fairytale hell asteroid | l.dh

twenty.

The campus has the most uncomfortable benches.

There were two types of them: the wooden ones and the metal ones. The wooden ones came with no back, and the metal ones did. Typically, students would pick the metal ones for their settle, but they all had diamond patterns that would leave their mark on your skin if you sat on them for more than ten minutes, which ended up making them the unappealing choice.

Donghyuck didn't mind it much, though. He rarely ever wears shorts. He would prefer the bench with a back to lean on anytime, which he usually did. But his favorite bench on the whole campus was a wooden one on the side of a walking road, directly facing the tinted glass doors to the student union center. He never went into the building; the school events never intrigued him, and his primary socializing method was more involved with fraternities than student union weeks. But he was consistently there at the bench, observing with an ache in his chest, for the daycare program the university implemented to help students.

The children were always faceless to him—a complete blur before his childhood projections. The ache comes in deliberate gut punches, from seeing the children smile at their parents, their parents returning the same sunny disposition because the children are loved dearly, to him realizing he never remembered the last time he held his father's hand and saw a loving smile from him. He debated if it ever happened at all. Perhaps his yearning for parental love was so severe that he hallucinated to mend his broken heart.

Donghyuck licked his lower lip when he felt the corners quirk down instinctively.

There was more to this issue than before now that you were in the picture, he recognized. Jeno briefly warned him about it before; his affection for you cannot come from the land of unchosen solitude. But he did not think that about his feelings. He did not think so shallowly of them. In fact, he found himself getting physically sick from the mere thought that he cared about you only for your ability to provide him with what his trauma lacked.

If a mirror image of him stood before himself and said that he didn't love you, Donghyuck thought he might weep.

"There you are."

Donghyuck looked away from the student union center to where your voice trailed into his ear. You were standing by the corner of the bench, chest heaving from jogging. It took you a much shorter time to find him than you expected. You were on your way to one of the campus exit near the biggest parking lot the university has and found him sitting alone on a bench. You looked timid, but the lines on your face remained gentle and calm as he knew them.

Adrenaline rushed to his brain. Soft adrenaline that carried more than the truth but also emotions he was never ready to handle. The adrenaline that only pumped in your presence, whether you were physically next to him or you were fragments of his memories that were made so vivid because he never stopped replaying them. His mind traced the lines on your face with the knowledge of how they were mapped out on your face. With soft adrenaline he once again knew he never stopped thinking of you, and he loved you more than everything.

"What are you doing here?" you started after you sat down next to him.

He straightened his back with a heavy exhale. His eyes found their way back to the glass doors. "Waiting for you," he said casually. "I sensed that you were looking for me."

You nodded. "Did you also sense what I came here for?"

"Let me guess," he smirked, "you can't stand being away from me."

You thought he would say something like that. The playful answer was so familiar to his personality that a smile slowly touched your face. You held onto it for a while because he wasn't looking your way, but it surely would have made him unbelievably happy if he saw. Besides that, though, the hilarity of his outrageous answer was in its partial truth.