it’s painful to say goodbye to someone you don’t want to leave, but it’s even more painful when they don’t give you a chance to say goodbye. it leaves behind hope.

one week before jaehyun's disappearance.

Dusk slowly crept her way into the cerulean skies, staining it with vibrant violet hues. Halsey blasted through the speakers of his black Honda Civic while two young seventeen year olds drove down the streets of the town with the stars entwined in their hairs and the world at their fingertips or at least they thought. Summer had begun. The season of shorts, tank tops, ice creams, and suntans. The start of the great plans for lazing near the docks, venturing down to the lake, movie marathons, late nights underneath the stars, and aimless drives to absolutely anywhere.

Two months to spend experience what summer had to offer with her one and only best friend, Jung Jaehyun.

"Hey Yuqi?" His hands turned the steering wheel, taking them down to Oak street on the road to their favourite ice cream parlor. The leftover rays of sunlight gently kissing his skin before vanishing down the horizon, slipping away from their vision.

"Yeah?" she replied, taking the black shades off her nose and tucking them on to her white t-shirt. Her fingers instinctively tapped against the edge of her seat, matching the beats of the song.

There was a stretch of silence between them. "Do you think we'll ever grow apart?" And there was an unusually hesitant tone in his voice when he finally spoke, greatly contrasting from his regular playful and self-assured lilt. Jaehyun was confident in almost everything he did, normally facing situations with a head-on approach, so it was peculiar for him to be the slightest bit nervous.

But Yuqi brushed it off without another thought. It seemed so small in that moment where they seemed to be resting at the top of the universe, completely and wholly free.

She smiled at him. "No. The world around us might change, but we'll always be best friends, idiot." Was it ever really a question at the time? 

Now, looking back through the future's lenses, Yuqi should have called him out on it when she had the chance, maybe then the outcome might have been different. 

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