Work Text:
In the end, they have each other. Hyun Min’s a mess of reopened wounds and new wounds he's scratched into his own skin after the whole thing with Hye Ji, after his mom, after, after (karma's a vicious cycle), and Ha Won’s life principles have been turned on their heads, not sure what family means anymore or who’s a part of hers now she’s got blood ties and emotional ties all tangled up together.
They’re out on the veranda one night, a little tipsy—
‘Pleasantly buzzed,’ Hyun Min protests when Ha Won calls him out for being a lightweight. (He’d started slurring his words about two shots in, a new low, if you ask Ha Won.)
—And very much in pain. (Inside, only ever on the inside.) And somewhere between arguing over who gets the last chicken wing, they end up in a lump on the floor, flailing limbs and unintelligible yelling filling up the emptiness of the 2AM sky.
But there is no kissing—Ha Won makes triple sure of this. She’d inhaled three bottles of soju but she wasn’t about to have that particular history repeat itself with Hyun Min who she (kinda, sorta) trusts, against all odds. So she keeps her lips to herself, tightly clamped and covered with a hand full of chicken grease, and thankfully Hyun Min doesn’t kiss her, just wiggles himself until he’s pressed against her side like it’s winter and he’s desperate for the warmth. Some of his immaculately shampooed hair gets in her mouth. She spits it out.
‘Ha Won-ah…’ he mumbles, tickling her neck with his soju breath. ‘You won’t leave me, right?’
His eyes flutter shut but Ha Won shakes her head like he can see. ‘How can I?’ she says, feeling something sad and bitter fill up the back of her throat, a precursor of the wide, endless loneliness spanning out before her, a void waiting to swallow her up when all this is over. She’ll get booted from Sky House, she knows, she knows, but maybe—
‘I have nowhere else to go.’ It sounds even more pathetic actually saying it out loud, hearing her drunken voice carry the syllables like it's running out of steam.
‘Very true,’ he agrees, lifting his head to look her blearily in the eye as he says it, then letting himself fall back against the part of her arm where it connects with her shoulder. She makes a noncommittal noise of protest.
It’s funny how they’d playacted as fiancées not too long ago, then gone their separate ways, got their hearts split open and slumped back to each other to help stuff everything that had fallen out back in, stretch duct tape over the cracks. (Neither of them are very good with their hands, that was all Ji Woon. And Seo Woo, too.)
It’s also funny how easy it is like this, lying under the stars with each other and blinking up at them and watching them blink back. It feels like they’re less real, like they’ve partially melted into the atmosphere. Hyun Min’s warm except for his chilly hands and Ha Won’s warm everywhere but her heart, the one Hyun Min’s breathing against, the one that’s lulling him to sleep with all the drumming its doing in his ear, keeping Ha Won breathing next to him.
And maybe, she thinks, if they just stay like this, it won’t be chilly there much longer.
Morning arrives with the audible snap of a camera phone. Seo Woo’s smiling down at them too smugly for Hyun Min’s tastes, his eyes crinkled in the way they get when he’s deeply amused.
Hyun Min makes a swipe for him that he then decides is too much effort to carry all the way through. He ends up with a face planted in the hardwood slats of the veranda floor.
Ha Won only hears something like a muffled ‘fuck you’ before she reclaims her numb arm from Hyun Min’s grip and creates a few inches between them with her foot.
'Sleep well, Miss Celebrity?’
‘Morning, Seo Woo,' she responds, groggy and crusty-eyed.
He helps her to her feet, the smirk still colouring his voice before a laugh bubbles out of him. She loves hearing him laugh, wants to bottle it up and carry it around in her locket, the same place she keeps her mom’s.
They get Hyun Min off the ground. ‘Alright, alright.’ He sounds like a tired old man and lets himself be carried to his room. (Bridal-style in Seo Woo’s arms, even though he will never admit to it later.)
Ha Won collapses into Hyun Min’s luxury goose-feather and down duvet, sore in places with cricks in others, lets the exhaustion and sleep call her back to unconsciousness. And somehow Hyun Min manages to wind himself around her like they did the night before, only this time they swap positions and it’s not so chilly anymore. He reminds himself to buy Ha Won some moisturiser when his ankle hooks over hers, and she thinks he reminds her of a big teddy bear soft toy she used to have when she was younger, minus the dust and the allergies that came with (also significantly grouchier).
Seo Woo leaves them like that, takes one more photo that he forwards to both of them and closes the door quietly behind him, feeling a new song tingling on the tips of his fingers.
In the end, they have each other.