[oneshot] and the worst of it now (i can't remember your face)
Title: and the worst of it now (i can't remember your face)
Pairing: GTOP
Rating: pg13
Genre: angst, hurt/comfort, au
Warnings: swearing
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: it’s the anniversary of a close friend’s death. college au in which daul kim is a vocalist. (based on damian kulash’s true story behind the song. not related to so cordial, so rotten but could be considered a companion fic to the morning after, which i wrote for whetstone last year ♥)
you were supposed to grow old
reckless, unfrightened, and old
return, you were supposed to return
return, ok go
Jiyong once read in an old, wise book that there was a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to mourn and a time to dance. It’s possibly the soundest piece of advice he’s ever received, even if it’s from a place he’s lost faith in after too many broken promises, too many disappointments.
Every year around this time, he skips a day of school and takes Seunghyun’s car. It’s the only day that he passes the outskirts of the city and drives through farmland, rolling hills and blue skies mocking him with their sunny dispositions. It’s as if the premature death of someone he’d loved wasn’t reason enough for the heavens to pour down cleansing rain. He still wears her ring, the one she’d tossed into his lap after a day out with Seungho and Chaerin way back when. It’s tasteful and not anything like the crazy, outlandish things he usually wears, but it still fits perfectly in the smooth grooves between middle and ring-finger, ring-finger and pinky, still glints dully after years of silent existence.
Seunghyun never really asks him about it, and it’s just as well because he’s not sure he’d be able to explain it any better than on the day he’d heard the news.
Daul Kim, the marker reads, and dark words inscribed across the gray stone underneath her name are a jumble of famous song lyrics meshed in with hers; they compose a striking asymmetry of their own. Traces of her soulful voice still linger on whenever he comes, and the soulful echo of her guitar jars with a passing, frustrated thought that she would’ve been so successful if the accident hadn’t happened-she would’ve been wild and courageous and beautiful and completely herself, he thinks, and that was the tragedy of it all, really, that she’d died so young.
He sits down on the springy St. Augustine of the lawn and leans against the memorial, closes his eyes at the pressure of cool limestone on his back. It’s funny because he compartmentalizes his life so well that he never lets these thoughts escape until the anniversary, and sometimes he thinks it might be a little unhealthy to keep things so bottled up all the time, in such precise slots just waiting to rip open.
And sometimes those pigeonholes disappear from disuse (softly, quietly) as if they’d never been there at all. It’s not until he’s almost back at campus, shaking off the residual pain and forlorn anger, when he realizes that he’s forgotten her face.
- -
The dorm looks like it’s been torpedoed when Seunghyun returns. Papers and books are strewn all over the floor, drawers stacked in messy heaps on his bed, and Jiyong’s sitting in the middle of the chaos, small and motionless, hands clenched tight and pressing hard into his knees.
He doesn’t say anything, just picks his way through the clutter and scoops Jiyong up like a rag doll, tucks him underneath the covers because the room is drafty and he’s shaking in Seunghyun’s grasp. Jiyong rips them off a second later, sits up against the headboard and looks at the ceiling, eyes wandering like he’s counting the individual dots on each tile. Seunghyun opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again-settles for scratching the back of his head until Jiyong reaches a hand out to grip his own, bony fingers cold and clammy.
Seunghyun finally breaks the silence. “Wanna talk about it?” There are vestiges of awkwardness in the low timbre of his voice, and Jiyong would usually reply with a snappy hell no, but his shoulders sag and the air leaves his lungs with an unsteady sigh. He curls into warm cocoon of Seunghyun’s arm.
“I was looking for pictures of Daul,” he says, and the name strikes a distant chord of memory in Seunghyun’s mind. He thinks of elementary school days spent with her and the other kids before he’d moved away, lazy afternoons playing baseball, huffing and puffing around the bases with the only girl on the team.
“I can’t remember what she looks like.” With a start, Seunghyun realizes that he can’t either. There are shallow tears swimming in Jiyong’s eyes and he rubs them away angrily, “She was supposed to grow up,” he says, almost choking on his saliva, “She was supposed to make something of herself, go to college with the rest of us, get married, have kids.” A hand smoothes over Seunghyun’s back, right where his spine ends. “What the fuck am I even saying, this is stupid.”
“It’s not. I-I didn’t know she died,” Seunghyun confesses. “What the hell happened?” Jiyong looks away, down at the floorboards, and he automatically assumes the worst. “Suicide?”
“No, fuck, no.” He runs a hand through his short hair. “Before college, during our senior year of high school. We were at Hyuksoo’s end of the year party and Seungho arrived late. Daul was standing next to this huge open window on the third floor of the house, and he-he ran up to give her a huge hug and they lost balance.” Seunghyun’s jaw drops and the hand gripping his tightens. “They fell down three stories. Youngbae saw it happen; he was the one who called 911. Seungho made it, but she didn’t.”
Seunghyun shakes his head in disbelief. “Yes,” Jiyong says, voice a cracked whisper. “Seungho moved away afterwards, went south for college.”
“Do you blame him?” he asks harshly, still shocked.
Jiyong averts his gaze again. “No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
It’s Jiyong’s turn to shake his head. “I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.” Seunghyun slumps down. There’s a dull thud when the back of his head hits the headboard, but he can’t feel any pain. The buzz of his cell phone jolts them both out of the silence, and as he takes the call Jiyong starts gathering the textbooks and notes on the floor and putting them back where they belong.
“What’s up, Seungri?” he says, but begins tuning him out as the kid chatters on through the speakers. By the time he ends the call, they’ve slowly finished cleaning the room up and Jiyong turns in early. Seunghyun lies awake deep into the night, Jiyong’s words an audio loop on repeat in the deep recesses of his mind.
- -
In the morning, Seunghyun is gone for early classes and there’s an open yearbook on the desk that wasn’t there before. Jiyong looks at the page it’s flipped to and sees a photo from a long, long time ago. In it, Jiyong still has his snaggletooth and Daul’s hair is cropped close to her head, like a boy’s. Seunghyun is (hilariously) fat as hell, and Youngbae is actually a head taller than all of them. Seungho and Chaerin are bickering in the background.
On the bottom, near the crease where the page meets the spine of the book and bleeds into the next, Daul’s untidy, fourth-grade scrawl declares a proud “my friends.”
A/N: college au ♥ :') also, ot: new layout! gdgdbaby gdgdbaby gdgdbaby :D
Pairing: GTOP
Rating: pg13
Genre: angst, hurt/comfort, au
Warnings: swearing
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: it’s the anniversary of a close friend’s death. college au in which daul kim is a vocalist. (based on damian kulash’s true story behind the song. not related to so cordial, so rotten but could be considered a companion fic to the morning after, which i wrote for whetstone last year ♥)
you were supposed to grow old
reckless, unfrightened, and old
return, you were supposed to return
return, ok go
Jiyong once read in an old, wise book that there was a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to mourn and a time to dance. It’s possibly the soundest piece of advice he’s ever received, even if it’s from a place he’s lost faith in after too many broken promises, too many disappointments.
Every year around this time, he skips a day of school and takes Seunghyun’s car. It’s the only day that he passes the outskirts of the city and drives through farmland, rolling hills and blue skies mocking him with their sunny dispositions. It’s as if the premature death of someone he’d loved wasn’t reason enough for the heavens to pour down cleansing rain. He still wears her ring, the one she’d tossed into his lap after a day out with Seungho and Chaerin way back when. It’s tasteful and not anything like the crazy, outlandish things he usually wears, but it still fits perfectly in the smooth grooves between middle and ring-finger, ring-finger and pinky, still glints dully after years of silent existence.
Seunghyun never really asks him about it, and it’s just as well because he’s not sure he’d be able to explain it any better than on the day he’d heard the news.
Daul Kim, the marker reads, and dark words inscribed across the gray stone underneath her name are a jumble of famous song lyrics meshed in with hers; they compose a striking asymmetry of their own. Traces of her soulful voice still linger on whenever he comes, and the soulful echo of her guitar jars with a passing, frustrated thought that she would’ve been so successful if the accident hadn’t happened-she would’ve been wild and courageous and beautiful and completely herself, he thinks, and that was the tragedy of it all, really, that she’d died so young.
He sits down on the springy St. Augustine of the lawn and leans against the memorial, closes his eyes at the pressure of cool limestone on his back. It’s funny because he compartmentalizes his life so well that he never lets these thoughts escape until the anniversary, and sometimes he thinks it might be a little unhealthy to keep things so bottled up all the time, in such precise slots just waiting to rip open.
And sometimes those pigeonholes disappear from disuse (softly, quietly) as if they’d never been there at all. It’s not until he’s almost back at campus, shaking off the residual pain and forlorn anger, when he realizes that he’s forgotten her face.
- -
The dorm looks like it’s been torpedoed when Seunghyun returns. Papers and books are strewn all over the floor, drawers stacked in messy heaps on his bed, and Jiyong’s sitting in the middle of the chaos, small and motionless, hands clenched tight and pressing hard into his knees.
He doesn’t say anything, just picks his way through the clutter and scoops Jiyong up like a rag doll, tucks him underneath the covers because the room is drafty and he’s shaking in Seunghyun’s grasp. Jiyong rips them off a second later, sits up against the headboard and looks at the ceiling, eyes wandering like he’s counting the individual dots on each tile. Seunghyun opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again-settles for scratching the back of his head until Jiyong reaches a hand out to grip his own, bony fingers cold and clammy.
Seunghyun finally breaks the silence. “Wanna talk about it?” There are vestiges of awkwardness in the low timbre of his voice, and Jiyong would usually reply with a snappy hell no, but his shoulders sag and the air leaves his lungs with an unsteady sigh. He curls into warm cocoon of Seunghyun’s arm.
“I was looking for pictures of Daul,” he says, and the name strikes a distant chord of memory in Seunghyun’s mind. He thinks of elementary school days spent with her and the other kids before he’d moved away, lazy afternoons playing baseball, huffing and puffing around the bases with the only girl on the team.
“I can’t remember what she looks like.” With a start, Seunghyun realizes that he can’t either. There are shallow tears swimming in Jiyong’s eyes and he rubs them away angrily, “She was supposed to grow up,” he says, almost choking on his saliva, “She was supposed to make something of herself, go to college with the rest of us, get married, have kids.” A hand smoothes over Seunghyun’s back, right where his spine ends. “What the fuck am I even saying, this is stupid.”
“It’s not. I-I didn’t know she died,” Seunghyun confesses. “What the hell happened?” Jiyong looks away, down at the floorboards, and he automatically assumes the worst. “Suicide?”
“No, fuck, no.” He runs a hand through his short hair. “Before college, during our senior year of high school. We were at Hyuksoo’s end of the year party and Seungho arrived late. Daul was standing next to this huge open window on the third floor of the house, and he-he ran up to give her a huge hug and they lost balance.” Seunghyun’s jaw drops and the hand gripping his tightens. “They fell down three stories. Youngbae saw it happen; he was the one who called 911. Seungho made it, but she didn’t.”
Seunghyun shakes his head in disbelief. “Yes,” Jiyong says, voice a cracked whisper. “Seungho moved away afterwards, went south for college.”
“Do you blame him?” he asks harshly, still shocked.
Jiyong averts his gaze again. “No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
It’s Jiyong’s turn to shake his head. “I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.” Seunghyun slumps down. There’s a dull thud when the back of his head hits the headboard, but he can’t feel any pain. The buzz of his cell phone jolts them both out of the silence, and as he takes the call Jiyong starts gathering the textbooks and notes on the floor and putting them back where they belong.
“What’s up, Seungri?” he says, but begins tuning him out as the kid chatters on through the speakers. By the time he ends the call, they’ve slowly finished cleaning the room up and Jiyong turns in early. Seunghyun lies awake deep into the night, Jiyong’s words an audio loop on repeat in the deep recesses of his mind.
- -
In the morning, Seunghyun is gone for early classes and there’s an open yearbook on the desk that wasn’t there before. Jiyong looks at the page it’s flipped to and sees a photo from a long, long time ago. In it, Jiyong still has his snaggletooth and Daul’s hair is cropped close to her head, like a boy’s. Seunghyun is (hilariously) fat as hell, and Youngbae is actually a head taller than all of them. Seungho and Chaerin are bickering in the background.
On the bottom, near the crease where the page meets the spine of the book and bleeds into the next, Daul’s untidy, fourth-grade scrawl declares a proud “my friends.”
A/N: college au ♥ :') also, ot: new layout! gdgdbaby gdgdbaby gdgdbaby :D