invalidater

[invalidater]

eviljongho​:

ROWOON as Chae Hyun-Seung She Would Never Know (2021)

[invalidater]

96ymh​:

his free hand pushes the sketchbook forwards until it's pressed up against junjae's arm, the traces of an unmistakable face etched onto the paper. "look. it's ruined now that i've lost my reference. i'll never draw again."

the first thing junjae feels when he’s stirring from his sleep is the warmth of the sunlight streaming in. there’s the soft sound of someone’s voice in the background, but junjae’s too groggy to decipher the words being spoken and the sheets he’s nestled in are a little too comfortable to get out of just yet. then there’s a faint whiff of someone familiar in the air – it smells like old books and burning eucalyptus, familiarity and yearning. 

junjae opens his eyes and almost instantly, a stupid, shit-eating grin takes over. there’s a slow, growing warmth blooming in his heart as he’s met with the unmistakable sight of minhyuk on the bed, junjae’s shirt pulled over his lean frame. it takes him a few seconds to register what minhyuk’s doing, but it’s enough to shake whatever sleepiness junjae had left in him out. ignoring his grumbles, junjae sits up eagerly, peering over at the sketchbook pressed up against his arm. 

“what are you talking about? go right back to it, i’ll pose for you however you like. i’m known to be a great model, you know. dashing prince charming looks and all. you can draw me like one of your french girls, i won’t mind.” he runs his fingers through his hair, tousling them in an attempt to flatten out his bedhead, before shooting minhyuk a wink. 

then he does a quick scan of the room around him. there’s a mirror near them, and a clock signalling that it’s 8.36am. it’s morning, junjae realises. morning and i’m still here with him. the shit-eating grin that was already on his face can’t help but grow a little wider, as the memories of last night come rushing in – minhyuk agreeing for the first time, albeit while grumbling, to let the taller stay after another one of their nights together. strange, really. staying the night isn’t usually more than a minor convenience for junjae, but he can’t help but put some kind of special meaning behind this particular morning, especially when the reflection greeting him in the mirror is one that’s been on his mind for a while, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. 

he fidgets with his fingers a little, thoughts jumbled up in his mind as he tries to ignore the obvious message behind his feelings. he looks back up at minhyuk, who’s back to being absorbed in his sketchbook. “so... breakfast?” 

[invalidater]

MOTIF: a playlist.

tracklist: stolen moments - cautious clay / stupidfreak - juice / plus - peach tree rascals / while we’re young - jhené aiko / i didn’t realise how empty my bed was until you left - roderick porter / wicked games - kiana ledé / waste - brockhampton / love affair - umi / closer - kid travis / don’t waste it - august 08 / stranger - dijon / II. shadows - childish gambino / if only for tonight - vacation manor / sex - the 1975 / conceited - sza

'cause i think that loneliness would serve us well / it's all real enough to know that you won't understand me / he said i belong in a place / where the love comes cheap / and the drugs come free / and i get my validation / i just wanna feel something / i just wanna feel your skin / baby, while we're young / i think we should do something crazy / like say, "fuck everyone" / and just run away from the daily routine / damn, i don't even know how to feel / i can't even tell what's real / i just want you to come chill / wonder who you are without all the games / was i more than it's worth / or will you see my name and i'll fade? / and i just want a good time / but am i wrong for that? no / i'll pull up quick if you need me / and if you say so / don't need to be your baby, don't need no labels / i know my side, i know my place / i know how to lay low / long as you say so / what if you change? / and look at me like i'm a stranger? / oh, what if i don't change? / what if i feel like this forever, is forever now? / and if i'm dead to the world, what you gon' do? what you gon' do? / i want to drive far away with you / i know that it's nothing new, but we feel it every time / for all my life, i felt like my hands were tied / i'm dying to feel alive if only for tonight / and i'm not trying to stop you, love / if we're gonna do anything we might as well just fuck / i don't like nobody, i don't feel guilty about it / i just heard your opinion, i could've done without it

@mgufm, 10.

[invalidater]

44m4​:

snap back to reality (there goes gravity) @invalidater

since the night of the dinner, everything has seemed so still. completely, corpse-like, still. everywhere muyeol turns, everyone looks frozen, posed like a photograph of a tragedy without fixing. the small town caught in a single critical moment. it’s so morbid that it would make the perfect picture. and maybe if muyeol thought to move a single muscle in the whole hour he’s been sitting with junjae, maybe he could take that picture. then, maybe that dinner wouldn’t have been for nothing. maybe he would have something to show for it, something to put up on that blank white exhibit wall. 

the exhibit is days away. he still hasn’t told his father.

as it is, muyeol sits unmoving, still as one of the hundred photographs strewn across the table in front of him. he stares at his hand, a camera uselessly slung around his neck. the expression he wears is long and dark, the look in his eyes opaque and hard. he’s been flaking on his friend and missing marked dates on his calendar. nothing junjae hasn’t seen from him before, surely, but nothing like the helpful and reliable friend muyeol has been to him in recent memory. and maybe if muyeol didn’t arrive so late to the having-friends party then maybe he would have said something like sorry. maybe he would have remembered that he trusts junjae—maybe not with the truth, but with himself. “what?” muyeol looks up, “did you say something?”

there are just five days left till the fall exhibition.

junjae feels the deadline looming over him like a ticking time bomb, anxiety slowly gnawing at the back at his mind as he takes winding paths down the corridors of mugunghwa university just to avoid the professors who he knows has been searching for muyeol and him incessantly for an update on the progress of their exhibition. normally, this wouldn’t faze him. but this exhibition isn’t just any old exhibition – it’s one him and muyeol are working on together. and muyeol isn’t just any old person – it’s one of the few people junjae fully trusts and cares about. hell, junjae hates labels, and he’d never admit this to anyone, but muyeol might just be the closest thing to a best friend he has in this godforsaken town. 

so he can’t just ignore the existence of this exhibition that muyeol and him are supposed to be working on, not after muyeol had been the one to persuade him to enter with him. not when junjae knows muyeol’s the one who has more to lose if it all goes to pieces and they turn up with nothing to present. and certainly not when muyeol’s sitting in front of him, glassy-eyed and in a daze yet again. junjae knows this look – he’s in a slump. and to be honest, he doesn’t blame him. the whole debacle with the fire isn’t something easy to move past, and certainly not for the detective’s son. but junjae can’t just stand aside and watch everything else rise up in flames - so he just clicks his tongue impatiently, and attempts to get his friend’s attention again. 

“yes, i did. for the past ten minutes, in fact... have you been listening to anything i’ve said?” junjae lets out a loud sigh. “do you wanna take a walk? or is there anywhere that could give you some inspiration, maybe? you know i hate to rush you... but the exhibition’s in five days, muyeol. we’re going to turn up with an empty wall at this rate... maybe i can contribute a selfie. or multiple? we could just present a hundred photographs of me, that sounds better than nothing.”

[invalidater]

for @wingedvictor​.

it’s a well-known fact that junjae’s not the most dedicated team player – he barely shows up for soccer practice, and when he does, he’s late half the time. jisoo was no big fan of his, and honestly, junjae knows at the back of his mind that minjun probably isn’t either. 

not that it fazes him. what’s important is that junjae likes his new soccer captain much more, regardless of what he thinks of him. minjun doesn’t nag at junjae the way jisoo used to, doesn’t mind when junjae saunters into the soccer field thirty minutes after warm-ups have ended, and most importantly - never says anything about junjae’s behaviour to the school. so even though junjae’s still reeling from the shock of his ex-captain’s death, uncomfortable with the knowledge that someone he knew had passed away in this very campus, he can’t deny the fact that he’s enjoying the soccer team’s new leadership style much more now.

the cherry on top lands right in the palm of his hand when he walks into the band’s practice room, fifteen minutes after practice has ended. here’s the scene he’s met with: two esteemed keepers of mugunghwa with their clothes off, one taken and the other who just so happens to be the new captain of the howlites. interesting, junjae thinks, as he shuts the door slowly after the shocked faces of miyoung and minjun are recorded in his mind. 

call him despicable, but junjae would do anything to benefit him. so he keeps mum about what he sees, knowing that this information is worth much more than a moment of gossip spread in the hallways. and after soccer practice the next day, he stays back in the locker room, casually tapping away at his phone while he waits for his beloved captain to walk in. “hey cap!” he cheerfully waves. “thought that you and i might have some things to discuss.”

[invalidater]

for @plctwists.

junjae remembers that night vividly.

steam rising up in billows as the building went up in flames. eyes wide open, jaw tightly locked as he’d followed the nauseating scent of smoke to the source of the fire from across the campus. for a moment, everything had seemed so unreal, as if he was just having a bad trip. then the sharp screams for help and echoes of an ambulance siren pierced through the air, and he’s snapped out of his trance. 

the next day, he hears whispering in the corridors. jisoo is dead, they say. mina was with him. he almost doesn’t believe them – or maybe he doesn’t want to. mugunghwa was supposed to be a refuge, a quaint little town to bide time by. not a murder scene steps away from his own room.

it would be easier for him to dissociate from everything if not for the fact that he knew all three of the victims involved in the accident. and of the three of them, he’s known kim mina, second year painting major - and hometown friend of han junjae, the longest. 

only a few people in mugunghwa know about junjae’s past in seoul – he’d moved here to escape from it, after all. kim mina was one of the few pieces of his past that had travelled with him to this small town, someone he knew he could find refuge in on nights when it’s painfully obvious that junjae doesn’t truly belong to this town. 

so when he gets the phone call, he doesn’t hesitate to say yes. he doesn’t even need to think, just says the same three words he always utters whenever she drops him a call: i’ll be there.

he meets her at the gate of mugunghwa twenty minutes later, a bottle of tequila in hand, a pack of cigarettes and his phone in his back pocket, and nothing else. the drive to seoul is filled with manic laughter as the two of them share morbid jokes that probably wouldn’t be regarded as jokes if they were overheard. they don’t talk about the fire - there’s an unspoken understanding between them that neither of them wants to think about that right now.

then they arrive at the club, and junjae doesn’t typically get shit drunk so fast, but he hasn’t spent alone time with mina for a long time, especially not since she’d gotten together with his own captain, jisoo (who’s now dead, a little voice at the back of his mind whispers). 

junjae doesn’t want to think about it, so he drinks. and under the pulsating lights of the club and with the thrill of being back in the place he feels most at home at, mina suddenly seems more ethereal than usual. it’s strange, really - he’s always thought she’s pretty, but there must be something in the air in the club tonight, because it’s as if he’s being magnetically pulled in closer towards her.

so he tugs her in for an impulsive kiss, loses himself in her for a few seconds. and when he pulls away, eyes unfocused, he asks belatedly. “is this okay?” 

[invalidater]

ISSUES: a moodboard for han junjae.

relationships built as fragile as houses of cards / placing bets you can’t afford / going all-in even when there are zero odds of winning / deep puffs of a cigarette at the narrow alleyway behind a raging club / a ten step skincare routine taught by an ex-girlfriend / speeding through the night in daddy’s stolen sports car / the sound of a sleek record player and a low voice gently singing reverberating through the room / crashing into a pole and getting out of the car with crazed laughter, adrenaline pumping through your veins / flickering lights in the distance as the blare of the police sirens grow louder / one-way tickets to tokyo, berlin, new york with no itineraries planned, no hotels booked, and no care in the world

@mgufm, 10.

[invalidater]

for @01cms.

if there's one thing junjae doesn’t care about, it would be his studies. well – technically, there are so many things junjae doesn’t care about, maybe it would be easier to list what he actually gives a shit about. for starters, he cares about whether his hair is nicely coiffed up in the morning before he leaves the house, and whether he has enough cash to cover yet another spontaneous trip back to seoul.

what he does not care about, is the growing pile of ‘F’s he’s gotten on his past ten assignments for prof im’s legal environment of business class. i mean, just hearing the name of the class itself already threatens to trigger a yawn from junjae. (who the hell cares about the legal environment of business?) 

so when prof im calls junjae into his office with a stern expression, pointing forcefully at the red ink circled multiple times around the large ‘F’ on junjae’s latest paper, all junjae cares about as he stares lackadaisically at the clock on prof im’s wall is when the old man’s lecture would finally end. 

“... out of her kindness and goodwill, hayoung has agreed to tutor you.” prof im looks up from his laptop, and his smile quickly turns into a frown once again. “HAN JUNJAE! are you even listening?” junjae snaps out of his daze, gaze back on prof im. “huh? sorry prof, what did you say?”

all prof im can do is let out another sigh of exasperation. “friday. 10.30am. meet choi hayoung in the library.” junjae furrows his eyebrows. “who the hell is choi hayoung?”

... friday, 10.45am.

junjae is fifteen minutes late for his tutoring session - but he considers it a win. after all, it’s a wonder that he managed to remember (and get the motivation to attend) this appointment in the first place. to be honest, he couldn’t give a flying fuck about improving his grades for this class – but prof im had threatened to raise the issue of junjae’s incredibly paltry gpa to the dean, and junjae couldn’t afford that. he’d already met the dean once this semester, and that was one time too many. 

so here he is, in mugunghwa university’s library, the one place in the campus he can count on one hand the number of times he’s been in the past three years he’s been at mugunghwa. he sees a girl sitting at a desk at a corner, eyebrows knitted into a frown as she types away on her laptop. as he walks closer, a faint inkling of familiarity washes over him - he must’ve seen her once or twice in prof im’s class, he presumes. well, in the few times he’d attended prof im’s classes, anyway. 

“hey, are you hayoung?” he puts on his signature smoulder. “junjae here. heard you’re gonna be tutoring me?” he gives her a look up and down, and then an incredibly annoying cocky smile. “hm, it might not be too bad to have to see you every week after all.”

[invalidater]

hello! i’m yul, 21, she/her and here is my beloved dirtbag junjae!!! i haven’t joined a tumblr rp in a really really long time so pardon my rusty writing. but i love a good murder mystery and i’m very excited to get to know all of you! (hopefully you are too?) i’ve done up junjae’s about and bio here but i’ll include a tl;dr about him under the cut as well! i haven’t gotten a plots page up yet but i’d love to brainstorm! leave a like or anything if you’d like to chat and i’ll get back to u asap. yes!!!!!! i have dc so if u prefer that feel free to msg me anytime at Childe#8698! 

han junjae, third year photography + business administration student, absolute idiot

comes from a wealthy background - raised in gangnam, he’s the second son of the han family, they own the successful tech firm hanrang tech

he has an older brother who’s the golden child and set to be the next chairman, meanwhile his parents never paid much attention to him bc his older brother already fulfilled all the criteria they need from a child. he doesn’t really mind tho cuz that means he’s not subject to the same expectations they hold his brother to and he can do whatever he wants (just kidding he’s a grade a attention seeker. see next point)

got shipped off to mugunghwa after he stole his older brother’s girlfriend for the lolz and kinda ruined his relationship with his family - not that it was great in the first place

sleeps his way through class, copying his answers from others. has probably the crappiest gpa in mugunghwa. it’s honestly a wonder how he made it in in the first place - he chose his majors on a whim and isn’t particularly passionate about anything. to date, the portfolio that helped him get into mugunghwa still contains the best photos he’s ever taken (and he’s satisfied with that tbh, he has no intention of pushing himself to improve). now he does the bare minimum for every assignment. he’s the type of guy you would pray to never get in ur group bc he would not gaf about helping

he’s used to living life lavishly but ever since he moved to mugunghwa he’s had to grapple with no longer having a bank account with seemingly unlimited funds to turn to (his father cut him off, only his mother sends a small amount every month now). so you’ll see him talking big like “hmm i feel like having steak today” and getting chased out of the restaurant when the cashier realises he doesn’t have enough to pay. he’s blacklisted from at least 5 restaurants in mugunghwa for this reason lol

doesn’t really care about much, will promise you something and immediately break it 20 seconds later. messed up moral compass tbh, he’ll do anything to have a good time

member of the howlites (but he skips practice all the time so he’s on the verge of getting kicked out tbh) and lead singer of miss tate (ya he likes rock music... is a little too relaxed about the band, which probably gets on the other members’ nerves?) 

he’s unabashedly confident about everything, even things he’s obviously crap about. would flirt with anyone and everyone within a 50-metre radius regardless of what he thinks of them/they think of him. knows how to manipulate things to get what he wants but he’s also an idiot so this isn’t necessarily foolproof since most people manage to see past his tricks

a serial clubber. if there’s one complaint jj has about the small town of mugunghwa, it’d be that it doesn’t have as great of a nightlife scene as itaewon. he wants to own a club in the future lol (who knows how realistic of a goal that is given his lack of business acumen - or common sense)

sorry this tl;dr ended up being too long after all

[invalidater]

𝘙𝘰𝘸𝘰𝘰𝘯 𝐱 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘇𝗲

[invalidater]

Can you at least pretend to care?

[invalidater]

junjae on why he stole his brother’s girlfriend