Young and Wild || seongjoong || ATEEZ

Chapter Seventeen: Life Without You

Chapter warning: none

Love is a constant feeling that can not disappear with time.

Love was always a concept that was both beautiful and completely confusing to Seonghwa. It was one of those things that seemed to be the simplest and easiest thing to obtain, especially from all the grand stories he used to read when he was younger. In all the great books, every character fell in love. There was always a journey that came with it, and some were more grand than others, but it always ended with the characters falling in a perfect love and ending with a happy ending. To a child, that was the dream. To a child, that was what their future was going to look like.

To an adult, that still was a dream. But more often than not, most found that it would only stay a dream. Stories, were in fact, just stories at the end of the day.

Seonghwa had known that it would stay a dream when he found out that his marriage when he was younger was going to be arranged. There were some kingdoms where the kings and queens let their crown princes find love in a foreign land, but that certainly would never be something granted to him. Love, in its truest and romantic form, would not come from an arranged marriage. And as lucky as Seonghwa had been to have his best friend at the time to be his partner, there would never be true love between them. At least not in the way that Seonghwa had looked to the stars and the moon and dreamed of in his future.

The dream of love for him died pretty quickly after he grew up. But that certainly didn't stop him from clinging to the hopes and dreams of the characters he read of in books. He was happy for them, most times, that they got their happy ending.

But as Seonghwa lay awake in the late morning, bright white sheets tangled over his tanned skin as he looked to the wooden ceiling above him and take in how there were countless dust particles floating in the soft sunlight that came from the window, he couldn't help but smile warmly to himself as he turned his head to the side to scoot closer to the man who was still sleeping beside him. There was love. There was trust and adoration. There was a kind of love that Seonghwa had never read of before. The kind of love that was talked about in the books he read was so different from the deep love he felt for the man laying there with his arm under Seonghwa's neck to keep him close.

Seonghwa could only blink slowly as he watched Hongjoong sleep so peacefully beside him, his bare chest warm with the sun just like the bridge of his nose that sparkled beautifully. When Seonghwa was younger and learning how to deal with foreign affairs and how to deem a man or woman important was to understand where they came from and why they came to him. Townswomen and townsmen were supposedly nothing compared to the Lords and Ladies that filled the once great halls of the castle where they each met with Seonghwa from time to time to discuss every matter under the sun in preparation for his head to receive the crown when the time came. But the longer turned his body so he could carefully look over every feature of his captain's serene face as he continued to sleep gracefully with little chirps from birds beyond the window, Seonghwa found that he didn't care where Hongjoong had come from or why he came. All that mattered was that he was right there at that very moment with him.

Their love had not started out the way Seonghwa had imagined his love for the person he would love forever to be. No their start, the true start, had been of anger and bad judgment. Before Seonghwa had known exactly who Hongjoong was other than the rogue pirate captain that every nobleman wanted dead, his heart had been so cold and hardened from vast amounts of pain that Seonghwa hadn't been able to see what was true before his own eyes. Though as time passed, day by day, month by month, Seonghwa found himself smiling more when he was alone. There were times when he saw things in a different light- how the true colors of the world were so vibrant compared to the monochrome grey- and he even began to learn little things about himself that he would've never known if the captain hadn't fallen right into his hands bound with chains.