In which everything starts to fall apart and come together all at the same time.

Request by: gmellyexo97

            In the next few months, happiness and pain were side-by-side in my life.

            I texted Park Jimin the beautiful stranger, a lot, about the things that I found interesting and the people I hated and the guy on the bus who kept giving me erted looks. He had a quirky sense of humor, and was open-minded to and took seriously anything I sprung on him. We shared songs that we liked, videos that we found inspirational, sad or just plain hilarious, interesting news stories, debate topics (which eventually led to us choosing sides and engaging in a heated argument), memes and basically everything we wanted to share.

            On the other hand, I literally became nonexistent to my parents.

            Starting from the morning after I came home drenched and strangely light-hearted, wearing Jimin’s sweater, everything changed. I didn’t matter to them anymore. I made a crappy dinner and ate it by myself late at night; I never told them where I was going whenever I left the house and vice versa; and if I sat down to watch TV, no matter if they knew how much I loved whatever show was airing then, they would continue to channel surf freely. At least before, they got up and left me alone to enjoy the show.

            Yoonseok, at least, talked to me a lot more after my parents started blatantly ignoring me. He would tell me how much they fought nowadays; how much they talked about disowning me (which, sadly, only stung a little); his grades, a pretty girl in his class, his new favorite color. We became closer than ever, him sometimes sneaking into my room at night and crawling into bed beside me whenever he’d had a nightmare. Since I was usually awake late into the night reading or typing down an assignment or something like that, I would rub his back soothingly until he fell asleep.

            Yoonseok was an absolute angel. No wonder everybody loved him.

            One night, he crawled into bed beside me, but instead of lying down and trying to sleep, he remained sitting upright.

            “Noona,” he whispered, poking my leg to get my attention.

            “Hm?” I bookmarked the page and shut the book, setting it down and diverting my focus to my little brother. “What’s up?”

            “I think you should run away,” he said abruptly, a set determination in his eyes like nothing I’d ever seen, which both scared and inspired me. “Live with the auntie in Seoul, and never come back.”

            I’d actually thought of that a lot. Hearing him, the only reason I was hesitating, say it, fanned the flames burning within me.

            “But Yoonseok,” I protested, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “I’ll miss you.” I ignored the pang of hope and longing in my chest, at the promise of a better future, of guardians who appreciated me and didn’t treat me like a squashed bug on the sole of their designer shoe. “And what will you do without noona here?” I added jokingly, ruffling his hair.

            He shrugged. “I guess I’ll survive,” he said quietly, leaning against me.

            My heart dropped to my feet at how serious he was being, how the look in his eyes was suited for someone way beyond his years. “Umma and appa are fighting, I don’t want you to get caught up in that,” I added quietly. “Yoonseok, I… I can’t leave you here.”    

            “But you can’t bring me with you, either,” he said firmly. “If you do, umma and appa will definitely come looking. If it’s just you, they won’t care.”

            That statement didn’t even hurt anymore. To me, it had become an objective fact, something it would be unreasonable to argue with. Like saying that tree trunk is not brown. Or this flower does not have petals.

            “That’s true,” I agreed. “But still,” I shifted a bit to make myself more comfortable, and Yoonseok shifted as well, “I should at least stay until they settle things down.”

            He thought in silence for some time before answering. “Okay. But promise me you’ll leave.”

            I put a hand on my heart dramatically, swaying as if I’d been shot. “You want me to leave?”

            “I do.” He answered quietly. “You deserve to live with people who actually love you.”

            “But you love me, don’t you?” I abandoned all attempts at trying to lighten the mood.

            “Of course,” he said, “but I don’t pay for your living expenses.”

            His words put me in shock. The fact that a boy his age could think like that was incredible. He really was wise beyond his years. My heart panged at his lost childhood.

            “Maybe I should,” I said to myself.

            “Maybe you should,” he agreed, and I swore I could almost hear his voice breaking. And that hurt me more than anything else that had happened in the past few minutes.

            “Oh, Yoonseok,” I murmured, brushing his hair away and kissing his forehead, “noona’ll come back for you someday.”

            He turned hopeful eyes up at me, and I almost started crying at how innocently broken his expression was. “You promise?”

            I nodded, pulling him closer as if that would give both of us the strength to fight any hardships that came our way. “I promise, Yoonseok. I promise.”

--

            I looked up as soon as I heard hesitant footsteps approaching, and smiled when I saw who it was. “Hey.”

            She offered me a little wave and a matching smile, sitting beside me and shaking her head when I started to move over. “It’s okay. It would be awkward if we sat far apart.”

            I contemplated making a snarky remark, something along the lines of I believe you’re thinking in the opposite, only couples and close friends sit this close, but one glance at her expression made all thoughts of joking around disappear.

            “Yoonmi?” I craned my neck to meet her eyes, as her head was ducked and it seemed like she didn’t want me to see her face. “Is everything okay?”

            She shook her head, and a tear dropped into her lap. “No,” she said, her voice cracking.

            “Yoonmi…” I shifted closer, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her close to me. The ease with which she collapsed against me, as if she was a mere ragdoll, was frightening. “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said quietly into her ear.

            “I can’t.” her breath hitched as she started sobbing gently, her frame shaking against me. “I can’t, it’s – it’s… it’s not that bad. I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

            “Yoonmi,” I repeated for the third time. “I’ve seen you fall apart completely in the pouring rain. Do you really think you can fool me into believing that?”

            She shook her head, trembling, as more tears dripped onto her tightly clasped hands lying idly in her lap. “I… I don’t want you to think…”

            “Think what?” I couldn’t help but get angry at this girl. Did she really think that I was going to judge her on the terrible life she obviously had? “I’m not going to think badly of you, Yoonmi. To tell the truth,” I chuckled, “if I didn’t judge you the first time we met, I’m pretty sure I won’t judge you in any other circumstance.”

            “There are always exceptions,” she murmured objectively.

            I sighed. “Stop being depressing and just tell me already.”

            I wasn’t worried when she stayed quiet for a long time. She would give in eventually. I knew she was aching to tell someone, to tell anyone and not be judged.

            “Okay, fine.” Finally, she took a deep breath. “I hope you don’t need to go the washroom, because this is going to be quite long.”

            Actually, I kind of did. But I could hold it for her. Her story, whatever it was, was worth it. She was worth it.

            “At first, I had the kind of family you see on TV,” she began. “Good-looking parents who loved me and each other to the moon and back, good financial support, stuff like that.

            “But I was never the child they wanted, no matter how much I wanted to be or how many summer sport camps they signed me up for. I was always more into the ‘nerd’ stuff, never cared about my appearance, always wore overalls and had messy hair and dirt underneath my fingernails. But they still loved me, not in that unconditional way they had before my personality was yet to develop, but in that tight-strung way, as if one catastrophic wrong move could completely flip the tables.

            “And that wrong move came in the form of my younger brother. He was everything they wanted and I didn’t have: athletic ability, sensitivity towards appearance, responsibility.”

            “So they started treating you worse,” I murmured to myself, but due to our proximity, she heard me.

            “Exactly. At first, I just thought it was an older-sibling younger-sibling thing, you know? Like he took some of our parents’ attention away from me. Which was fine by me, honestly, I wasn’t much of a fan of attention.

            “But then, around freshman year, they started insulting me. Back then, all their insults were new to me, so they cut deep and burned for weeks. Add that to the stress of starting high school, and, well… those were some of the darkest days of my life. I cut myself, became bulimic, often thought about suicide and the easiest and most efficient way to kill myself.

            “But I dragged on, with the help of my friends, and eventually I became numb to their words and the unfairness that they were treating me with. I didn’t care anymore, you know? Eventually it got worse and worse, and they…” I cleared my throat. “They said they should’ve gotten an abortion for me. Which was new, so it kind of really hurt… and added with everything I’d ignored in the past few years, I kind of just… lost it. I wasn’t numb anymore. So I ran outside, and, well, you know the rest of the story.”

            Oh, wow.

Now that I knew the reason why her eyes didn’t quite sparkle and her smile was always a little bit sad around the edges, I couldn’t do anything but admire her more. Almost an entire life of insults and neglect… My heart heavy with pain and sympathy, I pulled her closer, as if that would make her feel better, and she buried her face in my shoulder. As if saying ‘thank you’.

I looked over at her, and realized she’d stopped crying. For some reason, seeing her like that, with her hair a beautiful mess and her face vulnerable and full of pain, made me want to kiss her until she smiled again. A full, happy smile.

--

            He’s totally judging you, the demon in the darkest corner of my head whispered. It will be like what happened with everyone else – he’ll start distancing himself from you, and eventually stop talking to you altogether, and you’ll lose another friend, another rare person you trusted with your story. Silence stretched out between us, carrying on for so long with so many questions unanswered that I felt like I was losing my mind.

Before he broke it by simply pulling me closer.

The rush of relief that immediately overpowered me was so sudden that I dropped my head onto his shoulder, the words thank you thank you thank you repeating in my head like a broken record. We stayed like that for a while, me trying not to cry and him rubbing comforting circles into my back.

Finally, just as I’d managed to swallow back another round of tears (something I was starting to get good at), Jimin looked over at me. And the look in his eyes, the warm expression on his face, gave me the sudden powerful and painful urge to kiss him so that he wouldn’t ever stop looking at me like that.

((A/N: Just realized that ‘Yoonmi’ is one letter swap away from becoming ‘Yoongi’… and that wasn’t even intentional… And Yoonseok is the ship name of Hoseok and Yoongi… Omfg what is my life))

((PS Don't be a silent reader... comment and upvote (if you upvote I will give you a lifetime supply of cookies haha jk jk that would still be amazing though), it would mean a lot to me ^.^ I want to know what you guys think!))