jibes: (Default)
jibes ([personal profile] jibes) wrote in [community profile] 17hols 2021-12-29 01:42 pm (UTC)

[FILL] wishbone again

Ship/Member: wonwoo/jeonghan/(woozi)
Major Tags: offscreen gang(?) violence
Additional Tags: mentions of blood and injury, ambiguous relationships, whatever the opposite of tender wound healing is
Permission to remix: Yes

A/N: by pure chance, exactly 400 words <3 sorry for second person i was in a mood

***

The first night Wonwoo comes to you, you don’t bother asking why.

No were you in the neighborhood, no did you miss hyung that much. No whose blood are you wearing.

He shows up at your officetel battered and bruised from something you'll coax out of him tomorrow—spiderweb lacerations all down his arms; an angry, dark gash along his jawline that you press your fingers against until his eyes go wide, until he grits his teeth. The way his breathing whistles tells you there's at least one cracked rib.

You see all of this, and remember Jihoon's steady instructions; his calm, professional tone. The things he's taught you about fixing someone when they need it.

But you’ve sworn you’ll never do anything Jihoon tells you to do.

There’s nothing in your medicine cabinet but cobwebs and an expired bottle of pills, anyway.

Dirty mouth, dirty nails, his skin is inch for inch the ghastly pale of a near-dead thing. You can’t help him—but help isn't what he's asking for. There’s a reason, after all, that Wonwoo is here instead of with Jihoon.

Some people are just better at causing pain than healing it, and some people don’t need to be healed no matter how damaged they look. He has no illusions about what hands like yours are capable of.

This is what you, and only you, can do: you can take his arm and hold it above your kitchen sink, empty the contents of an old bottle of vodka over it to hear the way his breath hisses through his teeth again and again as it burns the rawness of his flesh. You can turn his knobbly hand over in yours and duck your head (watching, always watching, how his eyes darken), lick the inside of his wrist where it drips into the drain, salt and iron and alcohol in your mouth and nothing, nothing sweet about it at all—and he might be a long way from home but when you do this, you can taste the city on him.

Jeonghan-hyung, he sighs later, when you take him to bed. Not gently, not kindly, but this is what he wants. This is what he needs. Light pollution filters through the slatted window, drawing prison bars over your tangled forms.

Shh, you whisper, smile so full of teeth. I've got you.




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