FALLING SLOWLY ||Complete||

Traitorous tide

She spends a sleepless night. A finger always hovering over a video she would never conjure up the courage to play - Hae Soo reflects back to the hard plains of anger that made up Hwang So. She knows him from somewhere. Her mind whispers to the last of dying stars.

It is not another one of her imaginations she is certain. Only the image belongs nowhere. She remains tangled in her sheets, staring at the ceiling as the gray light of dawn lights it up and tries to place the shifting bits of details into a sensible outcome.
She knows him. How? From where? Was that what Wook had almost hinted at the party?

Tossing a well punched pillow out of the bed into the floor, Soo gets up in the end. Her hair is a mess, her eyes a little bloodshot, but her mind hardly finds a moment to focus on that.

She opts to wash with cold water, just to wake up her half sleepy brain. The first jolt of ice against skin triggers something.

Behind her cold eyelids, she sees the yellowish green of the sunlit water. The darker green of the depth, the whitish yellow above her from the sky veiled with a layer of water that thickens each minute.

Sinking, she is sinking fast. The doors are locked handles jammed in - with breath burning in her lungs she bangs her palms against the glass. It doesn’t yield. She feels the weariness in her bones, the protest of her muscles and she knows - she admits - the end is drawing near.

Above her the sky goes dark, the edges of sun sparkle in a ghostly manner. The glass cracks due to a force outside. Her vision grows darker from the edges as a hand wraps itself around her wrist. It pulls her up against the weight of the water.

A dark pair of eyes. A face with a gash down one cheek, still bloody and raw against the pale white skin.

She knows him. She knows her saviour.

**

He wants her. And the intensity of his longing scares So witless. It goes beyond anything physical to the core of his very soul. He aches for her with a thirst thousand years old that it hurts physically to pull himself away. So he does what he does best. He runs away, afraid that he might lose his mind any second, drown in her eyes and do something irreversible. Hae Soo - that woman with a face of a saint and a soul of a storm.

She is not his. She will never be. He chants it back and forth all his drive back. But then he remembers that look in her eyes and he loses all his progress on that front.

There was that one moment - when they had been so close, when he had all but lost his reason - that she seemed to give in to whatever was simmering between them. His longing was mirrored in her eyes. He does not know what goes between her and Wook but she has never been loved the way she deserves. For all that she truly was instead of what she has been forced to be. Where there should have been the confidence of a relationship there is a void of insecurities and self - doubts that calls out desperately.

He curses aloud. It’s none of his business.

But then her thoughts cling to his conscience and refuses to leave, like the traces of her perfume on his shirt - lavender with an undertone of something more wild, spicy and citrus just like the woman herself. He wants her gone - he wants the smell gone, but a long after he has thrown the shirt in the wash basket and taken a long shower, it still lingers on his subconscious just like Hae Soo.

He takes the plunge with her thoughts still clawing at him. The instant chill that surrounds him wakes him up from the trance. So welcomes it gratefully, his muscles flexing, undoing the knots of suppressed tension. He channels his frustration into his strokes, the building up speed, increases the time he spends under water letting his lungs burn with the need of air.