we are inevitable | jakehoon

ten.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Although, in all possible interpretations of the world ending, they couldn't be considered quite as drastic.

Their little circle doesn't disintegrate. The five of them still sit at the same table every day for lunch, except now they're joined sometimes by some of the basketball team, mostly a boy who goes by K, sometimes by another transfer student Hanbin and his friends, or sometimes even by Jungwon's second-year best friend Daniel, but the five of them stay constant.

Sunghoon and Jake remain cordial. There's no shouting, no arguing, no insults and backstabbing remarks, people from the outside could barely tell they had broken up, if not for the fact that they didn't hold hands in the hallways anymore. Jake is overly nice in the weeks that follow, putting his jacket over puddles for Sunghoon whenever he can, the motivations of which he hardly understands himself. Is his driving force guilt, for what he did to Sunghoon? Does he think being nice will make up for everything that happened between them?

All he knows is that it hurts to see Sunghoon treat him the way he does. Not even worse than everyone else, but just like everyone else. Like Jake never meant anything to him at all.

He reminds himself he doesn't have a right to be hurt anymore. For all it's worth, Sunghoon has every right to treat him like nothing, probably even less than nothing.

In some ways, Jake supposes the world has ended. In other ways, it goes on.

─

Graduation is a grand event, but it somehow finds a way to remain uneventful in Jake's memory. Though by no means does he lack achievement ─ the varsity football team bring home the national champion title as they always do, he does well in Advanced Placement Math and Physics and his teachers tell him his portfolio is good enough for any decent college or even a football scholarship, if he's interested in pursuing college-level athletics ─ his finds the entire year seems to have been that way. Everything is good, but nothing is special.

His applications for full-ride scholarships don't disappoint; by winter he's saddled with five different universities offering places, and it's a walk in the park picking the campus he feels he'll study best in, before he makes his decision. By spring he moves away from home to settle down at his new dorm, in preparation for the first semester to start. He's a freshman again, studying undergraduate Astronomy, in a hopeless bid to fathom the stars that set his life in motion a year ago, for better or for worse.

He shoots off messages to his friends on the long train ride to the college campus, checking up on their plans for the new year. Jay is all set for a business course in the most prestigious college in the country, K has a basketball scholarship offer from another college with a known strong sports' team, Jungwon is looking to accept the Advanced Placement course the high school offered him for third-year Math.

Jake even sends a message to Heeseung, though they all get enough updates about his life. Heeseung is one of those people who doesn't leave social media throughout his waking hours; Jake's quite sure he can pinpoint the older boy's exact location and activity on any given day.

Heeseung is happy to catch up with Jake, in any case. He's pursuing Higher Music studies in the same college, though the science and arts faculties generally don't mix, he expresses excitement over seeing Jake around sometime soon.

─

Jake's assigned roommate is a boy with pink hair from the English Literature faculty named Kim Sunoo. They move in on, coincidentally, the same day, and play rock-paper-scissors for which side of the room they get. Jake gets the first pick, and he picks right.

He doesn't think, as he unpacks his bags and settles in for the term, about how the bed is lined up against the wall just like Sunghoon's was. He doesn't think about how, as he sleeps on his side facing the wall, when he closes his eyes, he can almost feel Sunghoon asleep next to him.

Memories haunt him, as it does everyone else, but as Jake settles into the rigor of college, he learns to see past it. He's living with the consequences of his own choices, after all. He puts his heart into his new football team, his new classes, Copernicus and Tycho and Kepler, laws of planetary motion.

Numbers are always easier than people. For one, a cube is always a cube, and a sphere is always a sphere, and there are no repercussions to arriving at either.

─

Sunoo is, on all accounts, a most unobtrusive roommate. Jake has heard Heeseung's laments about his roommate for the first two weeks who absolutely refused to let him sing in his own dorm room and threatened to call campus security on him for 'disrupting the peace'. Thankfully, after two weeks, the roommate had given up on the idea of dorm rooms at college and moved out entirely, and Heeseung got reassigned a roommate from the Modern Arts faculty he could finally get along with. Jake, despite all his concern for his hyung, is more than happy he doesn't have to suffer the same fate.

Sunoo keeps his side of the room clean and neat, his syllabus texts stacked neatly on the table with rainbow book-tabs; Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities. Jake vaguely recalls reading some of those titles for a mandatory literature studies back in middle school, but he can barely remember the name of the main characters now, let alone analyse the texts.

"What do you learn in class?" Jake asks out of nowhere, one of the nights they both sit at their study tables, in the midst of studying.

Sunoo spins his wheely chair around. "What we're learning right now, or what we learn in general?"

"I don't know, right now maybe."

"We're analysing Jane Austen's use of characterization in Mansfield Park as a critique on societal expectations for our Literature in History module."

Jake widens his eyes and turns back to his work. "You lost me at 'we're analysing'."

Sunoo laughs, and pushes the book on his desk aside. "It's not as bad as you think. It comes with practice, really. What do you learn in class, then?"

"Right now, we're covering the Full Kepler Orbit Problem."

"See, for normal people," Sunoo interjects. "Those four words in that exact order are enough to drive them far, far away."

"Am I not normal?" Jake counters, laughing.

"No, you're weird."

"You look at squiggles on paper for eight hours a day and I'm the weird one?"

"That's what your formula symbols look like to normal people."

"...you know what, you might be right."