final.
wake me up (say enough is enough).wake me up (say enough is enough); sehun/seulgi | rating: pg-13, 1981 words
he spends his days killing people that don’t exist and she spends her days dreaming of places that can disappear in an instant.
| this is how they cease to live, limbs flailing through the ash, vermillion flames charing bodies, screams and shrieks cutting through the air, an acrid, burning, smell bleeding through like blood from a wound. seulgi tries amidst the chaos and confusion to find his hand, usually sure and true and strong, but it is limp, frigid against her burning palm. the heat, scorching flames destroying everything in it’s path, come closer and closer until she screws her eyes shut in fear, fire engulfing her body- eyes flutter open, followed by panting, shallow breaths. she is not dead. she is not dead. seulgi repeats this like a mantra, hands the warm material of her shirt, body tensed. she is not dead. that is the only thing that secures her sanity. seulgi has died a thousand deaths before she meets oh sehun in the middle of strangely familiar intersection she does not know the name of. as brightly colored cars halt at stoplights and pedestrians rush past, they talk. words are not important but the details are, the way color seeps out of everything, the sound of tires screeching, the slightly unpleasant smell of gas lingering, the walk sign that blinks in bright orange with a ten second warning. she watches it for a moment. “we should get going,” sehun notes. he’s looking at the walk sign with her now, and they both stare at it quietly as the city continues without them. “nah,” she replies, not taking her eyes off of the blinking ten. “we’ll be alright.” pedestrians pass by in their odd sort of anonymity, cars continues screeching to a stop and through it all they stare at the walk sign that is still blinking the ten second warning. all is well in this world. they decide to work together after that. their roles are almost poetic in a way: she creates things, he kills them. she makes, he destroys. it’s a relationship of resignation, of the weariness that settles over them both, of being pulled so far in it is impossible to get out. seulgi wonders if he dreams without sleeping the way she does, flexible and ever changing, colors shifting in front of her eyes. constructing words within a blink of an eyes, taking them down just as quickly - that’s the power that she holds. a dreamer. back in the beginning, when she was dragged into all of this (when it was still the four of them, jongin and taemin and jinri and her all together in a happy circle), seulgi briefly considered telling her mother about the change of job. i distract minds for living, she had planned to say, and it pays better than my internship at that architecture firm. now she scoffs at her early naivete, wonders if her parents would look at her the same way if they knew she could hack into their minds with ease. she knows how it is. sehun dreams in technicolor, in a dull, tasteless way covered by a facade of some sorts - orange, yellow, blue, green, all parts of the rainbow splattered on cement building and odorless coffee and forever still walk signs. everything is so him in a way, seulgi muses, eyeing the people who walk past (the women, the men, the children - all in suits), and the sky up above (the sun is almost eerie in how bright it shines down on them, cold and quiet). this is his dream, his creation, and it has sehun’s mark all over the monotonous buildings (pretty yet boring, just like him) and uninspired details. restlessness settles over her, slow and gradual, as she walks down the unnamed street. if only if she could change the colors, if only the buildings weren’t so uniformly boring, if only, if only- “what the hell are you doing here?’ it’s sehun, voice quiet, crackling - scared, she realizes with shock - face set in it’s usual stiff handsomeness. “what do you think i’m doing?” strangely defensive, the way she says it, given that she really doesn’t have anything to be defensive of. “listen, i don't know why you’re here, but please leave.” he grabs her arm, and his fear - heart pounding, pulse racing - shoot down her limbs and tingles through her body. “there are things, there are things…” “you're hiding something from me,” seulgi replies calmly, yanking her arm away. the aftershocks of his overwhelming fear are still tingling down her spine like sparks - having a potential to start a wildfire, but not quite there yet. “there are things i don’t want you to see,” he finishes pathetically. “just please, just… leave. wake up. whatever.” “who is she?” she asks, pointing behind him to a girl with delicate brown eyes and raven hair. the girl is eerie in a way the others here aren’t, a perfect smile on perfect lips, and seulgi can immediately tell that she’s a memory. but who? “,” she hears him mumble, before his fingers latch onto her pulse points and her vision turns blurry. between dreams and reality, between the imaginary worlds she loves and the truths she is forced to face there is a delicate line of separation. some get lost along that line, driven mad, and others try to find the lost, equally insane. she thinks of this after hazy dreams of loud laughter and sun kissed smiles, memories playing one after another on a silver reel. she thinks of this after the haze turns sharp with fear, after laughter turns to screams and smiles to sobs. after- after the realization that some people die and never wake up dawns upon her. “what was it? a bad dream?” sehun laughs darkly at his own joke, sounding even more nasal than usual through the cheap speakers of her phone. “kind of, i guess.” seulgi swallows dryly, her body restless atop of her frigid bedsheets, her knees pressed into her chest. “i mean, i just can’t stop thinking about that girl. the memory. who is she?” “seulgi…” he sighs, resigned and tired, and she wonders just how many times he has dreamed of this mysterious girl. “fine, i’ll tell you. her name is jung soojung.” “who?” she has never heard of this name before, but it still sits heavy on her tongue, like a bomb moments from explosion. another sigh, this one even more weary than the last. “she was an architect. like you,” sehun says, and she doesn’t like where this is going at all. “amazing, actually. she - she got lost in the worlds she created. driven mad. she - she couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.” “y-you know how it is,” he adds, voice more strained with syllable, tremulous and shaking. “the ones who are the deserve it the least live the shortest.” “then we’re going to last for a long time, won’t we?” “yeah, we are.” and the sound of voice - the tone that let’s her know he’s okay, the smile that she is almost to her ears - makes her forget about perfect lips and raven hair and things slightly off kilter. he spends his days killing people that don’t exist and she spends her days dreaming of places that can disappear in an instant. (just a well aimed gun and then - done.) seemingly opposite, seulgi decides, but not really. both of them have in common their utter lack of usefulness. (the truth is that they are both more important than the world chooses to acknowledge, agents working on the fringes of society. still - that isn’t saying much.) they share dreamspace more and more outside of jobs. it’s the comfort, seulgi supposes, the almost safe feeling of companionship. dreams were meant to be shared, she decides. (she never sees the strange girl again and the name soojung fades from both of their lips.) “sometimes, i wonder,” seulgi says slowly, running the pad of her thumb slowly over the side of the blade. it looks vintage, for some reason, and so does the room she’s in and sehun’s suit (she does not need to look down at herself to confirm what she’s wearing). he watches on silently, body cringing as if it cannot watch, eyes directed to where the tips of her fingers rest on the knife. “wonder what?” his eyes dart back and forth between the knife and her face, gaze almost scary in the tension it exudes. “sometimes i wonder what it would feel like,” she muses holding the blade up to the light. it glints strangely in the dim surroundings. “you know, if… if it hurts.” so she stabs it into the flesh of her thumb and despite the surreality of her surroundings, the pain that blossoms in her ribcage, spreading through her veins, lighting fire to her body is more than real. “it hurts, yeah?” that’s what i expected,” sehun says quietly, staring at her bleeding mess of a thumb. “pain… it’s not in the body like everyone thinks. it’s in here.” he taps his temple. seulgi wipes fresh tears off of her already wet face. “oh well,” she says airily. “at least it won’t hurt when i wake up.” there’s still a part of her that’s scared, a slow kind of fear that seeps into her steadily with every word uttered. (she knows that she’ll remember it when she wakes up. the pain is real, inside her somewhere, feasting on the deepest parts of her mind.) they kiss, and even though seulgi has trouble recalling dreams at times, she knows she’ll never forget this. the clean scent of sehun’s aftershave, her fingers pressing insistently into his shoulders, his lips soft on hers - these details are etched into her mind, burning brighter than any sun. this is real, she thinks. it repeats in her head even after she wakes up, even when he leaves their workspace without a word when he gets up, even later, when tears stain her pillowcase. this is real. sehun kissed her. if it isn’t real, she thinks, then what is? (she wonders if this is what they call insanity.) “you kissed me,” she says, the first thing that pops out of the next morning when she arrives at the lab. sehun’s features rearrange themselves many times over; first shocked, then scared, then sheepish, and finally a slump of shoulders that signifies defeat. “yeah. i did,” he says, looking into her eyes, unwavering. not fearlessly - she can still see the caution lurking in his irises, the anticipation of what’s to come - but close enough. “was it…” seulgi hesitates, then steps closer to him, so close that she can see the emotions swirling around in his eyes, the fear, the nerves, but above all of that - the hope. “was it real? what happened in the dream?” “just because it was a dream doesn’t mean it wasn’t real,” he replies, closing the space between them, all of the details flooding back into her mind, bright under her closed lids. “i think i love you,” he whispers to her after waking up from another job, and she ends up thinking about this for the rest of the day. sharing their dreams, breaking into people’s minds, toeing the line between reality and imagination - all of these things that she does with sehun feel too special to have a name. but love - love sounds like a nice name for sleepy sunday mornings and successful jobs, killing each other and talking about what haunts them. love is good enough for her. “i love you too,” seulgi replies. they fit together easily, seulgi decides. like two pieces of a broken heart, like the red strings of fate that bind their meetings, like the dreams in which they die in several times - not perfect for each other, but just right.
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author’s note: so yeah. i wrote this. i listened to kim sung kyu's album a million times while writing this lmao. this should hopefully give you more insight about this fic, and if you’re confused then ask me questions! :)
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