bipolyjack

i straight forgot about this one lads. pre-s2.

It’s real fuckin’ weird, being in their parents’ house again.

It’s not even the same house. They moved after Jin left for college, into a bigger, nicer house with lofty windows looking out on other even bigger, nicer houses. Jin sits at the kitchen table - the same table, Jin can see the scars in the wood where their plastic high chair tray used to chafe against the tabletop - and stares out a tall bank of windows at a fancy-ass flowering hedge outside. Their phone is chilling on the table in front of them, along with a BLT on a white ceramic plate. Jin touches neither.

They have phone calls to make. They’ve been putting them off.

Yesterday, their father cashed in a day of PTO and the three of them drove a few hours to the beach, the one Jin had liked the most as a kid. It was called Lover’s Point; some local story about two sad motherfuckers hurling themselves over the cliff’s edge together to die on the rocks rather than be separated, or some shit. Kind of gothic in concept, but the actual beach looked as innocuous as it did in Jin’s memory, and in the photos Jin’s mother always painstakingly compiled into plastic-sleeved albums when they got home - a rocky retaining wall with a few sparse trees above it, the cove-like beach. Little Jin had played there for hours - hours broken up by scheduled reprieves from the sun under their mother’s rented umbrella and militant reapplications of sunscreen - making necklaces of seaweed, digging their toes into the wet sand and gasping in shock and delight when the cold water rose around them and made them sink deeper, collecting fistfuls of smooth shells, having lively conversations with seagulls. Eating a dribbling ice cream cone, and then discovering after a wave splashed their sticky face that they loved the way the sweet and salt mixed on their lips.

Yesterday, Jin didn’t play in the shallows the way they used to. They sat with their parents on a blanket in the sand, jacket zipped up to their chin against the spring chill blowing in off the water, watching the seagulls wheel overhead. Their father had been engrossed in a book, pages ruffling with each gust of salt breeze, and after explaining to their mother that they weren’t supposed to read for another week, she’d let them alone.

Jin hasn’t told them yet. About the incompletes.

They know how disappointed their parents will be when they find out, and Jin doesn't need that stressor along with these fucking phone calls they still haven't made.

Nudging aside the BLT with their elbow, Jin huffs out an exhale and taps the touchscreen of their newest phone, courtesy of AEGIS after they lost the last one (again). Astin’s cell number is still saved in their contacts, but Jin isn’t sure he’s been allowed to keep it, so they Google the AEGIS-USA general contact number and dial that instead.

Might as well start with the easiest one.