Work Text:
HOW FLOWERS WILT
Seungmin knows that blood is thicker than water. He also knows that the boy he is staring at right now will soon pass. With time. Like time. He knows it well, perhaps too well, but he never says anything.
Neither to Hyunjin, nor to anyone else.
He keeps on telling himself that his is not just an obsession toward an abstract painting, the fear of letting go of whatever he is holding onto, or a passing feeling created but his unconscious and his dreams to prevent him from harming himself and losing a battle that yes, he is fighting in but that no, does not belong to him.
He likes to think it is love. Love that grows pure and intense. Love that blooms like a marvellous flower in the middle of a sunny, spring day. Love that is unique and soft, thoughtless. Love in which the sky is always clear and clouds never cry.
And he wants to convince himself this is the truth, because he's tired. Tired of being told he must be careful; tired of the echoes of all of his friends' voices running through his mind: you'll end up getting hurt; tired of Hyunjin's silences and tired of the dying violets in the jar on the shelf.
He is tired but he never says anything.
He always smiles ruefully, a faded color in his once honey, amber eyes: the look of a boy who does not know neither resentment nor revenge.
Everything's alright, he says. I love him and he loves me.
But he sets aside his most atrocious thoughts and only focuses on the ones that make his story a first-class fairytale.
He hides the rose that wilts in the middle of a cold, winter day, the sky that becomes grey as the fine weather leaves everything behind and the crying of the dead that makes its way through clouds. He hides his pain and his anxiety. He hides his fatigue, his exhaustion and his agony. He hides his screams.
He hides the truth.
And each item ends up in the corner of an empty room, or in a huge box in the attic, or even under the pillow where he lays his head every night.
And he breathes out a prayer, when Night embraces his delicate body in between Her warm arms and lulls him softly, turning the white ghost of a thought that overwhelms and kills into a grey shadow that cannot harm, nor frighten the boy whose voice is sweeter than honey anymore.
He recites a prayer with no name, writes a poem with no rhymes, and sings a song that knows no melody.
He looks at Hyunjin who is laying down next to him. He stares at his back, again and again and again till tears threaten to flow out. And Seungmin would like to hold him tight and ask him to stay. One more moment. One more forever.
But he knows Hyunjin does not belong to him, and never will. He knows his lover's body is just a temporary adornment, a welcome gift that is going to end up in a bunch of boxes once the apartment they're living in becomes ashes of a dead relationship, and he also knows Hyunjin hates his hiding himself behind a wall of lies, his running through the wind and his riding on a flying carpet thirty feet above the ground: he hates the way the other boy is living in an act, a life that is not made for two. At least, not for the two of them.
Seungmin knows it all - more than anyone else, but he never says anything.
Everything's alright, he whispers. There is love and love is there.
But it is an all-embracing love and leaves behind only the last remnants of a silence poured into a dented cup of coffee. It is a self-destructive love, in which there is no thing in the world one of the two lovers wouldn't do for the other. It is an ardent and exclusive love that makes everything else a lie: it knows, from the very beginning, that there will be no end, no future, no other chance in no other life.
It is a desperate, insane, hopeless, disruptive love.
It is a love that consumes, rips away every root, and makes you fall. It is a love that knows no defence. That tolerates no mercy.
It is a love that Seungmin did not expect to find but that, he knows, is placed in his shaky, weak hands, as Hyunjin builds a new barrier between them and buries words that haven't even come to life yet.
It us a misguided, clumsy, unscheduled love. A love that, with no training, can't be faced.
And Seungmin knows it, reads about it and hears about it each day of his life.
Then again, he does not give up because this can't really be the epilogue of his novella. He knows it, he knows it, he knows it and he knows it.
But he falls and shatters.
His favourite mug in pieces on the ground, a dead smile on Hyunjin's face, the echo of a last cry that resonates in the apartment.
And, then, the door that slams, the steps running downstairs, the hands that go and cover the ears and pull the hair, the tears that blur the eyesight.
Seungmin knows this is the end and that there will be no new start. He knows it and cries. Cries out all the things he has been always longing for; cries out all the sorrow he has been hiding since day one; cries out that miserable love he tried to reach, live, and save; and cries out the autumn that took the boy all snow and no water away from him.
He begins to cry, despair, ask for help.
He does not, however, regret anything.
He does not regret anything because he loved. As much as he could. Until he could. He loved the idea of love and he loved Hyunjin. A lot. Maybe, it is now time for him to let go.
But, stranger, you have to believe him:
Seungmin is a boy made of roses and blue waves, and he knows - in the deepest of his heart - that love heals only after hurting.