Hey there! I just binge-read "Believe Again" and absolutely loved it! Very well-written and charming! I do have a question about the ending: what were your thoughts as you were writing it? To me, it seemed like two endings in one. Thanks again for a lovely fic with great characterization!
aaaa thank you so much for reading it!!!! :)) I saw your comment on AO3 and im pleasantly surprised to see you here on tumblr :)
Ooo could you elaborate on what you mean by seeing it as two endings in one? :OO I’m so curious to know how you interpreted it hehe.
As for my thoughts while writing the ending... hmm well tbh I actually had a very different ending in mind when I first started writing this story, so when I was writing the last chapter I didn’t even know it would be the last chapter until it was finished HAHA. The characters’ emotions just kinda took me there.
To sum it up, it wasn’t a perfect ending. I wanted the ending to left open in the sense that there are still many things left to be fixed and sorted out between them—the secrets that he’s kept from her until now to protect both of them, how they’re going to handle the long distance, how they’re going to move forward considering his past, etc.
I also wanted to juxtapose the ending with the beginning. At the start it was all innocent and even sort of fairy tale-like. The reader character seemed to be the kind of person who might love Saeran unconditionally since she’s willing to look beyond his past to see him as he is now, and she’s persistent in trying to get closer to him too. So tbh my initial plan for the ending actually had the reunion being purely warm, happy fluff, with the “I miss you”s and the “Don’t leave me again” sort of rhetoric. And I thought that maybe some people might expect that too, considering how this story started off.
But things can’t possibly be the same after everything that happened. Life isn’t a fairy tale, scars and wounds are things that are very real and I wanted the ending to reflect that. These are very difficult issues and emotions that the characters have to grapple with — and beyond the ending you can imagine that they have so much more to work out, which is going to take a lot of effort on both ends. Mere feelings and being attracted to each other isn’t nearly enough for this relationship to work.
But that’s exactly how it is in real life, right? There are always issues left to be fixed, sometimes they’re never fixed and you just have to decide whether you can or want to love the other person in spite of that or break it off.
One thing I didn’t expect to write about was Saeran doing to the reader exactly what he had hated Saeyoung for — leaving him behind without saying anything, even though Saeyoung did it only to protect him. It just kind of happened while writing, and then I realised ooooo neat this comes full circle HAHA.
So yup these were my thoughts as I wrote the ending. :) Thanks for sending this ask! I didn’t properly sit down to articulate all this before so this was very fun to reflect on and think about. <3 I’d love to hear how you interpreted the ending though! :D
