(!) contains: vulgar language, homophobia, mentions of bullying, violence and death.

the first eighteen years of his life went a little like this: his father, a big, burly man in both stature and ego, with a voice that went against the very same grain of the vowels he spoke and war plastered scars, comes home reeking of cigars and buries seonghun neck-deep in the filth of his disappointment.

seonghun's the youngest of two, his older brother a spitting image of their father while he was more like his mother, yielding and passive and frail to the touch. his father tried to toughen him up throughout his childhood, forced him into the baseball league his brother was in, told him "you need to learn to be a real boy, a man when you grow up" and seonghun obliged because he, in his cowardly-ridden youth, craved approval from the only father he's ever known. he lasted not more than three days, his shorter stature and weak physique rowdied complaints from the other boys and their parents alike.

he got the worst of it when his father found out he joined the theater troop at his school. the dining table shook against the boom of his voice when he gave him lashing after lashing about how "gay" and "fucking stupid" he was being. his twelve year old self trembled under the scrutiny of his father's hate and the beating he was going to receive, bones splintered in migration and hands clasped so hard around the cheap silverware he thought his joints were going to burst through every single layer of his skin. he promised himself he wouldn't cry, not then, not there. he was strong, brave, not a weak, good for nothing piece of shit. there was a second long pause that stretched decades, the marred, yellow walls of the room closing in on him, breath lodged in his throat like an overblown engine, then he spilled(?) open, his minute long facade crumbled as he lost himself to the riot of emotions in his chest, sobbed, as quietly as he could (he would not ruin it for anybody else) all over the food his mother spent hours making.

eventually he stopped speaking, stopped sharing, stopped being present entirely. to his family, he was a fleshsuit that rented out a room.

good news came in the form of his father's death. he was informed via a voicemail his mother left: the stage four lung cancer took him. seonghun couldn't find it in himself to feel any type of remorse or attend the funeral proceeding because to return to a man like that, even if it was to watch him be buried six feet under, is a mistake he'll never make.

part of him resented his brother for never standing up for him - even his mother, as gentle and reticent as she was, tried easing the tension when it went a little too far - and he carried that anger, so big and ugly it could've filled up houses—mansions even, with him until his senior year of college when he had an accident that landed him three days in the hospital.

(he needs to remember the only way out is through).

but when he laid on his hospital bed, body strung out like a kite, it was his brother who first came walking through the door.

(he needs to remember the only way out is through, past the blood and the bruise).