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A FAINT PULSE, not quite Cha Jaehwa's, lingers beneath her eyelids. It snakes venomously down her cheeks in gentle rivets, curling at the ends of her fingertips and in the curve of her collarbone.
When she holds her breath, she can feel the pulse steady against her palm, intermingling with her heartbeat. Each pump of blood is a reminder that the life held between her calloused fingers is still holding on. Each muffled beep is Jaehwa's signal of divinity, granting the life carved into her second soul another day.
The world does not end when Ahn Suho's laughter fades into the wallpaper of her apartment. It continues on, leaving traces of his once magnificent presence in every place Jaehwa looks.
The most memorable of all being where his staid body rests, withering away into bone and rot.
He's not truly absent. Ahn Suho's eyes always linger in Jaehwa's fervid dreams, needlessly empty and yet so, so full.
But it comes time to move on. The hospital walls cease to become a comfort (were they ever?) and Cha Jaehwa's life begins to fall apart as she realizes that no amount of hoping will unhook Ahn Suho from what keeps him alive.
It takes her three days to come running back to that cold bedside, to weep against Suho's blue sheets that reek of chemicals and factory detergent and nothing like the usual sharp deodorant and faint restaurant smoke.
( And Ahn Suho begins to fade, only this time Jaehwa so desperately tries to make him stay ).
It costs Cha Jaehwa her first friend to regain some of what she lost; Chunks of her memories return in muddled waves. She can't tell the difference between what's real and what is a sleep-deprived hallucination, but when they begin to sear against her skin and leave her breathless, she realizes what she misses most in the world is Ahn Suho.
( Consequently, that's the only thing she can't have ).
The Cha family breaks apart. That isn't Suho's doing; It's Jaehwa's. Her placidness becomes anger, and her anger carries thorns.
It doesn't matter; But when it does, all Jaehwa can do is snap and fizzle like a dull firework, unable to keep herself alive without tearing the flesh of those that try to keep her warm.
Her parents carry the scars of her anger, and they dish it back on occasion. They spit heavy phrases that make Jaehwa upset, and the cycle continues, forever a constant battle between what is and what once was.
( Jaehwa knows she is not their daughter. She doesn't try to be ).
When Yeon Si-eun begins to grow distant, and the frayed ends of the relationships she'd been trying to hold together begin falling apart, Cha Jaehwa struggles to learn what it means to love again.
Through the harsh winds of the Winter broiling within her, to the hot bubble of Summer, Cha Jaehwa is stuck between someone who she is and someone who she's trying to be.
