Burnout ⊗ Jeongchan

①⑨ Go With It

Mom
Don't come home tonight.
I don't need you.

Jeongin frowned as he glossed over the message. He looked back, reloaded the messaging app, but there was nothing else sent by his mother besides those two lines of text. The two blips, the blights on his screen, were the only texts that would ever appear. Maybe, if he just restarted his phone there would be something more from her, this wouldn't be the only text he received from her. This isn't the way she would break her week of silence. This isn't how she would normally talk to him. It must have been something else to make her upset. Something at work.

But how much more proof did he need? As he stared down at the gray bubbles containing the foreboding sentences, the lump in his throat only grew. The grip he held on the hand phone tightened. The locker wall seemed like an optimal target to smash it against.

Before he could make any decisions based on the heat rising in his cheeks and the tenseness in his jaw, his phone buzzed again. He immediately casted his focus back to the lit up screen. A single notification for a single message from a person he had grown too familiar with over the past few days. Not who he wanted to sent a text, but unquestionably someone he needed a text from. Jeongin's lips turned up into a fond smile as he lightly tapped on the alert.

Chan
Free after school?

Jeongin
Yes. Can I ask you for a favor?

⊕⊕⊕

"Hey, Chan, Jeongin," Minho waved a hand at them as they entered the empty shop. He was the only one inside the main repair bay, save for the few cars hoisted up on expensive jacks or lounging around the perimeters of the wall until it was their turn under the wrench. The mechanic paused, seeming to think to himself for a few moments before peeking around the hood of his own precious car which he had previously been hunched over to repair and interrogated, "What are you two doing together?"

"There's trouble at home, I'm staying with him for the night," Jeongin told him briefly as the pair passed by Minho. His jaw went slack. The younger drew into his shell when he noticed the baffled expression adorning the older's face; hunching his shoulders over and dropping his gaze to his feet in order to avoid any possible eye contact, "Is that wrong?"

"We're not ones to tell you what's right and wrong," Minho hurriedly regained his lost composure, or what little composure he appeared to have possessed in the first place. He scoffed, "You can figure that shit out yourself."

Chan snapped, "Watch your language."

"Dude chill, no one else is here but us three. And Jeongin doesn't mind, right?"

Jeongin just nodded his head, more amazed by the fact he saw Chan snap at someone for the first time then whatever they were actually talking about.

"See?"

"Keep it minimum. I'm watching you."

"Whatever, you never cared about it before," Minho let out another uncharismatic scoff, this one sounding even more totalled then the one before it. If that were even to be possible. He shut up with a firm glare from Chan, almost instantly turning back to his puzzled work on the engine at the gentle nudge to cut it out. There were a few beats of silence between the three before Minho's head snapped up to the youngest, gaped for many uncomfortable seconds before his eyes widened in something like realization, "Ohhh..."

Jeongin was almost scared to ask, "Is something the matter?"

"No, I think I just figured what's going on."