Void in Blue || ThanGyu

Chapter 1

Namgyu never believed in God. It's always been a foreign concept he couldn't quite grasp. While other kids went to the small town church with their families in their clean, white button-ups and polished shoes every Sunday, Namgyu would peek in through the tall windows that felt more like portals to a whole other dimension, his small fingers gripping the edges as his bare feet dangled off the ground. His mother always said the same thing - God isn't real and won't help you. The people clinging to religion are simply cowards that can't face reality. Then, she'd tell him about how her own mother forced her to attend church, and how God only let her down once she got pregnant with him. Namgyu would apologize and lower his head, holding in the hot sting of his shameful tears. After all, his dad told him he was a man now, so he shouldn't cry.

He never got nice button-ups or polished dress shoes. He never went to church with his parents. He tried praying, a few times, after he saw a girl in ponytails do it in an old, grainy, black and white movie. It was one of those where the voices were muffled and no one really knew what it was about, but Namgyu watched it again and again until he could almost recite it line for line. It was a shame the prayer was particularly quiet and hard to make out. Maybe that was why God never responded to him.

In the end, he gave up on it. God had let him down, too. He didn't give Namgyu socks without holes, He didn't make his dad nice, and He didn't take Namgyu when he begged to not wake up.

Middle school was different. Nobody wanted to play with Namgyu because he had stitches in his clothes and his hair was cut uneven. He tried making friends, really, he did. He didn't understand why he was so different from the other children. They were all the same age and liked the same cartoon characters. Perhaps it was that Namgyu gazed at the toys on display in stores he didn't even step into, eyes wide in amazement, and the others had those same toys in their own rooms, probably cuddling them to sleep after being tucked into bed by the warm hands of their mothers. Namgyu's mom had cold hands. She didn't touch him much.

In High School, he finally understood. He smelled and his hair was greasy. His skin was covered in acne and his glasses didn't fit him right anymore. However, he'd learned to accept it by then. It sill hurt, but he got by with weed and cheap pills he bought off an edgy senior with a bad reputation.

He vowed to get his shit together by the time he got to university. The dorms were better than his home and they had warm water all year round. It felt as if he could finally turn things around, make himself into someone. He'd worked his ass off to get a scholarship and he would make sure it was used to its fullest extent.

Except that things didn't get easier just because he got away from his parents. In his business ethics class, he'd been paired with a girl with dark hair and a lip piercing. She was alright, a bit of a bitch, but tolerable. His roommate wasn't bad either. Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that he didn't belong. Every time he was alone, it was like the walls were pressing in, the silence turning heavy. Even the casual glances of strangers felt like stones piling on his chest. It wasn't his fault when he tied a belt around his arm and shot up heroin in the shared bathroom, one knee to his chest as he sat on the closed toilet lid. He couldn't help it.

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He hadn't meant to come back home. He only realized he'd forgotten the folder with his financial documents halfway through the ride back to campus from a weekend group meeting. It had everything - bank statements, scholarship paperwork, his student ID renewal forms. His hands had been shaking so badly when he realized, the old woman sitting next to him on the cramped bus asked if he was okay and called him dear.

He stepped over a pile of unopened mail as he pushed open the door, its hinges groaning like they were warning him. The living room was exactly as he'd left it: the same sunken couch with cigarette burns, beer cans stacked on the coffee table like some pathetic shrine to apathy. He didn't call out. There was nobody he wanted to see in that place. He paused as his eyes zeroed in on the doorway to the kitchen.