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It hits different this time. Takes a while to properly kick in.
Roots twist around Yuchan’s ankles like limbs, hands more true to what they resemble. Nudging out of their grasp is his first mistake. Pink bleeds along the edges of his vision in splotches but he doesn’t even notice it then, not until a voice erupts from within, behind, tensing up from the back of his neck like a thousand needles.
Sehyoon please, I can’t—
“Agh!”
Too late, and it’s loud. Each syllable echoes throughout his system as he swallows down its pain. The branches swarm him now and he has half a mind to swing his bat around, but it stumbles from his grasp when one yanks at his waist and throws him off balance.
The tendrils are purple, and if not for their splintery surface and the way they split like branches, he’d think of them as tentacles. Kraken Trees, Junhee had called them, and Yuchan had laughed when he had yet to experience their wrath in person.
Sehyoon—
“Please!” Where’s Donghun? He tries to lift himself, fingers raking lines in the dirt from how he’s being dragged. He tries to look around for his partner but it’s dark, eyes gone magenta and blackness beyond. The voice gets louder.
Sehyoon, where are you?
It aches so much, beyond what he’d experienced when he’d last fought the poison. Just the noise, the pain in it, it’s too clear to be just a hallucination, and that name.
He’s screaming now, body too useless to try much else, head gone too light to think of anything. He can’t even hear his own voice beyond the pulsing through his ears, and can only hope Donghun can find him.
He’s surrounded now, wood stretching and digging around his arms, splintering through his clothes, cutting the circulation. He’d never considered himself claustrophobic, but the forest seems to swallow him alive.
Too late and he’s giving up, nothing but the cries shaking him awake, filling him with their pain. The worst part is that he knows that ache, sees it in his dreams, pushes it throughout the day, and feels it especially now.
“I can’t…”
He’s tired. Of running forever. Of pretending to sleep every night and choosing to keep going. Of wondering where Junhee went, if he’ll ever see him again beyond these horrid dreams.
If he’ll make it there too.
“Yuchan!”
The voices are shallow. His world shakes.
“Please wake up.”
A loud chop, and then another— ”Ah shit—” a tug, and then he’s falling.
It’s brisk, this feeling, as the pink fades to purple. There’s a hand holding his up, incredibly cold, and another—
He yelps in pain beyond the control of his consciousness, but barely a whimper passes out. All he can feel is the cold air burning fire through the open wound — oh god his arm — and fingers, Donghun what the fuck.
“Christ, you’re alive.” Donghun must’ve heard him. His fingers dig deeper, lightning coursing through, and he wants to scream and sob and get his hand around Donghun’s wrist and god why does it have to hurt so much, his stomach tenses as if to curl away, or maybe to throw up all over himself, but he’s just too weak.
It feels for hours like that. Donghun holding him down, probably falling out of it too because healing is taxing, but it starts to go numb. He focuses on pacing his breathing with Donghun’s until the voices completely fade out, and the first thing he can feel after that—
“You idiot…” It’s a whisper. Donghun’s hair tickles his chin and neck, forehead warm against his chest. He feels his weight, pressing him against the grass, breathing out of beat with his own.
His vision is red now, just with the eternal skylight against his eyelids, and as if deciding to see their nightmare of a world again, he opens them.
The clouds are blue today, twisting aimlessly like being boiled in slow motion, but nothing like the acid rain or smog they’d gotten in the past. Trees roof the edges of his peripheral but not reaching out to eat them, and he can almost pretend that it’s a normal day in the field when his friends would call out to play ball. Maybe birds chirping on the side would be nice too, but he likes to think innocent creatures don’t deserve a place here.
With renewed energy, he lifts his arm to view Donghun’s handiwork. A bruise snakes around from his elbow to the veins on his wrist, blooming curved lines like faded indentations of bark where venom seeped into his skin, probably all over the rest of his limbs as well. And then there’s the incisions Donghun made with his own fingers, three crescents of red closing on their own.
Donghun could heal. Only Junhee ever told them he could heal.
“Donghun?”
“Mmn.”
Yuchan settles his hand in Donghun’s hair and notices lighter strands scattered between his fingers. Confused, he brushes it back to counter the lighting, but only confirms that about a third of his whole scalp has since changed, as if he’d aged thirty years. It reminds him of Junhee’s head of white.
Donghun hums softly at the movement. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” Yuchan relaxes back, taking the moment to regain his strength. “We should start moving. Still about in the smack center of a death-zone.”
“Everywhere is a death-zone.” Donghun curls against him, knees pinching his sides just to fall lax again with a heavy exhale.
“Junhee would’ve done a better job.”
Donghun smacks his chest almost instinctively and lifts himself to catch the smirk on Yuchan’s face. He knows it’s about the healing, Yuchan can tell from the worried frown. “Y’okay?”
Yuchan holds up his arm, smoothing his fingers across the scar without flinching. It’s only painfully numb now, if he’s being honest.
“Your head,” Donghun meets the back of his hand with Yuchan’s forehead as if to check temperature.
“S’fine, look.” He gets to his feet, weight on his bad arm, and even holds it out to help Donghun up, wobble-free and all. Donghun takes it quizzically.
“You were calling his name.” Donghun brushes off his pants, despite being permanent with dirt.
Yuchan scratches his head, feeling leaves in his hair. “Junhee?”
“Scared the hell out of me. Thought the whispering woods were yelling at me, clearly, but you weren’t anywhere else.”
Yuchan ponders it. He always thought the forest had its name for the fuzzy hallucinations it caused, but it adds so much possibility to the theory. “I heard something too.”
“‘Course you did.”
“Well yeah but— but so much clearer this time.” He digs for the memory, the magenta and the mouth of branches. “Aw crap my bat. It’s probably still back…” He turns to search for the path between the trees where he entered, only to find that the land had already shifted. How long was he out?
“It’s cool, I found something better.”
Donghun retrieves his knapsack along with the handle of something underneath, which he presents as a large old-fashioned axe. He wields it like a weapon, and Yuchan imagines Donghun playing hero, hacking at the trees to save him.
“Woah.” He traces his fingers over the design, the wood that’s clearly not purple, and the signs of usage. They always find loot in the most dangerous of places — traces of others like them lost in the wasteland, always ownerless with no signs of struggle nearby. Not that it’s possible to die here, not normally, but the objects always feel a little haunting, especially with how they’re clearly from earth.
“Handy. And conveniently useful.”
Too convenient. Yuchan blinks more theories from his head and offers to take the knapsack. “Lee Donghun could build me a house.”
“If you want the walls to eat you in your sleep, I’ll dare.”
Yuchan remembers the ghost of the voice that surrounded him, forgotten everything but its earnesty. That it sounded human. “Maybe they’re just hungry,” he says.
Yuchan doesn’t get hungry, it’s too human a way to die. He doesn’t have to eat and doesn’t get sick. Only sleep can take him, along with the elements, because sleep reaps him of his soul. There’s no way to explain it, other than the pull of dreams from reality —the fading of one's spirit, he’d known since he’d woken up in this forsaken place— so they are sworn to stay together. Something about isolation making it easy to slip away. That, and sleep doesn’t protect your unconscious body from the elements for obvious reasons. The land can injure them beyond recognition, he’s witnessed that far too many times, but it is tiredness —no, hopelessness — that eats the soul.
Thus, he supposes such an end isn’t death. He’d long concluded that he’s in underworld-hell, or some obnoxious afterlife of the sort. He knows that every inch of the place has a mind of its own, so there’s no point in settling nor direction. Nature will pull them out of their progress in one way or the other. He knows that there’s an opposite to their hell, some goddess Junhee calls to when he heals. He breaches his fingers through his or Donghun’s skin when they’re spilling out of their guts and gives them his lifeforce and still stands up after like a goddamn champ, because he took it upon himself to take everything upon himself. Like he took in Donghun, and Yuchan when they found him too.
He knows Donghun is a healer now too, and wonders if that means anything for his own abilities.
“Did you see her?”
Donghun looks over, tiredness all over his face but step still in spirit. He continues with a hum, hacking carelessly at the tendons of foliage in his way. To his credit, they don’t attack back. “How do I explain? I just knew. She was there… a hymn of something, about you I think. Or maybe it was me, singing.”
“Did he teach you that?” Yuchan says, a second of hesitation in.
“...Mm.”
Yuchan ponders it, finds it sounding too familiar: a voice and a name, not knowing if he’s hearing it or saying it, but being certain someone else is there. “What did you hear? From me I mean.”
“Huh? Oh,” he chuckles, and starts with an exaggerated whine. “Junhee, please, where are you, Junhee, I can’t move!”
“Shut it.”
“Word for word,” Donghun holds up his hands. “Don’t kill the messenger, though I don’t know who you were calling to.”
“Thanks, whatever.” It doesn’t help though. Right as it sounds, there’s something missing.
Eventually they hit a dead end of a cliff, and turn back mindlessly. If the map wants them in the whispering woods, they don’t have much of a choice. Taking on the cliff is an idea for energy, and Donghun seems low on it, so Yuchan takes lead. Maybe they should camp soon.
“I miss him too.” Donghun says low behind him. He’s given up on whatever anger he’d been taking out on the forest, and his footsteps are quiet. “I think, if i was getting eaten by a Kraken Tree —and Junhee’s an amazing healer— maybe I’d call for him too, hopeless as it is. We don’t know where he went, if he’s still here.”
“He’s not—” Yuchan stops himself, “you’re not hopeless.” Of course he remembers it, ripens in his memory every night. Junhee’s blank expression, skin turned crystal. The explosion that wiped the two of them out for days. Junhee, who had lasted here for probably decades, literally gone in a flash. It’s why he’s so certain Junhee’s not coming back, reason as it is for Yuchan to scream for him in his subconscious. Maybe Yuchan just wanted to follow.
But the thought would break Donghun.
“No look at this, Donghun,” he holds up both arms where lines of bruises already fade, takes Donghun’s palm and presses it to the creases in his wrist. “You did this. The hell, shoulda told me you’re a healer like that’d help a little? Give us a grain of assurance? Not saying nothing about throwing myself at danger but—”
“You one-hundred percent already throw yourself at danger”
“—but maybe it’d one-thousand percent add to our peace of mind? Maybe you’re our brilliant team healer and can teach me too?”
“Definitely not.”
“You can try?”
Donghun laughs and leans into him a bit, digging his fingers into Yuchan’s arm. He’s exhausted, Yuchan can feel it in the way he paces his breath and hangs his head to the side. With all the years he’s known Donghun, the change in hair, so sudden throughout his scalp from root to tip, bites him with a bit more concern than it should, like this information could really change everything and he can’t fully blame Donghun for keeping it from him. It was probably his first time healing too.
Yuchan shivers when a kiss lands on his neck.
“Purple bruises,” Donghun mutters.
“Sorry, you’re tired.”
“It’s okay.” He kisses again, slow, and it’s a strange peacefulness coming from Donghun.
Yuchan lets him relax against him, settling in his warmth, hot breath against numb skin. Donghun whispers something then, foreign to Yuchan’s ears so he doesn’t bother to decipher it. Simply he moves his hand in Donghun’s grasp to hold him around his waist. It’s only then that he feels it.
“Donghun,” he looks down to see the root snaking up from behind and coiling around Donghun’s wrist, “don’t move.” But what can he do? He just knows that struggling makes things worse. He can only hope that the venom doesn’t take over Donghun’s system beyond their control. He moves his free hand around, slowly, reaching for the axe in Donghun’s hand.
“Yuchan,” Donghun sobs, trembles, and the handle falls to the ground.
He lets go and Donghun falls to his knees, but a branch around his leg that Yuchan didn’t even notice stumbles him onto his side. Yuchan slices it as soon as he has a hold on the axe.
“Donghun? Donghun listen to me, what do you hear?” He may already be too late. The roots sprout from the ground, swarming them.
“I can’t, I can’t.”
Every time they had encountered the venom, it was just incomprehensible wailing. Never this strong, this quick. Yuchan think. Why would the trees be talking to them now?
“I can’t move…”
“Donghun, stay with me!” He swings the axe, slicing the branches with precision. “Can you tell me where the voice is coming from?” Free from the tendrils now, he pulls Donghun to his feet, who looks at him with better clarity than before. Harming the trees seems to do something.
Donghun cranes his head, eyes misty and distant, and Yuchan pulls them in that direction. He almost trips, balancing them both while swinging at the branches creeping into their way, but soon he recognizes a dirt path. Donghun wimpers, but it’s fine, as long as the one struggling is Yuchan. He’s head-first into danger with a healer in his arm.
Unironically, the trees get bigger this way, but Donghun appears to grow more lucid. They tower over, purple snaking into the sky and leaves casting any shadows the clouds don’t. They attack from the surface like a sea of serpents, slow and venomous, but now Donghun pays mind to avoid them behind Yuchan’s swing.
“It’s there,” his hands tremble, still fighting it, but he points away from the path, thick with brush. Yuchan takes his hand, as firm as he can make the action. He knows Donghun is terrified, can only imagine the voices in his head and the worry in his eyes from seeing Yuchan suffer before, and Yuchan’s scared too, but he also knows the pain.
The trees are crying out for them.
The brush leads out to one massive tree, towering above, thick columns of bark wrapping in slithers of purple, twisting in every direction. With both hands tight around the axe, Yuchan knocks away the last of the roots up front, takes aim at the thick of the trunk, and lunges.
The whole forest seems to shake.
“Agh!”
“Donghun?” He hesitates to continue. Donghun looks livid, hair twisted in his fingers as if the axe itself slices through his ears.
“Sehyoon!” Donghun cries out.
Yuchan feels his grip falter at the sight, the pulsing tree, Donghun’s torment. He’s so close, and swings again and again, stabbing at the trunk and shaking the whole forest at its core.
“Sehyoon Sehyoon Sehyoon! Agh, shut up! ”
Keep going. He’s only at the face of the layers but something clanks in contrast with the snaps of wood, and Yuchan sees a spark of blue fly out. It coats the layer of wood like crystal, and with each swing of the axe he feels every bit closer to his goal.
Donghun’s on his knees, fingers in the dirt, roots now retreating from him like a disease. And finally, Yuchan shatters the surface.
A face. It startles him, but the boy is sleeping soundly, skin sunken and pale in a deathly sleep. He’s alarmed to reach out and touch, but when more crystal snaps under his palm like ice, the boy flinches.
“He… stopped.” It’s Donghun, tremble in his voice replaced with faintness as he comes up behind Yuchan to reach out. He graces the boy’s forehead, knocking back his brown bangs. Lit by the shining crystal, Yuchan can make out angled features, appearing around his age. He wonders what it would look like if he did die, as the boy looks horribly close to it, probably not far from how Donghun had found him in the wrath of the trees just earlier.
“We have to get him out.” He pulls another shard out of the way, uncovering scars across the boys neck where branches once held him. Each movement of destruction causes the boy’s face to contort into pain, as if in a nightmare. “Can you heal him?”
“Yuchan…” It’s his name that Donghun had called, not Junhee’s, but now, no longer plagued by the voices of the trees, it’s a different kind of warning. With bloodshot eyes, he looks between Yuchan, the crystal casing, and the boy, like he’d just seen a ghost, frozen with fear.
“Let’s get him out first,” Yuchan answers himself, to try and present the damage done. If there’s a chance.
When the wall of crystal is shattered to the ground, Yuchan pulls the boy out and lays him onto the forest floor. With every second the trees fade in colour, turning charcoal and chipping away with the breeze. Their leaves fall, all life drained out and raining over them in a sea of rust.
Donghun soon joins him to look over the boy, hands curled into fists on his lap, one grasping a fragment of the crystal that had now faded in colour to look like glass. The boy’s small figure is covered in deep scars that wrap beyond his t-shirt and shorts, evidence of the trees even contorting his limbs, probably broken all over. He’s so still, with the movement of his breaths falling slower as leaves collect to his sides.
“You gonna watch him fade?”
“He’s not going yet,” though Yuchan is not even sure himself. With the boy no longer flinching in pain, soundless in his sleep, he looks peaceful. “He was calling for someone.”
“So were you.”
Yuchan turns to see Donghun already staring at him, holding on with insecurity, looking so, so scared, like something he would never admit. It’s frightening on him, and Yuchan thinks that beyond worrying about Junhee, Donghun’s scared for him. He just saw Yuchan on the brink of hopelessness, calling for someone who wouldn’t come, and used a power that he wasn’t sure he could, taxing him part of his soul.
It breaks Yuchan, because he can only feel that bit of selfishness, that memory of almost giving up, when he breaks to the boy beneath them. “But he’s not hopeless. He’s still… still here.”
A breath moves through Donghun, and he drops his head sideways against Yuchan’s shoulder. “It’s not easy. Hurts. ‘S like draining— a vacuum, from the inside. Like she’s ready to take everything.”
How much did she already take from them . It’s not a new thought, but adding to it boils up.
“Miss him.” Donghun says, tone sounding absent but words just heavy enough. He mindfully traces his thumb along the marks he left on Yuchan’s wrist. “Would’ve done a better job.”
Yuchan nods presently. Wonders if Junhee’s in a place where he can miss them too. He wraps an arm around Donghun’s side, pulling him in and kissing his hair.
“Sehyoon too,” Donghun says. “Kid must miss Sehyoon a lot. Think we can help him?”
Sehyoon. Yuchan wonders how many others are out there, wandering alone or swallowed by the land. “Just adds one more man to look for.”
Donghun chuckles and kisses Yuchan’s shoulder. He shifts his weight off, letting go of Yuchan’s wrist to take the boy’s arm into his hands. Yuchan knows it could take hours, maybe half the day with the condition the boy’s in, and he should take watch over the death around them, but for now he presses softly into Donghun’s side, to ensure nothing will harm this part of him. Yuchan’s part.
He hopes the mother tree where he left Donghun is still standing. Wooden bat retrieved from the rubble, Yuchan races back along the path, alert beneath the trees that rumble above him. They creak violently, a breeze away from crushing him to smithereens. The air grows thick with dust and leaves as more of the forest gets blown down and over. He covers his nose with the collar of it shirt as it grows harder to breathe
He finds the land around it draped in endless piles of branches. With heightened fervor, he hops over the debris, towards the massive structure of wood in the center, still shaking the earth and spraying the air with charcoal.
“Donghun!” he pulls his shirt down, echoes of his voice getting lost in the fog. Closer, he runs against it, towards the danger, because of course the two are nowhere else unless already trapped beneath him.
He spots just the shadow of branches moving up instead of down and immediately runs towards it, but soon realizes that they are not the black charcoal of the dying trees.
Two purple branches with pink leaves—the colour of their living venom—strike him no more than the head they sprout from. The boy is there revealing Donghun in his arms, whose hair falls below him in colours of scattered dust. He approaches Yuchan as the tree’s disintegrating crown collapses above him, concentration sharp in his eyes.
Another life to behold in this collapsing nightmare of madness, and the boy views Yuchan with the same front, daggers cutting through the haze that engulfs them, risen from the dead.
And Yuchan, nothing short of enamoured by just everything, returns it all with a smile.