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flush
Wonwoo slaps Seungkwan’s wrist before bringing it to his mouth to press his lips to his pulse.
Seungkwan squirms. “Not helping.”
“You said you wanted a distraction,” Wonwoo hums, mouth still pressed to Seungkwan’s skin, eyes barely open.
“More pain was not the answer,” Seungkwan whines, and Wonwoo looks up at him, now, frown pulling at his sharp features.
It does hurt, Seungkwan can feel the bruise forming high on his cheekbone. But he likes it, he’d liked it, when it happened. Can still feel his knuckles hitting solid muscle, head cloudy with adrenaline.
Wonwoo breaks out the bandaids. “Hands up,” he says, fond smile finding Seungkwan through the haze. “You did good, then?”
“Not perfect. I can do better.”
Wonwoo wraps Seungkwan’s bloody fingers carefully, rubbing ointment on where he thinks it’s needed, watching Seungkwan’s expression carefully.
This is eerily reminiscent of all the times, when they were kids, that Seungkwan would trip over his limbs, scrape his knees, and Wonwoo would pick him up and tape him back together. There’d been one time, years ago, when Seungkwan had broken a bone after Wonwoo had convinced him to climb a tree. Well, convinced is maybe a strong word.
They’d been teenagers, still growing, not quite rid of their uncoordinated limbs. Wonwoo was older, cooler, Seungkwan felt their differences in a place deep in his chest. Through the leaves, he could see Wonwoo sitting on a branch above him, eyes cast out over the landscape, his skin flush in the summer heat.
It’s wonderful up here, Wonwoo said, teeth poking at his bottom lip. I didn’t know anything could be this beautiful.
Childish jealousy nipped at Seungkwan’s heels, had him scurrying up the tree after his friend, although he couldn’t tell if he was jealous of Wonwoo or of the sky.
I’m sorry, Wonwoo said, eyebrows drawn together in concentration. I didn’t mean to get you hurt.
I’m not hurt, Seungkwan had said, voice tight, eyes avoiding the bloody mess of his own exposed bone. I’d do it again.
Wonwoo had laughed, then carried Seungkwan into town.
Now, there are no broken bones, but Wonwoo looks moments away from sweeping Seungkwan up into his arms anyway.
“I’m going again next week,” Seungkwan says as Wonwoo kisses his cheek.
Wonwoo stills. “I thought you said this was a one-time thing.”
His voice betrays nothing, but Seungkwan knows he disapproves, can feel it in his breathing.
He licks his lips, runs a hand down Wonwoo’s arm in an apology. “Just one more time and I’ll be done.”
Wonwoo doesn’t say anything, just buries his face in Seungkwan’s neck and holds on so tight Seungkwan thinks he might burst.
“Love you,” he manages, laughing as he pries Wonwoo away from his rib cage.
“Of course,” Wonwoo says. “Of course.”
[There’s got to be something more to it, this life.]
defect
“They like to watch you fight because you’re a novelty to them,” Wonwoo says through clenched teeth, jaw set tight. “You’re not a person when you’re there.”
Seungkwan rolls his eyes as best he can with a cold slab of meat held to his cheekbone. “They pay well.”
And that’s not why he’s doing it, Wonwoo knows that much.
The prize for winning is much more than money: it’s a permanent spot among the upper strata of mankind, a place among the ones lucky enough to be picked from the filth and disease of the outer circles.
That’s what he’s gunning for, that’s got to be what he’s gunning for. Because otherwise the truth of it is that their eyes on him makes him feel like he might be special, like he might be remembered long after he’s gone.
“They’re trying to feel, too,” Wonwoo says, dragging his thumb along Seungkwan’s cheekbone, carving out a place for himself there.
Wonwoo misunderstands: Seungkwan is looking to feel less, not more. He’s too human like this, needs emotion ripped from his lungs and capillaries. Wants a baseline.
“I can help,” Seungkwan responds, earnest, he says it like he means it, like that’s why he’s here. “I can come back, I can always say I want out.”
They both know people rarely return. Hardly ever in one piece.
Wonwoo grinds acorns with a pestle on the table, twists his wrist around, lets the task swallow him while Seungkwan packs his things.
He has very little, mostly clothes found on the outskirts of the city, a few beat up books with worn covers. One says I’ll Give You The Sun , another is far too faded to read, but it might say something about a murder. Seungkwan’s read them all, countless times, fascinated endlessly with what the world must have been like when there were still people to populate it.
The androids do not pen novels. So, there’s not really anyone practicing the craft anymore.
“You’re always welcome back here,” Wonwoo manages, not looking up from his work, still. “I’ll stay, I won’t leave.”
The promise rings hollow. The moving is what keeps them alive, and it’s a few months into winter by now, soon they’ll be packing up to move south.
Seungkwan runs his fingers through Wonwoo’s hair, feels him tilt into his palm, lets his heart lurch once, twice.
There’s just something he’s not getting here, in the impermanence of this life.
Is there anyone you’d like to take with you? they’d asked, posture perfect and prim.
The answer had been no.
[And it’s not about what you can and can’t do for me. Well, maybe it is.]
cuff
Wonwoo used to tackle Seungkwan in the woods when they were children, pull him down to the forest floor, push him into the dirt and leaves and let the earth take hold.
Seungkwan’s arms would sink straight into the ground, he’d pull up worms and maggot and grit and Wonwoo would just smile, push him back down.
They were just kids, then. They do other things on the forest floor when they’re older. Wonwoo holds Seungkwan down, watches intently as Seungkwan squirms and writhes under his touch. Seungkwan likes it soft: gentle hands pulling at his clothes, warm mouth at his neck, his thighs. It’s a progression, they stumble over the stones and rocks by the river, they fall together, in the tents they use in the summer, by the light of the fire, underneath the canopy of the forest that knows no end.
This, them together, felt endless, too.
Seungkwan draws circles in the dirt, dances wildly in the night. Wonwoo digs up books and reads them aloud. Seungkwan dances to: Wonwoo’s monotone recital of words from a burnt page, the rotation of the globe, his mother’s singing, the color blue.
“I wish I could be like that,” Wonwoo comments, eyes trained firmly at the work still to be done in front of him.
Seungkwan throws a questioning glance over his shoulder, moving along to the ebb and flow of the tide. “Like what?”
“Unafraid.”
“I’m plenty scared.” Seungkwan shrugs. “I just know nothing can be that bad when you’re here, too.”
Wonwoo grabs his waist one day, lets his forehead hit Seungkwan’s shoulder, lets himself go nearly limp. Seungkwan leads them in a dance Wonwoo pretends he hates, but he stays there by the fire, spinning, spinning, out of control into the clouds and the ash, and Jeonghan sings something sweet by the water.
They’re present, for a moment.
Seungkwan can barely remember what home looks like anymore.
Now, he’s sitting in a packed green room, actors and performers beside him having makeup applied to their cheeks in heavy coats, Seungkwan is reminded of the pale faces of sick queens he’s seen in old textbooks. He does not get his makeup done. He wraps his knuckles, but they’re already bruised.
“It’s your turn,” the woman beside him says. Her eyes glow a brilliant white.
She does not smile at him.
He’s thrown back into the fray.
[I just think we remember so little. And they’re here, in front of us, with the ability to carry us all with them. Our memories. I don’t want to be lost to time.]
gnarl
Seungkwan is good at what he does. Seungkwan is very good at what he does.
The dancing helped, probably. He’s lighter on his feet than most would assume, side-stepping uppercuts with ease, weaving under punches with clear intent.
When he’s focused, he’s hardly ever hurt.
He’d been good at ducking under branches, crashing through the forest wildly, like a cart without brakes. Wonwoo, less so.
“Do you even have anywhere to go?” Wonwoo panted out, hands on his knees as Seungkwan patted him on the back unhelpfully.
“Why? Do you?”
Wonwoo pulled Seungkwan’s arm, getting them both as close to the earth as their bones with allow. “You’re always in such a hurry.”
Wonwoo brushed leaves from Seungkwan’s hair. Seungkwan pursed his lips, felt something bubble up inside his chest.
This is when they are still small: when their parents are still looking after them, when the world still means anything is possible.
Seungkwan had a walkman, stole it from his neighbor after he’d complained of the lack of batteries. It’s useless, he’d yelled loudly at no one. None of this junk does what it’s supposed to do anymore. Need a goddamn power outlet. You know, we used to own all this, we used to own it all.
Seungkwan had batteries, they’re nearly used up now. Still, he can’t help but slip the CD player out of his bag, hand Wonwoo one earphone, and press play.
“Walk with me,” he said, and Wonwoo nodded.
Seungkwan held his hand out so it brushed Wonwoo’s as they made the trek toward their destination, as he guided Wonwoo from one low hanging branch to the next. It was almost completely dark out, the last bits of sunlight peeking through the clouds as a warning. They were nearly there, Seungkwan marched on.
The city was visible from a cliff top outside of town, just far enough away to seem like an impossibility, but close enough for Seungkwan to be able to distinguish individual lights.
He stopped them, plopped down bonelessly and gestured for Wonwoo to do the same. He’d been shivering. It had been far too cold for this.
“They’ve gotta have so much music down there,” Seungkwan said, eyeing Wonwoo’s face for any change in expression.
“I think we have enough here.”
“One Peter Gabriel CD isn’t enough,” Seungkwan whined, pulling the headphones from Wonwoo’s grasp. “I mean real music, I can hear it some nights.”
Wonwoo grabbed the headphones back, a listless smile on his face. “Don’t let Jeonghan hear you say that.”
Seungkwan pulled Wonwoo’s shirt, stretched out the collar, got him to his feet. “I’ll do whatever I want to,” he insisted. Wonwoo just stared down at him curiously.
This is the part Seungkwan remembers the most clearly, walking to the cliff’s edge, inhaling cold air, throwing weight behind his words. “I want what you have,” he yelled, hands cupped around his mouth, face turned toward the city.
Behind him Wonwoo laughed, held onto Seungkwan’s shirt to make sure he didn’t tumble to an untimely death.
“They can’t hear you,” Wonwoo had said, still listening to that song about city lights and home .
“I’ll make them hear me,” Seungkwan gasped, a gust of wind sending chills through him. “I’ll make them.”
They can hear him now, no problem. They want to hear him, are entranced by his frustrated vocalizations as a man throws a punch that lands too close to his kidney for comfort.
They don’t have anything we don’t , Wonwoo’s voice comes indignant over the loudspeakers backstage.
Seungkwan might be concussed.
They do, they have everything.
He’s delirious, half out of his mind, the pain in his chest nearly unbearable.
Then what about this, how you feel right now? Do they have that?
Seungkwan wishes he had what they have: a distinct lack of emotion, no neurons to recognize what this sick feeling in his stomach means. He wants to stop feeling like this, like he’s vacated his own body, like his veins are laying on the sidewalk, like he’s a terrible person.
[I love you, and in the space between the branches of the canopy, sometimes I think I might see the sun. And you’re there, of course, and you tell me you love me, and then we’re gone, just like that. Is it a nightmare? Were you ever there at all? Are we all just gone one day? I miss home.]
[I love you, this is fact. I want to know if this cycle ends somewhere. You know they kill them, right? After their hardware falls obsolete, they’re replaced. It’s sad, I think. Maybe. It makes them human. It makes them fallible.
Once, you told me you wanted to be buried with your books. Take me with you.]
venture
Seungkwan thinks the moment he realized he was in love might have been when Wonwoo kissed him for the first time.
Or before that, when Wonwoo helped him back to town after he’d fallen from that tree.
Or maybe later, when Wonwoo expressed his disappointment, when he looked at Seungkwan like there was no longer anything special about him, like he’d ruined everything.
He does know what it feels like to be helplessly in love. Maybe in the moment Wonwoo knew Seungkwan wasn’t ever coming back, he’d learned.
He thinks he sees Wonwoo in the crowd, one night. He no longer remembers why he’s fighting. He hasn’t listened to music in months, too bone tired to do anything but fall apart as soon as he gets back home.
“Can you keep going like this?” Wonwoo asks.
Seungkwan steps back to avoid a punch a second too late, feels his teeth come down hard on his own tongue.
“You know they like it when you fall.”
Seungkwan puts his hands up to protect his face, registers the moment his opponent knows he’s won.
“So fall.”
He loses consciousness, for the first time. No one cheers.
This night leads to the rest of it, the cold shoulders, the indifference. They stop calling him into the ring.
Wonwoo’s face flashes across Seungkwan’s vision too often.
In the middle of a hurricane, Seungkwan remembers the night he’d curled in on himself so tight he’d nearly disappeared.
Wonwoo’d just lost his telescope, the one they’d picked up closer to summer, when the nights were still short. He sat at the cliff’s edge, staring disappointedly up at the sky.
“Let’s go to space instead,” Wonwoo had said, hand on Seungkwan’s back as he sweated out a fever. “Plenty of light up there.”
“Not enough,” Seungkwan grumbled out, blinking through the fog. “Need more.”
“You don’t.” Wonwoo poked Seungkwan’s side. “Need them, that is.”
“Do too.”
“What if the world explodes in some huge cosmic event? What if this reality is gone tomorrow? What use are they?”
Seungkwan rolled over onto his back, furrowed his brows up at Wonwoo, watched as he eclipsed the moon. “What use are you?”
Wonwoo’d scoffed, bringing his hand up to pinch at one of Seungkwan’s cheeks. “They can keep you alive forever, on some hard drive stowed away in the back of a too-cluttered house. I guess in that way they’re preferable. But I think,” Wonwoo’s voice dropped to a whisper, his face inching closer to Seungkwan’s incrementally, “the feeling is better than the remembering. No one will know how we lived, how it is for us. They’ll know we were here. They’ll know we loved.”
“Loved who?”
Seungkwan could feel his cheeks flushing bright red as Wonwoo fixed him with a perplexed stare.
He remembers how Wonwoo’s lips felt against his: warm, trembling. He remembers not being surprised, feeling his heart burn a hole through his chest, seeing the stars and the moon and everything above them.
Wonwoo had always known, then, how hard Seungkwan would be to hold onto. Looking back, Seungkwan remembers his grip being almost too-tight. Suffocating.
“Please,” he’d whispered against Seungkwan’s lips. “Stay. For me.”
[Can I keep going when I know there’s no end? Maybe. I want you to know I never meant to come back. They smash old hard drives. They waste, they want too much. They do not look at the past for answers, like they've got horse-blinders on, they march forward.
I thought we overcame that part, I thought death was the real myth. It's not that they can't carry me with them, it's that they're not allowed to.
One day I will grow old and die. And then what?]
[They taste like metal and silicone. You tasted better, I could feel your pulse in your lips. Your skin, warm to the touch, had give. Sometimes, when you touched me I thought I might just stay. Here, the people don’t look at me. I feel seen through, like a window, a pane of glass. I’ll come home when I can.
You feel fake. I’ve not sent you a single letter.]
return
When Wonwoo sees him, busted lip and all, he throws a book at his head.
Seungkwan's seeing him filtered through the foliage, sunlight pricking at his retinas.
He can see the forest, the leaves on the ground, the cut of Wonwoo's jaw. There's that, and the aftermath of months spent in dimly lit rooms, flickering florescent lights stabbing wildly at his temples. The pounding headache is forgotten in favor of the summer, of the glint off Wonwoo's canines.
They're situated in space and time, Seungkwan no longer moves back and forth through memories like the wall between the past and present is liquid, is a thin line .
He can feel the dirt between his toes.
“You’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met,” Wonwoo says evenly, his face barely betraying how much he hurts.
But Seungkwan knows him.
He’s got a walkman, Seungkwan holds it over his heart like a shield.
“I think after all this time you should have something to say,” Wonwoo grumbles, walking over to pick up his book to dust the dirt off its cover, like he’s sorry he threw it at all.
Through the canopy above them, Seungkwan can see the sun, he catches its light on his skin, feels it warm him, feels it make him again.
All he had to him before was fists and blood, the cuts and bruises. He's got the scars to prove it.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Seungkwan says, holding himself up tall, an imagined giant lifting him upon its shoulders. “And I think, maybe, I owe you an apology.”
Seungkwan can hear the ghost of an I told you so upon Wonwoo’s lips, but then he’s kissing him, and all he hears is the sound of blood rushing in his ears, his heart pounding, these small reminders that his heart still beats, that he lives on.
That one day, he will be forgotten.
He tilts his head backwards, lets the ground grab at his calves, lets the earth open up and swallow him whole.
[I think it’s novel, the notion that no one will know how we lived. We were here, perhaps that’s the only thing worth knowing.]