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
p.s. here is a translation to русский by youlloveithere - thank you very much!!
~☀~
There were two things that Choi San could solidly say he was sure about in his lifetime.
One, that he had an unhealthy obsession with playing Undertale in the first blush hours of the day that he forgot existed until he checked his analog clock and sees the time is 2,3,4 in the morning and he has to force himself to stop petting the lesser dog and go to sleep.
And two, that he likes boys. He feels like he has to censor the word every time he thinks about it, like if he spoke it out loud he would just hear one big, loud BLEEP, and it would scare him and throw off his whole train. He thinks about the feeling and thoughts that weren’t really supposed to happen, but they did anyway and San chose to be okay with that. Being raised in a household where, whenever the topic of the g-word came up, it would amount for uncomfortable silences and unwanted talks of religion and weird references to the Bible that San didn’t even know were in there.
And San wants to know what the fuck was up with that.
He’d been thinking like this for a while now, though. Thinks about the what-ifs and possiblys of him actually, maybe coming out to his mom. Would it be awkward? Would it make her kick him out? San was a whole seventeen years old, and he knows that the world wouldn’t wait for him to do it. He couldn’t put it on pause and think for a few more days, because he knows that the sun still sets orange and pinks and brings out the stars and the violets of nighttime. He knows that people are still counting down the clock to their last breaths, he knows that babies are still being born somewhere on Earth and crying and people are still getting married and still crying.
He knows that the world isn’t going to stop for him, otherwise, he’d be thinking about it until he was old and wrinkly and he couldn’t see at all in one eye and he had white hair on his head.
So he decided to roll with it.
When San tells his mom, they’re driving down the freeway back from a small road trip to go see their relatives that San didn’t know the names of half, and it’s dark and he should have been on the verge of tipping over the cliff that was sleep deprivation, as they’d been traveling since this morning, but he’d been worrying all day about how he would word it. Should he make a joke of it? Hint at it with random objects in the car so it was less serious? Was that weird?
No, that was weird.
He just outright tells her, keeps his eyes on the uneven placement of the streetlamps giving off an orange, invasive glow that made him feel like it really was just the two of them in the entire world driving down this freeway, and she giggles at him and said simply “okay”, as if it was a cute inside joke between the two of them that he was bringing up again and telling her not to forget.
But it was enough for him.
It made him feel odd, like the static in the television replaced the very essence of his being, with the way she quirked her eyebrows, and San could barely see because she had to keep her eyes on the road and the streetlamps were projecting obscure shadows onto her face that ultimately could have given off the wrong impression and he felt like he needed to cry. And with the way she said it, like when he used to beg for her to buy him a toy as a child and she said okay, and then forgot to buy it. Like the okay she would say to him when he’s giving a half-assed argument on why he should miss school the next day because it would allow for chances to get more sleep, and studies show that a brain functions better when the body gets more rest. She would reply with that “okay”, and just when San thinks he had her in the bag, she woke him up early when he knows he never set his alarm to wake up for school.
But it had been enough for him.
When San tells his mom again, it’s on a rainy, Sunday night, and it was only because the first “okay” wasn’t enough for her, and she had been asking him about a girlfriend earlier that day.
San didn’t have one of those, and his mom knew that he didn’t have one of those, but she really, really wanted him to.
And when he explains to her that he didn’t - hours later when the sun had taken the conversation they had and stored it within its own memories to the extent of his mom nearly forgetting about it - she’d enclosed him in a little room of her trust and flashed a table lamp of guilt in his face, and he found himself telling her again, this time, adding in the fact that he has a boyfriend to prove it.
San didn’t have one of those, either.
He shows up wet and sodden and really cold at Yeosang’s window that night, crossed the big tree conveniently placed between their two neighboring houses, the want to stay in his own home completely gone, replaced by the want to seclude himself in the confines of Yeosang’s room and hide from all the thoughts that San can’t help but think about next to a warm body of support and inviting arms and kisses to foreheads and baked cookies that he’d found in the back of the fridge for him.
He decides that she pretended not to hear him that night, and that maybe he'd try again.
Maybe.