captain's log / 141120 

Jinhwan stops before the door, which was left slightly ajar as he cranes his neck forward slightly. The boy sits in the corner of the room as his book lies on his lap, its black cover largely contrasting with the light green hues of the pants loosely hanging off his thigh. The said boy turns towards Jinhwan as he hears his sigh and frowns before turning back to the window. Yet Jinhwan does not enter and leans against the door, his hands kept snugly in the pockets of his coat. He squints against the sunlight streaming into the room as he notices little things about the boy – his hair is slightly messier than it was the day before, he is hunching to a greater extent and his blanket lies helplessly in a heap on the ground. A slight smile makes its appearance on Jinhwan’s face as the boy begins to scribble on a fresh page in his notebook, the sound of the pencil against paper oddly melodious. As the boy stops writing, he relaxes a little and moves back onto the bed quietly, crossing his legs as he turns back to face the doctor standing in the doorway with a blank expression before breaking into a soft smile.

“Another song?” Jinhwan chuckles as he begins to walk towards the boy with a grin and settles on the couch opposite to the bed in the single ward. He places the blue clipboard on his lap as he leans forward and wiggles his eyebrows slightly, gaining laughter from the other boy.

“Yeah, another song.” The said boy appears to be comparatively energetic as he nods firmly while turning towards his book slightly. He reaches over to push the cover lightly with his fingertip as the book closes with a soft thud and places the pencil back on the table next to the bed, “It’s about butterflies and the concept of the string of fate.”

“String of fate and butterflies? It has to be pretty then?” Jinhwan probes further as he tilts his head towards one side, his hair falling over his eyes slightly. This boy’s songs weren’t always what they seemed, digging into emotions and morality deeper than what an average boy of his age would be able to produce. He recalls the episode where the said patient wrote a song about a scene in a night market only to reveal that it was based on his own childhood, expressing the fact that beneath the layers of make-shift warmth, there were always shadows and grey areas in the crevices of their home and eventually these blemishes formed cracks, leaving him the only tinted fragment thrown out onto the streets. Hanbin stills for a few moments, his eyes shuttling between two points barely centimetres apart on the bed sheet before drawing a line to join these points with his fingertips. He then lets out a soft whimper and looks up to meet the eyes of the doctor sitting across the room with a dim expression. Jinhwan bites his lip and glances towards the window for a few moments before returning the boy’s gaze.

“Christmas is coming, what do you wish for?” Hanbin’s voice is soft to the extent that it resembles a whisper, the kind of voices which one would hear in the deepest nights before the candlelight, the kind of voice which makes Jinhwan feel as though above hearing, he feels the manner in which the syllables slip off the boy’s tongue. His sharp enunciations resembles soft indentations of skin as one clenches one’s fist tight enough to feel one’s fingers digging into the thin sheet of protein over his palm and Jinhwan takes a few moments to form a barely satisfactory answer.

“There’s still more than a month to go, Hanbin.”

“Just say it.”

“I wish for the ability to do the things I’ve always wanted to do,” The older boy pauses as he blinks at the ground before letting out a soft chuckle, “There are too many things that I’d like to change about myself and its piling up maybe.”

“Go on.”

“For one, I feel like as a doctor we aren’t always given the chance to do what we’re really supposed to do. It’s kind of like how in medical school we’d be greeted in the first few lectures with a leathery corpse waiting for us to dissect and that was the deepest that we’d learn about humanity. It bothered me greatly that above morality and mortality we were only given the chance to learn about the human anatomy, to learn about the mechanical functions of one’s shell – never one’s soul.” Jinhwan stops as he smiles bitterly and pulls the clipboard out from behind him, scribbling lines of words in his scrawly handwriting once again. He smiles a little to himself as the notion of the boy getting better flashes through his battered mind, “Why am I even telling you this.”

"Perhaps that's because I'm comforting." 

"Comforting?" Jinhwan chuckles and flashes and inquiring look.

“Yeah, dependable maybe. I don't know, that's what I get from seeing you daily. But besides that I have something else to say. When I first came in, the line between was purple.” Hanbin speaks after a few moments of silence, as though chewing on his words with much thought.

"Respect." Jinhwan clicks his tongue and nods as he refers to his clump of barely legible scribbles on the foolscap paper.

"It changed though, I just noticed a few minutes ago."

“What colour is it now?” The said doctor looks back at the boy as he observes how the boy helplessly curls himself into a ball in the corner of the bed once again, and immediately recognises it as a sign of needing space and time to think. He then nods softly, “I’ll be back tomorrow, rest well.”

As the shorter male leaves the room, the young patient relaxes against the bed frame and peers out of the window, “I’m seeing peach hues.” 

AN: double update because oddly enough, this was actually the first chapter which i wrote haha.