Stray Kids Drabbles

Northern attitude

You've been raised to be resilient and unbreakable your whole life, but when the neighborhood stray kitten loses its life in an accident, your walls crumble and you fall apart.

Trigger warning: Verbal and physical child abuse, animal death, brief mention of animal abuse, PTSD episode, and a dead parent joke.

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Stoicism wasn't something you learned overnight. It was something that grew deep inside of you over time. Every hardship, you met it with a blank face. You took it in a determined stride and kept your dignity intact.

Growing up with your family was rough. Learning that crying was a weakness instead of a way to get out pent up feelings had done massive amounts of damage. You never let yourself cry. It was the one thing you were always proud of yourself for.

You didn't cry, you didn't break, and you stood tall. You were unreadable when it came to your emotions. You could get told awful news and it didn't bother you. You taught yourself how to stand with your back straightened and your chin up.

You taught yourself how to let the current of words flow through you. You never took words to heart or maybe you did. Perhaps you did and you let your heart soak up the words, but you never let yourself grieve.

To be strong was to be brave and to be brave was perfection. Life was often filled with the echoes of family members and their threats. "You wanna cry? I'll give you something to cry about." It was usually met by some type of physical punishment.

It's funny how things from childhood fade, but sometimes the past voices never do. Elementary school friendships can become blurry, but the angry words of your father thrown at your face on a random Sunday stick to you like glue.

It's hard to experience sympathy for those who didn't grow up the same way. Sometimes it's hard to see eye-to-eye with the rest of the world. Sure you grew up difficult and in a mess of a household, but you didn't cry like a lot of people did. Your habits were set in stone.

You folded to your father's wishes. Even as an adult, you didn't cry. When you broke apart on the inside and crumbled, you didn't mourn. You buried the grief, along with more dejection, deep in the depths of your heart.

Your heart was like Pandora's box. Who knew what awaited for the person that opened it. You didn't think too much about it. Eventually, those inner demons would fade away and you'd busy yourself with other things.

Bury yourself in mountains of work or go out to exercise. Sprint on a treadmill until your calves are on fire or lift weights until your muscles scream. It always managed to do the trick.

In fact, it worked a little too well. In a matter of months, you whipped yourself into the best shape of your life. The gym was where you met your boyfriend. You had never met anyone quite like Changbin before.

Changbin didn't run away from his emotions. He allowed himself to feel what he felt and he allowed himself to sit in them and experience them. Similar to you, sometimes he let them fuel him at the gym.

He did a lot more than that though. Sometimes he placed them into his music or threw them into dancing. You admired him for that. There was so much to Seo Changbin that you didn't quite understand.

It's not like you didn't sympathize with him, you did. All the times he came home upset or something happened and he got sad, you couldn't understand why he allowed himself to cry.

If your father would have raised Changbin, his tears would have been beaten out of him. How many times would he have been spanked with a wooden board until his tears dried? How many belt whips would it have taken before his body felt numb?