for @plctwists.
junjae remembers that night vividly.
steam rising up in billows as the building went up in flames. eyes wide open, jaw tightly locked as he’d followed the nauseating scent of smoke to the source of the fire from across the campus. for a moment, everything had seemed so unreal, as if he was just having a bad trip. then the sharp screams for help and echoes of an ambulance siren pierced through the air, and he’s snapped out of his trance.
the next day, he hears whispering in the corridors. jisoo is dead, they say. mina was with him. he almost doesn’t believe them – or maybe he doesn’t want to. mugunghwa was supposed to be a refuge, a quaint little town to bide time by. not a murder scene steps away from his own room.
it would be easier for him to dissociate from everything if not for the fact that he knew all three of the victims involved in the accident. and of the three of them, he’s known kim mina, second year painting major - and hometown friend of han junjae, the longest.
only a few people in mugunghwa know about junjae’s past in seoul – he’d moved here to escape from it, after all. kim mina was one of the few pieces of his past that had travelled with him to this small town, someone he knew he could find refuge in on nights when it’s painfully obvious that junjae doesn’t truly belong to this town.
so when he gets the phone call, he doesn’t hesitate to say yes. he doesn’t even need to think, just says the same three words he always utters whenever she drops him a call: i’ll be there.
he meets her at the gate of mugunghwa twenty minutes later, a bottle of tequila in hand, a pack of cigarettes and his phone in his back pocket, and nothing else. the drive to seoul is filled with manic laughter as the two of them share morbid jokes that probably wouldn’t be regarded as jokes if they were overheard. they don’t talk about the fire - there’s an unspoken understanding between them that neither of them wants to think about that right now.
then they arrive at the club, and junjae doesn’t typically get shit drunk so fast, but he hasn’t spent alone time with mina for a long time, especially not since she’d gotten together with his own captain, jisoo (who’s now dead, a little voice at the back of his mind whispers).
junjae doesn’t want to think about it, so he drinks. and under the pulsating lights of the club and with the thrill of being back in the place he feels most at home at, mina suddenly seems more ethereal than usual. it’s strange, really - he’s always thought she’s pretty, but there must be something in the air in the club tonight, because it’s as if he’s being magnetically pulled in closer towards her.
so he tugs her in for an impulsive kiss, loses himself in her for a few seconds. and when he pulls away, eyes unfocused, he asks belatedly. “is this okay?”