♛:If you want a short story about my characters past xoxo
[[ the muse is very very happy for the hugs and kisses anon he sends his affections~ lol ]]
Conscription is a weird time for Jaejoong.
He’d always been pretty popular around his peers, always had a decent number of friendly faces willing to side up to him. People would say he was likable, friendly, funny, in his school at least. At home, his sisters of course liked him too, but they took to teasing him plenty and caring after him as their baby brother, an entirely different role then he played with his same age friends. The same could be said for his two years in the army, how its different to anything he’s known before.
He’s not like a lot of guys. Pride isn’t settled into him, eating at his marrow if he doesn’t feed it well enough with his chartable life accomplishments. He’s been humbled thanks to a failed relationship, a failed comfort, that kind of pride now long and gone away, and started to look differently at life in a way kids his age don’t normally. The part of him that had always been left untouched, that other attraction he didn’t know what to do about, when plunged into the adult world, with men alone for company, it suddenly doesn’t seem so strange, so far from exploration.
It doesn’t happen in any sort of remarkable way, he just starts to notice things. Maybe its because there are older guys too, ones who aren’t still so close to their school kid selves, ones who aren’t living under their parents’ roof, ones who don’t care about fitting in with any kind of ideals. In fact, Jaejoong falls in love with the idea of building your own instead, goes head over heals into the idea of taking his lemons and making lemonade, strawberry flavor if he wants even. So when he starts to feel gazes of inhibition on him, Jaejoong takes it in stride the way he never would have only a year before.
Conscription isn’t a bad time for Jaejoong, or awesomely good either, though perhaps the weird is more good than bad, even if it is full of awkward. And not just on his part, because even the older guys, Jaejoong finds them fumbling now and then when he looks them in the eye, which is confusing, because he hasn’t really begun to think of himself as grown up yet. He’s curious though, what that’s about, and life gives him the chance to find out for himself. Life sends him a hyung who gives him the full tour, lays it out and lets him in on the secret of the jungle laws: that you might as well make ‘em up for yourself, or else you’re gonna to get screwed over by the ones other people put out first.
At twenty and a half, Jaejoong’s required shorn hair isn’t quite as short any more, but his life experiences seem to have grown at a disproportionate rate, seem to have lengthened considerably until they’re curling around his ears and into his head, then down into his heart, then even further down into another sort of awakening. Its weird, but its new, and new feels refreshing down to his marrow, where sensation left to replace the pride he couldn’t care less about. Its like a drink of strawberry lemonade spiked with vodka, and Jaejoong’s stomach swoops around in his belly up next to his flipping heart, for a new idea of life.
