Chapter Text
"Just think of it, man, this could be US!"
Min rolled his eyes. "For the last time, we are not calling ourselves Galactaron."
"But my dad got the shirt made and everything! What do you want me to do; wear a shirt for a band that's not real?"
"Hey, you can do what you want with the name; I just think we should use a real word, okay?"
"Galactaron is a real word," Ryan sulked, scratching out the name and folding the paper into a crude paper plane. It launched from where he knelt on the bed and halfheartedly collided with the wall across the room, knocking down Min's lighthouse figurine on the white dresser by the door.
"Hey, careful with that!" Min-Gi exclaimed, leaping off the bed to right the lighthouse and retrieve the paper plane. Upon its unfolding, however, he discovered here, instead—
"A poster for the Battle of the Bands? Ryan, you know I have ACTUAL paper, right?"
"Who cares! It's my method: writing on stuff that's not empty. Or paper. Conventionally. Get it?"
Min rolled his eyes in return. "Fine, whatever. Just don't go around writing on the walls. My mom prefers it when our house is... un-vandalized." Ryan sat himself on the edge of the bed and snorted.
"C'mon, your mom LOVES me! She'll let me off the hook if I doodle just a TEENSY bit!" He exemplified this by pressing together his thumb and forefinger, closing his left eye and adjusting his perspective so Min's face was framed by the tips of his fingers. Exasperatedly, Min-Gi sighed.
"Well one day you're gonna meet a mom who's not so nice, okay? And... you've just gotta be ready for people who don't like having their walls drawn on." He walked back over to the bed, setting both airplane and lighthouse on the table by its side, and took Ryan's warm hands in his comparably cold pair. Taken aback by this gesture, Ryan blinked in fascination. And Min-Gi smiled. "Maybe, one day... we can get a house with plenty of good drawing walls. That sound good?"
Ryan's eyes glimmered, and beaming happily, he nodded.
"Now..." Min continued, picking up the unfolded airplane from where he'd set it on his bedside table. "You and me are twelve years old, so where and how the heck did you get this?"
Ryan closed his eyes and threw his hands up in surrender. "Aaaaaa you caught me. Escort me to the bug-zapper, Judge Park."
Min scoffed and shook his head, dropping the airplane into Ryan's lap. "Give this back to your sister, okay? In the meantime, we can figure out our name."
"Right, how about—" he maneuvered his raised hands in a sort of arc, as if visualizing a rainbow. "Infiiiiiniiitatiooon."
"Say that again without the letters stretched out," Min giggled.
"Weeeeeell," said Ryan, tapping his chin. "FIRST, I'm gonna need that fancy pen back."
Obliging, Min opened the top drawer of the bedside table, and procured the sacred fountain pen. He bestowed the object upon Ryan as if it were a treasured family heirloom.
"DON'T get the ink everywhere, okay? We've still gotta wash THAT off." He pointed to the black smear upon Ryan's right cheek, and his friend cocked an eyebrow.
"SEEEEE, I write on myself too!"
"Okay, okay; just give me the name of this thing." Ryan transcribed upon the backside of the wrinkled paper, underneath the frenzy of rejected names which littered the top half. Min squinted to make out his scrawl.
"Infinite... eight... ion?" he read aloud; Ryan clapped a palm to his face.
"Infinitation! Infinite? -ation? You know!!!"
"I really don't," Min chuckled, shaking his head. "By all means, equivocate."
"Okay, infinity. You get that, right? Forever and ever or something. Like our music's gonna be when we're FAMOUS!!"
"If," Min-Gi countered, and Ryan's grin waned.
"Well, like, of course it's when because—"
"Ryan," Min softly asserted. "If."
"Right, yeah. Okay..." Ryan let gravity take its due toll, and he fell backward onto the bed, gazing straight up at the sloping ceiling, and letting warm sunlight spill down onto his face. Outside the window on the left side of the bed, flakes were falling softly on this nigh November eve, and the glow which filtered through the semi-foggy panes cast the room in a quiet lavender glow.
"Your room is always purple when I'm over," he observed.
"It's technically white," Min corrected, climbing onto the bed for himself. "But yeah, I like seeing you right around now. It's good. You see... things."
"Like what?" Ryan asked, abruptly sitting up; eyes aglow and facing him once more. Min, caught off-guard, blushed slightly and shrugged.
"Like maybe how purple and grey aren't all that different? I can't explain this actually. I shouldn't try to—" From where he sat, cross-legged, against the bed's headboard, a stray gesture of Min-Gi's hand collided with the figurine upon his bedside table. Ryan's ink-stained hand charged forth, not unlike a snake in its effort to strike, but in catching the lighthouse, its white hue was stained with black fingerprints. Panicking, Min-Gi snatched it away.
"No no no no no!!"
Ryan clutched his hand in horror. "AAAH!! Min, I didn't mean to—"
"IT'S OKAY!!!" Min-Gi exclaimed, rushing down the hall to the bathroom. Ryan dug his nails into the sheets upon Min's bed, as his friend's voice echoed over the torrential downpour of sinkwater.
"Augh, the stain just spreads! It's gone all grey now, I can't—"
"Sorry, SORRY!!"
"It's not you! And Mom won't be mad; it's just some stupid souvenir from some beach or lake we went to!"
"THEY HAVE LIGHTHOUSES ON LAKES?!"
"I don't know!!"
"HOW DON'T YOU KNOW?!"
"There's a lot of things that I don't know!!!"
"Does this mean that the ink on my face is forever too? Will it turn grey too? Am I gonna turn grey?!?!" His left hand, still buried in the bed, came in contact with the reddish-golden-bloody sunset streaming through, falling on the covers like a wrinkled, glowing crosswalk. Ryan yelped, tugged it away, tears brimming in his eyes.
"I'm gonna go grey! I'm gonna turn purple and disappear!!!!" And he collapsed into sobs as the water screeched down the hall at some unspeakable frequency, and when he tried to wipe his eyes the tears turned black and left aimless roads on his face. I could take any one of those paths, Ryan thought, sensing the saltwater turning into white sand on his cheeks. Black water, white sand...
seemingly lavender room, where a concerned Mrs. Park may have dried his tears, as Min watched from the doorway, a word on his lips that Ryan could never make out.
if...
( if... )
IF...
( Infinity can't exist without If. )
Ryan decided—one long-ago Tuesday—that staining the house of a friend with his tears was an ultimate, unforgivable crime. He didn't remember saying sorry...
So he found it easier to never cry at all.