Meridian ◈ Seungjin

21 ◈ Forever to Repair

"You're friends with Jisung?"

Hyunjin interrogated as he spun the old Rubik's Cube in his hand, his fingers aligning with the rainbowed hues stickered to the rectangular outsides and jarring the plastic pieces together with creaking groans in protest of their rotations. Although they had been designed, specifically created, formulated to be flipped and rotated for it's purpose as a common toy, the cube argued with his commands. He asked it to move, and it stuck. He asked it to switch, and it stayed. As if the cube had a mind of it's own, the individual pieces were as stubborn as his own insolent protests fighting against any person's imposing on his being. Teachers, police, even Seungmin sitting across the way from him at the provided dorm room desk in the dim lighting of the room.

Seungmin hardly turned to look at him. He only offered a sigh full of harsh disappointment, a sharpened glare narrowing in the vampire's direction slumped against the side of his mattress on the floor. His pen thumped against the top of the desk, the heavy tip arguing with his harsh reluctance towards the other. Hyunjin spotted his toes wiggling as they were folded underneath him, most likely with an irritation. Finally, he bit, "Obviously."

Hyunjin stopped spinning the Rubik's Cube, coming to hold it's jagged edges in the palms of his hands as carefully as one held a football. The colors sprinkled under his touch; White as purity, blue as royalty, yellow as loyalty, green as clarity, orange as lonely, and red. Red for the spilled blood for skin caught in the plastic grooves as he turned the dial like figure, red for the spilled blood dripping along victim's throats and slashing at their unequivocally final frustration. Somewhere, he had seen that look. Somewhere recently. As he began to peel off a sundrop sticker, he continued his investigation, "How much do you know about someone named Felix?"

"Besides he transferred here recently from the edge of the world, he and Jisung used to be an item, and that they had a rather bitter break up, I know nothing," Seungmin said rather plainly. Above all else, he seemed disinterested in the topic. Regardless of if it had surrounded his friend or not, the pile of homework sat half completed in front of him seemed to take more precedence in his mind than the most recent gossip of his friend and roommate Jisung. As if they never had the conversation topic brought up, he went back to the work; His pen scratching against the surface of the table, scribbling his thoughts, echoing the nouns in his mind to verbs on the front cover of the worksheet.

Hyunjin set the Rubik's cube on the carpeted floor next to him. He wondered, "Do you know why they split?"

"Jisung never mentioned,' Seungmin confided, though it sounded more as if he were attempting to defend himself from an accusatory statement. His eyes dropped, "He never bothered to tell me. So I don't concern myself with it."

"You two are friends," Hyunjin mindlessly retorted. Whether intentionally or not, he noted the way his tone accused in the way Seungmin assumed he did.

"Does he need to tell me everything because of that?" Seungmin didn't look up from his homework as he spat, "Have you told your friends what you've done?"

Hyunjin sealed his lips shut. He let his eyebrows furrow, his nose scrunch into wrinkles, his features contort with an irked protest against a statement he knew he couldn't win. No, his friends didn't know about what he did; They don't know he was Seungmin's attacker, they didn't know he was thirsting for a forbidden ichor persecuable should he even lay his eyes on it, they didn't know about his and Seungmin's deal, they didn't know about the latter's obsession to find a serial killer hooking Hyunjin into an inescapable deathwish. They didn't know. As Seungmin fiddled with the bandage plastered to the inside of his wrist, his fingers glossing over the bite mark along his wrists still irritated with a discomfort, they didn't know. They knew none of it, and he refused to speak a word.