Warning; mention of self-harm

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The band was playing too slowly and Myungsoo forced himself to swallow the scream that was clawing up his throat. Instead, he tried to concentrate on his breathing, and soon he found he could no longer hear the difference between slurred notes in decrescendo and the unsteady rhythm of his breath. He blinked his eyes rapidly in hopes that the black spots that filled his vision would go away, but no matter how many times he shut his eyes closed, when he opened them again, the daunting colour would remain.

 

Someone was speaking, but Myungsoo tuned out the voice. He wasn’t in the mood to hear recited words perfected under murmured breath from a guy who couldn’t care less about Woohyun. Words that were meant to sound empathetic and understanding only echoed inside Myungsoo’s head stale and indifferent.

 

Lifting his head, the first thing Myungsoo spots is a tall figure across the yard, Woohyun’s mother pressed protectively under his arm. Nails digging into his palms, Myungsoo balled his fists in anger. It wasn’t fair; none of this was fair. Woohyun didn’t deserve to die at the tender age of freaking eight-teen, his mother shouldn’t have had to pull out the same black dress she swore she would never wear again, and the tall boy that Myungsoo didn’t know personally, but has heard hundreds of stories about, shouldn’t be holding back tears because now the one reason for his smile, was gone. Myungsoo lost his best friend, and he thought that wasn’t fair either.

 

-

 

Woohyun was strange, to say the least.

 

He was compulsive and lived by spontaneity, unpredictable in the worst of times and shamelessly predictable in his helpful nature. It was in this way that Myungsoo wasn’t surprised that his cause of death was something as cliché as saving someone from being hit by a car. Woohyun lived for clichés. His whole life was a cliché, with an all too ironic ending.

 

It was his free-falling recklessness that people seem to gravitate towards. Or maybe it was because he was just as broken as they were and it was human nature to find stability in people with the same damn problems.

 

Myungsoo never questioned Woohyun and his little personal psychiatrist set up because every time he did Myungsoo would get an earful of Buddha and Confucius. Woohyun thought he was some super hero that could fix the problems of the world.

 

Every now and then Myungsoo would find that his walks home with Woohyun sometime contained one extra person. He would trudge silently behind Woohyun and his new friend, while they chattered aimlessly, thumbing the shutter of his camera. Other times, he would wait silently in Woohyun’s living room, ear pressed up against the thin wall, listening in on stifled crying and soft encouraging words. And even long after Woohyun’s ‘patient’ had left, Myungsoo would ignore Woohyun’s red eyes, swollen with his own perpetual darkness. It was seeping from his skin and his vibrant and pulsing positive attitude couldn’t even keep it at bay.

 

It didn’t matter how many people Woohyun fixed, he would never fix himself.

 

-

 

“Hey, Myung?” Woohyun sat sprawled across his desk; cheek pressed to the cold wood of the table, while Myungsoo fiddled with his camera and hummed a yes in reply.

 

“Do you ever just think about dying, suicide? Self harm…”

 

Woohyun had muttered the words so quietly, so calmly; a neon contrast to stark words. Myungsoo bolted upright.

 

“Hyung...” Myungsoo started, “Don’t you even dar-“

A bleak laugh filled the room.

“You idiot, I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t do that to my mother.” Woohyun propped his chin up onto palm, and drew little circles into the table with his finger. “You know, I made friends with this boy, Myung. And he sort of reminds me of you. I think you’d like him. He has the most genuine personality and when he talks he’s so animated, he laughs with his whole body and sometimes he seems truly happy, but then I see the scars on his arms, and Myungsoo- he’s so sad. I’ve never met someone so sad before.

 

“And he knows, Myungsoo. He knows. He realizes what he’s doing, and that’s the scariest part. He knows and yet he still has the courage to run a blade over his skin, push meals away.”

 

Woohyun rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, shaking his head.

 

“It terrifies me, because he reminds me so much of you.” Woohyun’s voice is barely audible, chocked. Broken voice suited to the broken soul.

 

-

 

Day after day, Woohyun would tell Myungsoo about this boy who smiled at nothing and lived a double life. Myungsoo learned that Lee Sungyeol was a boy who had been told from day one to stop trying, but worked harder than anyone else anyways. Smiled anyways. That bruises danced along the ridges of his back and across his ribs in a mess of fading yellows, bluing-purples and never anywhere that clothes can’t hide.

 

“And you know what’s so frustrating,” Woohyun’s voice shook with a high vibrato one day after school. “Being around him freaking , his whole life is a stupid mimic of mine and every time- every time I look into his eyes, I lose my breath.” A shaking laugh here and a continuance with shallow breathing, “And not in some cheesy, romantic way but because damn it, I-I see myself in those eyes, not just in the reflection, god in his whole entire being, and it’s sickening. I can’t stand him.”

 

“Then why do you.” Myungsoo asks gently.

 

“Because if I don’t, he’s going to erode into nothing one day and become hollow bones and sullen cheeks, and I can’t let that happen Myungsoo.”

 

-

 

Myungsoo knew. He knew from the moment Woohyun first spoke about Sungyeol that he liked him more than he should, and so when he told Myungsoo, he only smiled at Woohyun knowingly. He fell a little bit more in love with this fractured person, much like falling in love with fictional characters, ridiculous and absurd, and he didn’t even know Sungyeol. He snickered to himself.

 

“Are you going to tell him?”

 

“I already did.”

 

“I’m not surprised.” Myungsoo snorted. “What did you say?”

 

“’I fell in love with you because of a million things you never knew you were doing,’” Woohyun mumbled.

 

“How cheesy. Sounds just like you.”

 

“It wouldn’t be sincere if the confession wasn’t over the top and oozing with Nam Woohyun charm.” Myungsoo rolls his eyes when Woohyun sends him a wink.

 

“Did he reject you?” The question comes out casually; Myungsoo expecting Sungyeol to have said yes doesn’t notice Woohyun stiffen.

 

“No, he rejected himself.”

 

-

 

The week of Woohyun’s rejection (or whatever it was, Myungsoo didn’t really probe) was the same week of his untimely demise. It was also the worst Myungsoo had ever seen his best friend. He still smiled sure, but he operated with an empty sort of existence, doing things out of routine instead of usual willingness.

 

When Mrs. Nam called Myungsoo that afternoon relaying the police report, Myungsoo wondered if Woohyun knew what he was doing before he recklessly threw himself in front of the car. Did he do it because he wanted to save the young boy or was he just tired of everything?

 

Either way, Woohyun was gone and Myungsoo still questioned why he wasn’t crying.

 

 

Myungsoo had never personally met Lee Sungyeol up until this point.

 

But he knew things about the boy Lee Sungyeol probably didn’t think anyone knew.

 

“Hi, my name is Kim Myungsoo.” He introduces himself.

 

Sungyeol looks at him through wide eyes, he’s still in his pajamas, hair disheveled and dark bags under his eyes because Nam Woohyun is gone and Sungyeol can’t sleep anymore.

 

“I’m Woohyun’s best friend?” Myungsoo decides to ignore the sharp intake of breath, and hands Sungyeol a small box. “I just wanted to drop this off. It’s for you.”

 

“What is it?” Sungyeol’s voice is small and quiet.

 

Laughing, Myungsoo breaks the tension, “I can see why he liked you.”

 

And then he leaves, not staying long enough to see tears cling onto the bottom of long lashes.

-

 

Sungyeol isn’t sure what to expect when he opens the small box, but it sure wasn’t a stack full of pictures.

 

Lifting the first picture on the stack, Sungyeol feels himself cringe in disgust. Quick shutter has captured his body mid walk in clothes that hang to loosely on his limbs, while his face is stuck between the pages of the book. He tosses the picture quickly to the side.

 

He looks through several other pictures, and they’re all very much the same and while he thinks to himself how revolting he looks in each photograph, he can’t help but admire how beautifully each shot were taken. Photo after photo, it’s all him. Candid shots of him doing the most simplest of things, lots of them were of him walking, his back, his profile.

 

When he’s finished sifting through the box, he finds himself clutching a photo of him and Woohyun. Sungyeol was taken aback at how happy he seemed. Wide smile, crescent eyes. Angry fingers curl around flimsy paper film and the photo crumbled easily between coarse digits. Angry tears fell from sad eyes. Angry emotions tore at a broken boy.

 

Anger consumes you faster than fire up the bark of dry trees, or the way the shore retires into the middle of the sea before racing back to envelope a city. Sungyeol doesn’t see Myungsoo’s neat, writing on the back of photo clenched tightly in his hand. Maybe if he did, he wouldn’t have flipped his room upside down looking for something silver, slender that Woohyun made him promise to throw out. Maybe he wouldn’t have craved the feeling of cold against his skin before warmth trickled down his arm. Maybe he would’ve realized that he was good enough for Woohyun.

 

Ripping the picture in half, Sungyeol never got the chance to see the small writing on the back.

 

Lee Sungyeol,

 

“I fell in love with you because of a million things you never knew you were doing.”

 

Here is a repertoire of all these things, and I hope you fall in love with yourself the way I fell in love with you; blindly and recklessly, because love is blind.

 

Nam Woohyun.

 

-

 

Myungsoo made sure to end off with a cliché.

 

Woohyun liked clichés.

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a/n; I don’t know what erupted but this happened. I would just like to say that this was incredibly hard for me to write, but I tried to push through it and hopefully it’s not too horrendous. It’s definitely not my best work, but I’m proud that this was my first infinite fic. This wasn’t as angsty as I hoped it would be and Woohyun’s character literally drove me insane, but I hope you like it (‘: