Sweet (not) Home || Lee Eun-Hyuk

Prologue: It's All Red

"Oh fuck it's not coming out."

"What do you mean it's not coming out?"

"What do you mean what do I mean? I mean it's not coming out!"

The teenager rushed into the bathroom, nearly knocking over his roommate.

"Maybe you're just not scrubbing hard enough," he reasoned as he began running water through his hair. 

"Not scrubbing hard enough?" His roommate echoed, dumbfounded. "It looks like I committed a mass murder in our bathroom and you think I wasn't scrubbing enough?"

Apollo glanced at the girl, whose hands and face were covered in red liquid, before turning back to his own reflection. "...Yes."

Lilith stepped harshly on his foot with her boot.

"Ow!" He whipped around to face her, hands suddenly dropped to his sides. "Why?"

"Why?" She stared at him incredulously. He only shrugged. Lilith groaned before rubbing her temples. "I moved in with an actual idiot."

"Hey-"

"Where's the box?" She moved away from him to shift through the drawers and cabinets that littered the small room.

"What box?" He shook his shampoo bottle in a final effort to remove the red dye from his hair. The temporary red that was supposed to be temporary and come out with one wash because it was temporary.

"Stop talking."

"You asked."

She fell silent as she retrieved one of the several boxes Apollo had bought one week prior. The room was filled only with the sound of running water (which their poor neighbors surely appreciated) as she read everything on it.

"Apollo," she spoke up sternly.

He zipped his lips as a response to her previous comment.

"Apollo!"

He jumped at her tone. "God, what?"

She ignored his attitude as she walked towards him, box in hand. "Where the fuck did you see temporary on this box?" Her voice rose as he snatched the object from her.

"What do you mean?"

"Ask me that again I swear to God."

He rolled his eyes as he looked at the front of the box. "I'll stop asking when you start giving me context."

"The context is you're an idiot who just bought regular hair dye and permanently dyed our heads ketchup red."

Apollo's eyes widened as he flipped the box around. "What the hell? I swear this was with all the temporary dye," his voice rose with hers.

Lilith scoffed. "With all the temporary dye? You didn't even look at the fucking box?"

"No, I didn't look at the fucking box it was surrounded by temporary hair dye!"

"We put this in our hair and you didn't even think to double-check what you grabbed?" Water poured down her arm as she grabbed a fistful of her hair. "Do you know how stupid we look?"

"Yes I know how stupid we look I'm a barista! They're gonna kill me!"

The girl laughed dryly before grabbing the small box of dye from his hold and chucking it into the trash. "Don't come crying to me about it," she jabbed a finger into his chest. "You're the one who bought put this shit in our hair without looking at the box."

Silence took over the room again as Apollo finally shut off the water, leaving the two to maul over what they had done.

Realistically, it wasn't the end of the world. Apollo had the nicest boss in the world who would probably let him get away with it. Lilith was working as a choreographer that worked with teens who would think of it as cool. It wasn't the serious aspects of their lives that were the problem. It was their reputations at their universities and the way their families would look at them when they put pictures online that were going to kill them.

It would be hard to tell their families to kiss their asses by posting about how great their life was in Korea when it looked like they poured a bottle of hot sauce in each other's hair.

And when they forgot to pay their electricity bill the first week so the landlord forced them to live a day without their electricity on.

Or when Lilith posted a picture without seeing the four empty packages of ramen noodles in the background... which were only there because neither of the roommates got paid for the first two weeks they had lived there.

Or- Well, you get the point.

Every day it was proving harder for the pair to convince their parents (and themselves, but they would never admit it) that it was the right idea to move to Korea together at only nineteen. In their defense, they spent an entire month thinking the plan through. That is a lot of time when you look at it from the perspective of a teenager.

But when all was said in done, Lilith knew Korean from Duolingo and all of the K-dramas she watched, Apollo had a dream about it once, and the two of them had enough money (and disdain for their families) saved up to make the move.

Lilith sighed before stepping around her roommate to start dinner. "You're cleaning this shit up."