#advtae

@advtae

It’s been a long time since Hansol has found himself making such an effort to celebrate... Anything, really. He’s kept to himself somewhat more in recent times, but when he managed to find out about a certain gambler’s birthday, he decides that he might as well continue his efforts to be friendly. It’s not like Taehyung could say no to him if he tried. The contract he agreed to is a bit outrageous, but Hansol is glad for it. It’s nice to have someone he knows he can wholly trust. He’s more than aware that perhaps he shouldn’t be trusting someone who he’s completely forced into some sort of twisted friendship, but that fact doesn’t stop him. It’s Taehyung or... well, no one, really. He has other friends who he trusts, but never with everything. It’s hard to trust anyone with everything if he knows they can change their mind.

But this is different. He doesn’t need to think about how exactly Taehyung got trapped by him. What matter is that today is the gambler’s birthday and Hansol has already given the other a call with the order to come over. He’s not actually sure if Taehyung is aware that Hansol knows it’s his birthday, but that might make things more fun. It’ll be a surprise that way.

Hansol has already prepared food. He’s been cooking for several hours now, and even went through the effort to make some sort of cake. He... Didn’t exactly know what kind Taehyung would like, but a simple vanilla one seemed good enough. It’s not like dinner was the main thing anyway.

A yip from in his bed room make him jump just a little. He rushes over to the closed door and opens it, only to find himself jump on by the small puppy he’d picked out several hours ago. The little thing has been bouncy around his room playing with Gee ever since. Maybe it’s excessive, but Hansol couldn’t help but think that a pet was the perfect gift for a gambler who lived completely alone. The puppy might be a bit to excitable, but he’s sure that it’ll crash in just a moment. Puppies usually do.

He places the little dog on the bed with a slight shushing sound. He’s smiling a little more than he probably should be, but there’s no one watching. He’s sure that it doesn’t matter- no right now. He pets the puppy for just a moment before leaving the room and closing the door once more.

@advtae

She is a swirl of ruby red and a dash of sparkling diamonds as she descends into the ballroom, her tall stilettos that slam against the marble floor piercing the dull atmosphere. She’s all dolled up from head to toe: her lips the same shade as her dress, long lashes brushing butterfly kisses against her cheeks as she blinks, long brown locks curled meticulously with not a single strand out of place.

Under normal circumstances, Jennie would have been ecstatic with the situation she is in right now.

(So why, oh why, is the characteristic grin that is so Jennie absent from her lips today?)

The answer is simple and yet complicated all at once, and she supposes that describes her relationship with the man who had stolen her heart all those years ago. (The man who has kept some of its shattered pieces as a souvenir. But an eye for an eye, she muses as slim fingers fuss over the broken shards of his own heart.)

It’s been five years since she last saw him—five years since she had left him without a single word—and she thinks that today, finally, she’s ready to let him go. She just needs to see him once more; needs to see with her own eyes that he’s coping just fine without her, just like how she’s supposed to be coping just fine without him. She thinks that ideally, the last image of him that she’d want to see and keep locked in her heart till her dying days is that of his mischievous smirk, one that she had always secretly thought was more adorable than threatening. It’s the one she fell in love with, after all—the one that, against all odds, had managed to ground her when she was never built to understand the concept of gravity. But she doubts she’ll get her wish, because unlike her, his poker face is nothing short of perfect.

Heels grate against marble as she makes her way to the back room, where all the gambling men can be found. The stakes are high for a place as prestigious as this, and so she’s brought with her a million won worth of poker chips to buy a spot at the poker table. The identities of the men are hidden by masks of different shapes and sizes that trigger different emotions—fear, curiosity—in the hearts of others. (Jennie herself has never thought too much about hiding her identity—she couldn’t care less about what anyone else thinks, all she cares about is him—and so she relies on a flimsy mask that sits just above her nose with the sole purpose of blending in.) But despite the four other masked men seated around the table, Jennie would still be able to pick him out in an instant, because she knows her Tae like she knows how to hack past a flimsy security system.

The dealer starts shuffling the all too familiar deck, and whilst others are assessing their opponents, Jennie only has eyes for Taehyung. And when the game starts all too quickly, she doesn’t even pick up the two cards she’s dealt with before she decides to fold. It’s a lost cause to attempt to win a poker game against Taehyung, after all—when she had brought a million won with her, she came with the intention of leaving empty handed that night.

Instead, her eyes feast on his plump lips, and she remembers a time when she had brought him to a skating rink knowing full well that he couldn’t skate to save his life. (It’s unfair, after all, for someone to be good at everything. There had to be something Taehyung absolutely sucked at, and this, this was it.) She remembers the feel of his fingers intertwined with hers as she guides him along the ice, remembers moving just fast enough so he isn’t able to keep up and falls, instead, right on top of her. And she remembers confessing that this had been her plan all along; not to teach him how to skate—just like her father did her when she was this high—but to end up in this exact position, just so he was within a close enough proximity for her to shower his face with light kisses.

“Fold.”

She stares at the hills and valleys of his knuckles as his fingers clench the cards he so adores, and she is taken back to a time when she had patiently humoured him as he taught her about the rules of poker. Clearly, she had not been paying attention, and had instead been enraptured by how passionate he was in making sure she understood it, had adored how he wanted so much to bring her into his world, when she wasn’t built to be entrapped in just one world. She remembers nodding at random times as he talks, just so he’d think she was actually listening, and then she’d proceed to brush the tip of her nose lovingly against his cheeks or the nape of his neck, and he’d laugh and chastise her because he was ticklish.

Fold.

And lastly, she glances at his eyes, and she remembers a time when she was foolish enough to disappoint him. She remembers how she nonsensically dedicated the bare minimum of her time to him even though to her, every moment spent in his arms was a treasure. She remembers how his eyes would twitch—so slightly, you’d miss it if you didn’t know what to look for—when she told him she was leaving to spend time with her other friends. But then he’d put on a brave smile and told her to leave, and that he’d be right here when she decided to come back. She remembers knowing that this wasn’t a sincere smile, because the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes were absent, just as they usually were when she did something he didn’t approve of. (And still, she turned around and didn’t look back.) She had taken his love and their time together for granted, but if she knew then what she knew now, she would have spent every waking moment in his arms just so she’d live today with a little less regret. (But she supposes that is the story of her life.)

Fold.

📢 starter for! @advtae 📢 tw-- insomnia mention

It’s past two in the morning.

A steel barbell is resting against his shoulders as he stands in the middle of the squat rack, his legs shoulder-length apart, and his hands gripping either side of the bar for support. An impressive amount of heavy weights were perched on either side of the bar. He stares at himself in the mirror, drenched in sweat from his workout, earbuds blaring his Beastmode! playlist. His grey, sleeveless shirt had such long slits in the side that it showed everything if one were to look at him from the side. He was wearing compression leggings under his basketball shorts, and his phone was trapped in the black hole that was his short’s left pocket.

He was pushing himself tonight. He ran a bit longer during his cardio warmup, increased the amount of weights he was lifting, and doing more reps than what he usually does. He couldn’t sleep tonight, as if he had been able to sleep much lately. Not ever since his family went ghost and then--

Jonghyun didn’t want to think about it.

He came here to forget; came here to keep himself distracted from the real problems he refused to acknowledge at the moment. Maybe by working on his physique he’d be more prepared for the obvious horrors that waited him in the future. A large part of him doubted that’d help that much, but at least it helped him with getting laid now that his body was morphing into something you’d see in a male magazine.

A new song starts then. It’s fast and angry with a steady beat. Jjong adjusts his hold on the barbell one last time before lowering down into a low squat. Oh, these weights are a new feel. He feels it hard in his glutes and hams as he keeps his knees from passing his feet. This exercise is nothing new to him, but it was amazing how a couple more kilograms can make such a different feel. He lets out a heavy breath as he rises up, muscles straining just slightly as he does so. It’s such an invigorating feeling-- feeling his muscles strain and work to be able to support new weights, and Jjong all but loses himself in the feeling. He squats again, and again, continuing to do his reps as he normally would. 

He finishes his squats, and he feels proud of himself. Near the end of his reps he started to struggle with the new weight, but he kept going until he reached twenty. He put the barbell down, letting out a victorious yell in the empty gym as the weight is literally taken off his shoulders. He strikes a pose in the mirror, flexing his biceps and showing off his gains to himself. He grabs his water bottle then, taking a generous drink as his playlist pauses only to give off the dinging of a new text message before resuming playing. Pretty much done with his workout at this point, Jonghyun fishes his phone out of the depths of his pocket.

He almost laughs at the message, not because it was funny but because it was almost two thirty in the morning and most people are dead asleep. But Jonghyun rarely sleeps, and he never felt more awake than he did right now. He types out a quick response, pausing in the middle to send the other a photo of him at the empty gym, grabbing the hem of his shirt and lifting it up to show off his sweaty torso before sending it. He grabs his stuff and heads towards the locker room.