Chapter Text
shota woke up to pale moonlight dimly illuminating the room around him. it seeped in through the curtains and cast long shadows across the walls, only serving to confuse shota as he came to. he had passed out from exhaustion in jongseob’s room, and from how high the moon hung in the sky, he had been asleep for hours. his head hurt from crying, and his back ached from the odd position he had maintained in his sleep.
shota couldn’t really tell if visiting jongseob’s grave and his room had changed anything. he still missed him, still wanted to join him in death if only to see him again, but at least he hadn’t dreamed. maybe it was because it was the first time he had fully rested without the nightmares, without the tears drying on his cheeks when he woke up in the middle of the night.
a jolt of anxiety ran through him as he glanced at the alarm clock on jongseob’s nightstand. it was almost two o’clock, and he had left early that morning after basically ignoring his mother. would she be waiting for him to come back home, sat in the living room like she used to? would she be angry, demanding to know where he had disappeared to all day, or would she be worried, assuming he had done something drastic? would she even care?
he knew it was his own fault for ignoring how life had moved on without him, for practically going mute and shutting his family out. but sometimes, shota had almost wanted her to intervene, wanted her to comfort him through all this, wipe his tears and comb her fingers through his hair like she used to do when he was young. he wondered what he had done for her to stop, for her to leave him alone during the worst time of his life.
shota walked back home in the dark, listened to the leaves rustle in the trees in the quiet. he couldn’t see much in the light of the moon, but he had biked this route so many times over the years, it was as natural as breathing. jongseob had been like that, before. his smile, his natural habit of filling the silence, the way he seemed to complete shota, he had grown so used to them when jongseob was alive, he didn’t know what to do with himself now that he was gone. the silence was suffocating now, and shota couldn’t fill it by himself. he didn’t know how to live without jongseob, didn’t know how to move on from him.