off limits ✧ zb1 applyfic

✧ fifty eight

Irang was neither obsessively organized, nor a messy person. She usually stood perfectly in the middle, liking things to be clear and have room to breathe, without thinking too hard about the perfect sorting system for her pens. Her bedroom was a prime example of that: lived-in enough not to look straight out of an IKEA magazine, but tidy enough to look like the sort of rooms you’d see as inspiration on the internet. She liked it that way.

Only today, the mess had definitely overtaken the organization. Since she'd woken up in the morning, she'd been hard at work folding origami, slouched over her desk. The successful attempts were proudly gathered around her, while the failures had started to spill to the ground, crumpled and abandoned. She'd been following tutorials to make a bunch of different animals, but they were a lot harder than she’d initially expected. By now, she'd mastered the bunny, having made many of those before, but it turned out making a crab was a next-level challenge.

A soft knock at the door was not enough to completely pull her out of her work, but she hummed to let the person know they could enter. As always, Hanbin only opened the door slightly, careful never to invade on his little sister's space without permission. Irang had told him many times she didn't mind him walking in as he willed, but still, Hanbin just had to be polite.

"I'm done making lunch," he announced. "Are you coming?"

She pressed her lips together, thinking for a second. "Hmm, I'm not hungry."

Even from behind the door, she could almost feel the worry emanating from him. Slowly, the door creaked open, and Hanbin finally dared enter her room, probably wondering if she was doing okay. Before his eyes could scan his sister's face to detect any sign of illness, his gaze was immediately pulled to the pile of crumpled up paper on her desk, and pooling at her feet. He blinked slowly, and stayed quiet for a moment.

"Jeez, Irang," he finally spoke up, half chuckling, "what’s with the mass deforestation?"

She laughed, but quickly felt her cheeks warm up. "They’re, well, they’re gifts, so I'm trying to make them as perfect as possible."

There wasn’t much room for doubt that he'd guessed who they were for right away. "Oh, I see..."

His face set in a smile, Hanbin closed the door behind him as he took a few steps onto the wooden floor of Irang's room, approaching her slowly. Without saying anything, he grabbed a spare chair that was in the corner of her room and pulled it near her desk, before sitting down. For a split second, Irang felt her heart rise to her throat, wondering if she was in for a scolding or something like that. But it quickly became clear to her, that Hanbin rarely, if ever, scolded her. This was something else. A classic big brother talk.

"How is it going with Yujin?" Yup, she'd guessed right. "Are you happy?"

Honestly, Irang still found it a little hard to express her feelings and talk about her relationship with Yujin. It was strange, because she and Hanbin had always been close and talked about anything. He was so incredibly supportive of her, of them, and she knew he had nothing but good intentions and good words to offer her. Still, it was difficult to articulate her thoughts. Someone who had once been her closest friend, whom she could have screamed from the rooftops about how cool he was, now felt like her own secret garden. She wanted to keep him to herself, all the details about him, the way his hand felt soft yet slightly clammy in hers, the exact tint his cheeks took when their eyes met for too long. She never would have thought she would find it embarrassing to say these things to her brother...

"I've never been happier," she replied sincerely, albeit with reluctance. "I really feel like we've gotten more comfortable with each other, like we used to be, and it's... It feels strange, but so great at the same time."