Seeing Go Yoon smiling, Kang Juno squeezed his eyes shut to suppress his rising anger, chewed on his curses, then eventually let out an absurd laugh and cursed.
“Fuck, are you saying that’s even……”
In fact, Kang Juno couldn’t hear the voice of the person Go Yoon was talking to on the phone outside the bathroom in detail, but he could clearly hear Go Yoon’s voice.
“Yeah, then. That bastard who’s your friend too.”
It was a terrifying thing. So Kang Juno didn’t want to deliberately bring out the contents of Go Yoon’s phone call, the shocking words he heard there, out loud. But at Go Yoon’s shameless appearance, he eventually put that name in his mouth.
“Is the name Cha Hohyeon?”
“……!”
Go Yoon couldn’t hide his momentarily surprised expression and looked at Kang Juno with wide eyes. Kang Juno had thought he might have heard wrong, but seeing the surprised Go Yoon, he was certain.
“You were calling out ‘Cha Hohyeon, Hohyeon-ah’ so well. Even with this, you have nothing to say?”
While listening to that phone call outside the door, Kang Juno had all kinds of thoughts. Was Go Yoon crazy and talking to himself? Or was he, who was listening to this, the crazy one? Then what was that muttering sound beyond the phone, and why was the name of the person receiving the call Cha Hohyeon of all names?
“Stop keeping your mouth shut and say something.”
Kang Juno had been having too severe headaches lately even with just a little stress. Unable to bear it, Kang Juno glared at Go Yoon while pressing his throbbing head firmly with one hand, but Go Yoon just shut his mouth tight like a clam and turned his head, refusing to speak. In the end, the one going crazy in front of such a Go Yoon was Kang Juno.
“Why are you doing that?”
Kang Juno pressed him about the phone call contents, but Go Yoon just quickly pushed Kang Juno’s back with both hands as if wanting to end this conversation quickly.
“I’ll explain later.”
At the roundabout refusal, Kang Juno looked at Go Yoon with a deflated face, but he deliberately avoided that gaze and just silently pushed Kang Juno’s back.
As Go Yoon tried to get Kang Juno out of the room completely, Kang Juno at first resisted with strength and looked at Go Yoon as if telling him not to do that. However, Go Yoon couldn’t meet Kang Juno’s eyes and just lowered his head and silently put strength into his hands. In the end, Kang Juno released the strength from his body with a deflated face.
“So for now…… get out.”
Kang Juno obediently let himself be pushed as Go Yoon pushed, but at the door threshold, he stopped firmly. That moment, Go Yoon’s hand on Kang Juno’s back being roughly shaken off was instantaneous.
“This is fucking bullshit.”
Kang Juno cursed and shook off the hand. Kang Juno pushed Go Yoon’s shoulder like a person pouring out the anger he’d been holding back.
“You’re like this every time, aren’t you?”
“Kang Juno.”
“What the hell is it this time? Why do you have so many things you can’t say?”
At those words, when Go Yoon avoided Kang Juno’s gaze, seeing such a Go Yoon, Kang Juno couldn’t control his anger and violently kicked the trash can next to him. Seeing the overturned trash can and the messy floor, Go Yoon also eventually frowned.
“Kang Juno, I said I’d tell you when the time comes. Don’t you still know me? I’m asking you to wait just a little—”
“You’re the one!”
Toward such a Go Yoon, Kang Juno opened his eyes wide and yelled. Go Yoon, startled by the sudden loud voice, opened his eyes wide, and Kang Juno yelled alone for a long while with an indignant voice, then as if his anger wasn’t released, struck the wall with his hand with a bang.
“You’re the one who really doesn’t know us, you fucking bastard.”
Then he walked over in one stride and grabbed Go Yoon’s shoulder. When the two people of similar build stood facing each other, glaring into each other’s eyes, Kang Juno suddenly took his hand off Go Yoon’s shoulder with a crumbling face and swept his face covered thick with fatigue.
“I really feel like I’m going crazy.”
His voice was a tired voice with all energy drained, unlike his momentum from just before. The appearance of Kang Juno yelling and cursing disappeared in an instant as if it was a dream, and there was just an exhausted and hurt Kang Juno staring blankly at Go Yoon.
“Yoon-ah, how long do we have to try?”
Kang Juno, as the leader of ‘Fort,’ tried his best to lead the group well. And the weight of being leader approached even bigger and heavier now that Cha Hohyeon was dead. Still, he tried his best without showing it.
“What exactly am I supposed to do here, how am I supposed to do more?”
Seeing Go Yoon’s tightly shut mouth, it now seemed pointless.
The name ‘Cha Hohyeon’ heard from the bathroom, Go Yoon talking on the phone calling the unidentified other person Cha Hohyeon, Go Yoon acting as if the other person was Cha Hohyeon. What Kang Juno felt when he heard all of that from outside was.
“When will it get better?”
Despair.
He thought it had gotten better. No, he thought it was getting better. All of Fort’s members were having a hard time, but he thought Go Yoon, who witnessed Cha Hohyeon’s death right in front of him, would be having a harder time. Moreover, Kang Juno, who heard from the manager the story that Go Yoon treated Cha Hohyeon coldly right before Cha Hohyeon died, knew that as much as Go Yoon’s regret and guilt were great, the aftereffects would also be long. But.
“When are you going to escape from Cha Hohyeon?”
“Kang Juno.”
“It’s been five months. Five months have already passed.”
“Watch your words.”
It was the limit now. At Go Yoon’s words reproaching him not to do that, Kang Juno spat out curses fiercely and spoke as if crushing each word.
“Still don’t understand what I mean? Yeah. I’m also so sad that our Hohyeon died.”
“……”
“Cha Hohyeon, who we lived together with for years, died. And it was on a day nobody fucking expected, a day we should have been smiling! Suddenly. He died when we hadn’t done anything proper for him. Fuck. Without even saying goodbye.”
“Juno-ya.”
“So wouldn’t we be sad?”
It was a sudden death. Because it was a death no one expected, it was even harder to accept. Because the reality without Cha Hohyeon was hard to believe, it still seemed like Cha Hohyeon was living in the dorm together. So whenever Kang Juno left the living room, he sometimes saw like a hallucination the appearance of Cha Hohyeon approaching him calling ‘hyung.’
“The fact that there’s no Cha Hohyeon who always waited for me at home even if it was late when I came back exhausted after schedules.”
It was just one person. It was just the absence of Cha Hohyeon, but Fort’s dorm felt so empty and wide and hollow. Especially recently while preparing for activities, Cha Hohyeon’s vacancy was so big it couldn’t be described in words.
“From now on, Fort has to release songs without Hohyeon, and wherever we go, now there will be four chairs placed instead of five, and the fact that even if name tags are given, there won’t be a name called Cha Hohyeon.”
“……”
“Just imagining that is hard, fuck. How exactly am I supposed to accept this? So you know I can never tell you to forget Cha Hohyeon either.”
Kang Juno shook his head and pointed at Go Yoon as if telling him to please look at reality.
“But he’s not here now.”
“……”
“He’s dead. Hohyeon isn’t here now, so why are you doing this? Please stop. Snap out of it!”
Kang Juno, who kept shaking his head as if this wasn’t right and venting his resentment, yelled and rushed out of the room, and Go Yoon, who was looking at such Kang Juno’s back, slowly sank to the floor while leaning against the wall.
‘Where should I start solving this?’
Go Yoon couldn’t see any way to resolve the conflict at all, so his eyes went dark.
“Look.”
While Go Yoon was sitting huddled in a corner of the wall with his head in his hands, Kang Juno, who quickly came back into the room, was holding something full in both hands. And in front of Go Yoon, he kept flipping over various bags and dumped what was inside onto the floor.
Thud thud thud—
An enormous amount of medicine poured out. On the medicine bags were written not only Kang Juno’s name but also Ha Moon and Robi’s names, and unidentifiable medical certificates also kept falling to the floor as the medicine bags fell. Go Yoon, who had been blankly watching those things pour down like rain, blinked his eyes slowly.
“……What the hell is this?”
Go Yoon, thinking ‘no way,’ raised his hand and grabbed a medicine bag. The familiar bags had various dates from December until recently.
“They’re medicine.”
Go Yoon had stopped taking medicine. Because he could really meet Cha Hohyeon, there was no need to take medicine anymore. But except for Go Yoon, who knew the fact that Cha Hohyeon was alive, Fort’s members were still living in hell and couldn’t easily stop the medicine.
The sadness about younger brother Cha Hohyeon’s death, the guilt that they couldn’t protect the youngest, the regret that flooded in because it seemed like they had never done anything good for him, the burden of whether they could fill Cha Hohyeon’s empty seat from now on—because these things choked their breathing, even though they were sick of the medicine and wanted to stop, they couldn’t stop.
“Yeah. It’s medicine, but why aren’t you asking what kind of medicine it is?”
Kang Juno stepped into the middle of the medicine scattered messily on the floor and crouched down in it. And when his eyes met with Go Yoon who was still sitting, he smiled a self-deprecating smile with a face that said he could see right through Go Yoon.
“You’re scared, aren’t you? Afraid that if you know what this is, it can’t be undone.”
At those words, Go Yoon didn’t answer, and Kang Juno smiled sadly looking at Go Yoon who didn’t answer his question.
“Yoon-ah, do you still only see the dead Cha Hohyeon?”
The numerous medicine bags and Kang Juno’s words came to Go Yoon as a huge shock.
In the end, he couldn’t bear to look at Kang Juno crouching in the middle of the medicine bags piled up full on the floor and closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“I’m sorry.”
It was true that his recent attention had all been focused on Cha Hohyeon, so he couldn’t imagine at all that the members were visiting the hospital on a weekly basis. Kang Juno, who was looking at Go Yoon’s deeply bowed head, felt bitter about the fact that he didn’t want to go this far, but it had become this situation.
“You barely look at us only when I do this. But you know what? Even without having to do this, just……”
Kang Juno thought. Why don’t you look at us? We who are left behind are also so tired and want to die and go back and forth to hell several times a day.
