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"Help me," Kyungsoo pleads, his despair settling over Jongdae like a thick coat, so grave Jongdae can't move a limb. He watches Kyungsoo knock against his own chest, hears the hollow sound his knuckles make. "I can't find my heart."
Jongdae can't see his face clearly. He rubs his eyes only for it to get worse. "Did you check the cupboards?" he asks, slowly, as if jellied. His own heart is trembling against his ribs, beating so quickly he feels breathless, suffocated by the sound.
“I didn’t give it to you?” Kyungsoo asks. “I thought I—”
His palpable turmoil makes Jongdae’s sight blur until he’s nothing but a silhouette, edges bleeding into the background. He tries to move towards the kitchen, the cupboards, he’s so sure he saw Kyungsoo stashing it away behind their spices—
“I want to grow old,” Kyungsoo says, his voice breaking, “I want to die, one day.”
Jongdae knows. He’s had his tied at a young age, and their differences are getting more undeniable day by day. He isn’t sure how they both missed the last alarm for Kyungsoo to wear his heart. Kyungsoo must be crying now, the tears running down his face leaving tracks, a sharp, iridescent glow in Jongdae’s vision like fresh snail trails.
“We’ll find it,” Jongdae says, and if he’ll have to upturn the world particle by particle, he will.
"You're heartless," Jongdae tells him.
“You made me so,” Kyungsoo says and keeps eating his slice of cake, undisturbed by Jongdae’s sulking, as he places his free hand on the right side of his chest.
The sight makes Jongdae burst out laughing, even more so when Kyungsoo asks what’s wrong? what’s wrong? with such a confused expression on his face. He needs a while to calm back down and wipe his tears.
Kyungsoo’s realised his mistake by now, and he’s so embarrassed he forgets all about his posture, dissolves all over the café chair and table. Jongdae loves him for this, for not telling him to be quiet, not being ashamed of his loudness, and he reaches out.
“I’m never going on a date with you again,” Kyungsoo mumbles and fends off the fork sneaking up on the last piece of cake on his plate.
Jongdae smiles at him, through the strange high-pitched sound building in the back of his mind, says, “All the better, I’ll eat your share of cake, too.”
"You can't bury it there," Jongdae says.
Kyungsoo squints against the sun as he tries to look at him from where he's crouched down near the door sill, gardening trowel in his hand. "I can't?"
"Hide it in plain sight, not where everyone will step on it." He holds out a hand for the heart, surprised when Kyungsoo reaches for him instead. There's dirt under his fingernails. His hand feels dry, warm in Jongdae's, and it makes him feel all dry and warm inside.
"Help me up?" Kyungsoo says with a raised eyebrow.
Jongdae finds himself in his arms on the ground before he can reply, and he melts against Kyungsoo, thinks of all the kisses he’s thought of giving him throughout the day.
Kyungsoo turns them over before he can get his mouth on him, places the small box with his heart next to Jongdae’s head. "Here," he says, “be my hiding place.”
“Are you calling me plain?” Jongdae starts to protest, losing all steam when Kyungsoo brushes the hair out of his eyes. He’ll tell Kyungsoo later, when they’ve gone through all the kisses, just how much his bottomless trust means to him.
Jongdae cracks an egg, lets the yolk settle in his palm as the egg white slides past his fingers into a bowl. He dips the tip of his thumb into the gooey softness of the yolk, gently, so it won’t break.
"What are you making?"
Greased molds in his hand, he turns to see Kyungsoo on the couch, a blanket wrapped around his body, eyes barely open. "Fried eggs," he tells him, fits the molds into the melted butter in the pan, cracks another egg, one-handedly. He lets the yolk slide into the centres, one each, then pours the egg whites in the space around it.
"What's with all the heart-shaped food lately?" Kyungsoo asks a little later when Jongdae has placed the bowl of bibimbap he doesn’t recall making between his crossed legs. "Are you trying to tell me something?"
"It’s a gag gift from Chanyeol," Jongdae says. "I like using them at least once before tossing them out."
“Thank you for the food, then.”
The yolk oozes out when Kyungsoo halves his fried egg with his chopsticks—something Jongdae knows he must have worked hard for. He isn’t sure—he’s never even cracked an egg without getting eggshell pieces everywhere.
He knows he could make his intentions clearer than this, but he's not yet ready for being rejected, or worse: accepted.
"I'm sorry," Jongdae repeats as they stare down into the well. There’s no surface.
Kyungsoo frowns down at it. "Would you kiss a frog, if it retrieved my heart?"
"No," Jongdae replies without thinking. He grasps for the bucket, finds it roomy, sturdy, just like the chain. He sits on the lip of the well, swings his legs over it and lowers the bucket enough to set his feet into, grips onto the chain. "Wind me back up when I tell you to?"
"Jongdae—"
The descent takes a while, long enough for Jongdae to get bored and think. Kyungsoo’s always had more concern for Jongdae’s safety, even when he does things like tossing his heart into a well on a whim, and throwing himself after it.
He yells up at Kyungsoo when the bucket hits something with an unpleasantly quaggy sound, and as Jongdae combs his hands through gunky mud, kissing a frog doesn’t sound so bad anymore. They're only a few months apart, but he hopes to grow up to be half as pragmatic as Kyungsoo.