I posted this on Ao3 a while ago but figured I should promote it better here so I’m gonna post the full thing here. It’s based on the movie Better Days which is one of my favorite movies, the film composition is INCREDIBLE, I highly recommend.
“He stands and takes you with him, hands in yours to steer you to the bathroom where he keeps his clippers.
‘It’s too short to do anything, I’m sorry. I’m gonna shave it off, alright?’”
cw: mentions of physical assault, mentions of filming someone whilst naked, mentions of bullying, very brief mention of suicide
You started living with the punk you met getting beat up on the side of the road once.
Your mama was gone, you were being harassed and attacked by girls who had driven your classmate to suicide, you didn’t know where else to go.
So one night you showed up on Jongseob’s doorstep. “Can you protect me?”
He took that seriously. You had a shadow wherever you went from then on, a tough guy with his hood pulled up and his hands in his pockets, your own crooked guardian angel.
Until one night he wasn’t there.
And it didn’t go unnoticed by your tormentors.
It was dark on your way back home and you knew Jongseob wasn’t there. You knew something bad would happen.
A hand reached out and yanked you back by the hair as a phone’s flashlight came up to blind you and your glasses flew off. You found yourself surrounded by the girls you’d been running from for weeks, and this time they had bigger friends.
The girl holding your hair gave an order to the boy with the phone.
“Make sure you film every second of this.”
When Jongseob gets home that night and sees you, all sense leaves him.
There’s blood on your face, your books are destroyed and strewn on the floor, your uniform is torn and half ripped off of you, and your hair.
The lovely hair you covet so much is gone. Hacked off in jagged, uneven pieces shorn close to your scalp.
You’re crying, but your main concern seems to be your books. Your shaking hands are trying their best to tape the spines and pages back together despite the teardrops soaking the paper. When you hear him coming, however, your head snaps up.
He’s turned around before you can say anything else, but you catch a glimpse of the rage in his eyes and shoot up to grab him. “Jongseob, don’t!”
He struggles while you wrap your arms around him, trying desperately to break your grasp without hurting you. He claws at your forearms in an attempt to force you off of him. “Fucking… ugh, let go!” he snarls.
You hold on for a moment more before deciding to try a different approach, so you shove him as hard as you can. “What the hell are you gonna do, huh? You’re gonna go after them? Don’t be fucking stupid,” you shout. He stares back at you, untamed fury present on every centimeter of his face. His chest and shoulders are heaving with heavy breaths you can hear in the backs of his throat.
Until he registers your wobbly lip and the way your teeth are chattering. Until he realizes how scared you must be. Until he remembers he doesn’t even know what happened.
A loose strand of your hair is dislodged from the force of your vibrating jaw and floats down in the space between you.
Very carefully, he reaches towards you, resting his hand at the base of your neck. “Okay.” He swallows. “I won’t do anything stupid.”
You gently grab onto his arm. “Let’s sit down, okay? Don’t… don’t leave,” you choke out.
He nods and lets you lead him to the couch.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” he whispers. “Fuck, I shouldn’t have…. I should have been there. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there like always. Fuck.”
His worried hands are restless as they hover over your sobbing form, never staying in one place long until they ultimately rest on your head, on top of your hair.
“Hey, hey, let’s fix this first, okay? That’s something you can control,” he offers, forcing a reassuring smile when you nod.
He stands and takes you with him, hands in yours to steer you to the bathroom where he keeps his clippers.
“It’s too short to do anything, I’m sorry. I’m gonna shave it off, alright?”
You nod. “That’s fine.” It doesn’t matter anymore.
You strip off your uniform dress and shirt so they don’t get more messed up than they already are. You’re still in your tank top and thin shorts, but you’ve never been a prudish person, so you don’t mind much. Maybe you would have minded anyone else after tonight, but you trust Jongseob more than anyone you’ve ever met. He takes your discarded clothes and hangs them on the shower rod to wash later.
You sit down on the edge of the tub and both of you stay in silence the entire time he’s preparing the clippers, stepping into the tub behind you, and starts shearing your hair.
Every now and then, he manipulates your head so he can shave it easier and you let him. There’s a strange sort of apathy that washes over you. Or, not apathy, more like a disconnect. Maybe it’s some sort of protection from your brain, you don’t know. Your hair is important to you. It’s the one vanity that you allow yourself in your life almost entirely dedicated to studying. So for it to be gone…. You feel tears wetting your cheeks.
Okay then, that protective apathy lasted all of forty seconds.
Your sniffles reach Jongseob’s ears and he pauses to lean down and press a short comforting kiss to your crown. “Almost done,” he whispers against your scalp, and he resumes.
When he’s done, you turn around to take a look at the hair left behind in the basin of the tub as he brushes some off of your shoulders. Not a lot there, especially not compared to what you had before the choppy haircut that bitch and her lackeys gave to you earlier tonight.
Jongseob taps at the backs of your shoulders encouragingly. “Let’s go see, yeah?”
You stand up and walk to the mirror. “My skull isn’t shaped weird, that’s good,” you muse as you run your hands over the fuzz.
Jongseob chuckles and you blush slightly. “Sorry, that was my first thought,” you sheepishly whisper.
He comes up behind you and loosely wraps his arms around your shoulders, looking at your reflections in the mirror. “See? Still so pretty.”
You stay like that for a minute, temples pressed together, before you decide to go get changed. Jongseob stays behind, “to clean up,” he says, and you have no reason to think otherwise, so you head to the dresser in the main room for new clothes. You try to pick ones that’ll cover as much skin as possible (your skin has started crawling at the memory of being exposed on camera only an hour or so before) but will still be comfortable in the humidity. Your glasses have been smashed and basically useless, so you don’t even try to put them back on, leaving them on the dresser.
Your ruined books on the ground call out to you, begging for TLC, and you answer, returning to the shaky taping you were attempting before Jongseob came home.
Where is Jongseob? He said he wouldn’t take lo—
The door to the bathroom opens, and you turn from your position on the floor to face it.
A gasp tears through you.
“Jongseobie, you didn’t.”
He meets your gaze with a shy grin. “I did.”
You shoot up and reach for him, bringing his head down to your eye level and inspecting every short hair. “Why the hell would you do this? Your hair was so long and gorgeous…”
He wrenches himself free from your grasp and prying gaze and shrugs. “You were sad. I wanted you to be less sad.”
You lightly smack his freshly-shaved head. “That’s stupid,” you whisper. You’re scared that if you talk louder than that, you’ll start sobbing again.
“No it isn’t,” he insists, and you smile despite yourself.
Later that night, you may tell him the extent of what happened. He won’t ask, but he’ll listen if you choose to tell him. For now, however, you bask in the feeling that someone finally, finally, has your back.
FIRST ONESHOT ON THE BLOG LESSGOOOOOO!!!!!
@luvmunchies @melfresita-ruri2 @angelwings-fly @afararraaaa
Lmk if you want to be added!
