Burnout ⊗ Jeongchan

bonus ✘ Smaller and Smaller

Minsung content.

Can I get an awooga for the #weneedtherapy icons? I rewrote this chapter like ten times until finally gave them the ending I wanted. It's a long chapter, it's more simple writing, more a return to the original style of burnout unlike High Society but long nonetheless.

And I will not lie, I love this entire part so much.

Forewarning: Talks of physical abuse and domestic violence, suicide, self harm, trauma, basically, some spicy talk, it's a good time!

The Hub was always a damp place.

Beneath the proper glow of the city lights, the dark underworld had it's own luminance shining through the street lamps and off the reflective neon strips of the street lines. The headlights coursed bright, flying through the darkness of the midnight calling, etching into the back of eyelids and leaving the painted memories of the dark sweep over their lonely rooms when the forgotten and abandoned left for the houses they called home and the monsters they called family. Until then, this burrowing underground, weaved into the farthest corners of night, sung loud into the morning dawn, nothing of their small hearts growing smaller reigned.

The cars, those loud, booming machines which clapped like thunder, screaming like wails, pounding adrenaline into their hearts as the slamming of the steering wheels cried 'See us'. The growling, groaning, feasting on the fears of the phobic hearts until their minds went catatonic with fear of what those minds could possibly do. What they could possibly become, what damage they could cause when their hoods bent and folded around street lamps. Tied around leashes staples to the ground, this was the exodus of the creatures from their handcuffs to spark up the ignitions. The cars, their engines, purred like desiring whimpers in his eardrums. They purred and crooned down to his spine, to the hand which carded over the smooth metal fenders he passed by.

This is home.

In a world where he never had one to called his own, this, the shop, was his home, and the crew he loved? They were his family.

He climbed atop the roof of the car, his eyes narrowing as he scanned over the subjects crowding beneath him.

The jacket slipped off his bare shoulders as he wiped the light coating of sweat from his huffing chest, the fuzzy fabric tickling into the cropped arms of his midnight halter top and the buckled straps which banded across his bare skin digging deep into him whenever he moved his arms. He fumbled with the silver necklaces decorating his neck, fingers tangling and hands fidgeting with their weight to lay them evenly on his collarbones as his eyes matched the sweeping motion he forced those chains to fly through. He gulped down the vibrations of the engines, throat swallowing the harsh abrasions of the filthy air down to his gut.

Someone shouted up to him, "Han! Get off my car!"

"One moment, I'm trying to see something," Jisung waved them off as he looked over the heads bobbing in the dark. He glanced down to the street racer standing on the ground below him, eyebrow quirking at the bleached blonde hair of the folded hands on her hips; The irritatated Mom stance he recognized from all his years acting as a disappointment to Changbin and Chan while he navigated the strange maze of growing up. With a light hum recognizing her as a friend of Hyunjin's they had raced with before, he questioned, "Have you or your crew seen any members of the King's crew? I'm trying to find them.