SYPNOSIS. 11 years. you’ve been loving wonwoo for 11 years. you’ve loved and supported him since you were 16. and you’re starting to wonder if you can keep living like this.
PAIRING. idol!jeon wonwoo x writer!reader
GENRE. angst, it’s mostly just angst.
NOTES. english isn’t my first language !! para sa mga filipino, inspired by "i'm drunk, i love you" and sugarfree's "burnout". reader has done like 3 different jobs + went to college. multilingual!reader, writer!reader.
WORD COUNT. (estimated) 13k
DAY OF RELEASE. (estimated) august / september
“In two days, your new drama comes out. This is the… what is it?”
“12th.”
“12th drama you’ve written that’s somehow about Wonwoo.”
“And?”
“So, when will you finally confess to him?”
It’s not the first time someone’s asked you that– or specifically, not the first time Jihoon has asked you that. He’s been asking you that for years now. You can only look into your glass, staring into the abyss of soju and beer because you don’t have an answer.
You’ve never had an answer to it.
“I don’t know. Never? I’ll get over it eventually, probably,” you say. His eyebrows raise and he can only scoff and snaps his fingers in front of you, drawing attention to his face. “Eleven years,” Jihoon remarks. “You’ve never gotten tired of whatever–” his hands point vaguely at you, “this is.”
He gives you a once over and, you don’t have it in you to be offended when he says, “And you look like you don’t plan to stop. You have had every–”
“Not every.”
“Yes, every, chance to confess but it just seems like you keep delaying it.”
Jihoon gives you that look, the look that says ‘Well?’ and you can’t say anything (again). When he lifts his cup up to drink, he looks at you expectantly, eyebrows raised and ready for your response. But it’s just silent.
“Am I wrong?” He asks.
“You’re crazy,” you say rolling your eyes and taking a sip of your own glass.
“See! That’s not a no,” Jihoon laughs. “Well… it just seems kind of a waste,” you laugh tracing the rim of the glass. “We’re good friends… Ha! We’re good friends.”
“But?”
“But…” You sigh, “But he doesn’t love me back.”
When you look at Jihoon, he’s smug. His face says smug but his eyes say pity, they always have. Every time you have this conversation, he always reminds you of this, and well, who doesn’t like to be right? But you can always tell he pities you.
“Timecheck!” Jihoon shouts, you flinch at the sound, what the fuck was that?
“It’s been 11 years, somehow your hopes are still up and nonexistent at the same time,” he says and you roll your eyes, snarky… as always.
You tap your wrist with a scoff, “I know it’s been 11 years. I can read the time, Jihoon.”
He sighs again, “But that’s why it’s so… I don’t think you realize really how long you’ve been hoping.”
That kind of stops you because fuck, he has a point. 11 years… That’s a decade, probably 1/7th of your life– you spent your youth loving Wonwoo, your college years still loving him, and your adulthood continuing to love him. When you think about it, so much of a person can change in 11 years, no one is the same person they were 11 years ago. He’s changed so much over 11 years, you’ve changed so much.
And yet here you were, still loving him. Loving every version, every iteration.
It’s kind of crazy.
Confronted with the reality in your hands. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?
You’re confronted with this insane reality and all you can say is…
“Give me time.”
When you meet eyes with Jihoon, he’s looking at you like you just said you plan on quitting writing forever. His eyebrows are raised, eyes wide as saucers, staring at you in absolute shock at your audacity.
“GIVE ME TIME?!”
There we go. You close your eyes letting yourself sit and just absorb the lecture he’s about to give you.
“What type of nonsense is ‘give me time’?!” Jihoon asks. “You believe in the cosmic powers or whatever of the universe–”
You mumble, “It’s called fate–”
“Fine! Fate. God, I feel like I say this every time. You believe in the cosmic supernatural possibilities of whatever fate and the universe have given you E L E V E N years! The universe gave you all the time you could need and yet, here you are!”
You let out a small huff, fiddling with the handle of your glass. Yet here you are.
“I don't know why,” you take a small sip again of your drink, “like, I even made like… 12 dramas about him!” Then you take a larger gulp, “Why are they all about him?!”
Jihoon can only shrug, “Maybe you’re a masochist.”
He was expecting you to deny that actually, you can get so defensive about this sometimes but you’re actually thinking about it. Your eyebrows are scrunched up in concentration as you revisit every drama you’ve made in the past 5 years.
When you look back at him, your brows are still furrowed and you say “You know, I might be. Like, what sane normal person writes Twenty-Five Twenty-One?”
“Or Hotel del Luna. Even worse, that was your debut. So from the start, it’s really all been him.”
It’s always been him. “Everything’s always about him, like, my youth revolved around him and whatever he revolved around.”
“Because he was Seventeen, your youth was Seventeen.”
“My youth was Seventeen… Do you think he knows that like for four years straight he was singing songs about himself?”
That one brings a laugh out of Jihoon, your former partner in crime in writing. One of the only people to witness every step of your writing, which involved staring a lot at Wonwoo. “I don’t think he knows, you’re surprisingly not obvious.”
“Everything’s about him… God, maybe I AM a masochist.”
“Okay, let’s just put it this way, let’s do this differently. Let’s enumerate what your and him’s relationship was for those 11 years, each of those 11 years.”
You can only sigh, as if you haven’t done that several times this night, again when he raises his glass triumphantly. “When did you and Wonwoo first meet?”
“You ask this question but I’m sure you know the answer.”
“Should that stop me from asking? It’s about consistency.”
it's been a month since i released the burnout teaser, hoping to get back in the writing groove ong cuz like i need more i want to get it done soon by September
aside from burnout i wanna check the interest on a seventeen x reader gossip girl au where you're (for now) the new secretary of your schools student council and you're thrust into the lives of the elite after having been hiding the past year (scholarship student (basically dan humphrey)) you have to work with the richest people in the world, families with networks in the billions and either uncover the skeletons in their closet or bury the body with them haha
for me, the way i viewed the conversation between the old woman and barbie on the bench is also a matter of confidence.
when you compare the barbies in barbieland and the old woman on the bench, they practically say the same thing ("i'm beautiful") but their confidence and the core and roots behind it is so different.
the barbies in barbieland are confident out of ignorant, they have nothing to not be confident about. they're made of plastic, they have no cellulite, no private parts; it's always perfect in barbieland, so their hair is always perfect, their clothes, their shoes, everything is perfect. there's no bad day, no prejudice, no standards that you can't be part of in barbieland. so when the barbies say "i'm beautiful", they say it because they're ignorant. the core of their confidence is ignorance.
but when the old woman responds to barbie with "i know" to the "you're beautiful" comment, the confidence she has has a completely different core than the barbies. the old woman is the antithesis of everything you should be in barbieland. she's old, she has wrinkles, crow's feet, white hair, no hair. she has all of these qualities that our society will say is not beautiful, is ugly that these are things you avoid with skincare, retinol, botox all these things. the old woman lives in a society where the mass will not view her as beautiful.
and yet she's still confident, she still says "i know" because despite what everyone says, what all the standards are, she knows she's beautiful. thousands of people can disagree and say she's not, it won't matter because she knows she is. the old woman is confident despite knowing.
huwag naman sanang filipino bhe ayokong gumastos sa therapy 🥹
.... di ako pwedeng sabihin na yung next is happy kasi after burnout (wonwoo) yung plan ko is a jopay/ngayon kaya/raining in manila jun fic... kasi wonwoorideu/lhuihui ako eh....
masakit din yung fic na yun...... best friends sila nung nasa china si jun (teenage jun) tapos bigla siyang umalis punta sa korea, di sila nakita ng 11 years (whats w me and 11 years) tapos nung bumalik si jun sa china, eh umalis siya na sa new york para maging artist.
pero nung nasa elevator si jun, nakita niya si best friend after 11 years, kasi siya creative director ng new jeans na nagmigrate sa korea para mas malapit sa opisina haha
si jun, hindi niya nakita ng 11 taon si yn. pero si yn, very much nakita siya everywhere esp nung nasa china pa siya haha
very much last kiss by taylor swift
So I'll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep
And I feel you forget me like I used to feel you breathe
And I'll keep up with our old friends just to ask them how you are
Hope it's nice where you are
sorry na ang haba nito ..... nag info dump ako tapos 1am, sobrang mali ng grammar ko kung late na
helloooo! thanks for the question, burnout will be out in purely english even though it's based on a Filipino song&movie, it's mostly eng for international reasons because i'd like non-filos to be able to read it
but honestly, i kind of wish i could've written burnout in taglish, there are so many lines i think would've hit harder in filipino.... alas T T
If only Wonwoo knew, that all the songs, all the poems were about him.
You wrote your love quietly– in the footnotes of everything you said and did. You wrote your love in the subtext and hidden meanings, if you analyzed it you would unravel a string of letters leading to Jeon Wonwoo.
But Wonwoo, for all his love of novels, was horrible at reading you.
You keep your feelings to yourself, for you fail to find not just words, but a language to describe it with.
It’s not his fault he can't mind read.
i wonder if other students know that student council member may watches a 27-year-old south korean man play video games for 4 hours while working on the budget proposal for this school year
