#wordsmith: eoieopda

[the-mazed-magic-shop]

I can't find words to describe how sad I felt while reading this and how sad I am feeling after reading this! I am just so grateful that you wrote this and I got to read it! The way your words flow in every emotions is so poetic... seriously... when moon and sun will return our earth will resume spinning like it should.

the one where hoseok comes home

Pairing: Jung Hoseok x gn!Reader Type: Drabble // Fluff // Established Relationship AU Rating: PG-13 — Minors DNI w/ my content, regardless! CW: None 💕 Summary: It’s October 2024 and your life finally — finally — resumes its orbit. WC: .5k A/N: Deviating from my WIPs (ope) because I needed a fix-it fic for, like, reality? Nobody requested this lil baby blurb, unless you count… me. Dedicated to (m)y jihope-biased emotional support moot, @here2bbtstrash

You’d learned more in eighteen months than you had in over eighteen years of formal education.

The first lesson came on your second morning alone: hotteok tastes better when it’s made for you. Even if the cook gets distracted by the background music they themselves are generating. Even if the edges are crispier than they should be, and the centers are a bit gooey, or there’s pre-packaged mix dusting over your previously clean countertops. Even if that hotteok is cold by the time you stop kissing and start eating, you know now that few things in life are sweeter.

He is, of course, but the point still stands.

Showers, you’d learned, are colder when you take them alone. This was a surprise you grappled with for weeks and a confounding reality you still struggle to square. A scientific mystery, then and now.

All of the hot water was yours — exclusively — to use as you pleased. You didn’t have to scramble, soap-covered and squealing, for the prime spot under the shower head. Cold air didn’t nip at your damp skin when you lost territory because you didn’t have to compete for any in the first place. Still, without whole-chested laughter to echo off the walls, not much existed to separate your body from cold porcelain.

The absence of personal space isn’t something you intend to ever take for granted again.

Of all the things you’d realized in your uncharacteristically quiet apartment, one thing hit a little harder:

Love looks different every day.

Sometimes, it comes at an odd angle. It’s spending all thirty minutes of a daily allowance with a phone propped against a faucet. It’s staring up at someone’s chin, watching fondly as they brush their teeth, and smiling when they remember — without being told — to put the cap back on the toothpaste.

Other times, it looks like an Excel spreadsheet of pop culture news, fastidiously collected and organized so that no groundbreaking celebrity gossip goes unreported. It’s incredulous eyes and a scandalized mouth hanging open, interjecting occasionally with, “Wa, jinjja?”

Every now and then, it looks like handwritten letters with thick, black redactions applied after the fact with a far heavier hand. Though you couldn’t tell where in the Republic they came from, you knew — without question — that government censorship does not apply to hastily doodled hearts.

Today, however, love doesn’t look like much of anything because its hands are covering your eyes.

It sounds like clean spoons clattering back into the dishwasher you’d been emptying, entirely unaware that the door down the hall had opened and shut out of earshot. It smells like army-issued shampoo and Thai milk tea from that little spot near the train station, where surprise journeys home occur two days ahead of schedule. And it feels like the ground shifting beneath your fluffy house slippers; the Earth now back on its axis and ready to resume spinning like it should.

Tonight, love will taste like hotteok for dinner — and you won’t have to make it yourself.