Lee Taeyong fansite ❤️

late as always but hellllooo again it’s hye (she/her, 19) coming back with everyone’s biggest nightmare bang “here for neither a good time nor a long time” hansol!! p much nothing has changed about him except for the fact that he’s two years younger (so a med student instead of an intern) and a pinch more insufferable than before so i’ll link his previous intro here but just wanted to drop an embarrassingly long new one with some extra details! as usual, lmk if youd like to plot or like this post :^)

[ ... ]

the road before them was shared with a couple other cars but it didn’t feel as stifling as driving during the rush hour. for the first time throughout the entire day, she finds herself relaxing. giving him a quick sidelong glance, she huffs. “i know.” vanity is truly one of her strongest suits. “i was thinking of incheon just because i want to drive through the bridge but if you want to go anywhere else, that’s fine too so shoot. you have until the light turns green—” she says, pointing up at the stop light on top. “to tell me where you want to go. if not, then, i guess we’ll just go with my choice.”

her hands rest on the steering wheel as though there’s no other place that they belong, fingers drumming against it to the beat of whatever song she has imprinted onto her mind that night, the semi-permanent frown on her mouth forming once he immediately begins to make her life difficult because that’s what he always does.  it’s a routine like clockwork. he watches her with a particular air of fondness, leaning forwards to turn the dials of her car (by this point he’s learned that her hisses of don’t touch my car, hansol! and smack of his hand are more bark than bite) until he settles the radio on some quiet, lazy song. 

his head rolls back against the headrest of the car seat, the soreness in his shoulders and ache of his head washed away by the city lights, low hum of the radio, roar of the wind that makes its way through the small crack of space she’s left as she rolls the window down, the way aera throws him a glance with the endearment that she insists she doesn’t have. hansol can count on one hand the amount of times he’s been able to run away since the beginning of the week, the dizzying feeling that comes with a busy life impeding on everything else. his ability to spend time with those he wants to, to take a break, to breathe. 

she’s a breath of fresh air for him. he wonders if she knows that.

“incheon is fine,” he says, ever the helpful location decider and assistant to the navigator that is shin aera, mouth turned up by how she huffs at that answer. the stop light turns green, the next song plays on the radio, his hand in his pocket fiddles with the engraving on the side of his lighter’s metal case. “i haven’t been since you took me there a month before, actually.”

it’s a nice feeling to say before. before implies there’s going to be a next time, and a next time after that, and so on. it’s the regularity that he needs, that he wants. “chimaek is on me by the way. we can order when we get there.” a pause as they’re both basked in the orange glow of the street lights, and then tentatively, testing the waters, “or anything else you want to have. you look like you’ve lost weight.”

[ ... ]

He is staring at him, genuinely now, if he didn’t before. The angular shift of his zygomatic bone. The width of his eyes and the makeup underneath it that becomes more evident the more he watches. The redness, appearing again. The virulence which disseminate from Hansol’s being. He does not favor the resurgence of memory, nor the discomfort following shortly thereafter —— not when he is the one being endowed with the thorned, throed crown. “I was looking at the blonde chick approximately twenty meters to the East. I don’t recognize her —— think she had surgery?”

poorly concealed irritation – like he had bothered being respectful enough to conceal it in the first place – flickering in his eyes, eyebrows drawn together, digits fiddling with the lollipop that sits unwrapped between his thumb and index finger all comprise the reason he shifts in his seat: hansol’s unsettled. more unsettled than angry anyways, by the other’s newfound interest in his face, the down turn of his mouth when he sets his gaze onto sang like an anthropomorphic version of a dog baring its teeth in a fruitless attempt to look more threatening than he actually is. he wonders when he’ll stop feeling like he needs to build walls outside of walls outside of walls to hold up defences against the other. 

“you’re so mean to me,” he then says gently, lowering defence from a level 10 to a level 7, a sense of frosty softness coalesced into his words where it had been obviously sharpened knives and cutting edges just seconds before. hansol’s not bothered enough to feign hurt especially where there isn’t any, as if he would be hurt by sang’s flippancy to begin with (or so he tells himself), but there’s still the jutting out of his bottom lip, almost petulant. he sets the lollipop down on the table. “it’s not like you come to the reunions every year for peace and quiet.”

it’s with bright eyes that he uncrosses his legs, chin resting on the open palm of his hand as he fixes sang with a look that’s part sweet and part acidic, biting his tongue to hold himself back from the executing the first step of his defence: a snarky comment. it’s then that his fingers itch to reach out for the alternative, a cigarette, the familiar shape of his lighter, but he knows it’s nestled somewhere inside sunan’s pockets and he chooses the first option instead.

“i’m surprised that you recognise anybody, actually.” like this they’re almost evocative of what they used to be, a game of tug and war with a clear winner – it’s the same thing, just with hostility turned up and fondness turned down. a beat passes. defence is lowers to a 6 and he sighs, mouth pursed. “i’m pretty sure she was in your korean history class. don’t you remember? you had to ask her for notes because you missed that one lesson.”

because you were with me, is left unsaid.

[ ... ]

“Anyway, let’s eat! I brought these today. You liked them, right?” He pauses once more, nostrils flared as he leans in, nose burrowed maybe too closely, breathing in the other’s scent like it were something he could saturate the core essence of his being with. “Aw, no way! Did you smoke already?”

he’s photosynthesising.

figuratively, obviously – to be honest, he’s just about as stationary as a blade of grass wedged and rooted into the soil beneath it, the splinters of the wooden bench digging into his back as he continues to lie down on it like he had been for the past fifteen minutes, an arm thrown over his eyes to block out the glare of the sun that washes over his face but that doesn’t mean he’s a plant just yet. grass takes in carbon dioxide and gives out oxygen. he takes in the silence of the rooftop and gives out to hannam momentary respite, the gift being his absence from the rest of the student body.

his ears perk up at the familiar stretch of his name, legs swinging off the bench to sit off as he watches the way sunan strides across the expanse of the rooftop with the éclat and panache of someone who owned the entire school, sliding into the empty seat besides him like he had no other place to be. “oh right, sorry,” he says, a little sheepishly, his foot sliding the pack of cigarettes on the floor underneath the bench and safely out of sight. “i didn’t want any lunch so i just came up by myself.” he pauses, and as though it’s an afterthought to sunan’s speech, “you don’t need to apologise to them. meeting you was probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to them all week.”

he’s photosynthesising again but this time, the source of sunlight is from the way sunan beams at him, hushed and erratic “hi, hi, hi’s” like he was worried there wasn’t enough hours in the day to greet hansol. as though hansol wouldn’t be perched on the rooftop like usual, either waiting for him, waiting for him or waiting for him. he’s sort of pathetic. he thinks he could count on both hands the hours he’s spent waiting.

“i don’t think we should go bungee jumping,” he comments tentatively, flipping through the manual with a blink, peering back at sunan with a careful smile. “maybe next time. it’s true though. all your muscles do relax at the moment of death.”

it’s been like that since they first met. sunan runs at a hundred miles an hour and he struggles to catch up. “you like the lime ones, right?” he phrases it like a question when he knows it’s a fact, ignoring the way sunan dives into him with his nose crinkled (he’s become a professional at this; an expert in accepting that forming a relationship with sunan hiranchai is signing yourself up to a lack of personal space. not that hansol minds, to be fair) like he can smell the remnants of the cigarettes hansol has already stamped out with the heel of his shoe. he probably can. instead he avoids the question like he always does, fingers reaching out to pluck away the lemon sweets, leaving a sea of green in sunan’s hand and nudging his hand back towards him. “keep the rest to eat during pre-calc.”

[ ... ]

           gweneira steps backwards again, one more subtle step away and she thinks she sees him mimic it. had he? had she also imagined the way he tensed slightly at her touch when she had hugged him, uncomfortable almost, or had that been real too? even if it was, she knows nothing is meant to be anyone’s fault but her own. it was something she had been learnt in passing, from another patient in rehab. how disappointing now that there’s no one to blame but herself.

there’s only so much that you can forget, and unsurprisingly enough hansol doesn’t think a year is enough to erase the dizzying memories that have already burned into the back of his mind. welded into place, constantly there.

it’s even harder when the burden of reality is one he carries with him day-to-day like a souvenir he never wanted in the first place but is stuck with anyways, pieces of her wedged in between the gaps of his life like an echoing reminder of what had happened. what he had done. one of her first trophies sits on the top shelf of his bedroom desk proudly as though it’s his, a photo of them at her first recital stuck haphazardly on the wall, a sticky note with her signature chaotically scrawled across next to it. you can sell it when i’m famous, so i’m giving this to you in advance, okay? she had said to him, mouth turned up in that grin she always had when she was around him, the one that said ‘everything will be fine, everything will be great’, rolling her eyes when he had asked whether she wanted his in case he embarked on an upwards journey to fame too.

it had been easier back then, when there hadn’t been a weight pressing down onto his shoulders and he didn’t feel like his tongue was tied in knots, words uncharacteristically formal, stepping on eggshells around the one person he thought he’d never have to. it only takes one look at her to know that she feels the same way, but it’s never easy to go from family to strangers.

“you’ve gotten shorter, eunha,” he comments with a muffled laugh, neck bent as he allows her the liberty of patting his head like they were eight again and not pushing into adulthood. she feels frail against him, her arms around his neck, his own encapsulating her like a tiny wooden figure swallowed, hair spilling onto the front of his shirt whilst his finger draws a pattern on her back. when she somehow manages to extract herself from his grasp, he knows it’s difficult for her to miss the way he had tensed under her touch, and her tenuous step away from him tells him she had felt it too.

he hates how it’s almost nauseating to see her again, the sort of nausea associated with the bile that rises at the back of your throat one when you drink too much, the sort of nausea that he had felt every time he had passed her studio, the ghost of her presence prickling away at his brain, the sort of nausea that had washed over him whenever had had seen the jeons in the last year, their gentle hands on him and kind smiles no different from sharpened daggers and concealed resentment. he hadn’t apologised to them at the gala back then, or the one after that, or the one after that. he thinks he should (he knows he should), but he also knows eira enough to understand that she’d never let him apologise to them in the first place, or even let them know.

it’s not your fault, she would say, it’s never your fault. he doesn’t know who else’s it would be if not his.

he bites the inside of his mouth. there’s the literal gap between them and then there’s the figurative gap, as though they’re both chasing at shadows of the people they used to be. at the relationship they used to have. “you look – ” better than the last time i had seen you? step one of fixing a cracked relationship is ignoring the past like it had never happened to begin with. he’s doing a shit job. “you look like you cut your hair. did you? it suits you, you look pretty.”

compliments are a metaphorical step forwards. to him, anyways, because he doesn’t know what else to say that wouldn’t leave an acidic aftertaste on both of their tongues. his mouth is running miles ahead of his brain, as though he’s trying to fill up every second of silence that passes with something. anything.

"you can take a picture if you want, it’ll last longer.”

he doesn’t quite know what to make of himself when he’s alone like this, dressed head to toe in some suit worth five figures that he can’t pronounce the name of, perched away in a seat at the corner of the room with more of his mind focused on the music from piano tiles ringing from his phone than actually participating in the reunion.

see, it’s not really a reunion when nobody wants to see each other again and he’s tuned down most of the conversation to white noise, but he’s not so socially inept that the gaze that lingers on the side of his face goes unmissed.

he glances next to him, offers up an unusually wry smile, not like the ones he used to greet him with when they were younger and stupider and wasted time on the rooftop like they had nothing better to do and nowhere better to be. he blames the location. trying to find a method to erase the three years he was at hannam from his memory is always a stab in the dark when he comes back annually to overpriced wine and shallow conversations, like a routine, like clockwork. it’s something he can’t rub off his skin no matter how many times he douses himself in soap. 

sang is a living reminder of what it feels like to want and be wanted back for a fleeting moment. he’s also a reminder of what it feels like to not be wanted at all.

there’s a flash of orange across the cracked led screen of the run down bus stop, strikingly bright against the dimly lit sky as the colours morph into ‘2:54AM - NO BUSES AVAILABLE’. he’s hit with déjà vu like the last few times he had found himself seated underneath the cracked wooden roof of the stop, completely useless when it’s raining and completely useless when it isn’t raining either, caught in ceaseless repetition of running from everything once a month only to be rescued by a princess in shining armour.

it’s a routine. one embedded into his system like something he had needed all along but hadn’t realised so until he met her, so unlike and like him all at once. he watches the familiar car pull up in front of him, pushes the hood of his jacket down and taps on the driver side window with his fingers.

“wow, what time do you call this?” he complains as soon as the window is rolled down, nose crinkled as though he’s actually perturbed by the late hours in which him and aera seem to find solace. hansol’s tempted to slide over the bonnet and into the car, but she already looks like she’s bursting with things to say (or hiss, more fittingly) and he doesn’t feel like putting his life on the line for a few seconds of amusement. he treks over to the other side of the vehicle, slipping into the passenger's seat with a scoff, words pointed like the knife of accusation. “you said 3am. you’re late, you liar. i could’ve been kidnapped. or worse, i could’ve had to take a bus.”

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“y’know, if you keep frowning like that, you’ll have wrinkles by the time you’re twenty five.”

even over the keys of the piano and the strings of the violin his voice is one that pierces through the music, permeated with something halfway between mocking and amusement, rich with i’m-here-to-fuck-up-any-plans-you-had-for-tonight. his presence is an unwelcome one, hovering around the doorway like a vampire waiting to be invited in, but he supposes he can’t really take offense when he knows that to her, he’s no different to anyone else that would have the impertinence disturb her this late at night. he takes a step inside (clearly not a vampire then), grinning at her reflection as he holds up the bags in his hands. one clinks as he lifts it up, the other doesn’t but there’s already the stench of ddeokbokki covering the room and a tell tale shape of bungeoppangs pressed against the plastic. she’s not a genius – he thinks she isn’t one, anyways – but he knows she’ll figure out the contents.

if not by deduction, by her memory. he can count on his hand (one finger, actually) the amount of times he’s brought something other than the few items he currently holds. and that had only been because he had arrived too late to shamelessly beg the already closed stalls to open up again. he remembers her telling him to leave if he wasn’t going to bring her anything to eat – he threw her a bottle of water, and she threw him out the room.

classic myo suran.

he strides across the room with éclat of someone who belongs there, as though the world’s mistaken and he’s the only professional dancer in the room, as though he can’t see the way she looks like she’s about to kick his ass for the sixth time that week. he’s been counting.

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[ ... ]

from the corner of his eyes, he can see men in black approaching, betraying hands pointing to the direction of their booth. men can’t deal with their shit without someone stepping in nowadays … if only they were dealing with it like men, and not like sixteen year old testosterone bursting teenagers. minwoo sighs. and while hansol’s grip on him increases, he puts his pained hand, the same one which violated him before, on his own wrist; this time, gently. “no. we’re both disappearing, unless you want to make friends with the police. you’re getting fucking sober.”

sometimes, hansol wishes he could dig his fingers into minwoo’s skull and pry it open to get answers to questions he’s been asking since the disintegration of civilisation. civilisation being their little trio that had seemed inseparable, of course – it’s foolish to think about old promises made in high school, talking for eternity about everlasting friendships, especially now he has the hindsight to know that the oath would be broken when he least expected it, but he can’t help it when minwoo’s talking at him rather than talking to him like he’s someone who needs constant scolding instead of a normal fucking person. 

he inhales sharply, wonders what minwoo would say and do if hansol tells him he resents god to the point where he can feel it stirring in his bones for keeping him alive. maybe he’d laugh, like he was pulling one of the old pranks they used to pull. maybe he’d say hansol deserves the suffering.

“that’s not fair, minwoo.” he says, voice shaking, any anger he’s spent the past nine years convincing himself he has stored up in him sweeping through his body like an inferno. he says it like it’s not fair that they’ve spent almost a decade hating each other, like it’s not fair that the first time they’re face to face after everything is on the dance floor of some club chock-full of people. he says it like anything in the world is actually fair in the first place. “you – you out of all people don’t get to – ” a pause, “you don’t get to fucking judge me like that. to tell me what i should and shouldn’t be grateful for.”

you weren’t there even if sunan was, he wants to say, and i needed the both of you.

he doesn’t get an opportunity to. it’s fight or flight in situations like these and he always chooses the latter, letting go of the front of minwoo’s shirt only to grasp the sleeve instead and drag him from behind, the strobe lights a yellow brick road for him to stumble to safety. the nostalgia kicks him, makes him bite the inside of his cheek but he manages to pull him through the swinging doors of the club and into the alley that sits beside it. he takes one look at minwoo and it’s enough to send another wave of nausea over his body. 

it’s too much for one night. sunan. him. everyone.

he slides down the brick wall, promptly dropping to his knees and crouches over. the concrete ground digs into the palms of his hands painfully as he dry heaves, chest burning like it was set aflame, but he thinks there’s nothing quite as nauseating as the ringing in his ears that leaves him deafened to any other noise. nothing comes out of his mouth even if he feels it rising in his throat, and tears prickle at the corner of his eyes at the feeling. the pain. the embarrassment.

“quit movin– ”

like usual, his actions are a contradiction of his own instructions, unskilled fingers fumbling with the dark tips of jamie’s hair as he tries – somewhat pitifully it seems, if her consequent unimpressed snort is anything to go by – to braid the locks. he’s caught his bottom lip between his teeth, eyebrows drawn together with the concentration of someone doing something much more serious than playing hairdresser for the night. 

the right strand pursues the left one. he’s suddenly reminded of the first time he had met her, feet pattering against the ground as he chased after her in the empty room next to the main hall of the gala. they had been younger then – her, quieter, and him louder. hansol remembers going home and telling his parents he liked the ahn’s older daughter.

the world spins on its axis, a constant reminder than everything comes and goes. ahn jamie doesn’t go.

she claps when VICTORY flashes onto the tv screen. DEFEAT might as well be stamped across his forehead as he drops the half completed more-tangles-than-braid braid with disappointment, sliding down the sofa to sit next to her on the floor. 

“it’s ugly because you wouldn’t stay still,” he huffs, pushing the half eaten tray of cheese ddeokbokki from the nearby stall towards her. the food’s been long forgotten on the table, beer warmed and chicken cooled to room temperature, but he opens the drink for her anyways. at the back of his mind, he asks himself when the right time to point out the bags under her eyes and abnormally lethargic tone is. 

he decides promptly that it isn’t now.

[ ... ]

“Did you know that? How alike we are. We keep our promises, don’t we? You said you’d bring me to the market today.” Her fingers stir as harshly as needed to wiggle his nose. “Oppa, do you remember? I have your outfit.” She liberates his airway, pointing to a pair of shoes and its smaller duplicate. “Wear blue like me. We’ll match today.” 

the inception of their relationship comes to him like a dream.

albeit too blurry for him to remember now (it’s a memory tucked away in the corner of his mind – he’s a firm believer that it’s not the start that’s important, it’s what follows), the dream starts like this. she’s perched upon the corner of the street, arms around her knees, fixing him with a look close to insouciance whilst his own gaze says the opposite. been homeless for a while now, he remembers her saying when he had asked, words alien-looking and sounding on her mouth as though she was trialling the word on her tongue for the first time. he believes her as much as a person with two eyes and a somewhat decent brain would, clean nails and cartier necklace, soft hands and a far fetched on her smile betraying any earlier comments about her living situation. 

she ends up at his regardless. not turns up, not plans to move in, just ends up. international student, flew over yesterday, some weird attempt of hannam’s at improving sino-korean relations – he lies through his teeth the same way she does, watches her eyes gleam with something for once, like she’s finally decided he’s interesting enough for her to dig her claws into. barely interesting anyways, when he pales in comparison to his clothes. he’s quick to pick up on the way her eyes linger on his open closet whenever he pulls something out, fingers running over the material of whatever he’s wearing that day, always ready with a question regarding the locations of his purchases. 

he always tells her. she turns up with a matching item the next day.

“you’re a fuckin’ menace.” the dream ends here with his lack of oxygen, fingers scrabbling up her arm as he pulls her wrist away with a noise alarmingly similar to that of a wounded dog’s. this is what he gets, nurturing the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the very same one who sits on the edge of his bed now, her own armchair abandoned behind her despite his tedious accomplishment of having moved it to his own room after months of finding her asleep in it next to his bed anyways. 

he rubs at his nose, shooting her a glare behind his hand as he peers at his designated costume for the day, hand reaching behind him to grasp the pillow that he hurls at her. 

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“thank you,” hansol tells him, a dimpled smile thrown at the speaker of the compliment, modesty out of place at a place like this, people like them. he can’t read his character yet, nothing known about him except for the the fact that sunan takes an interest in him, the shape of his mouth when he takes a drag of the ablaze cigarette and throws flattery at them. you two look really good together, he says. it’s the same way someone would compliment an outfit, a painting hung up on a gallery wall. so pretty, it fits well together. 

he racks his memory for a name, lands on a honeyed syllable and tests it out on his tongue, eyes crinkling. “that’s very sweet of you to say, hyun. i think you’ll look good with us too.”