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Sieun got into yet another fight.
It was something stupid, something without a particular reason, because nowadays there never is a reason. Even if there was one, it wouldn’t matter. Someone had an issue with the simple fact that Yeon Sieun exists, or maybe he said something two weeks ago that didn’t land well, or maybe it was his fucking eyes again. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.
He lets himself get punched before he attacks, savors the sting of his skin and the ringing in his head. He deserves it, he thinks. He always lets them get a punch or two in before he strikes back. Before, it was to make them lower their guard, make his opponents underestimate him. Now, even though it also fulfills that function, it’s also a punishment he dishes out for himself. For everything that has happened. For Suho, even though he knows it would be the last thing he’d ever want for Sieun to do.
The second they are down, turn around and run away.
Sieun doesn’t run away these days. He was never particularly good at it; he stopped running away completely the second he decided to find Jeongbin and smash a pen into his shoulder.
So he gets hit and then he punches back and throws the guy against the concrete wall. He grabs his hair and smashes his face into the surface, three times, before he lets the guy fall to the ground. Annoying. Too easy. He itches to raise his leg and step on his already bloodied face. He thinks he might’ve broken his nose. Instead, he picks up his backpack and heads towards the bus stop and catches the one that he always does, the one that leads to the hospital.
All the nurses know him by now. It would be embarrassing, perhaps, if Sieun ever got the hang of the idea of what it means to be embarrassed. The one that currently sits on the reception is one of the better ones. She doesn’t try to talk to him or make him feel better — she simply lets him head to Suho without a word and lets him stay long past the visiting hours. Considering she’s here and it’s Friday, he might spend the night here.
Sieun enters Suho’s room and drops his backpack by the sofa; he never stops moving, not until he finally reaches the chair and sits down by Suho’s bed. He gently lifts his hand and cradles it in his own. Sieun lowers his head towards it, lifts Suho’s fingers to his forehead. He stays like that for a while. He always does it, every single time he visits, without fail. A ritual. It’s the first thing he does when he comes and the last thing he does before he leaves. Sieun knows how he looks like.
He looks like a sinner asking for forgiveness.
Slowly, he removes himself from the position and goes to the little bathroom. He changes out of his uniform into the usual clothes he has stored in Suho’s room. He leaves when he's done and he hangs his school clothes over the sofa, next to his backpack. He should study, the way he always does. There never was a point to it but now it’s even less obvious why Sieun does it.
He thinks it might be the only thing tethering him to reality, next to spending every available second next to Suho, like some kind of guard. (What point is there in it, now? What does it matter, when he couldn’t protect him when he should’ve?)
He decides to leave, just to grab a coffee from the vending machine down the hall. He heads out, closes the door quietly, to not disturb Suho. He knows what he does is useless; he doesn’t care.
He inserts the money and clicks the number. Standard black coffee with no milk, no sugar. The drink doesn’t taste good; it tastes atrocious, actually. It’s never pleasant to drink it. Perhaps it’s Sieun’s another way of punishing himself. He doesn’t know.
Once, one of the interns caught him drinking it and she stopped dead in her tracks and asked if he was fine. He thought it was funny; it might’ve been the first time he had been asked if he was fine not because of how he had looked but because of his drink of choice. He simply stared at her and then moved his gaze at her own cup unimpressed. She just sighed, mumbled fair enough and then was on her way again.
He sees her around from time to time. She’s nice, too. Doesn’t talk to him much, but when he meets her by the coffee machine she sometimes pays for his coffee. Sometimes, he pays for her. Solidarity, except he muses that the reasons for them drinking it are different.
He picks up his cup when the machine is done. He’s about to go back to Suho when he lifts his head and stops before he even manages to take a step. In front of him, maybe just two meters from where he’s standing, he locks eyes with his mother. He thinks that maybe she hasn’t noticed him, that maybe she’ll just pass by him and that will be it.
Sieun has learned fairly young that he rarely gets what he desires.
His mother stops in her tracks, the clicking of her heels falling silent. She’s dressed in a well-fitted black coat and a navy blue dress that falls just below her knees. Her hair falls loose over her left shoulder and she corrects the bag that hangs on her arm. Sieun has no idea why she’s here. He has no illusions about her coming here for him. Maybe she has some business acquaintance recuperating here for whatever reason.
She measures him, looks him up and down. Her mouth forms a hard line.
Sieun doesn’t ask why she’s here because he doesn’t care. She doesn't ask him why he is here because she knows why. He dreads the upcoming conversation. He wants to get back to Suho, slowly resigning himself to the fact that he probably won’t manage to get back to his room before the coffee he’s holding grows cold. He braces himself for whatever’s about to come.
His mother has always been an elegant woman. He never could really piece together how someone like her got with someone like his father and vice versa. They didn’t fit. It was like someone trying to put two oddly shaped puzzle pieces from different boxes together. They failed and the pieces chipped, leaving broken remnants behind.
The broken remnants were Yeon Sieun.
He knows that his mother was there when he was little; he has the pictures. Later, after the nothingness and the silence of his house and before everything (before Suho), he grew up listening to her videos and the bimonthly meetings at fancy restaurants.
He looks her in the eyes. She looks back. A memory claws its way out from the confines of his mind, a voice whispering Sieun-ah, you have such lovely eyes. Never forget it.
He suddenly wonders why she would tell such a lie. There was only one person that liked his eyes and currently he was laying unconscious just a couple meters from where the two of them were standing.
“You have to get it together,” she finally settles on.
That’s all that she has to say. You have to get it together. How is he supposed to get it together? What is he supposed to get together? There is nothing left for him to pick up. Suho took all of that Sieun was with him when he fell into the coma. Sieun cannot exist without Suho.
Wherever Suho goes, Sieun will follow. He thinks that if there ever comes a day Suho’s heartbeat flatlines, Sieun will follow him. Whether it be in life or death, Sieun belongs wherever Suho is.
She frowns, clearly unsatisfied.
Obviously she would be. Sieun’s no longer number one, no longer at the top, no longer a perfect child, no longer someone she can boast about, at least not really. Maybe someone else would be proud of him.
“I think you want to be like this,” she continues.
And see, Sieun really has become numb to whatever his parents have been saying to him years ago, somewhere around when he was seven. He had to. He didn’t have a choice. Somehow, even considering all of that, what she says somehow manages to land correctly and rip into his heart.
I think you want to be like this.
He knows what he means, of course. But why would she care? Why now? He also knows the answer to that. He should be angry. He’s mostly tired. He wants to go back to Suho.
“You think I want to be like this?” he can’t stop himself, finding this whole situation mortifying but at the same time amusing. He doesn’t care that he sounds rude; he knows his mother, at this point, won’t care for this either. His voice is hoarse. He hasn’t spoken to anyone for the past three days. The next words claw their way out of his throat, burning like acid.
“You made me like this.”
She doesn’t say anything in return at first. She just looks at him, her eyes cold and calculating. His mother, in contrast to him, has beautiful eyes. Sieun has always thought that. He thought that when he was five and she looked at him with warmth, thought that when she looked at him when he was seven and told him she and his dad are getting a divorce, thought that throughout all the years when he watched her videos. His mother has always had beautiful eyes.
His eyes don’t resemble hers at all. They don’t resemble his father’s either. Broken remnants, his mind supplies. Of course his eyes would be unnerving and creepy to anyone. His whole person is like a mismatched image with parts missing.
He thinks about Suho. He thinks about the fact that he said that Sieun’s eyes, that Sieun himself was so warmhearted. He feels sick in his stomach. He thinks he hates his mother; he knows that he doesn’t hate her at all.
“I didn’t make you into this, Sieun,” she says, sternly, like he’s six again and she’s scolding him. “Whatever I made you into, it wasn’t this. Whoever made you into this wasn’t me.”
She doesn’t have to say what she really means. Sieun has always known his mother well. He knows what she means the same way he knew she was lying when she said she’d visit a lot, just before she moved out during the divorce and he didn’t see her until two years later.
Ahn Suho is the one that made you into this.
Sieun doesn’t respond. He simply leaves. He bypasses her, making sure to not even brush against her.
“Get it together. The world won’t wait for you,” she throws out and then he hears the signature sound of her heels click-clacking on the floor. They move into opposite directions, the distance between them growing bigger and bigger; Sieun making his way deeper into the hospital and she towards the exit.
The world doesn’t matter, Sieun thinks. It stopped mattering the second I learned what happened to Suho.
He returns to Suho and puts the cup with the cold coffee on the table standing near the wall. (He returns to Suho’s side the way he always does, the way he always will. He thinks he will always find a way to him, no matter what happens.) He sits down next to him, grabs his hand again. He was supposed to study but he doesn’t think he will, not tonight.
He thinks about what his mother said. Get yourself together. Whoever made you into this wasn’t me. She wasn’t wrong, his mother rarely was wrong. Sieun has been remade by Suho and then shattered by what happened to him. Suho is the reason he is the way he is now but not in the way his mother thinks. She deems it as a disappointment, as a failure.
Sieun thinks he’ll stay like this, until Suho wakes up. It’s all he has left of him. He looks at Suho’s face, takes his features in like a starving man.
Maybe he will follow Suho if he never opens his eyes again. (Whoever made you into this wasn’t me.) Suho remade him and now Sieun can’t imagine a life without him.
And so, he sits. He leans and prays to Suho. Because even though Sieun never believed in God, he always believed in the boy he loves.