#minchul.

[paranormalite]

39.  CAPTIVE :  for [tooru] to hold [min-chul] against their will. // ok listen. im Picturing that minchul is sick and tooru's trying to get him to stay in bed. but anywhere you want to take this is ok i trust you fully

there’s something about this — one of those super common early summer bugs, where you sniffle and cough and have the justified excuse to stay at home two days in a row — that takes him back to those several years after he left home, the not-so-narrow slip of time separating life-changing event #2 and #3, respectively. 

it feels like he was perpetually sick back then, diligent about it — always in-between houses, in-between warm meals, in-between cash, barely sleeping — and in constant pain as its consequence. that’s probably the part he remembers best.

“stop… s-stop, i give…!”    he seems to deflate, from restless to limp in an instant, limbs dropping heavily at his sides. he’s felt off since he woke up this morning, lethargic and distantly light-headed, knowing the cause but stubbornly refusing to succumb to it. no wonder the peanut gallery’s been so quiet today — must’ve been waiting.    “chest hurts…”    hurts to move. hurts to breathe. hurts to even think about how much it hurts. 

he turns on his side, hunching in on himself. maybe if he makes himself smaller, tucks his limbs in so there’s less of him to go around, it won’t be as bad. 

it was never bad when he was small.

“you’re so mean to me.”    he looks up at tooru. doesn’t even have the energy to try for a merited pout. he mutters,    “you could at least come here and hold me...”

[paranormalite]

"do you dream of me?" minai :)

he recalls, if not the sensation, then at least the sentiment of his dreams. his own ones. they used to be sweet, once, filled with the best parts of his early youth — his big brothers and their easy laughter filling the common rooms, the sisters and their gentle, unending forgiveness, his childhood friends from across the big, open field behind the orphanage, the clean, crisp smell of washed sheets when he settled in to sleep at the end of each day, the warmth of a freshly-baked bread bun in his small hands, having a place, a home, somewhere to return to. 

when he lost all those things, was always cold, and always hungry, and often much worse, and more often not much of anything, it was his dreams that fed him, and so he knows they must have been sweet — sweet enough to sustain him through all of it.

he wishes he had met her back then, at least once. 

he would have dreamed of her. it would have been sweet.

“i daydream about you.”    he watches her from his side of the booth. (there’s a faint boom of laughter somewhere in the back stage of his mind, several voices suppressed and absolutely none of them his. he immediately wishes he was somewhere else.)    “lots more control over that. usually, it’s just a play-by-play of the most recent date we went on, but with the pda dialed up to eleven.”