the half-life of isotopes: the notes

[hardfeelings]

so i finally had a successful fic fest entry this year!

it’s a remix of ao3 user sandstorm’s untitled, a short piece that honestly felt like a punch to the gut the first time i read it. and the second time. and the third and the fourth and the fifth.

anyway,

the original plan i had for my remix was to split it into three parts - the before, the during, and the after (of the break-up). i also kinda wanted to turn it into a beomgyu pov, soogyu pov, then soobin pov or the other way around? and this was what i submitted to the mods, but then a week before submissions i was still stuck on figuring out how to write that. so i didn’t.

since the original fic was initially inspired by a tweet about lorde’s hard feelings, i decided to turn to melodrama as a whole + someone great (2019) - which was inspired by supercut (and 1989 + clean). the first line of my fic - In his head, Beomgyu does everything right. - is very obviously taken from supercut, and i wrote it minutes into my rewatch-for-research of someone great, right when supercut was playing. half of the fic was written in the 4-5 hours it took me to watch the film with Lots of pauses, and the other half was written across 3 days of me listening to melodrama on loop.

> the title + the scene it comes from came to me when i was half-asleep. i was thinking about using the title ‘half-life’ for no reason, but i realized it’s too similar to ‘half alive’ which is a friend’s fic. and then i started thinking more about what the hell a half-life is, and i realized it’s for isotopes. the half-life of an isotope, is half the time it takes for an isotope to reduce to half of its original value - to decay. it just kinda clicked to me, that i could take this and use it and make it mean something in the fic, so that’s what i did.
> all the scenes i wrote were all over the place … there was A Lot of rearranging in this as i tried to get the right flow, and there was a lot of rewriting too so i could make the scenes properly fit with each other
> originally was going to make csb break up with cbg over the phone, but then i realized it wouldn’t make much sense for cbg to run away to tyunning’s house because he’d just wallow in his self-pity alone at home instead if that were the case. so i changed it to csb breaking up with him in person, and i think it was a lot better in general - kinda adds to how bad the break-up really was for cbg, and how it’s not one of those break-ups where one of them is suddenly an asshole. it’s just something that happened, something that had to happen.
> soobin’s words about breaking up being that he doesn’t think he can’t do this anymore. it’s so vague. what does it even mean? to him it probably means that he doesn’t want to stay in a relationship that’s not working for him anymore, but to beomgyu it means a lot of different things. it makes him angry, considering all these different meanings, and he cries. but soobin still tries to comfort him, because he does still love and care for beomgyu - just not in the way he used to.
> beomgyu’s love songs! directly inspired by this quote

I'll tell you a secret. Most of the songs I used to write were just made-up stories but... I think I wrote so many made-up stories so I could bury the real songs. Nobody would catch me. This is a real love song.

i… don’t even know the source, but when i saw it from one of the accounts in my brainrot list on twt, i immediately thought of ao3 musician beomgyu. since this beomgyu is also a musician, i wanted to slip it in.
> the scene where yeonjun and beomgyu are at band practice was the second last scene i wrote, and i wanted to use it to emphasize how the break-up really wasn’t something beomgyu saw coming, and how it wasn’t something soobin wanted either, in the sense that he thought as much as beomgyu that they’d be together forever. both of them having implied that they’d get married, soobin going so far as to have talked about it to tyunning, yeonjun being able to casually ask about it and beomgyu being able to comfortably answer. they all thought it was something that was definitely going to happen.
> the ending where beomgyu asks it’s you and me, right? and soobin doesn’t answer because he’s already asleep… in my head it’s linked to beomgyu still being so horribly in love with soob while soobin already made up his mind about breaking up.

emotionally, this was so hard to write, but practically, it was fun and i’m really proud of how it came out. i was also super happy about writing in a break-up using non-linear narrative, because i, personally, am obsessed with films surrounding break-ups in non-linear narratives (someone great, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, comet, 500 days of summer, us and them, the last five years etc.).

i am a little … remorseful? (the feeling here is 아쉽다) that i didn’t get to finish eternal sunshine au/comet au first, even though i had been working on those longer, because now i feel like i can’t post another non-linear fic about a break-up for at least another 3 fics … but i guess that just means i’ll have to write more and more just so i can finish and post those too.

all in all, this is one of my favorite pieces, along with feeling the sun from both sides, even if i may or may not have accidentally manifested a shit ton of negative energy in the universe throughout the writing process… but accidents happen sometimes ♡

+ thank you annie my beloved for beta-reading this fic and sorry that you went through a break-up directly after... i know it's not my fault but what if it is .