A/N: In case you missed the notice, unfortunately I have decided to discontinue this story. While I’m still interested in it, I can no longer make enough time to write it to the best of my ability, and I’m not going to put out a fic I’m not proud of. But if you want to know what would have happened, here it is! Thank you, I hope you enjoy it :)

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Chapter 1

-- One year ago, Luhan has a picnic at Lake Spenard in Alaska with a girl. He senses there is something wrong, but she promises there isn’t. There’s a hint here that there is something wrong, because it says it’s the first, last and only promise she ever makes him, and she breaks it, too.

-- Two years ago, Yoona leaves a message on the phone to an unnamed man and has something of a breakdown because he “never listened” to her, and now he can no longer answer her. This is in British Columbia, Canada.

-- Now, Yoona returns to Alaska, to the house near Lake Spenard. It’s obvious she knows the place because a whole mix of emotions come through her during the drive to Alaska, and also when she gets to the house and see everything has changed. Luhan (though we don’t know this yet) comes out with a gun, thinking someone is breaking in, but upon seeing her, he passes out.

Chapter 2

-- Two years ago, Yoona is at a funeral for a man (I’ll tell you now this is the same man she left a message to in the first chapter), and has just returned from Alaska. Her mom tells her it was a good decision, but Yoona is reminded of when her mom left her dad. Yoona’s dependence on alcohol is a little clearer here.

-- Now, Luhan wakes up and think he knows Yoona, but when she speaks, he realises it’s not her. You may be wondering why he can’t decide immediately whether he recognises her or not just by looking at her, but you’ll find out why later. He tells her to get out of his house, but Yoona brings her bags in and stays, knowing he won’t call the cops. Yoona also discovers that he works at a book shop.

At work, Luhan tells Junmyeon, his co-worker about how he has a girl (Yoona) at his house, and Junmyeon freaks out because he knows what happened one year ago...

Yoona leaves the house, and Luhan finds himself waiting to see if she’ll come back. Her things are still in the house, so he figures she will. She comes home from a date, completely drunk, and falls into Luhan’s arms. Her date (sneaky cameo by Lee Minho) looks and sounds like a creep when he tells her that he’ll call her later. He leaves. Against his wishes, Luhan drags Yoona to the spare room, but just touching her seems to traumatise him, bringing back memories from his childhood—memories which seem to make him want to pass out.

That night, Luhan repeats to himself, “You were good to me, you were good to me,” over and over while “someone calls him to dinner”. This is his stepmother. He tells himself that she was good to him, but in reality, it was a different story.

That night, Yoona also has a nightmare (she’ll have a lot of these throughout the story). Both Luhan and Yoona are emotionally tortured that night by their own memories.

-- The next morning, Luhan bans alcohol in the house, but Yoona obviously isn’t going to take him seriously, and he realises that, knowing he probably hasn’t even made a difference by banning it.

-- The next night, Luhan is once again drowning in memories, but is brought to the front door by noises. This is Yoona running away from her date as he tries to her. Luhan sees that 1) she is drunk and 2) her dress has been torn. She laughs it off, but Luhan doesn’t think it’s funny and tells her that her date doesn’t actually care about her, he probably doesn’t even know her last name. Yoona gets angry—the cruel, kind of serene anger—and asks if Luhan knows her last name, and when he says no, she says, “That’s right, you don’t know anything.”

[Okay, before I continue, let’s just establish some things about the main characters. Yoona is an alcoholic, self destructive, and is very moody. She can be very cruel, but also very vulnerable, and does whatever the heck she wants to do. She’s also haunted by the memories of the man who used to live in Luhan’s house, the same man who died two years ago.

Luhan has a problem that you’ll find out about later. He also has memories of two women. The first is the one at the lake, the one Yoona reminds him of. The second is his stepmother. There’s also a reason why he’s so traumatised by touching Yoona when he has to drag her to the spare room.]

Chapter 3

-- Yoona visits Luhan at work. He ignores her when she says hi and starts talking to him, but when she won’t shut up, he says, “How did you know where I work?”

To which she says, “I have my ways.” (aka I went through your office the day I met you)

“Don’t you have a date to be on?” Luhan asks.

“Let’s go on an adventure, honey,” Yoona says, ignoring him.

Luhan raises his eyebrow at ‘honey’. “Where’s your boyfriend?” (Referring to Minho)

“Nowhere.” Yoona shrugs. “He doesn’t call anymore.”

Luhan sighs. “I’m working, Yoona.”

“But there are no customers around yet.” Yoona looks around. “Hey!” she exclaims suddenly, beckoning the only other person in the store closer. Luhan realises it’s his colleague, Junmyeon.

“What time does Luhan’s shift finish?” Yoona asks.

-- Yoona leads them around a random wandering of Alaska, finishing up in the afternoon at a waffle place. They’re eating and Yoona is spouting random nonsense about waffles when Luhan asks suddenly, “What is your last name?”

Yoona pauses mid-bite, setting her waffle down and pursing her lips. “Im.”

“Im?” he repeats.

“What’s yours?” She quirks a brow.

“It’s just Lu Han.”

“That’s boring,” Yoona says.

Luhan sighs. “Are you ever not rude?”

“I’m not being rude.”

“Oh, so what do you call forcefully setting up camp in someone else’s house, getting drunk every night—”

“You know what,” Yoona cuts in, eyes narrowing, “this discussion is really boring me. Let’s go outside.”

They leave their half eaten waffles, Yoona walking ahead of Luhan, arms crossed. At the traffic light, Yoona looks away from him, now a completely different person to the one who showed up at his work and took him on a spontaneous ‘adventure’. “I can’t figure you out,” Luhan says.

Yoona turns to glare at him, livid. “I never asked you to.”

-- The next day, Yoona brings home a new boyfriend (sneaky cameo no. 2 by Jaejoong) and kisses him in front of Luhan. A second later, he “doesn’t see it anymore” (you’ll understand later). Regardless, Luhan isn’t sure if Yoona is someone anyone ever recognises clearly.

-- That night, Yoona returns home alone, and Luhan says nothing.

-- Flashback in a dream. One and a half years ago, the girl Luhan had a picnic with comes home looking stressed. Luhan turns over in his sleep, because no matter how hard he tries to re-imagine the scene the way it actually was, he only sees the girl with Yoona’s face.

In the dream, he says to the girl, “I want to tell her (Yoona) to go away, but the fact that she’s still here, even though she hates me, shows that she’s got nowhere else to go. And I can’t turn her away. Not when you didn’t turn me away.”

Chapter 4

-- Yoona walks into the bookstore where Luhan works. She has a new man with her, the intern (sneaky cameo no. 3 by Siwon) who had been working with the doctor she had just gone to and had asked her out for coffee. Luhan doesn’t look at them, but he listens while the medical intern boasts to Yoona about himself and his life achievements; he notices Siwon never asks about Yoona, or for her opinion. Luhan wonders why she always goes for jerks.

-- That evening, Luhan is having dinner when Yoona comes home, and he tells her that all her dates look the same. “They’re all just the same person, but with different faces, different names.”

-- Later that night, Yoona considers what Luhan had said, and is suddenly distraught. She doesn’t know why she cares so much about what Luhan thinks, but she texts Siwon and tells him she doesn’t want to see him again.

-- Luhan wakes up in the middle of the night to find that Yoona is gone, so he goes outside, prepared to drive around and get her (because the snow is starting to fall heavily and she could fall ill), but when he walks out, he sees her in the front yard. It’s snowing and she’s sitting there in a white dress, crying.  Yoona says nothing when Luhan takes her inside and puts her hands in warm water. He sits opposite her and asks what’s wrong, but she pretends everything is fine. Luhan offers to listen, to which Yoona yells at him in response, “I said I’m fine!”

Chapter 5

-- The next day, Saturday, Luhan wakes up and breakfast is laid out on the table. It can’t have been made by anyone other than Yoona, but she’s not in the kitchen, dining room, or her room. He walks into the living room and finds her sitting on the couch. They move the breakfast spread to the living room, and Yoona tells him about Lee Jonghyun.

Jonghyun was her boyfriend, the one who died 2 years ago and lived in this house with her before Luhan did. Luhan comes close to telling her about his past, but ultimately holds back, and asks instead, “What was he like?”

“Oh, he was bad for me.” Yoona smiles faintly as she looks down at her fingers, intertwined. “He was like all my dates combined; even worse than that, actually. He hit me, too.”

Luhan is silent for a while. “Did you love him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember the feeling. It was always just needing him; needing him there, around. But I must have, since I keep...”

“Thinking about him?”

“No,” Yoona murmurs. “Not thinking. Just wondering. I keep wondering.”

A frown creases Luhan’s brow. “Wondering what?”

“What would have happened if I’d have left him before he...” Yoona looks away, biting her lip, “before he left me.” She stands abruptly. “Put your dishes in the sink, I’ll wash them later,” she says, then disappears.

The realisation that their conversation hadn’t ended with Yoona yelling at him dawns on Luhan, and he sits there in silence until he wakes up later that afternoon, having fallen asleep. Yoona is asleep on the kitchen floor, head against the pantry door.

-- At the bookstore, Luhan is working when someone comes in. He’s out the back of the store, so he asks Junmyeon, “Who’s that?”

Junmyeon looks, and recognises the woman as the same woman who had been in Luhan’s life a year earlier (the one who had a picnic with him by Lake Spenard). Junmyeon’s eyes widen, but the woman puts a finger to her lips, silently asking for him not to say anything. Wondering why Junmyeon hasn’t responded, Luhan asks again, “Is it someone you know?”

The woman shakes her head to Junmyeon and turns away, and Junmyeon says, “N-no... Why do you ask that?”

“Just seemed like you recognised her...” Luhan pokes his head out in time to see the back of her disappear out the door. “I thought it might be Yoona.”

“Really?” Junmyeon looks at him sadly.

-- The woman stops by the house the same day, while Luhan is still at work. Yoona answers the door.

“Do you live here?” the woman asks.

“Yes...” Yoona narrows her eyes. “Why?”

The woman’s eyes widen slightly. “Oh... I- I just wanted to offer my condolences for Lee Jonghyun’s death.”

“He died two years ago,” Yoona says shortly.

“I know,” the woman replies simply, turning to leave.

“Wait,” Yoona calls. “What’s your name? You seem familiar.”

The woman hesitates. “Juhyun,” she says finally. “And no... I don’t think we know each other.”

Yoona shakes her head. “No, I don’t think we do.”

[btw Juhyun is Irene, not Seohyun]

-- Luhan gets home from work and asks Yoona if she’s been home all day, and she says, “Yeah, why?”

“Oh. I thought I saw you today.”

Yoona comes closer, and whispers, “Been looking out for me, have you?”

They inch closer and closer towards each other and end up kissing. With her eyes closed, Yoona puts a hand on Luhan’s face, surprised to find it wet. She opens her eyes, and sees that he’s crying. She asks what’s wrong, but Luhan says nothing, and Yoona nods, then walks away.

Chapter 6

--Luhan finds a photo of Juhyun and looks at it long and hard, but it’s hard to focus on her features now that she isn’t around. He falls asleep and has a dream about her, in which she tells him to be happy because that’s all she ever wanted for him.

Luhan wakes and knocks on Yoona’s door. He tells her about how he was ually abused by his stepmother, how any form of physical contact upsets him because it brings back the memories of the ual abuse—memories his mind wants to block out because he so badly wants to believe that his stepmother was nothing but “good to him”. His mind tries so hard to block the memories out, which is why sometimes the effort of it makes him faint. But by blocking them out, it’s almost like he can pretend it didn’t happen, like reality was different. “That,” he says, “is why kissing you hurt me more than it should have.”

Yoona is sympathetic, and they try their kiss again.

-- In the morning, Yoona says something to Luhan about how she feels like he doesn’t see her.

Luhan is a little spooked. “That’s silly,” he tells her. “I’m not blind.”

He excuses himself to get ready for work, and on the way there, he thinks about what she said and can’t stop himself from crying.

-- Yoona thinks she’s ready to let go of the past, now that she’s moved into a present in which she can be honest and Luhan has shown that he will be honest with her, too. So she sits in front of the fireplace with all the photos she has of Jonghyun. For the first time in a while, she is drunk again, and starts sobbing when she remembers her conversation with Luhan:

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember the feeling. It was always just needing him; needing him there, around. But I must have, since I keep...”

“No more wondering,” she says through a thick throat. Yoona prepares to throw the photo in the fire, but suddenly she starts thinking about all the things that made Jonghyun different from Luhan; all the things she’ll never have again. She almost decides not to get rid of the photos, after all, but then she looks down at her scars, the ones from broken glass and beatings, and throws the first one into the fire, followed by all the rest.

-- Yoona discovers a photo of Juhyun in Luhan’s room (the one he had been looking at the night before) and starts to question what both she and Juhyun mean to him.

-- Luhan finds Yoona throwing up when he gets home. At dinner, he tells her he wants her to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group, and she says she will if he promises to answer a question. Luhan agrees to it, and Yoona asks if the name Juhyun rings a bell. Despite being shocked, Luhan tells her that Juhyun is his stepsister but he “hasn’t seen her in a while”. When he asks her why she wanted to know, Yoona insists she was just curious. Luhan doesn’t believe her but leaves it, because he can sense that for some reason something has upset her a lot (seeing as she has turned to alcohol again), and he’s scared that in this fragile state, she will revert back to her tendency to get easily and unreasonably angry.

Chapter 7

-- After a couple of weeks, Yoona has been going to her AA meetings and has shown improvement. Feeling uneasy because Yoona has been so honest with him while he’s been keeping something from her, Luhan sits Yoona down and says he has something to tell her.

He tells her he has prosopagnosia, a condition that severely affects his ability to recognise faces, which means he has to rely on their general appearance and mannerisms to recognise them. (This is a real condition).

“When you said you felt like I don’t see you... Yeah, in a way that’s true. But I see you in other ways. I see you now as someone who is so real, so deep that I don’t have to see your face to know you. I don’t see you in the way that I know what you look like, exactly, but you look familiar... like home.”

Yoona is moved, but she also wonders if she only looks like ‘home’ because she reminds him of Juhyun. Isn’t that why he hesitated the very first time he saw me? she wonders. She decides she needs to meet Juhyun again to find out the truth for herself (i.e. she wants to know if his stepsister is the same Juhyun because it seems like Juhyun means more to Luhan than a stepsister should), because she has realised that with Luhan, the truth will come slowly and she doesn’t know if she wants to take the time to wait.

-- Yoona’s nightmares return. Every night, she relives Jonghyun’s death and sees it more clearly each time. One night, she gets up, desperate for some alcohol to cope, but accidentally drinks something else instead and has to go to the hospital.

-- At the hospital, she has a dream that in the car accident that killed Jonghyun, she had swerved the wheel and run over Luhan.

-- Luhan visits and he tells her he is disappointed in her for turning to alcohol, and Yoona gets mad, but she holds herself back from saying that he disappoints her every day because his attention is always divided between her, the present, and the past. She says nothing.

-- The day after the next, when Yoona knows that Luhan is at home and sleeping in because he had stayed with her until late the previous night, Yoona escapes the hospital and makes her way to the bookstore, where she finds Junmyeon. She asks him about Juhyun. “As far as I know, you’re his only friend. You must know something.”

Chapter 8

-- Yoona recovers and Luhan thinks she has started going to AA meetings again because that’s where she told him she goes. In reality, she’s been going to the library, reading and receiving emails from Junmyeon; the two of them have been trying to find Juhyun.

-- One day, Yoona tells Luhan that she is going to visit her parents, though she is actually going to see Juhyun, who lives in British Columbia, Canada (where the rest of Yoona’s family lives).

Eventually, she finds Juhyun, who only tells her the truth after Yoona assures her that she’s looking out for Luhan more than she is herself. So Juhyun tells her that she’s the daughter of the mechanic who fixed Jonghyun’s parent’s car.

Years later, when Jonghyun lived in the house near Lake Spenard and Yoona practically lived there, too, Juhyun needed a home. Jonghyun let her rent the place whenever neither him nor Yoona were there, but he never told Yoona about it because it had nothing to do with her. When Jonghyun died in a car crash, Yoona returned to British Columbia, and Juhyun stayed in Alaska, thinking Yoona would come and they could talk things through. But Yoona never came.

 Juhyun asks Yoona to describe the car crash (she had been in the passenger seat); Yoona says the car had been swerving towards the wrong side of the road, so Jonghyun had righted the car, but then suddenly turned it back to the wrong side. The incoming car took out most of Jonghyun’s side, killing him instantly.

Juhyun then tells Yoona that on the night Jonghyun died, Luhan had run away from home. He had been walking alongside the highway, when a speeding car came too close to the side he was walking on and clipped him, breaking his shoulder and arm.

“I found him in the dark, on the side of the road, a couple of hundred metres from the ambulance,” Juhyun whispers. “The ambulance that took Jonghyun away.”

While Yoona sits in stunned silence, Juhyun says, “When you answered the door the other week and told me that I seemed familiar... You might have seen me as I drove past the ambulance. But you were in shock that night, you wouldn’t have—”

“...remembered.” Yoona’s eyes are wide.

“After the accident, I took Luhan to a motel to recover. When you didn’t come back, I moved him into Jonghyun’s house. His condition worsened after the accident due to stress, and he didn’t recognise me as his stepsister. Granted, I was always away from the household because my mother was overbearing and I couldn’t stand her, so he didn’t know me well. When I found out...” Juhyun clenches her jaw. “When I found out what she did to him and that he ran away because of it, I told myself I would find him and I wouldn’t make him come back to that.”

“So... in the years after the accident, you and Luhan have been living in that house? But when I got there, you weren’t there.”

“I know,” Juhyun says quietly. “A year ago, when Luhan had settled into his new life, I left. I just gathered my things and left the morning after we had a picnic at Lake Spenard. I should have done it a better way, but I was afraid he wouldn’t let me leave. I was afraid he’d come after me. I was afraid he wouldn’t let me go.”

“He hasn’t.”

Juhyun frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I think...  He’s convinced himself he’s in love with you.” Yoona looks at Juhyun and feels her chest ache. “Like he thinks he owes you for all the gaps you filled in his life that no one else did or could.”

For moments, Juhyun stares at Yoona. “That’s why you came,” she whispers finally. “You’re looking out for Luhan, but you also want to know what it means for you. You want to know if it’s something you can walk away from, or if you should stay.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Yoona looks away, clearing . “He doesn’t know you’re his stepsister. I think he should.”

Chapter 9

-- Juhyun comes home with Yoona and Luhan breaks down. Juhyun tells him who she really is, and apologises for leaving. She asks Yoona to leave the room so they can talk alone—Juhyun tells Luhan that sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to, and that he should remember that if that happens, it’s okay. Life goes on, and he should learn to let go.

Juhyun leaves because she says she thinks it’s important in order for him to start letting go. When she’s gone, Luhan locks himself in his room and refuses to talk to Yoona. That night, Yoona thinks about who they both really are, and if they can actually work. She comes to the conclusion that while she’s ready for him to be in her life, he’s probably not ready to share his life yet. Yoona knows that it’s not fair to be with Luhan while he hasn’t even figured out how to be with himself and be okay with that; he hasn’t accepted his past yet. Like Yoona burnt her photos and is on the path to giving up alcohol, whereas the relationship the two of them have built is on such shaky ground that Luhan won’t even talk to her about something she is trying to fix in his life; it shows that if she can’t fix it, Luhan has to fix it himself.

-- In the morning, Yoona tells him through the door that she was in the car crash, too. They talk through the door until finally Luhan opens it and they reconcile; but Yoona feels the cracks forming and knows that they’re not going to work. Not right now, at least.

-- While Luhan is sleeping, she gathers all her bottles of alcohol. One by one, she tips all their contents down the drain, then lines them up on the kitchen counter. Yoona labels one of them with the words, For when you’re ready, and writes an address on a piece of paper, which she puts into the labelled bottle.

-- In the morning, Yoona is gone.

Chapter 10

-- 7 months later, Yoona has returned to Canada and has resumed her studies at the University of British Columbia. During her winter holidays, she pays a visit to Alaska out of curiosity—and also because, if she has to admit it, she wants to see if maybe there is a reason she hasn’t heard from Luhan; if maybe he has left the bottle unopened.

She gets to Alaska only to find that the house near Lake Spenard has been sold. She goes to the bookstore and Junmyeon tells her Luhan had packed his bags the other day, ready for a road trip to British Columbia.

Fin.

That’s it! I know this summary seemed a little patchy—in some places there were only short descriptions of what would happen, and in others, there were full bodies of dialogue. This is exactly how I plan, though. Some of the ideas I have are just sketchy and I work on elaborating on them only when the time comes to actually writing those sections; other ideas I have clear visions for, such as what the characters will say, what actions they’ll take, and so on.

Why it is called Adrift in Alaska:

I picked Alaska because there’s a lot of white, open space, especially in winter. It’s a place that, for Luhan and Yoona in particular, is easy to lose yourself in, but while you’re lost, you’re also out in the open, easy to find. And sometimes, in the case with Luyoon, you want to stay lost and nothing can work with anyone else until you find yourself again.

I used the word ‘adrift’ because it describes Luhan and Yoona perfectly, all throughout the story. They are constantly drifting or ‘adrift’ between their present and past, between decisions and feelings, and even at the end, they’re drifting, but this time, towards each other.

Also, this only contributes a small bit, but one of my favourite books ever is Looking For Alaska by John Green. I’ve always wanted to write a tribute to it, and while I didn’t technically finish this story, this summary was not half-assed at all. The hours I spent just planning and writing the story and summary make me feel like I have written enough of a tribute to Looking For Alaska and so I'm happy with what I’ve done :)

What I wanted to portray here was loss, and how you recover from it— which I personally think is letting go and/or accepting that things will change. Feelings will change, people will change, places will change. You will change. And while something might not happen at the right time, the right time and place for the right thing will come. You just have to find yourself first in amongst all the craziness of the world.

This was originally supposed to be a super angst-y story with lots of character deaths, but I thought y’all needed a break from that heavy stuff, at least from me. Also, I thought it would be more realistic and would tie up more loose ends, as well as give more opportunity for character growth, the way I ended it. Was it what you expected to happen or not?

Anyway, thank you for reading this, I hope this compensated even a little bit for an actual story. I sat for a solid 5 or 6 hours straight writing this summary alone, and all throughout it I was thinking it was a shame I wouldn’t be writing it properly. But I know that if I don’t get this out, I’m probably not going to finish the story unless I work on it next year, which I won’t be able to do; even if I did that I’d also most likely neglect it and then you guys never know would have known what would happen. So yes, I thought this was the best option.

Thanks again, everyone!

Much love,

Elle xxx