewhere in the long complicated middle that didn't have a clean word and probably never would.
"For what it's worth," he said—and his voice had gone to that quiet register, the late-night one you knew like a second language—"you're the only person I've ever actually talked to. Like. Actually. Not small talked or lied to. Talked to."
You felt that in your sternum. You felt it move through you the way things moved through you when you felt it in your gut that they were completely true.
"Me too," you said. "You're the only person I don't have to explain myself to. Have to translate myself for." Another pause. "Which makes the whole thing even more—"
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
"It's kind of fucked up."
"It really is." He looked at the fire, and for a moment he looked very young in a way that cracked something open in you. You were not looking at the Juhoon you'd been watching from across the yard all year, careful and composed and carrying himself like someone who'd learned to hold things together. This one looked like the version you'd known before all of it. The one who'd sat in your car and talked until the battery almost died and never once seemed like he was anywhere else he'd rather be. "I keep thinking that if I'd just—said something. In November. Or December. Or literally any point before it was too late. I keep running it back."
"Me too," you admitted. "I've run it back a hundred times."
"And what do you come up with?"
You thought about it honestly. "That we both would've had to be different people. And we weren't different people yet. Maybe we needed the year to become them."
He was quiet for a long moment. "That's either very mature or very sad."
"Probably both."
"Probably both," he agreed.
He turned to look at you one more time. Intently. The depth of looking that took inventory, the kind that meant he was trying to hold onto something. The firelight caught the angles of his face and you looked back at him and let yourself feel the full weight of it: this person you'd known for years, who'd known you in the only way you'd ever felt properly known, standing at the end of a summer that was almost over, both of you carrying fourteen months of silence and still somehow able to find the thread back to each other like it had never been cut. Just—tangled. Just buried under a lot of quiet and a lot of fear and two people who'd been too similar in all the worst ways at exactly the wrong time.
"I hope college is good," he said finally. "For you. I genuinely mean that."
"You too." You meant it completely. "I hope you find people who get you the way—" You stopped and started over. "I hope you find your people."
He looked at you for a second. Some emotion moved across his face that you couldn't fully read. "Yeah," he mumbled softly. "You too."
A pause. And then, because he was Juhoon and Juhoon always knew when something was done without being told: "I'm gonna go find James before he does something stupid."
"Wise choice."
He huffed a breath. it was an almost-laugh, warm and low, the one you'd heard a thousand times—and pushed off the fence. Took a few steps toward the party. Then stopped. Didn't turn around, just stilled with his back to you, and said:
"I'm glad we talked."
"Me too," you responded.
And then he walked back toward the fire and the noise and the rest of the night, and you watched him go. You observed the particular way he moved, unhurried even now, hands back in his pockets, disappearing into the crowd until you couldn't pick him out anymore from everyone else. You stared at his no longer lit blunt that he littered on Minji's lawn and you took a sip of your drink.
And the space where he'd been standing was just air again, but different. It was changed. Like something had been named that had only ever been felt before. Something like putting words to a thing didn't fix it but it did make it real in a way you could carry properly—with both hands, without pretending it wasn't there.
You turned back to the treeline. The party moved behind you. Somewhere above, past the glow of the bonfire and the light pollution and all the ordinary noise of a summer that was almost done, there were stars you couldn't quite see but knew were there—and you thought about growing up without someone, and how it wasn't the same as losing them, and how you'd keep doing it anyway, and how maybe that was okay. How it had to be okay, because it was what was true, and you were getting better at holding true things even when they weren't what you would have chosen.
Some days you'd hear Self-Control by Frank Ocean in a grocery store and feel the whole weight of it. You'd stand there in some aisle somewhere new, someone slightly different than you were tonight, and the feeling would move through you the way feelings did—fully, and then less fully, and then like weather that had passed.
And then you'd keep going.
That was the whole thing, probably. That was all there was.
Take $50 dollars and get a proper drink cheapskate
Juhoon x f!reader
extra: smau, fluff, written+images, kys jokes, swearing, humour++
Synopsis: When you accidentally Venmo request the wrong person instead of your friend, and they send you even more money telling you to get a proper drink.
05 — 07 — navigation
Notes : heeseungcomebackpls ive been listening 2 enha songs like a madman i been sobbing all day
Take $50 dollars and get a proper drink cheapskate?
Juhoon x f!reader
It was supposed to be a $5 request to your best friend for a drink. Instead, you accidentally hit up a stranger named Juhoon. He doesn't just pay it—he multiplies it. He even adds a snarky comment: Stop being a cheapskate, you’re not getting shit for $5. One accidental transaction and an americano payback, now Juhoon is suddenly the most interesting person in your notifications. Wrong account, Right person?
Synopsis: When you accidentally Venmo request the wrong person instead of your friend, and they send you even more money telling you to get a proper drink.
Extra: smau, fluff, written+images, kys jokes, swearing, humour++, mentions of empl*yment
Status: ongoing
Started: 05.03 ;; Ended: tba
Notes: im SCARED + ask to be taglisted
profiles: #getajobmaki ;; martin pause d damn beat.
01: DID YOU VENMO REQEST A STRANGER😂😂
02: Well that was odd.
03: maybe you're not a frog
04: model hopper
05: i think im gonna try
06: CLOCKEDD
07: xxx
08: xxx
09: xxx
blakekathryn
dededos
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl
janainaart
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic
