UGH! / SOPE & VMIN.

NINETEEN, HOW DO I MAKE THIS OKAY?

[ tw: intentional misgendering / i recommend listening 2 the brit rock version of spring day while reading ]

HOW DO I MAKE
THIS OKAY?

   EVERY DESCRIPTION OF a hospital is the same. the smell, the dim lighting, the bad colour choices for the walls, the atmosphere of general hopelessness and depression. but no one ever says how cold they are, no one mentions the numbing sensation of sitting on tiles for four hours, no one tells you how horrible you're going to feel.

jeongguk, with butterfly stitches across his cheek and eyebrow, skin and flesh torn by a thug's ring, sits in the waiting room outside the room where seokjin's being treated, and he can't stop shivering from shock and the clinical cold of the hospital, the early spring already cold enough as it is. he wrapped his red leather jacket around seokjin, and now sits shivering in a clash t-shirt, holding back tears because boys don't cry, not boys like him.

he hadn't been in a fight like that since childhood, back when he and the other gypsy boys would spar for a right to uphold the family boxing title. jeongguk's uncle held it in their family; his father did not, so he used his son as a weapon, made him fight till he was black and blue and at only twelve years old he'd broken seven different bones, some twice. jeongguk didn't even feel it when the thugs hit him, he'd been more concerned about jin, who had gone outside for a smoke and to call hoseok from the phone box, and five minutes later jeongguk and maxxie heard shouts and screams.

he remembers trying to jump at them, not seeing the other two who had ended up grabbing him. remembers hits landed on his stomach, face and chest, but most of all he remembers the words they called seokjin, remembers the venom spat from their poisonous, crude lips, the rip of seokjin's fucking favourite shirt, the black one pattered with white roses, torn away, along with the tight piece of fabric wrapped around his chest to flatten it, leaving the part of his body he detests the most exposed to the whole world. one of them was a fucking police officer, who waved at a copper's car as it passed by and told them to keep going, despite jeongguk and maxxie's screams for help.

maxxie went home with hoseok because they've been at the hospital for too long, they need to go take care of their houses, maxxie needs to feed his dog. but jeongguk, sadboy jeongguk, he doesn't have to go anywhere, sitting bloody-knuckled on the floor of the hospital reception with tears in his eyes.

there's no one here. you can cry.

seokjin's face passes through his mind every second, his screams ring in his ears, and jeongguk has never been that afraid, never been scared to lose someone the way he had been that afternoon. he buries his face in the ripped fabric of his jeans and allows his paper self to crumple up and cry, shoulders shaking, allowing himself to actually lose all control over his emotions. sadness washes over him in waves, intermingling with worry, with anxiety, with fear for his friend, with fear of losing him.

he's like a scared little boy again, hiding whenever he was challenged to a fight that his father would make him confront, with yells of you'll never be a real man if you can't fight, you can never uphold the irish traveller traditions like this, you're just a useless fucking pansy faggot boy! jeongguk cries and remembers the place he'd grown up, remembers how much of a fucking hellhole the caravan sites he saw and lived in were, fifteen different ones in just as many years, all teeming with people who'd fight him because he had the jeon name. jeongguk sobs and remembers seokjin's bloody body, the bruises and hematomas slowly blooming on his milky skin, the skin meant to be adorned in makeup and sparkling drag clothes, dressed up like that rocky horror movie in tight corsets and glittery makeup.