#wxkahi

sorry, we cannot connect your call at the moment.

irony is a cruel, unforgiving teacher. here, she presents him the ethical dilemma: the hwang lineage on the right, the hwang legacy on the left, and she charges forth with a fifteen-tonne train. which will he choose? 

junho phones home.

“eomma—”

sorry, we cannot connect your call at the moment.

“shit. fuck.” it’s unlike him to lose his composure like this, for expletives to roll off the tongue of a man who is known to be so polite. always with a smile, and he wears friendliness in a way that exhibits his enthusiasm to help. he begs for forgiveness, hopes the good he has done is enough to excuse him of the bad he portrays now. after all, is there an appropriate reaction to the end of the world? make no mistake: when the world ends, it is his final wish to be buried with the hwangs.

junho phones again.

“eo—”

sorry, we cannot connect your call at the moment.

“fuck!” his phone is held in his fist, and his fist punctures the brick wall. or tries to, anyway. see, junho should know better. he is a hwang brickmason, after all. knows these walls to be solid, impervious to the kinds of brute force any fairy of his stature could possibly manage. ironic, isn’t it?

“ah, fuck—” he draws his fist back, poorly nurses the bloodied knuckles to follow the punch. junho looks around for a cloth, and it’s at this point that he catches sight of kahi staring at him. a soft red sits in the apples of his cheeks, and he parts his lips to speak, but it takes him a moment to get the words out.

at the song’s extravagant dinner table, her seat is a thin cushion atop the marble floor, tucked neatly against its southwest corner. it is in this way that she trains the hyperextension of her neck, to always crane upwards in anticipation of the crumbs to roll off the table’s surface. this is to say that song bitna has always been starved of attention, stomach rumbling as acid claws the organ from its innards first.

the thing about scavenging is one learns to make do with what they have, learns to make do with almost, and almost always never enough. learns to get creative. and what this means, in a situation as dire as this, is song bitna teaches herself to rest her slim fingers in kahi’s palm.

they paint the picture of a darling couple, hearts entwined with the way she leans desperately into his warmth, if only to fight the chill air that blankets the academy’s once vibrant cafeteria. but pictures are deceiving in the way that it only ever captures the snapshot in time, in which its subjects are preened and perfect, ever ready to present the version of themselves they long to be perceived. never the nervousness before. never the disappointment after. never the parts of the relationship that feel like unfitting pieces of a puzzle, like calling each other ill-suited pet names and bypassing the cringe. like holding him tightly in her arms and wishing he were someone else.

bitna won’t admit this, but her first crush was on one kang kahi. she’s five when she feels it, that pesky fluttering in her stomach whenever kahi’s mother would drop him off at their neighbourhood playground. she’d been just as stiff and reserved ( read: awkward ) then, if not more pronounced than she is now, but it was obvious enough if you knew what to look for. like the way she’d always linger within a few metres from him, the way she’d steal immediate glances whenever she heard his belly laughs, the way she’d snatch her hand back when it brushed accidentally against his, as though scalded.

from a young age, bitna had always been the sort to focus obsessively over ballet, so it’s no shock that she never had time for anything else. naturally, this meant that she’d escaped the teenage rites of passage into love and romance. she remembers her peers at the ballet company teasing her about her inexperience and seemingly lack of romantic suitors, and she must’ve gone mad, the way she pulled out kahi’s wingstagram profile in response and proceeded to spin this lie tale of their fairytale romance. she kept the act up for six months before declaring that they’d broken up and were better off as friends.