At twenty-four years old, Yeonjun celebrates his second wedding anniversary. Three days later, he meets Soobin.
Original source- published by overflow on ao3
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
A few days later, and Soobin has returned to his seat at Juwon's kitchen table, eating Juwon's food and using Juwon's wifi. Yeonjun sits at his side, scribbling in illegible cursive. He leans on Soobin's shoulder as he eyes his laptop screen.
"You don't need a comma there," Yeonjun says. Embroidery became an official subject in girls' schools, and one method for women to achieve financial independence in the Joseon Dynasty.
"Where?"
"Actually, the whole sentence is kind of..." Yeonjun tugs the laptop closer, fixes it himself. It should be two sentences, really.
"You're so smart," Soobin says, scratching the back of Yeonjun's head.
"For fixing some grammar?" Yeonjun needs to be less self-deprecating, if it makes Soobin think he needs to be complimented on something so trivial.
"I just feel like you know everything about writing. You're the reason I get A's on all my essays now."
"That's not true. The ideas are all yours."
"My ideas were getting C's before you cleaned them up. Ideas are useless if you can't communicate them, and... You make everything perfect." His eyes are wide, earnest.
"Details are important to me," Yeonjun says, looking away. It's perhaps the only part of himself that survived after he presented. The effort that he once poured into word choice for the student newspaper he now reserved for home decor decisions. Instead of hunching over his laptop, neurotically editing a poem he plans to submit to a literary magazine, he leans over a stove, monitoring the heat to make sure his sauce doesn't break. "You really should do something with your writing," Soobin says. "Try to get your work published again. Join a writer's group, maybe try freelancing or something."
"I don't know."
"I'm serious. You have the time, and it's not going to get any easier. Especially if..." Soo trails off, and Yeonjun squeezes his eyes shut. If a baby comes, it's over. He won't have dreams after that.
"You just need to do something for yourself."
It's not that Yeonjun hasn't been writing. Since he's been spending time with Soobin, he has been opening up his notebook, jotting down thoughts. He's been writing scenes for characters he doesn't know yet, pretty descriptions of nature and faces. He has a couple of images in mind for a story but not much of a plot. Nothing but beautiful, useless sentences — a flower-lined path leading nowhere.
He needs to put some real work into his writing if he wants to do anything worthwhile. He needs to get organized, water his ideas until they grow into something he can harvest, but the idea is uncomfortable. It's so much easier to do things for others; their disappointment would be much easier to bear than his own. An editing job — maybe Yeonjun could handle that. But if he opened up his own mind too wide, who knows what might spill out? Who knows if there would be anything at all?
