[fic] crushing all your walls right down
fic: crushing all your walls right down (ao3)
fandom: The Heirs
characters: Eunsang/Youngdo (history of E/Tan)
word count: ~3800
summary: an AU set after ep16 - Youngdo finds Eunsang 10 years after she runs away from Tan
prompt: Eunsang/Youngdo. Porn. for ever_neutral I HAVE MADE A DECISION TO GIVE ALEX SOMETHING NICE INSTEAD OF THIS MONSTROSITY. Which means more work for me - but it also means that I'll be able to (hopefully) mend the broken hearts in a couple days. So this is officially JUST FIC and not at all a gift to Alex. Because I'm not that mean. This is just torture for everyone instead.
a/n: Totally incapable of trying to catch up on the series now because I so desperately need this to be the ending and I know know know that it won't be.
[Loving Eunsang was giving up everything he’d ever imagined it would be.]It only took five years for him to find her.
In the back of her mind she felt he shouldn’t have taken quite so long.
In the back of her mind she wondered why it didn’t take longer, she had grown so good at hiding.
It took three years for someone else to fall in love with her.
(Scratch that - begin again - it’s time to tell the truth, he’s standing right in front of you now.)
It took three years for her to let herself be loved again. This time it was sweet and soft and slow. She smiled a lot more. She learned how to date, how to relax, how to hold hands walking down the sidewalk. (No one had come looking for her and she started to feel safe.) But then there was a night with candles and sincerity and a hopeful, tearful gaze over a box with a diamond and a proposal and a declaration of love and her heart stopped.
She told herself she ran to protect him.
She left the little blue box on his doorstep and disappeared into the night because how do you explain to your would-be-husband, Sorry honey but this wealthy boy fell in love with me when we were teens and he’s still trying to find me so every six to eight months we’ll have to move and change our names and I’m sorry about that but he will take me away from you and you’ll be forever damaged by how quickly I’ll let him.
She’s not sure that she’ll let him, but she remembers how easy it was the first time to let go of her self and let him drag her away from everything she dreamed and wanted.
She’s not sure she’ll let him, but it’s the fear that keeps her awake at night and keeps her running every day whether he is looking or not.
She knows he’s looking.
She knows there’s two of them and they’ll never stop looking.
She’s never sure which one she is more afraid of finding her, sometimes she thinks it doesn’t matter.
Until the day she opens her door and he’s there and it’s the right one and it took ten years for her to let him find her but it only takes twenty minutes for all her walls to come crashing down and it only takes two minutes before he is kissing her like that’s all they’ve ever done and it was all she was waiting for.
She ran the first time, because of course she did.
It only took ten years for her to open her door and find him standing on her doorstep, his eyes haunted and his hair ragged, as though he was the one who was trapped in a cave, just waiting for the monster to come home and devour him whole. As if he was the one who had been running.
It only took her a week to lose her virginity to a stranger in a dark alley, his drunk complacency so easy to push towards what she wanted, his clumsy body thrusting hers against a wall, leaving dark, ragged scars on her back that she wears now as armor.
She never cried.
She left all her tears behind in the gilded cage a child had offered her as a gift, as protection.
She had seen her life spread before her as a child and she rejected it every day after.
How dare you offer me a cage where I can see the sky? I’d rather you hide me underground than show me the world I cannot have while I pretend all I need is your love.
It took her only a month full of grasping, gasping, alcohol-lazy one-night stands to wash away the taint of her first possessive ‘love’ that was never hers and couldn’t touch her heart no matter how hard she tried.
In alleys in the dark, far away from the child she had once been, she proved to herself that he didn’t own her anymore.
She chose the ones with bloodshot eyes. She chose the ones with cocky smiles. She chose the ones drowning their broken hearts in bottles at a sticky bar. She chose the ones who wanted to feel stronger with her small body below them. She chose the ones that wanted her to take them in hand and feel weak.
She played the damsel, the whore, the Madonna, the princess, the conquest, the prize. She laughed at the bloody hearts she spilled wherever she went.
She washed herself clean in their lust and she never looked back.
She was always three steps ahead of the ones looking for her. It only took a month the first time - in a city littered with her conquests.
(He was the wrong one anyway.)
But she was already gone. She left before he arrived.
She left the first time in tears.
She ran laughing every time after.
(Sometimes she thinks back to that life and home that he wanted to wrap her all up in and longed for the comfort and safety of his need. Sometimes she thought of how much simpler it would be to just submit to the life he planned for her, his treasure, to be kept safe in a special golden cage, brought out to be shown off to others. His golden girl. His treasure. High above the world and all alone and only his.
And then she laughs and her laughter is coarse and hard.
And then she runs.)
Running becomes as easy as being still was when he loved her and his love made her silent and still like a wild animal caught in a sudden burst of light. Running becomes easier than anything she has ever done.
It wasn’t what the man who gave her the means to run had intended. He wanted her to cower and wait for rescue, so that he could use her over and over again.
She laughs and her laughter is a howl to the night sky.
It takes five years for him to find her, for her to misstep.
He wasn’t the one she was worried about.
She runs out of habit.
It takes another five years for him to find her again, for her to let him catch up.
He wasn’t the one she was running from.
She stops moving and it hurts.
It takes ten years, but there he is standing on her doorstep.
And they don’t talk about the times before when he was close and she knew and kept running, slipping through his searching fingers like sand.
(She told herself that if one caught her, than the other wouldn’t be far behind and she couldn’t guarantee that her heart would win and she couldn’t risk being locked up in a cage by one or both.)
It takes ten years, but she opens the door and there he is standing there, still the boy she loved and now the man she wants.
She stopped running.
It’s harder than he knows, standing there on her doorstep as it begins to snow (how did she end up in the snow, did she plan this, did she imagine this moment for them, a brief window of romance so that they could forget what they really are), it’s harder than he can imagine, for her to open the door and look him straight in the eye.
(She had been watching his stumbling, anxious, desperate gamble for a week. It wasn’t that large of a city and he’d been on her trail for far too long for her to not know exactly where he was.
A week of packing and unpacking and repacking and determination and hesitation. A week of holding herself back from running into the night sky. A week of breadcrumbs and waiting. A week of anxious, heart-crushing worry.
A week of wanting to run and holding back just a moment longer - surely he’ll find her before her instinct takes over.)
He blinks at the suitcases lined up beside her and her travelling coat and her surprised face.
Her lips part slightly as though there are words somewhere in the space between them, but she doesn’t have the strength to push them forward.
“You have been running from me,” he advances on her and pushes her into the house just by the sheer might of his height and energy and desperation. “You have been running from me.” And the first time is an accusation but the second time is a clinging, irrational hope that she’ll deny it and it is a whisper and he knows it is more true than anything he has ever known.
She throws her keys at him in frustration, “I have been running. You had absolutely nothing what-so-the-fuck-ever to do with it.”
Because honestly not everything is about you.
It’s unspoken and it hangs between them and he’s reckless and he wants to laugh at her short temper and tease her for her swearing but all he can do is stand there dumbly as the cold wind sweeps in from the open door behind him and destroy the warmth of her life and her body and he thinks it’s a terrible metaphor but honestly what the fuck is he doing there after all these years all he ever does is destroy the things he loves a stupid child with too large a heart and all he does with it is crush everything he runs after.
“I could have-we could have…” his words falter and she looks at him the way she always has, as if she is seeing all the things he wants to hide and works so hard to ignore and he wishes there was something he could lay his hands on and break in front of her to distract her.
Not that that ever worked before. Not that she didn’t see right through him.
He didn’t see the destruction that she leaves behind her, doesn’t recognize the kindred spirit in her rising to his, wanting to maim and hurt in all the right ways that will speak to him, he still sees the innocent young girl he needed her to be when they first met, and that soul-crushing truth of him and his weary eyes makes her breath catch in her throat and turn to fire.
“Youngdo,” it is plea and directive and demanding and yearning.
And maybe all he hears is his name on her lips and that’s all it takes even if he doesn’t see the truth of them yet, but he walks towards her all the same and for the first time in ten years he doesn’t stumble and she doesn’t run and when they crash into each other their lips burn from the impact.
In the back of his mind he wonders if she’ll still be lying next to him in the morning.
In the back of her mind she’s already planning an escape route.
With her small, hard body pressed against his, he wonders if they will continue this game of cat and mouse for the rest of their lives. Her tongue tangled against his and the moans she presses out of him taste like a future of hiding and seeking, there are no hazy images of waffles and coffee and newspapers and her bras hanging in the bathroom and his paperwork sprawled on the coffee table. There’s only this brief, stolen moment and he is intoxicated by it - he lifts her up by the waist and her legs circle around his and his skin burns beneath her touch and he thinks momentarily that he should be melting his ice-cold heart in her warm embrace but all he feels is burning rising up from inside threatening to take them both.
He remembers to shut the front door when she slips out of his arms and shrugs them both out of their winter coats. The sting of the wind coming through the window reminds him where they are, but she has to push him away towards the door before he acknowledges ruefully that they can’t just fuck on the floor with the door wide open in an apartment complex where the single mom and her three kids under ten are watching them anxiously from an open door just opposite hers.
He wonders what it would be like to lay her down naked in the snow as the sun blinds them and the cold chafes their skin and turns the world red.
Wasn’t their world already red from the wounds they’ll never speak of?
Let’s make new ones and revel in them together because we chose them.
That what her nails speak to him as she leaves deep scratches down his back and moans out words that are just sound all around him and he’s drowning in her.
She’s all he wanted and also so much more because she’s nothing at all what he expected. She hurts and she’s hard, she scratches and bites, she is sharp angles where he expected only softness. Her eyes are deep pits of darkness where he thought there was only light. The kisses she trails up his chest leave bruises and there’s a chuckle deep in her throat that makes his head spin.
When he turned around she was gone.
Of course she was gone, that was the game they were playing and it made his heart leap in his chest just as she wanted it to.
He followed discarded articles of clothing like breadcrumbs through the forest and willed himself to not run down the length of the hall, carefully matching shirt-for-shirt, shoe-for-shoe, until he found her standing naked before a window looking out on a street far below them. He stopped there and waited for her to turn - wishing she would, daring her not to so he could keep the image of her in his mind in that moment always. Finally still, finally waiting, always outside of his grasp.
Loving Eunsang was three parts stamina and ten parts a willingness to not give up or stumble. He always stumbled when she wasn’t watching - there was something about her eyes gazing down at him that made him clear in his direction, that kept him moving forward in a straight line without faltering and giving up.
Loving Eunsang was giving up everything he’d ever imagined it would be.
She turned so slowly he thought maybe he had imagined movement at all, until she was facing him and his world shifted to include everything he’d ever never dared hoped to see and have. She beckoned to him as regal as a queen and he knelt at her feet in supplication.
There was no other way.
This is how it began and it will be how it ends, with him at her feet pretending to be the stronger one as she laughs at his insolence.
This is how it begins with his lips and tongue on her and her hands in his hair his hands holding up her shaking, trembling knees.
He didn’t feel empowered, knowing that her legs trembled at his touch, he was humbled - possibly for the first time in his adult life - as her feet stayed steady, solid and she was holding them both upright through sheer will alone, as her body ached and asked to be knocked to the ground.
She was a tower of will and might and he groveled at her feet and grew hard as if that was his own body’s prayer to an ancient religion completely encapsulated by the trembling body in front of him.
When one leg lifted up and kicked him away from her, he nearly cried out from want and frustration, but she would only have laughed. Anyway it was so fast (but a millennia of time) between her kicking out and her landing on top of his irreverently sprawled body.
He would be forever dazzled by her ability to oscillate so quickly from an ageless, ancient goddess to a happy, giggling young girl in his arms.
She hesitated and groped blindly for balance as her world swung and her emotions twisted up inside her. One moment, she was a lioness on the prowl and the body laid at her feet was a feast and in the next she was a young kitten rolling in a delight of the senses, giggling like a child even as she left bloody footprints in her wake. It had never been like this, she hoped it would never be again.
She lived her life by being distant and closed off - she held herself high and she ran to ensure nothing ever broke again. Ten years practicing in the art of escape and evade, yet here she was - laying her whole soul on the line for a man who was once a boy who had once tortured her with his love.
As she slunk down the length of his frame, leaving a path of broken dreams and unshed tears upon his skin, she tried to keep herself contained but found it harder and harder to accomplish - his body became the threshold between self-containment and her world lying broken, shattered on the floor. She took him in her mouth slowly and hoped against hope as she did so that doing so would regain some semblance of control, but the shocked groan that came floating up towards her ruined all her resolve, all her good intentions.
She was a flurry and he was steady and they broke into each other with the reckless abandon they always had. Or with a new sense of recklessness they had never allowed themselves before.
He found release in her screams and pants of pleasure.
She found peace in the sound of his voice moaning out her name.
Her world was in a shambles.
That was the price of being caught again, she thought as she laid her sweaty head against his chest and let him wrap his arms around her without flinching away.
This was the price of a wrecking ball destroying her world with a simple decision.
This was the price of being found.
Neither one of them said I love you.
In the slow, soft moments between their clutching, wild explosions of passion and hurtling bodies rushing to the breaking point, they spoke softly and harshly to each other. They teased and hurled insults and tried not to show the desperate, lingering interest in the other’s words and worlds.
That day they crumbled down the boundaries between their realities, but clung to the façade that they could maintain any semblance of separation.
They playacted at being disinterested strangers, they pretended not to notice their intuitive rhythm.
They pretended not to notice the way they finished each other’s sentences, they pretended not to love the part when they ate ice cream out of the carton on the kitchen floor just as much as the sloppy, slow sex that came after, they pretended that the sex on the kitchen floor wasn’t soft and kind and domestic, they pretended that they didn’t giggle and laugh in the shower and it didn’t have everything to do with her splashing him and nothing to do with the kiss that left her breathless.
They pretended that in an afternoon they didn’t function far better together than they ever had apart.
They made love like the wild, untamed creatures that they were.
They’d never apologize for it.
It’s what they had been waiting for all along.
A month later he is just wandering, the bitter bite of liquor not quite keeping the memory of her from his mind, but doing a much better job of it than trying to recklessly hunt. He’s tired of hunting. He’s tired, he’s not a reckless young boy anymore. He’s heartbroken and bruised.
He loves it and he cherishes his bruises the way other men cherish trophies from their glory days.
These are his glory days and his glory is in being maimed by his own personal villain.
He was made for her to destroy and she was made for him to beg for destruction.
He should throw himself back into his quest, but the empty bed he woke up to still haunts him and that’s not a wound he wants to heal quite yet. He wants to be bitter and angry for a while.
It was such an ugly, long hunt and shouldn’t he be allowed a reprieve?
A tumbler of amber liquid is pressed into his hands and a soft voice beside him says, “Checkmate.”
She’s sitting there on the barstool next to him and he finds himself clinking his glass against hers in salute and watching her down the glass in one, mighty gulp - her eyes closing as if too overcome by the mere pleasure of it and he follows suit, his eyes always upon her, and his throat singed.
“You found me,” and it’s the stupidest thing he can think of to say but there aren’t words with her sitting beside him as if that’s where she always belonged (and isn’t this where she always belonged).
She shrugs and manages it to look infinitely delicate, “I figured it was my turn.”
Youngdo gazes into the empty glass in his hand and tries to clear his fizzing, fuzzy brain. It’s his turn to be witty. It’s his turn for a biting, sarcastic remark.
But none are coming.
She exchanges their empty glasses for full ones and says in the instant before her eyes close and her lips reach the glass, “I don’t want to run alone anymore.”
When he takes her in the alley behind the bar, his body is awake and alive, his blood boiling from her presence. There is nothing sloppy or slow or awkward when she looks at him and that’s all there is and there’s only this moment and he sinks himself into it. This is the beginning and he can’t ever know how much it is full circle for her (only maybe someday she’ll tell him and they’ll have a good laugh) and she cries into his neck for the first time in ten years.
And they bathe in their excess and become pure again.
Later, maybe she’ll run again because that’s only instinct now and he’ll understand and find her again.
Later, maybe he’ll destroy her heart and take it in his hands and grind it to dust as he once tried to do to his own and she’ll understand.
Maybe their days will be full of dirty laundry and empty coffee mugs and parading around in his boxers while cooking dinner.
Maybe they’ll be functional people for the very first times in their lives.
Maybe they’ll live normal lives with jobs and a shared car and inside jokes and crossword puzzles on rainy Sunday afternoons.
Or maybe they’ll keep burning each other up and come crawling back for the scraps.
fandom: The Heirs
characters: Eunsang/Youngdo (history of E/Tan)
word count: ~3800
summary: an AU set after ep16 - Youngdo finds Eunsang 10 years after she runs away from Tan
prompt: Eunsang/Youngdo. Porn. for ever_neutral I HAVE MADE A DECISION TO GIVE ALEX SOMETHING NICE INSTEAD OF THIS MONSTROSITY. Which means more work for me - but it also means that I'll be able to (hopefully) mend the broken hearts in a couple days. So this is officially JUST FIC and not at all a gift to Alex. Because I'm not that mean. This is just torture for everyone instead.
a/n: Totally incapable of trying to catch up on the series now because I so desperately need this to be the ending and I know know know that it won't be.
[Loving Eunsang was giving up everything he’d ever imagined it would be.]It only took five years for him to find her.
In the back of her mind she felt he shouldn’t have taken quite so long.
In the back of her mind she wondered why it didn’t take longer, she had grown so good at hiding.
It took three years for someone else to fall in love with her.
(Scratch that - begin again - it’s time to tell the truth, he’s standing right in front of you now.)
It took three years for her to let herself be loved again. This time it was sweet and soft and slow. She smiled a lot more. She learned how to date, how to relax, how to hold hands walking down the sidewalk. (No one had come looking for her and she started to feel safe.) But then there was a night with candles and sincerity and a hopeful, tearful gaze over a box with a diamond and a proposal and a declaration of love and her heart stopped.
She told herself she ran to protect him.
She left the little blue box on his doorstep and disappeared into the night because how do you explain to your would-be-husband, Sorry honey but this wealthy boy fell in love with me when we were teens and he’s still trying to find me so every six to eight months we’ll have to move and change our names and I’m sorry about that but he will take me away from you and you’ll be forever damaged by how quickly I’ll let him.
She’s not sure that she’ll let him, but she remembers how easy it was the first time to let go of her self and let him drag her away from everything she dreamed and wanted.
She’s not sure she’ll let him, but it’s the fear that keeps her awake at night and keeps her running every day whether he is looking or not.
She knows he’s looking.
She knows there’s two of them and they’ll never stop looking.
She’s never sure which one she is more afraid of finding her, sometimes she thinks it doesn’t matter.
Until the day she opens her door and he’s there and it’s the right one and it took ten years for her to let him find her but it only takes twenty minutes for all her walls to come crashing down and it only takes two minutes before he is kissing her like that’s all they’ve ever done and it was all she was waiting for.
She ran the first time, because of course she did.
It only took ten years for her to open her door and find him standing on her doorstep, his eyes haunted and his hair ragged, as though he was the one who was trapped in a cave, just waiting for the monster to come home and devour him whole. As if he was the one who had been running.
It only took her a week to lose her virginity to a stranger in a dark alley, his drunk complacency so easy to push towards what she wanted, his clumsy body thrusting hers against a wall, leaving dark, ragged scars on her back that she wears now as armor.
She never cried.
She left all her tears behind in the gilded cage a child had offered her as a gift, as protection.
She had seen her life spread before her as a child and she rejected it every day after.
How dare you offer me a cage where I can see the sky? I’d rather you hide me underground than show me the world I cannot have while I pretend all I need is your love.
It took her only a month full of grasping, gasping, alcohol-lazy one-night stands to wash away the taint of her first possessive ‘love’ that was never hers and couldn’t touch her heart no matter how hard she tried.
In alleys in the dark, far away from the child she had once been, she proved to herself that he didn’t own her anymore.
She chose the ones with bloodshot eyes. She chose the ones with cocky smiles. She chose the ones drowning their broken hearts in bottles at a sticky bar. She chose the ones who wanted to feel stronger with her small body below them. She chose the ones that wanted her to take them in hand and feel weak.
She played the damsel, the whore, the Madonna, the princess, the conquest, the prize. She laughed at the bloody hearts she spilled wherever she went.
She washed herself clean in their lust and she never looked back.
She was always three steps ahead of the ones looking for her. It only took a month the first time - in a city littered with her conquests.
(He was the wrong one anyway.)
But she was already gone. She left before he arrived.
She left the first time in tears.
She ran laughing every time after.
(Sometimes she thinks back to that life and home that he wanted to wrap her all up in and longed for the comfort and safety of his need. Sometimes she thought of how much simpler it would be to just submit to the life he planned for her, his treasure, to be kept safe in a special golden cage, brought out to be shown off to others. His golden girl. His treasure. High above the world and all alone and only his.
And then she laughs and her laughter is coarse and hard.
And then she runs.)
Running becomes as easy as being still was when he loved her and his love made her silent and still like a wild animal caught in a sudden burst of light. Running becomes easier than anything she has ever done.
It wasn’t what the man who gave her the means to run had intended. He wanted her to cower and wait for rescue, so that he could use her over and over again.
She laughs and her laughter is a howl to the night sky.
It takes five years for him to find her, for her to misstep.
He wasn’t the one she was worried about.
She runs out of habit.
It takes another five years for him to find her again, for her to let him catch up.
He wasn’t the one she was running from.
She stops moving and it hurts.
It takes ten years, but there he is standing on her doorstep.
And they don’t talk about the times before when he was close and she knew and kept running, slipping through his searching fingers like sand.
(She told herself that if one caught her, than the other wouldn’t be far behind and she couldn’t guarantee that her heart would win and she couldn’t risk being locked up in a cage by one or both.)
It takes ten years, but she opens the door and there he is standing there, still the boy she loved and now the man she wants.
She stopped running.
It’s harder than he knows, standing there on her doorstep as it begins to snow (how did she end up in the snow, did she plan this, did she imagine this moment for them, a brief window of romance so that they could forget what they really are), it’s harder than he can imagine, for her to open the door and look him straight in the eye.
(She had been watching his stumbling, anxious, desperate gamble for a week. It wasn’t that large of a city and he’d been on her trail for far too long for her to not know exactly where he was.
A week of packing and unpacking and repacking and determination and hesitation. A week of holding herself back from running into the night sky. A week of breadcrumbs and waiting. A week of anxious, heart-crushing worry.
A week of wanting to run and holding back just a moment longer - surely he’ll find her before her instinct takes over.)
He blinks at the suitcases lined up beside her and her travelling coat and her surprised face.
Her lips part slightly as though there are words somewhere in the space between them, but she doesn’t have the strength to push them forward.
“You have been running from me,” he advances on her and pushes her into the house just by the sheer might of his height and energy and desperation. “You have been running from me.” And the first time is an accusation but the second time is a clinging, irrational hope that she’ll deny it and it is a whisper and he knows it is more true than anything he has ever known.
She throws her keys at him in frustration, “I have been running. You had absolutely nothing what-so-the-fuck-ever to do with it.”
Because honestly not everything is about you.
It’s unspoken and it hangs between them and he’s reckless and he wants to laugh at her short temper and tease her for her swearing but all he can do is stand there dumbly as the cold wind sweeps in from the open door behind him and destroy the warmth of her life and her body and he thinks it’s a terrible metaphor but honestly what the fuck is he doing there after all these years all he ever does is destroy the things he loves a stupid child with too large a heart and all he does with it is crush everything he runs after.
“I could have-we could have…” his words falter and she looks at him the way she always has, as if she is seeing all the things he wants to hide and works so hard to ignore and he wishes there was something he could lay his hands on and break in front of her to distract her.
Not that that ever worked before. Not that she didn’t see right through him.
He didn’t see the destruction that she leaves behind her, doesn’t recognize the kindred spirit in her rising to his, wanting to maim and hurt in all the right ways that will speak to him, he still sees the innocent young girl he needed her to be when they first met, and that soul-crushing truth of him and his weary eyes makes her breath catch in her throat and turn to fire.
“Youngdo,” it is plea and directive and demanding and yearning.
And maybe all he hears is his name on her lips and that’s all it takes even if he doesn’t see the truth of them yet, but he walks towards her all the same and for the first time in ten years he doesn’t stumble and she doesn’t run and when they crash into each other their lips burn from the impact.
In the back of his mind he wonders if she’ll still be lying next to him in the morning.
In the back of her mind she’s already planning an escape route.
With her small, hard body pressed against his, he wonders if they will continue this game of cat and mouse for the rest of their lives. Her tongue tangled against his and the moans she presses out of him taste like a future of hiding and seeking, there are no hazy images of waffles and coffee and newspapers and her bras hanging in the bathroom and his paperwork sprawled on the coffee table. There’s only this brief, stolen moment and he is intoxicated by it - he lifts her up by the waist and her legs circle around his and his skin burns beneath her touch and he thinks momentarily that he should be melting his ice-cold heart in her warm embrace but all he feels is burning rising up from inside threatening to take them both.
He remembers to shut the front door when she slips out of his arms and shrugs them both out of their winter coats. The sting of the wind coming through the window reminds him where they are, but she has to push him away towards the door before he acknowledges ruefully that they can’t just fuck on the floor with the door wide open in an apartment complex where the single mom and her three kids under ten are watching them anxiously from an open door just opposite hers.
He wonders what it would be like to lay her down naked in the snow as the sun blinds them and the cold chafes their skin and turns the world red.
Wasn’t their world already red from the wounds they’ll never speak of?
Let’s make new ones and revel in them together because we chose them.
That what her nails speak to him as she leaves deep scratches down his back and moans out words that are just sound all around him and he’s drowning in her.
She’s all he wanted and also so much more because she’s nothing at all what he expected. She hurts and she’s hard, she scratches and bites, she is sharp angles where he expected only softness. Her eyes are deep pits of darkness where he thought there was only light. The kisses she trails up his chest leave bruises and there’s a chuckle deep in her throat that makes his head spin.
When he turned around she was gone.
Of course she was gone, that was the game they were playing and it made his heart leap in his chest just as she wanted it to.
He followed discarded articles of clothing like breadcrumbs through the forest and willed himself to not run down the length of the hall, carefully matching shirt-for-shirt, shoe-for-shoe, until he found her standing naked before a window looking out on a street far below them. He stopped there and waited for her to turn - wishing she would, daring her not to so he could keep the image of her in his mind in that moment always. Finally still, finally waiting, always outside of his grasp.
Loving Eunsang was three parts stamina and ten parts a willingness to not give up or stumble. He always stumbled when she wasn’t watching - there was something about her eyes gazing down at him that made him clear in his direction, that kept him moving forward in a straight line without faltering and giving up.
Loving Eunsang was giving up everything he’d ever imagined it would be.
She turned so slowly he thought maybe he had imagined movement at all, until she was facing him and his world shifted to include everything he’d ever never dared hoped to see and have. She beckoned to him as regal as a queen and he knelt at her feet in supplication.
There was no other way.
This is how it began and it will be how it ends, with him at her feet pretending to be the stronger one as she laughs at his insolence.
This is how it begins with his lips and tongue on her and her hands in his hair his hands holding up her shaking, trembling knees.
He didn’t feel empowered, knowing that her legs trembled at his touch, he was humbled - possibly for the first time in his adult life - as her feet stayed steady, solid and she was holding them both upright through sheer will alone, as her body ached and asked to be knocked to the ground.
She was a tower of will and might and he groveled at her feet and grew hard as if that was his own body’s prayer to an ancient religion completely encapsulated by the trembling body in front of him.
When one leg lifted up and kicked him away from her, he nearly cried out from want and frustration, but she would only have laughed. Anyway it was so fast (but a millennia of time) between her kicking out and her landing on top of his irreverently sprawled body.
He would be forever dazzled by her ability to oscillate so quickly from an ageless, ancient goddess to a happy, giggling young girl in his arms.
She hesitated and groped blindly for balance as her world swung and her emotions twisted up inside her. One moment, she was a lioness on the prowl and the body laid at her feet was a feast and in the next she was a young kitten rolling in a delight of the senses, giggling like a child even as she left bloody footprints in her wake. It had never been like this, she hoped it would never be again.
She lived her life by being distant and closed off - she held herself high and she ran to ensure nothing ever broke again. Ten years practicing in the art of escape and evade, yet here she was - laying her whole soul on the line for a man who was once a boy who had once tortured her with his love.
As she slunk down the length of his frame, leaving a path of broken dreams and unshed tears upon his skin, she tried to keep herself contained but found it harder and harder to accomplish - his body became the threshold between self-containment and her world lying broken, shattered on the floor. She took him in her mouth slowly and hoped against hope as she did so that doing so would regain some semblance of control, but the shocked groan that came floating up towards her ruined all her resolve, all her good intentions.
She was a flurry and he was steady and they broke into each other with the reckless abandon they always had. Or with a new sense of recklessness they had never allowed themselves before.
He found release in her screams and pants of pleasure.
She found peace in the sound of his voice moaning out her name.
Her world was in a shambles.
That was the price of being caught again, she thought as she laid her sweaty head against his chest and let him wrap his arms around her without flinching away.
This was the price of a wrecking ball destroying her world with a simple decision.
This was the price of being found.
Neither one of them said I love you.
In the slow, soft moments between their clutching, wild explosions of passion and hurtling bodies rushing to the breaking point, they spoke softly and harshly to each other. They teased and hurled insults and tried not to show the desperate, lingering interest in the other’s words and worlds.
That day they crumbled down the boundaries between their realities, but clung to the façade that they could maintain any semblance of separation.
They playacted at being disinterested strangers, they pretended not to notice their intuitive rhythm.
They pretended not to notice the way they finished each other’s sentences, they pretended not to love the part when they ate ice cream out of the carton on the kitchen floor just as much as the sloppy, slow sex that came after, they pretended that the sex on the kitchen floor wasn’t soft and kind and domestic, they pretended that they didn’t giggle and laugh in the shower and it didn’t have everything to do with her splashing him and nothing to do with the kiss that left her breathless.
They pretended that in an afternoon they didn’t function far better together than they ever had apart.
They made love like the wild, untamed creatures that they were.
They’d never apologize for it.
It’s what they had been waiting for all along.
A month later he is just wandering, the bitter bite of liquor not quite keeping the memory of her from his mind, but doing a much better job of it than trying to recklessly hunt. He’s tired of hunting. He’s tired, he’s not a reckless young boy anymore. He’s heartbroken and bruised.
He loves it and he cherishes his bruises the way other men cherish trophies from their glory days.
These are his glory days and his glory is in being maimed by his own personal villain.
He was made for her to destroy and she was made for him to beg for destruction.
He should throw himself back into his quest, but the empty bed he woke up to still haunts him and that’s not a wound he wants to heal quite yet. He wants to be bitter and angry for a while.
It was such an ugly, long hunt and shouldn’t he be allowed a reprieve?
A tumbler of amber liquid is pressed into his hands and a soft voice beside him says, “Checkmate.”
She’s sitting there on the barstool next to him and he finds himself clinking his glass against hers in salute and watching her down the glass in one, mighty gulp - her eyes closing as if too overcome by the mere pleasure of it and he follows suit, his eyes always upon her, and his throat singed.
“You found me,” and it’s the stupidest thing he can think of to say but there aren’t words with her sitting beside him as if that’s where she always belonged (and isn’t this where she always belonged).
She shrugs and manages it to look infinitely delicate, “I figured it was my turn.”
Youngdo gazes into the empty glass in his hand and tries to clear his fizzing, fuzzy brain. It’s his turn to be witty. It’s his turn for a biting, sarcastic remark.
But none are coming.
She exchanges their empty glasses for full ones and says in the instant before her eyes close and her lips reach the glass, “I don’t want to run alone anymore.”
When he takes her in the alley behind the bar, his body is awake and alive, his blood boiling from her presence. There is nothing sloppy or slow or awkward when she looks at him and that’s all there is and there’s only this moment and he sinks himself into it. This is the beginning and he can’t ever know how much it is full circle for her (only maybe someday she’ll tell him and they’ll have a good laugh) and she cries into his neck for the first time in ten years.
And they bathe in their excess and become pure again.
Later, maybe she’ll run again because that’s only instinct now and he’ll understand and find her again.
Later, maybe he’ll destroy her heart and take it in his hands and grind it to dust as he once tried to do to his own and she’ll understand.
Maybe their days will be full of dirty laundry and empty coffee mugs and parading around in his boxers while cooking dinner.
Maybe they’ll be functional people for the very first times in their lives.
Maybe they’ll live normal lives with jobs and a shared car and inside jokes and crossword puzzles on rainy Sunday afternoons.
Or maybe they’ll keep burning each other up and come crawling back for the scraps.