Chapter Text
hello!
really quick - this story is completely fictional and meant for entertainment purposes only!
everything is entirely made up, and the real-life people that the characters are named after have nothing to do with how they really are. i wrote this solely for your enjoyment (hopefully!) and for me to have something to pass the time with.
please have fun with this, and thank you for everything!
- mandi
~☾~
The wind was nippy tonight.
San shuts his eyes, lets it run its fingers through his hair, lets it dance with the threads of the rips in his jeans and cool over the decaying heat of his face. He feels it annoyingly tug on the end of his eyebrow, raising both of them once to cut the steady teasing of the breeze and silently telling it to go somewhere else, to go bother someone who wanted its company. He sways, feels his body lightly rock to the imaginary music the wind was playing for him, to the percussions the moon bounced against him, as he dances loosely in her creation, letting his feet kick lightly and feeling the slight bumps to the back of his shoes as they hit the edge of the cliff he sat on. He had a flame of happiness for a moment, filling his chest and stuffing the hollowness of his bones as he smiles quietly, that the street leading up to this place had been empty for once. He was belated in the fact that only he was here, that nobody could watch him, that only he could feel the Earth and revel in how she made him feel.
He loved the Earth a lot. Tonight in particular, when his head was full and his heart was hollow and he just needed to be alone out here.
He opens his eyes again, swallowing and feeling the cottony uncomfortable that his dry throat brought to him, wishing he had brought a bottle of water or something out here before coming. His chest felt heavy, as if he had already been sinking to the bottom of the sea and had his lungs fill with salty forgiveness as he danced with the waves.
He brings his bottom lip in between his teeth as he stares at the water below him, studying how the moon casted a blinding silver ribbon against the navies of the water, how the waves break their stride just to allow her to fill it, how the rocks closest to him were decorated in slimy algae and looking up at him with open arms and an inviting gaze, how the smell of salt was nearly addicting as it filled his head and settled in the back of his eyes like nicotine.
He thinks that it was wonderful, how the ocean could be just as vast and just as empty as he had been, though she had life beneath what he could see from here.
Choi San, however, did not.
It was hard, being here on his own. It was hard knowing where to go on the first day of school and trying to keep himself hidden in the crowds, it was hard staying awake after not getting enough sleep the night before from snoozing with his nightmares beside him. It was hard saying goodbye to his mother as he watched her in the hospital bed, being surrounded by chemicals and the suffocating smell of latex as they pushed him out once the beeping stopped. And it had annoyed him, that beeping and that loud breathing because he just wanted her to be okay, but he didn't want it to stop, just like that. He hadn't imagined the sound to change so suddenly, as if the world was listening to him with intent.
How awfully bittersweet the universe could be to him.
He wasn’t supposed to be here by himself, he was supposed to have parents and friends that he could look forward to seeing at school and he was supposed to be engaged in class to get good grades to grow up and make something of himself but he wasn’t and it was the hardest thing in the fucking world for him to do.
He scoots a little closer to the end of the cliff, feeling the rockiness and jagged edges of it digging into his thighs and he almost wants to move, just so he could enjoy the moon and how it peers at the creations of the ocean, so he could keep staring at the foamy shore and how the rocks beneath him glimmer like jagged jewels in the world’s most precious ores. But he thinks that he might just deserve it, for the way he thinks so little of everything around him when other people have it much worse.
He used to think that there was nothing worse than leaving his mother behind, but he’s learned to believe there was.
There had to be.
He presses his legs down onto the rock beneath him, wincing a bit as it began to ache in a way that he felt in his entire body, a flame lighting in his spine that he knew all too well.
He lets a breath escape him, letting his hands run over the rock he’d sat on, paying extra attention to the way it felt underneath his fingertips, how it felt underneath his fingernails and he grimaces at the feeling but he doesn’t stop, and he wonders how many times he had actually sat down and took the time to appreciate the world. He loved it, he cherished being outside and relishing in the sunlight during a cold day, or looking at flowers near the sidewalk and feeling how pretty their painted petals felt in his hands. He knew he didn’t deserve to be here among such pretty things, from the most dangerous snakes to the brightest phase of the moon.
He was guilty, that it took him so long to come out here. He wanted to take everything in, after being away for so long.
San feels barren, his chest filled with the burliest winds and weighed down by the dunes that Atacama could never top, and he wants to finish crying, but he felt like he had nothing left in him to do it. It was weird, feeling like a walking shell, and he was living but he didn’t really feel like he was alive. He looks up into the stars, seeing patterns that he thinks are constellations but he didn’t really know, considering he’s never been stargazing before. He feels bad, knowing that he would probably never would get the chance to considering there were no good places to see them, but he likes to hang onto the idea that there were the brightest and prettiest stars where he was going, and he could live among Andromeda and Perseus rather than watching them from a distance when he got old and had a white mustache and the universe had decided the rest for him.
He wanted so badly to play with the stars one day. It’d be everything he’d wanted.
He stops kicking his legs, lets them dangle as gravity plays with his shoelaces, the canvas of his shoes dirty and faded to a filthy burgundy rather than the red that polished the wings of ladybugs, but he forgets about it once he watches the ocean. He thinks this is good for him, to be out here and watching the world go by when he felt stuck in his head all day. His mother, who brought him the most love once, caused him the most pain and resentment to everyone and everything that wasn't himself.
He had the freedom to do what he wanted, and he thinks that might be the worst of it, because he had no one to worry when he was out this late. His mom would have killed him to know that he was nearly an hour from home, sitting at the edge of a dangerously high cliff and watching the moon paint the sea.
The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks takes him back to the times he would go to the beach with his mom.
He would play with the sand, make sandcastles and cry when the water would pull in the tide and ruin them. They weren’t even good sandcastles, but he tried his best and his mom would tell him that she was so proud of him and his stupid fucking sandcastles.
He cries again, not noticing how hot tears really were until they pooled into his eyes and singed his skin, rolling down his cheeks and creating sticky paintbrush strokes of all the memories he had let slip away in such a short time. He thinks it’s almost pathetic, and he wants to get up and maybe go for a walk and come back later, but there was something in him that he knew wouldn’t let himself do that. He wouldn't come back out here if he left.
That would be a favor, and San’s given himself enough favors recently.
And even through his blurry vision, as the waves melted into the rocks like burning candle wax, he thinks it’s beautiful. He scoots a little closer to the edge, feeling the imbalance between himself and rock beneath him, a feeling of adrenaline melding into his desolate chest, letting his head hang, his jeans splotched navy as he silently gazes to the waves, as if it were nothing.
As he thinks to himself, lost in his ashy cloudy head and realizing just how suffocating desolation really was, the sky begins to cry with him, thin needles of rain piercing his hair and his skin and puncturing his back in an icy terror that he didn’t think the Earth was capable of. And it was soft, until it switched, like the television on the wrong channel, and soon he was being beaten underneath the rage the sky brought. She was angry with him, but he understood.
Anyone would.
The rain covers his eyes with cold hands, bites at his sensitive skin as it flattens his black hair against his forehead and soaks into his clothes, and he feels that same guilt again that it would be angrier once he left to sit in his bedroom and play video games again, or shut his window blinds and sleep for half the day just to wake up and play even more video games. He shuts his eyes again, wanting to fall back into his head as he looks up into the rain, letting it wash over his face and take with it everything he had been and everything he was when his mother had left. And it hurt, stung so badly against him, but he breathes and lets the resentment of the sky hit him, slowly abuse him as he had done the world.
He permeates with the petrichor of the rain as the Earth sunk in greyscale, covering everything with cinder as the clouds began to pry, and San felt like he was drowning already, but he could stay out here all night if he wanted to. He doesn’t do anything, just lets himself be doused in the loudness of the rain as he’s soaked, swinging lightly with the weightless feeling of being stuck in a cycle of hatred just for him, and in a twisted way, he feels better.
He feels good knowing that the sky was just as furious and bitter as he was, that it was shared and he wasn’t going through tonight alone.
He didn’t want to be alone.
His shoulder.
It’s barely there, when he feels something warm on his shoulder, and it really should have scared him so bad that he fell off the edge of this cliff, but he only hangs his head and opens his eyes, more tired and exhausted than when he came out here. He’s annoyed, because he knows that it’s someone who came out here for a late night walk or maybe their car broke down and they had nothing else to do as they waited for a tow truck, and he knew how this looked but he thought that being nosey wasn't much of a solution to anything, either. He hoped so badly that the streets would stay empty, but hope wasn’t enough lately and god, couldn’t he just be left alone?
He wanted to yell at them to just fuck off so he could be by himself, but he doesn’t. The urge is strong, and he feels a little sorry for the person even though he knows he’s the one who really needs it, but he stays quiet.
“Hey.”
It’s so soft, his voice, it makes San want to think. He didn’t know exactly about what, but he just wanted to think about it.
It was light, nearly shimmering just as brightly as the moonlight against the ocean below them. It reminded him of crystals in the afternoon sun, how they glinted and produced a beautiful reflection of the world’s most brilliant lights, like the neon signs in his favorite 99 cent store, revealing pretty flecks of gold and silver hidden beneath its surface. There were many places his voice had been, and San kind of feels upset of all the people that heard it before him. He relaxes a little bit, trying to put a face to the voice that had spoken to him, a simple word that probably didn’t even care that much about him, making him stop.
San breathes in deeply, as best as he could through the thick sheet of rain that was soaking into his clothes and into his soul, filling his chest and smothering his heart as it ran down his face and off of his nose. He feels like he’d been boiling once he crouches behind him, and he’s kind of mad at him for interrupting him as he was trying to build up another world for himself, in the unforgiving cold the rain had brought him.
“What do you want? Why are you here?” San asks, quietly against the rain, bringing up a heavy hand to run through his even heavier hair, brushing it out of his face and shutting his eyes, trying to go back into the broken and black paradise that he had made up within the past couple of hours he had been sat here.
“Do you really want to know?”
San thinks that his voice might be prettier than the rain’s tonight. He hadn’t heard one like that in a while, pillowy and comforting and San can’t help but imagine him running through a field of daisies with it during the changing summer of the end of August, like the saccharine drip of strawberry ice cream in the heat.
“N-no. Not really.”
“Okay.”
He feels the boy still behind him, and he could feel him staring into his back. Chills pour down his spine and litter his skin with goosebumps when he pictures him staring at him and all of his broken glass, his eyes like gentle spotlights, and he feels naked in a way, though he was shielded with the rain and the thickest sweater he had in his closet. He didn’t want the boy to see him in any way, not now, not ever, because he knew he would notice how damaged he looked and how pale his skin had become in the past couple of days and how his heart was hanging onto him by a thread.
He knew he would really see him if he kept staring.
San doesn’t even realize how the rain was beginning to alleviate, beginning to slow down, as if the boy had magic on the dandelions that carried with his voice of spring breeze.
“How come you’re out here?”
San blinks, his eyebrows raised just slightly in unconscious caution, because he knew he would ask but he really didn’t want to answer.
He shrugs.
“Why are you?”
The boy doesn’t answer him for a moment, and he feels a little capsized in the idea that he didn’t feel like answering. He wonders if he felt this way when San didn’t answer his own questions.
“You said you didn’t want to know. Not really.”
San blinks. He did say that, but a small part of him did want to know. He doesn’t think he could really come back from that, but he tries anyway.
“I changed my mind. Tell me.”
“...Do you change your mind often?”
San’s head fills with static, like a balloon rubbing against the strands of his conscience the more he speaks to the boy. He was itchy, wanting to go back to thinking and dreaming in the rain, but the more he talks to him, the more he’s pulled into reality and the more uncomfortable the rain was and the more painful the rocks under his legs felt.
“Are you gonna tell me? Or not?”
The boy sighs lightly, but San could barely hear it, though the rain seemed to cease with time.
Time. That was a thing that they were living in and doing right now. It felt like it was nothing when he spoke to him.
“Well, I was driving home and the rain was getting really bad. My mom told me that driving in hard rain was dangerous, so I pulled over here to wait until it stopped, and then I saw you. I decided to come to see what you were doing.”
San is nearly lost in Wooyoung’s thought process, lost in the way the highs of his voice complemented his words, and as he talked about driving in the rain, San almost visualizes what that was like and wants him to keep going. He thinks he was too caught up in something as unimportant as his voice, but he couldn’t help it. The rain parted just for them to talk, and the moon was quiet to give them room, but the waves were still dancing with each other below him in company.
He focuses on the drops of rain insipidly splattering onto his jeans from his hair to give himself a distraction from everything.
One...two...three, four. One, two...three...four, one.
Okay. He was okay. He was almost freezing and he was troubled with being drenched and achy, but he was okay.
He moves his toes slightly to feel the slosh of rain in his now ruined shoes and it takes everything in him to not grimace at the feeling of the wetness on his body. Normally, he wouldn’t mind. But as he sits out here with him, it felt like there was a split in his rift brought to him by his summery voice alone and he wants to listen, wants to go somewhere else and talk about what he did today. He doesn’t know why he’s so interested in hearing him.
He just is.
“Did I disappoint you?” He asks, his voice soft and wary as he spoke against the world.
“A little bit. I thought you might have been a ghost or an alien waiting to kill me.”
San smiles at that. Sometimes, he does feel like an alien, like he was invading everything and everyone and he wanted to go back home. But where was there for him go?
His house wasn’t home. Not really.
He then remembers why they were even having this conversation, and he finds it nice, the immense humanity in Wooyoung’s intentions to keep himself safe, compared to his own intentions to do the exact opposite, maybe stray another hour from his house or see how far the water could take him if he reached the shore by low tide. He was almost too free tonight, and with the urge to run from himself, he felt like he could do anything he really wanted.
“My mom used to tell me stuff like that, too.”
San thinks that was maybe why he never got his license, because he would think too much about his mom sitting in the passenger’s seat as his father stopped at red lights and telling him to watch out for things in the road when they used to go places together, or remember all the things she told him would kill him if he wasn’t too careful.
He was only six. He remembered.
It seems like being careful wasn’t enough to keep her safe in the end. There was no use for it.
“Used to?”
There was a silver needle in his heart, at the word used.
It pierces his ribcage as they tried to protect his fragile heart of butterfly wings, but he was too weak to not let it bother him, and soon his heart felt like it had stopped beating, and he was numb, despite his eyes welling up with heat and he felt the need to cry one more time. He scoots back from the edge of the cliff, the rocks digging into the back of his knees now, and his thighs were still aching, but it wasn’t as bad as before. He can’t look at the sea again, feeling like he let it down in not doing what he came out here for, getting interrupted as he tried to be in its company like the world had been for him.
It seems like he was very good at disappointment.
San only nodded, and he was thankful that Wooyoung opted for staring at him and figuring out what that meant rather than asking about it. He didn’t know if he could tell someone again and relive the memories he tried desperately to scrape out of his head, but they were rusted and couldn’t leave and rotted his brain, taking over all the good and covering them with blank ink.
“What’s your name? And how come you’re out here? It’s wet.”
“My name?” San nearly forgets, losing himself in the novel that is the boy behind him, escaping in his imagery and floating in between every sentence and exclamation he made. “It’s San. Choi San. And I came to think. I do it a lot. I like to do it a lot.” He technically wasn’t lying, but he figured obscuring a part of the truth would make him not want to run away, just like everyone else.
San can’t see him, but he imagines him looking at the ground to take in what he said.
“...To think, huh? That’s good. Life is busy sometimes, and most of us don’t have the time to think...I think that would solve half of the world’s problems. If we just stopped to think sometimes.”
San looks at his knees, studies the hole above his right one and watching a raindrop from his hair slide over the bare expanse of skin, and he can’t help but smile. He doesn’t know if it was because of how naive he sounded, or if it was because he agreed, and nobody else put it into words until he did.
He didn’t know. But he was smiling, just a little.
He wipes the raindrop from his knee.
“What’s your name?” San only asks to get the attention off of him for once, to take an opportunity to listen to Wooyoung more and learn a little.
“I’m Wooyoung. It’s a little weird, and someone told me once that it was hard to remember. If it helps, all of my friends call me Woo. Like the sound you make when you’re on a rollercoaster, or if you’re really happy. Woo!”
San thinks his name was just as pretty as the way he pronounced it. He thinks of wildflowers billowing in the wind, or of the feeling of being free during summer’s vacation because classes wouldn’t start up for a while. It was in the way he said it that made him remember his name to something of freedom. His name sounded like how rose petals felt in between your fingers, how cherry blossoms fell from trees or how petunias bloomed perfectly in the fall. It was weird, but he saw beauty in his name.
Wooyoung.
It was beautiful, and different on his tongue compared to everyone else’s names he said aloud in his lifetime.
“Wooyoung is a nice name,” San tells him, just to be polite, and he brings a hand to his hair again, this time weighing slightly less, as he runs cold fingers through his wet hair and feeling how strange the texture was against his skin.
Everything felt strange against him, right now.
“Thank you. I like your name a lot, too. It reminds me of the sun. Is that weird?”
San shakes his head, and it’s then when he has yet to look behind him and see what Wooyoung really looked like. A part of him didn’t really care, but there was a desire, just in case he saw him on the sidewalk or in the grocery store one day and he could point him out and talk to him a bit more. He didn’t know, and he thinks it’s sad how he relied on Wooyoung so much already and he didn’t even know his last name.
“It’s starting to rain again. Would you want to come into my car to not get wet? Or, anymore wet? I could put the heater on for us.” Wooyoung switches his thoughts again, like a strike of lightning in a storm of ideas. “Hey, what if we go get hot chocolate? I know a really good diner where my friend works. It’s still open!”
San resists the urge to cry again, at the fact that Wooyoung was just fifteen minutes into being with him and talked to him as if he were his very best friend in the world, and he feels his soul begin to perk up and his heart was beating again and he wants to sob into his hands at being cared for like this, even if he was just a complete stranger. Wooyoung could have walked away and not have given a fuck about him after their conversation like every other kid his age he's met in this garbage, idle town, but he was offering to let him into his car and get hot chocolate with him.
He ended up crying anyway, and Wooyoung gets frightened a little because he didn’t like seeing people cry, especially if he was the cause.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to…” Wooyoung’s voice falls once he sees San cry harder, bringing his hands up to his face and seeing him dip his head lower, as if he was ashamed and wanted to hide from him.
Wooyoung felt his heart plummet for the first time in a while, to see clenched teeth in a frown and cheeks blushed from the pressure. Of what, Wooyoung wouldn't know. But he understood that it was there, like blinking or breathing when you sleep.
The rain was picking up, and Wooyoung felt it slide down the back of his neck and hit his already soaked jeans, so he stands and holds his hand out for San to take, feeling the slight ache in his muscles for squatting for so long, but he brushes it off as the rain hits his skin and begins its incessant prodding. He bends down to reach for San’s hand, and San immediately pulls back slightly, staring at his hand and watching the way the rain drips off of his fingertips and slides down his wrist over the silver rings adorning his fingers, glinting in the moon like asterisms to gems.
He puts his own in it after pushing his brain to just let him , taking his hand and letting Wooyoung pull him from the cliff, slipping a little bit from the wetness of the rocks underneath his feet. His hand is radiating, warm and safe, despite the rain and how it was now blistering onto his skin as it picked up almost too quickly.
For the first time in a while, he wanted to get out of the rain.
He watches Wooyoung pull open the passenger’s side door, seeing his black shirt clinging to his skin and jeans the color of obsidian darkened with the rain, and he slips in, silent, not really connecting with everything that was going on. He stares at the dashboard, his eyes raw and stinging and he doesn’t know if it’s from the storm outside or the one raging in his head, and it’s muffled against the car for a moment, until Wooyoung opens the driver’s door and gets in, water dripping onto the gear shift and the inside of his door and on the leather of the seats in here.
San feels nearly too scared to talk.
Wooyoung breathes out a sigh, just as the heater kicks in, and San didn’t even realize he was still frozen in his own ice until Wooyoung pointed it out.
“Why are you frowning? Why did you cry?”
Wooyoung seemed to say things before he thought, and in a way, San kind of admired it in the fact that he was still childish and still curious about what the world had to offer him. He was sunlight at the bottom of the sea, fighting through San’s waves and getting tangled in the weeds that stuck in the sand, but he reached. San takes this opportunity to look at him again, to really study him inside the dimness of the moon’s shine.
His hair was black, just like his, and he thinks that in the way he expresses himself, they might have been alike in some way. There was a beauty mark right underneath his eye, underneath his pretty shaped eyes that sparkled halcyon and trembled with curiosity for him that makes him want to open up, just for a little while, to see that spark diminish.
They’re bathed in the blackberry wash of the nighttime as San runs his eyes over Wooyoung’s face once, then twice, and he sees him staring right back at him, looking at him as if he was the extra credit question on his math test, but he’s not worried about him noticing all of his flaws or saying much about them right now.
Wooyoung felt like company.
And not the company that you get when you’re in a room full of kids you don’t know in class, or when you’re at work and there are customers littering the aisles.
It was the kind of company that you had when your pet walks into the room as you read your favorite novel, the kind of company that you get when you’re with your very best friend and listening to the sound of their breaths as they slept beside you while you played a game on your phone, or watched your favorite cartoons on their television.
And San has yet to really know what that felt like, but he thinks this is a pretty good start.
“Uh, I...I don’t know.” San shakes his head, and looks at his jeans running a hand over the hole in his knee and feeling the threading and the fabric that he came to hate in a short span of time. “I don’t know.”
Tonight had been especially bad. He was trapped in a terror, almost pulled out the frayed threads of his head until Wooyoung decided to interrupt him. And he was still kind of mad that he let him do that. But he felt the need to stay out there and talk to him. He had nothing better to do anyway. He blinks, snaps out of his spider web thoughts once Wooyoung pressed his hand to his head, and he feels the cold rain on his scalp and thinks Wooyoung was very touchy for a stranger, but for some reason, he doesn’t mind it.
It’s like his world was completely reversed, like his empty rooms reverberated underneath Wooyoung’s steps, creating hollow music from his strings as he freely walked around him and all of his thoughts and all of his feelings, He looks at Wooyoung, that same urge of wanting to curl up under blankets by himself or lock the doors to his treehouse coming back to him, and he feels warm.
Wooyoung made him feel warm just but looking at him, just by pressing a hand to his head to let him know he was there. And he still has that same wary feeling that he could kill him at any moment if he wanted to, watching one too many murder mystery documentaries, but he wasn’t afraid.
It was becoming very hard to be afraid of Wooyoung the more he spent time with him.
“Do you still wanna go get hot chocolate?”
San feels the heat coming from the vent on his cheek and in a part of his wet hair, and he shivers once as he looks at the clock.
It was 1:34 in the morning. He had school on Monday.
“I didn’t bring my wallet.”
“It’s okay. I’ll buy you a million hot chocolates. We’re gonna go there, okay?”
I’ll buy you a million. San focuses on the taste of it, focuses on the whipped cream that would sometimes get on his nose, focuses on the scent of powdered chocolate and how the cleaning products that the diner probably used would bother his nose, and he feels of sylvanshine, lit up only in the presence of Wooyoung’s daylight eyes and cloudy smile, and he doesn’t know why he has the urge to cry again but he does.
A tear runs down his face as he nods silently, throat clogging with an acidic lump as he slowly puts on his seatbelt, reveling in how the rough fabric feels against his sensitive skin, how the air around him made him feel dirty and how his sweater was soaked between the leather and his back. He was still wet, and each drop of water felt like stabs of ice into his skin, but he undeniably appreciated Wooyoung’s efforts and decides to make the best of it, despite feeling disgusting in more ways than one and the memories he's been trying to suppress all night were as clear and vibrant as ever. This was Wooyoung's fault - he could have been on his way home by now, but instead, he was thinking about him and everyone at school and everything at home.
The clock changes to 1:36.
And even as the sky cracked apart, cried just as loud as he had not too long ago, smacking the glass of the windows with heavy fists and chanting angrily as it hurtled on the world beneath it, Wooyoung still shone brighter than the moon had been on that cliff. He was drumming his fingers along to some silent beat that he was probably rocking out to in his head, looking around carefully to watch the rain until it let up so he could drive and not worry his mother. San stared at him again, because frankly, there was nothing else to do in the car and by the looks of it, it was very old and the radio only played FM and San would rather not stare at it while it crackled back to him like crinkling a chip bag filled with nothing. He adjusts himself in his seat, immediately regretting it once he felt the slosh of wet jeans and socks and the cold taps of rain on his shoulders from his wet hair.
Wooyoung’s hair looked almost blue under the moonlight, glistening with rain as it slid down his face and into his damp shirt, but he didn’t seem bothered at all. He was just watching the world go by, enjoying himself and ticking his own personal clock as the rain finally began to let up again, and by the time San was done taking Wooyoung in again as best as he could from his peripherals, the windshield was glimmering with the star’s light and the only sound that could be heard was the AC working to keep heating them up.
He sighs lightly, holds a hand up to the vent and feels his fingers defrost in the heat. His fingernails were slightly dyed a pale blue, the color of celestine bleeding into the soft pinks and he gets a little worried because he only ever saw that in movies where they die of hypothermia.
But then he realizes he’s being too dramatic, and pulls himself back into the coziness of Wooyoung’s car rather than past the universe and into the dark infinites of space.
And as he starts the car to take San to his favorite diner to get hot chocolate with him, he thinks Wooyoung is too good to be true. He keeps the idea of never seeing him again in his back pocket to think about when it eventually happens. He looks over when Wooyoung turns the radio up a little bit as he stops at the four-way near the end of the neighborhood, the static getting louder, but he pressed a button that only he knew how it worked, and there was soft indie music cradling them in irregular kick drum rhythms and minor chords that only a certain group of people would like.
Wooyoung begins to tap his fingers on the steering wheel again, softly, as if to try and not grab San’s attention but he needed to do it.
He admired how cool he was during all of this. The dead of early morning, you’re driving and you find a stranger, alone at the very edge of the only cliff in town, and he cries when you offer him hot chocolate and doesn’t talk about his mother and his hair is black just like yours and he’s got bruises on his soul and acid where his heart should be. He would have freaked out, probably would have left him there if it were him. He and Wooyoung were complete opposites in that respect, too.
He really admired how good he was, how pretty his heart was and how welcoming he'd been.
And as the streetlights flash past them on the way to the diner, glowing sandstone illuminating them in a comforting and indeterminate surge, San begins to think Wooyoung’s spark would never diminish.