i never thought i’d do this but my friend is five months pregnant and abortion is not a thing here in the philippines. there’s no way to terminate the fetus that’ll be safe for her, and she’s already severely unhealthy at 38kg as a 22 year old pregnant woman. she doesn’t want to carry it to term because of financial issues; all her checkups and vitamins and everything her doctor has prescribed her have already used up most of her savings. we’re supporting her to the best of our abilities but we’re just broke students too.
her checkups cost about $50 per session, and we’re trying to save for when she delivers the baby and has to buy necessities.
if you can help by donating or sharing, we’d be so grateful. any amount would be helpful.
It hurts me to know this from the most recent legal update on the Handala freedom flotilla boat crew: “Christian Smalls (United States), reported severe physical violence by Israeli forces.” My brother, you are so powerful and courageous. Stay strong, and see you again soon.
Update from @GazaFFlotilla:
on Chris: The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, U.S. human rights defender Chris Smalls was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals. They choked him and kicked him in the legs, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back. When his lawyer met with him, Christian was surrounded by six members of Israel’s special police unit. This level of force was not used against other abducted activists. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition condemns this violence against Chris and demands accountability for the assault and discriminatory treatment he faced.
Chris Smalls is an organizer for amazon labor unions and was the only black civilian aboard the Handala and seems to be the one receiving the most violence while being illegally kidnapped by Israel.
Do not let this be swept under the rug. Israel is claiming to be allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza while assaulting the civilians who want to bring non-rotten, non-spoiled food and supplies into Gaza.
Creaking doors have never scared Hyunjae. Or maybe, more accurately, he should say that they hadn’t. Because when the door to the skate rink creaks open, he jumps. Hands up and guilty. Like he’s the real mastermind to the string of jewelry store heists he and Younghoon solved this week.
“Oh. Hyunjae. What are–”
“Uh, no. Not me.”
“–you doing here?” Your voice tapers off, squinting at his figure sitting in the dimly lit rink.
“Well, I was just..” He stammers, not entirely sure himself. To clear his head, is what he told Younghoon when he left the office with the company car before the poor guy could even stop him. But if he’s honest with himself, truly honest, that’s a load of bullshit. His head is clear. Like stupidly, squeaky-clean clear. So why did he leave? Why did he drive himself here? He notices your eyes. He frowns. Next, he notices your hands. “Are those skates?”
Your hands move quick, shoving the scuffed pairs behind your back. Your body hinges forward. “No?”
He stares at you. You stare back at him. You both have done this a million times before now; you both know how this ends.
Your body gives in, folding in on itself and pitching you towards the seats where Hyunjae was sitting. You plop down next to him. Skates thumping softly on the carpeted ground.
“This was a weird week for me.” You finally say, staring at the rink through the clear plastic wall.
Hyunjae reclaims his seat. “But you were undercover this week? Usually that’s like your whole mojo.”
“Usually.” Your lips pucker slightly, eyebrows raising in this confused, far off sort of stare that Hyunjae isn’t quite sure what to make of. He goes back to your eyes. He can see the rawness of them better from this angle.
“So what was different?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, the case or you know how the chief gets when I go undercover.”
“Well you do get, like, really, into it.”
“Or what about Eric this week?” You continue, without missing a beat. “I mean what was up with him?”
“Well, it has been a tough couple–.”
“He’s been acting out the way he did when I first joined the office.” You can’t even hear him. “All that macho, holier-than-thou, protocol bullshit. I thought he was past that phase.”
“Hey–”
“He totally steamrolled me and ruined all the work I had been putting in and it’s not even like–”
“Hey.” This time you don’t ignore him. “Stop.” Your eyes flicker to the one of the hands he’s placed on your shoulder. “Just slow down for a moment.” Hyunjae removes his hands from your shoulders. They hover in the air for a moment. You swallow. He pushes them straight down, punching the seat silently. “What happened?”
Your voice turns quiet. “This was just a really important case for me.” You shake your head, gaze falling to your knees. “I thought it would be my chance to prove myself to Sunwoo, to Eric, to the office, to you. But it just all turned to shit.”
Hyunjae blows a raspberry. “You’re being harsh.”
“I blew my cover, Hyunjae.” You wince. “And if I’m remembering the detective handbook correctly–which, oh right, I am–that’s the worst thing you can do.”
Hyunaje just shrugs. “So what?”
Your head whips toward him. “So what!”
“Yeah? So what?”
Your hands fly up, exasperatedly pushing air out of your mouth in uneven breaths.
“Did Sunwoo fire you?” He tests.
“No, but–”
“But what? You made a mistake. Everyone does. I make mistakes every week. Sometimes twice.”
You give him a sideways glance. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
He chuckles darkly. “Look,” Hyunjae gives air to his hands again, releasing them from the vinyl to reach over and take hold of yours. “What I’m trying to say is that you’ll learn from it, and knowing you, you’ll probably never make this same mistake again. You’re an amazing detective. So forget about trying to prove yourself to me. You have, a million times over. I mean, everyday I get up excited to come to work just to see you. To watch how you analyze a case or get inside the minds of suspects. You could be doing anything else, anywhere else in the whole entire world, and every single day I just thank the big cosmic whatever that for some reason you ended up here doing this.” You watch him carefully, testing out the sincerity of his words he imagines. So for good measure, he adds, “And I mean every word of that, detective.”
At last, you smile. A breathtaking, heartstopping, altogether unreal smile that gives Hyunjae literal chills. There’s so much he wants to say to you in this moment. So many thoughts he’s had for so long that he wishes could breathe air. You laugh, squeezing his palm in yours. He finds himself giggling. He finds he isn’t even ashamed of it.
“Come on.” He murmurs, standing up. “Let’s go skate.”
You look down to his feet, head tilting a full 45 degrees. “How did I not realize you were wearing skates this entire time?”
Eventually, you lace up your skates and meet him on the otherwise empty rink. You skate beside him, at a slow pace, solely for Hyunjae who is not nearly as good at skating as you. He almost falls at least three times and falls straight on his ass once. You laugh in his face, but take his hand to help him up all the same. And your hand stays just like that, for the rest of the night, while skating circles around the rink.
The second time I smoke weed is during my first week living in Chicago. The new roommate asks me in the morning in between standup calls three and four if I’ve walked yet on the very aptly named Chicago avenue. The answer is no. We’re dressed and walking past Eckhart Park before my Eastern time zone counterparts have even logged off.
After 20 minutes, we pass the dispensary. “I’m out of weed.” The new roommate declares stopping in front of the pink and green sign. “Mind if we stop in?”
I browse the different strands on the tablet. It’s all more expensive than I had assumed it’d be. I peek over the roommate's shoulder. There are two different pre-rolls loaded on the screen: Georgia Peach and Apple Fritter.
I smile.
The roommate notices. “Yoo, you should so get it.” She looks my way, a wide smile on her face. I’m hit with the memory of our first facetime call after meeting on a chicago housing facebook group. She looks nothing like I had imagined, but her smile is the same. Then, I’m hit again with another realization on the other side of my body and chest that the roommate is tall. This, in itself, is not a new realization, but the fact that her boobs are quite comically right in my line of sight is. I laugh as a response, leaning back towards my tablet to reproduce the search and misspelling the word Georgia three times.
The roommate stops in the corner store next door to purchase a lighter. I wait outside and fish out the plastic cylinder labeled Georgia Peach. Holding the capsule under my nose, I take a whiff.
Reappearing, the roommate pulls out one of the cylinders from the bag, places it in her mouth, and presses down with her teeth until a ‘pop’ sounds. “Does it smell nice?”
I squint into the sun, dropping Georgia Peach back into the bag. “Not really. Just smells like weed.”
I keep to myself the fact that I smelt the thing thinking it would smell like home.
most basic treatments for sickness involve some form of salt water (drinking electrolytes, gargling with warm salt water, epsom salt baths) as a way of microdosing going to the seaside
random post to say that I was talking to my sister a little bit ago and she said that I as a person have a lot of fortitude… now is that a full circle moment or what
can I just say how much I LOVED the sea is yours to take??? I've been inactive for a while and I came across it randomly looking for seventeen fics and I'm definitely going to read everything you wrote now... like I know it's hard work but I would love it if you continued it or another one in that universe or hell even buy a book if you published it!! definitely left me wanting more so thank you so much for writing and posting it :)
wow thank you for reading and loving that piece!! it's honestly so surprising that you found it the way you did just because that fic is many years old now so it's def not popping up on anyone's dash lol but nonetheless im glad the fic found its way to you and you to it :))
as for more, there actually is side piece written in that universe and posted on here called 'the world is ours to remake'. it's not written as fanfic and instead as an original work of fiction. it follows the gift of fortitude as well as king avi in the years surrounding the holy wars up until avi's death (who if i'm remembering correctly was written as being jeonghan in the seventeen fanfic version).
i recognize that this probably isn't what you were hoping for but just wanted to put it out there in case it does strike any interest. as for a literal continuation of the story in the sea is yours to take: it's been a long time since i've worked on anything in that universe so i don't want to encourage anyone to get their hopes up, but i do still love that story, the universe, and all the characters so much and very often tinker with the idea of picking it back up :p
omg shawna you beautiful ray of light :( i almost did a double take cuz i was so surprised to see you!! sometimes i just have no clue of who pokes around on here and it enchanted me to read your lovely words!! i'm sprinkling you with good energy ✨ i hope all is well!!
ray of light...me?.... choco pls :(( but no i get what you mean about the double take lolol once i started being on here more often i was also doing many a double takes to see certain blogs pop up on my dash again after literal years of not seeing them, which is lovely and nostalgic and a million other indescribable emotions. all is indeed well in life right now! thank you :))
pairing: Taehyun x Beomgyu
genre: angst, apocalypse!au
warnings: cursing, character death, mentions of blood and guns, zombies
word count: 7.1k
notes:
— this is the second rewrite I'm posting here of this story! you can find the original and the first rewrite linked below :)
As the world around him falls, Taehyun keeps moving on.
Lavender Mist | the things we lost along the way | TXT Masterlist
Kai disappears in the middle of the night, and all he leaves behind is a note.
I’m sorry. But everyone’s leaving and I have to leave first or you’ll leave me too.
Don’t look for me.
That’s it. That’s all, the culmination of nearly twenty years of friendship—familiarly messy handwriting scribbled in fading pen on a scrap of dirty paper, fingerprints of dirt smeared on the edges. It’s still in Taehyun’s backpack, crumpled so much by now it’s unreadable, but it doesn’t matter. He couldn’t forget those three sentences if he tried.
I’m sorry.
Taehyun’s sorry, too. Because for all the betrayal of Kai’s disappearance—he chose to leave, chose to vanish, chose to leave Taehyun behind in this shell of a world when they’ve been best friends for so long—Taehyun wonders if things would have happened the same way if he’d been more observant. Less consumed in his own grief. Able to see Kai, really see him in the days after Yeonjun and Soobin left. Would the blank of Kai’s silences have managed to permeate the dull static of his own thoughts. Would Kai have come to him? Would he have been convinced to stay?
They look for him anyway, Taehyun and Beomgyu both. The undead roam and the sun burns fierce, but even as the heat sloughs off his skin and the faces of the undead haunt his sleep, Taehyun can’t stop, won’t stop, even when Beomgyu lays a hand on his arm and says with his eyes that Kai isn’t coming back.
Because he can’t be gone. Not like this. It’s just—a cruel joke. It has to be. Taehyun searches every house and sees Kai hiding behind every corner. He ventures into abandoned subways to find Kai walking out of an old train. He wanders the earth in a daze, seeing Kai everywhere and nowhere, and he’s gone but he can’t be he won’t believe Kai can’t be gone he can’t be gone I need to find him—
Then an undead lurches out of a gas station bathroom and nearly takes a chunk out of Beomgyu, and Taehyun remembers he still has someone to lose.
So he opens his eyes. Blinks away the visions of Kai that haunt the corner of his eyesight, and forces himself to see the world beyond the blank space that Kai left when he disappeared. There is still someone here. Someone left. Someone with him—who stayed even after Kai chose to leave, who still cares for Taehyun, miraculously, even after weeks and months of neglect. And so they move on. As five minus two minus one.
So it’s something of a fucked up joke when Kai returns.
. . . . .
He appears as a shadow in the corner of Taehyun’s eye. Another hallucination, Taehyun thinks at first. A mirage in the heat shimmers rising from the sunbaked ground. He turns away, ready to ignore it, but then Beomgyu gasps, too.
“Kai.”
Taehyun blinks, and there’s his friend standing in the sun, staring back with shattered eyes.
Everything in Taehyun screams to sprint forward, to grab Kai and shake him and hug him and punch him hard. Sob a garbled mix of something like fuck you and how did you find us and I’m so glad you’re back and what happened to you—
But then he sees the black veins creeping up Kai’s neck, and he knows.
“Taehyun.” Kai’s familiar voice cracks on the syllables of his name, but his shattered eyes are clear, so clear. He doesn’t move, but Taehyun has to fight the urge to step back. “Please.”
Please. His head spins. The world is static and only Kai’s bruised face is clear. Please. What the hell is he asking for—
Bulging pupils drop to the gun at his side, and Taehyun understands.
“No. No.” He shakes his head, takes the step back. “No, no—Kai—I can’t—”
“Please,” Kai whispers again. “For me.”
Solid in the haze of the sun and the moment, Beomgyu’s hand makes its way to Taehyun’s shoulder. He barely feels it, almost doesn’t even remember anyone exists but Kai and him, but he does hear when Beomgyu’s whisper flutters past the static and into his ear. “You don’t have to.”
And he’s right. Because Taehyun doesn’t have to—in the strictest definition of the word. He doesn’t have to raise the gun, put Kai out of his misery the way Kai wants him to. The world will move on if he doesn’t. He could turn around and walk away and nothing would be any different.
Besides, Kai was the one who left first.
But—he’s also wrong. Because Kai’s been bitten and if he doesn’t die, he’ll live forever in the worst way possible. Because if Taehyun does turn away, he’ll be condemning Kai to a fate they’ve both agreed is worse than death. Because Kai is still his best friend, no matter what, and who is Taehyun to resist a dying boy’s last wish? What is he, really, if he doesn’t?
Taehyun’s hands are cold. He doesn’t shrug off Beomgyu’s grip, but he does shake his head. “No,” he replies, numb fingers wrapping around the barrel of the gun. “No, I do.”
Kai stares up at Taehyun as he readies the weapon, cracked glass eyes almost whole as a little smile glimmers on his face. “Thanks,” he whispers, and in that moment, Taehyun can’t do it. Won’t do it. This Kai looks too much like the old one, the one with a bright smile and a dolphin screech laugh and dark eyes that glittered with mischief—
Dark eyes marred, now, by those bulging black veins crawling across bruised, burnt skin.
Almost on reflex, Taehyun pulls the trigger. Bang.
And what remains of Kai slumps over, blood and brains pooling in a deep red puddle on the dusty ground.
Taehyun stands there for a while. A second, a minute, an hour—he’s not sure. It’s cold and it’s hot and the world is hazy and he can’t move, can’t tear his gaze away from the remnants of his best friend.
“Taehyun.”
When he finally reacts to his name, Beomgyu has definitely said it more than once. His grip has tightened on Taehyun’s shoulder but when Taehyun finally twitches, the rough-soft hand loosens, slides down to his wrist. “Come on,” Beomgyu says quietly, tugging slightly. “We need to go.”
Blood and brains, still open eyes. A smile.
Taehyun doesn’t move.
“Taehyun.” The grip tightens. “Let’s go.”
Go. Let’s go.
“Taehyun.”
He forces his eyes away from the bloody hole blown into Kai’s head. Vaguely, he feels the gun being peeled out of his hand, hears the safety clicking back on. Beomgyu tugs at his arm again and with a final whisper of his name Taehyun follows, numbly, Kai’s bloody face all he can see.
. . . . .
How do you remember the dead?
It’s a question Taehyun hasn’t been able to answer in the months since the outbreak, when the initial slew of bodies filled the streets and his parents never came home. He could have answered before—smiles immortalized in picture frames, voices in videos taken on phones with the recorder laughing behind the camera. But the internet is gone now and with it the hundreds of thousands of memories people left stored in the cloud. Photos are easily crumpled, even those tucked into plastic sleeves eventually ruined by rain or dotted with dust and dirt, and the time it takes to properly sketch and color a scene to remember is a luxury no one can afford anymore. It’s not as if Taehyun ever had the skill for it anyway.
Memory, then. The duty of the human mind. But the brain is a fickle thing—imperfect, messy, jumbled and imprecise compared to the printed photos he once held in his pocket and backpack, the pictures and videos he had saved on his phone. It remembers what he wishes it wouldn’t and lets go of what he holds most dear. The voices of his family, his friends. Their smiles, their laughs. Ghosts, now, all of them—so faint and pale compared to the horrors that haunt him now. These are the things that leave.
Kai’s bloody face is one of the things that stays.
It haunts him in the days after, that vision of a bloody smile. Beomgyu’s gasp, the black veins creeping up Kai’s face, spasms of pain ruining the angelic picture his friend had once been. The gun barrel between his hands, the broken look in Kai’s eyes, a whispered plea for a mercy that only he could grant. The whole moment is so vivid in the way Kai’s last smiles aren’t. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair, his parents had told him in the past about things like broken crayons and strict teachers. Move on, and let go. And maybe, in the old world, he could have taken that advice. But they weren’t there to see the world crumble. They weren’t there to watch Taehyun take his first undead life at the ripe age of nineteen, his first real life weeks later. They weren’t there when the ropes at which he could grasp in this swirling ocean of a desert frayed and snapped, when the world took everything and everyone away and left him behind. They weren’t there to watch their son shoot his best friend in the face.
How do you move on when there’s nothing to move on to?
Life isn’t fair. Taehyun hates his parents for leaving him with that, and loves them for not knowing better. What a luxury it would be to have been left behind in the strange world of before, of neon lights and supermarkets and the ability to store laughs on the cloud, never to face this new earth full of monsters only before seen in nightmares. He’s grateful they didn’t have to see what he’s become. He resents that they left him to figure this out alone. He prays that their lives ended as painlessly that they could have. He cries when it hits him, over and over and over, that he’ll never see them again.
Move on, and let go.
He's so glad they died in a world where that was the best advice they could have given, and hates them for not living long enough to give him something better.
(What would his parents say if they knew what he had done? What words would they have given him to live off of?)
(Would there be anything to say at all?)
So Taehyun doesn’t move on. Can’t. Because—he needs to know. How do you reconcile the horrors of now with the joy of the past, keep the memories of the dead alive without seeing their bloody faces every minute? He can’t remember Kai’s laugh or his music, not when his mind won’t stop playing that moment on loop, a faint smile, a whispered thanks, a sharp bang and the remnants of Kai’s body falling, falling, falling to the ground…
Five days after he pulls the trigger, Beomgyu finally begins to tell him.
“They’re still with us.”
Taehyun isn’t sure why that’s what brings him out of this half lucid stupor. Vaguely, he understands that Beomgyu has been talking to him for a while. Talking at him, at least, because he definitely hasn’t been responding. But for some reason he hears that sentence, fully registers it, and though there must be some context he doesn’t have the constant aching grief catches fire in his chest and all he can think is how dare you, how dare you, how fucking dare you try to say that to me now—
“How do you know?” He has Beomgyu’s dirty shirt in his grip, the older boy looking up at him with eyes wide in confusion, surprise, burgeoning anger of his own. “How do you fucking know? How could you say that to me, how could you try and say that after I killed him with my own hands—”
And then his eyes begin to burn. And the tears begin to fall. And the fire dies as soon as it blazed, melted under the weight of Beomgyu’s words, and he’s crying, sobbing, his grip on Beomgyu’s shirt gone as every tear he hasn’t been able to shed over the death of everyone he loved releases itself from the broken remnants of his soul, and he’s crying, and crying, and crying—
Beomgyu’s face swims in his vision. It’s so clear, that moment, despite the blur of his tears obstructing the large eyes and thin lips drawn in a pinched, painful expression Taehyun recognizes from his own few encounters with a mirror since it all started. Because—fuck, Beomgyu is grieving, too. Kai wasn’t just Taehyun’s friend. At some point in time, he was Beomgyu’s too.
Yet despite this grief, Beomgyu’s eyes are soft. No longer angry. And—in the future, Taehyun will know why. Because the loud and playful and endlessly, carelessly kind Beomgyu that he’d known from a distance on the schoolyard is somehow still the Beomgyu of this deadened husk of a world, brash and cheerful and sweet chaos personified in his lightning sharp laugh, still a ray of kindness and raw hope despite all the world has done to make him otherwise. In the moment, though, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t understand. Can’t comprehend how Beomgyu couldn’t hate someone who’d killed a boy they both knew because for all that they’d each pulled the trigger, it had never before been on someone they knew as a brother, a boy they both cherished and loved. So why was Beomgyu still here and trying to comfort him, of all things, when Taehyun was the one who’d caused him so much pain?
“He’s dead,” Taehyun sobs. “He’s dead, and I killed him.”
“He asked you to,” Beomgyu replies quietly.
Against his will, the image returns. Kai’s eyes, so clear, so earnest as he asked despite the oozing veins spasming up his neck and cheek. Please. For me. Words as lucid as his eyes had been, then, devoid of the glazed grief they’d held when Yeonjun and Soobin went, of the emptiness they’d borne the night before he left. In those last moments, if you could ignore the final phases of infection creeping up his skin, he’d have been indistinguishable from the childhood best friend Taehyun had known all his life.
Taehyun squeezes his eyes shut against the scene burned into his vision. Please. For me.
Who was he to refuse the smallest of mercies to the boy he’d always called a friend?
But still, the grief keens in his chest. But still—even then—
(Mom, Dad, I’m so glad you never saw me like this.)
“It wasn’t fair of him to,” Beomgyu continues, cutting through the ache. “But he did.”
Taehyun’s stomach lurches. Twists. It wasn’t fair of him to. No, it wasn’t, but what else could he have done? What else? He was already in the final stages of infection. He had no weapon that Taehyun could see. What could Taehyun have done—what the fuck else could he have done, what other fucking choice did he have—
Life isn’t fair.
Not fair. Never fair. It never could’ve been, never would’ve been, not in this world where he’s been cursed to remain amidst the ashes of everything he’s ever known.
“None of this,” Taehyun grits out, trying not to scream, “is fucking fair.”
“That’s how I know they’re still with us, Taehyun. Because nothing was fair to them, and nothing is fair to us.” Beomgyu had been holding him before but somehow Taehyun was also holding Beomgyu, then, fingers and legs twisted, their sides pressed together as the older boy heaved a deep, shuddering sigh that Taehyun could feel against his chest. “They know it, and they accept it. They must.”
So honest. So sound. So reasonable in Beomgyu’s soft voice, even though on the schoolyard, Taehyun had often fancied himself the more logical and cynical of the two, between his skepticism and Beomgyu’s purported cheer. He listens, and tries to hear, and though the moment is but a blur between the pounding in his head and the tears in his eyes, some things echo. Some things stay. Beomgyu’s words ground him, his voice hoarse with tears, whispering so clearly into Taehyun’s ear.
“I want you to know, too, Taehyun. That’s why I dare to say it.”
. . . . .
In the weeks after, Taehyun thinks. And wonders. Ponders Beomgyu’s words and their truth, teases apart belief from fact. It’s true that life is unfair, that nothing has been fair for Taehyun or Beomgyu or anyone else they knew, but how does Beomgyu know with such certainty that the others know? That they believe, and understand? Because knowing and believing are not one and the same, and besides, they’re dead. How could Beomgyu ever know the thoughts of the dead?
“I don’t know,” is what Beomgyu admits when Taehyun finally finds the courage to ask. They’ve long stopped counting the days but it’s been some time, maybe a month or two, though neither of them can be sure. “Like you say, it’s belief, not fact, but only in the sense that they never told me. I believe in them.” He sighs a little. “That they would never blame us for their circumstances, the way we’d never blame them for ours.”
Taehyun stares at the ceiling, feeling the rough, dusty carpet beneath them. They’re lying in another abandoned house, the previous one picked clean of the few provisions it once had. Picture frames of a happy family haunt the tables and walls, and he tries his best to ignore their eyes staring down at him from their perches. Some of them have fallen to the floor, knocked over by another survivor too worried about food to care about a few smashed pictures and panes of glass.
Or perhaps the photos unsettled them as much as they unsettle Taehyun, and they gave in to the urge to shatter the frames on the ground.
Grief and loathing rise in Taehyun’s chest, and he swallows around the urge to vomit. Beomgyu is better than he is. Taehyun still finds himself cursing his parents for leaving him alone like this. Soobin for getting sick. Yeonjun for disappearing. Kai for forcing him to pull the trigger. Even Beomgyu, sometimes, for making him wanting to stay alive even the slightest bit when it would be so much easier to just give up. Which is none of their faults and he would never want the dead to return just for the sake of his own cold comfort, but it still fucking hurts and sometimes it tries to eat him alive.
He tells Beomgyu as much, not really knowing what reaction to expect, but the older boy only shrugs from his position splayed out on the floor. “But you could never really blame them for this, could you?”
He’s right. Taehyun couldn’t. Which just makes everything hurt more.
“I don’t want to think of them this way,” he says. To his side, he feels Beomgyu’s eyes turning to him, but Taehyun keeps staring at the ceiling. “I just—I want to remember the good things. The memories we had. And how they should have been, if we were all still alive.”
“…Remember when I told you they’re still with us?”
Taehyun almost snorts. “I nearly strangled you, I think it’d be hard to forget.”
“Yeah, well.” Beomgyu snickers too. “Besides that, I was being serious, you know.” His tone turns somber, and even though sleep pulls at his eyelids, Taehyun strains his ears to listen.
“It’s not really remembering,” Beomgyu says quietly. “At least for me. It’s like…a certainty. Knowing that they were there. Knowing that they lived, knowing that I loved them, and knew them, and knowing that they loved and knew me too. I was touched by them when they lived.” He takes a deep breath. “So as long as I live, a part of them…they’ll always be alive, too.”
Beomgyu’s words wash over Taehyun’s skin, a light balm to soothe the ever-present ache in his chest. It’s a lovely thought—so lovely, really, that only Beomgyu, the last ray of raw hope in this world, could have thought of it. But when he finishes, and the silence falls again, something about it still doesn’t sit right with Taehyun. Because it’s all a little too lovely for this broken world of disaster and death.
“How can you think that?” Taehyun asks, and there’s no venom this time. Because for all the beauty of Beomgyu’s words he still can’t quite comprehend them, understand how Beomgyu could ever accept them fully. He wants to know. Needs to. Kai’s face still haunts him whenever he closes his eyes, blood and a smile and stifling smoke rising from a gun in his hand, and he needs it to stop and Beomgyu’s the only one who knows how. How do you remember the dead for what they were, and not just the monsters they became?
“I don’t know,” Beomgyu says again, voice almost frustrated and uncharacteristically sharp. He softens, though, when Taehyun finally meets his eyes. “I just…” He swallows. “I don’t think I’d be able to live if I didn’t believe in it.”
They sit in silence for a while as Taehyun mulls over Beomgyu’s words. I don’t think I’d be able to live if I didn’t believe in it. He understands. It feels like if he doesn’t believe in something, the grief will bury him alive.
“I feel like I’m dying,” Taehyun says quietly. “Every moment, even when I’m not.” Drowning in what is, what was, what could have been.
“Me too,” Beomgyu replies, and in the fractured starlight glinting into his dark eyes, Taehyun knows he’s telling the truth. That he’s dying, but his belief lends him a rope in this dark, dark ocean of blood and sorrow, a rope to cling to that keeps him alive.
I want to believe, too, Taehyun screams inside. I want to. I need to.
“Taehyun.” Moonlight glints in Beomgyu’s eyes. “Look at the stars.”
Taehyun looks out the window. The black night glitters with little diamond stars, so bright and so beautiful that his breath catches. How had he never noticed them before?
“Sometimes, when it’s my turn to watch, I look at them. And I pretend.” Taehyun follows the trail of Beomgyu’s finger as he points to the sky. His eyes, once fractured, now glitter wholly in the moonlight, soft and shining and lovely, all-knowing, so full of a glowing foreign hope. “Like, in that cluster, maybe that’s my mom. And my dad, and my brother. And maybe, next to it, there’s Yeonjun and Soobin and Kai right there.” His finger shifts slightly. Hovers. When he looks back at Taehyun, there’s a little smile on his lips, strong and soft and sure. “I like to think that someday I’ll join them, and we’ll finally be together again.”
Another lovely cliché, one that could only have sounded so beautiful from Beomgyu’s own voice. And this time, when Beomgyu’s hand lowers to the ground, Taehyun finds himself bound by the spell of his words for just a moment longer as the stars twinkle cheerfully above him.
But they’re too lovely. Too bright. Too beautiful to be proper elegies for the dead, when their cruel hope never even dims as the pieces of Taehyun’s world shatter one by one. They could never reflect the sorrow he carries in his scraped hands, the grief he cradles in his ruined chest, the memories, good and bad, that he clings to in the fragments of his broken mind. And as Taehyun continues staring, staring, trying to summon the hope that sparkles so beautifully in Beomgyu’s eyes, all he can think is one thing.
The stars have no right to shine this brightly, not when everyone he loves is dead.
. . . . .
It’s not the only fancy of Beomgyu’s that Taehyun doesn’t understand. Beomgyu sees so many stars in his sky, finds hope in so many strange little things—a tiny flower by the side of the road, a single whole lollipop in a dusty convenience store, a rare, cool wind breezing through his hair as they trek from one shelter to another, taking from empty grocery stores and hiding in abandoned subways. It’s fascinating to Taehyun, really—that Beomgyu can go through so much, can see Kai’s bloody face in his memories every day, and still find something in nothing and believe it matters. He’ll turn around to find Beomgyu humming old songs to the empty air. Inhaling the scent of nature’s overgrown flowers so deeply he chokes. Making bracelets in five braided colors of string as a byproduct of a night’s boredom, looped around his wrist when Taehyun wakes.
“I found the string in a random room and remembered making these when I was a kid,” is all he says to the question in Taehyun’s raised eyebrows. “Got bored while you were sleeping.”
It feels strange, the sensation of the soft, thin braid tickling his wrist as Beomgyu ties it in place, shifting against his skin as he turns it this way and that. Five threads messily twisted and turned together. Five colors, five boys, five friends…
Material things don’t last. Taehyun knows this well. It’s one of the first things he learned in the days after the world fell apart—when the photos he carried of his family finally ripped to the point of no return, victims of dust and rain and his dirty backpack and pockets, when the mementos of home he tried to take became more burdens than memories and he had to leave them behind. But though he knows this, something akin to hope still flares, the tiniest spark, in his chest.
Later, he’ll admit to himself that he’d hoped, foolishly, that this could be his grounding. That this could be how he would remember. But for now he pushes the spark away, looking at Beomgyu and raising an eyebrow to hide the lump welling in his throat. “You sure this is a braid?” he asks, and neither of them says anything about the way his voice catches on the last word.
Beomgyu sticks out his tongue and Taehyun has to hide a smile at how ridiculous the older boy looks, eyes narrowed and glinting with mock hurt and mischief. “You don’t need to wear it if you don’t want to, jerk.”
Even as Beomgyu says the words, though, Taehyun knows that nothing could ever induce him to take it off on his own. Because for all he can’t understand Beomgyu’s stars in a dark, dark night, Taehyun does understand how he feels about the lovely stars in Beomgyu’s own eyes that make him want to listen to everything the loud-mouthed, sweet-tongued boy has to say. A candle lit in the dark, a rope thrown to the drowning.
A single star in Taehyun’s black night, the only one he could ever say was truly beautiful.
Which is why, perhaps, when the bracelet disappears several months later after a too-close call with a horde of the undead, Taehyun feels like something in his chest has been ripped open and torn out. It was bound to happen, he knew—the strings were already thin and faded before Beomgyu found them, and the dust and grime of every day under the hot sun couldn’t have helped. But still, when they get away and Taehyun realizes only dried black blood and sweat now decorate his wrist, not a hint of the five colors to be seen, he nearly goes back. Nearly turns around and sprints to where he almost died just to find it again. Because of that hope, that cruel, dangerous hope—hope when he knew, he knew, that it couldn’t be.
(Hope is meant for the naïve. Hope is meant for fools. Hope is meant for the people who still see loveliness in a world torn apart, for the people who look at the stars and do not see the cruelty of their beauty, only their cheerful, everlasting glow.)
(Hope is a sword that attacks the wielder and weakens him to the world, showing him the love obscured by dust and static and blood.)
(Hope is a word that gives the world meaning again.)
(Hope is a weapon that snatches that meaning away.)
Beomgyu stops him, a hand on his wrist. “Leave it,” he says quietly, his fingers wrapping gently around Taehyun’s arm. “It’s done what it can.”
But—it hadn’t. Hadn’t, at least, the way Taehyun wanted. It hadn’t remained the grounding point that he needed. It hadn’t kept the horrors away. In fact, it was one of the horrors that tore it from him, tore away Beomgyu’s gift and the meaning attached to it, leaving only black blood behind.
(Hope is a weapon that snatches that meaning away.)
Taehyun cries that night, tears running hot and silent down his cheeks as Beomgyu breathes softly in his sleep. And when Beomgyu eventually wakes to Taehyun’s quiet sobs, he doesn’t stop the older boy from wrapping his arms around him, bringing Taehyun’s head down to his shoulder, and letting the tears soak into his shirt.
Because for all it seemed Taehyun never understood Beomgyu, it had always felt like Beomgyu understood him.
. . . . .
Beomgyu knows, too. That material items don’t remain, that they can’t be counted on to house the memories they need, desperately need, to preserve. Taehyun was there when Beomgyu’s own photos became too crumpled and torn to salvage, when the braid he’d made for himself disappeared beneath the dust and dirt of the earth just days after Taehyun lost his. For all his sentimental nature, Beomgyu understands the world around him, knows that despite warmth of its burning sun, nature is cold and unforgiving to those who have wronged it.
So when Taehyun finds the empty can of lavender Febreze in Beomgyu’s bag, he feels like he should be surprised. The last of the scent has long since dispersed into the air, memories of the smell relegated to the back of his mind, so when it comes out in his hand he blinks a little and for a moment there is some surprise—he’d thought Beomgyu tossed it when it emptied. But then he blinks again, and he has to wonder how he ever could’ve thought Beomgyu would even think of throwing it away.
It had been a rare cool day when Beomgyu plucked the can off a barren supermarket shelf and shoved it into his bag, despite Taehyun’s raised eyebrows and obvious concern for the state of his remaining sanity. Taehyun hadn’t asked questions then, but when they found shelter for the evening, just a few days out from where they hoped to reach a survivors’ compound, he’d raised a pointed eyebrow as Beomgyu produced the can from his bag.
“Don’t interrogate me!” Beomgyu had yelped, hands raised in mock indignation as Taehyun fought to hide a smile at his antics. “I’m innocent!”
“I wasn’t going to interrogate you,” he’d replied, giving up on hiding the smile. There was no point anyway, not when Beomgyu looked so carefree, so happy, so unchanged despite the cruelty of the world around him. “I just want to know.”
The hands came down, but Beomgyu’s smile stayed. “I don’t know,” he’d said, shrugging. “It was just there, so I took it.” Taehyun had snorted at that, but he wasn’t done. “I guess I just…didn’t want to leave with nothing at all.”
Despite the previous levity, Taehyun remembers a tightness in his chest, a prickling behind his eyes as he stared at the almost garishly purple can in Beomgyu’s dirty hand. That was something he could understand.
“Do you even know how it smells?” he’d asked, ignoring the stupid lump in his throat. He’d never quite given up on that habit, not even long after Beomgyu proved he could read Taehyun no matter how he tried to keep his tears quiet.
But Beomgyu didn’t say anything, just looked at the can with a guiltily mischievous expression on his face. His finger rested on the valve as he looked back up at Taehyun, ready to shrug again as he grinned. “Look, it has to be better than the things we smell outside.”
It was better, but mostly because it’s hard not to be better than the stench of rotting corpses mixed with the tang of dried blood coupled with the scent of blooming flowers in the hot wind that somehow makes it all worse. Strong, too—clearly a year of sitting unused on a shelf hadn’t done much to dampen the scent. When Beomgyu sprayed it the first time, more on accident than anything else, they had to stifle coughs and sneezes for too many minutes as the mist tickled their noses.
And yet they kept it.
Which is weird, because most useless things that Taehyun and Beomgyu, despite his inner child, would put in the same category as questionable year-old Febreze get left behind. It’s a luxury, and there’s no space for luxuries in their bags—not phones, not photos, not dingy string bracelets braided with threads in five different colors. Things like Febreze weren’t supposed to have held a place in their lives.
But as the days pass, Beomgyu carves out a place for its too-strong flowery sweet scent. A tiny puff in the air when they return to their current shelter after finding the compound razed to the ground. A small spritz to freshen up before they move on to the next abandoned home. And as they keep struggling through their barren world, emptying the can on their way, Taehyun begins to wonder—when humanity has completely fallen and another race takes up the earth, what will they be remembered by? Will it be the broken braided bracelets threaded in five different colors fallen by the side of the road? Will it be photos of the dead left in abandoned frames in abandoned homes, or stuffed in dirty bags and soiled by dust and rain?
Will it be an empty can of lavender mist at the bottom of a survivor’s bag, the strong, sweet scent of home still a wisp in the air?
Because for all the tickle of lavender mist grates on Taehyun’s nose at the start, slowly, subtly, it does begin to smell of home. Of comfort. Of rest. Of Beomgyu’s presence on the days when Taehyun can’t hold the gun for fear of seeing Kai’s bloody face, when Taehyun can only find death and disaster in every street they pass, when he can’t stand without the world crashing down on his shoulders. On these days, there’s always the weight of Beomgyu’s hand in his, in the press of his body against Taehyun’s during sleepless nights, in the brief dusting of lavender mist into the air…
And one day, the scent isn’t too strong. It isn’t too sweet. It’s a break, a respite, a piece of the old world that miraculously wasn’t lost even in the wake of disaster.
When Taehyun looks at Beomgyu then—really looks at Beomgyu—as he spritzes small bursts of mist into the air of their new makeshift shelter, it only takes him a minute to realize that Beomgyu feels this way, too. That he’s probably felt it for a long time.
So when Taehyun finds the empty can in Beomgyu’s bag, after the momentary surprise, he blinks once, and twice, and remembers the scent. Remembers the sentiment. Remembers this reminder, however small, of home.
How could Beomgyu have thrown this away?
He tries the valve, even though he knows it’s empty. Nothing comes out.
It’s been three days since Beomgyu went. Three days since he showed Taehyun the bite festering black and red, three days since he drew the gun at his belt and weighed it in his hand, three days since he smiled at Taehyun, lips trembling, and raised the muzzle to his temple.
(“Turn around, Taehyun. Don’t watch. It’s okay.”)
(“I won’t do it until you turn away.”)
Only then, with the empty metal can in his hand, does Taehyun finally cry.
He cries for his parents, who were out when the virus got them and never managed to return alive. He cries for his friends who passed first, three of the five strings that frayed over the months until the knotted bracelet fell off his wrist, one ill, one disappeared, one shot. He cries for Beomgyu, the fourth string and his only family left, his last thread of hope in this heartless world. He cries for him, Taehyun, the fifth string and the last one alive, so far from home and never to return.
Taehyun cries for the hope Beomgyu carried that was destroyed three days ago with a bullet shot by Beomgyu’s very own hands. A bullet that took the last of all that he had, leaving him with—
Nothing.
(What will the world remember him by when he goes?)
When Taehyun wakes in the middle of the night, eyes red and cheeks sticky with tears, something in him begs to stay still. What use is there in forging on, in living when everything has been lost, when there’s nothing and no one left to survive for?
(A crumpled family photo dissolved in the rain?)
Is there even a point?
(A broken braid of five frayed strings, buried under the dust by the road?)
Taehyun stares at the gun by his side. Loaded. Always within arm’s reach. So easy to lift, so easy to position, so easy to use. It would be so simple to mimic Beomgyu’s actions from three days ago. Lift. Point. Pull. Bang.
(Or the trail of bodies left in his wake, one sick, one vanished, two shot with the very gun by his side?)
But on his other side, the can of lavender mist rolls against his hand. The metal is warm from his touch, the dirty purple of the wrapping an eyesore in the corner of his vision. He looks at it through bleary eyes and for a moment, he can almost smell it in the air—strong, floral, sweet.
Home.
(Perhaps a can of lavender mist at the bottom of a beat-up bag, the remnants of a scent that came from home.)
Material things don’t last, it’s true. Everything eventually gives way to death and decay. But in that moment, Taehyun learns—some things return anew. Bursts of five rainbow colors, a single star in a cloudy night, a remnant of lavender blooming on the breeze—and they tickle a memory in his mind, bringing back, if only for a moment, something beautiful.
Perhaps this, then, is letting go. How to remember. Not by the stars and their ominous cheer, not by memories slipping from the desperate grasp of his mind. Because he will remember. Always. By the tiny things that remind him of those he once loved, and still loves.
Memories fade. There are things Taehyun can’t or doesn’t recall for long stretches of time. Voices. Laughs. Smiles. The good and the bad, the horrors and the joys, what once was and now is. But sometimes, a piece of the current world will remind him of something. A bird’s soft chirp brings back his mother’s gentle voice. A roll of thunder crackles like his father’s laugh. Yeonjun’s reassuring grip, Soobin’s soft smile, Kai’s musicality in a light, cool wind curling through the air.
Beomgyu’s hand in his own under a night sky full of stars, fingers loosely intertwined with a promise of hope he will never understand.
(Hope is for the naïve. Hope is for fools. Hope is for the people willing to give their hearts to the world, when nothing guarantees that they will get it back.)
But this is hope. His hope. His remembrance. His elegies for the dead, poems written not in the stars but in the pockets of color he finds as the days go by. There isn’t much for him, not in this world, but there is something left for those who have gone. A hope. A dream. A wish. A prayer whispered on lavender scented air, too sweet and too strong and smelling so much of home—a prayer that things will be okay someday.
(Hope is a weapon that weakens the wielder to an unforgiving world.)
And if they are, even if it only becomes true in the last moments of Taehyun’s life, he wants to see it. For them.
(Hope is a word that gives the world meaning again.)
It isn’t easy. It isn’t fair. It never will be, really. There will always be days when the horrors constrict his chest so he cannot breathe. There will always be days when he can’t lift himself from the ground, so he tries to just give up. There will never be a reason he’s alive and everyone else is dead. But on those days, when the sun sets and the moon rises and the stars come out once more, Taehyun holds the long empty can of lavender mist, its label rubbed away under layers of dirt and grime, and he remembers. A sweet scent, a cackling laugh. A gentle voice, a warm smile.
A boy who gave him a reason to be.
So when morning rises, Taehyun rolls over. Stands. Places the empty can back in Beomgyu’s bag, picks it up along with his. Slings them over his back.
And starts walking again.
The sun beats harsh on his brow. Branches catch on his clothes. The snarl of animals and the undead alike whisper faint in his ears. But day by day, Taehyun continues, despite the strangling embrace of Mother Nature curling around him no matter where he goes. Because at night, when darkness sets and the moon rises, Taehyun will feel it. Hope. Not in the garish twinkle of the stars, not in the baleful gaze of the moon on his skin, but in the reminder of a boy whose smiles never made sense, who found things beautiful Taehyun could never dream of comprehending, but who held his hand anyway as starlight shimmered in his dark, laughing eyes.
In the scent of lavender mist filling his nose, no matter where he decides to go.
Reblogs and comments are deeply appreciated! Hope you enjoyed this, and have a lovely day :)
✧✎ synopsis: wonwoo, a heartbroken and burnt out writer nearing the end of his math degree, wants nothing to do with the seemingly perfect, intimidating girl who has everyone under her thumb. you. unfortunately, his literary talent has got him shoved him between a rock and a hard place when you want to write a book and require his expertise. you two are the furthest from compatible. wonwoo can’t see this going well. at all.
pairing: wonwoo x fem!reader
teaser word count: 1.4k
actual word count: 140k (yes, u read that correctly)
genres/tropes: writer!wonwoo, university!au, plug!vernon + boyfriend!mingyu as prominent side characters, SLOWBURN (i am not fucking around this is my slowest burn yet), relationship drama, soul searching, strong angst/hurt (i’m coming for the jugular), comfort, romance, smut, a smoothie of every emotion on earth.
(!) warnings for the full fic: drug use (weed, coke, ecstasy), wonwoo has anxiety + anxiety attacks + fairly dark thoughts, prescribed medication, gambling, intense language, infidelity, throwing up.
✧✎ a/n: as i descend to one knee and cup my hands together at your mercy, i offer a tidbit to the wonwoo fic i have finally completed after two years (lol). i know i ALWAYS say this, but i truly wasn't expecting the fic to be THIS FUCKING LONG! thankfully, i planned it well and although i lost momentum countless times (nervously side eyes the approximate & several 5 month breaks i took in between), my dedication to seeing the characters through & "completing" their growth was smth that i could not leave behind!
not having posted a fic for two years is prob a little much :0 so hopefully the length of this makes up for it (?) usually my writing is just teehee silly little romance agonizing slowburn surface level dilemmas of the self BUT THIS ONE HAS A LITTLE KICK!
so read it if you want! don't read it if you don't want!
hearts & flowers, xoxoxo (me :*)
—MARCH 19TH.
“I have a relatively big favour to ask of you.”
No. Wonwoo didn’t want anything to do with favours.
The fact that Seokmin had actively picked out his presence in the coffee shop like he was some shiny contortion of plastic had actually offended Wonwoo. He came here for two things: to not be bothered, which his friend knew, and to work on the book he was halfway through typing and had been halfway through typing for the past six months. Call it writer’s block, or an inspiration drought, or an absolutely depressing lack of drive—it had been hanging over the writer with an annoying persistence and it seemed that no number of lemony scones or cold coffees were going to make it vanish.
“Uh, Wonwoo?”
“Sorry… what?” He forced his gaze to shift from the blank page on his laptop to Seokmin’s apologetic, softly expressional face, slightly flushed from his time outdoors in the chilled March weather.
“I was just wondering if you’d be up for a favour—a pretty big one—and I know this is your special creativity spot, but she’s been like, breathing down my neck about it and I can’t put it off again.”
“Whose been breathing down your neck?”
At first, Seokmin didn’t say a word, or even make a sound. His lips twitched for a moment, but then he pressed them together and his chest visibly sucked in with a breath. God, Wonwoo hated the suspense and he hated Seokmin for interrupting him when he had been so stupidly close to putting a sentence down that he probably would have back-spaced in frustration a minute later.
“Y’know…” he trailed off, “Her.”
Her.
No, not her, you.
But most people—if not everyone—referred to you by an alias that had seemed to stick so well the majority believed it actually was your name. When people said her they meant Her, and so in a confusing mess of finger-pointing they really meant you. Come to think of it, Wonwoo had no idea where the nickname even came from or who gave it to you or what it even meant.
And he was perfectly fine with never knowing.
“What?” Wonwoo deadpanned. “What on earth could she want to do with me? She doesn’t even know me.” He slid down in his chair, fingers pulling at his circle-lensed glasses so they tilted uncomfortably across his nose bridge. “Or, is this a joke?”
“Oh—no! Absolutely not!” His friend was insistent on proclaiming, vigorously shaking his head. “I’m being serious.”
“Why don’t I believe you then?”
“Okay, well, if you let me explain everything, it’ll all make sense. I said I know someone who writes really well—”
“Meaning me?”
“Yes, meaning you. And the only reason that was even brought up is because she wants to write a book.”
Wonwoo couldn’t help it. He laughed—a very short, disbelieving laugh that flashed a transient smile to his face as he readjusted his crooked glasses. You were the last person he would ever envision wanting to write a book. He then navigated the trackpad on his laptop, deciding to close the document simply titled, 01, that harboured the fleet of pages to his own current work in progress.
“Yeah,” Wonwoo disregarded, “sounds like bullshit.”
“I’m telling you the truth!” Seokmin exclaimed, gripping onto the metal back of the café chair like he was squeezing someone’s taunt shoulders. “She won’t tell me about what, okay? Just that she’s been thinking the idea for a while now. It’s not like I didn’t try to get details. But she refused—said the only person who can know is whoever’s going to help her. Look, y’have to understand, she was pestering me about it nonstop. And you’re my only writer friend!”
“Well, you’re about to have none.” He answered, reaching for his coffee cup but stopping it just short of his lips. “How serious is she about this, anyway?” Wonwoo sighed. “Do you know how much fucking time you need to dedicate to writing a book?”
He stomached a slow, somewhat grimacing sip as he tasted the coffee’s coldness, meanwhile Seokmin swallowed heavily, and at last pulled out the chair he’d been white-knuckling to take a seat.
“Yes, I’m aware it takes time. I know that. And she is serious or else I wouldn’t be here, bothering you. She takes everything seriously.” The boy began unbuttoning his sleek black jacket. “Really, who knows what’ll happen? Maybe you’ll meet her once and she’ll decide she can’t stand you, and then you’re off the hook for life.”
“Yeah, well have you ever considered what might happen if I can’t stand her? Are my feelings even being considered? Minutely?”
“Minutely, they are being considered.”
“Liar.”
It wasn’t that Wonwoo disliked you.
In actuality, you scared him more than anything. But to be associated with you was to be drawn into your life and caught like a firefly in a glass jelly jar. The proof was right in front of him—to Wonwoo’s eyes, Seokmin was basically your little mailman that scrambled around in hectic nature to do your bidding, because most tasks apparently weren’t worth the time or effort.
“I can’t believe you’re trying to rope me into this. You know I can hardly write my own shit, right?” Wonwoo said bitterly, wishing it was the opposite, “my mind is a desolate, blank canvas of fuck-all and if she thinks I’m writing it then she needs a reality check.”
“No, no—of course you won’t write it!” Seokmin reassured him with his big, opalescent smile. “Really, you’re just giving tips, maybe guiding her process, helping with the planning… you know, this could be facilitated so much easier if you spoke to Her yourself!”
“So, my nightmare?” Wonwoo huffed, shaking his leg.
In an instant, Seokmin had whipped out his phone, tapping around the screen quickly using his thin pointer finger.
“I’m just going to pull up her schedule. It’s always pretty packed, but more into the summer break, it thins out a little. “
Wonwoo exhaled, staring off into the warm, afternoon sunlight that hailed in through the windows, striking all the shimmering flecks and pieces of dust afloat in the café air. When he breathed in again, he could smell the luxurious coffees brewing in their rich and distinctive notes. It was such a beautiful day—still chilly as the snow outdoors began to thaw—but pleasant nonetheless.
“This is such a fucking waste.”
And Wonwoo spent it being miserable.
“No, it’ll be useful. Trust.” Seokmin chirped.
“You’re trying to dip me in your optimism gloss again.”
His friend smiled affectionately, tilting his head.
“This will be good. You’ve been a hermit since I’ve known you.”
“Yeah,” Wonwoo scoffed, “so you think it’s a good idea to shove me with the person I relate to least on the entire planet?”
“Really? The least? So, what you’re saying is, you relate more to serial killers? Or animal abusers? Or like, literal fasc—”
“Stop.”
“You want to do this. I can see it in your eyes. I’ll set you up.”
A part of Wonwoo knew there might be no wriggling out of the situation, especially with Seokmin sitting across from him, characteristically eager and brightly pushy as always, like a goddamn salesman. For now, it could be easier to let himself get cuffed.
“Can I at least have some time to think it over?”
“Uh… well… the thing is… the thing with that is—”
“You’ve cornered me?”
“I wouldn’t word it like that.”
“… Okay.” Wonwoo removed his glasses, shoved his knuckles tender but deep into his eye sockets, massaging through flashes of white as he came to accept a fate he didn’t know even existed in his astrology. “Just, I don’t know—fuck—schedule me in wherever.”
“Ha! It doesn’t exactly work like that.”
“I really don’t give a damn how it works, Seokmin.”
“Right,” his friend laughed nervously, “I promise that I’ll get back to you pronto. Sorry for the disturbance. And, uh, good luck.”
“With what part?” Wonwoo grumbled, fixing his spectacles back on to clarify Seokmin’s sympathetic face, the light bouncing off his head of brassy hair like a disco ball. “My incapability to write a goddamn thing or the fact I have to help your perfectionist friend who’s probably going to chew me up and spit me out?”
“Both parts.” Seokmin grinned. “It can only go up from here.”
✧✎ a/n: tada!
this is the introductory scene! i think i've read it so many times that i could probably recite it from memory at this point ;_; anyway! as i mentioned, i know that it's been a hot minute since i last uploaded any scenarios. but one way or another this monster is getting posted! i did NOT have this lurking on my poor tired macbook causing it to overheat and sputter and spew FOR NOTHING!!
i swear that i don't plan for my works to get this goddamn long. before i hardly planned at all. maybe now i plan too much? i guess i have yet to find a happy medium!! but again, i do hope the size of the fic makes up for all that missed time :_( life has been ruff. but this fic was there as a handy distraction mechanism (when i prob should have been facing reality fhwejfhwk) so i guess it's been a double-edged sword!
also just want to preface that the reader goes by an alias throughout the fic. i'm not sure if this is like... a very huge or popular concept nowadays? so if it hits your reading ear a bit weird at first i apologize! but i swear it has purpose!! *chekhovs rule* *winkwink*
ANYWAY! no more rambling!
i'm pondering the idea of adding a taglist for those who are interested, just as i did with honey boy :3 so if that tickles ur fancy then feel free to each out!
BUT PLZ HEED THE FOLLOWING:
the fic in its entirety will be split across 6 parts
the word count of each part ranges from 22-24k!
i do not YET have a set posting schedule, simply bc i am unsure of how long it will take ppl to get through each part
(so that would be smth i'd have to gauge afterward)
REVISIT THE WARNINGS!!
i will not be flagging mature/nsfw/triggering scenes throughout the fic as the fic itself already has a heavy nature to it
so pls read the warnings!
if there's any additional questions i encourage u to swing by :3
