Domino | hongjoong

twenty six ▋the art of lying

"Oh, I remember this one!" Yunho exclaimed, taking a picture off of the wall without Mingi's consent. The boy nearly had a heart attack as the photo was removed, scrambling towards the boy to return it back to its original place. Yunho ducked out the way instinctively, dodging the red giant completely as he held a picture out to Mari. "This was around maybe... the end of secondary school? Beginning of freshman year for Hongjoong? This was way before any of us had met Seonghwa."

"You look like children," Mari responded, taking the photo from Yunho just as Mingi dove in to snatch it out of their hands. The girl pivoted out of the way, leaving Mingi to crash into the ground as she examined the picture quickly before the boy could take it from her. It was a picture of both Mingi and Hongjoong together, much more young-looking with full-on babyfaces. There was no wild color in either of their hair, the natural black and browns that most of the country adorned.

Hongjoong didn't have any tattoos that littered his left arm, neither did he have any excessive piercings that hung down from his ears as a sign of rebellion or whatever he called it. They were wearing school uniforms as well, uniforms that were usually worn by middle schoolers and public school high schoolers but uniforms nonetheless. He seemed really happy. "You two look so prepubescent in this it's almost scary. And that uniform, I don't think I recognize what school it's from."

"That's because Hongjoong was constantly moving schools when I was younger," Mingi explained, finally taking a hold of the picture. "He was a year ahead of me so in this picture he would have been in high school by then. I think this was some random public school on the other side of the country he went to, but it didn't last very long before he moved from that one again. This picture was from my graduation before I became a freshman though."

Mari nodded, listening to the boy's reasoning and letting it resonate in her head for a moment. "Why was he moving around so much? I can only imagine how god awfully hard that must have been for him if he was just a freshman when that happened. Aren't freshmen only like fourteen and fifteen? I would have thrown myself off a bridge."

"It was easy!" Hongjoong's voice called, making all three of them turn their heads down the hallway like a group of meerkats. He was light on his feet as he approached Mari, taking the photo out of her hands to look at it himself. A fond smile immediately began to grow on his lips as he recognized the picture as if a million old memories were flooding his mind. "I didn't make any new friends and kept in contact with the ones I already had. Soon enough I started doing dumb stuff to get my parents to stop moving around so much. First, it was skipping classes then skipping school entirely."

"Then it was sneaking out of the house late at night and doing a bunch of petty crimes," Mingi recalled, adding onto Hongjoong's list as he began to remember all the things had done. "Then it was getting your first piercings on the lobes. After that, you moved up to the inner part of your ears and moved up to helixes on both ears."

"Then you got your first tattoos and a thousand more piercings!" Yunho exclaimed, rolling up his shirt sleeve to point to the various places that Hongjoong had permanent art on his skin. "I'm surprised you didn't die from all that blood loss because then you decided why not learn how to ride motorcycles so you could escape the house quicker? The amount of times you fell off of those things and hurt yourself when you first started was scary."

"He basically was a devil child." A voice spoke, a figure practically looming over the boy's body. Both Hongjoong and Mari looked up to catch a glimpse of the person, both being rather small in height compared to the others they stood around. He was watching them through the black hair that hung in his face, his eyes shining with a slight glimmer of amusement as he glanced towards the picture in Hongjoong's hands. "You didn't even stop after they moved back. You just toned it down enough to not make them retaliate in a bad way."