Everything hurt.

 

His back ached from bending over a freezer full of stubborn ice cream; his head pounded because he had hit it a total of six times on various objects throughout the day; the tendons connected to his heels were pulled past the brink of exhaustion; the balls of his feet felt as though someone had been stabbing nails into them for the past four hours; his eyes were weary and sweating from being open too long. 

 

He was in pain.

 

Not just physically either. His brain was numb from countless nights of two hour sleep. The hole inside of him had been threatening to swallow him up and he spent sleepless nights worrying over what would happen if it did.

 

His mind spun and his limbs ached and he was crying out in desperation for a bed, couch, a ing futon, so he could collapse and try to forget.

 

Forget the way his friends and family had slowly stopped talking to him; the only conversation they had was initiated tensly and rarely on his part. Forget the way his boss had cut his hours drastically and had been giving him looks for the past month now.

 

And really he needed this job.

 

His rent was too high and he was struggling. Struggling to fill his car with gas, struggling to pay his taxes, struggling to buy ing food.

 

The only happiness he found lately was in singing. He had tried joining his church choir but was sadly rejected, receiving a look of pity after being told that they had already met he quota for the year.

 

He could try again next time.

 

So he resorted to singing in his free time. Sometimes songs from his childhood or something he heard on the radio. Most of the time it was just nonsense murmured out to fill the space and dull the ache. It helped. Helped him forget, push things away and keep him level with sanity.

 

He had done this since he was a kid. Force things down; refuse to confront them eye to eye until defeated.

 

Maybe that was why he had reached this point.

 

His life up to this point was useless and empty. He had done nothing with it, following in the path his parents had set for him and failing almost immediately. When he told them he at business and wouldn’t be able to meet their expectations they refused to accept him as a son and told anyone who asked that they only had one child, his younger brother who had already achieved twice as much at half his age.

 

After graduating he had immediately gotten a job to support himself. Something low pay and low intelligence, but something he could do. Something that didn’t require thinking.

 

Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

 

Because as he stood over buckets and buckets of ice cream, he had too much time to pick apart everything in his life. He had asked himself what made him happy, and the answer made him have to bite back tears as he served unknowing customers with a large smile carved on his face. 

 

The answer was nothing.

 

Even when he was with his first and only girlfriend, the relationship had been empty. There was no love, no solace, no joy. Only need. And once that need had died, their “happiness” ended.

 

He didn’t even want to think about his family.

 

The friends that he did manage to make in college, quickly lost touch with him, claiming he was too boring, too awkward, too weird.

 

He had Something better. heard it all before.

 

There was really nothing holding him back. Nothing telling him he was being selfish or that someone, anyone, would miss him. Nothing tying him to holding on any longer.

 

And it was with this thought that Lee Jinki, who was quickly approaching his thirtieth birthday, pulled the trigger and out into something less painful, where there was no room to think, speak, breath.

 

A/N: So I'm not reallly sure what this is:/ I've been feeling really angsty lately so this is the result. I don't think that Onew is suicidal and this is not a depiction of actual events. This is an AU. I guess you could say this is my birthday present to the beautiful leader even though it is a really ty one. Anyway I hope you liked it and please comment to let me know what you think:)