spring teeth, growing in
bae joohyun and the space theory
594w; pg (irene-centric)
the distance from a to where you'd be.
Summer almost over, an intersection in a busy part of Seoul. Cars and scooters pass, a multi-colored blur of helmets blooming like flowers in the dusk, the time mosquitoes like to feed on unassuming flesh. Fresh smell of rain on the pavement mixed with the gas emitted by the traffic, passing pedestrians.
Zoom in. A woman in the middle of the crowd, flinching as faceless name (Dohee, as her classmates are calling her between sprinting ahead) brushes shoulders with her slightly as the light goes green.
Zoom in once more. This woman tucks the hair that has fallen in her face behind her left ear.
This woman's name is Bae Joohyun.
Joohyun's last boyfriend told her she kissed him weird. Not once. Not twice. All the time.
Your lips are. His, by the end, failed to quirk up at the corners as they had done before. Frankly, it's (he'd often punctuate with a sigh here) like I'm kissing a dead person.
She considered that on December 12th, 2015 - two months and fourteen days after she came home and found every trace of him bleached out of her apartment, almost painstakingly. Two days after that, Joohyun curled her toes under the sofa and found one of the earrings he gave her for her 25th cold against her pinky toe. Him and his good intentions, once removed.
It didn't occur to Joohyun until she was watching a rated R movie, her ear piercings closing up, that maybe he wanted to stick his tongue between her dead lips.
To really understand things, Joohyun often needs time, notebooks, and ballpoint pens, the tops of which are well-chewed. Time, unlike notebooks and ballpoint pens, is in junction with space, which people often gift her alongside everything else.
I don't know, Seulgi said. Joohyun thinks it was a long time ago. I know you don't mean to, but you're pushing me away. Seungwan spoke along those lines too, just more words, more apologies. They both don't say much to her now.
The few words Joohyun spoke to them (Seulgi, Seungwan, ex-boyfriend number four, ex-boyfriend number three, the ex-boyfriends that'd listen): I just need. Then she'd shake her head. I just need -
It reads on July twenty-seventh, unmarked year:
Distance. A human necessity in moderation.
I'm afraid I need/have too much of it.
(it also reads like this on january fourteenth, january twentieth, february fourth, february tenth, february sixteenth, 2/28, 3/6, 3/15...)
Zoom out once. A bus turns the corner on the asphalt before Joohyun's very feet. In the third-to-last row is a man in a business suit, staring out the window. They make eye contact during this moment, in which the bus idles to maneuver itself toward a new direction, And in this split second, Joohyun wonders if it's possible to understand someone so completely with a single glance, only held for less than a handful of seconds.
Zoom out again. That bus drives down the street. A woman with dark hair turns her head to follow it a beat too late, and the stranger from the third-to-last row is gone forever. Her hair falls into her face.
Keep zooming out until this woman is lost among a sea of others. until those others that she can physically touch but know nothing about, light years removed, are specks in a city, which is a speck itself, lost in the lights. Keep zooming until we're far, far away, and then, finally we are in space.
Distance. A human necessity in moderation.
I'm afraid I need/have too much of it.
it all boils down to how you eat your oreos
777w; pg-13 (ten/joy)
there are monsters. and then there are ten and sooyoung.
Ten thinks monsters are the things that hide under children’s beds at night, with twisted, fractured teeth and spidery fingers bleeding out from the shadows. They kept his eyes bloodshot and stinging for years, afraid of waking up to a nightmare.
Sooyoung, though, Sooyoung thinks monsters come disguised in human flesh, walking among the crush of bodies down the street. And in her waking nightmares, they smile and promise one thing, but turn around and do another.
Sooyoung was probably born from the crossing path of two comets, both hurtling at speeds bordering two hundred ninety-eight miles per second, one miraculously passing before the other to avoid collision. Sooyoung would be something along the lines of the known and proven and undecipherable phenomena. Sooyoung would be that miracle.
Her stoic parents - who’ve taught her how to flinch the first time Ten tries to wrap his arms around her, who look at him disapprovingly when he trips through Korean, trying to explain all Sooyoung means to him - cannot really be her parents, Ten’s reasoned a long time ago. This was somewhere around the time they were driving back from that disastrous first meeting, Sooyoung trying not to cry, gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles shone white through the darkness.
“You’re going to grow old with me,” she told him as he lay adjacent to her on his living room floor, too tired to pull out the sleeping mats. Her face was distorting, indecisive between sobbing her lungs out and trying not to let it get to her. Only the shaky lilt in her voice betrayed to Ten that she was really affected at all. “We’re going to have white hair, or you’re going to bald a little, and we’re going to be really old together.”
Ten laughed, arm propped beneath his head tingly and asleep. “Is this because you want to spite your parents, or because you love me that much?”
Sooyoung turned to face him, left cheek flat against the carpet. She looked up for a moment, considering, before answering honest.
“Both.”
Sooyoung thinks Ten is a good person. Maybe it’s because she’s convinced that good people have to be perfect, and she believes that Ten is the perfect one for her.
“And what about you?” Ten asks, laughing. He did that a lot - found joy in the mundane facts she’d state. Sooyoung liked that he didn’t take things too seriously.
She taps her finger against her chin. “I guess I’m okay. Not great, not horrible.”
Ten hums. “An okay person.” He takes a sip of the milk Sooyoung buys, but never drinks. “I guess I can live with that.”
Ten did not think he was a good person.
His mind often believed one thing, but his intrinsic train of thought often told him another. You are not kind, he told himself after a co-worker told him otherwise for agreeing to switch shifts. A kind person wouldn’t feel irrational anger or annoyance at that, the same way a kind person wouldn’t feel envy when someone else was praised for things Ten knew he could do as well.
A kind person didn’t tell half-truths sometimes to make themselves look better than how they saw themselves in the mirror (liars, webs of fibs spun between their tongues and teeth, own eyes wary of what was looking back at them), and kind people were often good people. By the logic of conditional statements, this meant that Ten was not one of them.
Taeyong blows a cloud of cigarette smoke into his eyes. They used to be friends, when Ten smoked. Now, they are people who sometimes hang around each other, tolerating one another’s existence. “What are you thinking about?” he asks as Ten studies the ground of the alley behind the store.
Ten laughs, shaking his head. “I quit,” his brain tells his mouth to say when Taeyong offers him a stick.
He doesn’t think about the pack of Marlboros he’s got in his kitchen drawer, hiding beneath a bunch of paper bags so Sooyoung will never find them, unopened.
Sooyoung falls asleep on the couch, in the middle of paid programming. She has a dream that Ten, smelling like cigarette ash, solemnly sits her down across from him and tells her his name is actually Nine.
Ten gets home late and puts a blanket over the sleeping Sooyoung. He lays in her bed, bone tired, but restless. At four in the morning, he slips out of the sheets and crawls under the bed, dust sticking to his back, staring at the wooden skeleton of its frame.
In the darkness, Ten wonders if this is how monsters feel.
closed system
838w; g (sungjin-centric)
sungjin is a bit of a control freak, according to brian.
Sungjin is a bit of a control freak, according to Brian. And Jaebum. And Jaebum’s cousin, Nayeon, who’s studying to be a therapist, which seals the whole deal.
“You don’t let your coworkers organize your data, the only thing you let me touch in your room is my designated spot on the floor, and I can’t even use the PlayStation without you glaring at me,” Brian tells him when Sungjin asks for a list of his flaws, insisting that it humbles him.
“That was one time,” Sungjin says, defensive. “Your hands smelled like garlic.”
Brian gives him a pointed stare before going back to his homework. Adds on, “Holds grudges from high school.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
Twenty minutes of silence later. Sungjin’s won. Or so he thinks. “Do too,” Brian mutters, before putting on his noise-cancelling headphones.
The story goes like this -
In high school, Sungjin had a friend named Wonpil. Said friend Wonpil came to school one day wearing this knitted pink sweater with the most unflattering pattern Sungjin had ever seen. He didn’t even know clothes could come in that garish a color.
Sungjin thought that it was a Christmas present gone wrong - maybe Wonpil’s mom wouldn’t let him out the door without wearing it at least once. He wanted to give Wonpil the benefit of the doubt. So he didn’t comment, and pretended that his eyes didn’t twitch whenever he saw the sweater.
Then a week went by with Wonpil showing up to school every day wearing it. Sungjin decided he had to do something.
“Wonpil?” Wonpil turned around with that even, polite smile on his lips and Sungjin faltered. Would he hurt Wonpil’s feelings if he said the sweater was hideous? Could he secretly take the sweater from Wonpil during gym and dump it in the garbage can behind the school? “Uh, you really like that sweater, don’t you?”
Sungjin forgot that Wonpil was friends with another guy named Jae. As soon as the words “sweater” left his lips, Jae stalked over to their lunch table and put an arm between them.
“Hold up,” Jae started, tilting his head to look at Sungjin. “Are you trying to make a comment here about Wonpil’s sweater?”
Sungjin cleared his throat and stood his ground. “I was just going to gently suggest that he wear something else -”
Jae put his hand up, interrupting. “Look, man. I’m the only one who can make comments about Wonpil’s sweater. I’ve, like, staked a claim on them. Patented it and all. Copyrighted. Jaerighted.”
“Jaerighted,” Sungjin echoed, offended that he was cut off. He opened his mouth to protest, but Jae cut in again.
“Have we met before?” he asked. Sungjin stared at him. They were in the same calculus class. “No, don’t tell me! Your name is…” Jae squinted, deep in thought. “Bob?”
Sungjin decided then that he hated Park Jaehyung.
That said, Sungjin doesn’t think he’s as bad as Brian (and Jaebum and Nayeon) suggests. Dowoon even gets him to go to their high school reunion (but that’s because Sungjin would basically do anything for Dowoon). It’s been an hour of sitting on around a plastic table with Wonpil and Dowoon and Sungjin hasn’t seen anyone that would trigger a bad flashback, so the coast seems clear -
Until a hand slaps him in the back. “Wonpil-ie! Dowoon! And…” Jae, with the same enormous glasses frames, turns to face Sungjin.
“Bob.”
It’s the fourth cup of fruit punch Sungjin’s gotten up to get in the last thirty minutes. The frozen strawberry bits that he had a lot of in his first three cups are dwindling into extinction. All that’s left in the bowl is the orange juice that was poured to defrost them.
“I can’t believe he called me Bob after all these years!” Sungjin hissed to Wonpil during their first trip to the food table.
Wonpil looked at him sincerely, with what Sungjin thought was pity in his eyes. “You look like a Bob,” he said. Thought was the key word.
“Hey,” Jae says, coming up from behind as Sungjin’s staring at the punch bowl.
He flinches. “My name’s Sungjin,” he grimaces, reaching for a napkin.
Jae nods. They’re silent for a bit. “So what’re you up to?” Jae finally asks.
Sungjin looks at him weird. “I’m getting punch.”
“I mean, like, in real life,” Jae says. Sungjin frowns at him, still confused. “You’re practically a genius so I’m guessing big things?”
“Genius,” Sungjin repeats, amused.
“Yeah, you were always getting perfect scores and stuff in high school, you know?” Jae elaborates. Sungjin feels somewhat flattered.
“You remember?” he gawks.
Jae laughs. “It’s kinda hard not to.” He sips his punch.
Sungjin sips his punch. Silence.
“You know,” Sungjin starts, surprised about how relaxed he feels with Jae, his previously sworn mortal enemy. “I used to have a grudge against you in high school.”
“Really?” Jae says, looking very amused.
“Yeah,” Sungjin laughs and it rises, light, out of his chest. “But I let it go.”
this side up
720w; pg-13 (hyuk/nayoung)
they break up like they get back together.
"Hey."
Nayoung looks up at him from where she's sitting cross-legged on Hongbin's empty side of the room, trying to assemble Sanghyuk's dresser. They both know she'll never be able to finish it today. It makes what he's going to do next a little easier.
"I think we should break up." It comes out quick, painless. The best way to peel off a band aid.
Nayoung puts down the parts. The sunlight streaming in catches on the now-empty spaces between her fingers that Sanghyuk used to fill with his own. She runs those fingers through her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear.
"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Brushes past him on her way out the door. Sanghyuk's suddenly struck with the feeling that he's been scooped empty on the inside.
You see, when you take off the band aid, the wound is supposed to be healed. But this band aid took the half-formed scab with it, leaving the scrape a raw and fleshy red still.
Nayoung knows what Sanghyuk is good at. Kissing her softly before she falls asleep, reaching for her hand in the dark of the movie theater. Pauses. Singing badly at the top of his lungs at karaoke. Somewhere in between sharing ice cream tubs when they were ten and pulling all nighters together studying in college, they both got good at walking around each other in aimless pathways that somehow resembled circles.
Haebin notices the first time it happens. And the second time. The third, the fourth, and now Nayoung's lost count. She bets Haebin knows what number they were on now.
"When are you guys going to move on?" she always says. And, if Nayoung was the one who ended things, "I mean, you decided you had enough."
Nayoung never quite knows what to say to any of that. "We're best friends," she'll settle for. Haebin'll roll her eyes.
"Friends don't fuck. Or fuck each other up like you and Sanghyuk do." The conversation usually ends there with Nayoung somewhat agreeing, but she'll find herself two weeks later making out with Sanghyuk again.
Tonight, Nayoung doesn't want to hear it. Which is weird, because she never really minded hearing people go off about her and Sanghyuk. She was relatively good at listening, but bad at doing.
So when Haebin slides into the seat across from her, Nayoung talks first. "Do you want half of my omelette?"
Hongbin's side of the room is still empty, with that precarious, half-finished dresser Nayoung had worked on in the corner, when Sanghyuk's pushed down on his mattress, Nayoung flush against him. They're so close that all Sanghyuk can see is Nayoung, and all Nayoung can see is Sanghyuk. Their breaths tangle together, warm like their limbs.
He doesn't know how i'm bored and then go read a book, dumb ass texts turned into come over i miss you and be there in five. He doesn't know how fighting over deciding what movie to watch turned into him cupping her face with his hands, tracing her cheek with his thumb, and then kissing her full on the mouth. He doesn't know whether the reason why they keep ending up back in this position is because they let themselves or the nature of the universe dictates it. But when Nayoung reaches her hands under his shirt, Sanghyuk swallows and lets his mind go blank.
"Hey," he exhales as she dances her fingertips, light, over his ribs. "Go easy."
She dips her head so her lips are right next to his ear. "Your dresser's gonna fall apart," she says with a smile that Sanghyuk feels against his neck. Leave it to Nayoung to be shit at talking dirty.
Sanghyuk looks her dead in the eye as she pulls away, her hair a curtain between their faces. He sighs. "Nayoung, I don't fucking care."
She laughs and Sanghyuk loves it, loves the way her eyes light up and the way the corners of her mouth pull up. He wraps his arms and legs around her to bring her closer to him, just far enough away that their lips are a hairsbreadth away.
"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Her cheeks are flushed a pretty pink.
Sanghyuk tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear before kissing her again.
cotton mouth
628w; pg-13 (wei/wooshin)
wooseok has horrible timing.
Wooseok is staring at him again. Sungjun shifts uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze. Wooseok had a way of looking at him like a predator (unassuming in the guise of a flower boy idol) regarding its prey (in this case, sadly Sungjun), in a more analytical, human sense.
If Sungjun didn't have a full bladder, he would've turned right around after seeing Wooseok washing his hands in the bathroom. Instead, he was now doing his best to keep a steady stream of urine going, hoping it would conceal how awkward this whole situation was.
Wooseok tilts his head to the side, still considering a peeing Sungjun. Sungjun clears his throat. "Uh...can you get out?" he mutters nervously, wondering if Wooseok is messing with him like he tended to do with Hwanhee.
Wooseok doesn't reply to that, only pushing himself up to sit on the sink counter to further cement his presence in the bathroom. Sungjun tries to ignore the fact that Wooseok's new vantage point has a particularly better view of his dick. Someone's toothbrush goes skidding into the sink, probably Changhyun's, Sungjun mourns, staring at it, displaced by Wooseok's butt.
"Do you not like me?" he asks suddenly. Sungjun lets out a particularly forceful spurt of urine at that.
"Are you for real, Wooseok?" Sungjun manages to cough out. Wooseok blinks at him owlishly, waiting. This can't be happening right now, Sungjun tries to convince himself, conjuring the angelic first impression Wooseok had given him, before he dropped that pot on Hwanhee's head full-force and before he threw shoveled sand into the sand castle Sungjun was trying to build, and well, okay, maybe he wasn't angelic, but he wasn't the type to force Sungjun into tense and awkward situations for pleasure, he wasn't a sadist like that -
Except he totally was. "Did I do something, Sungjun?" he prods on, sighing, and is that a hint of a pout on his lips? "I - "
"No!" Sungjun quickly sputters, because like hell he’s going to let Wooseok subtly mention this to Jinwook and get a thirty minute lecture about playing nice with the other kids. "You did nothing wrong, Wooseok." You started staring at me, like, all the time. Kind of like right now. A reassuring chuckle for the hell of it. His voice cracks.
That brings a smile to Wooseok's face, and it's adorable - the corners of his mouth lifting slightly because Wooseok tended to smile with his mouth closed, like nothing was worth his pearly white teeth - but at the same time somewhat unnerving. He starts leaning toward Sungjun (and his dick) and Sungjun swallows, paralyzed, watching as Wooseok comes closer like watching a trainwreck unfold in slow motion, unable to tear his eyes away.
"Good," Wooseok starts, still leaning in. Sungjun's done peeing now, and all his instincts scream Move now. It doesn't matter if you run out of this bathroom unzipped, but he's too shell-shocked to. "Because I like hyung," he says, letting his head settle into the crook of Sungjun's shoulder.
Oh. Sungjun knocks his cheek against Wooseok's hair, still a strawberry red, and laughs a little, out of relief. Wooseok buries his head further into Sungjun's neck and it reminds him of cat craving attention. It's kind of cute, actually.
This wasn't so bad after all. "Hyung likes you, too," Sungjun smiles, feeling guilty for being so suspicious before. He's about to pat Wooseok's head with his hand before realizing that's kind of gross, even for him.
He's moving to zip himself back up when Wooseok pointedly glances down with that adorable smile still on his face and says, "'Cause it would suck if you didn't."
Sungjun chokes.
594w; pg (irene-centric)
the distance from a to where you'd be.
Summer almost over, an intersection in a busy part of Seoul. Cars and scooters pass, a multi-colored blur of helmets blooming like flowers in the dusk, the time mosquitoes like to feed on unassuming flesh. Fresh smell of rain on the pavement mixed with the gas emitted by the traffic, passing pedestrians.
Zoom in. A woman in the middle of the crowd, flinching as faceless name (Dohee, as her classmates are calling her between sprinting ahead) brushes shoulders with her slightly as the light goes green.
Zoom in once more. This woman tucks the hair that has fallen in her face behind her left ear.
This woman's name is Bae Joohyun.
Joohyun's last boyfriend told her she kissed him weird. Not once. Not twice. All the time.
Your lips are. His, by the end, failed to quirk up at the corners as they had done before. Frankly, it's (he'd often punctuate with a sigh here) like I'm kissing a dead person.
She considered that on December 12th, 2015 - two months and fourteen days after she came home and found every trace of him bleached out of her apartment, almost painstakingly. Two days after that, Joohyun curled her toes under the sofa and found one of the earrings he gave her for her 25th cold against her pinky toe. Him and his good intentions, once removed.
It didn't occur to Joohyun until she was watching a rated R movie, her ear piercings closing up, that maybe he wanted to stick his tongue between her dead lips.
To really understand things, Joohyun often needs time, notebooks, and ballpoint pens, the tops of which are well-chewed. Time, unlike notebooks and ballpoint pens, is in junction with space, which people often gift her alongside everything else.
I don't know, Seulgi said. Joohyun thinks it was a long time ago. I know you don't mean to, but you're pushing me away. Seungwan spoke along those lines too, just more words, more apologies. They both don't say much to her now.
The few words Joohyun spoke to them (Seulgi, Seungwan, ex-boyfriend number four, ex-boyfriend number three, the ex-boyfriends that'd listen): I just need. Then she'd shake her head. I just need -
It reads on July twenty-seventh, unmarked year:
Distance. A human necessity in moderation.
I'm afraid I need/have too much of it.
(it also reads like this on january fourteenth, january twentieth, february fourth, february tenth, february sixteenth, 2/28, 3/6, 3/15...)
Zoom out once. A bus turns the corner on the asphalt before Joohyun's very feet. In the third-to-last row is a man in a business suit, staring out the window. They make eye contact during this moment, in which the bus idles to maneuver itself toward a new direction, And in this split second, Joohyun wonders if it's possible to understand someone so completely with a single glance, only held for less than a handful of seconds.
Zoom out again. That bus drives down the street. A woman with dark hair turns her head to follow it a beat too late, and the stranger from the third-to-last row is gone forever. Her hair falls into her face.
Keep zooming out until this woman is lost among a sea of others. until those others that she can physically touch but know nothing about, light years removed, are specks in a city, which is a speck itself, lost in the lights. Keep zooming until we're far, far away, and then, finally we are in space.
Distance. A human necessity in moderation.
I'm afraid I need/have too much of it.
it all boils down to how you eat your oreos
777w; pg-13 (ten/joy)
there are monsters. and then there are ten and sooyoung.
Ten thinks monsters are the things that hide under children’s beds at night, with twisted, fractured teeth and spidery fingers bleeding out from the shadows. They kept his eyes bloodshot and stinging for years, afraid of waking up to a nightmare.
Sooyoung, though, Sooyoung thinks monsters come disguised in human flesh, walking among the crush of bodies down the street. And in her waking nightmares, they smile and promise one thing, but turn around and do another.
Sooyoung was probably born from the crossing path of two comets, both hurtling at speeds bordering two hundred ninety-eight miles per second, one miraculously passing before the other to avoid collision. Sooyoung would be something along the lines of the known and proven and undecipherable phenomena. Sooyoung would be that miracle.
Her stoic parents - who’ve taught her how to flinch the first time Ten tries to wrap his arms around her, who look at him disapprovingly when he trips through Korean, trying to explain all Sooyoung means to him - cannot really be her parents, Ten’s reasoned a long time ago. This was somewhere around the time they were driving back from that disastrous first meeting, Sooyoung trying not to cry, gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles shone white through the darkness.
“You’re going to grow old with me,” she told him as he lay adjacent to her on his living room floor, too tired to pull out the sleeping mats. Her face was distorting, indecisive between sobbing her lungs out and trying not to let it get to her. Only the shaky lilt in her voice betrayed to Ten that she was really affected at all. “We’re going to have white hair, or you’re going to bald a little, and we’re going to be really old together.”
Ten laughed, arm propped beneath his head tingly and asleep. “Is this because you want to spite your parents, or because you love me that much?”
Sooyoung turned to face him, left cheek flat against the carpet. She looked up for a moment, considering, before answering honest.
“Both.”
Sooyoung thinks Ten is a good person. Maybe it’s because she’s convinced that good people have to be perfect, and she believes that Ten is the perfect one for her.
“And what about you?” Ten asks, laughing. He did that a lot - found joy in the mundane facts she’d state. Sooyoung liked that he didn’t take things too seriously.
She taps her finger against her chin. “I guess I’m okay. Not great, not horrible.”
Ten hums. “An okay person.” He takes a sip of the milk Sooyoung buys, but never drinks. “I guess I can live with that.”
Ten did not think he was a good person.
His mind often believed one thing, but his intrinsic train of thought often told him another. You are not kind, he told himself after a co-worker told him otherwise for agreeing to switch shifts. A kind person wouldn’t feel irrational anger or annoyance at that, the same way a kind person wouldn’t feel envy when someone else was praised for things Ten knew he could do as well.
A kind person didn’t tell half-truths sometimes to make themselves look better than how they saw themselves in the mirror (liars, webs of fibs spun between their tongues and teeth, own eyes wary of what was looking back at them), and kind people were often good people. By the logic of conditional statements, this meant that Ten was not one of them.
Taeyong blows a cloud of cigarette smoke into his eyes. They used to be friends, when Ten smoked. Now, they are people who sometimes hang around each other, tolerating one another’s existence. “What are you thinking about?” he asks as Ten studies the ground of the alley behind the store.
Ten laughs, shaking his head. “I quit,” his brain tells his mouth to say when Taeyong offers him a stick.
He doesn’t think about the pack of Marlboros he’s got in his kitchen drawer, hiding beneath a bunch of paper bags so Sooyoung will never find them, unopened.
Sooyoung falls asleep on the couch, in the middle of paid programming. She has a dream that Ten, smelling like cigarette ash, solemnly sits her down across from him and tells her his name is actually Nine.
Ten gets home late and puts a blanket over the sleeping Sooyoung. He lays in her bed, bone tired, but restless. At four in the morning, he slips out of the sheets and crawls under the bed, dust sticking to his back, staring at the wooden skeleton of its frame.
In the darkness, Ten wonders if this is how monsters feel.
closed system
838w; g (sungjin-centric)
sungjin is a bit of a control freak, according to brian.
Sungjin is a bit of a control freak, according to Brian. And Jaebum. And Jaebum’s cousin, Nayeon, who’s studying to be a therapist, which seals the whole deal.
“You don’t let your coworkers organize your data, the only thing you let me touch in your room is my designated spot on the floor, and I can’t even use the PlayStation without you glaring at me,” Brian tells him when Sungjin asks for a list of his flaws, insisting that it humbles him.
“That was one time,” Sungjin says, defensive. “Your hands smelled like garlic.”
Brian gives him a pointed stare before going back to his homework. Adds on, “Holds grudges from high school.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
Twenty minutes of silence later. Sungjin’s won. Or so he thinks. “Do too,” Brian mutters, before putting on his noise-cancelling headphones.
The story goes like this -
In high school, Sungjin had a friend named Wonpil. Said friend Wonpil came to school one day wearing this knitted pink sweater with the most unflattering pattern Sungjin had ever seen. He didn’t even know clothes could come in that garish a color.
Sungjin thought that it was a Christmas present gone wrong - maybe Wonpil’s mom wouldn’t let him out the door without wearing it at least once. He wanted to give Wonpil the benefit of the doubt. So he didn’t comment, and pretended that his eyes didn’t twitch whenever he saw the sweater.
Then a week went by with Wonpil showing up to school every day wearing it. Sungjin decided he had to do something.
“Wonpil?” Wonpil turned around with that even, polite smile on his lips and Sungjin faltered. Would he hurt Wonpil’s feelings if he said the sweater was hideous? Could he secretly take the sweater from Wonpil during gym and dump it in the garbage can behind the school? “Uh, you really like that sweater, don’t you?”
Sungjin forgot that Wonpil was friends with another guy named Jae. As soon as the words “sweater” left his lips, Jae stalked over to their lunch table and put an arm between them.
“Hold up,” Jae started, tilting his head to look at Sungjin. “Are you trying to make a comment here about Wonpil’s sweater?”
Sungjin cleared his throat and stood his ground. “I was just going to gently suggest that he wear something else -”
Jae put his hand up, interrupting. “Look, man. I’m the only one who can make comments about Wonpil’s sweater. I’ve, like, staked a claim on them. Patented it and all. Copyrighted. Jaerighted.”
“Jaerighted,” Sungjin echoed, offended that he was cut off. He opened his mouth to protest, but Jae cut in again.
“Have we met before?” he asked. Sungjin stared at him. They were in the same calculus class. “No, don’t tell me! Your name is…” Jae squinted, deep in thought. “Bob?”
Sungjin decided then that he hated Park Jaehyung.
That said, Sungjin doesn’t think he’s as bad as Brian (and Jaebum and Nayeon) suggests. Dowoon even gets him to go to their high school reunion (but that’s because Sungjin would basically do anything for Dowoon). It’s been an hour of sitting on around a plastic table with Wonpil and Dowoon and Sungjin hasn’t seen anyone that would trigger a bad flashback, so the coast seems clear -
Until a hand slaps him in the back. “Wonpil-ie! Dowoon! And…” Jae, with the same enormous glasses frames, turns to face Sungjin.
“Bob.”
It’s the fourth cup of fruit punch Sungjin’s gotten up to get in the last thirty minutes. The frozen strawberry bits that he had a lot of in his first three cups are dwindling into extinction. All that’s left in the bowl is the orange juice that was poured to defrost them.
“I can’t believe he called me Bob after all these years!” Sungjin hissed to Wonpil during their first trip to the food table.
Wonpil looked at him sincerely, with what Sungjin thought was pity in his eyes. “You look like a Bob,” he said. Thought was the key word.
“Hey,” Jae says, coming up from behind as Sungjin’s staring at the punch bowl.
He flinches. “My name’s Sungjin,” he grimaces, reaching for a napkin.
Jae nods. They’re silent for a bit. “So what’re you up to?” Jae finally asks.
Sungjin looks at him weird. “I’m getting punch.”
“I mean, like, in real life,” Jae says. Sungjin frowns at him, still confused. “You’re practically a genius so I’m guessing big things?”
“Genius,” Sungjin repeats, amused.
“Yeah, you were always getting perfect scores and stuff in high school, you know?” Jae elaborates. Sungjin feels somewhat flattered.
“You remember?” he gawks.
Jae laughs. “It’s kinda hard not to.” He sips his punch.
Sungjin sips his punch. Silence.
“You know,” Sungjin starts, surprised about how relaxed he feels with Jae, his previously sworn mortal enemy. “I used to have a grudge against you in high school.”
“Really?” Jae says, looking very amused.
“Yeah,” Sungjin laughs and it rises, light, out of his chest. “But I let it go.”
this side up
720w; pg-13 (hyuk/nayoung)
they break up like they get back together.
"Hey."
Nayoung looks up at him from where she's sitting cross-legged on Hongbin's empty side of the room, trying to assemble Sanghyuk's dresser. They both know she'll never be able to finish it today. It makes what he's going to do next a little easier.
"I think we should break up." It comes out quick, painless. The best way to peel off a band aid.
Nayoung puts down the parts. The sunlight streaming in catches on the now-empty spaces between her fingers that Sanghyuk used to fill with his own. She runs those fingers through her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear.
"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Brushes past him on her way out the door. Sanghyuk's suddenly struck with the feeling that he's been scooped empty on the inside.
You see, when you take off the band aid, the wound is supposed to be healed. But this band aid took the half-formed scab with it, leaving the scrape a raw and fleshy red still.
Nayoung knows what Sanghyuk is good at. Kissing her softly before she falls asleep, reaching for her hand in the dark of the movie theater. Pauses. Singing badly at the top of his lungs at karaoke. Somewhere in between sharing ice cream tubs when they were ten and pulling all nighters together studying in college, they both got good at walking around each other in aimless pathways that somehow resembled circles.
Haebin notices the first time it happens. And the second time. The third, the fourth, and now Nayoung's lost count. She bets Haebin knows what number they were on now.
"When are you guys going to move on?" she always says. And, if Nayoung was the one who ended things, "I mean, you decided you had enough."
Nayoung never quite knows what to say to any of that. "We're best friends," she'll settle for. Haebin'll roll her eyes.
"Friends don't fuck. Or fuck each other up like you and Sanghyuk do." The conversation usually ends there with Nayoung somewhat agreeing, but she'll find herself two weeks later making out with Sanghyuk again.
Tonight, Nayoung doesn't want to hear it. Which is weird, because she never really minded hearing people go off about her and Sanghyuk. She was relatively good at listening, but bad at doing.
So when Haebin slides into the seat across from her, Nayoung talks first. "Do you want half of my omelette?"
Hongbin's side of the room is still empty, with that precarious, half-finished dresser Nayoung had worked on in the corner, when Sanghyuk's pushed down on his mattress, Nayoung flush against him. They're so close that all Sanghyuk can see is Nayoung, and all Nayoung can see is Sanghyuk. Their breaths tangle together, warm like their limbs.
He doesn't know how i'm bored and then go read a book, dumb ass texts turned into come over i miss you and be there in five. He doesn't know how fighting over deciding what movie to watch turned into him cupping her face with his hands, tracing her cheek with his thumb, and then kissing her full on the mouth. He doesn't know whether the reason why they keep ending up back in this position is because they let themselves or the nature of the universe dictates it. But when Nayoung reaches her hands under his shirt, Sanghyuk swallows and lets his mind go blank.
"Hey," he exhales as she dances her fingertips, light, over his ribs. "Go easy."
She dips her head so her lips are right next to his ear. "Your dresser's gonna fall apart," she says with a smile that Sanghyuk feels against his neck. Leave it to Nayoung to be shit at talking dirty.
Sanghyuk looks her dead in the eye as she pulls away, her hair a curtain between their faces. He sighs. "Nayoung, I don't fucking care."
She laughs and Sanghyuk loves it, loves the way her eyes light up and the way the corners of her mouth pull up. He wraps his arms and legs around her to bring her closer to him, just far enough away that their lips are a hairsbreadth away.
"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Her cheeks are flushed a pretty pink.
Sanghyuk tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear before kissing her again.
cotton mouth
628w; pg-13 (wei/wooshin)
wooseok has horrible timing.
Wooseok is staring at him again. Sungjun shifts uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze. Wooseok had a way of looking at him like a predator (unassuming in the guise of a flower boy idol) regarding its prey (in this case, sadly Sungjun), in a more analytical, human sense.
If Sungjun didn't have a full bladder, he would've turned right around after seeing Wooseok washing his hands in the bathroom. Instead, he was now doing his best to keep a steady stream of urine going, hoping it would conceal how awkward this whole situation was.
Wooseok tilts his head to the side, still considering a peeing Sungjun. Sungjun clears his throat. "Uh...can you get out?" he mutters nervously, wondering if Wooseok is messing with him like he tended to do with Hwanhee.
Wooseok doesn't reply to that, only pushing himself up to sit on the sink counter to further cement his presence in the bathroom. Sungjun tries to ignore the fact that Wooseok's new vantage point has a particularly better view of his dick. Someone's toothbrush goes skidding into the sink, probably Changhyun's, Sungjun mourns, staring at it, displaced by Wooseok's butt.
"Do you not like me?" he asks suddenly. Sungjun lets out a particularly forceful spurt of urine at that.
"Are you for real, Wooseok?" Sungjun manages to cough out. Wooseok blinks at him owlishly, waiting. This can't be happening right now, Sungjun tries to convince himself, conjuring the angelic first impression Wooseok had given him, before he dropped that pot on Hwanhee's head full-force and before he threw shoveled sand into the sand castle Sungjun was trying to build, and well, okay, maybe he wasn't angelic, but he wasn't the type to force Sungjun into tense and awkward situations for pleasure, he wasn't a sadist like that -
Except he totally was. "Did I do something, Sungjun?" he prods on, sighing, and is that a hint of a pout on his lips? "I - "
"No!" Sungjun quickly sputters, because like hell he’s going to let Wooseok subtly mention this to Jinwook and get a thirty minute lecture about playing nice with the other kids. "You did nothing wrong, Wooseok." You started staring at me, like, all the time. Kind of like right now. A reassuring chuckle for the hell of it. His voice cracks.
That brings a smile to Wooseok's face, and it's adorable - the corners of his mouth lifting slightly because Wooseok tended to smile with his mouth closed, like nothing was worth his pearly white teeth - but at the same time somewhat unnerving. He starts leaning toward Sungjun (and his dick) and Sungjun swallows, paralyzed, watching as Wooseok comes closer like watching a trainwreck unfold in slow motion, unable to tear his eyes away.
"Good," Wooseok starts, still leaning in. Sungjun's done peeing now, and all his instincts scream Move now. It doesn't matter if you run out of this bathroom unzipped, but he's too shell-shocked to. "Because I like hyung," he says, letting his head settle into the crook of Sungjun's shoulder.
Oh. Sungjun knocks his cheek against Wooseok's hair, still a strawberry red, and laughs a little, out of relief. Wooseok buries his head further into Sungjun's neck and it reminds him of cat craving attention. It's kind of cute, actually.
This wasn't so bad after all. "Hyung likes you, too," Sungjun smiles, feeling guilty for being so suspicious before. He's about to pat Wooseok's head with his hand before realizing that's kind of gross, even for him.
He's moving to zip himself back up when Wooseok pointedly glances down with that adorable smile still on his face and says, "'Cause it would suck if you didn't."
Sungjun chokes.