Highway to your Heart || Haechan ||

two

"I'm back~"

The empty apartment greeted Iseul when she returned from visiting her parents in the States as her roommate was probably out eating hotpot again.

Dragging her bags over to the room she had been staying in for the past two years the girl sighed at the thought of summer vacation ending soon and their third year in university starting.

Iseul had been accepted to the university in Seoul and moved into a rented apartment with her best friend as they both left their home countries to study abroad.

Renjun and her go way back until elementary school first year when they became letter pals trough a project connecting schools.

Thanks to the Chinese boy placing a Moomin sticker on the envelope of his letter the two basically found soulmates in one another.

Letters turned into emails, then into messages and calls that eventually lead to the two kids meeting a few years later.

Iseul's mother who is a writer and works from home had the idea first to visit the Huangs, which ended up the becoming a yearly routine for mother-daughter pair.

The two families became close as Renjun was living in an area where Korean language was also spoken so the parents could easily converse too.

The two kids would be taken on short trips all over china during those summer vacations and Iseul's mother grew to care for Renjun like her own son.

Iseul and him were both only children and quite introverted so the other's presence substituted as a sibling, their platonic relationship only getting stronger as the years passed and the two easily getting mistaken for siblings as well.

There was no doubt when the two requested to live together after moving to Seoul and their parents were actually glad both had someone there to rely on.

The entrance door opened before the rustling of plastic bags was heard from the kitchen along with a male voice.

"I bought us hotpot so get out once you've changed your clothes!"

"How can you be sure it's me and not a burglar?"

"No other person I know wears mismatched pastel purple and blue high tops, especially not ones custom made by me."

The girl giggled and hugged her bestie before taking a seat at the table and catching up on everything that happened during their vacations.

"Did you see the announcement about the upcoming writing contest?"

"Mhmm~ I was thinking about submitting one of the scripts I wrote as a draft for the theater plays that haven't been reviewed yet."

Renjun nodded knowing the amount of works the girl wrote alone in the past few years from which so far only three got chosen to be showed on the big stage.

He himself was sometimes painting scenes from her works out of boredom and had read trough all of her scripts, even the ones written about themselves had somehow turned out to be more interesting than the reality had felt like.

Iseul was talented in writing and creating scenarios in her work that were able to touch people's hearts, her storytelling skills inherited from her mother's side.

Her scripts always ending up on the table of the theater department's head when choosing their year end play, her name easily becoming well known around their university.

This opportunity though would open the doors to let her works be presented outside of their campus and for a bigger audience, but that the girl still wasn't aware of.

In the following weeks she let herself be convinced by Renjun and handed over a script along with her application paper, not paying too much attention to the rest of the contest until the results were out.

It was only when she received a mail stating that her piece was in the top five that the girl nearly fell off her chair after reading the title of her submitted script - Highway to your heart.

Screeching in shock she immediately went to her bookshelf and pulled out a pile of identical binders hoping that she was mistaken, but seeing the said script missing and her intended one still there made her cry out in despair.

"What happened?!"

"I submitted the wrong script! How could this happen when I know I left it on the top!?"

"You seriously didn't check what was in your binder before you submitted it?"

"Because I was sure it was the right thing! How even did that one accidentally get to the jury?!"

Renjun looked over to the screen and let out a quiet oh when he read just which piece it was that made her so panicked.

"Oh?"

"Well, you see, I was bored and was looking for inspiration on what to paint..."

"Huang Renjun! My pathetic love story is now out there for everyone to read because of you!" She whined as she threw her body on the bed in embarrassment.

"Oh stop it! That was one of your best works, plus you didn't use your own names and changed up the plot a bit too so nobody would know.

Besides, the only person being able to possibly make a connection is Jisung as he is also part of the story, but we both know he won't tattle."

"I swear that if anything goes wrong I'll immediately book a flight and go back to the States where nobody could find me."

"Sure. Just be glad that you decided to change the author of all scripts to your Korean name and didn't keep it as Alice."

"Right... and it's already too late anyways so all I can hope is that I get eliminated in the next round."