DANDELIONS.

No. 41

Jeonghan left for spring break. He had told Seungcheol and Jisoo about a week prior; "I'm visiting family," he had explained, "I got out of it during the winter break, but they're forcing me to come home this time."

Seungcheol and Jisoo had reasons not to go home. Seungcheol's parents were largely concerned with their family business, and they would have been too busy working to even acknowledge Seungcheol's presence; he knew this because their family group chat was incredibly dead, and he had been left on read about a hundred times because his parents were just too busy to reply. On the other hand, Jisoo just didn't want to go home. "They'd just be forcing me to study, anyway, and I might as well just do that at here," Jisoo had explained this nonchalantly when Seungcheol asked, "and they'll probably be asking unnecessary questions about my love life, which will be absolutely terrible, because my cousins are idiots and will probably let it slip to my parents that I'm about as straight as a circle."

Jisoo had stopped coming to Seungcheol's house as often. Seungcheol assumed that it was because he probably didn't have a reason to when Jeonghan was gone, but it still worried him to no end. That was the thing about Jisoo; unless he was right there, no one knew where he was. No phone calls, no texts, no traces of his existence. When Jisoo wanted to be left alone, he practically disappeared off the face of the Earth. No one knew where to find him.

Almost all of Seungcheol's worries disappeared when he finally got a text from Jisoo. (Seungcheol had spent at least three hours wondering whether he should sent the first text or not. All he could hear was Jeonghan's voice in the back of his head yelling, 'But you don't want to look desperate!' He was relieved when Jisoo texted him instead.) It was actually a series of short texts rather than just one block; Seungcheol had noticed that about Jisoo. He sent things in separate texts, despite them all relating, not to be clingy, but rather because he just didn't like large paragraphs.

'You're good at math, right?' Seungcheol could practically hear the text in Jisoo's voice as he read it to himself. He was not good at math, not at all, but he wasn't about to tell Jisoo that. 'I need you to help me.'

It took him far too long to respond with a basic text that went through endless consideration. 'I'm coming over.'

Jisoo didn't reply, but somehow, the little 'read' under the message gave Seungcheol a little hope.

—

The first thing Seungcheol noticed was the cat. He knew that Jisoo had one, but that was it. One. Small and orange with little white patches of fur and fluffy and resembling Jisoo in an uncanny way. Last time he checked, Jisoo did not have a black cat. Somewhat taken aback, Seungcheol scanned the room once more, spotting the other cat — the one he knew Jisoo had, the orange one — curled up into a ball on the couch, which was a huge contrast to the black cat standing tall on the coffee table, looking like it was about to attack Seungcheol and stab his eyes out.

The second thing he noticed was Jisoo, sat criss-cross on the floor, face buried into his hands. The room was decorated with textbooks, notebooks, random sheets of paper and about a hundred different pens. He had earphones in, but Seungcheol couldn't tell if he was actually listening to anything.

Jisoo hadn't yet noticed Seungcheol's presence. The door had been unlocked, and he wasn't looking. Seungcheol presumed that he was listening to something, and that was why Jisoo didn't hear him.

Seungcheol caught the slightest glimpse of Jisoo's face, immediately noticing the dark bags underneath his eyes. His face was pale, and the rosy hue normally decorating his cheeks was hidden by a ghostly white that made him look more dead than anything. Seungcheol thought he was getting thinner, in an unhealthy way — had he been eating properly? Judging by how tired and, quite frankly, dead Jisoo looked, Seungcheol would have assumed that he had just kept on putting eating aside; the several books and notes in front of him had already gave the impression that he was studying, and his condition had made Seungcheol think that the study session had gone on for far too long.