until the end of time | seungjoo

:𝔰𝔦𝔵:

Jooyeon had his blood drawn, and Seungmin couldn't wait for him to finish. It's been a few days since their talk about home, and they both seemed relieved. Really.

The moment Seungmin saw his smile the next day, he giggled, he was glad it was over, and now he couldn't take being alone without him for even a second, so peeking through the window to the room, he tried his best to see if Jooyeon was still sitting on the uncomfortable black chair that would always sticks to the skin, but he was too short to see anything. Still, he could hear some voices coming from the room, so attaching his ear to the door, he made it his goal to find out if he was there.

"You should call her family," he heard, and squinting his eyes (as if it were to help him hear better), he pressed himself harder against the door. "It was quite unexpected."

He didn't understand anything; who they were talking about and what happened, but it didn't help him grasp if Jooyeon was in the room.

"Died at 4:57 before noon, right?" A man uttered, and Seungmin's eyes widened. Someone died?

"Yes."

"Should I order the Sister to call her family or will you do that, Sir?"

Having enough, Seungmin ran away from the place. Jooyeon wasn't inside. Oh, he definitely wasn't there, not even near.

He found himself getting away from door 34 as quickly as possible and he even bumped into someone.

It was weird hearing about death in a place like a hospital—how ironic, but that was how it worked.

Being there he was never met with anyone speaking aloud about being closer to death, or even about suffering from any illnesses. It was a taboo topic no one dared to broach.

It was very absurd considering the fact that in reality, it was simply the reason why they were all gathered there.

"Where were you?" Jooyeon asked, opening the room to Seungmin's room. There was a smile on his lips, and as he squinted his eyes assessing if it was worth jumping at Seungmin from behind, he even laughed quietly, making the older boy forget about everything that was on his mind. About death.

But one thing was sure; you could forget about it, but it couldn't forget about you. This is how it has worked and looked for hundreds of years.

The next time he and Jooyeon had an encounter it was snowing outside the window, meaning Christmas Eve was approaching them in big steps, meaning it was their first Christmas Eve in the hospital without their parents.

"And then," Jooyeon furrowed his brows, trying his best not to shout the next words out with disgust. Instead, he lowered his voice and hissed through his teeth. "He told me that something is so wrong with my heart! The look he gave me! Maybe next to him my heart is so wrong, because he is a moron."

Seungmin just sighed, looking once out the window at the snowflakes sticking to the other side of the glass (the side of the world he preferred to be in), and once at Jooyeon who had that frustrated grimace painted all over his face.

"If he were normal and wouldn't look at me like that, I bet my results would be better." He spouted, crossing his arms on his chest. "Even better, if it weren't he who examines me, everything would turn out positive. I feel like he does it on purpose."

"Fakes your results?" Seungmin asked, his tone heavy with worry. He didn't know if faking results was legal. It didn't sound like that... and as much as Seungmin hated the Doctor as well, he thought that he wouldn't push the boundaries and make Jooyeon's results worse just because he didn't like him.

"Mhm," Jooyeon hummed in response, and then fell silent for a few seconds, during which Seungmin tried his best to hear his heartbeat. And it was... uneven, inconsistent, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, just not as it should be.

He didn't know how bad it was and if it even affected Jooyeon. His heart was just working differently than for example Seungmin's heart, but that was it. Despite all that, Jooyeon was just like him—a normal kid, with normal kid needs—and nothing else.