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It starts during a rainstorm.
Changkyun and Jooheon are waiting for Minhyuk— it’s their turn to patrol and they should be out on the streets by midnight. It’s five minutes after when Kihyun goes in search of Minhyuk for them, walks the empty, echoing corridors of the abandoned building they sleep in at the moment, until he finds the old gymnasium, where Minhyuk and Hyungwon have been sleeping lately, away from the rest of the group.
He clears his throat as he approaches the door, giving them time to prepare for a witness to their little life away from the rest of the group. It feels like he is a stranger in a home not meant for him when he sees them. Hyungwon is sleeping on his side, Minhyuk sitting next to him. Minhyuk’s boots are laced up and his bag is beside them, so Kihyun can tell that he hasn’t forgotten about patrol. Still, he doesn’t make any effort to move, just looks up and smiles at Kihyun.
"Hey. The others are waiting for you." Kihyun steadies himself, resting on the door frame to adjust his crutch. “They’re outside.”
"I won't be long,” Minhyuk half-whispers. The words echo round the empty room, despite his efforts to be quiet. “I'm just—he only just got to sleep now, so..."
"Oh, right.” Kihyun isn’t sure what else to say to this. Hyungwon looks small in Minhyuk’s arms, though they’re around the same height and weight. It strikes Kihyun as a scene he might see if he stared through a window of a home still standing, lived in and comfortable, in another place or time. It’s not warm, though, and Hyungwon is clearly shivering.
Hyungwon used to simmer with an under-the-surface anger back before his father left town. He lived on the edge of a knife his father sharpened, flighty and tense-jawed. Now he’s withdrawn, quiet. He has time to reflect on everything that happened now, Kihyun figures, stuck here in the town in which they grew up, with nothing left but each other.
They’d gone to school in this building, all of them, though they were in different classes. Kihyun wasn’t close with them back then. He wonders if he’s close to them, now, and sometimes he swears he’s never felt more a part of something, but other times —like this, here in the doorway, trying not to stare as Minhyuk strokes Hyungwon’s hair—he feels far away from everyone.
Minhyuk interrupts his thoughts. "Do you want to, uh, would you stay with him?" He asks. In the candlelight, Kihyun can see the softness in his face, and he wonders what it would be like to be cared about as much as Minhyuk cares about Hyungwon.
"Me?"
Minhyuk nods. The oil-lamp flickers. "I don't like to leave him alone at night at the moment,” he admits. “But don’t tell him I said that, he keeps saying he’s okay.”
Kihyun swallows the weird lump in his throat. "Do you want me to take your night-patrol? And you can stay here?"
Minhyuk hesitates, like he wants to accept the offer, but doesn’t want to all the same. Finally, he shakes his head. "I can't. I can't let them down. I have to do my part. But if he wakes up— he'll feel better if you're here when he wakes up. I'd feel better." He bites his lip. "I know it sounds stupid—"
"It doesn't." Kihyun gives him a reassuring smile. "It doesn't sound stupid all. I’ll get my bedding and bring it through.”
"Thank you," Minhyuk says, and Kihyun can tell the words are sincere and grateful, and not just a throw-away courtesy.
He stays with Hyungwon all night. Kihyun strokes his back when he whimpers in his dreams; he thinks of stroking his hair like Minhyuk does, but it doesn't seem like it's his place to do that. No one has touched his own hair since he was a small child, and there's something about the act that looks so tender when Minhyuk does it, that Kihyun is scared to even try.
When Minhyuk returns, he squeezes Kihyun's arm gently and mouths, "good morning," at him, stifling a yawn behind his hand. Night patrol can be boring when it's not terrifying, and it's so cold at this time of year that it makes for a difficult seven hours of waiting and watching outside. Still, it's been necessary for a long time now.
Kihyun heads back to his own bed of straw stuffed inside an old sleeping bag, and when he falls asleep he dreams that Minhyuk is stroking his hair.
The second time that Kihyun finds himself inside the world that his friends have carved out delicately in the room at the back of the school, it's with both of them awake. They drag a rusting trash-can in from the street outside and set fire to old workbooks found in a locker in the eerie hallways of the building they now inhabit. The flames lick at the faces of his friends, and they look almost golden from where he sits across the fire.
Kihyun notes that they always sit close together, knee to knee, always touching somewhere. Kihyun wonders if this is as much for Minhyuk's benefit as it is for Hyungwon's. He can’t deny he isn’t touch-starved himself, and he didn’t even particularly crave touch before all of this happened. Things are different now, though. Now he wants things he never knew he would. Now he values an hours sleep or a dry evening in a way he'd never have imagined.
Now, he craves the warmth of someone sitting knee to knee with him.
He doesn't blame either Hyungwon or Minhyuk for fostering a sort of silent reliance on each other. Sometimes he wishes he had someone who knew him inside out, too, but even though the seven of them are thicker than thieves, bonded for life (at least, that's what they say when they're high on the stuff jooheon brews) kihyun has never felt needed like he knows some of them need each other. Like Minhyuk needs Hyungwon, and vice-versa.
He isn't jealous of them, though. He really, really doesn't think he’s jealous. Kihyun knows jealousy and he doesn't feel it now, as they fall asleep in front of the fire, twin expressions on their faces. What he feels is something else entirely.
“What are you thinking about?” It’s Hyungwon who asks him, watching him with interest. He’s been sleeping better lately, Minhyuk told Kihyun earlier, and Kihyun can tell it’s true— Hyungwon looks more alive than he has for the last few months. It shines in his eyes, which have regained some of the humour Kihyun didn’t realise he’d missed so much.
“Just—that this is nice.” Kihyun shrugs. He feels self-conscious now, like maybe he isn’t allowed to think so. "Sitting like this."
Minhyuk smiles at him. “It is nice,” he agrees. “The fire should carry on burning for a few more hours, if you want to stick around.”
Over the fire, Kihyun can make out Hyungwon and Minhyuk’s hands and the way their fingers are intertwined. He wonders what their palms feel like— what the weight and warmth of their touch would be like, either of them. Both.
“I might stay a while longer.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but it forms as one in his mouth, and when Hyungwon smiles at him, and says, “That’d be cool,” it makes Kihyun feel good.
He stays with Hyungwon again the next time Minhyuk takes night patrol, and the time after that, until it's a given that Kihyun will be there to take Minhyuk's place. Or, not take his place exactly, because that wouldn't be right. He isn't a stand in, he doesn't think. He couldn't compare himself to Minhyuk and what Minhyuk is to Hyungwon.
He doesn't want to replace Minhyuk, can't even imagine Hyungwon and Minhyuk not coming as a pair; they're separate people, but rarely separated and it's nice, he's always thought so. It's just that recently he's wondered what it would be like to be a part of it with them.
He's essentially third wheeling a relationship, he decides that night with a pang of sadness. The realisation should feel awkward, but he's far too past embarrassment now. He likes being in their company. He likes that Minhyuk can rely on him, that Hyungwon feels comfort by his presence. He likes them . So, he stays.
Hyungwon still smells of campfire smoke from the night before. They all do, Kihyun imagines, even if they've washed. It's ingrained into them now, into every strand of hair on their body, on their heads. They'd heated the moonshine Jooheon had spent weeks brewing, and Kihyun is certain he'd been high off the fumes alone within minutes. The flowers and plants that have started to grow around here have a potency none of them have ever known from the liquor that used to be sold in the state owned store that was ransacked mere days into the fighting.
Hyungwon lies still, breathing softly, but he isn't asleep. He stares at the ceiling with sunken ships for eyes, focused on something that only he can see, something that's causing his mouth to pull into a frown every so often.
Kihyu's own eyes feel like lead anchors, and he knows he won't be able to stay awake much longer.
"I might fall asleep soon," Kihyun whispers into the darkness, just the oil lamp set next to them giving the room a slight glimmer of orange light. "I'm sorry, Hyunwon."
"Wait." Hyungwon sits up, then. "Are you— Kihyun, are you trying to stay awake for me?" he asks, brow pulled together like he's confused.
Kihyun feels embarrassed. "No," he says. "Yes. Kind of."
Hyungwon seems to consider this. Finally, he lies back down. "It's okay if you are. I know Minhyuk has spoken to you about my... The reasons I struggle sleeping sometimes." He hums. "He thinks he’s looking after me, but I let him do it. I know it makes him happy. Soft idiot."
"Soft idiot," Kihyun echoes, it makes him laugh the way Hyungwon says it. There's no malice in his voice— he sounds like he's stating a fact, and a good one at that. Like being soft is something to be revered. It never has been in Kihyun's world— not in his father's eyes, not in his teacher's eyes. And now they have to be so cold, so strong all of the time. Maybe it would be nice, he thinks, to strip things all the way back to simply being gentle. "Does he know you call him that?"
"Probably," he says. He smiles and sits himself up. "Hey, shift over here and put your head in my lap if you want. I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep tonight, so you might as well be comfortable."
"Oh." Kihyun doesn’t go to make a move. It seems too intimate a request, too much of a reversal of roles. He’s technically here because Minhyuk asked him to keep Hyungwon company, and being comfortable at Hyungwon's expense seems like it’s a betrayal of that. "Will Minhyuk mind?"
"Why would he mind?" Hyungwon gives Kihyun an odd sort of look—a little amused, a little suspicious. Or maybe Kihyun is imagining it.
"I just… No reason." Kihyun shrugs. He runs his hand through his hair and shakes his head. “Forget it said that.”
"He won't be jealous, if that's what you're implying." Hyungwon looks straight at him and Kihyun doesn’t look away, even though he desperately wants to. He feels read in a way he didn’t know Hyungwon was capable of. “He loves you too, you know.”
When Kihyun lies down, Hyungwon looks down at him fondly. He says, 'We know you think you're alone, but we don't want you to be."
When he wakes up to Minhyuk getting back in the early hours of dawn, Kihyun waits for Minhyuk to make a remark or give a displeased look, but all he gets is a wide smile, before Minhyuk lies down on the mat next to them and closes his own eyes.
Kihyun waits at the edge of the forest on look-out with Hoseok, while the others head further into the dark canopy of trees. It takes an hour, maybe more, but then they hear voices and out of the clearing come Jooheon and Minhyuk, armed with fistfulls of blue flowers. “Look what we found just fifteen minutes from here!” Jooheon calls. “A whole fucking field of them!”
The mood is joyous. They’d been running low on the mysterious plant they so rely on now, and to find so many has clearly brought a reverie to the group who went out to search.
Kihyun feels a sting—thinks, another thing I’m not quite a part of. It’s stupid, he knows, because wherever the go and whatever they do, at least two of them have to keep watch for militia or one of the other fringe groups of raiders that have formed since the wars, who are travelling through the countryside finding places to ransack.
It’s a group effort—every job is important, that’s what Hyungwoo always reiterates—but Kihyun still feels a pang of jealousy at the fact he wasn’t with them for this excitement.
He chews at the inside of his cheek, watches Minhyuk and Hyungwon walk back towards the town carrying their haul. They keep their heads close together, laughing at something Kihyun can’t hear. Hoseok hangs back with him. Says, “Are you alright?” and watches for clues on Kihyun’s face as to why he’s not celebrating.
“I don’t know,” Kihyun admits. It’s never worth lying to Hoseok. He deserves better than that.
“That’s okay, I don’t think any of us do.” Hoseok smiles. “Hey!” He calls to the group walking ahead. “Wait for us.”
They do, Minhyuk and Hyungwon grinning at Kihyun as he falls into step with them, and then they laugh with him too.
Minhyuk holds his hand tightly while they fall asleep that night, Hyungwon snoring softly on the other side of his body, and Kihyun realises that he's truly home for the first time in his life.
It feels right when Kihyun officially moves his sleeping bag to the old gymnasium, away from where he used to sleep with the others, and into the facade of a home that Minhyuk and Hyungwon have cobbled together over the last year or so.
Changkyun watches him as he packs his things up to move into the other part of the building. He wears an expression that Kihyun can't quite read, but then, Changkyun usually seems to know something Kihyun hasn’t caught onto yet.
He mentions the move the next time they're alone.
They are on patrol outside the old guard's residence, where the militia last rampaged four nights prior and set fire to the factory where Hyungwon’s father used to work. It had been cathartic, watching the empty building burn, with only the ghosts of people long gone at the windows. Kihyun's leg is seizing up lately, as the weather changes, and his crutches need mending where they are splintering at the end, but he bears the pain to take his turn on a food run to get supplies from the next village over.
"The back of the school is colder now winter is setting in," Changkyun says. "You know, your leg might be better if you slept with the rest of us in the front classrooms again."
It's pointed, the way he says it, like Kihyun's leg is just a convenient way of bringing up what is going on, like he doesn’t care if Kihyun can see through him.
Kihyun shrugs. "I'll keep that in mind," he says, aiming for nonchalance and missing the mark.
Changkyun grins. “I support it, the three of you. I am all for the notion that there is still a little romance left in this shithole.”
"What?” Kihyun doesn't even know why he says it, because he heard every word Changkyun said and they both know it.
"I’m saying I think it’s nice that they let someone else in to their thing. I don't know what they see in you, of course." He's still grinning, teasing. “But it’s cool.”
"It's not like that," Kihyun says. There’s a heat creeping up his neck. He doesn’t know why it makes him so uncomfortable to be faced with what someone else’s perception of recent events are, and especially when their interpretation is what Kihyun is hoping for.
He still hasn’t verbalised it with them yet. Nothing has happened that would solidify what’s happening for him. He’s not— he doesn’t need kisses or sex or any of that, though he’s defintely thought about it. He’s wondered if they want him in that way too, but he isn’t greedy, nor is he presumptive. He’ll take what they offer and ask for nothing else.
“Sure it isn’t.” Changkyun smiles. "And the patrols aren't becoming futile, and the gangs passing through town aren't getting more dangerousand the, flowers Jooheon found aren't fucking space-opioids or something.”
Kihyun blushes. "I get your point, but it’s none of your business."
Changkyun squeezes his shoulder. "I'm just happy for you, bro. That's all," he says.
Kihyun feels terrible all night. The next morning, on their way in from patrol he pulls Changkyun aside from the rest of the group.
"You're right," he says. "And I'm sorry. I'm just— I'm not used to feeling happy anymore, and they make me think maybe I could be, at least as much as it's possible here."
"It's possible," Changkyun says. He's a little younger than the rest of them, Kihyun remembers him from when they used to play around here as kids, but he's always seemed to understand the world better than Kihyun thinks he ever could, so Kihyun tries to believe him. “It’s definitely possible.”
Kihyun remembers the first few months of the wars.
Minhyuk says, “Sometimes it feels like four separate worlds. There is the before, the way, way back, before this began. There’s the world in which we fight and the world in which we wait, and then there’s this— us, quiet, content.”
“Are you still high?” Kihyun asks. It's been three hours since they wandered back from the forest edge, where Jooheon had brandished pots of paint he'd found in a truck abandoned by a protest group who'd been ran off the road a few days before, and had painted their faces in stripes of yellow and red and green.
“Yeah. That or the face paint was toxic and has got into my bloodstream." Minhyuk snuggles down further under the blanket and star-fishes his arms and legs, so that his limbs land like dead-weights onto Kihyun and Hyungwon.
“Ow.” Kihyun laughs. "We're here too, you know."
Hyungwon groans, pushing him away. “You almost kicked me in the groin, asshole.”
“Sorry.” Minhyuk giggles. "I felt squashed and I wanted to be free."
"Definitely still high," Kihyun says.
“You’re lucky we love you," Hyungwon tells him, but he doesn't sound mad, just amused. Kihyun holds his breath, the words echoing in his mind. We. He is still getting used to being part of something, and it still feels like it might be too good to be true. Part of him thinks that one day Minhyuk and Hungwon will realise they were better off without him, like before, and it makes him feel like his whole body is aching.
“I am very, very lucky.” Minhyuk hums happily. “Goodnight both of you.”
He falls asleep first, between them. Kihyun wonders if this is the dream-world too. It feels too good to be happening for real, even if they’re cold and they’re hungry, and— he’ll admit it —scared for what tomorrow is going to bring them, another shitty gift from the universe, Like a cat brings its owner dead, rotting things.
When he wakes up in the night, Minhyuk is no longer there.
Kihyun wakes Hyungwon, who shares the blanket with him, walking slow as Kihyun’s leg gets used to activity, until they find Minhyuk outside, staring up at the night sky.
“I saw something,” he tells them. “Not something bad, just— it was in the sky, I think it was something living.”
They laugh behind their hands, take him back to bed and hold him between them as he whispers about the purple light in the sky. They’re all lost in their own ways, and the only map they have is each other.
Kihyun has no idea where the map leads, but he’s ready for the journey if its with Minhyuk and Hyungwon.
Soon they’ve all seen the thing in the sky. It hovers above the forest outside of the town more and more often, and the flowers— Jooheon's flower's as they all think of them— begin to bloom there in their hundreds of thousands.
More people begin to pass through the town, and patrolling the area around the old school building gets less like a seven hour stand-around and like the patrol used to be when the fighting first began, quiet and tense, and fraught with danger.
Still, the orb that bathes the sky in an eerie light is the hottest topic of conversation amongst the seven of them. War is the norm, it need not be discussed at length anymore, but this is something different. This is exciting.
“I was the first one to see it,” Minhyuk adamantly declares, after another hike into the forest. “You thought I was just hallucinating.”
“We didn’t say that," Hyungwon points out, but they'd thought it, that was for sure.
Minhyuk grins. “Well, I saw it first so I must be special,” he repeats with a grin and stabs at the wilted greens in his bowl, slimy and bitter. They eat what they can get these days and a salad like this is akin to a delicious feast. “Not that we know what it is."
"We might never find out," Kihyun says, and it makes Minhyuk frown. Kihyun understands, because he too likes to know things, likes to understand them, to rationalise them, to work them out. But Kihyun has tried, and he can't work this one out, and maybe, he thinks, it doesn't matter.
Hyungwon has a nightmare that night, and Kihyun pulls him close against his body while Minhyuk strokes both their hair, and Kihyun thinks about his mother that he hasn't seen in four years and what she would think of the love he's found as an adult.
Maybe she wouldn't understand, not fully, and he wouldn't expect her to. He just hopes she'd be happy that out of grief and destruction had come something warm, something peaceful.
Minhyuk kisses them both softly before he settles down next to them to sleep, and Kihyun follows suit: one for each of the men he loves. It becomes a nightly routine, a little ritual of their own. He's warm when they pull their blankets up over their bodies, all the way up to their chins, and press themselves close together in one big embrace. It's so nice that for a moment Kihyun forgets just how lost they all really are.
Maybe Changkyun was right, Kihyun thinks, maybe happiness is possible.
When the militia come back again, they mean to decimate the entire town and despite his intentions to stay put, in the end Hyunwoo takes the last of his grandfather's money and gathers the group together. "It's over,” he says, voice gravelly, dejected. Hoseok stands at his side in support. “We need to leave.”
Jooheon's stash of the flowers that the gangs didn't manage to set alight gets them through the second checkpoint outside town, and Hyunwoo's money the third. The first— well, Kihyun doesn't want to remember that, but there was blood, and shaken hands and Changkyun mumbling, "fuck, fuck, fuck," as they ran through the trees and away from the fires.
Kihyun looks back towards the burning buildings where their town used to stand, and wonders if there will still be a place for him like they made back there when they reach their next destination.
Kihyun is at the back of the group as they travel, but he's not alone. Minhyuk and Hyungwon walk with him the whole way, even as the night turns to day and back again, villages of ruin are the only places they pass by.
“Is it just me, or does it seem like the orb is leading the way for us?” Hyungwon says, voice low at Kihyun’s ear. The light above them has been there since not long after they fled town, and Kihyun wants to laugh the suggestion off, say no, ignore the feeling in his chest that things are only going to get even weirder from here on out.
Instead he just smiles, says, "Maybe," and lets Minhyuk slide in between them and slip an arm in between each of theirs.
Minhyuk and Hyungwon hold him close later, as they huddle together for warmth in the undergrowth.
There is a storm brewing overhead, the purple glow of night sky is imprinted into their vision even when they close their eyes, and something about the way he feels right now tells Kihyun that he'll still belong wherever they end up next and, really, that is all he's ever wanted.