FALLING SLOWLY ||Complete||

Call of void

The rain pours as if the sky is cut open by the silver edge of lightening and it is bleeding relentlessly. So cares only a little when it soaks him to the bone, the purple flashes casting stains on the pitch black that surrounds him. He stands on a precipice that over looks the lake which roars in the storm - another lonely summit with nothing ahead nothing behind.

He feels cold only distantly, something more hollow eats at his insides. It feels as if the years in between had been washed away by the turning tide and he is once again the nineteen year old who had no idea of the implication of his words.

“OST?” In his mind Tae’s sarcasm is still afresh. “Will you go to Olympics little brother - the youngest ever?” A hand slammed against the locker obstructing his way and a brooding older brother’s fist curled on his collar is enough for a fourteen years old’s courage to buckle. “You slimy little thing -” his breathes on his ear. “You’ll go only if I don’t - right?”

Tae’s fist on his jaw that marked his first gold against his brother So still remembers that sixteenth birthday. His chest tightens when he realizes it was then it had begun.

“I can’t lose to a monster who was born with no legs!” He recalls the words he heard Tae mutter in dark determination. He grips a hand against his heart. There had been poison in Tae’s eyes and poison in his veins ever since.

The year after So is the champion and Tae destroys all his trophies. The darkness claims him and he begins to rise in a lethal gait ever since. Sixteen hours of training - in the pool in the gym - the trainers his sponsors provide flock around Tae and there is a cruel twist to his mouth the next time he makes gold. It is no longer a sport, it has turned into a battle and each event a kill that steals a bit of his brother’s soul.

He doesn’t come home - he doesn’t talk between events. Even when they stand side by side on aisles he looks ahead with the all consuming focus of a soldier. And when he does notice - it is when he comes closer to failing - bullying begins.

The gap between them is three and a half seconds in the world championship and Tae leaves him bleeding on the locker room floor a week later, his decoy already leaving for home wiping all traces of him ever being there.

It is where Ha Jin finds him when she comes around to congratulate. The girl who had gotten to his nerves by following him around at school, whose nonstop chatter makes his head spin and ears hurt steps on the peonies she had brought and dropped as she rushes to his side.

Hers are the softest hands he remembers, as she tends to his broken body and her care seeps into his broken soul. And he loves her, not because she meant the world to him thousand years ago (he hasn’t even remembered that yet.) but because she begins to pick up the pieces of him from where he lies all over the place. There is a fire in her eyes and ice on her fingertips. She wipes away the blood with a wet cloth and holds his gaze all the while. There is no disgust when he searches her gaze and he is too amazed to speak.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” He asks slowly and drops his gaze when he realizes how timid he sounds. “The blood?” She doesn’t reply and his heart sinks a little. Instead she dabs his cuts with ointment and sighs when he flinches.

“Take off your shirt.” Her tone is clipped. Had he dared to look up, he would have seen the flush on her cheeks. So doesn’t dare - so he doesn’t see. Instead he complies and fidgets under her scrutiny, goosebumps rising along the path her fingers take, tending to each bruise she finds.

With each scar she notes his breath hitch a little and his shoulders slump. Coward - he could almost hear her mutter. And he waits for it, waits for her to walk away - waits for her fascination with him to come to an end. She had no idea what laid within the sparkling shell - now that she knows it is a matter of moments. As much as So had find her annoying at first - or how skeptical he had been about their tentative friendship (she called him her best friend he never believed her) at that moment he wishes - as he had never wished before - that she stays a while longer.

He knows not how to stop now that he has started falling.

“Hwang So?” her voice brings him back, her hands are on his shoulders, her eyes peering into his. Her hair has come undone and touches the sides of her face. “I said this has gone long enough.” The same fire burns in her voice.

“Don’t you think I’m a coward?” He speaks in whisper daring her answer. “Are you disappointed?”

He looks up at her and wonders why she hadn’t left yet, but instead there is something else stirring in her eyes. She brings a tentative hand to his face and brushes the corner of his lip, it is split he acknowledges the sting as her hand begins to trail sideways gently cupping his bruised jaw.

His exhale is harsh when she dips her head and brushes her mouth against his jaw, the raw skin too sensitive to each touch. He holds her shoulder and stops her from moving away and he looks into her eyes with wonder. “I think you are too brave for your own good” she mutters against his ear. “But if you won’t go to someone I’m going to your father!”

“He is my brother -” he shakes his head and she straightens up, snatches his shirt from the chair he had flung it into and throws it at him. Then continues to rant as he pulls it on.

“All the more reason to stop him from doing this. I mean it So, he is destroying himself. Take a look at yourself have you seen what he’s done? And what about all those old scars - why didn’t you -”

He holds her wrist and pulls her against him it is an awkward embrace - a tangle of limbs, but when he breathes her in, his head buried against the crook of her neck, there is peace and he wants more despite himself.

“You shouldn’t be here Ha Jin - ah,” his conscience makes one last attempt to come clean. But her fingers threading through his hair makes his logic hazy. “Not with a guy like me. I’m going to pull you into so much trouble.”

Hands that swathe around his torso brings him back from the recollections. He does not hear her footsteps against the rain that has them both drenched and shivering, but he feels her soft form pressed against his back, the rise and fall of her chest as her breathing pattern falls into a rhyme with his.

“Why are you here?” As he asks he wonders if she thought he was going to jump. He wasn’t, but the relief her presence brings makes it feel as if she had pulled him out of the jaws of death.

He peels her off of him and turns the harsh rain slamming against both of them. He doesn’t ask her how she knows - for he is scared of seeing the doubt in her eyes. He had gotten the call earlier and he knows by the time Baek Ah might have reached them. The jaws of a trap is closing in and he hesitates from asking her to blindly follow. If he falls he dares not hold her hand and drag her along, if he falls there is no longer anything for him to offer her.

Instead of reaching for her he watches how she stands, trembling, teeth clattering, hair plastered to her face. And he wonders, if she believes he could stoop so low. He wants he to trust him, but he finds he has no words to offer in explanation. He wonders if she would still read into his silence or if she would finally give up on him.

He makes a move to walk off but her arms come around him once more. A cage of warmth that finally starts to thaw at the edges of his ice walls.  

“So-” her voice is muffled against the dump layers of their clothing. “It’s not over yet. Please - ” her voice cracks and dies and he wonders if she is sobbing. It is strange how the same woman has the power to make and break him. This is not Ha Jin, it is Soo, while Ha Jin picks up his broken pieces Soo could shutter the walls he has put up between them.

And when all is lost he gives into his heart. There is a battle at his threshold, he’d rather not battle with his own heart. This time when he turns instead of pulling away, he tucks her against his heart and presses his lips to the crown of her head, bowed and praying for her faith in him.

“I'm clean.” His words are lost in the rain, in the cackle of the wind but she hears him and her hands cup his face, her fingers stroke his jaw. He feels as if the years in between are washed away and he is the same nineteen years old boy, bruised and battered and so unfamiliar with affection that the seventeen years old girl who tends to his wounds feel like his personal angel.

She pulls her against him, cuddling his head against her heart, offers him the peace he yearns for even in torrid rains.

“I know. I know.”