THE SHAPE I FOUND YOU IN * / featuring @yujinfey
jeon sunkyu maps escape routes. among them, here are some constants: they start from his front door or his fire escape, winding down the street and hitting the closest 24-hour convenience store. after that, it depends if he’s standing at the end of the world and realizes he needs something else before he leaves seoul entirely.
here, another constant: most, if not all of them, run through yujin’s apartment, diligently planned so that no matter if sunkyu’s at the library or the shelter or the community center when the apocalypse begins, he can find yujin before leaving seoul in the dust. the routes that don’t pass through his apartment allow instead for a chance to call yujin later, so that sunkyu would be able to make sure he’s safe from the aliens or zombies or haywire robots, or his parents -- whichever decides to descend in a great hailstorm of fire and fury first. then, according to these plans, they would figure out what to do next together. maybe they split anyway, but he would never just leave yujin behind.
sunkyu would call this a promise, but promises imply some sort of declaration or assurance, which implies he’s told yujin about this, and he’s never exactly said to him, i swear i’m with you to the end. maybe yujin knows anyway, had heard it in sunkyu’s voice years ago when that first dream of fire gouged the ground between them, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if he knows or not because sunkyu knows, and he intends to stand by it. maybe it would be more fitting to just call it a truth.
this truth means that he counts the steps from the start of the hallway to yujin’s apartment door, trying to drown out the memory of his mother’s last phone call that afternoon. it’s been a blissful two months since she last mentioned the jungs and the family line and the ritual and when will you follow through, sunkyu? two months since he’s thought of those escape routes. he should have known it wouldn’t last.
he dreads telling yujin after-- what has it been, a week since he last saw him? he hates adding to the sheer weight already on the witch’s shoulders. he had stopped for food before he came over, hoping it would make the conversation easier, but he knows it’s going to suck anyway. and they can’t avoid it.
“hello-o-o,” he calls, rapping on the apartment door. “delivery for jung yujin-ssi?” hopefully yujin’s hungry. or needs his fridge restocked. grocery shopping is his tried-and-true anxiety reliever, which means that the bags he’s carrying are filled with takeout and milk and household vegetables.