#hdxjongin

Sometimes Jongin resorted to less than moral tactics in his search to survive storms, cold weather. It was hard, living on the street. It was hard having nowhere to go when the wind cut through threadbare clothes, when a sudden rainstorm kicked up and drenched him, left him frigid. It wasn’t like he had a shower or a clothes-dryer or even a change of clothing, for that matter. Sometimes he made enough to get a pack of kimbap from the corner store and sleep in a PC bang, but when he came up a little short he resorted to the clubs.

  There were a lot of them in Hongdae, all over the place. And they were full of people interested in a one night stand- especially with an exotically handsome half-foreign looking kid. It helped that he stayed sort of rugged, sort of constantly tanned and weathered from the elements.  So he played it up, spun his way through smoky rooms until he landed on someone liable to take him home for the night, always claiming he was a tourist or that his apartment was ages away or that his roommate was a weirdo. It wasn’t moral and it wasn’t dignified but Jongin had stopped caring much about that sort of thing a long time ago.

  It was hit or miss though. Sometimes people ended up way, way weirder than they looked. Taemin had been one of those- but in a surprising way. He’d let him stay through the next day when a monsoon blew through, let him look at his paintings and take a shower. They’d made fried rice and dumplings and watched every Fast and Furious movie and, a few days later, they’d repeated the experience. And then again. And then again. It had turned into a sort of routine by now, to the point that Jongin was secretly-sort-of-banking on one night of comfortable sleep a week, and it had really picked his mood up a lot.

It was probably weird for him to know her name, but he told himself it wasn’t. She wore a nametag, sometimes. Other patrons – regulars- called her by name. Jongin wasn’t a regular- he was a weirdo. He didn’t have the disposable income to be a regular, honestly, but he’d come in once when it had been storming, tucked himself in the corner and ordered the hottest of all hot teas. He’d nursed that tiny drink for a good four and a half hours before he dozed off, and she’d only shaken him gently awake when it was time to close. A lot of shop owners would have been decidedly less kind to a scruffy, obviously dirt poor scrap of a kid, but she had let him stay and that meant something.

He’d stopped by once or twice after that to actually order something, out of some odd desire to repay her. But it had been immediately clear that Gayoon needed something else- needed a pick me up. And maybe Jongin needed to feel like he could help someone, wanted to feel like he could make a difference, or a connection, however small. That was when he’d started leaving post-it notes. He didn’t bother buying drinks he couldn’t afford or lurking around the establishment, just popped in to stick a few reassuring notes and carefully scribbled drawings onto the brightly colored paper, leaving them stuck to the message board before he ghosted away, back onto the streets.  That was what he was doing presently, a scrap of bright blue clutched in his left fist, his cheeks wind-burned and red and his hair a tousled mess from the wind as he shuffled to the little message board, glancing around quick before he smoothed it into place.