first, i don't know how suicide hotlines work because i've never actually called in one second i'll rant laters

His hands were shaking as he dialed the number, his eyes in frenzy as it read the numbers aloud in his mind. When all numbers had been said and there were no more to press, he allowed himself to put the phone to his ear and just sit back against his couch and listen.

                There was one ring. Then two. Another one.

                He just waited, forced himself not to think because if he did, thoughts like why am I even doing this? and I should just stop, nobody wants me anyways, it’s better to kill myself and get it over with seemed to just pop up.

                “Hi…how are you?” a soft, sweet voice said almost immediately after the ringing had come to an end. “Are you doing okay?”

                Myungsoo didn’t even react to the voice. He just shivered a bit holding the phone closer to his ear. “No. No. No, I’m not okay. At least I don’t think I am.”

                “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands,” the person on the other line, who Myungsoo deducted to be a male, said. “I’m just here if you need to talk.”

                Myungsoo hesitated a bit, then brought his legs up to the couch and wrapped his free hand around them. “What’s…what’s your name?”

                “My name?” the speaker sounded a bit surprised, but didn’t say anything shocking. “Ah…I’m Sungyeol. Lee Sungyeol, in fact. Do you want to tell me your name? If you don’t, it’s alright –“

                “Kim Myungsoo,” Myungsoo half-sobbed out, not knowing what was wrong with him. “I’m Kim Myungsoo, but I don’t even know if I deserve having a name anymore because – because…”

                Sungyeol waited from his side just to see if Myungsoo would keep talking or if it was his turn.

                “You don’t deserve a name?” Sungyeol asked after a few moments of silence. “That’s absurd. Of course you do. You deserve everything.”

                “No, I don’t,” Myungsoo persisted, shaking his head. “I’m just stupid. Stupid, I don’t know anything, I’m insane, I’m just…I’m…”

                “No,” Sungyeol said next without waiting, like he’d done before. “No. No, you’re not. You’re amazing, and you need to know that.”

Around the corner, just a few walls away from where Myungsoo had been sitting, another man stared, gaping almost.

                “A suicide hotline? You gave Myungsoo the number to a suicide hotline?! Are you crazy??”

                “No, I’m not ‘crazy’,” Woohyun answered with just as much anxiety as Sunggyu had asked with. “Gyu, he needed somebody to talk to, somebody that didn’t know him and that wouldn’t judge him. Who else was I supposed to send him to?”

                “I don’t know!” Sunggyu cried out, stressed and frustrated as he paced through his bedroom. “A therapist, somebody we both know, anybody! Who knows what could go on, who knows who’s talking to Myungsoo right now! It might be some creep telling him bull about life and maybe that’s just going to make it worse!”

                “Myungsoo needs help,” Woohyun said with a hoarse voice. “As his best friends, we have a say in who helps him.”

                “Say? Are you ing kidding me right now?!” Sunggyu fell onto the couch, clutching his hair between his fingers as he looked down at the ground.

                “The operator working the line,” Woohyun started, keeping his eyes on Sunggyu, “it’s someone I know. I called before, personally asked to say that if Myungsoo’s cell phone number came in, that he’d take it.”

                There was at least a minute of silence for Sunggyu to comprehend what one of his best friends was saying, and then he lifted his head back up. “…What? Who? Who is it, then?”

                “Lee Sungyeol,” Woohyun answered, tilting his head. “We were friends back in the day, when he lived in the house next door. He moved, but we still kept in touch.”

                “Oh…do you think…do you think he could help Myungsoo?”

                “He could try, and that’s the best any of us could ever do.”

It wasn’t until the next week that Myungsoo finally called the number back, when Sunggyu and Woohyun had left the house to go grocery shopping and he was alone to wail in his loneliness.

                “Hey, Myungsoo,” Sungyeol’s voice greeted him over the phone. “How are you today?”

                “Good,” Myungsoo replied a second later. “I’m pretty hot right now.”

                There was a laugh, and Myungsoo thought it could’ve been one of the happiest noises he’d heard in a long while.

                “Of course it’s hot, it’s summer right now,” Sungyeol giggled. “If you like wearing a jacket, you should probably take it off. They’re not going to make you any better.”

                Myungsoo looked down at his long, black sleeves, then up at himself in the mirror above the fireplace.

                “No…”

                “No? Why not? Is there something…under your jacket?” Sungyeol asked slowly. The last time they had talked, just when Sungyeol was asking him what was going on, Myungsoo had hung up on him. It wasn’t the best way to end the very first conversation they had, but it was all they could do.

                “There’s nothing,” Myungsoo rushed, shaking his head regardless if Sungyeol could see him. “Nothing. Nothing.”

                “There’s you?” Sungyeol tried.

                “I’m nothing,” Myungsoo said back.

                “You’re not nothing, Myungsoo, trust me. You’re wonderful, I’m sure of it.” Sungyeol sounded so convincing, Myungsoo wasn’t sure whether it was right for him to believe or not.

                “I just…no, I’m…”

                “You’re what?” Sungyeol sighed, but in a way that made Myungsoo know he wasn’t disappointed in him. “Don’t worry, I’m here, alright?

                Myungsoo wanted to say something along the lines of I don’t even know you that well, we’ve only talked one time before for like twenty minutes but he didn’t, half because he was still quite scared and the other half because he was nervous to death.

“Do you…do you think I’m weird?” he ended up questioning, because he really did want to avoid what Sungyeol was talking about, and because he really did want to know.

                There was a little pause, mostly because Sungyeol was startled by the question.

                “Weird? Well, I think everybody’s a little weird. I mean, I’ve had countless amounts of people tell me that I’m a lot stranger than they are. It’s just a preference, that’s what I think.”

                “So you wouldn’t think it was weird if I said I wanted to kill myself?” Myungsoo asked, his voice somewhat steady though his mind was a jumbled mess.

                “Myungsoo…” Sungyeol’s tone was slow, and Myungsoo could recognize the way he was talking. That’s how everybody talked to him, and he hated it.

                “I just…I just want to know, you know?” Myungsoo shrugged uncomfortably. “I feel like it’s what everybody thinks. They just don’t wanna say it out loud.”

                “Myungsoo,” Sungyeol repeated again, this time a little more pleading.

                “…Yeah?”

                “You okay?”

                “Is anybody ever okay?”

                “I think at one point everybody is,” Sungyeol answered.

                “Is that the same as the way I think at one point everybody wants to die?”

                “Do you think that’s true?”

                “Well, it is, isn’t it?” Myungsoo slightly shivered, finally resulting to sitting back onto the couch. “I think that…that at some point, a person just knows when they’re not needed in the world. Because death’s a natural thing, right? Some people are just meant to die. Then there’s suicide. Death is supposed to be a natural thing and some people are just meant to die, but then there’s the issue if they don’t die naturally. Then they’re meant to kill themselves, right? Right? What if you’re supposed to die, but you don’t? Don’t you just end up taking it into your own hands and killing yourself? Then everything’s over with and everybody’s just so much happier.”

                There was a long silence afterwards, longer than any of the other ones had been. But Myungsoo didn’t feel any more anxious than the other times because maybe for once he was starting to feel free. He was exhaling hard and he was nearly out of breath but there really wasn’t anything he could do because he was just so glad he had finally got that off his chest.

                “…Why don’t you tell me, then,” Sungyeol finally said, his voice tucked in and his throat sore from not speaking. “Tell me why you think that way. There has to be a reason, right?”

                “Reasons are overrated.”

                “You mean making sense of something is overrated?”

                “You can put it that way.”

                And they stayed quiet on the phone for a little while longer.

“You seem happier,” Woohyun commented the next day as he got the milk out of the fridge.

                “Happier?” Sunggyu looked up from his cereal and up at Myungsoo. “Hey, you do.”

                “I don’t think ‘happy’ is what you would call it,” Myungsoo grumbled (and yes, that was an actual improvement from what he was before), walking lazily into the kitchen. “Just more content with life, I guess?”

                “I’m making some chocolate milk, you want some?” Woohyun asked, turning around to smile a little wider at his younger best friend.

                “I’m okay,” Myungsoo shrugged, taking the seat across from Sunggyu. “I just wanna sit here, that’s all.”

                “And not in your room?” Sunggyu asked with raised eyebrows, making sure not to add a like you usually do behind it because, he knew, that would just screw up Myungsoo’s healing progress.

                “My room doesn’t get much sun?” Myungsoo shrugged, blinking a bit more than usual.

                “Well then,” the eldest grinned, taking his empty bowl and putting it into the sink. “I’m going to take a shower and go to work.”

                When Sunggyu was gone and the seat across from Myungsoo was empty, Woohyun slid in with a cup of chocolate milk in hand.

                “Hey.”

                “Yeah?” Myungsoo looked up, lazily resting his head on his right palm.

                “Did you…try it?” Woohyun asked carefully, taking a sip of the liquid through his straw. “The number I gave you.”

                There was a brief moment of serenity until Myungsoo hurriedly shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

                “Really now?” Woohyun tried one more, because he swore he and Sunggyu had heard Myungsoo a few days back. “You didn’t call yet?”

                But Myungsoo insisted on keeping his front up and shaking his head. “I told you, hyung, that I was fine. I’m perfectly fine. I don’t need help.”

                By then, Woohyun knew that his best friend was obviously lying because there was not a chance Myungsoo would let something like his slide by so easily.

                “Fine then,” Woohyun stood up, pushing the chair back in. “I gotta go get ready for school now. You stay good at home, alright?”

                “Yeah,” Myungsoo agreed, lifting his head up as Woohyun walked past to ruffle his hair.

“I was in the fourth grade.”

                “What?” Sungyeol asked, confused. He was ruffling with papers until he finally settled them to put all his attention back on the phone and the strange greeting Myungsoo was giving him. “You were in the fourth grade?”
                “When it first happened.”

                Sungyeol had half a mind to ask What happened? but he decided against it last minute, instead resulting to listening on to what Myungsoo had to say.

                “There was a field trip to an animal shelter, and I got caught up with the bunnies…they were just so adorable…” Myungsoo faltered off a bit, then caught himself. “But then without knowing it, the entire class left me to go back to school and when I finally noticed, it was too late.”

                “Oh…” What was this supposed to be? His history of being forgotten? Was that why he was (maybe) suicidal? Because he was neglected so much –

                “And when I got back to the school, everybody was laughing at me. Making fun of me, saying that I loved bunnies more than girls and people and that I should just marry them.”

                “Oh,” Sungyeol said, his voice a lot more restricted and it was very obvious that he was trying not to laugh. He swore, though, it definitely was no laughing matter.

                “Then it got worse in middle school,” Myungsoo continued, his voice being the very definition of sorrow. “They kept calling me ‘cool’ all the time…and it just…it made me so sad…”

                “…Excuse me?”

                “Cool. You know? ‘Constipated, overweight, out-of-style, loser’? You never did that in your day?”

                “Well…no…but I’m sure they didn’t mean it! Kids joke around all the time, it’s stupid stuff. Everybody gets affected from many things.”

                “It hurt, though…”

                “A lot of things hurt,” Sungyeol said. “Are you hurting now?”

                Myungsoo in a breath. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

                “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

                “I feel funny. Weird, kind of. This morning my friend Woohyun said that I looked happier.”

                “He did?” Sungyeol’s voice sounded different to Myungsoo, but it was soon regarded as not a big change. “Were you?”

                “I don’t know. I’m not sure what happy feels like, not really at least. But it’s better than what I’ve been feeling before.”

                “And what was that?”

                “Tired,” Myungsoo replied after a minute. Usually when people asked him questions, bombarded him the way Sungyeol was doing, he’d freak from either the attention or the pressure of having to give an answer – except this time he felt like he could answer these without wanted to wrap his turtleneck around his face and lock himself in the closet.

                “Of?”

                “Living. Breathing. Talking. Tired of being useless, and not the nobody-wants-to-be-my-friend type of useless but the…the actual useless.”

                “The actual useless?” This was something new to Sungyeol and Myungsoo both.

                “The one where I can’t do anything for anyone,” Myungsoo honestly answered. “I can’t make a difference to the world, I can’t be the reason for anyone’s smile.”

                “Well, that’s not true,” Sungyeol spoke up after a few moments of silence. “You’re the reason I’ve been smiling for the past few weeks.”

There was a two week period before Myungsoo finally called the number again, this time having an actual reason; he missed Sungyeol.

                And not just the sound of the other’s voice, or the comforting words, or the ability to confide in him – it was the whole entirety. Myungsoo missed everything about Sungyeol.

                “I was thinking about what you said the other day,” Sungyeol started when they’d gotten into a conversation. “You know, about feeling useless?”

                Myungsoo was hesitant to answer but nodded nonetheless. “…Yeah…”

                “Well I have a part-time job at a café in the morning and I was wondering if you’d like to come join me. You may think it’s nothing big, but for some of our customers, without their morning coffee, they can’t go on throughout the day. So in a way, you could make their entire day.”

                “No.”

                “…What?”
                “I’m not going to. I can’t go outside. No.”

                “Myungsoo,” Sungyeol said in a soothing voice, “it’s only –“

                “I can’t. They’ll talk. They’ll all look at me and point fingers and say mean things –“

                “They won’t.”

                “No.” Myungsoo’s voice was shaking harder than the first time the two had spoken on the phone. “No. They’re all ready to judge me and tell me I’m not –“

                “Myungsoo, they won’t. They won’t hurt you in any way.”

                “You don’t know that,” Myungsoo said in such a quiet and pained tone that he wasn’t even sure that his phrase was going through.

                “Yes, yes I do. Because I won’t let them.”

                “…Really?”

                Sungyeol wanted to smile at how innocent and hopeful Myungsoo’s voice sounded, and he did, listing another way the younger made the corners of his mouth turn up. “Really.”

When Myungsoo saw Sungyeol for the first time, it wasn’t what he expected. In his mind Sungyeol was a shorter, much chubbier (there was a lot of munching going on between their talks) young man, maybe a dad of some sort, always happy and cheerful and ready to aid anyone that needed help. But instead, he saw a male who looked at most 21, super tall and skinny, light caramel hair floating around his head with bangs perfectly intact. Sungyeol had nice brown eyes and a maybe too bright smile.

                The feeling was mutual, because the real Myungsoo was nothing like the Myungsoo in Sungyeol’s head.  Imagined-Myungsoo was…different. A lot different. Staring at the real one, Sungyeol wasn’t sure what the heck Myungsoo had to be insecure about. His skin was a nice pale tone with no acne from the lack of going outside, he didn’t seem overweight or underweight, and his face was very, very nice.

                “Ready to go?” Sungyeol asked in that same tone Myungsoo had always heard over the phone, caring and sweet.

                Myungsoo hadn’t even thought of questioning Sungyeol’s ability to come to his apartment; he trusted the taller enough that nothing would happen to him. Maybe this was one of his flaws, a reason why he could never make any friends – he trusted the people who tried to get through to him too easily.

                Too scared to talk, Myungsoo just aimed his eyes towards the ground and nodded hurriedly.

                “It’ll only be for today,” Sungyeol said, pulling Myungsoo’s arm through the doorway to get the other out of the apartment. “If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you back. Is that okay?”

                Myungsoo flinched, taking a hold of his arm back. Sungyeol didn’t seem fazed at the action, instead closing the door and locking it with the key Woohyun had given to him. Still too scared to think, Myungsoo hadn’t taken notice of what Sungyeol was doing.

                “Do you like black?”

                Myungsoo just nodded.

                “It’s your favorite color, huh? I can tell.” Sungyeol eyed down Myungsoo’s black shoes, loose jeans, and hoodie. All one color. “My favorite color’s pink.”

                The tips of Myungsoo’s thin lips twitched, then dropped back down. Sungyeol felt a surge of pride go through him, forcing himself not to wrap his arms around the shorter male.

                “Everyone always laughs at me when I tell them that, but it doesn’t matter to me. Pink’s a nice color and I’m proud to say it’s my favorite.”

                This time the smile actually came through to Myungsoo’s lips, only to disappear quicker than a flash.

                “Do you like coffee? I really like coffee.”

                Myungsoo shrugged, though he took Sungyeol’s answer into mind. This was weird, all of it. Usually he disliked it more than anything when people talked around him (minus Sunggyu and Woohyun, except they didn’t count) but now he was actually kind of  appreciating the lack of silence around them.

                When they reached the outdoors and into Sungyeol’s car, the older waved his hand around the air. “Isn’t it hot?”

                Myungsoo pushed himself back into his homemade shell of black, and shrugged.

                “Are you wearing anything underneath that?”

                Shoving himself further into the cocoon, Myungsoo shook his head.

                There were suspicions flying all around but Sungyeol knew better than to poke at them. He was getting Myungsoo to warm up to him, they were doing well. He wasn’t going to do anything to ruin that.

At the café, Myungsoo learned soon enough that he didn’t actually enjoy being a worker there but rather a customer. And not even a customer, he just liked standing there and watching Sungyeol work.

                The taller smiled at everyone he saw despite the customers’ grumpy attitudes. He executed each order perfectly and grinned all the way through it. He would even smile at Myungsoo when the other did anything so little as handing a sleeve to the customer.

                “This is fun.”

                Sungyeol nearly choked on his Americano during break time, grabbing a napkin to wipe the excess coffee off his chin.

                “Do you wanna come back tomorrow?” Sungyeol asked a minute later after going through the initial shock of hearing Myungsoo speak. And it wasn’t even that his voice had been a surprise; Sungyeol heard it enough over the phone. It just sounded a lot more…emotional in person.

                There was another minute of silence between them until Myungsoo’s lips made that little half-smile of his, nodding slowly. “Yeah…I’d like that.”

It wasn’t until winter of that year that Sungyeol really discovered what was wrong with Myungsoo.

                Sure, it was everything – it’d always been everything, the teasing since he was a little kid, the neglecting from his classmates and parents, the fact that he had no one to turn to or talk to. It was all mushed into one big ball of horrid feels and it caused Myungsoo to skyrocket past insanity one day in his junior year of high school, and it’d gone downhill from there.

                They were walking to the café that day, since Sungyeol’s car had broken down, and although it’d been chilly that morning, it wasn’t anything Sungyeol couldn’t handle with just a t-shirt.

                That was until it started pouring.

                He was shivering and blinking the rain away, soaking wet hair clenching to his face. Sungyeol was cold and tired from staying up late that night studying for his psych exam and he was miserable, yet he was still willing to walk to his workplace to hand people their smiles and give them enough to live on for the day.

                And it was in that split second of strength that Myungsoo seemed to have forgotten about himself – the same way that Sungyeol forgot about himself everyday – and all that was on his mind was Sungyeol needed his help. So, knowing full well that he had a tank top and a t-shirt on underneath, pulled his hoodie off and tossed it on Sungyeol.

                The taller stopped and felt the fabric around him, the rain ongoing above him, and the love coming towards him. He looked over at Myungsoo…and stared.

                Not at his face, not at his eyes, not at how wet the rain was getting him, but at his arms. His arms and the cuts everywhere, going left and right and horizontal and diagonal and Sungyeol wasn’t sure if all the cuts he was seeing was repeats his mind was creating from the headache the scars were giving him or if it was a true representation of Myungsoo’s pain, from childhood until now.

                Myungsoo’s eyes widened, then: “.”

                He was supposed to run away, that was what his mind was telling him and that was what his mind was telling the nerves in his legs but he wasn’t going anywhere, he was only standing in the same place, staring at Sungyeol’s shivering body. And he couldn’t move.

                Sungyeol grabbed Myungsoo’s hand and, seeing as they were actually right in front of the café, pulled the younger in and past the counter and the other workers to the empty employee room in the back.

                “At least they’re all healed.”

                At least. Myungsoo gulped and stood there, not saying a word as Sungyeol felt up his arm and around the marks.

                The older had been expecting something. If anything, it was this. It didn’t hurt any less that he’d been prepared for it – either way he wanted to take a knife and cut an identical pattern on his own arm to match Myungsoo’s previous pain.

                “I was 16,” Myungsoo forced it out in a low exhale. “It was a small cut with a paperclip. I just…I just wanted to try it. To see what would happen. And then the next day everyone at school found out and then my parents found out and my teachers did too and they didn’t…they didn’t care. You could see it in their eyes, that they knew that this was all lousy Kim Myungsoo could amount to. So I stopped caring, because if they didn’t, then why should I? And I kept doing it, and doing it, and doing it until Woohyun banned having any sharp objects in the apartment…”

                “Hey, look at me, Myungsoo…look at me.” Sungyeol moved the younger’s face up so that Myungsoo’s eye contact was on him. “As long as you know now that people do care about you and that people do worry that you’re hurting yourself, you’re fine. You don’t do it anymore, and no matter how horrid, your past isn’t anything to be ashamed of if you know how to embrace it.”

                “…You’re really good at your job, aren’t you?”

                Sungyeol blanked for a second before realizing what Myungsoo meant. He let out a sad smile and shook his head. “I’m not, really. You know, I’ve lost people before. People that I couldn’t help because I didn’t know what was going on. Do you know how much weight that puts on your shoulders, knowing that you could’ve helped someone but failed?”

                Myungsoo shook his head and Sungyeol only pulled him closer.

                “But you know, you kinda take it as a punishment. That this is what’s going to happen if you never do what you’re meant to do correctly.”

                “Was I done correctly?”

                Sungyeol couldn’t help but break out a smile at Myungsoo’s not-so-great attempt at being funny. “You were done perfectly because I was meant to be there for you.”

i wrote the first half of this like what half a year ago and i pulled it out cos of a certain someone but anyways if you have anything against it i get it i'm sorry i'm not exactly the best when it comes to serious fics like brooo don't let me do them i'll probably push some buttons nobody wants touched and i'll probably push them incorrectly 

anyways wow this is like 4k haven't written something this long for a while yays that's all, thanks for everything! hope you guys had a great christmas and hopefully a fantastical new year's!

ps i did a myungyeol christmas thing if you guys would like to check it out hehe ♥ it's like a 1k drabble thas all
merry merry christmas

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