ᴛʜᴇ ᴄʟᴇᴀʀ ᴇɴᴇᴍʏ || ᴊ.ᴡʏ + ᴄ.ꜱ

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟑𝟕

"Things only got worse after he was gone," Wooyoung remarked rather stoically following his last statement, and San silently nodded his head, having an idea where he was going with this.

Unlike most times, the two of them, unmindful of the clock ticking on the far wall, sat on the damp locker room floor lost in their own bubble of conversation, an unjustified calm settling over them.

Everything had felt so heavy listening to Wooyoung talk about his dad, but San knew his story wouldn't get any less heartbreaking. They had yet to touch on the other loss he'd endured, the reason he'd even set out to find Wooyoung on this particular day.

Wooyoung hadn't only lost one parent, he'd lost both of them...

Wooyoung brought up one of his knees and let his chin rest on it, his eyes closing for a moment while he took a much-needed pause.

It was emotionally draining to look his trauma in the face after constantly shoving it down, the emotions hitting him so intensely that it was almost numbing. Nobody had ever given him that push to emote rather than keeping it all stuffed away, most either uncaring or worried about overstepping. 

Since he'd been given this space to let out even a little of what he'd been holding inside, he couldn't, or rather his brain couldn't decipher his emotions fast enough. This was a door that, once opened, was difficult to seal back up, considering it was holding a hoarder's amount of his past inside that he had yet to sort through, or rather had intentionally put off with no intention of ever rummaging through it.

Would he ever admit that he was sorting through some of it now, and with San? Likely not. That was too much to comprehend.

"My dad obviously couldn't come to my thing at school, but neither could my mom," Wooyoung began to explain in that brash talking style of his that noticeably eased up as he reached the next part.

"A few months after my dad died, my mom's doctor diagnosed her with a late-stage bone cancer, so she had just started chemotherapy." A single chuckle from his mouth followed, drained of all humor.

The fancy word for her condition was Chondrosarcoma. It's not a term that everyone knows, but Wooyoung knew it painfully well.

San released a heavy wave of air, a plethora of emotions hitting him all at once.

Here Wooyoung was, making him homesick to the core and, not just that but, letting him in enough to the point where he could empathize with him—see him more clearly as just a boy who loved and lost two important people in his life, and was now living with the after-effects.

San couldn't imagine how he might be had that happened to him.

He never imagined he'd be in a place to have any kind of understanding of Wooyoung, but there was no way he could walk away with the same view he'd had of him prior. Not after being the one to listen to him dish out the sensitive details of his past, and do all of that willingly.

San wasn't a monster, and, turns out, Wooyoung wasn't a douche...or was, but had some pretty fair reasons as to why he went out of his way to ward off people the same way virgins ward off STDs—not opening themselves up for anyone.

"That was the first time I experienced what it felt like to be parentless," Wooyoung commented lightheartedly as if all of it hadn't flipped his whole world upside down.

"People try to be extra nice," he explained, dragging the word 'nice' out sarcastically. "Or they act awkward--or best of all," he smirked a bit, "they talk about you instead of to you because it's some pretty interesting shit when it has nothing to do with you."