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wonwoo is all moonlight, all soft corners and round edges and faint craters and light sides against dark sides and undiscovered surfaces and the only thing guiding you home on late night walks back from your best friend’s house. he is quiet strength when you least expect it and gentility where there is none and the slow lifting of a hand right before you turn on to the next page so as to not to bend the spine. he is city lights and faint starry nights and living near traffic for so long that it starts to sound like a lullaby.
soonyoung is all sunlight, all harsh beams and bright rays and brilliance and energy and not letting you get close enough to know what’s really there without hurting you so you’re left making countless predictions that you hope stick. he is laughter ringing in your ear and running with your arms in the air and almost ripping the pages of a book as you flip through because you can’t wait to see how it ends. he is country summers and garden-fresh vegetables and waiting to hear the rooster cry before jumping out of bed every morning.
“we were made for this,” soonyoung breathes out, though what “this” was is never clarified. “the sun never rises until the moon tells him he can. the moon doesn’t light up without reflecting off of the sun’s rays.”
wonwoo desperately tries to remember what he read from the astronomy encyclopedia he got for christmas to confirm that any of what soonyoung is saying is true. he’s having a little bit of trouble focusing on anything at that moment, as it were, because soonyoung is staring at him with his eyes wide in an almost childlike fashion and his chest gently rising and falling and his knees ever-so-slightly brushing against wonwoo’s, and all of it made any comprehensive thought in wonwoo’s brain turn to mush.
what he wants to say is this:
every day with you is bright, almost too bright, like i am staring into the face of the eclipse and i can’t look away. every day with you is like flying a plane without a pilot’s license or your seatbelt on or any knowledge of what you’re doing, but every time you soar your stomach does a million somersaults and you convince yourself that you don’t need any of those things. every day with you makes me believe the night is never going to come. every night with you turns to day.
instead what he says is this:
“yeah,” and hopes that it translates.
seungcheol used to joke that schooling was the only thing in the world that got harder the longer you did it, but wonwoo has to disagree. this - the sitting across from his best friend on wonwoo’s hardwood floor the night before school started, talking about nothing in particular - this only got worse every single year. a small part of wonwoo thinks it’s because every year he realizes he’s more in love with soonyoung than ever before. an even larger part of him thinks it’s because every year he realizes a bit more that soonyoung would never love him back.
soonyoung pulls his sleeping bag even tighter around him. he brings the same star-speckled sleeping bag with him every year, and every time he rips or spills something on it, soonyoung insists he’s making a new constellation. he looks down at it and darts his tongue against his lips before looking back up at wonwoo. “do y- what are you going to do after you graduate, do you think?”
the eye contact lasts five, six seconds at most before soonyoung’s eyes go back to burning holes into his sleeping bag.
that question was uttered a handful of times over the course of their friendship, and never at all in the last few years or so. it had become an almost unspoken agreement to not speak of their plans after school as soon as it had become apparent that they weren’t going in the same direction. wonwoo supposes the night before the last year of high school warrants the question to finally be asked, but he was sort of hoping it didn’t.
“appa asked me to work on the farm with him,” soonyoung continues, still speaking to his sleeping bag. “i think i’m going to. i get to stay close to my family and all of that, and he needs the help. i don’t think school’s ever really been for me, honestly.” he’s rambling, wonwoo notes. not in the sense that he’s speaking particularly fast or frenzied, but he’s saying more than he ever had before, more than he wants to. soonyoung looks back up at wonwoo, and his wide eyes hold something besides wonder and curiosity now. “what about you?” he says, his voice barely audible.
wonwoo says the same thing he said the last time the question was asked, maybe three to four years ago. “i think studying abroad would be really interesting.” he can hear soonyoung’s breath catch, a whirlwind forming in his throat, but wonwoo keeps going. “i was thinking maybe japan, or america maybe.”
there is a stillness. time freezes, and wonwoo knows soonyoung is giving him one more chance to say something. what he wants to say is this:
it doesn’t matter where i am. it doesn’t matter where i go. every plane ride will remind me of you because you will always be where i want to go. every bite i take will remind me of you because you will always be who i want to share it with. every house i stay in will become my home because it’s always going to be yours. everywhere i am, i am yours. i don’t want to be anything else.
what he says instead is this:
“i think a foreign country would be really good to help me, you know. practice different languages and stuff.”
there’s a sharp intake of breath, and wonwoo waits. wonwoo waits for soonyoung’s ears to turn red, the telltale sign that he was upset, the sunbeams revealing themselves as solar flares and shooting out any place imaginable. he waits for the sunspots to blotch up soonyoung’s cheeks and the dead quiet that follows the gravitational collapse that is inevitable when caught in soonyoung’s path of destruction. but when wonwoo’s eyes reset to meet soonyoung’s, he sees something he never expected.
tears prick in soonyoung’s eyes as his gaze shifts from the half-open window to the chipping paint on the side of the bed to the stains on the hardwood floor to anywhere else in the room that isn’t wonwoo’s eyes, brimming with bewilderment.
“soonyoung,” wonwoo says gently, and just like that soonyoung wipes his eyes and begins tracing words into his sleeping bag like nothing happened. “soonyoung,” wonwoo repeats, a little bit louder. soonyoung ignores him again.
wonwoo slowly lifts himself on to his knees and inches forward until their faces are almost touching. his fingers wrap around soonyoung’s wrist. soonyoung looks up at that, his cheeks scarlet pink and his eyes tinged red and his every move careful.
wonwoo finds himself at a loss for words. what he wants to say is this:
you have been my home long before i learned what the word could mean. you have been the brightest thing in my galaxy long before i even knew what my galaxy comprised of. there are days when i can’t help but feel i must have been tied to you at birth, because being too far away from you makes my heart ache. there is nothing that could change that. you are the centre of all my being. you are the reason i shine. you are my sun.
instead what he says is this:
“you’re my best friend...okay?” and hopes that it translates
they’re so close, so close that wonwoo can see the way soonyoung’s eyelashes frame his eyes, still wide and looking at wonwoo. the colour in soonyoung’s cheeks have subsidized slightly, resembling a dusting of red sprinkles on cream-coloured fondant that made him look even more childlike than before. soonyoung relaxes after a few seconds, and wonwoo lets out the breath that was lodged in his threat.
“you’re my best friend, too,” soonyoung says as he rises to his feet, lying his sleeping bag out before crawling back into it. “you always have been.”
and wonwoo - wonwoo wants to tell him that always be damned, that friends be damned, that he’s been in love with kwon soonyoung since he first laid eyes on him and if wonwoo didn’t at least ask to kiss him before tonight ended, before they finished talking about nothing and everything and all that in between, then he was an even bigger coward than everyone believed. that he wasn’t going anywhere until soonyoung knew that wonwoo was never going to stop thinking about him, was never going to stop loving him with everything he had. that friendship was a stupid word that couldn’t even begin to encapsulate what wonwoo felt for soonyoung. that wonwoo reflects off of soonyoung.
but instead, wonwoo turns off the light and crawls into his sleeping bag and wishes soonyoung a good night, and hopes to god that it translates.