"Why did you do this? Were we not enough for you?"
"I was selfish and you just got caught up in it!"
In which the group ATEEZ disbands because of a mysterious incident. This story follows the lives of the members after disbandment.
Mors non est fin...
Jung Wooyoung was many things. A singer, a dancer, a lover, a cheater, a liar, a puppet, a cook, an artist. Many things. Many parts, many costumes, many masks, many faces, many personalities.
Do you remember those 'panic attacks' we thought he suffered with? Well, to understand exactly what they are we would have to go back to a few months before Hongjoong messed everything up.
Wooyoung was always a wild soul. He never settled down or stuck with anything for too long. This is why I was so surprised when he stuck with the group for 8 whole years. Proud, that's the word. I was proud that he'd finally got his shit together.
His afflictions started just after I was beginning to suspect something was going on, a few months into our relationship. Everything was going smoothly. Wooyoung wasn't cheating...as much. San was warming up to us and I was happy. And then, the nightmares started.
Randomly, he would just wake up screaming, flailing. Hands around his throat. He wouldn't tell us what they were about. He couldn't tell us. If he tried, for a couple of days after, the nightmares would just get worse.
A little time (after the nightmares started) had passed. It was then that he would just randomly start spacing out and completely remove himself from reality. When we looked it up, it seemed like he was disassociating but it also said he was dying so we took it with a grain of salt. Thinking back on it now the irony is absolutely hilarious.
He became distant, secretive even more so and it pissed San off. They argued every time Wooyoung would come home at 2-3 in the morning, especially if we had shows or appearances that day. Hongjoong wasn't doing it and Seongwha was caught up with his own issues. I was grateful at the time. It seemed like the only thing that was keeping us together as a group, as friends, as a family was the very thing working so hard to tear us apart.
Then again, we'd been on the rocks for a while. Our family dynamic hadn't been the best but we'd been working on it. So it didn't really take much to break us apart, piece by piece. Like a poison, corroding the delicate balance oh so slowly. One of those poisons that you didn't notice was killing you. You didn't even think about the possibility that you'd been poisoned. You blamed yourself and the people around you, but somehow missing all the obvious hints and clues to who exactly did it.
The perfect murder.
And poor us, we were the chosen victims.
Chosen. That word always rubbed me the wrong way. Especially in this context. I would say I didn't know why we were chosen but then I would be lying. We'd all done something unforgivable in that damned psychopath's eyes and paid the price for it. For us, judgment day had finally come.
For Wooyoung, his price was the loss of his free will. He didn't get to make his own choices based on his own desires, only what he wanted. He now lived only to please. Something as trivial as choosing wanted he wanted to eat. If he tried to against what he wanted Wooyoung would "disassociate". That's what it looked like at least.
For a minute or two, Wooyoung was completely removed from this earthly plane and was subjected to what I could only call his personalized hell. Do you know how those Google ads pop up based on your searches? Think of the ads as a room or a space and the searches as Wooyoung's worst fears. Time passed differently down there than it did up here, it's only natural (even though there's nothing natural about this). So 2 minutes up here, to us was 2 years or 200 years depending on what he did.
Quite fitting, I suppose. I feel bad for my childhood friend of course. But that doesn't mean he didn't deserve it.
Someone like Wooyoung—you wouldn't think of him as a mean drunk. All the times he was 'drunk' on camera were fake. The company couldn't risk it.
It happened once but once was enough. He'd been drinking for a couple of hours at a bar and came back to the dorm absolutely shitfaced. San, being the good boyfriend he tried to be, waited up for him and I stayed up as well but only because I was promised food. (As I absolutely should. My time does not come for free.)
He tried to help the stumbling Wooyoung to the couch so he could sober up but Wooyoung pushed him off and backhanded him into the wall. I remember being so shocked, so absolutely disgusted, that I didn't even notice that his eyes seemed to glow a malevolent red before he started to cry. It never happened again but Wooyoung never explicitly apologized for it.
So no, I don't exactly feel bad for him because, well, karma's a bitch. Plus, it was due time he felt the consequences of his actions.
Don't you think?
Sincerely, #8975
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