🌿 · 2mo
To quote this line "He didn’t know how he’d done it. How he’d walked into that apartment and worn cruelty like armour. How he’d stood there and spoken in that cold, foreign voice, watching Geonwoo panic" and then you think of how xl tried his level best to avoid looking at his eyes, his back on gw almost the entire duration cause... it would have been so so much harder if he hadn't 😭 why do I feel like he would have crumbled if he had looked into his eyes (atleast a little coz cmon)
You’re not wrong at all. That instinct tracks painfully well because if Xinlong had looked at him properly, really met his eyes, the armor would have cracked instantly. Avoiding Geonwoo’s gaze wasn’t indifference, it was survival. He needed distance in every possible way: body turned away, hands busy, voice flattened. Eye contact would have undone the performance, because Geonwoo’s eyes are where the truth lives. They always have been.
That’s why the cruelty reads so foreign even to Xinlong himself. He’s not choosing coldness because he doesn’t care. He’s choosing it because caring is too dangerous in that moment. One look and he would have stayed. Or broken down. Or told the truth too soon, without knowing how to live with the consequences.
So yeah. If he’d looked at him even once, properly, I think he would have folded. And the fact that he knew that about himself makes the whole scene hurt worse, not better.
