#jihoonmi

dated december 15, 2019 // the crow’s nest

@jihoonmi

the evening starts with birthday candles, twenty-one of them, piled so close together on a small cake that they almost look like one big one, flames licking at each other as if they might converge into one huge fire and take over the whole room. he’s still crooked smiles and delightful quips as he blows them out, the break room just as crowded with coworkers in paper party hats patting him on the shoulder and cutting him a slice. somehow, he is still bright and warm, even with a certain oppressive, icy suffocation weighing down his happiness from the inside out.

i don’t love you sits at the back of his mind, at the top of his spine, like a bad nerve threatening to paralyze him at any moment. he has always loved too hard, too fast, pushing limits others set for their own safety. and now he has the internal wreck to show for it. he can convince himself and everyone else that he’s okay, that nothing’s wrong, on a normal day, now that their shifts don’t overlap, now that blank white has started to coat the streets and gray the skies, now that the air between them is as cold and merciless as the air outside. 

i never loved you. but when jihoon shows up now, on this day of all days, and sucks the life out of the tiny, colorful break room in that way only he can, spencer feels something inside himself shift, a loose keystone finally giving up, sending a weighted ton of rubble toppling until it buries him completely. he loses sight of the sun, finds it that much harder to breathe, excuses himself from his own party with the same crooked smile he always wears. he needs air.

i ‘m never going to love you. air greets him when the side door of the restaurant swings open. it’s crisp and cold and immediately turns the peaks of his face pink. he should’ve brought a jacket - the thin layer of a wrinkled dress shirt doesn’t do much against the late autumn chill. the pavement is wet as he turns the corner toward the front of the crow’s nest, sleet melting away to paint cement almost black, and there’s a family ahead of him with a small child taking advantage of pink galoshes and shiny puddles with every step. the sight makes him want to smile, but even his characteristically permanent smile hurts at the edges, corners strained and cracked, stale stone frozen in place, petrified where he left it.

he breathes air, fresh and cold. it leaves him in a pale puff, a steady reminder of his own humanity, an ironically intangible anchor to reality.

tw: blood, violence, guns, gun violence, gunshots

@jihoonmi

the house still doesn't feel like his own. the halls, though more familiar now than they had been when he was first welcomed into the building, still feel like they belong to strangers. the room they had given him is supposedly his own, now decorated with his own trinkets and a blue and gray bedspread that he chose himself, but there are nights when the quiet of sleeping alone feels uncomfortable. jisu has been in his parents' (his actual real parents) house for a couple months now, but he struggles still to call it home.

and that's why he resorts to old habits.

he's done it before with fosters that never lasted long when the group home was just too overcrowded, only they make it so much easier for him than those other would-be parents ever had. he walks down the hall, fingers tracing the wall next to him idly until they brush against a doorframe. it's not his bedroom, or at least the one he sleeps in at night, but his brother's. it had been shown to him on the rest of the house tour, and he'd be lying if he said he'd never been in there since. jisu is still hardly more than a child, his curiosity gets the better of him more often than not.

nimble fingers wrap around the doorknob as the boy slinks into the room, footsteps light as a cat's as he investigates jihoon's various trinkets and treasures. he doesn't understand most of it. there's shelves of what seems to be junk; well-worn lighters, decks of playing cards, cheap costume jewelry, and a dozen other useless things. jisu picks up one of the lighters, one that might have been pretty when it was new and shiny brass but now lays tarnished and dented and dirty. he flicks it once, twice, three times before deciding it's out of fluid or broken altogether. jisu pockets it anyways.

the boy is quiet as he snoops around, claiming a watch with a black leather band for his own as well as taking a book off a shelf, if only for an excuse if his mother catches him looking in places where he probably doesn't belong. i was bored, he'd whine, eyes large and as innocent as ever, i'll put it back when i finish it. he doesn't even like reading.

@jihoonmi

they’ve long passed the evening rush of the more ‘civil’ crows nest patrons, and in the lull of the night seoah finds herself checking and double checking the bar’s stock. the only problem is, however, that every time she counts, the number is off. she lets out a frustrated sigh and plops unceremoniously on one of the stools in front of the bar. 

@jihoonmi

bomin knows what he is. he knows that he isn’t your average college kid, that he’s involved in darker things, dangerous things. his mind is his asset, his weapon. yet there were still many things that bomin could never understand about his own self.

he sits on the couch of the apartment, staring at the screen of his laptop, his mind at unease. bomin knew he was a criminal, if you were involved a gang, didn’t that make you one? his eyes fall onto his hands, scratches on them when he’d attempted to get more involved on the field. he’s no stranger to bloodshed and just what consequences his actions have.

though lately, after having spent more time with people from his college, with people that weren’t involved in the scene that he was, he craved that normality. yet he knew that someone like him could never be normal, he hadn’t been given the gift of simplicity.

he takes a look around the apartment, and everything there only reminded him more of the fact that he wasn’t normal. that crime lingered at every corner. but there were just simply days when he’d want to forget. he wondered if that was possible. “shit,” he sighs, clearly unhappy. 

frustrated, he balls his fist up and slams them hard against the table. “shit,” he repeats, biting hard on his bottom lip. his hands begin to bleed, the wounds opening up once more from the intensity of his fingers against his palm. bomin sits there, staring at the blood on his hands before he stands up to head towards the first aid kit.

@jihoonmi

it’s always a sequence of some sort. one thing causes another, and from there you unlock the next step to explore. maybe that’s why jaein likes these puzzle boxes so much; everything is in a controlled, logical set. or maybe he just likes the euphoria of finally undoing the final latch or peg or whatever the mechanism is for that last surge of success. in any case, the boy almost always has a puzzle on hand. they’re great for bus rides, for boring classes, and, in this case, for killing his fifteen minute break before he has to get back to his tables.

today’s puzzle isn’t new to him, but he’s also never solved it perfectly. not that he’s ever really tried beforehand. sometimes he’s seen it called the idiot test, but that doesn’t seem like a very nice name. still, when he runs out of moves and there’s still more than one golf tee in the triangle-shaped peg board, he starts to wonder if he really is an idiot. how many times has he seen this puzzle before? how can he not know the answer to it?

he’s five minutes into his break when he decides that this must be a social game. one of the kitchen staff walks by the table they take their breaks at and pauses for a minute to try his hand at the puzzle. three tees left. jaein has made it down to two, but again gets stuck.

@jihoonmi

the clattering of the spray paint can as he shakes it already seems too loud for the stealth his mission requires. he should wait, really, until the lights are off and the staff have gone home. but jisu has to make an appearance at school tomorrow if he doesn’t want to be kicked out, which means he has to get up early, which means he can’t wait until the ungodly hour of the night that this restaurant closes. no one is more unhappy about this fact than the boy himself, but he will not delay his petty revenge one night; how could he deny himself this childish satisfaction? 

this stupid restaurant run by a stupid family. he couldn’t believe it at first. when he had first looked up his name in the family registry, he hadn’t expected to find anything. the other kids at the home hardly ever did; they knew what their story most likely was: single, unwed mothers, unable to care for the babies or scared of the damage to their reputations should the child be listed in public record. jisu had been pleasantly surprised, at first. he had a mother and father. and a brother. finding them had taken some more research, some more poking around, but he wanted to meet them. he wanted some closure on why they had given him up. what he didn’t expect to find was a booming business and a grander house than jisu had ever dared to even dream of setting foot inside. he hadn’t expected a boy who looks a lot like him, but older, strutting around the business like he owned the place. 

jisu hadn’t even gone to the door that day he found them; the hurt had been too much to bear. his biological parents had gotten rid of him without reason, and they kept the other child. why? it’s not fair! why didn’t they want me? his tantrum had him in tears until his face was splotchy and his eyes burned, and his anger had still not dissipated. a half dozen eggs, lifted from a shop, found themselves smashed against the restaurant storefront. he lingered outside of the restaurant the next day, lifting wallets off of any customers he could safely manage. after that was knocking over their garbage bins. and now he comes armed with a can of red paint and all the maturity of a sixteen year old boy scorned.

choi bomin’s instagram ! « @bbobbomin »

his profile picture is a photo of his dog in sunglasses. he thinks its really cute

mostly posts photos of his dog, jyu, because he loves him

posts more photos of himself than one would expect bomin to

likes taking photos of his friends too!

since he’s a super huge mcu fan... his instagram is full of mcu related stuff too (and he shamelessly tags the actors)

his instagram stories are funnier than his actual posts

naeun ( @minaeun ) came up with the username bbobbomin. it’s supposed to rhyme with 뽀뽀 (peck/kiss in korean). since bomin thought it was really cute he used it

types with a lot of ellipses in his captions. ie; doesn’t jyu look so cute..., i love you 3000..., pretty... 

@jihoonmi​

tw; death/murder, blood/gore

wrong place, wrong time.

that’s not usually jisu’s modus operandi; up until recently he’s been very good at being in the right place at the right time. maybe his luck started to change when he came into his biological family’s life. since then, he’s been choked out, punched in the throat, and a dozen other small tragedies that have him starting to second guess his own lucky star.

but really, this time it’s all his own fault.

he should have heard the news, whether it was the live broadcast or trending all over local social media with the article posted to follow. it’s jisu’s fault for not heeding the warnings, for trusting that it was either a hoax or the police would actually take care of it. he should have known better than to venture into the center of the city, where all of the fun was supposed to go down. all he thought about was how busy the streets looked, and how a few idiots wouldn’t notice that their fat wallets were missing until he’d taken the cash and made out like the happy little bandit he is.

jisu did not expect what he sees in reality. blood, more than he’s ever seen his life, dripping from a dead man’s throat. the shouts and shrieks of poor, naive civilians fleeing the scene, of gang members grabbing men and women who made the mistake of getting too close. they press a gun to their heads or knife to their throats and dare the police to come closer, to try to take their shot. an innocent life is worth nothing to them. jisu, wisely tucking himself into some dark crevice and out of sight as best as he can, watches as a man’s desperate cries are silenced by a loud bang. he crumples to the ground when the gangster releases him, half his face missing and brain matter littering the pavement.

the boy retches. and that’s how they find him.

he kicks at first, struggles and screams, but a strong hand is clasped over his mouth and a raspy voice tickles his ear. “you’ll stay still if y’know what’s good for ya’. there’s a hundred other bastards i could kill if you’re too much effort as a hostage.”