He craved a drink. There was nothing more soothing than the fiery liquid burning down his throat and the knockout sensation at the end, when there was nothing left for him to think about. His heart was tattered, torn to pieces, and even though alcohol didn’t help to mend, it numbed.

            There was a whimpering cry next to him and that drew him from his senselessness. Yongguk forced himself to look at the swathed bundle next to him, carefully placed into the basket by his sister earlier, and took a deep breath. Baby, not bottle.

            He gently lifted his son from the carrier and held him in his arms. The baby didn’t calm as if knowing that daddy’s hardened arms are different from mommy’s soft ones. But Baby also didn’t know that mommy was gone forever.

            “Sh, sh,” Yongguk whispered. His promise to her to take care of Yongwon was the only thing keeping him from falling deep into the bottle. It was masochistic really, using the last reminder of her as a way to keep himself sane.

            The baby cried and he wished he had his sister here still, wished that he had the maternal instinct to simply know what he wanted. And so Yongguk did what she taught him in the last few months as she prepared for her death. He checked everything. He sniffed the diaper, nothing. He warmed up a bottle; Yongwon turned away. He tried to burp him, croon softly to him and it was late at night that Yongguk faced reality. Like him, his son was hurting too. And like him, Yongwon misses mommy as much as he did. But that, unfortunately, was the one thing he could not fix.

            Sometimes when his sister was with the baby and she had packed him off to work, Yongguk wanted nothing more than to stop by the local bar and disappear from reality. He often saw her in his dreams. No, daily. And it was a craving, an addiction. He wanted to see her more. He’s had enough experience to know that every hallucination requires a stimulant, and so if sleep couldn’t be his all the time, he’s okay with it being alcohol.

            He did it once, and found himself sitting at the bar crying like a baby until a couple big but kind men paid for him and lifted him to a nearby park.

            “Hey, man, broken heart?”

            They handed him a water bottle and he drank thirstily. He had only seen glimpses of her, not enough to satisfy his needs, but enough to get him yearning again. “I miss her,” he had blubbered.

            One of them patted his back. The firm pounding almost made him choke on the water. “There are plenty of fish in the sea, you know. And if it didn’t work out in the first place, it won’t ever work out.”

            “She’s gone.”

            That caused a silence and one of the older man placed an arm around Yongguk in a sign of camaraderie. “Hey son, I know. I know. You’re still young, so you probably didn’t have as much time as I did, but it still hurts. But what you need to do is to have something to live for. Do you have that?”

            “A son,” he sighed quietly. The water was helping him clear his head and the men clapped their hands in approval.

            “Then live for him.”

            Their words didn’t perform a miracle. The advice helped but at times, Yongguk still wanted to fall back onto crutches. Yongwon grew and each time he asked for mommy, Yongguk had to brace himself for the sting that started from his heart and spread through his body. He was practical so he didn’t make up an elaborate lie. From the beginning, Yongwon understood that his mother was really gone.

            Yongguk met her years later, when Yongwon was already in kindergarten. By then, the loss of a mother was less a loss of someone necessary, but a social pressure. The other kids couldn’t understand why it was daddy who brought Yongwon to school and not mommy who kissed his cheeks goodbye.

            She was a teacher, not Yongwon’s, but the class next to his. They bumped into one another whenever Yongguk went to pick his son up. Sometimes work ran late, and she stayed with him because she took a liking to the little boy.

            At first, it was just a few polite smiles, a few nods and shyly uttered thank you’s. But then, he purposely stayed at work a little longer, by a few minutes, just so he could go and see Yongwon barreling towards him and her, standing a few feet away, smiling at them.

            She was no substitute, but she was another. And when Yongwon would babble about how much he liked the teacher next door, more than his because “Mrs. Choi is really, so scary,” Yongguk allowed himself to start feeling again.

            The dreams were recurring less and when he did dream about his wife again, the night he finally plucked up the courage to ask the teacher out on a date, a small one, she was smiling. Her face, still young despite the years and still beautiful, was grinning mischievously at him.

            “Ha, Bang Yongguk, you’re finally leaving me.”

            Rather than a frantic denial, he felt a small moment of peace. She was the love of his life, and he would always be in love with her. But he found that he could still love. “I wouldn’t call it leaving,” he amended.

            “No,” and she leaned on him once more, “I’d call it living.”

this is for abhorsen

Okay I sort of cried a little bit at the end. Sorry it didn't get as fluffy as you wanted but I like the way it turned out.