He lies back down almost immediately. “Stay.”
“Stay?” Mingyu huffs indignantly, too busy trying to not move to realize what Jeonghan has planned. “What am I? A dog?”
He regrets saying it the second Jeonghan’s eyes light up. There’s a faint ringing in his ears that he will later realize is actually the FaceTime ringtone and not from Mingyu trying his best to not clench down around Jeonghan.
“Oh? You didn’t know?”
Seungcheol. “Know what?”
“These ten years passed by in the blink of an eye. I don’t want it to end yet.”
“Then it won’t.”
Seungcheol makes a noise in disbelief, startling upright. “How can you say that?”
Mingyu grins. Ah, this part is easy. All of it is, when he’s with Seungcheol, but this is the easiest of all. He leans in patting Seungcheol’s cheeks—squishing them, really—and drops his voice low, a conspiratorial whisper.
“Ah hyung, don’t you know? You’re the leader. If you say it’s not over yet, then we’re all right behind you, you know?”
Mingyu tips her head back and presses her lips to Seungcheol’s breastbone, emerging from the water and towering over her as she settles in her lap, sunshine in her lap once more. She trails her lips up the column of her throat, meeting her lips and carefully coaxing a sigh from her.
“Keep me,” she whispers. “Empress, won’t you keep me?”
“Is this not pretty enough for you?” Seungcheol whines.
“If you’d like to meet Mingyu like this, you can be my guest, Seungcheol-ah.” Her nail tugs down and Seungcheol lets go of the robe. Jeonghan’s fingers drag down, running over her gold necklaces and the swell of her breasts, trailing past the gold rod in her belly button to her mound. “You’re very pretty.”
She draws back, fingers shining with slick as she brings them to her lips. She doesn’t drop her gaze even as Seungcheol’s chest heaves, biting down on her lip hard. If they could, her eyes would have flashed red.
Jihoon hesitates, tilting his head curiously and opening his mouth to speak before his lips ultimately part around a different word. “Hyung, your lips, really—You always look like you just got back from kissing someone.”
He doesn’t know what inspires him to say it. In-divine intervention, perhaps. “I kissed you, once.”
commentary: i wish i could run to your house when it gets dark out
Driving back home to visit a place that never was with a best friend you’re probably in love with and it doesn’t mean everything (even if it means everything)... that's the chihiroine standard baby!
the actor by of monsters and men
i remember we were waiting like two kids in the parking lot // keep it separated, is it enough that it’s breaking my heart? // i forget i’m masquerading, we were laughing and then i was not // keep it separated, is it enough that i’m playing the part?
If I think about the timeline, it goes a little something like this:
There’s something so hopeful about the way Seungcheol is so open about his love. The way he’s very much adoring and loving when it comes to Mingyu and it’s blatantly obvious, even if Mingyu never really seems to react to it, and it never stops him from expressing his love.
This should be a gyucheol fic, they’re just breaking my heart at this point.
It’s the end of October and it feels like it should be winter. There’s a road home I still remember, nearly 700 miles and two time zone away. It’s 22 and the home that will never be again.
Seungcheol’s the one in love with his best friend. Mingyu can be the one trying to get back home.
I’ve always thought about it, driving all the way back to that hometown, just to see the place I grew up. It’s a lonely road trip, two days of driving, and it’s quite possibly the most vivid memory I have. It’ll be 13 years this year, since I was last home.
Would it make more sense to have both be Seungcheol? Yearning for his best friend and home? No, but that’s too similar to the impossible art of being okay— and the key point is that these two desires have to be separated.
The Hyunjin and Seungmin 2 Kids Room.
I think the world ends here.
Also, seungjin felt too close to home. Can’t quite put that one into words.
In this universe, Seungcheol and Mingyu haven’t known each other since they were kids. That felt too perfect, too unreal, even though I’m sure it’s more common than not that people have childhood friendships that last all their lifetimes. I picture them meeting in Berkeley as graduate students, somewhere between the cool breeze blowing in from the Bay and the green trees plaguing the crumbling campus.
Both of them seemed to be writers, so I turned to their KOMCA credits to decide. In the end, Seungcheol won out, despite the way he’s been caught on camera multiple times, absolutely passed out with a book in his hand. In return, Mingyu got to be an interior designer and live out the dreams I’ve heard my mom talk about.
Well. At first. I rewrote these parts because it made no sense to have Mingyu wanting to make this journey unless he was the one stuck with writer’s block, thinking about returning to his roots. Seungcheol got to be a boring business major then, even if he seemed too rebellious for it. This was a universe with no trace of music present within its characters, even if the music ultimately wove the storyline together.
i remember we were waiting like two kids in the parking lot // keep it separated, is it enough that it’s breaking my heart?
This part was for Mingyu, waiting for the road home to clear in his memories, waiting for the story he wants to tell to come to him again. They both yearn, but the line about two kids in the parking lot felt perfect for someone trying to find their way back home, their way back to youth, their way back to themselves.
i forget i’m masquerading, we were laughing and then i was not // keep it separated, is it enough that i’m playing the part?
Which means this part was for Seungcheol, hiding the intensity of his feelings for Mingyu even from himself. He may be self aware in that he knows he’s in love with Mingyu, but the journey surprises him at the intensity, at the ways that he hides things from Mingyu without realizing why he’s doing it. Whether it’s out of hope or a misguided sense of insecurity remains to be seen.
Closer to the end of the fic—the very end, like minutes before posting it—I questioned whether this should be about Jeonghan and Seungcheol instead. Seungcheol as the wistful writer seeking his way back home and Jeongan as the pragmatist who follows. It made a lot of sense in that moment, particularly because of the way he’s mentioned being raised by his grandma and not being the closest with his brother, but the idea of visiting a relative’s house after the fact was already explored in the impossible art of being okay— so I didn’t want to revisit it so soon.
And, ultimately, I wanted this to be about Mingyu and Seungcheol, two best friends who do everything together, who match so well together, and still have differences between them. Two best friends with parallel narratives that turn out to not be parallel at all.
The setting of the fic itself remained ambiguous—while I pictured them attending Berkeley and making the same drive I once did, the appeal of a winter in Seoul—the snow falling between the city lights—was too great to miss out on. There’s hints of the original setting throughout that I couldn’t quite edit out, but felt would be better to leave in to maintain that ambiguity. And the rest builds up to their first snow in Seoul.
barefoot in snow by of monsters and men
you tell me a secret, i'm telling no soul // all this pain in your pocket is heavy to hold // i wish you were patient enough with yourself // i spoke with you wednesday, we spoke before noon // about how this old planet wasn't made for us two // i wish i was happy, but i forgot my words // we don’t speak much lately // and i forgot to tell you maybe
“Seungcheol might as well be barefoot in the snow, socks soaked through and his feet frozen stiff. Mingyu looks a little apologetic as he pulls Seungcheol to his feet.”
All my memories of snow are quite distant—the last time I was in the snow must have been eight grade and that’s not the fondest memory, but before that, there are two distinct memories from the same season:
Second grade, when the first snowfall of the year was a dusting two days before Halloween
Second grade, when we received a foot and a half of snow
Second grade was so far ago but I still miss the snow. Mingyu does too.
Including this song was an easy decision though—it fit into the narrative, it fit into the malaise and melancholy of two friends drifting apart, but oddly enough, it felt like the happiest song of the three included from this particular Of Monsters and Men album. A wish for sun is wishful thinking. There’s a lot of wishful thinking on both their ends that remains unspoken. I toyed with the idea of speaking it into existence, but the aim of this particular fic was to draw out the tension, to illustrate that even people who seem so close can find a distance between them.
winterfall by dpr ian
the world will see the war in me // it’s all i need when you see me loving you // i set my wings ablaze // 'cause I thought you would barely notice // it just came down to you're the only one i want to // now I get what you mean // when you want to feel // you're the only one who made me feel like something // feel like something
The goal was to split two things I wanted badly between Mingyu and Seungcheol and oddly enough, in separating two things you know to be true about yourself, you create two separate people, entirely different from your own existence. This iteration of Seungcheol and Mingyu proved to be more difficult to write than iterations past, likely because they were created around core ideals that I had and molded around the people that I perceive them to be.
In overthinking the meaning of that, we come across winter.
As a kid, it was so easy to say autumn was my favorite season, complete with the reds and oranges of fallen leaf piles and the whispers of an early snow, topped off with Halloween. Somewhere between child and teen and adult, autumn disappeared, and with it, the season that I once looked forward to.
All that is to say—I once hated winter. When winter meant the misery between greater miseries and a bleak gray, it was easy to hate.
It’s harder when I picture the time before that—the way that snow slows under street lamps and paints the streets white. In many ways, autumn is real but winter is a dream. It’s very hard to get through life without a dream.
It’s also very hard to get through life alone. It’s not worth trying at all, in my opinion. Thank you for braving the winter with me.
“Like an anchor,” Mingyu murmured. “That’s romantic.”
“A little, right? It’s the end of the world and I’m more worried about love.” Joshua sighed. “Talk about bad timing.”
Mingyu tilted his head to the side, catching his reflection in the mirror on the wall before shaking it slightly. “I think the end of the world is the best time to worry about love.”
Wasn’t that what he had been doing all these years? Every time he entered the Drift, all he thought about was love. And it had brought him back, over and over again.
finally got a chance to finish another pacrim fic... read it here!
lately, i've been thinking a lot about the cyclical nature of. everything. it all returns, in some form or the other, and that's the theme i wanted to convey most through my favorite fic trope: the pacrim au.
initially, i had slated this out to be a gyuhan fic, but the more i thought about it—and the more gyucheol posted pics from their hawaiian honeymoon—i couldn't help but consider that gyucheol would be better suited to the kind of story i wanted to tell. that isn't to say that this story is free of gyuhan—i fear everything i write is tinged with gyuhancheol in some way or the other—but the focal point was facing that fear that chases cheol throughout the narrative.
the one we all have, about something in us not matching well with something in someone we love, whether we admit it to ourselves or to someone else.
see what i mean about it suiting gyuhan? they've made no secret of how much they fought with each other and how they're opposites, to the point where it feels too obvious to be a genuine concern they'd have about each other. with gyuhan, it would be easy for either of them to say, so what if we don't match? we're opposites, and we'll choose each other anyway.
but with gyucheol, they aren't opposites. they're quite similar, the same person in different fonts but not quite too. no two people will ever be the same and cheol's fears stem from this particular insecurity. how far can your love bend before it twists into something else?
a few scenes and things to note:
when seungcheol tells soonhui to make it back in one piece, that's a deliberate parallel to jeonghan wishing the same of gyucheol. it's an intentional distinction in their relationships too—that mingyu isn't chasing seungcheol's ghost in jeonghan any longer nor is jeonghan pining after seungcheol either.
mingyu catching seungcheol was fully inspired by the way cheol just throws himself into mingyu's arms whenever they hug. it's cute.
the jacket. i feel like i have to talk about this because it was going to be a bigger deal and i wanted to expand on cheol's jealousy over seeing jeonghan in the jacket but it didn't fit the direction the narrative took me. which is probably a much healthier direction than making them all jealous over each other, even if it's not realistic. is it? i wouldn't know. either way, the jacket quickly became a kind of symbolism for gyuhan's relationship. they've closed that friends-with-benefits chapter but there's no love lost there. cheol sees this from the outside—that's why he never wears mingyu's jacket.
i tend to drift (haha) between who is more avoidant/pushes addressing things first, and while mingyu bulldozes through it as the king of positivity, i think seungcheol's underrated in his own stubbornness when it comes to mingyu specifically. a few examples come to mind: mingyu saying he's growing his hair out and cheol jumping in to say he looks handsome, even if it wasn't the point of the question at all; jeonghan teasing mingyu by saying he doesn't think mingyu looks handsome only for cheol to nearly cut him off in a rush to say no, mingyu is; etc. there's an oblivious on mingyu's end to this too, like he doesn't want to see it or he just simply doesn't. i'm inclined towards the latter, but i wouldn't call it total unawareness either. so maybe this reflects the dynamic they have throughout the narrative?
ironically enough, i don't think i have anything to say about the gyuhan scene in the medbay. i think they hijacked every scene they were in and wrote it themselves because the scenes truly do speak for themselves.
a huge part of my love for pacific rim comes from my love of hong kong as this city where so many narratives take place. i continue to dream of the day i can witness my own unfolding there. until then, i liked the idea of venturing out of the shatterdome to remind gyucheol that even when the world ends, it keeps spinning.
of course, i couldn't ignore the marshall's speech from the film. 10 year old me would still like to fight the hurricane!
the bo staff scene!! this one was also very important because i wanted to get the timing right. traditionally, the bo staff fight would be before the drift sim, but i wanted to mention it later because neither of them were ready for it before. mingyu still lingered in the ghost drift and seungcheol couldn't let go of his ghosts either. actually sparring together required them to both be on the same page, despite their own worries.
and the follow up—it didn't make sense to have that one conversation and sparring session be the answer to their problem. evoking realism in fic will forever plague me and the line always blurs on what's too much realism and what is necessary. still, i wanted to emphasize the central theme of both pacific rim and what keeps seventeen going, i think—who else, if not you? it's a choice, and they keep choosing each other. (you may be wondering, isn't that marriage? yeah, i'm also wondering. svt even have the rings for it. get in the jaeger. kinda like getting hitched?)
i almost don't want to talk about the ending because of how much it pissed me off but i think it's because it pissed me off that i need to talk about it: i initially thought about ending it right there, having them choose each other and the world continuing to end around them, hinting at things improving. but after writing this whole journey, it was too unbalanced to end things there. they're able to make things work here because it's life or death—the world depends on them choosing each other, whatever that means. baggage and all. years apart and twisted history and all. therefore, having them complete the exact mission that caused gyuhan's drift to fail was like passing on the torch. kind of like saying that mingyu had finally moved on. and in order to do so, he ends up piloting the jaeger alone, however briefly, just as jeonghan had to save him, so he can save seungcheol. but the beauty of it is that he wouldn't be able to do it if not for seungcheol.
in hindsight, this is as much of a story about gyuhan as it is gyucheol. i'm not even surprised.
happy pacrim year (2025)! there's still time for the kaijus to get us.
if you made it this far, i'd love to hear your thoughts on the fic as well <8
