ENTITLED. Age of Aquarius
FANDOM. We Got Married
LENGTH. 2,000 words
SETTING. Episodes 1-12 (now current) and into the speculative future?
DISCLAIMER. I literally don't even know what plane of reality I'm on anymore.
NOTES. I should probably whimper about how embarrassing this is except I'm not even a little bit sorry.
SUMMARY. Sometimes, life is random. Sometimes, people keep on making the same choice. — Lee Jong-Hyun/Gong Seung-Yeon

It starts off boring, and he's tired.

At some point he's just sitting in bed with the room gone dark and wondering what the hell is going on, why he'd said yes, what was up with him and the word yes lately? There's positive thinking and new experiences and then there are the people who are actually suited for such things.

On some days, with all his SNS notifications switched on, he could almost breath in sequence to his phone going off. It's not a bad vocal exercise. Here is the thing: he is secretly afraid of becoming the person that nothing and no one can touch, the person who can let go of anything, a ghost.

This is how it starts: time still doesn't care about him and the cameramen show up at six in the morning. One of them has brought him a drink. He wonders if it would really be so bad to be eliminated in the first episode, to go out easy as the wronged, tragic hero. It's an okay album concept, if irony was ever going to be popular and not just annoying.

He tells himself to wake up. It's not just him in this. He wonders if it'll be an idol, a singer, or an actress? What are the odds that it's someone he already knows? Is it someone older or younger? Already, he knows, she has to be pretty. Pretty girls are a sense of inner peace, a divine inspiration, a headache. Flowers for the flower? He holds the first bouquet like a shield, ready for anything, sliding past face after face after face, all with entirely too much long, black hair.

It's too cold to hang around outside, but there she is anyway, alone on a winter's day. When she looks up at him, his mind clicks of course. But that doesn't make any sense. Of course she would be pretty, but more than that, he likes instinctively the clean way she carries herself, the deliberation of each gesture, each breath. The way she smiles and ducks at him reminds him of cartoon girls balancing water jugs on their heads. When she nods to him that first time, her eyes shuttered up, he imagines just the first few drops spilling over the edge of the pot, and shattering into the cracked earth.

What can follow, but flowers?

Here is the easiest ending.

As the show closes, she looks at him with her red-touched eyes, and swallows. Her smile is the one of the first born child, not the actress. "We'll still keep in touch," she says. "Right? Of course. It's funny—even knowing that, I don't know why it hurts so much to say goodbye." Then she laughs softly because there's nothing funny about it.

In the moment where he wonders if he's supposed to hug her or kiss her or take her hand and walk and walk and walk until they've left their lives behind them, she offers to him a single, fine-boned hand. Her nails are painted an opaque pink, as subtle and tasteful as anything else she'd ever done.

For the last time, he wraps his hand around hers. She looks up at him with those eyes like unrefined honey, and whispers, "Please take care of your health. Please be happy. Thank you, for everything."

And Jong-Hyun, he says yes when he wants to say no. And Seung-Yeon, she smiles at him as she walks away. She smiles at him from magazines and the television and billboards but it's not just him she's smiling for, now. She sends him presents on his birthday and Christmas and sometimes, just because; heat packs when he hurts his back during a drama shoot, special tea for when he's recording his fifth solo album. She stays sprinkled through his life through these inhales of kindness, with the silences between only serving to remind him of what it feels like, to drown.

One night she calls him crying. Again and again she begins to speak, to explain, and he wonders if she's been drinking, if something horrible has happened and someone has died, or a project was torn away from her at the last second, but it's never anything like that. In the end he stops asking and just sits in the dark, listening while she sobs on, and on, and on, until eventually as the dawn breaks she goes silent, and then for a long time, he just listens to her breathing.

Finally, she whispers, "Are you still there?"

"Yes."

A few days after the first filming he starts texting her. She almost always replies quickly, which he likes about her. In the gaps where she doesn't answer, he knows that she'll be busy with something, and he likes to imagine her filming for her drama, or studying for an exam, or watching her sister's dance routine.

Early on, she confesses, It's so much harder than I thought it would be. I don't mean you, I mean the cameras. Sometimes it's hard to figure out which person I'm supposed to be. Do you ever feel that way?

No, because I always like you, he texts back. If it was a drama, I would make them change the script. If there weren't any cameras, I would behave badly. If I was Jong-Hyun, I would like Seung-Yeon.

She opens the message, and almost instantly replies, UGH.

Jong-Hyun cackles. Hours later, just before he falls asleep, she sends him, Thank you. If it wasn't you, I don't think I could do it.

In his nightmares, the bad ending, the show gets cancelled due to low ratings, and their wedding episode never gets to make it on air. He assumes it rots for a while on some producer's hard drive, before eventually being deleted along with the many other hours of unedited footage.

His manager calls him to tell him the news, and the first thing Jong-Hyun thinks to ask is, "So, when is the after party?"

"There isn't going to be one," his manager confesses. "It's just…done. The money's gone. I think a lot of people were fired or transferred."

"So…" Jong-Hyun blanks. "Is there anything I need to do?"

"Get dressed, I'm supposed to take you to a charity event."

"I meant about the show."

"Oh. No. I guess if the press asks, just be polite, you know. Non-committal. There's nothing really that we can do, at this point, that will help you." His manager is silent for a pause, and then says more gently, "I know you must be shocked. We can talk about it in the car, if you want. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"I'm okay," Jong-Hyun assures. "Who told you? Do you know if anyone's told Seung-Yeon? I feel like I should say something to her, now that we're…divorced."

"She's a nice girl," his manager agrees, still with that odd, tentative tone of voice, as though he expects Jong-Hyun to explode. "You're right, I'll arrange to have something sent to her. A fruit basket?"

"No melons," Jong-Hyun orders, and hangs up. He stares at his phone for a moment, wondering if he should call her, then shakes his head and sighs. There isn't time. He never has time, not even to think.

Later, he scribbles a card for her while pretending to use the toilet, and through his manager he has it delivered by courier, along with a bouquet of cyclamens.

She sends him a pouting selfie upon their receipt, with the message, Resignation and farewell? Who taught you about the language of flowers? I won't accept them; you didn't meet me.

Why does meeting you have to mean farewell? he responds, and for a while, neither of them say anything. Then she has to film in China. Then he has to tour Japan.

Then suddenly it's three years later, fast forward, and he claps in the audience as she climbs on stage to accept the Best Couple Award, 2018, with some other man from her most recent drama. Her hair has gotten longer and her face has gotten smaller.

He looks at her and feels lost.

It has come true. Now, he's the sort of person who can let go of anyone and anything, the eternal survivor, the one who keeps going even when everyone else is gone.

He still remembers their wedding that never was, her skin pillow-white in her wedding dress, the arch of roses, her bouquet soaring playfully back over her shoulder. He remembers kissing her, messing up her lipstick, and kissing her again, and again, all day long until she stopped trying to re-color her lips. The producers whined and she blushed and he protested, "Who's being weird? It's my wedding!"

When she raises her hand to wave into the black, faceless audience, he can't tell if the ring she's wearing is his.

When he answers the door, what he thinks first is: Pizza!

And then Seung-Yeon pushes back the low-slung cap, and untucks her chin from the fake uniform's collar. "Can I come in?" she asks. "You have no idea how much courage this took, I'm all maxed out."

He almost yanks her inside, throwing the door closed. She offers the pizza box to him, saying, "It's not just a prop, I really did bring pizza with me."

"I can't believe this!" Jong-Hyun whispers back at her, his mind buzzing with glee. Here she is, in his apartment, with no cameras and no one around. The perfect crime.

She lowers her voice. "Is anyone around?"

"No, it's just me." He opens the pizza box. She's had them make a heart out of sausage. "I will never let anyone eat a single piece of this."

"Don't say that, I'm hungry!" she laughs after him. He walks aimlessly away from her and then back again, too excited to sit still. He brings her a glass of water.

"No, not even you can have any. I'll buy you another one, I'll buy you five. How is it that you can be here?"

Seung-Yeon ducks her head, and rubs her neck. Without thinking he s her delivery girl jacket, and pulls off her cap. She flutters as he does so, chiding him even as she follows instructions. "I read online that you tend to get lonely, late at night. I know that feeling well, and—it's been a while since we filmed, and I just thought…I just thought, I wanted to see you alone, maybe. For once."

Jong-Hyun attaches himself to her wrist, and then her hand, and then their fingers sneak together. "No one's coming to get me until nine tomorrow morning. I won't let you leave."

She scrunches her nose at him. "Because you'll be lonely?"

He scrunches back. "No, because the wife should sleep next to her husband."

Seung-Yeon makes a high-pitched noise of protest, and flushes with delight.

"No matter what, though, I think we would reach this point. Maybe this time, things worked out well, and the path was easier. But I think that no matter what, no matter how many obstacles or mistakes, we always have a happy ending."

The cameramen shift for a new angle, and Jong-Hyun holds still, waiting for them to readjust. After a minute, one of the producers asks, "Why do you think that?"

"Because I love her. No matter what the scenario is, I love her. That never changes, it doesn't go away, so what else can I do but follow it to the end?"

Some of the female producers look pleased and embarrassed, even while the head cameraman rolls his eyes. "Is there anything else you would like to say to the viewers, a farewell?"

"Yes. Everyone, thank you so much for watching myself and Seung-Yeon, and cheering us on all this time. Although this may be the end of our run on the show, I wanted to say that my time here has changed my life. I learned a lot of things about myself through being a part of this family, and I think being here has made me truly happy." Upon finishing, Jong-Hyun bowed awkwardly towards the camera, holding the pose until one of the cameramen tapped him, and told him they had enough to call it a wrap.

He stopped in briefly at make-up to have his skin cleared, then trotted out of the studio to drive home.

On the way there, he stopped only to buy flowers.