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When Ricky gets to the house he’s sharing with the rest of the ZB1 members, the situation is not what he was expecting.
He expected to find a few people talking in the living room, but instead, he finds Jiwoong sitting on the sofa alone wearing his pajamas. The top is unbuttoned and his hair is kind of a mess. His face is flushed and Ricky wonders for a moment if he might have been crying but since he’s drinking from a bottle of Soju, maybe the alcohol has something to do with it. Some series is playing on the television but there’s no sound and there are two more empty bottles of Soju, plus a full one, on the coffee table.
Jiwoong is so focused on the video on the phone that doesn’t seem to realize that Ricky is standing there looking at him until he speaks to him.
“Hey, where’s everybody?” Ricky asks, waving his arms.
Jiwoong stops whatever he was watching and the music stops. “How should I know?” It’s their free day and he’s not seen anybody all day.
“With family? Friends? Hooking up somewhere?” Jiwoong offers.
“Right,” Ricky nods. “I’m guessing you didn’t go out…”
“Nope,” Jiwoong shakes his head before taking a sip and ending the bottle.
“Give me that,” Ricky takes two steps closer, grabbing the bottle from Jiwoong’s hand and leaving it on the table.
“Pass me the other one, will you?” Jiwoong asks.
“Man, you’ve drunk enough, don’t you think?”
“I’m not drunk,” Jiwoong says, “but maybe I need to be, so don’t tell me what to do or not to do, okay?”
Ricky frowns. He’s never seen Jiwoong like this before. He’s seen him drinking and knows that the guy has a very good alcohol tolerance, but Jiwoong’s current demeanor is not something he’s seen until today. If he had to guess, he'd say he looks between sad and depressed.
Jiwoong leans over, successfully reaching the other bottle, takes a sip, and rests his head on the back of the sofa, closing his eyes.
Ricky decides to take off his jacket and leave it in his room, “I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t bother,” Jiwoong says, still with his eyes closed.
A few minutes later, Ricky comes back, wearing some blue pajamas, and decides to sit sideways next to Jiwoong. He shakes his head when he sees that the bottle in his hand is already half empty.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong with you?” Ricky frowns.
Jiwoong snorts, “Why do you care?”
“Why?” Ricky sighs and bites his lower lip. As he looks at Jiwoong, he considers what to say next. If he’s not drunk, he sounds at least half drunk by now.
“We are friends, aren’t we? And you don’t look like your usual composed self—”
“Are you saying,” Jiwoong opens his eyes to look at Ricky, waving his left arm, ”that I don’t look cool, and collected, and handsome? Is that what you're saying?” Jiwoong raises his eyebrows.
“Jiwoong,—”
“That’s impossible,” Jiwoong shakes his head, “Not-possible—My boyfriend says I’m always handsome… he’s always saying it… all the time. He thinks I’m beautiful… so you’re lying…” Jiwoong frowns and turns to look at Ricky’s puzzled stare, “I don’t know why… but you are, okay? You’re lying to me, and I hate it when people lie to me. You’re not my friend and I don’t like you—Just let me be…”
Ricky shakes his head, “I’d never lie to you, but you’re drunk and—”
“I told you—I’m not drunk,” Jiwoong shakes his head, “but I wanna be, so just go and let me get drunk alone, okay?—Just go.”
Ricky sees Jiwoong take another sip, closing his eyes again. He considers if anything might have happened with anybody he knows, but he can’t think of anything since everybody had left the house earlier that day. Then he recalls seeing Jiwoong looking at the phone with a scowl when he arrived, so maybe it is related to that.
“I’m not going. I’m asking you what the problem is. If you tell me what’s happened, maybe I can help you,” Ricky insists, although he’s starting to feel like it’s totally useless because even if they are friends, it’s not like they are intimate or have a very close friendship yet. It’s certainly not as close as Ricky would like it to be.
Jiwoong snorts, smiling wryly, “Sure.”
"Let me tell you this," Jiwoong continues, waving his arms, "Nothing—Nobody can possibly fix this. You can’t and nobody can, okay? There’s no fixing—There’s no fucking reparation…” Jiwoong takes another sip.
“Jiwoong—”
“No, wait, you’re such a handsome, rich, tall, and talented guy… you’re so talented that you made it to the nine. Hell, you were four and I was fucking eight. You’re supposed to be better than me—More talented, right?”
Ricky rolls his eyes, licking his lips. Apparently, drunk Jiwoong is also bitter Jiwoong instead of fun Jiwoong.
“So, maybe… Fuck, you have so many talents that who knows, can you turn back time, too? Can you make people use their fucking heads? ‘Cause yeah, if—If you can do that, then, you can fucking help me.”
Ricky frowns as that catches his attention. “What do you mean?”
“The final—I wanna go back. Can you take me there? Can we all go back there? Please.”
Ricky scoffs at that. “You’re not making any sense, you know?”
Jiwoong takes another sip, “Yeah, I wanna hear it—His name. I wanna fucking hear it. Loud and clear. I wanna see him smile. I wanna hear the fans cheering for him. I wanna see him being all shy because he can’t believe it.”
Jiwoong licks his lips as tears start rolling down his cheeks. “I wanna—I wanna see him going up those fucking stairs. I want him to take his seat—The seat he deserves. And then, I wanna hug him, and kiss him, and tell him that we made it—Both of us—We made it and we don’t have to be apart.”
“That’s what I want.” Jiwoong nods, bending over to leave his phone awkwardly on the coffee table. “If you can make that happen, then yeah, please do it—Just fucking do it right now. Come on—What are you waiting for?”
There’s obvious desperation, sadness, and something else that Ricky can’t really define, and Ricky feels impossibly uncomfortable and useless.
Jiwoong rests his head on the sofa, closing his eyes, and doesn’t bother removing the drying tears from his cheeks.
Jiwoong looks more than sad, he looks heartbroken and inconsolable. And Ricky is left speechless for a moment. What’s he supposed to say to that?
Ricky wasn’t sure what this was about but he never saw that coming, especially with all that crying. Probably all that was something that Jiwoong carried inside him since the final and something happened that made him blurt it out today. Ricky has also been there… sometimes you start saying how you feel and there’s no stopping you anymore.
“Look, even if we could go back. I don’t think he would make it anyway—”
“No! You don’t know that,” Jiwoong interrupts him. “He will make it! I’m telling you this time he will! He’ll live with us… He’ll be fucking here, okay? But maybe you won’t be here and that’s why you don’t want to go back. You’re afraid—You are... because you know that he’s better than all of us. You fucking know that but you don’t want to admit it. We took his place—We're fucking thieves—We took his place from him and he’s not where he’s supposed to be—He’s not, you hear me? He’s not.” Jiwoong takes another sip, closing his eyes again.
Ricky runs a hand through his hair and sighs. It seems that whatever he says only makes it worse because high on alcohol Jiwoong lives in his own sad world where nobody can enter.
“If he was here, we wouldn’t need fucking rules,” Jiwoong says.
Ricky has no idea what Jiwoong means and he’s not seen Jongwoo since the final, but he thought that everything was going well between him and Jiwoong. Now he can’t help but be curious about their situation because this is definitely not normal.
“Did you—I mean, did you break up with him?” Maybe that is why he cried before. Maybe that is what started this.