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readerforexiao · 2 months ago

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𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐋 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐃: 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒕 𝒃𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒏 | 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ

⌗ Sung Jinwoo x Fem!Reader | romance, angst, fluff | childhood friends to lovers, denial + unspoken feelings + mutual pining, hurt / comfort, canon universe, emotional vulnerability and isolation, trauma ... tba

⌗ "I am human regardless of the power running through my veins. It lies within my heart, my human heart which feels ever so deeply, that I am bound to feeling emotions such as fear, hatred, greed, and love"

⌗ Word Count: 3.3k

⌗ Synopsis: Despite knowing that everything given demanded a price, and everything taken had a cost, Jinwoo would have done everything for you, relinquished all he had. But when granted power without end capable of continuous growth beyond that of limitation, he feared before he reasoned, and in his panic had he pushed you away. Still, you could love him no less even as his presence thinned into absence. Eventually, Jinwoo realized he could only run as far as you'd let him.

⌗ A/n: been working on this since feb. i am as hopeless with my writing as i am hopelessly in love with Jinwoo 💙

THEY MADE, AND IN THEIR MAKING, THEY UNMADE. And it became their legacy retold in history.

For the greatest of empires had they built upon the spine of the land, upon the hum of the earth’s uneven breaths and the shifting of its sands. But as they raised them into lofty castles of grandeur, into bridges that crossed ravines and forded gushing rivers, they had brought them to ruin by the thirst for more. Even the alliances forged by the blood of sacrifice— meant to be immortalised in legend— were cleaved apart with the blade of mistrust wedged deep between the scapula.

Once, when the fields of flowers had been kissed by the sun and caressed by the moon. When forests of old sheltered life beneath the canopy of their trees, and streams of pure birth coursed outward, nourishing all they touched. Light felt softer then. And time must have moved without urgency, too. For even the silence was sure to have been alive, full of meaning, full of breath. Until their petals were plucked and their rivers bloodied.

Trees were splintered. Wings clipped. Skin carved. And it had been such that nothing ever remained untouched. For the blame worthy were indeed beings of flesh— mortal… frail. Frail in what lies inside unspoken of. What mattered most.

They trample and are trampled by what lies beyond their control. And they break and are broken by the hands of those they love, envy… fear.

When the gates appeared and hunters rose from among the panic with powers beyond their grandest desires, disaster had been mistaken for salvation. Hunter Guilds were established to combat the monsters. But beneath their banners, division grew. Subtle at first, then swift, accelerating the downfall of what was already fraying at the seams.

In a cruel game where the strong preyed upon the weak, the greedy devoured the humble, and the wicked turned their blades to the innocent. Sins were repeated, not repented. For the power that descended upon them, disastrous in their hands, would be their undoing.

And so it was to be, as if writ by fate’s hand— humanity were forever doomed to become the ruin of every story. A final chapter none could ever rewrite.

❝𝙷𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚜 𝚒𝚝𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏. 𝙼𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚕𝚠𝚊𝚢𝚜 𝚍𝚘𝚎𝚜❞

❝𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚎.❞ - 𝙷𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚞𝚜

— 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐍𝐄

THE SUN TOOK LEAVE OF THE WORLD, bequeathing to the veil of shadow. The traffic lights turned green, engines stirred, and wheels began rolling. Uproar hurled through the streets as a motorbike wove between the blurred cars, its growl reverberating down the asphalt vein.

In the merging of headlights, you had seen his eyes; the speckle of blue within the grey that surfaced when caught in the gleam of luminosity. Those eyes sought you out, flicking from face to face with urgency, like a caged bird who mourned for the sky. He moved through the world shaped by his tragedies and misfortune, brave yet labelled weak and mocked as a coward.

Life altered him more times than one could count, wearing him down in the most horrid ways. He was the boy who knew pain too intimately, considered it a companion even if it had never been a desired one.

His smile had always held too much apology, stretched over a face that had forgotten genuinity. His shoulders drew taut and his spine locked in rigidness beneath a jacket worn and torn by responsibility and fight; the posture of someone taught by repetition to brace for the worst and never expect anything better, for the clothes on his back and a growing stack of unpaid bills were all he had.

Like a shadow, he carried himself, bowing his head as if he might offend the light. And though he had tried to stay small, to slip by unnoticed, mockery found him like a breath upon his neck all the same, as if daring him to think he deserved even that.

Their words cut deeper than any beast ever did. The sharpness of their laughter and ridicule hollowed him out, but he did what he had to do, even if it made him fold into himself and apologise for being weak and a pathetic stain on the world.

Your hand, cold against the heat of skin, held your neck where the phantom ache of his name still echoed alive.

You remembered the night the call came. When the hospital’s number flashed across your screen and how it hadn’t startled you at first because he had been in and out of emergency rooms enough times for it to feel like a routine. Bruises, fractures, and the occasional concussion, but he never stayed long. He had always walked out alive in the end. But that night had been different when Jinah’s voice, strangled by apprehension, threaded through the call.

The memory became one impossible to shake, for you had leaned close to his motionless body and inhaled the scent of ash and iron until it could not be forgotten. The image of him, every inch of exposed skin buried under gauze and wrapped so thickly it seemed he might disappear beneath it, burned into your mind.

"You idiot... stupid… stupid…" You hadn’t meant to say it in anger, but the words slipped from your quivering lips anyway, too heavy to hold back because so foolish, he was. Always so stubborn and persistent to a fault.

You couldn’t call it strength— what he did. Could not deem such reckless behaviour noble, even if he had done it all to provide for her, to ensure she had what she needed. To carry a burden that should not have been his alone. There was nothing noble about the way his body lay there, broken and unrecognisable beneath the bandages. Nothing admirable in the way he hadn’t stirred for days, no sign that the man you knew was still fighting to come back while his sister, whom he had done it all for, was left with nothing but the unbearable routine of waiting.

She had spent her days running back and forth between the hospital and home despite your protests. Nights were lonely, though she had grown accustomed to it. She always had her phone nearby as she waited for you to call with any change or any sign he would wake. She didn’t have the luxury of giving up. Not while her brother lay there, just like her mother. Not while he had made sure she wouldn’t have to.

Neither of them deserved this. And yet, here they were.

Red lights blinked overhead and as the cars rolled to a stop, you stepped off the curb, swept into the tide of pedestrians, moving like rain dissolving into the ocean, loose, unbothered, flowing with the kind of ease that comes from having somewhere to go but no urgency to get there. But you moved differently, slipping between them, quicker, with purpose. A single note out of tune. Your pace outmatched theirs. You couldn’t walk slowly— not tonight.

Bit by bit, the press of bodies thinned and the noise of car horns and voices had fallen away like smoke in the wind. Eventually, only the quiet rhythm of your breath and your footsteps remained.

Your knuckles struck wood, once, twice, then once more, until after a pause, the door creaked open.

“You're late."

“Work ran overtime," the warm ambience of her home welcoming you as you entered.

"You don't have to lie, you know." She wiggled her brows, a knowing grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Jinwoo will be happy to see you"

“Dumbass” you muttered more to yourself than her, closing the door behind you.

Jinah went back to her show, drawing her knees up beneath her on the couch. The hum of the program filled the room but your attention drifted elsewhere, onto the shelf where dust clung faintly to the edges of picture frames, untouched for who knew how long. One in particular caught your eye. It was of Jinwoo and Jinah, years younger, caught mid-laughter, their faces bright and unburdened with a joy that no longer visited, a kind that did not belong to the present.

The second frame held a photo of Jinwoo and his mother. He couldn’t have been more than five, clinging to her with the easy trust of a child. His small chin rested against her shoulder as his feet dangled behind her, a supportive hand keeping him steady and sure, as if she’d always known exactly how to hold the weight of someone else’s world.

She was beautiful. Truly beautiful. Touched by the rare grace that only motherhood could shape. Time had aged her in each photo, but not unkindly for she wore her maturity well, like silk and aged wine, bearing those marks with pride. You saw a woman who lived, perhaps not perfectly, but wholly. A woman who had loved deeply, lost deeply, and still found a way to keep going.

When your eyes opened, the memory had receded. Still, her eyes sought yours in the familiar blur of your vision. But as your focus returned fully, you realised you had mistaken Jinah for her mother. Had come close enough to forget just how long it has been since.

You ruffled Jinah’s hair, like her mother had once done to you and she swatted your hand away, urging you to her brother’s room before you could do it again.

You made your way down the hallway, where the walls had been lined with so many memories, some of which you could only vaguely recall. Crayon drawings curled at the edges, left untouched since their mother fell ill. Neither of the siblings had the heart to take them down, despite how much they grew to hate them, for she loved those scrappy stick figures and food-stained paper. Above those childish doodles there hung a neat row of school certificates tucked into tarnished gold frames. Jin-ah’s name had stood out in bold across them, impossible to miss. Achievement after achievement. You loitered there in search of a name that never appeared and never would, and you moved on… what else could you do.

The door to Jinwoo’s room stood ajar. You peered inside. Livid greys and a gentle white light bled from the computer screen where he sat hunched over, his shoulders slouched and his spine curved in a way that suggested he’d been sitting there for hours staring at the monitor yet not really seeing it.

You didn’t knock. You hardly ever did. You offered the door a cursory nudge with your knuckles at most, but even that was rare. More often, you pressed it open the rest of the way and slipped inside if he hadn’t already been the one to draw you in first.

The creaking hinges might as well have been a greeting.

“Jinah was right…” you walked in, “You are brooding."

The mattress dipped beneath your weight with a muted groan, but still had he yet to acknowledge you. For a bated breath, nothing changed.

“What are you doing here?” He asked, swivelling his chair to face you. When his voice came to be, it came with the faintest brush of retraction and you were caught off guard by the low timbre.

Caught in a moment of process, you hadn’t replied, but your attention directed elsewhere, and Jinwoo followed your gaze to his desk where the clutter offered an unmistakable answer to his own question.

He understood immediately.

You wouldn’t have come all this way, at this hour by choice, not when he had made his distance so glaringly evident. He thought.

His eyes faltered on the cans of beer strewn across the surface, then moved to the one in his hand. A fleeting twitch of his fingers betrayed the desire to sweep them aside, out of your view, but he reined it in and tilted his head back, his throat working with practised ease as took a large gulp.

There had been no visible sign of intoxication on him, nothing in his posture to suggest the careless abandon of too much drink, and his movements, too, were steady and unshaken as he lowered it and settled it amongst the rest, making you pause because you knew something hadn't been quite right; you just couldn’t prove it beyond mere speculation.

“… You always had a bad sense of timing,” he said, blinking in short intervals until the distance in them fled, and he'd been something other than what was in front of him.

For some reason, discomfort slithered up your spine at the way he looked at you, the way he said that, as though a centipede had begun its crawl with a thousand legs prickling your nerves and seeking to burrow beneath your skin.

“I wasn’t planning on coming”, you confessed reluctantly, unable to voice what troubled you. Only that it had been marked in the fringe framing his eyes and in the finger tapping against the second-hand clock on his thigh.

“Then why did you?” he prodded.

“Because I gave you two weeks”

So you had known.

Part of him felt relieved, but the rest simmered with frustration. “So it’s not because Jinah called you?”

“She did, yes,” you admitted, “but I would have come around sooner or later”

All this time, Jinwoo believed he was successfully avoiding you when really you had only been allowing him that.

He stared at you.

You had always managed to complicate things for him and all along had he known your presence to be too much for him to resist, that a second in your company and he’d be bound to your every whim and tied to a mess of emotions he spent too long pretending he could move beyond. But in truth, he hadn’t because he knew he could not. Not really.

He lifted the can to his lips when your hand came upon his and stilled his movement. He smiled then, behind the metal. Though not with joy or relief or even bitterness, but because your touch aroused what he knew he was at present and perhaps for much of his life he would be undeserving of.

“You never ask,” He uttered in a breath almost missing, a breath nearly lost.

“Would you have answered?”

Fair enough.

He’d give you that.

Still… You never pried. Never pushed him into corners where he had to confront things he wasn’t ready to face, as if you perfected the balance of letting him come to you while at the same time knowing when to pull him by the ear and rein him in, and that frustrated him as it did attract him.

You took the can from him.

Although he hated it, he knew you were right. There was no use pretending anymore. No use keeping up the act. You had obviously caught on, and Jinwoo, astute and self-aware, knew better than to waste time on futility. He couldn’t push you away any further. And honestly, he no longer wanted to.

Annoying. His head fell against your stomach. Did you always have to be so... you?

“I would have answered,” he affirmed, “If only you had been the one to ask.”

Jinwoo’s hands encircled your wrists, his hold gentle and his touch almost pleading, like someone drowning alone for far too long. As if he had weathered shifting tides that pulled the shore from beneath him, endured squalls that reshaped the very landscape around him.

Like a man who clawed for the surface, desperate for the blaze of the sunlight in his eyes, for the agony of breath to tear through his lungs and burn the salt from his throat, he needed proof that he was still alive. That the scars and shattered bones, torn limbs and bloodied tears, all meant something.

Then again, it’s not like he gave you the chance to ask.

With your heart racing ahead of your breaths, your palm smoothed over his head. He hummed low in his throat, pressing closer to your abdomen. Close. Maybe too close. But not uncomfortable. Not awkward. You were still the same to him, in all the things that stirred his memories with fondness.

“I like the haircut, by the way,” you remarked, still threading gently through his hair, curling at the ends, scratching lightly at his scalp in a way you knew he liked.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said flatly, leaning back.

“I’m not, you look good. Like you aged overnight in a cool, ‘I’m a reliable older brother who has his act together and is single-parenting his teenage sister while somehow managing not to emotionally combust’ kind of way.”

You tried to ruffle his hair, but he caught your wrist, slightly irked. “That was oddly specific and sounded much like an insult”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing. You look the part of a mature young man, put together and all. Girls like that sort of thing.”

His grip tightened slightly in warning, not enough to hurt.

“Okay, okay,” you laughed, tugging your hand back. “But seriously, how many poor souls fainted?”

Jinwoo was unimpressed. “You’re the worst.”

“That’s not a number,” you replied in a sing-song.

He exhaled through his nose, the closest thing he ever got to a laugh when you really pushed him. “You are worse than Jinah”

“High praise,” you grinned.

Jinwoo dropped onto his bed without ceremony, back hitting the mattress with a soft thud, one arm tucked behind his head. “That wasn’t a compliment”

Oh, but it was. You sank into his chair.

Jinwoo turned onto his side to face you.

The fear that had gripped him each time death pressed so near he could taste it always ended the same: with a final prayer. For himself. For the ones he’d leave behind. His mother and father would never see the boy who had raised himself into a man worthy of their pride. Only Jinah would remain to walk a path alone, chasing dreams they might never witness unless some cruel mercy woke their mother from her endless sleep, or brought their father from wherever he had disappeared to.

And you… whom he had loved longer than he had dared to breathe it aloud.

Back when, in the muck and dust of your childhood, your small fists had burrowed into the sand, not knowing the handfuls you threw found their way to him. He could only stand there taking it, his eyes wide but in awe, as if the hole you dug were a hundred-dollar bill placed into the hands of a struggling man. He had known it then, even. Perhaps not as love entirely, but as something precious to him.

The tide rose and washed into the holes he carved out since the disaster of the double dungeon, and further, into the fissures time had hidden and never healed. The fear of losing you had kept him at bay as he grew because it was better to remain your friend than to gamble and lose what little joy life had given.

Jinwoo exhaled, long and dreary, letting the dolefulness fall with the breath, he called your name so softly, so full of care and affection.

“I missed you”

You swallowed hard, blinking like it might steady the way the room tilted around your heart.

It wasn’t fair!

The way he said things like that and didn’t seem to realise they landed like an arrow between your ribs. Like he could just drop a quiet I missed you after pushing you away and not expect the ground to shift under your feet and unsettle you.

But that was Jinwoo, wasn’t it? Never loud about what mattered, but never careless either.

“I missed you, too” you whispered.

And he smiled.

He smiled. His eyes fluttering close, lashes falling against the tops of his cheeks, and for once, there was no tension in his brow, no shadows carved beneath his eyes. Just the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing as sleep found him.

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