"Where there is hope, there is always pain."
When you were young, there was one thing you wanted more than anything in the world. One thing you would give your very soul up to achieve, if only it meant you would finally be able to make your mark in...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
⋖∘ʿ⋆✧⋆ʾ∘⋗
The walk to the convenience store is long.
Mingi lives a block away, or at least that is what Google Maps says. However, Google also says that a block is two hundred steps, and Mingi knows for a fact that is not true. After all, on a normal day, when he is well-rested and energetic, it takes him about three hundred and fifty steps to reach the corner store at the edge of the street from his dorm.
He knows.
He's counted.
However, on a night such as this, when the air is hot, the bugs are irritating, and he has had too much to drink, his feet stumbling as he struggles to put one in front of the other...Well, he would think it takes him more than a mere three hundred. And if his mind wasn't clouded with the fresh, fuzzy, tingling, buzz of alcohol, he would have counted and retrieved the numbers to back up his hypothesis.
The point is that he is tired, drained, and frustrated.
Though the walk may have helped to sober up the dizzying effects of too many glasses of soju and beer, it has not erased the annoyance pestering and prodding at the back of his mind.
He does not see why his members needed more "refreshments" when half of his team had begun to litter the floor with their near-lifeless bodies. Nor did he know why it was his job to make this tedious, long walk to this cursed corner store when he was not the one who wanted the drinks in the first place. And it is not as though he could call a cab at this time of night, nor would it be reasonable to request an Uber for a block's distance that is only a few three to four hundred steps.
It is infuriating, and for a brain that has been clouded of all rhyme and reason, his minuscule dilemma becomes that much more maddening.
So when he opens the door to the store, the jingling bell barely managing to drown out the soft grumblings he makes underneath his breath, you can imagine his displeasure when he is set to witness the commotion that greets him in turn.
Melody stands at the registrar's desk, fighting with the cashier over a bottle of hard liquor. It's clear that she's drunk, what with the heated blush on her round cheeks and the way she moves almost sluggishly to pull the bottle out of his hands. Of course, Mingi doesn't know it is Melody, nor does he know why she is hanging on to the bottle for dear life, but he does know she looks staggeringly familiar.
If he were a bit more sober, and the impounding headache hadn't turned his vision spotty, perhaps he would've realized it was the same woman he saw at the coffee shop earlier that day. Perhaps, at this moment, he would've realized he wasn't imagining things before and it really was the girl who he'd grown to adore all those years before.
"Why not?!"
No, instead, he winces when Melody whines for the tenth time, begging the cashier to hand the liquor over, and chooses instead to begin searching for the items on the list his members so graciously gave him. Sighing, he pulls the crumpled wad of paper out of his pocket, smoothing the wrinkles out against his leg as he stumbles toward the back of the store.
