Salvation

Chapter 1

Guess who's immediately launching themselves into their next project? Yep. Author-nim!

Guess who nearly forgot to credit their cover artist? Yeppers. Cover once again made by the absolutely amazing royalxlion. Give her some love everyone. She's the best.

...

The bass pounded low in the squat little bar Junmyeon had called home for the last few hours. He tipped himself back in his chair, downing the last of his soju and slamming the bottle on the table. Another bottle quickly replaced the empty one, and Junmyeon huffed out a breath, gulping down half this bottle before remembering to breathe. He blinked slowly, taking in his surroundings but forgetting entirely how he ended up here anyway.

His bartender of the night, a stout little man with dark eyes and a slightly impish face, eyed him up and down, assessing if the man was really okay. Junmyeon shot him a withering look that sent him scrambling to the safety of the establishment's back room. Junmyeon chuckled darkly, casting his eyes down to his hands resting lightly on the table, his way too long hair flopping into his vision. He brushed it aside, idly thinking briefly about a hair cut then dismissing the idea as quickly as it had come. His hair was fine. Long, sure, but nothing he couldn't manage. Besides, short hair was the old him. The happy him. The one before he met her.

Song Eunha was a fiery girl with a flared temper but a gentle side she'd very rarely show others around her. Junmyeon experienced it first hand though. They were high school sweethearts, graduating together and moving in immediately. At twenty he proposed, and at twenty-one they were husband and wife. But Junmyeon's stubborn side clashed with hers constantly, and the first few months of supposed marital bliss were spent arguing over anything and everything, from the way the towels were folded to Junmyeon going to see his two best friends from high school every weekend. It finally escalated to the point of them full on fighting, throwing words like physical punches.

It finally came to a head when Eunha, in a fit of rage, smashed Junmyeon's fine China set, a graduation gift from his grandmother, the only person in his life that had showed him genuine love. He stormed out before he could do some truly regrettable things, never looking back. That was the first night of many Junmyeon found comfort in liquor, letting its warm embrace wrap around him.

After a year of back and forth she finally slapped him with divorce papers, something he was kind of relieved about. But the battle wasn't done, no no no. She fought him on everything, and finally he surrendered everything he had just to get it over with. So in a span of a few years Junmyeon lost his house, the crappy vehicle he owned, almost all his possessions. He had a small trunk of belongings and the clothes on his back with no clue about his future. He would hop from couch to couch, numbing the pain with every alcoholic beverage he could get his hands on.

From time to time he would try and score some sort of part time job. He could never live on his own if he didn't have any money. But any money he did come into contact with was gone in an instant, feeding an addiction that was spiraling beyond his control. He was vaguely aware of his decisions, but then it pulled him under again, digging in its claws and holding him captive. And when he did manage to land himself one, he almost always quit or was fired shortly thereafter.

On the few occasions he was sober enough to remember his name, he would stop to ponder how he got to this point. He didn't have a golden childhood. Far from it actually. He was an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy, only carried to full term because his mom had been pressured into doing it. His parents never married, though the got along the few times he'd seen them interact. His mother flittered in and out of his life as she saw fit, throwing herself into her work, her hobbies, her other boyfriends, anything but motherhood. Which left Junmyeon with his father a lot as a child. Amd his father wasn't exactly fond of him, often telling the young boy directly to his face that he wished he didn't exist at all.