#flashbackthread

There should be more, Jihyo keeps thinking. There should be something more.

Your mother jumps off your appartment building when your younger brother is home and all you get is a few documents to fill out and then you’re back as it was. There should be more, wailing sirens or a dread hanging in the air for days. Where are the rainclouds and the heartfelt speeches about never giving up and the determination to become a superhero of some sorts? Where is the stutter in the world as everything stops, as you float around suspended in time trying to grasp the pieces of your shattered life?

But there’s nothing.

There’s nothing but the bleak,unforgiving trudging on of time and the bills piling up and the waking up for work in the morning and the sorting of laundry and holding Joongki as he wakes from nightmares -- never with a shout, but always with a whimper, and if she didn’t know how much it hurt him, she’d like it better that way, because when he sleeps now, it’s no longer peaceful, it’s eerie and motionless and reminds her too much of death. Of the fact it could take him, too.

It’s the only thing different about her now, the only thing that pierces through the exhausation that coils around her like a vine, wringing the life out of her slowly. 

So here she is, on a swing at 3 am in the morning, ink stains from filling out endless piles of papers on her fingers, holding to the chains like a child and she doesn’t feel any different at all. She doesn’t feel anything at all.

Except then she sees him, rubbing the exhaustion out of his eyes and not bothering to hide his yawn, and somehow knowing she doesn’t have to suffer alone makes it harder not to, makes it worse and she’s out of the swing in a second, hugging him tightly, as if she might collapse if she lets go.

She doesn’t though (of course she doesn’t, no one ever does in real life, you hold on no matter what) and she gives him a shrug.

“So, the fucking bitch finally jumped,” she says, knowing Gary would know what she was talking about, a sudden flare of anger taking her over now she said the words out loud. “She didn’t even fucking wait for Joongki to leave home. I wish -- I wish she’d survived so I could have the satisfaction of ripping her fucking throat out and feeding it to her through a motherfucking straw for what she did to him.”

Then she shrugged again, changing the topic, as if it didn’t matter that much.

(It didn’t, she jumped and she was horrible but that was done and now there was nothing but the forward motion of life)