In the world that Woohyun has grown up in, there is no colour, no depth of emotion.  There is no pain or suffering.  There are no lies or secrets.  Conversations are filled with precise, exact language, each word carefully measured and weighed to ensure that there is no miscommunication.  Difference is severely looked down upon, and it is considered rude to pull attention to anyone’s mutation.  In this society, love is meaningless.   Love is not precise and cannot be defined, so it has been taken away.  Love can lead to too many different pains, even if it may end in happiness too.  The pill that the community is forced to take, takes that love away.  It takes desire and want and lust with it and dulls all other emotions.  Woohyun had thought that they were just vitamins, but after he became the Receiver, Yoochun had showed him.  He stopped taking them afterwards, sworn them off completely.

When you’re a baby, you are unnamed and wait to be assigned to a family – that is, if you are not released from society.  The day you are accepted into a family and given a name at the Aging Ceremony, you become a One.  Each year, you attend the Aging Ceremony with your group and age from a One, to a Two, to a Three, all the way to a Twelve.  After Twelve, the years are not celebrated anymore.  You become a fully functioning adult.

Each year comes with a new responsibility.  When you are a One, you get a name.  But when you become a Twelve, you are given your Assignment in the community.  Many years ago, Woohyun had been given the assignment as the Receiver of Memory, the only one in the community.  It is his job to hold all the memories of the past, of how things used to be, when there was sun and stars, laughter and love, and war and famine.  The Receiver then advises the council using this knowledge, when needed.    He had taken over from the previous Receiver, Yoochun.  As Yoochun had become the Giver and gave his last memory to Woohyun, he became just like everyone else in the community again, until he had been released.

When Yoochun was the Giver, he had told Woohyun, ‘Having a spouse is frustrating, because they don’t really love you. They can’t.   They may feel positively towards you, and they’ll stay with you because they were assigned to you, but they don’t understand emotions like you or I do.  Someday, you’ll understand why I chose to apply.  It gets lonely, this job.’  A year after Yoochun had been released, Woohyun understood. 

The day that Woohyun meets Sunggyu, he’s enthralled.  He sees Sunggyu in all his different colours; the red of his hair, the pink blush of his cheeks.  He thinks he’s never seen anything more beautiful.  Woohyun thinks that Sunggyu is the one memory he won’t ever give away.  Woohyun falls quickly.  He thinks ‘who wouldn’t fall for Sunggyu?” 

Woohyun had slipped once, and told Sunggyu that he loved him.  He doesn’t think his heart has ever been ripped out and trampled on faster.  (‘I love you, Sunggyu’  ‘What is love Woohyun?  It’s so meaningless.  I don’t know what you mean by it.  Can’t you use a different word?’)  Woohyun thinks ‘there is nothing harder than loving someone that doesn’t know what love is’.  Woohyun had never said those words to Sunggyu again. 

Every day, Woohyun wonders if Sunggyu would love him, if he could.  He knows that Sunggyu is fond of him, in the way that Nurturers are fond of newborn babies, but Sunggyu doesn’t feel love.  Sunggyu knows he should be with Woohyun because the committee that accepted spousal applications had guaranteed it.  But Woohyun loves Sunggyu in a way that he knows Sunggyu can never love him.  Woohyun knows they belong together, in a way that Sunggyu does not.  It makes Woohyun feel so much more unbearably lonely.

He wishes every day, so badly, that Sunggyu could see his world.  That he could feel his happiness, his love.  Maybe then Woohyun would find, what he knows from the Memories, what he knows is missing between them.  Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so lonely.  After Woohyun had become a Twelve and had received his first memories of happiness and pain, and had begun to see colour, he could not help but to feel separate and apart from all the others.  He wasn’t allowed to share the new world he could see with anyone, not even his family.  Pretty soon the other children had begun to stay away from him too, because there was an understanding that he was different.  It had been bearable then, because he still had Yoochun, but after he had been released, Woohyun had deluded himself into thinking a spouse would be able to keep him company and ease ache in his chest.  Now Woohyun thinks he’s never been lonelier. 

Sometimes Woohyun forgets that Sunggyu sees in monochrome, and says things like ‘have I told you that red is beautiful on you?’ All Woohyun gets is a confused look and ‘what is a red, Woohyun?’   Woohyun forgets not to hug Sunggyu when his heart feels like it will explode from how much he loves him.  Sunggyu indulges him sometimes, but Woohyun knows that Sunggyu is uncomfortable.  Sunggyu thinks it’s unnecessary to hug, to even touch, really.  (The loneliness drowns Woohyun.)  It frustrates Woohyun that he can’t share the world he sees with Sunggyu.  But he doesn’t know how to change anything because everything came from the receiver before him, and the one before him, and back and back and back.  He knows nothing can ever change because how is a society that has never known pain, be expected to tolerate the crack of a broken ankle, or the heartache that comes with losing loved ones? 

All the pain that people are meant to feel is given to Woohyun, and had been given to Yoochun before him.  Woohyun holds pain so everyone else can live their planned, monochrome lives.  Woohyun remembers pain and hunger and death.  He feels it in his bones and in his soul, and it never goes away.  He feels it in each memory that’s been locked inside of him.  Woohyun can safely say that he is the only living person that knows what it feels like to die.  On random days, the pain becomes so intense that it takes him over, renders him incapable of moving, of functioning.  The memories all come together and all Woohyun can feel is millions of people starving, millions of broken bones, and billions of deaths.  Everything burns and everything is freezing, there are pin prick in his eyes and screws in his brain.  There’s a gunshot in his chest and there’s acid on his skin. 

On another night, when Woohyun feels that immeasurable pain, from guns and war and hunger and death, he sits on his bed wrapped in blankets, his head buried in his arms atop his knees that are pulled to his chest, and sobs.  This is not the first time it’s happened, but this time Sunggyu sits with him.  Sunggyu does not say anything, because he doesn’t know what to do.  Nothing that is taught from childhood is for dealing with pain.  Sunggyu tries to understand, but he doesn’t really, in the end.  (Inside, Woohyun is screaming ‘I just want you to understand.  I don’t want to be alone anymore’) 

The next day, Woohyun takes the pill.  He thinks he doesn’t mind so much, if it makes him a little bit more like Sunggyu.  He’s so tired of being alone.

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A/N  This is just a short thing I wrote, I hope it wasn't too bad ><.  I think I have a thing for torturing Woohyun and redheaded Sunggyu hahaha. Please comment below!