(picture credit)

this side up
720w | hyuk (vixx) + nayoung (gugudan)

"Hey."

Nayoung looks up at him from where she's sitting cross-legged on Hongbin's empty side of the room, trying to assemble Sanghyuk's dresser. They both know she'll never be able to finish it today. It makes what he's going to do next a little easier.

"I think we should break up." It comes out quick, painless. The best way to peel off a band aid.

Nayoung puts down the parts. The sunlight streaming in catches on the now-empty spaces between her fingers that Sanghyuk used to fill with his own. She runs those fingers through her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear.

"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Brushes past him on her way out the door. Sanghyuk's suddenly struck with the feeling that he's been scooped empty on the inside.

You see, when you take off the band aid, the wound is supposed to be healed. But this band aid took the half-formed scab with it, leaving the scrape a raw and fleshy red still.






Nayoung knows what Sanghyuk is good at. Kissing her softly before she falls asleep, reaching for her hand in the dark of the movie theater. Pauses. Singing badly at the top of his lungs at karaoke. Somewhere in between sharing ice cream tubs when they were ten and pulling all nighters together studying in college, they both got good at walking around each other in aimless pathways that somehow resembled circles.

Haebin notices the first time it happens. And the second time. The third, the fourth, and now Nayoung's lost count. She bets Haebin knows what number they were on now.

"When are you guys going to move on?" she always says. And, if Nayoung was the one who ended things, "I mean, you decided you had enough."

Nayoung never quite knows what to say to any of that. "We're best friends," she'll settle for. Haebin'll roll her eyes.

"Friends don't . Or each other up like you and Sanghyuk do." The conversation usually ends there with Nayoung somewhat agreeing, but she'll find herself two weeks later making out with Sanghyuk again.

Tonight, Nayoung doesn't want to hear it. Which is weird, because she never really minded hearing people go off about her and Sanghyuk. She was relatively good at listening, but bad at doing.

So when Haebin slides into the seat across from her, Nayoung talks first. "Do you want half of my omelette?"






Hongbin's side of the room is still empty, with that precarious, half-finished dresser Nayoung had worked on in the corner, when Sanghyuk's pushed down on his mattress, Nayoung flush against him. They're so close that all Sanghyuk can see is Nayoung, and all Nayoung can see is Sanghyuk. Their breaths tangle together, warm like their limbs.

He doesn't know how i'm bored and then go read a book, dumb texts turned into come over i miss you and be there in five. He doesn't know how fighting over deciding what movie to watch turned into him cupping her face with his hands, tracing her cheek with his thumb, and then kissing her full on the mouth. He doesn't know whether the reason why they keep ending up back in this position is because they let themselves or the nature of the universe dictates it. But when Nayoung reaches her hands under his shirt, Sanghyuk swallows and lets his mind go blank.

"Hey," he exhales as she dances her fingertips, light, over his ribs. "Go easy."

She dips her head so her lips are right next to his ear. "Your dresser's gonna fall apart," she says with a smile that Sanghyuk feels against his neck. Leave it to Nayoung to be at talking dirty.

Sanghyuk looks her dead in the eye as she pulls away, her hair a curtain between their faces. He sighs. "Nayoung, I don't ing care."

She laughs and Sanghyuk loves it, loves the way her eyes light up and the way the corners of pull up. He wraps his arms and legs around her to bring her closer to him, just far enough away that their lips are a hairsbreadth away.

"Okay," she says, a little too easily. Her cheeks are flushed a pretty pink.

Sanghyuk tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear before kissing her again.

thrice swallowed, four times consumed
800w | lay (exo) + irene (red velvet)

When Yixing comes to, he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen that’s parked on the shoulder of a highway, window rolled down so the noise of passing traffic pounds through. It’s so loud that he doesn’t realize that the radio’s on until a small hand with nails painted cherry turns it off.

He turns to look at her. Large pair of sunglasses covering most of her face, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, lips stained the same shade of cherry as her nails. A half-finished bottle of cola in her other hand, the one that didn’t turn off the radio. He doesn’t know her name.

She takes a sip. Her lipstick leaves a mark on the bottle’s rim. She swallows. He swallows.

“Drive,” she says, voice soft. Maybe he knew her name, once. Yixing puts the key in the ignition without much of a second thought.





The name’s Joohyun. Bae Joohyun. Or at least that’s what she tells him when he asks, after wetting her lips in deep thought sometime in between late afternoon and dusk. They’ve had this conversation at least two times before, he learns, which explains the itching sensation of déjà vu, if not more. She – Joohyun, Yixing trains himself to remember – doesn’t keep track.

Yixing forgets a lot of things, he’s told. From the innocuous birthdays and old math formulas to the more extreme – names of friends and cities he’s lived in for decades. He forgets the names of cities they pass right after he’s finished reading the sign. He forgets the insistent beating of two hearts in his chest, two spit up, four swallowed. He forgets the way Joohyun pulls matchsticks between her teeth, lighting them with a lighter. And when the flame dances dangerously close to her cherry red lips, she picks the unburnt tip between her fingers and ingests the fire.

There’s a place for people like them somewhere in the desert. That’s where they’re going, and that’s all Yixing knows. When he tries to ask Joohyun for more, she’s either asleep – head resting on her shoulder, lips slightly parted and blue in the midnight, the brief light of the moon and stars holding her cheek – or silent, like he’s a child who’s asked the same question too many times before.





They’re eating fast food in the car when Yixing asks her about it for what he thinks is the first time.

“Can I try?” when she’s got another matchstick between her teeth. The desert air filtering in through her half-open window is sandy and hot.

Joohyun doesn’t reply. Her hands shake as she handles the lighter. Yixing takes it from her and lights the tip for her.

“You’ll only get burned,” she says, voice trembling. The match quivers with her lips. Those deep, cherry red lips. They leave marks on everything.

He considers. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Joohyun looks at him pointedly and he can hear his two hearts going fast in an off-kilter beat. “Hearts and matchsticks aren’t the same.”





One night, he wakes up and forgets who she is.

And then, Yixing smells the earthy scent of smoke, plumes of ivory escaping a small mouth painted cherry red, the way she coughs up wildfires and his hearts go into overdrive, the pale sliver of skin when her shirt rode up and before she pulled it down prudishly for all her fires and flames and burns, and for all the hearts he’d swallowed and beat out of his chest before –




And then he remembers.





(He’s been burned before, with her matchsticks and the fires she starts with her tongue, rolling off like the way she can’t quite say Yixing like his parents did, no matter how many times he repeated it for her to listen to. He was burned the moment she – Joohyun, Joohyun – tangled her tongue with his and forced Soojung and Qian’s hearts out of him, the smoke of her uncontainable brush fires choking him until he reached for hers. Her heart.

He swallowed. She swallowed. Cherry red lips. Cola bottle pressed to said lips. Sliver of skin in flux. Matchsticks between her teeth. Shaky hand – his shaky hand – reaching through the ivory peels of smoke, broken record of i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry playing for someone who didn’t want to listen.

Shoulder of a highway.)





So this time Joohyun lights the match between her teeth, Yixing puts his lips on hers. Catches the stick with his tongue and swallows it down – flame and all – the smoke smothering his lungs.

He coughs, chokes. Breaths in again before coughing some more. Joohyun watches him with what Yixing thinks is a blurry concern.

And just when Yixing thinks he’s going to die, it happens. He presses his open mouth against Joohyun’s and gives her heart back.
 

spring cleaning
503w | seulgi (red velvet) + sungjoo (uniq)

"Do you ever feel like a speck of dust?"

Sungjoo looks up from where he's lifting one of Seulgi's boxes. The late afternoon sunlight, a plain but unadulterated shade of honey, filters in through the single square window in her attic, illuminating the dust they keep kicking up like stars in the daytime. Seulgi, from her perch on one of her decades-old lock-top plastic boxes, dangling her legs above the ground, cards a hand through the air, opening and closing her fist as if she's trying to catch something he can't see. Every time she uncurls her fingers, she frowns, palms coming up empty again.

In his momentary distraction, Sungjoo drops the box on his toes. Seulgi smiles lazily when he curses, stretching languidly across her face like a sunbeam, and laughs a moment too late.

"Why do you say that?" Sungjoo finally replies after deciding to give up. Seulgi shrugs, swiping her palm against the stack of boxes next to her and then observing the subsequent dust that sticks to it.

They did this a lot - drowning in did you ever's, if you could's, and what would you do's - and called it a game. Wenhan called them boring. Sungjoo called it fun, fun until he found himself staring at one of the hypotheticals becoming reality in the face, suddenly not knowing if he would be able to uphold all his earnest answers from before. It looks suspiciously like Seulgi staring back at him.

She sighs, deflating. "You know. Floating aimlessly by yourself." Shakes a loose strand of hair away from her face. Sungjoo sees her lips quivering, moth wings against the brightness of the window. "Meaningless without others."

Something shrinks in his chest, somewhere around his lungs, and whe