A/N: was working on another WooGyu but this popped up halfway (heh...) Thanks a lot for all your comments- really appreciate them♡

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Title: Blank Space

Characters: Nam Woohyun, Kim Sunggyu

(Song: Goo Goo Dolls- Iris) just felt it suited the story

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Life is made up of bright and dark days. 

Life is a rollercoaster ride; there are ups and there are downs, and somedays there is neither- just a flat, straight track with no end in sight. 

It is the time when things go fuzzy. It is the gray area between the bright days and dark days where life is in a limbo- a blank space. 

It looks a lot like misty mornings- gloomy grey clouds and white, washed-out walls, and peeling wallpaper, an indication of passed time. Staleness stains the air- it tends to remind one sharply of emptiness, echoing soundlessly off the yellowed bedroom walls. It feels like cold sheets, for they haven't been slept in for a while now, but they are crumpled- so you know they have been once upon a time.

It feels like time has never stopped, not even as the heart hollows out its contents slowly, from the inside all the way out to its thin flimsy walls. Not once, and they never will stop- ever. Somewhere far away, there's the sound of a tap dripping, dripping, and dripping. But it's not water that's dripping out of a tap, it's blood- trickling out loudly from the holes of a heart you never knew was broken. You your lips and taste blood that isn't there- perhaps the blood has finally seeped through your skin. 

And you're just waiting, and waiting- it never stops. You're not too sure you want it to, too. You're scared that once the waiting stops, everything else does as well. It'd all be over. 

You're walking to the corner beside the chest of drawers where the both of you keep your things. You pull out a brown cardboard box sitting snugly against the wall. It is now covered with a thin blanket of dust that looks like lace. You lift the lid to reveal cluttered items: a few cloudy snowglobes, then bundles and bundles of envelopes in all colour and size tied together by rubber bands, each one swollen with letters, and you find more pictures (he loves taking pictures of yourselves)- albums and albums of them, as well as dozens of random polaroids snagged between the crevices. 

You pick up a book: a photo album with tiny blue flowers all over the front cover- the one you two bought as a joke ("Look, it's so gay it's us!"). You flip the first page, then another page, and another. Some pictures were already smudged, attributing to the years spent being pressed up against adhesive films of plastic. It's funny know the backgrounds in the pictures change, the clothes, and even the way the people in the pictures stand together, yet one thing does not. 

The smiles are all the same, in each and every pictures. Big, toothy ones that make the eyes go into a line, the real genuine smiles you reserve for that special few people. Only now the smiles look like they're moulded from plasticine- fake and albeit too wide. 

A drop of water falls onto the plastic covering the photographs. You come to realise that your cheek is wet- you're crying. You also notice the single tear fall exactly where his smile is in the picture, blowing up the smile, making it bigger than the face. 

And for the first time in weeks, you laugh. 

It is not a happy kind of laugh, for you're not happy- you're not sad, either. A kind of numbness has encapsulated you1 from head to toe, and has thickened enough to become some kind of shell, a shield against all your emotions. 

But this laughter was an earthquake; it shatters all your defences and instantly you become vulnerable and exposed and . Everything breaks open, even your shell, and the tears fall all at once with the intensity of a tsunami. For the first time in a long, long time, you could feel. 

You hate him for walking out the door while you were sleeping, like the wind- without warning, without saying goodbye. You hate him for being able to do so: sweep everything aside like it was nothing, like you were nothing. You hate yourself for not being good enough. It must be, or he wouldn't have left. 

Then angry ash clouds settle into remorse. It is like the bitter aftertaste of cough syrup- but more bitter. Sunggyu begins to wonder if Woohyun was wrong to even love him in the first place. He should've known that commitment wasn't for him, and perhaps he's held him down for too long. 

The transparent simplicity of Sunggyu's ideal life was probably too bland for Woohyun's taste buds; for he who chases excitement, seeks adventure, and craves adrenaline, this would be like taming german shepard into the domestic house dog. He is the caffeine in coffee, fireworks in the night sky, sprinkles on a vanilla cupcake. Maybe the prospect of waking up every morning to the same person, to Sunggyu, scared him so much he had to run away. 

He thinks of that morning, just a few months before, when they were scrolling through pictures of beautiful rings, and Woohyun casually says, we should start saving up for a pair to wear when we get engaged. And maybe Sunggyu was too naive and took that as a promise, an unbreakable oath. And maybe, Woohyun hadn't meant it the way Sunggyu thought he had.

He thinks of the mornings the air smelt of bliss, like coffee and a little bit of last night, and a bit of Woohyun. He remembers all the mornings the bed was a warm, toasty cavern, but being all wrapped up in his arms was where it was the warmest. He thinks of how beautiful the sky looked every day, even when it wasn't particularly sunny. He wonders when he stopped waking up in the morning. He wonders when he stopped loving how the sky looked from the window. He wonders when they stopped doing all of that. 

He wonders when Woohyun Stopped loving him. 

He tries to recall when the magic started to wear off- well maybe, just maybe- it didn't? Maybe it slipped away silently while they were fighting for space in each others' tongues, sitting in between the folds underneath their sheets. Or maybe it fell in between the holes of the old couch, where one of them would always be waiting up for the other into the unearthly hours at night. Perhaps it's only normal for these kinds of things to fade away, the way oil paint slip from the walls over the years without anyone noticing. Maybe they can fix it, maybe they can't. 

Slowly, the night masks the entire house in a dark veil. Sunggyu is exactly where he is this morning (or afternoon, he no longer knows what time he wakes up anymore), the drip, drip of the tap resounds through the walls even louder now, as the house always feels bigger at night when he's alone. He doesn't move when he hears the sound of metal grooves grind against another ridged surface- keys being inserted into a keyhole. 

The front door creaks open, and then clicks shut. The sound the door makes is eerily unfamiliar to Sunggyu, who happens to not have stepped through it for god-knows-how-many days. He wonders momentarily how many pieces his heart is going to brrak into the next time he hears the front door shut again, and the house emptier by one half of its contents. 

Footsteps pad softly towards the bedroom- the lights are still off. 

(You know what they say about how you can recognise a loved one from their footsteps? It's true.)

He hears the darkness panting and to his surprise, he feels warm breath hit softly against his shoulder. Warm arms wrap themselves around his waist in one needy, yet gentle motion as two hands clasp tightly infront of his navel- a single act that reminds him of so much. Sunggyu hovers his hand over them and hears the clanking of metal hitting against each other. Their rings- two plain, steel bands. 

"I won't ever leave you again."

Maybe sometimes there is no logic, but Sunggyu knows things will turn out just fine after all.

There has to be gray clouds in order for a rainbow to form.