hiraeth | woosan

may

San doesn't dream of Wooyoung. He wishes he does. In a dream, he would be able to hold Wooyoung. He would be able to smile with him, laugh with him, or even fight with him, because San is willing to do anything, anything if it's with him.

But even when his conscious self sees the ghost of Wooyoung in every corner of his life, Wooyoung decides not to visit him in his dreams. Perhaps he knows that if he does, San would never want to wake up.

So San jolts awake when he hears Wooyoung's voice calling him from the border of dream and reality.

"Rise and shine, Sanshine!"

He gasps for air, sweating all over his body and flips his head around. When he sees nothing but emptiness, he sighs once. The clock on his phone reads '6:10 am', announcing the beginning of another blank day.

He trudges his way to the bathroom. It's the same routine; wash his face, take the blue toothbrush out of the two in a cup, and brush his teeth.

And then.

"Damn, you still keep that toothbrush? It's insanitary as hell, San."

San jolts, because that voice isn't bordering a dream but definitely a reality, unless a dream has decided to take on a vivid and physical scale. He flicks his eyes to the mirror in front of him, and he sees a faint white figure behind.

"Wooyoung...?"

The mirrored Wooyoung grins and waves his hand to the mirrored San. San turns his head urgently. Wooyoung is still there, standing, and smiling. San gasps, immediately approaching to hold him but his arms only swing through air.

"Yeah I'm a ghost, and as a well-known ghost fact goes; I'm physically unavailable." Wooyoung shrugs.

"What-"

"Uh, San, maybe you'd want to finish brushing first. You know, saliva-ed toothpaste dripping down your chin ain't sexy." Wooyoung makes an unapproving face and circles his finger around the mouth suggestively.

All cleaned up as Wooyoung suggested, they sit on the couch in the living room. Well, technically, Wooyoung isn't sitting but probably hovering over the couch because he is 'physically unavailable' and San can't help but be awed at the sight.

"So, you're saying you're a ghost," San confirms.

"Yup, that you summoned yesterday."

"I did?"

"Yeah, in that grandma-centric room."

It doesn't take much for San to figure out he was talking about Seonghwa's office.

"I was role-playing," San says, unsure of whatever that meant.

"I don't know, maybe it's your heightened emotion or something and I found myself there."

"But you disappeared."

"I only excused myself because you became emotionally unstable, San," Wooyoung says softly. "Then I followed you home."

The ghost places his hand against San's cheek. He can't feel anything.

"You told me you had a lot to do with me and say to me, so let's get things started!" Wooyoung prompts, and 'hops' off the couch.

San is still sitting there, staring at the incomprehensible sight in front of him. Jung Wooyoung, his lover and fiance (if South Korean government granted same sex marriage), who had died in a tragic car accident a year ago, is now dressed all in white, visibly transparent, physically unavailable but standing there before his eyes.

Is this a dream? Or did San missing him so much lead to this hallucination? Yeosang might suggest seeing a psychiatrist at this rate. But whatever this is, San wants to keep it. Wooyoung is with him right now, and that's all that matters.

Wooyoung, frustrated by unmoving San, urges. "Come on Sannie, we don't have forever."

Forever.

There was once when San believed in it.