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Yuta’s skin is tingling. It’s like this always now. In the mornings , when he wakes up. He can feel the hairs on his arms prickling, the hairs on the back of his neck, even his scalp. Proof at least that Doyoung is still here.
Yuta rolls over in his bed. There, on the other side of the room, sure enough, Doyoung is still sleeping on the cot Yuta made up for him. Though he appears to be waking up. Mornings arriving early and the days last long on this planet where the sun is brighter, and bigger. Doyoung says the sun on his planet earth is much farther away. Farther, and yet hotter. Yuta can barely imagine a world like that. It seems so alien. Doyoung is alien to him.
“Oh, did I wake up?” Doyoung’s morning voice is groggy. His eyes blink in the early dawn glare. “I’m sorry.”
“Mmm. No,” says Yuta. “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
In the days since Doyoung appeared, they’ve cobbled together something resembling a routine. Doyoung wakes up, bathes his face and other parts with the buckets of water Yuta keeps outside. Yuta builds the stove fire and makes them breakfast. Doyoung says he never learned how to cook, and he really doesn’t know what to do with the kinds of food Yuta can provide them with here.
Sometimes they talk during their meal. Sometimes they don’t. Doyoung has run out of stories that Yuta can understand. It frustrates Yuta, frustrates Doyoung too when he tries his best to describe something like colossal structures in the sky and flying vehicles and interstellar space, or humans with frightening abilities. Yuta only knows there’s a modest ‘spaceport’ in the nearest thing resembling a city here, but he’s never been there before. Doyoung hasn’t either. Doyoung arrived from the sky, crash landing, literally, in Yuta’s backyard, without a spacecraft at all.
After breakfast, Doyoung helps clear the dishes and though he isn’t great with the washing, he tries his best. Yuta does most of the work. He laughs a little at Doyoung’s focused energy.
“What. What’s so funny?” asks Doyoung suspiciously.
“Just you,” Yuta admits. “You can shoot, how do you call it, lightning bolts , from your hand but how does that help you?”
Yuta can think of about a million other superpowers different than the ones Doyoung has described that would actually be useful to human beings like themselves. Super Strength would have been nice, or the power to point at the skies and make the rain fall, crops to grow. But lightning, no one actually needs lightning. At least around here, they don’t. That’s another barrier Yuta can’t begin to understand that marks the difference between his world and Doyoung’s.
Doyoung stops what he was doing and stares at his hands almost petulantly. “They.. It can be useful. To some people, I guess.”
“But not to you?”
“It was good for fighting. In battles.”
“So, you only used your power to hurt people.”
Yuta doesn’t mean anything by it, but Doyoung’s face crumbles. “I don’t… I didn’t…” He falters for a few moments while Yuta wishes he hadn’t asked. “I don’t like hurting people, if that’s what matters to you,” he finally settles on saying.
Doyoung has explained before that he’s in exile.
“ It’s temporary. But still, exile. Just for a little while. Until some people forget I exist.”
Exile from what exactly, that’s something Doyoung hasn’t explained. Yuta knows better than to ask. When he found Doyoung in the field, he looked fairly beaten up with scars and bruises all across his body, most of them probably from the landing. Within an hour, however, they had healed. The scars on Doyoung’s mind have yet to heal.
There is a word Yuta does know though, and that is war . Wherever Doyoung came from, he came out of a war.
“Well, perhaps later tonight you can show me another light show. It is kind of pretty, what your hands can do,” Yuta says, to herd Doyoung away from whatever deep thoughts must be surfacing.
“You like that? Really?”
“MMmm. I do.”
For the most part, Yuta’s gotten used to the near-constant buzzing he feels under his skin whenever Doyoung is around. He felt that first day when he approached the singing object which was Doyoung in the field. It’s less extreme now, but only because Yuta knows better than to actually touch him. The most bizarre part is that it doesn’t hurt Yuta at all, which puzzles Doyoung.
“So, most people aren't like you, back where you come from?” asks Yuta one day. He’s already heard the answer but sometimes he doesn’t mind hearing it again. Maybe if Doyoung repeats it enough times, his homeworld won’t seem quite so unreal.
“No. Very few in fact. Can you hold out your hand again?”
Yuta shivers in anticipation, his fingers prickling with what he knows is going to happen. Sure enough, when Doyoung touches their palms together, Yuta begins to feel that sizzling sensation of Doyoung’s electricity skimming up his arm, almost ticklish.
“But, they’re not like me either?”
Doyoung’s frowning, the same as he always does whenever this happens. “No… they aren't just able to…. receive this like you do. Like a conduit.”
Doyoung has explained that their species are technically the same between planets. Yuta’s started out as a colony sent out generations ago. That jogs a memory in Yuta from way back during his schooling days, where he spent more time daydreaming than taking in history. Even then, lessons like how to run a farm seemed far more important. Life on this planet is a harsh one and food is important to a lot of people.
But right now, he’s still channeling some of Doyoung’s energy.
“Okay, slowly,” says Doyoung, “reach out with your other hand and… point it.”
“Point where?”
“At the ground, just the dirt.”
Yuta obeys, his eyes following the angle of his hand and the tip of his index finger. What was the word Doyoung asked him to do? Feel it, direct it….
He jolts.
The dirt where he was pointing is burned in a jagged circle.
Doyoung is more disturbed than Yuta is. “That’s… that’s really not possible.”
Yuta just wants the tingling to go away. It doesn’t feel as strong anymore but over time it grows uncomfortable. He wonders if Doyoung feels like this all the time, this buzzing with unused energies where the only thing that contains it is a bit of good wood connected to the ground. Yuta walks quickly to a scraggly tree and encircles the whole branch with his palm, smiling when the tree doesn’t incinerate but calms him instead.
He hears Doyoung walking up behind him.
“You know, it’s probably a good thing that aren’t too many people like you, here or there,” he says laughing.
Doyoung, however, doesn’t laugh. “You know, you’re probably right.”
Sometimes Yuta wonders if maybe Doyoung isn’t a hero in disguise. What if he’s the villain.
Three years ago Yuta encountered a man passing through who would technically count as an accidental murderer fleeing his crime. Yuta fed him some water and grain snack before sending him on his way to one of the larger cities, a sanctuary city. Days later the authorities came by asking questions. Yuta didn’t tell them anything. The man hadn’t tried to hurt Yuta, so Yuta didn’t hurt him in return. It’s the law of his land, if perhaps not the whole world.
If Doyoung is fleeing for the same kind of reason, Yuta wouldn’t be surprised. But for what other reason then would he be content spending out his ‘exile’ in a place like this. The middle of nowhere on a backwater planet with a farmer like Yuta who for most of the year has no regular company.
“You really don’t see many people,” Doyoung commented once, after days of their own solitary existence.
“Not until the harvest. Then a couple boys come by from the nearest other farms and help me out.”
“But don’t you ever just get lonely ?”
“Sure I do. But they help me with that too sometimes.”
There’s a light dusting of blush on Doyoung’s cheeks when he stares away from Yuta and asks, “Like they just, pop by for dinner or…”
“And other things.”
Doyoung doesn't ask any follow up questions, though Yuta could think of some. Villain or not, Doyoung is kind of shy about a lot of things. First with his ability, then when his body. Yuta isn’t shy about much, but then again he lives by himself most of the time and there’s almost nobody ever around. Having Doyoung living with him hasn’t changed much of his routine.
Doyoung fits into his life fairly seamlessly. It makes Yuta wonder what’s going to happen when he finishes his exile. Another thing he’s afraid to ask.
The cot breaks eventually, a poorly built leg that makes the whole thing sway and wobble lopsidedly. It wasn’t exactly made to last.
“I can sleep on the floor,” says Doyoung, staring at the ground like it’s the last place he wants to be.
“Don’t be silly, you can sleep with me.”
Doyoung shoots him a quick, unreadable look. “But… aren’t you… what about, the buzzing. Sometimes when I sleep I...”
Yuta leans against the sturdy wooden bedpost. “Made of wood, remember? It’ll be fine.”
And it is, mostly. Except that Yuta gets to learn what it’s life sleeping next to somebody night after night. The warmth, the comfort, the relief when they’re both just too angsty after long days being around each other. Eventually, Yuta decides he doesn’t want him to leave.
“Would you go back with me?”
Yuta stops what he was doing. “What?”
“When I go home.”
Yuta doesn’t answer right away. He’s in the middle of scrubbing laundry in the basin outside, a backbreaking chore Doyoung has explained they no longer have back in his world. There are machines that do that kind of work.
Yuta keeps thinking more and more about Doyoung’s planet. Earth, he calls it. The place where they all began. Simultaneously advanced and magical. Where basic chores become almost nothing, but war is fought by people so powerful they can make whole continents shudder. Where lightning comes down not from the skies but through the work of a single man’s hands.
Life is different here. Here, Yuta can expect the same old thing day in and day out. Maybe the monotony gets broken up one year by a profound drought or Yuta loses his entire crop in one day from a swarm of locusts.
“When are you going back?” he asks instead.
“Soon. I think.”
“How soon?”
Yuta’s already thinking of what he’s going to tell his few remaining friends. Which, he supposes, means his answer is a yes. The allure of seeing what Doyoung’s real life is like on another planet… the allure of not having to say goodbye…
“I’ll need some time to sell the farm,” he says.
Doyoung is frozen still, as if he’s afraid of reacting too strongly. Like he’s still processing what Yuta’s said. Hopefully, it doesn’t take too long. Yuta needs to make a plan.
Slowly, Doyoung approaches him, one hand on an old wooden bucket, the other on Yuta’s shoulder.
“You’d really do that?”
“If you want me to, I would.” Yuta smiles.
It’s going to be an interesting future for sure.