Title: Coffee
Characters: Eunhyuk/Donghae
Rating: G
Wordcount: 564
Summary: Donghae compares his life to coffee.
A/N: So very productive day. Took a break and wrote on paper, this rolled out in one go.
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He sits at the breakfast table, being the first one up because of his stupid alarm clock that had been put ten minutes early by someone. Not that ten minutes was that long, but if he could choose to sleep or be awake, he had rather spent them sleeping. There’s a half empty cup in his hand, out of which a white damp swirls into the kitchen, spreading the rich aroma throughout the room. Coffee, he thinks, is a nice metaphor for his life.
There’s the raw core of it, the coffee itself; black, dark, bitter, like waking up to a bucket full of water being splashed in your face, with a pungent scent that penetrated your senses like stepping out into the freezing cold of winter in nothing but your pyjamas. It is much like his life, he figures, with its cold and dark centre, its lifeless and useless core.
But then there’s the sugar, which you choose to put in or not. It’s like friends, family, people who matter to you, people who make a difference. It comes in a package, a paper cover that’s effortlessly torn to spill the contents, but it’s there and you can easily choose whether to use it or leave it, whether to keep those people close or push them out of your life. He uses it. He likes his coffee a lot better with sugar, just like life is a lot better with his friends and family, with the people he holds dear. Sure, some of them might have dissipated in the dark core of life, but he still has many around. Enough to turn the bitter slightly more sweet.
And finally, there’s the milk. The soft-tasted milk added to coffee, he concluded a while ago, is very much like Hyukjae, a friend who soothes the worst stings of life, because the more milk you pour into your coffee, the less bad it tastes and the less much you notice the bitterness. It is much like what Hyukjae does to his life; add colour, happiness, sunshine, masking the crap that is his actual life. It’s like the way pouring milk into coffee makes the liquid turn, so Hyukjae stirs up his life. Just like how milk fills the cup, enriches the drink and makes the black turn a light-brown or even beige, so Hyukjae fills his life, brightens his days and brings smiles even at times when he thinks there is really nothing left to smile about.
Slowly, dangerously slowly, the days tick past and he sips the coffee of his life, sometimes too eager, so that he burns his tongue, sometimes too careful so that he hardly gets a taste of it; and even though he doesn’t always sip up some of the sugar, there’s always the soothing, neutral taste of the milk, easing his apprehension towards the drink.
He thinks, while the door bursts open and a hyperactive anchovy-boy basically jumps on top of him in a happy morning greeting, grabbing his own cup of strawberry milk afterwards and already babbling on and on like he didn’t just wake up two minutes ago, coffee should never be drunk without milk in it at all, just like he would never live without Hyukjae around either.
So he grabs the bottle of milk and pours the white liquid into his cup until it is full again
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