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But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at.
In the perfect field someone has left everything
including themselves. You. You should stay here.
— Alex Dimitrov, Together and by Ourselves
The first time Donghyuck meets Renjun, he’s a hunched-over figure sticking out like an underturned foot in the middle of the empty field just behind the carpark. Sun bright and fizzy on the back of Donghyuck’s neck, wicking the worst of the soreness out of his muscles as he shields his eyes and stares. Why not. He doesn’t have anything else to do for the day. He takes a step off the concrete and onto the plush untrimmed grass, testing his footing, crossing the threshold. Then he picks his way across the field towards the boy.
“Hey,” Donghyuck says. “Renjun Huang, right?” He thinks they might have had Body Conditioning together last year. A thin face reflected in the mirror over the barre in the periphery of his vision flickers in his mind’s eye like the wink of something bright at the bottom of a well.
Crouched down in a patch of clovers, the boy glances up at him. A startling directness to his gaze, and everything seems to sharpen in colour around him for a moment: the lemon yellow of his track jacket, the unreal greenness at his feet. Light flaring around him in magnetic arcs, and then Donghyuck blinks and his vision resettles. “Yeah,” he says, no recognition in his voice, but he doesn’t ask Donghyuck for an introduction.
“I’m Donghyuck,” Donghyuck says generously. “What are you doing?”
Renjun unfurls a hand in response. In the heart of his palm: three four-leaved clovers. Donghyuck raises his eyebrows and whistles, impressed.
“You must be very lucky,” Donghyuck says.
“Guess so,” Renjun says. He returns his focus to the clovers. Another one gently uprooted and added to the harvest, four limp lobes dangling from the stem.
Donghyuck squats down. In a silence he chooses to characterise as companionable if only because Renjun doesn’t seem to be objecting to his presence, he rakes his fingers through the clovers at the edge of the patch. “Hey, you missed one here,” he says, snapping the stem between his fingers and holding it out.
“I always leave a few,” Renjun says. “In case I need a little bit of extra luck later.” He stands up, the slight outline of his body perfectly positioned to blot out the sun. That unmistakeable blade-straight bearing of a classically-trained dancer, now that he’s on his feet. Smudges of dirt on his knees, a silver gleam in his eye when he smiles. “You can keep that one.”
They’re all good at dance, but there are some things they’re very, very good at. Jeno is very, very good at holding his breath, Jaemin is very, very good at freehanding straight lines, and Renjun is very, very good at finding four-leaved clovers.
And Donghyuck? “I can pick up a little bit of energy from the sun,” he says, when Renjun asks, a week into the term. As luck would have it, he’s Donghyuck’s roommate this time, breaking Donghyuck’s two-year-long streak of somehow managing to score Jeno every time the dorm assignment lottery gets redrawn. It’s Renjun’s first year boarding, so Donghyuck’s determined to give him the fullest roommate experience possible.
“Like a plant,” Renjun says, snickering. He’s in the middle of arranging his latest clover haul flat across the double spread of an open dictionary. “Like a… clover.”
“Fine, yes, my epic superpower is photosynthesis, if you must,” Donghyuck says, affecting a sigh.
“Only from the sun, though?”
“Unfortunately,” Donghyuck says. “Artificial light doesn’t work. Not even UV light.” When he was a kid he’d experimented with a UV lamp borrowed from Mark’s neighbour’s pet lizard, to a negative result. His body can tell the difference, some kind of muscle memory, the way it knows how to land in a perfectly aligned plié in fifth after a triple tour en l’air, or precisely how far to extend a leg behind him for the most beautiful attitude derrière.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Renjun says. “There shouldn’t be any difference.”
Donghyuck shrugs. “It’s magic,” he says. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”
In response, Renjun slams the dictionary shut with an unnecessarily vehement display of force. The first thing Renjun did upon moving in was requisition all the heavy books in their dorm as makeshift presses. Dictionaries, encyclopaedias, old textbooks, all spilling over with drying clovers. Over the past week it’s become evident that he doesn’t do things by halves. It exhausts Donghyuck to look at him, sometimes, even though it doesn’t show in his dance the way Jeno’s intensity manifests itself so forwardly. If anything, Renjun dances like Donghyuck. Ballet is strict, its grace regimented, but Donghyuck pushes restlessly at the rigidity of the forms, the limits of what he can loosen, get away with. He’s applied to switch tracks to contemporary this year, as soon as the school will let him, a discipline exercised sideways.
On his bed, Donghyuck rolls over onto his stomach, propping his chin up on his hands. “What’s the deal with pressing all the clovers?” he asks. “That part of your magic?”
“Each of them stands for a wish,” Renjun says. “I keep them until the wishes come true. Then I bury them.”
“Weirdly morbid! I like it,” Donghyuck says. “But also aren’t you mixing your mythologies, isn’t wishes supposed to be, like, birthday candles. Or dandelions. Stuff you blow out?”
“It’s my magic power, it can be whatever I want,” Renjun says.
“So what’d you wish for?”
“You can’t tell anyone what you wish for or it won’t come true,” Renjun says, with more matter-of-fact conviction than warranted by something he clearly invented on the spot.
“You don’t know that,” Donghyuck says. “You just made the whole thing up.”
“Well, maybe I just don’t want to tell you,” Renjun says.
“Aw, come on,” Donghyuck wheedles. “I’ll give you mine if you give me yours.”
“And then neither of our wishes will come true. That’s even worse.”
Donghyuck drops his head into the quilt. “You’re no fun,” he says, muffled against the fabric.
A knock, then Jeno’s head appears in the open doorframe. “Jaemin wants to know how much longer you guys are going to be, because the next bus comes in five minutes and if we don’t catch that one we’re going to miss the booking.”
“Oh, shit,” Donghyuck yelps, scrambling upright. “I forgot—Renjun, we were gonna take you out to lunch today. To officially welcome you into the dorms. You’re free right now, right? No hot dates with more clovers?”
“You forgot to invite me to my own welcome lunch,” Renjun says incredulously.
“Are you free?” Jeno asks. “We can always reschedule. Sorry about Donghyuck’s... everything.”
Renjun laughs. “Sure,” he says. He stands up and slots the dictionary back into its place on the bookshelf. Idly, Donghyuck watches the flash of his pale, slender fingers curving around the spine, the precisely drawn line of arm to wrist to fingertip. “Let’s go.”
All dancers are superstitious types, and ballet attracts the worst of them. Backstage before a show everyone’s either meditatively stretching or clutching some totem or both at the same time. Renjun has his clovers, Jeno carries a little swallow keychain around in his pocket and Jaemin acts like he’s above the rituals of the others with such obsessive vehemence it’s practically a superstition in and of itself. Donghyuck also tries to stay away from lucky charms as a general rule but he doesn’t enjoy overlapping with Jaemin, so he prefers to consider himself more as a superstition dilettante. If he can, he’ll duck outside before matinee performances for a few moments, that little extra boost from the sun. He’ll take all the luck he can get, but he won’t chase it. It’ll come to him.
“What does it feel like?” Renjun asks abruptly.
Donghyuck glances up from where he’s tying his shoelaces. They’re in the hallway outside the vacated green room after a final practical. Renjun is watching him in the mirror, sweats thrown over his dancewear, duffel bag tucked under his arm. “What does what feel like?”
“When you photosynthesise.”
“I don’t know,” Donghyuck says, straightening up. “What does it feel like when you do your clover magnet thing? It’s probably the same.”
Renjun makes a face. “Doesn’t feel like anything,” he says. “I just find them. They happen to me.”
“But do you reckon you’re just finding them, or, like, manifesting them into existence? Because I feel like there’s no way there’s naturally that many four-leaved clovers nearby.”
Renjun tilts his head and frowns. “I have literally never thought about that.”
“You’re welcome,” Donghyuck says. “Summoning clovers out of thin air is much cooler than being a clover magnet, though.”
“Then I hope it’s that,” Renjun says decisively.
It should feel like a contradiction, but it doesn’t. Renjun’s the type who wants to be the catalyst, the force of impetus. Not the flashing ambiguity of something like luck, chances up in the air, but Renjun’s dogged faith in his clovers persists past the point of irony. Inhabiting polar extremes, the pendulum strike of a battement frappé from ankle to full extension and back again.
“Does it actually work, though? The wishing?”
“Most of the time.”
“So why don’t you just, like, wish for a million dollars or something?”
Renjun fixes Donghyuck with an unimpressed look. “I only wish for things that are actually possible.”
“That’s boring,” Donghyuck says. He’d hate it if his powers worked on a time delay. Better the immediate response than the uncertain future payoff. “Then it might not even be the clovers. Maybe it’s just you.”
Unexpectedly, Renjun’s face lightens. Clear as the summer sky outside. “That’s good, too,” he says.
One afternoon during P.E. Donghyuck manages to charm the teacher into letting the four of them leave the gym to physically educate themselves, so they scrounge up a battered volleyball from the storeroom and head out to the net someone’s set up on the green outside student reception, partly under the shade of a few trees dripping with violet flowers. None of them have any idea how to play volleyball, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a relief to be out in the lazy sprawl of the sun after a day shut indoors with only a few stale slivers of reflected light bounced around the studio mirrors for company.
They go two on two, Jaemin and Renjun on one side of the net, Jeno and Donghyuck on the other. Jeno sizes up a jump serve and misses the timing of his swing, the ball dropping uselessly to the grass. In the end he gives up and just lobs the ball over the net, where it ricochets off Renjun’s forearms and clean out of the square.
“Damn,” Donghyuck says. “We really suck at this.”
But they keep going, fumbling the ball back and forth over and under the net. The afternoon deepening gold around them. Then Jaemin and Jeno leave ten minutes before the end of the period to make sure they can get to Advanced Music on the far end of campus in time, so Jaemin tosses the ball to Renjun and tells him solemnly to win for them both.
One on one. Renjun smashes the ball directly into a low-hanging bough and a burst of purple petals showers down around Donghyuck. Shocked into stillness they both stare, shredded flowers sifting through the air like slow-motion confetti, the ball knocking into the base of the tree and coming to a standstill. He has to shake the floral debris from his hair. The world reasserting its presence with such gorgeous, unmissable fervour they’ve got no choice but to stop for a moment and watch.
“You know, for a dancer, you really have horrible posture,” Renjun says. He presses a palm to Donghyuck’s lower back and slides his hand up along his spine like he’s smoothing out the curve. Warmth bleeds through the thin layer of fabric in between their skin. Donghyuck slouches further in retaliation.
Dance is all about the lines of the body. This is, unfortunately, why Jaemin’s skill is more useful than it might first appear, every carefully exceptional angle of his limbs cutting through the air with a beauty that could break hearts. But it’s not like it’s unique to Jaemin, only instinctive. Donghyuck outscores him in exams on the regular.
“Worry about your sickling problems first,” Donghyuck retorts.
Renjun shrugs, retracting his hand, and extends his right leg into a perfectly turned-out tendu devant, then ruins it by rotating his freaky flexible ankle.
“God, that’s disgusting,” Donghyuck hisses. “Why do you make me look at that.”
“You’re such a baby,” Renjun says.
Donghyuck pointedly does not respond to this, lifting his leg to stretch it out taut on the barre and aligning his torso parallel. Inhale, then he pushes his forehead against his knee, counts to ten as he breathes out through the burn. He switches legs and repeats the process to finish off his warm-up.
There’s a competition coming up in a few weeks, and they’ve tweaked the choreography from one of their midterm assessments, a paired assignment, for their entry. The steps are familiar, gliding over the wooden studio floor. Donghyuck flies.
At the end of the runthrough, Renjun fetches his phone from where it’s propped up at the front of the studio so they can check the recording, critique how they look from the outside. Donghyuck hooks his chin over Renjun’s shoulder and Renjun passes him an earbud. They watch their recorded selves flashing across the screen in sync with the music, with each other. Renjun dances like he’s trying to break out of himself, a terrible longing that’s barely containable. Bleeding out of the pixels like they’re past saturation point. Donghyuck almost forgets to size up his own movements.
The video ends. “Not bad,” Renjun says, slipping his earbud out. Donghyuck follows suit and slides down to the floor, flat on his back.
“Hey,” Donghyuck says. “We go pretty well together, don’t we?”
“Every time we practise that lift at the end I think about throwing you across the room,” Renjun informs him.
“You’re in love with me,” Donghyuck crows. “I knew it.”
“See if I don’t ‘accidentally’ drop you on your ass next time,” Renjun says.
He shifts his head onto Renjun’s thigh, the firm and leanly corded muscle of it. If he tilts his neck, puts his ear to the femoral, he’ll be able to hear the steady pulse of blood underneath, the definitive proof of life.
“Your hair’s getting long,” Renjun says. The sunset slants in spokes through the blinds, faint pressure like fingers in his hair. Evening like a bruised plum outside. “Are you gonna cut it?”
“Nah,” Donghyuck says. “Maybe I’ll dye it. Though Ms Kim probably won’t recognise me after and it’ll fuck up my attendance.” He pauses. “Also it’s against the school rules. But whatever.”
Renjun hums, thoughtful. “You could wait until graduation. They can’t do anything about it after that.”
“God, that’s so soon,” Donghyuck says, frowning. “Where’d all the years go.”
“Plenty more to come,” Renjun says. “I’m nowhere near done with dance.” He curves his thumb and forefinger into a circle and brings it up to his eye, peering down at Donghyuck through the ring.
“See anything you like?” Donghyuck says.
“An empty room,” Renjun says. “Peace and quiet.”
“Please,” Donghyuck scoffs. “I’m the best roommate you’ve ever had.”
“You’re the only roommate I’ve ever had,” Renjun says. “That means you’re also the worst.”
“Yeah, how come we keep ending up with each other? Are you wishing for me?” Donghyuck presses a hand to his chest and pretends to swoon further back into Renjun’s lap. “Wow, I didn’t know you cared so much—”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Renjun’s voice is severe, but his mouth twitches.
A somnolent lull, brief. Donghyuck breathes in, out. “I think we’re going to win,” he says.
Renjun’s hand creeps loosely over his eyes. His fingers warm and dry. Donghyuck blinks, eyelashes dragging unevenly against Renjun’s palm.
He raises a hand and catches Renjun’s wrist, pulling the obstruction to his vision away so he can catch Renjun’s gaze, that little flare of surprise. Thumb to the delicate inside, between the bones. The skin there soft as petals. The light in Renjun’s hair almost violet.
The leaves turn. Donghyuck and Renjun place second in the competition, and pull mirroring faces at each other once they get backstage with their runners-up ribbons. It’s not enough, and it’s a relief to know that Renjun shares the feeling. “You should’ve wished for us to win,” Donghyuck grumbles.
“I’m saving my luck for bigger things,” Renjun retorts. “I can’t rack up too much karmic debt or something will go very wrong. Anyway, we could have won that on our own.”
“Who says you’re incurring debt? Maybe it’s free.”
“Nothing in the universe works like that,” Renjun says. He’s looking down at the ribbon in his hand, its not-so-auspicious red. “Not even magic.”
The fulcrum of the term pivots; all of a sudden they’re closer to the end of the year than the beginning and everyone simultaneously experiences the joint realisation that life continues past the structure of high school. A steady stream of visitors pour in and out of the career advisor’s office. Donghyuck never pauses when he walks past the door. He knows what he wants to do.
The concept of changing course now is so distant to Donghyuck it doesn’t even occur to him that anyone could feel differently. “Are you gonna stick with classical or switch into contemp with the rest of us,” he’s saying to Jaemin, as they walk through the shaded corridor between the dorms and the practice studios.
“I’m not continuing,” Jaemin says.
For a moment Donghyuck wonders if he’s having an auditory hallucination. “What?”
“I’m not going pro,” Jaemin clarifies.
Donghyuck stares. “... Why?”
Wryly: “Why do you think I would?”
“But you’re so good,” Donghyuck says, flabbergasted into straightforwardness. Jaemin’s mouth crooks at the uncharacteristic compliment, but he doesn’t call Donghyuck out on it. “I thought you liked dancing.”
He and Jaemin, they don’t do these types of conversations. Words stumble over themselves in his mouth, a series of steps slipping out of time. He wants to move away from the awning and into the sun, but it’s too obvious a motion.
Jaemin’s gaze is unwavering. “I do,” he says. “But I don’t think I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
It wouldn’t be the rest of his life, anyway. Donghyuck doesn’t have any illusions about the long-term viability of a career in dance, the briefly brilliant dream. So Jaemin wants longevity. Donghyuck wants the lights.
“But if you did,” Donghyuck presses. “If you did go pro.”
“Maybe I’d be happy,” Jaemin says. “Or maybe I’d hate it.” He tips his elbow into Donghyuck’s upper arm. Even an action as insignificant as this settles his body into immaculate angles. “We’ll still be friends, though? Unless you’re planning to only talk to dance majors from now on.”
“Might have to put a new policy in place,” Donghyuck sniffs.
Three years gone in the blink of an eye and these last few months dripping slow like honey through his fingers. Donghyuck's never been so acutely aware of the passage of time, its lack of metronomic beat. Their shadows on the pavement overlap, tinged with blue. Neither of them bring the topic up again.
“You going out?”
Pausing in the doorway, Renjun brandishes a shovel and a small ziploc bag filled with green in lieu of an answer.
Donghyuck swivels his chair around to face him directly, taps his pen against his chin. “Ahh. Burial time. So your wishes came true?”
“Not yet,” Renjun says calmly.
“Getting ahead of ourselves, are we now,” Donghyuck says. “You’re very confident.”
“I want to prove something to myself,” Renjun says. The ziploc bag disappears into a jacket pocket; the shovel stays in his hand like a knife. He adds, “You can come, if you want.”
“Thought you’d never ask!” Donghyuck says, already on his feet. His essay can wait. It’ll be good to get some sun directly on his skin, too. “All these years and you’ve never invited me along before... I’m genuinely obsessed with this whole wishes thing, you know. I have no idea how you came up with all this, but it fills me with so much joy.”
“Thanks,” Renjun says. “I also enjoy it when I win.”
They venture out past the courtyard in front of the dorm building and around the side of reception. Here the grass thins out underfoot into sparse clumps pockmarking exposed and crumbling dirt, clearly too close to the far boundaries of the grounds for the school to bother returfing. Inconstant cloud cover prickles like pins and needles on Donghyuck’s bare forearms. Renjun leads them towards a squat, silverbarked tree, branches dense with yellowing foliage.
“I usually bury them here,” Renjun says.
Donghyuck slaps the trunk reverently. “I’m standing in a graveyard,” he says. “The ghosts of clovers past…”
This goes brutally ignored. Shovel in hand, Renjun scoops out a shallow grave between the ridges of two roots and shakes the contents of the ziploc bag into the hole. It seems like a rather unillustrious end. Donghyuck feels a little sorry for them.
“I feel like we should like, eulogise or something,” Donghyuck says. “Here lies, uh, a bunch of four-leaved clovers harvested by Renjun Huang in the prime of their youth, not yet activated, possibly defective, gone too soon—cruelly buried alive—”
“You can leave at any time,” Renjun says, aggrieved.
Instead, Donghyuck kneels down beside Renjun. With his hand, he sweeps the displaced pile of dirt back into the hole, covering the clovers up. He smooths the edges into place. “So since you’re giving up on these ones, you can tell me what the wishes were, right?”
“No,” Renjun says.
“Not even a hint?”
“They’re all for the same wish.”
“That is so helpful, thank you,” Donghyuck says flatly. He stabs his fingertips into the overturned soil. Then he says, “Jaemin’s quitting dance. Did you know?”
“Yeah,” Renjun says. “He told me a little while ago. I always thought—” He breaks off. There’s no need to say it. His fingers are lax around the handle of the shovel, which dangles loosely from his hand.
Donghyuck reaches out and wraps his hand over Renjun’s to firm his grip. “Careful,” he says, before letting go.
They stand up again, unintentionally coordinated. Those kinds of moments come more and more often lately, a strange rill of satisfaction to the idea that they’ve danced together so much their bodies are beginning to move as one, caught in the pulleys of the same muscle memory. They’re standing in the shade, but the sun must have shown its face again, that near-unnoticeable brightness that settles at the base of Donghyuck’s spine, just a little more strength than ordinary.
“I never asked you,” Donghyuck says. “What do you do with the clovers for the wishes that don’t come true?”
Renjun doesn’t answer. Just sticks his hands in his pockets and offers Donghyuck a stray penmark of a smile. An invisible wind gently dislodging his bangs from his forehead, though Donghyuck can’t feel it himself, can only see its aftereffects. The shape of everything yet to come taking root around them all. Things buried. Things reaped?
“So you’re leaving too,” Donghyuck says. He can’t help the petulant note sidling into his voice. It’s better than the scream building pressure at the bottom of his throat.
Jeno fidgets. “Well, we’ll still be in the same faculty,” he says. “It’s not like—I’m not really leaving. I just… I like flute more than I like dance.”
Donghyuck swallows back the acrid Then you should have just gone with it from the start that bubbles to the tip of his tongue. It isn’t fair to Jeno, but—it isn’t fair at all. It’s so hard not to be selfish. Two points left, not even a stable shape, only a vector, the line of his outstretched arm towards Renjun’s figure on the other side of the stage.
“Don’t tell Renjun,” Jeno adds. He glances hopefully at Donghyuck across the cafeteria table. “I haven’t told him yet, I’ll do it myself.”
“Renjun’s gonna be so mad,” Donghyuck mumbles. Quitting is one thing; dividing your passions is another. The latter is particularly unforgivable, for Renjun. All or nothing, that’s the way Renjun operates.
“I know,” Jeno sighs, glum.
“It’s not your fault,” Donghyuck says. “I just wish—I wanted us to stay together for a little bit longer.”
He sticks a hand out, palm up, soaking up the dregs of the faint winter sun sifted through the high-recessed cafeteria windows. These malt syrup afternoons, that’s how he wants to remember them for the rest of his life. Jaemin’s horrible accent as he mangles the syllables of exercices au milieu, Jeno’s upturned and smiling face. Renjun’s hands on his waist, steadying him mid-air. Renjun’s shoulder knocking against his and staying there. Renjun watching him through the circle of his index and thumb like it could reveal something unknown to even Donghyuck himself. All the shining days of his youth. How has he already reached the horizon line?
Donghyuck scrubs his hand across his eyes, shutting off the vision of Jeno with his palms open and pleading and blameless on the table, just for a moment. Then he drops his hand, says, “Hey, do you think I’d look good with red hair?” and Jeno smiles, only the minutest of tremors to the expression, and answers, “Yeah, I think you’d look great. Yeah.”
At the end of the very last day of high school, Renjun is nowhere to be found. “Have you guys seen Renjun anywhere?” Donghyuck asks, hurrying across the courtyard to the awning where Jeno and Jaemin are taking shelter from the gale that’s picked up sometime in the last ten minutes, a liquid, silky punch of unseasonable cold sending leaves firecrackering across the pavement.
Jeno and Jaemin exchange glances. “Not since fifth period,” Jeno says, apologetic.
“Neither,” Jaemin says.
“What the hell,” Donghyuck hisses. The wind bites at his throat like an unfriendly dog. He should have taken a scarf out with him. “Where is he?”
“Isn’t he flying back home today?” Jeno says.
“His flight isn’t until, like, seven!”
“Why do you know this,” Jaemin says.
“Is he really just going to leave without even saying goodbye?” Donghyuck fumes. “I’m his roommate. I’m his partner. Why didn’t he…”
Jeno suggests, “Maybe he left a note?”
Renjun’s half of their dorm is neat and bare. But what Donghyuck hadn’t noticed before, during his cursory check while he was looking for Renjun earlier: there’s an English dictionary, the largest one from Renjun’s collection, on top of the covers at the foot of Donghyuck’s bed.
Donghyuck sits down on the bed and pulls the dictionary towards himself. He turns it on its spine and lets it fall open and out tumbles a miniature fortune of fortunes, pile of beautifully preserved luck sliding into his lap. Each clover delicate and dry and faded to a dull green. Translucent in the light when he holds one up between thumb and forefinger, the stem brittle and papery. He stares. Hands full of somebody else’s wishes—had they come true? Is this another premature burial? Renjun tipping the bag upside down with such care, letting go with the serene confidence of a foregone conclusion, but Donghyuck’d thought then it was on the assumption of victory. It doesn’t make sense for Renjun to turn his mind towards loss. It’s not something he should ever have to think about.
“You fucking asshole,” Donghyuck says out loud, disbelieving, “is this your idea of a confession?” and then he starts to laugh.
A frantic sprint and a short bus trip later, he manages to catch up to Renjun in front of the train station, zeroing in on the distinctive faded pink of his hair amidst the straggling crowd. Suitcase in his hand, branches frothy with pale flowers arching over his head. Absolutely unthinkably incredible stroke of coincidence. The sunlight is the consistency of weak tea, and sinks sullenly into Donghyuck’s exposed skin, barely taking the edge off the wind chill, but he isn’t thinking about the cold at all.
Inhale. “Renjun Huang,” he yells, at the top of his lungs. Renjun whirls around, mouth parted in surprise. White petals shaken loose by the wind fluttering over him like snow. “I know your flight isn’t for ages—did you seriously try to pull a confess-and-run on me?
The tips of Renjun’s ears go red. “No,” he says unconvincingly.
Donghyuck reaches into his pocket and draws out a fistful of desiccated clovers. Shakes it accusingly in front of Renjun’s nose. He opens his hand and the wind sweeps his palm clean, fragments of leaf eddying away. “What the hell am I supposed to do with these? They’re your luck, your wishes—”
“They were for you,” Renjun snaps. “All of them. I wished for you and I kept wishing for you, okay? All the clovers I buried, too, they were all for you. ”
Incredulous, Donghyuck throws his hands up. “So you just gave them to me and then you left? What exactly were you trying to achieve?”
"I hadn't thought that far," Renjun admits.
“You thought I was leaving!”
“Things change,” Renjun says. A tautness to the words. “People change. Everyone’s leaving—Jaemin, Jeno—I couldn’t be sure, I didn’t know if you’d—”
“You could have just asked,” Donghyuck says. “I wanna keep dancing. I wanna keep dancing with you. Not anyone else. Just you.”
He watches the struck bell of Renjun’s expression, the shivery slow-blooming delight, exhausting and inexorable hope. The same parts of himself moving in concert, perfect pas de deux, helpless with fondness. Yes, I’m saying yes. You in the clover fields with dirt under your fingernails, you in the studio surrounded by mirrors, you in the shade and in the sun, all your selves, all your luck that you entrusted to me.
“D’you remember the first time we met, in the field behind the carpark,” Donghyuck says. “You summoned me.” The flicker of a faint smile, creamy heart of a plum blossom. “So you’re stuck with me. You can’t get rid of me as easily as the rest of your clovers. Unless you feel like burying me alive too.”
“No guarantees,” Renjun says. Then: “You’re going pro with me.” There’s no upwards questioning lilt to the words, but Donghyuck sees the uncertainty wavering over his face.
“Of course I am,” Donghyuck says. “God, what the fuck, I can’t believe you tried to dance-break-up with me via dried plant, I’m never letting you live this down.”
“Dance break,” Renjun mumbles under his breath. The grin in his voice like sunlight. Then he looks Donghyuck square in the eye and says, “I’m not going to stop. I want to win. More than anything.”
And it’s like a premonition again, the way the world strikes him all at once, Renjun with his hair flaring out in the wind, standing less than an arm’s length away. Pearlescent sky curving over their heads like the inside of an oyster shell, encasing the bright treasure within. Donghyuck wants so badly to see it from the outside he thinks he finally understands how Renjun feels all the time, like his body isn’t enough, like he needs to escape, become something bigger and better than himself.
Impulsively he reaches out to fit his thumb under the ledge of Renjun’s collarbone, then draws the line of his knuckles from shoulder to elbow, an improvised choreography. Renjun’s hand comes to rest at Donghyuck’s waist. Not the closed and secure grip of a lift. Only an open palm, like how he’d presented the proof of his gift to Donghyuck that first time behind the carpark all those years ago, that small and vital part of himself shared. Waiting for Donghyuck to do the same.
“You’re in luck,” Donghyuck says. “I want to win too.”