#suranchr

“y’know, if you keep frowning like that, you’ll have wrinkles by the time you’re twenty five.”

even over the keys of the piano and the strings of the violin his voice is one that pierces through the music, permeated with something halfway between mocking and amusement, rich with i’m-here-to-fuck-up-any-plans-you-had-for-tonight. his presence is an unwelcome one, hovering around the doorway like a vampire waiting to be invited in, but he supposes he can’t really take offense when he knows that to her, he’s no different to anyone else that would have the impertinence disturb her this late at night. he takes a step inside (clearly not a vampire then), grinning at her reflection as he holds up the bags in his hands. one clinks as he lifts it up, the other doesn’t but there’s already the stench of ddeokbokki covering the room and a tell tale shape of bungeoppangs pressed against the plastic. she’s not a genius – he thinks she isn’t one, anyways – but he knows she’ll figure out the contents.

if not by deduction, by her memory. he can count on his hand (one finger, actually) the amount of times he’s brought something other than the few items he currently holds. and that had only been because he had arrived too late to shamelessly beg the already closed stalls to open up again. he remembers her telling him to leave if he wasn’t going to bring her anything to eat – he threw her a bottle of water, and she threw him out the room.

classic myo suran.

he strides across the room with éclat of someone who belongs there, as though the world’s mistaken and he’s the only professional dancer in the room, as though he can’t see the way she looks like she’s about to kick his ass for the sixth time that week. he’s been counting.

well pops, hate to break it to you, but i’m pretty sure god really is dead!

(and other fruitless, worthless, pointless, and not to mention half-hearted sentiments presently coursing through nam yuhwan’s mind.)

the human body is probably a prison. that’s what yuhwan’s actually thinking right now. sitting in a family restaurant, grilling the meat (silently, too, which is crazy because yuhwan loves disrupting otherwise idyllic atmospheres—a favorite past-time right up there with exploiting people’s secrets) for two people he’s pretty sure are, on paper and to the masses, supposed to be his best friends shouldn’t feel like punishment.

but it does. 

for more reasons than one, it does. and he has to admit that at least forty-nine percent of the guilt weighing on his shoulders is probably a product of his own mistakes, but maybe they wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t his first time seeing @suranchr face-to-face in years?

(but every time he catches a glimpse of her face, he feels himself wavering like a god damn fool, and maybe he’s okay with taking fifty-one percent of the blame after all. shit.)

the meat sizzles. loudly. and he notes, mildly, that it’s not very good meat. @chrwoohyun deserves better for their first joint huzzah since his release from prison, but they’ll all have to pass off living paycheck-to-paycheck as indulging in some nostalgia instead. didn’t they bag on this restaurant in high school? how nostalgic!

the meat. it seriously sizzles. 

The running joke is that he's the overgrown son that she'd been practically forced to adopt and look after. In some ways that's not too far from the truth (exhibit A: freshman year). While he's got more of a backbone now, but she'll always hold down the fort in that department.

On a less funny note, he has this self contained thought that crosses his mind once every so often that she only ever tolerates him purely for the sake of commitment. There's a reason why the whole "we wouldn't be friends had we met today and not then" phenomenon exists.

Or it could be out of guilt when it was allegedly her damning bag of weed that he'd been busted and arrested for. The memory's starting to get fuzzy on this one.

He wouldn't be surprised if she upped and left one day. Almost expecting it. See points #2 and #3 and the trend of casual abandonment in his life. Probably wouldn't stop her either because let's be honest, all of that (and him) can be a lot. The stretch of time when she didn’t visit him behind bars for a hot second gave him a taste of what that’s going to feel like when/if it happens. 

       "christ on a fucking stick.” 

       the stairwell’s winding; not the good kind, either, but the dizzying kind. and the smell of cigarette smoke and something acrid feels especially strong the second the door closes behind him. there was a DO NOT ENTER sign abandoned somewhere in yuhwan’s wake, but he can’t bring himself to care. there’s an itch in his teeth, after all. he can’t get any work done at this rate. 

       three steps from the top and he stumbles. his tennis shoes are worn down. come to think of it, they were a gift from his parents, weren’t they? haven’t they heard? give a man a pair of shoes and he’ll walk straight the hell out of your lives! then again—maybe that’s what they wanted.

       hey man, he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut. focus. this isn’t the time to unpack. granted, it’s never the time to unpack. but right now, right this second, it’s especially not the time for letting his thoughts wander. mental olympics are his forte and in the summer, winter, fall, and spring, all he brings home are golds when it comes to running cyclical hypotheticals—but not now. not when there’s money on the line.

       the door to the rooftop’s unsecured, a broken chain dangling from pristine handles. he doesn’t think much about it when he shoves it open, and the humid air of seoul’s summers is hardly refreshing or crisp (sometimes, he pretends he can taste the light pollution—he imagines it’s what la croix tastes like) but it’s one hundred times better than trying to navigate a conversation with a bunch of two-faced people trying to curry favor with his pen and paper. 

       ah, well. he’s two-faced too. but two’s a crowd. three might as well be an apocalypse.

       behind him, the door clatters to a close. yuhwan presses his back to it and shuts his eyes again. breathes in. out. he mutters the national anthem under his breath like a mantra. meditation. zen. he’s doing this for money. never mind the fact that sometimes, when work sends him to report on real news, it feels like he’s navigating hannam all over again. he prefers the sensationalism; prefers speculating about whether person A did fucked up thing B or why person C screwed person D and all of their ancestors over. when he’s forced to show up somewhere with only the truth to confront—only the truth, raw and unadulterated—it’s too boring, too stifling, and he’s not into it.

       “fuck,” he sighs out again. the tip of his shoe feels worn, but the dull pain kind of draws him back into himself. god, this blows. and when he reaches, blindly, for a pack of cigarettes only to find he doesn’t have a lighter, he thinks, well, at least things can only look up from here.

       and looking up from here happens in a one-two step:

       first, he opens his eyes.

       second, he realizes he’s not alone.

       and because one’s lonely, two’s company, and three’s so contrary it might as well be right—

       third, he locks gazes with someone all-too familiar. and he really shouldn’t be so simple-minded, but the way the sun’s setting casts an orange curtain on ( SURAN )'s face—timed so perfectly that it almost feels so cinematic. 

       an unlit cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth. he’d laugh, but he doesn’t want to waste a perfectly good cigarette.