Chapter Text
Hyunjin likes farm life!
Hyunjin doesn’t like being woken up at ass o’clock in the morning by a chicken.
Groaning, muscles sore from his long trek in the woods the night before (he wonders whether those cats ever got found) he rolls over in bed, the dewy morning sun falling warm on his cheeks. He can hear the quiet shuffle of his aunt cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and bird calls drift in through the open window.
He drags himself out of bed, stopping to adjust his hair in the mirror for about half a second before promptly giving up (who’s gonna see him anyways?) and stumbling into the kitchen.
“That chicken’s,” he yawns, “that chicken’s awful loud.” His aunt raises an eyebrow at him as he takes a seat at the table, watching, half-asleep, as she cooks.
“It’s a rooster,” she tells him, “And waking up early is good for you.” He grunts in response. “I’ll give you a tour after breakfast, and then, ” she smiles wickedly, “you can start working.”
“I can start what. ”
“We all have chores around here, it doesn’t take all day, don’t worry - besides, Chan always appreciates the help.” She sets down a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him, and Hyunjin is aware of how completely unaware she is of the past night’s adventure, and decides he'd like to keep it that way. “Anyways,” she continues, “I should probably warn you- there’s a couple boys from town that lease the horses, since I barely have time to ride anymore, and I let them use the old outdoor to practice in the summertime. They’re nice boys, you’ll get along well I’m sure, but they might be stopping by to practice later this afternoon and I don’t really know when-”
“You have horses?” Hyunjin blurts out, curiosity overcoming him. “To like, ride and stuff?”
“I do,” she says, cocking an amused eyebrow at his obvious intrigue, “why, are you interested?”
“I dunno, I’ve just never really seen somebody ride before, I guess. What’s it like?” He asks, his thoughts slipping back to the boy he saw yesterday.
“Indescribable,” she says simply, leaving Hyunjin to wonder. He finishes his breakfast in comfortable silence, gazing out the window at the rest of the farm outside. A hawk circles high above the fields, a mere speck in the sky, drifting peacefully between the clouds. When he finishes, his aunt sweeps up his plate and tosses it in the sink, urging him to get dressed so she can give him a tour of the property.
He's looking forward to it honestly, all sleepiness gone from his demeanor; he only used to come here when he was a little kid, and he doesn’t remember much. There’s something fascinating about the way that life here differs from his own, how the rushing cars and tall buildings are replaced with grazing animals and softly rolling meadows, how city’s noises are exchanged for the quiet, yet still just as busy buzz of the countryside.
Quickly, he grabs the nearest pair of shorts and a t-shirt and throws them on, accepts that his hair is a fluffy mess, and grabs his glasses so that he can see things before dashing back out into the kitchen to meet his aunt, who’s standing by the door with Callie wagging excitedly by her side.
“I figure you can figure this little old house out okay, so we’ll just go around outside,” she explains as they go out; Hyunjin’s hit with a wave of hot, fresh summer air as soon as he steps outside, the kind that’s not too humid or too dry, the kind that makes you feel all giddy because it’s summer. And Hyunjin hasn’t had a summer this free, this full of possibilities, in a long time.
He follows closely behind his aunt as they walk down the long driveway, Callie trotting at his heels.
“We keep the chickens over there,” she says, pointing to a little wooden coop surrounded by a wire fence; sure enough, Hyunjin can see the chickens inside, feathers golden brown and white and mottled grey. “They used to be free range, but there’s been too many coyotes around lately for it to be safe.”
“Coyotes?” He asks, curious and a little scared.
“Oh, they’d never come near you, but at night they’re pretty sneaky,” she explains, “I’ve lost a few hens to them. Chan was devastated,” she chuckles, “he gets attached.” Hyunjin has yet to meet this Chan, but he assumes he will soon. “He names them and everything, and I keep telling him not to, but he won’t listen to me. Says it’s a violation of their individuality, he’s unbelievable.”
“I agree,” Hyunjin says, “the chickens have rights. ” His aunt laughs.
“Okay, kid, if you say so.” They walk past the chicken coop and up to the big barn; the doors are open, letting out the slight scent of manure (Hyunjin wrinkles his nose) and the soft sounds of animals just beginning to wake up.
The interior of the barn, he discovers, is actually really nice, the ceiling high and airy, the wooden walls and stalls made of clean, polished brown wood. As they walk in, a horse pokes its head out from one of the stalls, ears perked in mild interest as they enter.
“That’s Copper. He’s a sweetheart.” The horse shakes its head slightly, as if he heard what she said; Hyunjin stares for a moment, in awe. He’s much bigger up close then he assumed most horses to be. Casually, his aunt strides up to the animal and rubs his nose affectionately; surprisingly, the horse leans into the touch, seemingly enjoying the petting he’s getting. “He’s a bit like my second puppy, on the ground at least- he’s still a little bit of a hothead when you’re on him, but Seungmin does a good job.”
“Seungmin?” Hyunjin asks at the mention of the unfamiliar name.
“The boy that comes over to ride him,” she explains, still stroking the horse’s long nose. “He’s a real talented kid, and he has a certain way with the animals- I’m sure he wouldn’t mind teaching you the basics, actually,” she says thoughtfully. Hyunjin half panics at the thought of having to talk to more unfamiliar people.
“Couldn’t you teach me?” He asks, shuffling nervously.
“I mean, I guess I could, but I’m pretty busy during the day,” she says, “and besides, I just want to make sure you have friends your age while you stay here.” She gives him a reassuring smile, and Hyunjin can’t help but smile back and nod in understanding. If there’s anything he doesn’t want to be, it's a nuisance or a bother, so he keeps quiet and instead marvels at the grace of the animal standing before him.
Another horse pokes its head out of the neighboring stall, nosing at his aunt’s shoulder curiously; this one is a deep brown color dappled with white patches, coat gleaming in the sunlight filtering in from outside.
“Oh yeah, and this old girl is Dash,” she laughs quietly, “ She’s about twenty-two, but we’re not entirely sure,” she says, “we rescued her from the back of a shitty old truck along with a bunch of other horses- we think she was on her way to the slaughterhouse.” The mare shakes her head, as if agreeing with the grimness of her story. “But it’s funny, actually,” his aunt continues, “she’s the gentlest thing I’ve ever met. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” At that moment, Dash’s tail whips across her back, effectively smacking away several flies. “Or maybe some flies.”
The thought of anybody hurting something as beautiful and intelligent as a horse sort of makes Hyunjin feel sick- he can’t help but wonder, as he stares into Dash’s eyes, why?
“If you want to learn, she’s the one you’ll learn on,” she tells him. She’s about to say something else, but suddenly a loud shout cuts through the otherwise peaceful morning air; when Hyunjin peers out the barn doors, he sees. . . several things at once.
There’s a boy on the ground, and a dog, specifically Callie, on top of him, excitedly wagging and licking his face. There’s another boy standing next to him, struggling to hold not one but two saddles in his arms, and it’s clearly not working. Now, Hyunjin may be shy, but his mother raised him like any good gentleman and so he dashes out to help.
As he draws nearer, the shade of the barn exchanged for the radiant glow of the sun, he recognizes (underneath the saddles) none other than Han Jisung, who, despite being pretty well muscled, was no match for two very large chunks of leather and metal.
“Oh, hey, Hyunjin!” He says, sighing gratefully when Hyunjin takes a saddle from him; it’s heavier than he expected, and he stumbles for a moment, struggling to get a grip on the unfamiliarly shaped object. Jisung laughs and smiles sunninly at him. “Stick your arm underneath, like this,” he says, demonstrating on the one in his arms. Hyunjin adjusts his grip like he says, and finds it instantly easier.
“Me and Seungmin are here for a quick ride,” he explains, jerking his head at the other boy still buried under a very enthusiastic dog, “honestly, I might just leave him there. What a weirdass.” Jisung quirks an eyebrow at him. Hyunjin muffles a laugh. “Have you ever ridden before? Probably not, considering you can’t even hold a saddle right- do you wanna watch? I promise it’s not super boring, sometimes we make bets on whether Seungmin’ll get bucked off or not-”
“ Hey! ”
“-well I’m not wrong ,” he continues, “Hyunjin, really, stop looking so pitifully at Seungmin, he wants to be on the ground with the dog, he practically is a dog.”
“Yeah, I’m good!” Seungmin pipes up from the ground, sticking up a thumbs up. Hyunjin wonders if everybody around here is so high energy and. . . strange.
“His family won’t let him have a dog,” Jisung stage whispers as they walk towards the barn, “so he uses everybody else’s as replacements. I promise he’s not as weird as I made him out to be, though.” Once in the shade, Jisung puts his saddle down so it sits on the side of an empty stall, and Hyunjin does the same. His aunt has disappeared, probably gone somewhere else to do. . . farm things, he supposes.
“Here, I’ll show you all the fun horse things that you must do in order to horse, you know?” Hyunjin takes a moment to process that trainwreck of a sentence, and then nods uncertainly; Jisung laughs, a loud, bright sound that startles a sparrow out of its roost in the rafters, and there’s the brief, panicked beating of its wings as it feels the barn.
“Anyways,” Jisung continues, striding up to a stall and grabbing the rope hung on a hook next to the door, “my favorite fat old lady is probably done with her lunch by now, so I’ll just slide in,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows comically as he cracks open the stall door and disappears inside. There’s the faint rustle of movement in the hay on the floor, and an undignified, “Ow! Fucking hell, I didn’t mean it, you’re not fat!” before he slips back out, a slightly miffed-looking horse that Hyunjin now knows is named Dash. She shakes her head, dark mane whipping from side to side, as Jisung leads her out.
Jisung clips her halter to the ropes hanging from either side of the barn’s aisle and pulls out a box full of brushes, and begins to clean her before he even gets on. “I’m sure you and Dash’ve already been acquainted, but don’t take what just happened in there as a good example of her attitude,” he says, “she’s chill. Just annoyed that I took her away from food.” As Jisung brushes away, quiet footsteps on the floor alert Hyunjin that the other boy, Seungmin, has finally come inside.
“U-uh, hi.” He’s looking down, helmet clasped by the straps and swinging awkwardly in one hand, and the other buried in the hair at the nape of his own neck. “I’m Seungmin?” Hyunjin notices that he’s a lot shyer when he’s not covered in dog, voice quiet (though he can't help but notice that it has a soothing sort of timbre).
“Stop being so shy, Minnie,” Jisung scoffs from where he’s working knots out of Dash’s tail. Hyunjin waits patiently, a little nervously, for the other boy to look up.
When he does, he nearly falls over.
He’s him- that boy he saw on the train, that beautiful, free boy he saw on his very first day in this new town and longed to see again. So he stands in stunned silence for a moment, as he meets Seungmin’s eyes.
“I’m Hyunjin,” he tells him, and he feels warm inside when Seungmin’s lips quirk up in the smallest of smiles. It’s also now that he remembers that his hair is still a hot mess and his glasses are lying crooked on his nose, much to his horror.
“ Ow, ” Jisung yelps from across the barn, “my foot, my foot! ” Hyunjin and Seungmin break eye contact to look at Jisung, who’s trying and failing to pull his toe out from where it’s trapped effectively beneath Dash’s hoof.
“Dumbass,” Seungmin mumbles affectionately, walking directly past Jisung and ignoring his plight to open up Copper’s stall and lead him out, clipping him to the ties and starting to do the same as Jisung. Hyunjin doesn’t do much but watch, fascinated, from his place by the door, as Jisung starts to saddle his horse, strapping it on somehow and adjusting a bunch of buckles and Seungmin does something weird with Copper’s hooves. It all makes absolutely no sense to Hyunjin, but Jisung and Seungmin are so calm as they run through what seems to be a well-practiced routine.
It’s silent in the barn besides the rustling of the equipment and the breathing of the horses, and Jisung humming a faint, incoherent song. Hyunjin doesn’t mind it; his gaze drifts over to Seungmin, whose face is set in concentration, his nose scrunched up minisculely as he fiddles with a buckle on Copper’s chin. Belatedly, he realizes that he’s seen Copper before- Seungmin had been riding him when he’d seen him on the train, hadn’t he? Hyunjin wonders if they’ll be just as graceful a pair today.
“Dori’s doing fine, by the way.” Hyunjin’s eyes snap up from where he’d zoned off on Seungmin- thankfully, Jisung didn’t notice (Hyunjin has a feeling he’d never leave him alone if he knew).
“Who?”
“Minho’s kitten,” he supplies, “it was just a few scratches, no infection, blah, blah, blah. Younghyun didn’t get home until like, two in the morning, though,” he adds, laughing, “spent ages looking for the other two. It was super cool of you to help, though.”
“Minho lost his cats again last night?” Seungmin asks, not sounding very surprised. Hyunjin would like to add that he didn’t have much of a choice over whether he could help them or not, but he decides to keep quiet about that for now.
“Yup,” Jisung confirms brightly, “it’s like, the fifth time this year. It’s tradition at this point. Maybe if he remembered to shut his windows he wouldn’t have the problem, but he won’t no matter how many times we remind him.” He shrugs. “Okay, I’m ready to go.”
“Me too,” Seungmin says. Just as he’s about to lead Copper out of the barn, he hesitates, glancing shyly at Hyunjin.
“Are you uh- are you watching?”
“I mean,” Hyunjin rushes to respond, “only if, only if you don’t mind, I mean-”
“Of course we don’t mind, it’s fine! Maybe you’ll discover a new passion for picking up horse shit and eating dirt!” Jisung exclaims cheerily. “And, you know, riding or whatever. But those are the two main aspects.”
“True,” Seungmin agrees.
“Um. Very enticing?” Hyunjin is not enticed.
He follows the two of them outside, steering very widely clear of the two horses, and watches as they somehow step effortlessly up into their saddles from the ground. In the sunlight, Copper’s coat is golden, shimmering in the morning sun like- well, like copper. As soon as Seungmin’s seated the horse takes off at a brisk walk, and Hyunjin watches Seungmin steer him in tight circles before following Jisung into the fenced off area next to the barn.
“So basically,” Jisung says, his voice carrying across the paddock, his reins (yes! Hyunjin knows what those are!) held in one hand, the other rested lazily on his thigh as he guides Dash around the perimeter of the fence, “this is what we do. It’s very exciting. Circles and circles around the arena, like a merry-go-round. Now, I do not deal in crazy shit like Seungmin here does,” he adds, “I like to keep my feet on the ground, thanks. So those are for him.” He points to the fences scattered around the arena, set at various heights and angles.
This comes as a surprise to Hyunjin, mostly because Jisung seems much more inclined to indulge in ‘crazy shit’ than Seungmin, but apparently not. He harkens back to that mental image of Seungmin, galloping across the fields, that free, nearly reckless energy about him evident even through the train windows. Maybe it’s not so surprising, he decides.
Still, he finds himself entranced as he watches Jisung and Seungmin run through their ride, mesmerized by the way the horses move, by the way their muscles ripple and their coats shimmer as the sun reaches its peak. He leans against the fence for longer than he intends to, just watching, observing- it’s just so fascinating, how horse and rider can work in such a fluid way, move in such a collected manner that they almost seem like one being. He decides, very suddenly and firmly, that he wants to try it, needs to.
Apparently, Jisung was right- he really might have uncovered a newfound passion for “picking up shit and eating dirt” as he put it so eloquently.
“Hey, Hyunjin!” His aunt’s voice cuts through his thoughts, forcing him to tear his eyes away from the riders. She’s standing in the barn doorway, waving a pitchfork in a slightly terrifying manner.
“Yeah?” he calls back, hesitant to leave his spot.
“You wanna learn how to muck out a stall?”
No, he does not. Whatever that means, it has the word “muck” in it and that’s not a very pretty word at all, in any sense, ever .
But she has a pitchfork, and him? He’s defenseless.