interlude
Even if the subway wasn’t his usual choice of commute, the filtered quiet that penetrates through the rail-car interior is nothing short of familiar. The early hours of the morning are cast under pale, blue tinged fluorescent lighting; the weight of the world nearly rocked to slumber by the dull and steady click-clack of the train moving along the tracks. Save for a few others scattered across in their seating arrangement, he’s more or less alone in his innate alertness—eyes wide open behind thick frames, his attention trained to the glow of his Kindle screen, all else fading into the backdrop. His fellow passengers warranted little to no attention, given how little they appeared to stir, left to tend to the ache that comes with the end of yet another day without so much of a word.
But there’s always a lesson to be learned, even in spaces this isolated, and that’s to never take anything for granted.
Case in point: it takes a single sound to break his attention, The Things They Carried abandoned to arrive at the realization: that someone had passed out on him, head against his shoulder. He’d been vaguely aware of there being someone who had taken the spot next to him—but now there’s everything to take note of; from the slow pattern of breathe in and out, to a face to match a name—
Wait a minute.
“Excuse me,” He murmurs, as though he’s afraid to disturb the silence. Something about letting sleeping dogs lie could be applied here, but Seunghyun’s almost positive that he knows her, in ways that are nearly unavoidable. He shakes his shoulder gently. “Hey.”
