paradise

more headcanons! — no longer accepting

@dacaapo

💧: Are there any places they avoid? If so, why?

She’s not a big fan of crowded places, especially enclosed ones. Anywhere that’s too loud, too many smells, too many people. I can imagine she’s not the biggest festival/concert goer, for example, as much as she might enjoy live music, I can’t see Darlene being able to relax and enjoy that environment.

💞: What was their first love like?

Darlene's (or should I say Dahye's...) first love followed her into her early twenties since a young age. It was always there in the background, unacknowledged and tender, like the first blooms of jasmine. He was a friend of her older brother and a frequent guest during the summers. Sea dipped golden boy with the softest voice anyone has ever known, constellations in his eyes. Sharing tangerines on the doorstep in dusty flip flops. Scraped knees and salty hair. Staying up way past bedtime. Handholding while walking on wet sand.

Life brings them to Seoul many years later; he’s grown into his melancholy cloak and he smells like tobacco most of the time now, bears the weight and watch of the world on his shoulders and has cherry blossoms growing across the side of his neck in permanent brush strokes. 

Someone once said, art and war are best observed from a distance. If you take a step back, you will be able to see the picture much better.

The clock reads 3:23am.

Darlene fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, stripped down to her underwear. She didn't even have time to wash off the airplane stink. After an 11 hour flight and what seemed like an entire day of travelling, the woman was thoroughly exhausted.

Bony fingers feel around for a pair of glasses on the bedside table. Her once impeccable eyesight had deteriorated slowly over the past couple of years as a likely response to the trauma of the explosion. The future was better unseen.

She pulls herself upright with a groan, soft gaze now focusing on the city below, the world outside the hotel room. Seoul spread vastly across the horizon — normally being this high up would have made her uneasy, but at the time of check-in she had been too exhausted to negotiate. The sky was a blend of deep shades of purple and charcoal, no star in sight. Traffic had slowed down to a gentle constant. Complete silence.

It was hard to get her head around the fact that, at some point, she would have known the city like the palm of her hand. She would have known the ins and outs, the undergrounds, the filth and the glory. There had been friends, right? Lovers, missed calls, near-misses.

Hyuk. Tangerine stained fingers, sea dipped bodies, his palpable melancholy that he wore like a cloak. There was his voice, but no melodies. Darlene should have remembered the melodies. Those memories should have stuck. Where was he, now? Was he still smoking himself to death, was he still in love?

She tried not to dwell on the fact that she would probably never see him again. She didn't have a name to look up, no phone number, nothing. Just another ghost.

There were other faces and fragments — there was one particular face, one without a name. Inked skin, raven black hair, the sound of metal disturbing otherwise quiet footsteps across the hardwood floor. One that had haunted her since that pivotal moment in her life. It was embedded in her skin, beneath her fingertips, a face she could carve out even with her eyes closed, hardwired into her.

That was it, though. Just a face.