Perhaps questioning oneself and one's past actions was part of growing up and transitioning into adulthood. After all, wasn't maturity often associated with being able to take a step back and see the bigger picture, regardless of one's own feelings and opinions? Or perhaps Moonjin's recent change of mind was more due to the fact that his wounds had mended, that his heart had found a new home in Impulse and no longer lay where he had left it, on the threshold of that Dimensions practice room he had spent a good portion of his youth in, abandoned.
Whatever the reason, things had changed over the course of the past few years – the spectrum of emotions swirling around in his head when he was confronted with a former colleague no longer spanned only from disdain to disinterest but encompassed a whole new array these days. Among them, possibly the most prominent of all, was regret.
The decision to leave was right, he managed to tell himself with the same firmness still, but the way he had gone about it might have been flawed. No. It had been; no doubt there. What he had wanted, needed, to do back then was to cut off the rotten part before it had the chance to consume him too, but in that process, he had also severed several beautiful and perfectly healthy pieces of himself. Collateral damage, he would have called it back then, and justified it with a simple 'you never know.'
But not anymore. Nowadays, he wasn't quite sure what to think or feel or even do when reminded of old times, of people who had once meant the world to him. The first to come to mind was always Daeun, sweet, kind, free soul that she had been, who would never know how much light she had brought into his strenuous trainee life, because he had left with no goodbye. It hadn't hurt as much back then because he had refused to let it, buried the pain beneath an unbreakable layer of anger so it couldn't be reached. Unbreakable – but clearly not permanent.
When he passed her at an event they were both in attendance of, lifting his eyes to look at her and actually see her for the first time in years, the levee broke. A lump formed in his throat, and when he swallowed it, it settled in the pit of his stomach in the form of something akin to fear that he couldn't quite place. “Daeun,” he wanted to call out to her, but it came out too quiet, like he was simply saying her name to himself. Get a grip, he scolded himself, what are you doing? Taking a few tentative steps towards her, he offered, voice laced with hope and worry in equal parts: “Can we talk?”
