[ S W E A T . ]

[ ... ]

“so, hanbin hyung,” he begins, “what the fuck happened between you and kim jongin?”

this is how bridges are burnt.

hanbin thumbs his anger into the healing scabs that decorate his skin. it is all he can do, because the alternative is to stand up and pace and scream and yell. it is an uncommon sight for a man who typically boasts of great composure, what with having learnt to dampen his anger lest he misuses the strength he is gifted.

and yet, here is the explosive anger jongin summons, one makes its home within the cages of his ribs.

he takes a deep breath in. breathes out. he exercises every anger management tactic known to man.

one, two, three—

(all of this, holding it in. he does this for jiheon.)

he hears the annoying, incessant sip of vacuum against straw. hanbin grits his teeth.

“what the fuck happened between you and kim jongin?”

there, the question of the millennium. a dry laugh grates against his throat.

all he remembers is this. like heroin is to an addict, competition is hanbin’s most addictive drug. he remembers the euphoria that burned within his veins, remembers a disgustingly confident smirk sitting permanently on his lips. it was his first game as an alpha member, and aside from his need to prove himself to his demanding legacy, hanbin had wanted to win so badly. and so he played a little too rough, and jongin just happened to be there. still, despite his lust for victory, hanbin had tried so hard not to hurt his new friend.

jongin, unfortunately, didn’t have the same consideration.

so hanbin falls, and blood seeps from the new rips of his skin, and he swears he feels his blood boiling.

he remembers looking at jongin then—for help, for an explanation, something—but all he was met with was jongin’s typical dead eyes.

what the fuck happened? hanbin wishes he could conjure up an answer to jiheon’s question, because then, he’d at least be able to justify and thus, forgive jongin’s actions.

“you make some real great fucking friends, don’t you?” it comes out hoarse, unrefined, sarcastic. hanbin regrets it instantaneously.

“that’s not what i—”

fingers pinch the bridge of his nose and he sighs.

“it’s not your fault,” he assures, and then he’s looking at jiheon with murderous eyes, “it’s that fucker. i’m gonna kill him.”

[ ... ]

at least two balls are sunk into the pockets. nayeon turns back to her date, her smile bright, with lips as red as her outfit. “stripes are mine!”

sometimes he forgets who she’s related to.

perhaps it is the way she rushes to the pool table and obediently sets the game up without command, as though she is once again ten and there is an unspoken eagerness within her to gain her older siblings’ approval. it is different from the lazy stroll her brother adopts, the confidence and calmness and surety as he crosses his arms and blinks slowly and expectantly at his juniors.

or perhaps it is the way she is competitive, and it is altogether similar and different from that of her brothers’. because where their competitive spirit comes from a place of harmless want, hers finds its roots buried deep in a desperate need. and though she grins and gloats and taunts the way they do, still there is something forceful and calculated laced in the timbre of her voice.

(he knows because she is more like him than she thinks. it is the whole basis of their friendship, the reason why they get along too well.

and so he smiles encouragingly at her every time she catches his gaze.)

or perhaps it is the way the devil’s red coils snugly around her tight body, and she grins at him as though she is well aware of a secret he doesn’t even know exists, and then she’s bending over and his gaze trails down her blood red lips and down the curve of her neck and down, down, down—

and then he remembers. and he lazily drags his eyes back up.

he traces the curve of his bottom lip with the pad of his thumb.

“let’s not get ahead of ourselves—”

the smack of pool balls colliding steals the voice from his throat. there, the sight of hanbin’s imminent loss.

behind the large smile is gritted teeth.

(he’s never been great at pool. it takes thrice the amount of effort to control his strength in a game like this.)

“let’s raise the stakes.”

from where he is leaning on his cue stick, he straightens and saunters over to her side. he leans towards her as he says, amidst the noise that accompanies a typical alpha party, “forget the score. we’ll keep playing, round after round, and the first one to give up, loses.”

there, his fingers glide over the small of her back, and he traces the jagged rim of her lotus pin with the tip of his thumb. an unspoken wager.

he leans infinitesimally closer. the tip of his nose bumps against the curve of her jaw, and his lips brushes against the shell of her ear as he whispers, “your move.”

my biases (male edition)

[ ... ]

he should leave it at that, leave the children to dwell in their own juvenile fury, but the stranger has an uncanny way to provoke the bile threatening to claw its way out of his throat. his voice chilled from its easy nonchalance to testy hostility, his cadence akin to claws piercing the ground beneath him as he prowled. “fake? as if i have anything to prove to the likes of you.”

his story begins in the year 2005, when dusk bleeds into the winter sky and all the good students have gone home.

save one.

(here, a boy with trembling fists and trembling lips and a trembling heart. there, a group of larger boys with stronger fists and crooked lips.)

the boy’s puffed chest is reminiscent of deimatic behaviour, not unlike a kitten that raises its coat of patched fur in the face of a terrifying predator. fearful eyes trace the sturdy shoulders of his oppressors, and he notices that unlike him, they are absent of all quiver.

he grits his teeth in defiance, but he knows, before the fight begins, that he has already lost. he holds his breath in preparation for the wake of the first punch.

/

and in the year 2017, in a not-so-quiet library some hours before dusk, the story takes the form of the ouroboros, a serpent that latches onto its own tail.

(there, a lone librarian with hardened fists and gritted teeth. here, the same boy now leading the group of large men, and here are his stronger fists and crooked lips.)

this is a story of a boy who is both the prey and predator. the bully and the bullied.

(most days, he is the knight. some days, he is the damsel. these days, he is the dragon.)

there is something so awfully confronting about being identified as the one thing he once despised. he opts for denial simply because the alternative is too difficult to bear, and his ignorance fuels the anger that dots the flecks of his irises.

(here, the dragon snaps its jaws and sets the scene ablaze.)

“you talk a big game,” he snarls, and his eyes flick quickly down the length of moonsik’s body, then up again. he scrunches his nose up in disgust, “is that how you snaked your way into gumi, you worthless cunt?”

there, a laugh rolls off his forked tongue. and yet, it holds condescension and disbelief in place of humour.

“that’s what every fake says.”

an ugly smirk. a slow blink.

[ ... ]

an odd moment of courage led jungho to stuffing her mouth shut with a piece of pastry, grinning, catching her off guard entirely.  widened eyes leaving his face out of a flurry of annoyance and embarassment, she locked gazes with a sight that caused her to snort mille-feuille right up into her nostrils.

kim hanbin.

this is how a warrior falls. (gasping, bleeding, breaking.)

a blanket of thick, black smoke settles comfortably within his room, the product of drawn curtains. it once bothered him, how the smoke gets into every fucking thing.

(there, it seeps into the cracks of his broken phone. here, it rolls off the gashes decorating his knuckles and sinks into the splintered floor.)

now, he barely even notices it.

instead, he counts the seconds that tick on. one hundred and thirty-six, one hundred and—

he loses count. a laugh rolls past a bitter smile, and he starts again. one, two—

his room is devoid of light, and the concept of time fails to exist. instead, he measures these passing moments in the flashes of memory that contain her. her, his sunshine girl with a la vie en rose attitude, who sings when she talks or spins with her arms wide at first snowfall. she, who is infectious laughter and suggestive lip bites and looking at him prettily from under thick lashes. her, his one source of joy on days like these, where dark circles decorate the skin below his eyes and his breath reeks of alcohol. where the sound of his name invites fear in place of the adoration that once was.

her. mideum.

he thinks of the missed calls and unread text messages that flood his now unusable phone. he thinks of the adorable crinkle between her eyebrows when she frets.

this time, the laugh that falls from his lips is absent of bitterness.

therein marks the twenty-seventh time she crosses his mind, and he thinks it’s finally time to go home. to her.

/

he thinks he’ll buy her her favourite slice of cake as an apology for the worry he’s caused. (except he doesn’t know her favourite flavour.)

he thinks he’ll buy her a bouquet of her favourite flowers to distract her from the fact that he’s drunk and hungover all at once. (except he doesn’t know her favourite kind.)

now that he’s no longer preoccupied with ambition, he finds that he is apologetic for his absence in her life, when she has always felt so present in his. so he walks into the café close to theirs with the resolve of guessing her favourite slice. he hopes that even when he is on his knees, with an evidently terrible taste in cake and flowers, she’ll accept him anyway.

frankly, he just hopes he’s not too late.

(except he is.)

because there she sits, wide eyed and with furrowed eyebrows, just as he had imagined her to look like when they meet again. except, in place of him, there sits a stranger across from her, feeding her cake which he guesses is her favourite.

and then their eyes meet. and the laugh that rolls off his tongue is filled with bitterness once again.

it is as though he’s bound to fall, the way he treads slowly towards his cheating lover. he stumbles and stutters and moves at a pace that is painfully slow in relation to the people around him.

here, these are his last steps. he counts them until he reaches her.

“excuse me—”

a pained howl draws the attention of the few within the walls of the café. in hanbin’s tightened grip, the man’s shoulder crumbles like black ash. her date falls to his foot like a wilted petal succumbing to the lull of gravity.

undeterred, hanbin continues calmly, quietly, like a dying warrior’s gasp amidst the chaos of war, “—while i borrow my girlfriend for a moment.”

he doesn’t touch her because he knows he’ll crush her. instead, he turns and walks away from the frenzied scene, fully expecting her to rush after him. and when they’re finally outside, his back to her and in someplace quiet on a weekday such as this—when he is supposed to be training god damn it, but now he can’t—he finally speaks.

“did you enjoy it?” the question grates painfully against his dry throat.

he counts the seconds that tick slowly on. one, two.

“when you fucked him, did you enjoy it?”

A new way of playing a guitar

B.I. x Rock Ver. of Rhythm Ta

;

[ ... ]

“let’s see, what is this, your fifth time? i think you’re really living up to your legacy’s stereotype, strongman.” 

it is his love for competition, his lust for winning, that nearly kills him.

(it always does.)

a natural consequence, he argues, as he likens the stiff competition to the fear of falling. there, pallor lips gasp for air in desperation, and sweaty palms reach to grab anything that he can hold on to.

some don’t understand why he lusts for it, why he chases after it like it is the air he breathes.

and so he tells them, look, there are times when you will fall, but there are other times when you break your fall and survive and succeed. because it is not the fall that is important, but how you rise.

yes, hanbin admits that there is nothing as terrifying as falling. but he also argues that there is nothing that traces euphoria into his veins quite like success. like fame, the deafening chants of your name from a crowd that has watched you rise and adored it.

alas, success is only found on the other side of obstacle.

(and so he creates it.)

this is why he seeks the ledge. this is why he jumps.

sometimes he soars.

(this time he doesn’t.)

so this is how a warrior falls from grace, vexed and shamefaced, physical injuries garnering little attention next to a broken pride. there he sits, amidst the sound of sickness—of grating coughs and pained moans—to remind him that he is weak and that he has lost.

a scowl is carved into his features.

but then he hears a familiar snort, and his head turns at the sound. the horrid scowl falls from his face to make way for the relief that washes over him.

“jimin,” he breathes, and on his lips is the replica of the smile that rests on the subject’s face, “thank fuck you’re here.”

hanbin quickly reveals the painful swell of his ankle accompanied by the ugly gash along the length of his calf.

“whatever, man. work your magic and fix me up,” he orders, and a grimace momentarily occupies his features at the pain that accompanies shifting his leg that much closer to the healer, “you may like it here, but i sure as hell don’t. i need to get the fuck out; this place is suffocating.”

a pained sigh falls from his lips.