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The shadow of a man catches Yuta’s eye almost immediately.
He stands, as serene as a spring lake, fifty feet away, there under the boughs of the magnolia tree. It’s the very same tree that Yuta sometimes spends his afternoons sitting under, until his fingers are stained with ink and the sun has begun its cruel retreat into darkness.
Something in the back of Yuta’s head tells him to continue on his way, to ignore the flicker of a man and to make his way home at a faster pace, and he tries to, he does. He keeps walking, away from the scene, but every time he blinks he can see the man, and the man is beautiful, and the man wants him to turn back.
Yuta turns back.
The man is watching him with a curious half-smile, when he approaches. He’s drenched through, shivering slightly as Yuta approaches him. “Excuse me,” he offers, for he’s always been taught to be polite, “Are you alright out here?”
“Take me somewhere dry.” It isn’t a demand nor a cry for help, it's just a set of words in order, whispered softly by a mouth as pink as the magnolia blossoms that bloom here in spring. The man’s pupils are blown wide when he blinks. He looks tired. When Yuta holds out his hand, but he doesn’t take it.
Yuta takes him home, sits him beside the fire and makes hot tea. The water takes a lifetime of silence to boil, and Yuta watches the back of the drenched man— the hunch of his shoulders as he warms his palms near the fire and the curl of his wet hair at the back of his neck as he waits for the tea to brew. The water boils over the pan before he can manage to look away.
As he hands the man a cup of hot tea, Yuta asks, “What happened to you?”
“It was the rain,” the man replies, which tells Yuta almost nothing. It hasn’t rained here in over a week.
They exchange polite introductions as they sit in the dark, the light from the fire the only thing that stops them from being engulfed in darkness. Yuta would be embarrassed about it if he was entertaining a friend of his family’s, but he hasn’t entertained in a long time, and he can’t find it in himself to feel anything but intrigue and fear.
The man is called Sicheng and he says he’s been looking for somebody. He says he is lost, and that he’s lonely. That he doesn't belong.
“I oftentimes feel the same,” Yuta admits to him. “I’ve felt that way for a long time.”
Sicheng smiles at him, and it’s fleeting and hauntingly beautiful. Yuta bites at his lip. “At least we have each other, now,” he says and he expects Sicheng to dismiss his comment with the wave of a hand, but he doesn’t. In fact, he looks pleased about it.
Yuta offers him more tea, but he shakes his head and simply turns back to the fire. Water drips from the back of his hair onto the floor beside the fire and slowly pools at his feet.
The days come and go, and Sicheng doesn't leave Yuta’s cottage.
Yuta guesses this is simply because Yuta doesn’t ask him to. He can’t find the words to say it, they won’t form and he doesn’t want them to anyway. He's always craved company and, even if Sicheng doesn't say much, he's here.
Yuta takes the little money he is has stored away and visits the nearest farm to buy eggs and milk. He walks at a brisk pace to clear his head. He likes to feel the cold winter air against his face, and he likes this time of year, when the trees are stark and the nights draw in early. The farmer's wife looks at him with a kind sort of pity when he approaches the gate, presses a side of beef wrapped in cloth into his hands and says, "You can pay us for the meat next time."
Yuta thanks her for her generosity, though he feels ashamed for having to rely on it. He allows her to engage him in local gossip— of the commissioner's wife, who has given birth to twins and of the fire in the clergyman’s house in the next village, which had blazed through his quarters and killed him, the driving rain and the muddy waters of the lake behind his house no use against the flames. “It’s terrible.” She shakes her head. “A terrible way to go.”
Yuta walks home slowly, walks past his favourite tree and thinks about Sicheng and the way he almost seemed to be waiting for Yuta to pass by the week before.
“You’re still cold,” Yuta notes as he presses his hand to Sicheng’s forehead eight days into his visit. "I'll cook a warming broth, you sit there a while longer."
Sicheng shakes his head softly. Says, "I'm not hungry, thank you."
"You're cold through." Yuta's hand lingers on Sicheng's cool skin. "And if you want to get on your way... You'll need to build your strength first."
“I'm not hungry,” he whispers, eyes closed. “But I should stay here a little longer, with you.”
It’s Sicheng who is being touched, but it’s Yuta who shivers. “I’d like that,” he replies, and then he retreats to the pantry.
He cooks the eggs. It’s a simple meal— Yuta isn’t well versed in domestic tasks, he’s never had to be— but it’s warm and it’s filling, so Yuta hopes that Sicheng will appreciate it. Sicheng eats a little and then asks to be excused and slips away from the table. Yuta thinks he means to go outside, take a walk maybe, but he doesn't head towards the door and it occurs to Yuta that he never has, not in eight long days.
Instead he returns to his place beside the fire, back to Yuta, quiet and serene as the flames crackle. Yuta thinks he can hear rain outside, but when he goes to the window, it's still dry, the winter wind blowing a gale across the village. Yuta forgets about his own supper and it’s cold by the time he returns to the table, but he isn't hungry anymore.
“What are you thinking about over there?” He asks Sicheng. Yuta can’t tear his eyes away from him as the flames lick at Sicheng’s shadow. Yuta can still hear the soft patter of rain outside, but he knows it isn’t raining.
“I’m thinking about how glad I am that you let me come here.” Sicheng turns to him and smiles. “You’ve been very kind.”
That night, Sicheng slips into his bedroom. Yuta hardly hears the creak of the door and it isn’t until Sicheng is between his bedsheets with him that Yuta realises he’s been joined. “What are you doing?” He asks, his heart in his throat. Sicheng’s leg, bare under the nightshirt Yuta has leant to him, ghosts across Yuta’s own like a chill on the coldest of nights.
“I’m watching you,” Sicheng tells him. He doesn’t look shy about it. His foot comes to rest at Yuta’s ankle and Yuta has to concentrate harder than he ever has before to control the urge to kiss a man. “You’re warm, like the fire.”
Sicheng finds Yuta’s hand with his own in the night, and his hand is cold and it’s wet, and Yuta doesn’t sleep until dawn.
Yuta talks and Sicheng listens.
He hasn’t had anyone to talk to since he left home. Sicheng could be mistaken for being disinterested as he stares into the fire and warms his hands, but Yuta can tell he’s listening to him carefully. He asks questions, but doesn’t talk about himself, and Yuta would ask but something about Sicheng’s demeanour suggests he doesn’t want to tell, so Yuta tells Sicheng about his childhood in riches and about the way he’d chosen to distance himself from his family’s money in search for a romantic life of simplicity as a budding poet, here in the small village on the other side of the trees.
He’d never been good with money, had never had to be, and now he can barely afford to heat his cottage. Still, his childhood governess, now the governess to his young niece, sends him a letter with money tucked inside every few months, and he pretends he isn’t going to use it until he’s hungry and he’s cold, and none of his poetry has been published yet so he has no other choice.
Yuta loses time watching the weather change outside the window as Sicheng watches the flames at the fire. It looks like it’s raining, the windows steamed up with condensation and dampness in the air, but when Yuta goes outside to close the gate at the end of the path leading to his cottage, which has started to clatter against the fence in the wind, the ground is still cracked and dry.
He stands at the end of the path and looks back at his house; modest, unassuming and stark. It’s so different to the house in which he grew up, with its grandiose demeanour, sweeping velvet curtains and ornamental busts. He feels sick. The smoke escaping the chimney is the only sign of life inside the cottage, until Sicheng’s figure seems to appear at the window, his face in shadow as his watches Yuta make his way back to the house. Yuta turns back to the gate as it swings open again and when he looks back up at the cottage, Sicheng is no longer at the window, and the cottage looks almost empty again. Yuta’s heart aches in a symphony with the howling wind.
Yuta hasn’t written a word in weeks. He doesn’t know how to anymore. All he wants to write about is Sicheng’s face, but he doesn’t want to look away for long enough to set pen to paper.
He’s always fallen in love quickly. First with the tiny feral kitten that would creep up the backdoor of the kitchen in his family’s home, to whom the cook would feed scraps of fish to after supper, and then he fell in love with words. There was a time that he was in love with one of the gentleman his father invited over to discuss business in his cigar-smoke filled office, but he’s since seen that for what it really was (infatuation, childish and regretful). Still, he isn’t ashamed.
He thinks he might be in love with his guest, though he still doesn’t know from whence he came or to where he was headed to, or why he’s never left. He has his suspicions, but thinking about them is unpleasant, and there has been enough unpleasantness in Yuta’s short life. Sicheng is not unpleasant. He is beauty defined, and he is a mystery upon all of Yuta’s senses, and as he sits beside the fire and sings a sweet song, Yuta feels like a sailor cast out on the rocks, enchanted by sirens’ eerie song.
Sicheng lies next to him each night, and Yuta writes poetry in his mind about the things his heart desires, the things he has always been told he shouldn’t desire, and his bedroom feels cold but his heart feels warm, so Yuta couldn’t care less.
He watches Sicheng, who watches the fire, as dusk turns to darkest night four days after the moon is at its largest in the sky.
“You’re in love with me.” Sicheng turns to face him. His hair is wet again, raindrops slip from the tendrils of black hair and down over his face. He’s beautiful.
The breath leaves his lungs so quickly it hurts. “What?”
“Don’t look so scared. I’m glad of it,” Sicheng tells him. “Do you want to kiss me?”
Yuta nods. Oh he does, so much. “Am I allowed to?”
Sicheng nods. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” he smiles, and it’s fox-like in the moonlight. “But you didn’t. Not even when I lay in your bed.” He sounds amused.
“I wanted to,” Yuta admits. His hair falls around his shoulders. “I find you quite a distraction.”
This may be somewhat of an understatement. It’s not so much that Sicheng is distracting, it’s more that he’s become everything. Yuta’s days are blurring into one dark evening beside the fire, and he isn’t working, he isn’t eating or taking his daily walk to the edge of the farm. It’s like he’s been consumed by something, but he’s happy for it. He’s the happiest he has been in a long time, since long before he chose to leave his family home across the woods.
They sit beside the fire and Sicheng sets his hand upon Yuta’s knee. Water soaks into his trousers, endless water flowing from Sicheng’s touch, but Yuta doesn’t care.
That night, when Sicheng appears at the foot of Yuta’s bedframe, he isn’t wearing a night-shirt at all.
Yuta is a liar.
Yuta is a liar because he didn’t choose to leave home, he was made to. He tells Sicheng this, whispered with intoxication, whisky on his tongue as the fire makes their shadows dance at the window.
He says, “They caught me with a man.” He is crumpling at the memory, dying inside. “And they— they couldn’t even speak. They wouldn’t look at me. My belongings were packed up while I cried and begged at my father’s feet. He couldn’t say a word to me, not a single word.”
Sicheng’s glass remains untouched. “How did it feel?” he asks.
“Like being suffocated, like I was devoid of life.” Yuta recalls the fear and the shame that had flooded his chest on that night and the days that followed. It’s only in recent times that the shame has dissipated, replaced with a hollowness that is only just beginning to be filled.
Sicheng looks at him carefully. His hair is wet and curled at the edges. “But you weren’t. And here you are now, alive and well, and drunk.”
Yuta sighs. He is happy, and he is warm and— Sicheng’s right— he’s drunk. “Why are you still here?” he asks. “And why aren’t you drinking with me?”
Sicheng says, “The drink has no effect on me, you know this,” and smiles. He stands up. “Let’s add kindling to the fire before we undress.”
The knock on his cottage door gives Yuta such a fright that he finds himself shaking as he wakes.
Sicheng is no longer in the bed next to him, but the pillow next to him is damp. When Yuta presses his face into it, it smells of burning wood.
The light surprises him, and Yuta blinks into it as he brother comes into view: his stone-like face as set as ever. “It is noon, Yuta,” he says, taking in Yuta’s dishevelled appearance. His hair is long and it isn’t pulled back from his face, and his clothes—in comparison to his brother’s formal attire— are loose and plain.
“Why are you here?” Yuta steps back and his brother follows him.
“You have not responded to my invitation.” his brother barges his way inside. His nose wrinkles as he takes in the mess of papers on Yuta’s desk. “Have you lost your courtesy as well as your manners?”
“I have received nothing from you.” Yuta frowns. He hasn’t and he wouldn’t expect to, not after the way they left things after their last conversation in the hours before Yuta was stripped of his right to their family name.
His brother gives him a withering look and glances towards the fire. “The envelope is there.” He points to the stool set up closest to the fire, it’s embers glowing. “It’s right there on that stool. Are you mocking me? You’ve burnt the invitation.”
Yuta wonders what else might have been burnt by accident in his haste to keep the fire going, always at Sicheng’s request, although he is certain he would have noticed such a tastelessly stamped envelope. He’s sure he wouldn’t have mistakenly put it on the fire. Maybe purposefully, after opening it and reading it’s contents, but not before. It must have been done by accident.
His brother jaw is set into a harsh line. He looks nauseous as he speaks. “I must have grown soft in my married years, but my wife suggested I take pity on you and extend you an invitation to this year’s Winter Ball at the house. Come to the ball, we can clean you up a bit, cut that hair,” his brother says. “I’m sure we can find a young woman who would agree to marry you.”
“Thank you for your offer, but I’m in no need of your pity.” Yuta looks away.
His brother laughs, one cruel bark that sets his jaw even tighter. “Do you want to die ashamed and alone?”
Yuta’s eyes drift towards the two glasses on the sideboard. He makes a point of allowing his gaze to linger. “Alone? You say that as if I don’t have any guests.”
His brother visibly bristles at the thought of male company. “Night time visitors are not suitable for a man of your standing, Yuta. Even if you do have the most peculiar of habits.”
“Who said he is only here at night time?” He’s feeling indignant now; hurt, angry, despondent. Why does no one love me? He wonders. He wants Sicheng at his side right now, but Sicheng is nowhere to be seen.
His brother sighs, contempt drips from every word he speaks. “What have you going for you, Yuta? I’ve not seen your name on any publications. I’ve not heard your name in the literary circles. You are not a misunderstood poet, Yuta, you are deluded and selfish, putting your desire for men over your desire to continue our family name, and you will die a disgrace if you do not change.”
“I can’t just change.” He reaches out. “Brother, please, I—”
His brother shrugs him off. “Father was right, you’re beyond the salvation of the church or anyone else.” He spits at the doorstep. “I can say I tried, but that is all. I shan’t be associated with you any longer.”
The tears spill from Yuta’s eyes bitterly. When he shuts the door, Sicheng is sitting beside the fire again. “I don’t like him,” he says. “Come and sit with me.”
Sicheng stands at the window.
His breakfast sits uneaten on the table. He never eats, Yuta knows this, but he sets a bowl out for him anyway. Yuta has spent a large proportion of his life feeling like he isn't normal and he's good at putting on airs and graces, and pretending everything is fine. He shan't stop now.
Yuta joins him at the window and leans against the ledge. "Not hungry?" He asks.
Sicheng just turns and smiles at him, ignoring his question. He looks Yuta dead in the eyes and asks, “Do you ever want to hurt them?”
“I’m sorry?"
"Your family." Sicheng turns back to the window and it's view across to the edge of the woods. On the other side sits his family estate. “They forced you to leave your home, demand change from you. To them, as you are now you are worse than dead.”
Yuta knows this, he knows, and it hurts to hear it even if Sicheng's tone isn't mocking. “They had to. I’m— I’m not a worthy heir," Yuta replies. He puts his hand to the window, reaching out to no one. The glass is cold. "It’s my fault."
“The sunrise across the forest looks like a fire,” Sicheng whispers. When he blinks, his eyelashes are wet, and a drop of water falls to his cheek.
"Hmm. It's quite beautiful," Yuta says. He isn't talking about the sunset.
Sicheng covers Yuta's hand against the cold window with his own. A cold chill runs up Yuta's spine. “We could hurt them if you wish," Sicheng says softly, and then he turns away and returns to his place beside the hearth.
Sicheng is preoccupied with fire, and he’s cold to the touch, and he leaves wet footprints everywhere he goes. “You never planned to leave,” Yuta says, as Sicheng’s eyes gloss over while he watches the gentle flicker of the fire.
Sicheng says, “You don’t want me to.”
People have noticed the smoke from the chimney of his modest home burning day and night.
“There must be quite a chill settled into your bones, young sir,” The farmers says, not unkindly, when he picks up eggs the following week. “You didn’t used to have the hearth on this often.”
Yuta says, “It’s been a cold winter.”
“I’m glad you’re staying warm.” She smiles at him. Yuta has his suspicions that she knows who he is— knows he’s the disgraced son of the great house on the other side of the village— but she’s kind, regardless. Until Sicheng, she was the only person who had smiled at him in a long time. He presses too many coins for what he’s buying into her palm and refuses to take any back, even if he is running low himself.
He stops making meals that his guest won’t eat, and he sets only one glass on the counter when he pours himself a whisky that night.
He no longer humours Sicheng by asking him if he wants to go for a walk, or if he needs to write a letter to anyone who might be waiting for him. Instead he sits beside the fire next to Sicheng, hand in hand, closes his eyes and listens to the crackle of the fire in the hearth. Then, as it strikes midnight and Sicheng dissipates, he blows out the candles set on the table next to his abandoned poetry and takes himself to bed, where Sicheng is now waiting.
It’s an idyllic life in some respects, but at heart they’re just two men with no future. Sicheng still leaves wet footprints on the wooden beams of his bedroom floor, and his hands are still icy. They always will be. Yuta still doesn’t write.
Sicheng sits closer and closer to the fireplace, until he’s practically in it, and he never flinches. One evening he places his hand over the open flame, as if he’s reaching for something.
“Here.” He takes Yuta’s arm with his free hand and tugs at it. “Join me.” Yuta isn’t sure he means to join him at the fire, or to join him in death, and he wonders if he’d say no to either.
The piercing heat is too much against his finger-tips, and he pulls his hand back, blows cool air onto his fingers, which throb with a sharp pain. Sicheng barely looks back to see if he’s alright.
“Stop now. Be careful,” Yuta can’t help but warn him, even if it’s pointless.
Sicheng just reaches into the heat even further. “It can’t harm me,” he says. “I like it.” Water pools the floor around his feet. He sighs, eyes closed, blissful.
Later, he strips of all of his clothes, leaving them to dry out in front of the embers of the fire. “You like this, don’t you? You like it when I’m undressed.”
Yuta looks away. “You know I do.”
“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to die in flames.” He sighs. “To burn.”
“It would be horrendous.” Yuta frowns. Sicheng is preoccupied with fire, and Yuta is preoccupied with him, and he isn’t sure whether he’s exhilarated or just scared anymore.
“It can’t be worse than drowning,” Sicheng says. He pushes a strand of Yuta’s hair behind his ear.
There are tears in his eyes. Yuta pulls him closer. Says, “Is that what happened to you?”
Sicheng nods.
Yuta’s heart hammers against his chest. “Was it an accident?” he asks.
Sicheng’s mouth turns up into the ghost of a smile. “The police reports said so.”
Yuta looks down at his lap. His hands are fisted at his sides. Sicheng covers one with his own and gently pushes his fingers in between Yuta’s own. “Oh Sicheng, was justice ever served?” Yuta asks.
“Oh yes.” Sicheng smiles, and when he kisses Yuta his body feels warm against Yuta’s own. “There was a terrible fire.”
As the year draws to a close with the Winter Ball at its climax, Yuta receives another letter from his governess, who writes that she plans to travel with his niece to the coast to visit her mother who is in convalescence there after catching a fever. Yuta reads the letter out loud to Sicheng, and he listens carefully, smiles and says, “She sounds like she is a good person, like you are.”
Yuta agrees. He takes the small amount of money she has sent him, along with a hand drawn picture from his niece, who was only three years old when he was banished from the family home, and passes the envelope to Sicheng, who places it into the centre of the fire.
Sicheng smiles. “They’ll be away from the estate at the end of the year,” he says. He looks happy now, too happy, and his eyes are darker than the night outside, and his lips are wet, and Yuta is still drawn to him no matter what. Yuta crosses the room and slides his arms around Sicheng’s shoulders.
“Yes, at the coast, the letter says. Why?” Yuta murmurs against his skin. He presses a kiss to the back of Sicheng’s neck. “Sicheng, what are you planning?”
“Justice is always served, Yuta.” Sicheng turns around to face Yuta and waits for him to him in the eyes. Yuta feels like he’s suffocating. “You’ve been so kind to me, taking me in, loving me, it’s my turn to do something.”
He kisses Yuta, and Yuta allows his mouth to eclipse all of his thoughts—of what Sicheng might be going to do and why Yuta knows he won’t stop him. There’s a silent scream in the back of his throat, but he kisses Sicheng again and again until he has no thoughts left aside from wanting more.
At the turn of the New Year a week later, they sit at the table in Yuta’s cottage, and Yuta writes poems about the soft flutter of Sicheng’s breath when he comes.
“I’m going to stay forever,” Sicheng tells him in hushed tones. “If you’ll let me.”
“Yes,” Yuta replies. “I want that.”
“We’re all haunted, if you think about it. Some of us are haunted by regret, by old memories or the blank faces of those we thought loved us. Some of us are haunted by dark nights, raging storms, our lungs filling with water as we are held down in the lake.” He blows out the candle on the table between them. “Some of us are haunted by ghosts.”
Yuta feels light-headed. He can just make out Sicheng’s form in the dark—just a figure at the table, just as he was a figure under the magnolia tree as winter had set in two months before. “Can one truly be haunted by someone they want to be with?”
The fire at the hearth relights in a spark of flame that wasn’t there before and Sicheng’s face is lit up in the soft golden glow of the fireplace behind them. His clothes are drenched through again, water pooling around the feet of the table, and Yuta wants to be scared but he isn’t, even though he knows that Sicheng is driven by vengeance, that he’s been drowning since he died and that his love is as intense as Yuta’s, but it manifests in the unnatural.
“I suppose in time we’ll find out,” Sicheng replies.
“I suppose we will.” Yuta smiles, and takes Sicheng’s cold hand in his warm one.
“I’m glad you didn’t go to the ball tonight,” Sicheng murmurs, and just the slightest feeling of dread sets into Yuta’s bones.
(Across the village, on the other side of the woods, the Nakamoto estate is shrouded in black smoke, the great house already ablaze as the patrons of the Ball begin their last dance, and there will be nothing that can be done to stop it.)