celestial strings | h.js

six.

A shy tear rolled down your cheek and you huffed at yourself, reaching up to wipe it away as more rushed to your waterline in hopes to welcome their escape. You pursed your lips together and faced skyward at the ceiling, forcing down a shaky breath only to feel a croaked sob claw up your throat. Too much was going on in your head, starting from you revisiting your past for Jisung to you suspecting he was probably mad at you.

This was bad, really bad. After keeping your feelings on a down-low, you knew very well that once you break out of moderation, the tears would start flooding.

You should fly for a while, you urged yourself. You should jump off the balcony and float for a little. The sky had always cradled you as one of its own, like the ocean has always hugged you as her child. Nature was your second mother, and your first after your own passed. You had slept in trees and sung to the moon. If you wanted to calm down, you should fly. You would feel safer with the clouds.

Rubbing your eyes, you hoisted yourself on top of the balcony fence and balanced your body so you could stand still on the thin railing. The wind brushed against your body, causing Jisung's thin shirt to stick closely to your skin. The wind seeped through the fabric, grazing you with cold. You prepared the blue string in your hands, a string that makes you weightless, and you closed your eyes.

You tried to ignore the droplets that kept rolling down the corner of your face, but the crying didn't stop. It never stops. The pain just keeps going, possibly until exhaustion takes over you.

From your past experience of flying, you liked to chant the spell whilst falling through the air. The thrill was addicting to you. Despite the constant protest of your teachers and family members, you had continued to do it, and you have gotten used it to now. Your shoulders slumped with an exhale as you prepared the spell with your strings, then you poked one foot out into the air after you were done with the initial phase of spell casting.

Just as you were about to fall forward, a pair of hands harshly gripped at your ankles, yanking you back to the ground with a huge thud. Jisung scrambled across the floor, ignoring the pain that expelled from his back when he fell with you on top of him.

He couldn't see straight, only the vivid image of you standing on the balcony fence haunted his knowledge. The instant he has you all forgotten. He knew not that you could use magic, or to assume that you knew how to fly. All he knew was that he needed to feel you in his arms, he needed to know he pulled you back from falling and that you were safe with him.

His arms fussed around the air, desperately searching for your form before he grabbed a fistful of your shirt and tugged you to his chest, hugging you with every ounce of strength he has. The previous grogginess slow began to vanish. It was slowly coming back to him now.

He thought you woke up to get a glass of water, but you had been gone from his bed for too long to just be getting water. When he decided to leave his warm cocoon, he remembered seeing you tipping your leg forward into the sky and how it brought him a sense of panic he has never felt before.

It wasn't the usual paranoid nervousness, something most anxiety-prone people would feel on a daily basis. It was not the ones that would surface when it was his turn to do a presentation in front of a class or when his mother found a loop-hole in his array of lies about failing the Math test. This felt like spikes growing from within his ribs, penetrating his body, and there was nothing he could do aside from waiting for the impending moment of his heart being pierced through.

This was genuine fear. The second he was introduced to the concept of losing you, all Jisung could feel was terror. And then it was resolution that if you did, in fact, not know how to fly, the next person going off the building would be him. It was the resolution to connote the soulmate tradition where if one goes, the other soon follows.