swxtched. | jhs

LOW

❝ maybe if you tried hard enough, i wouldn't question why i shouldn't stay. ❞

•

IT ALL HAPPENED so fast, the memories of it blurred in Green's fragile mind. By the time her senses came to her, people dressed in black were standing up and huddling together to loom over the familiar corpse behind a glass display.

If the supernatural could've made souls switch bodies, could it also bring the dead back to life? she wondered, as the silent, hot tears slipped down her pale cheeks and dripped onto her lap. She quickly wiped them away. Long sleeves and gloves adorned her arms and hands, hiding her prosthetic limb.

A gentle warmth rested on her forearm, rubbing circles into it, and Green slowly turned her head to her boyfriend beside her. Hoseok offered her a small, weak smile, wrapping his arms around her without another moment's hesitation.

"I've said this a million times, but I'm sorry you had to see that. I'm so sorry you had to go through that," he muttered into her hair, kissing the top of her head tenderly, "and that his mother did that to you—"

"I'm fine," she coughed, swiping more falling tears under him, forehead pressed to his chest. "I hope Jinyoung's mother gets better."

This reasonably astonished Hoseok.

It hit him that the Green he first met and the Green grasping tightly onto him at that very moment were two different people with different thought patterns and different hearts. Was this his influence? Was it his doing? He almost convinced himself that this wasn't even Green.

This wasn't how he wanted to see her cry.

"You're grown so much," he thought aloud, resting his cheek on her head and staring distantly at the crowd mourning over Jinyoung's coffin adorned with white flowers. "I would be really hateful against her if I were you."

"Yeah. I honestly wanted to kill her. I thought that if she wasn't abusive, then no one would be here right now. But then I thought that it was us who didn't pick up on it enough, that we were to blame for this. Then I just found reasons to blame everyone."

"Green—"

Green laughed bitterly in her sob, sounding like a sour note in Hoseok's ears. "But she's— his mother's a person too, and people make so many mistakes. I make mistakes. His mom makes mistakes and so does mine. We all have our own issues and pasts, so— we need to just move on. I need to forgive her and just... move on."

"Do you think you'll ever move on from this, though?"

A tall figure approached the two of them, hands clasped together as if to hold himself. He pursed his thin lips and cleared his throat. "Excuse me, but are you two Junior-ah's friends?"

Junior-ah? Green pulled away from Hoseok to look at him. He had piercings lining his ears, and thin, slanted eyes like a cat. He was a handsome young man.

"Oh, wait," he corrected himself, "no one calls him that here. In his hometown, we all used to call him Junior. You're probably his classmates, right? Park Jinyoung's?"

"We are," Hoseok confirmed, as Green leaned her head on his shoulder, "and we're also his friends. You call him Junior? Are you close with him?"

"We're childhood friends," the stranger answered wistfully, hand in his dark hair. "My name is Im Jaebum. Junior-ah and I go way back, but we went to different high schools so we didn't spend much time together as of recent. And now we— well, we never will, will we?"

"That's terrible," Green whimpered, sniffing and touching the corner of her eye to catch any remaining tears.

Jaebum shook his head. "I can't do anything about it. He was a great kid though. His father was like my father."

Oh.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to know... what did you two last do with him?"

"He had a bad situation, and we tried to help him," Hoseok replied shakily, catching on as quickly as Green what might've happened. "That's how we— got close. Jinyoung took up dancing with us, since we're both dancers, and we're all classmates in English."

He twitched a smile, remarking, "He was terrible at English compared to some of our other friends. Can't say that I'm any different though. We were both terrible together."

"I'm sure he has good memories of you," Green cracked mid-sentence, eyes falling to her lap in embarrassment to her voice.

"I'm sure he does for you two as well," Jaebum reciprocated, just when Jungkook came into view, holding a single white rose.

"Noona? Hyung?"

"Jungkookie," Hoseok breathed, standing up to hug him. Jungkook fisted his suit, choking back his lament.

"Hyung, he— Jinyoung-hyung kept a lot of things from me," he confessed quietly. "He had a knife under his bed, and pills in his closet, and deep scars on his upper arms and legs, but I— I was so stupid, I'm so stupid—"

"You're not stupid, Jungkook-ah," Hoseok asserted sternly, pulling back to take a good look at him. Jungkook was breathing shallowly, as if his guilt was swallowing him up whole. Jaebum was too stunned by the boy's words to speak. Green simply stared hard at her lap.

"He's still recovering from a chest strain," she bothered to explain. "He had it right when Jinyoung... did it. I had a bad feeling, so I rushed to his house and found him, but I was too late."

He gaped at her. "You found him?"

She covered her mouth, barely breathing either, the images flashing back in her mind. "His eyes were lowered, lifeless, with the knife in his stomach."

Green shut her eyes, trying to shake off the scene in her head, but it only became more vivid, and she felt trapped, like she could never escape the trauma.

•

❝ should i use my heart or my head? ❞
『 written on 2017.11.05. | 2017.11.23. 』

【 NOTE—STUCK IN TRAUMA 노래나 부를래 】