Chapter Text
late in the winter of his seventeenth year, taehyun’s mother decided he was depressed.
presumably because he rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of his abundant free time to thinking about death.
whenever someone reads a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. but in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer.
depression is a side effect of dying. (cancer is also a side effect of dying. almost everything is, really.)
but taehyun’s mom believed taehyun required treatment, so she took him to see his regular doctor namjoon, who agreed that he was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore his meds should be adjusted and also he should attend a weekly support group.
this support group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness.
why did the cast rotate? a side effect of dying.
the support group, of course, was depressing as hell.
it met every wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled episcopal church shaped like a cross.
they all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of jesus would have been.
taehyun noticed this because hoseok, the support group leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of jesus every freaking meeting, all about how they, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in christ’s very sacred heart and whatever.
so here’s how it went in god’s heart: the six or seven or ten of them walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the circle of trust, and listened to hoseok recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in korea, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of damocles to give him the relief that he escaped to those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
and you too might be so lucky!
then they introduced themselves: name. age. diagnosis. and how they’re doing today.
im taehyun, taehyun say when they’d get to him.
sixteen. thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. and im doing okay.
once they got around the circle, hoseok always asked if anyone wanted to share.
and then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning.
to be fair to hoseok, he let them talk about dying, too. but most of them weren’t dying. most would live into adulthood, as hoseok had.
(which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. like, taehyun realised that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: i gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
the only redeeming facet of support group was this kid named soobin, a long-faced, skinny guy with straight black hair swept over one eye.
and his eyes were the problem.
he had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. one eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you.
from what taehyun could gather on the rare occasions when soobin shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.
soobin and taehyun communicated almost exclusively through sighs.
each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, soobin would glance over at taehyun and sigh ever so slightly.
taehyun would shake his head microscopically and exhale in response.
so support group blew, and after a few weeks, he grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair.
in fact, on the wednesday he made the acquaintance of choi beomgyu, taehyun tried his level best to get out of support group while sitting on the couch with his mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season’s korea’s next top model, which admittedly he had already seen, but still.
taehyun: “i refuse to attend support group.”
mom: “one of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
taehyun: “please just let me watch korea’s next top model. it’s an activity.”
mom: “television is a passivity.”
taehyun: “ugh, mom, please.”
mom: “taehyun, you’re a teenager. you’re not a little kid anymore. you need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”
taehyun: “if you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to support group. buy me a fake id so i can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
mom: “you don’t take pot, for starters.”
taehyun: “see, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake id.”
mom: “you’re going to support group.”
taehyun “ughhhh.”
mom: “taehyun, you deserve a life.”
that shut him up, although he failed to see how attendance at support group met the definition of life.
still, he agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of kntm (koreas next top model) he’d be missing.
taehyun went to support group for the same reason that he’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison him with exotically named chemicals: he wanted to make his parents happy.
there is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.
taehyun’s mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56.
taehyun pretended to fiddle with his oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.
“do you want me to carry it in for you?”
“no, it’s fine,” taehyun said.
the cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and he had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind him. it delivered two liters of oxygen to him each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath his neck, wrapped behind his ears, and then reunited in his nostrils.
the contraption was necessary because taehyun’s lungs sucked at being lungs.
“i love you,” his mom said as taehyun got out.
“you too, mom. see you at six.”
“make friends!” she said through the rolled-down window as taehyun walked away.
taehyun didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a last days kind of activity at support group, so he took the stairs.
he grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a dixie cup and then turned around.
a boy was staring at him.
he was quite sure he’d never seen him before.
long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. magohany hair, straight and short.
he looked taehyun’s age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.
taehyun looked away, suddenly conscious of his myriad insufficiencies.
he was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow t-shirt advertising a band he didn’t even like anymore.
also his hair: he had this pageboy haircut, and he hadn’t even bothered to, like, brush it. furthermore, he had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment.
taehyun looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. this was not even to mention the cankle situation.
and yet— taehyun cut a glance to him, and the guy’s eyes were still on him.
it occurred to him why they call it eye contact.
taehyun walked into the circle and sat down next to soobin, two seats away from the boy.
taehyun glanced again. the boy was still watching him.
look, he was hot. a nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault.
but a hot boy . . . well.
taehyun pulled out his phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59.
the circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then hoseok started us out with the serenity prayer: god, grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
the guy was still staring at taehyun. he felt rather blushy.
finally, he decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. boys do not have a monopoly on the staring business, after all.
so taehyun looked him over as hoseok acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring contest.
after a while the boy smiled, and then finally his eyes glanced away. when he looked back at him, taehyun flicked his eyebrows up to say he won.
the boy shrugged.
hoseok continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. “soobin, perhaps you’d like to go first today. i know you’re facing a challenging time.”
“yeah,” soobin said. “i’m soobin. im seventeen. and it’s looking like i have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which i’ll be blind. not to complain or anything because i know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, i mean, being blind does sort of suck. my boyfriend helps, though. and friends like beomgyu.” he nodded toward the boy, who now had a name.
“so, yeah,” soobin continued. he was looking at his hands, which he’d folded into each other like the top of a tepee. “there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“we’re here for you, soobin,” hoseok said. “let soobin hear it, guys.”
and then they all, in a monotone, said, “we’re here for you, soobin.”
cheongsam was next. he was twelve. he had leukemia. he’d always had leukemia. he was okay. (or so he said. he’d taken the elevator.)
on-ju was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy’s eye. she was a regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which taehyun had not previously known existed.
she said—as she had every other time taehyun attended support group—that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to taehyun as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled his nostrils.
there were five others before they got to the guy.
he smiled a little when his turn came. his voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy.
“my name is choi beomgyu,” he said. “im seventeen. i had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but im just here today at soobin’s request.”
“and how are you feeling?” asked hoseok.
“oh, im grand.” choi beomgyu smiled with a corner of his mouth. “im on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
when it was taehyun’s turn, he said, “my name is taehyun. im sixteen. thyroid with mets in my lungs. im okay.”
the hour proceeded apace: fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn’t get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered.
neither choi beomgyu nor he spoke again until hoseok said, “beomgyu, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.”
“my fears?”
“yes.”
“i fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “i fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
“too soon,” soobin said, cracking a smile.
“was that insensitive?” beomgyu asked. “i can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.”
soobin was laughing, but hoseok raised a chastening finger and said, “beomgyu, please. let’s return to you and your struggles. you said you fear oblivion?”
“i did,” beomgyu answered.
hoseok seemed lost. “would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?”
taehyun hadn’t been in proper school in three years. his parents were his two best friends. his third best friend was an author who did not know he existed.
taehyun was a fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.
and yet, just this once, he decided to speak. he half raised his hand and hoseok, his delight evident, immediately said, “taehyun!” he was, hoseok must have assumed, opening up. becoming part of the group.
taehyun looked over at choi beomgyu, who looked back at him.
you could almost see through his eyes they were so brown.
“there will come a time,” taehyun said, “when all of us are dead. all of us. there will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.”
“there will be no one left to remember aristotle or cleopatra, let alone you. everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”— taehyun gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught.”
“maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. there was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. and if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, i encourage you to ignore it. god knows that’s what everyone else does.”
taehyun learned this from his aforementioned third best friend, peter van houten, the reclusive author of an imperial affliction, the book that was as close a thing as he had to a bible.
peter van houten was the only person he’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.
after taehyun finished, there was quite a long period of silence as he watched a smile spread all the way across beomgyu’s face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at him, but his real smile, too big for his face.
“goddamn,” beomgyu said quietly. “aren’t you something else.”
neither of them said anything for the rest of support group.
at the end, they all had to hold hands, and hoseok led us in a prayer. “lord jesus christ, we are gathered here in your heart, literally in your heart, as cancer survivors. you and you alone know us as we know ourselves.
“guide us to life and the light through our times of trial. we pray for soobin’s eyes, cheongsam and sihyeok’s blood, for beomgyu’s bones, for taehyun’s lungs, for liu’s throat. we pray that you might heal us and that we might feel your love, and your peace, which passes all understanding.”
“and we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: ilnam and aayeong and jaemu and naeha and wendy and sojun and . . .”
it was a long list. the world contains a lot of dead people.
and while hoseok droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, taehyun kept his eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when his name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.
when hoseok was finished, they said this stupid mantra together—living our best life today—and it was over.
choi beomgyu pushed himself out of his chair and walked over to taehyun. his gait was crooked like his smile.
he towered over taehyun, but beomgyu kept his distance so he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to look him in the eye. “what’s your name?” he asked.
“taehyun.”
“no, your full name.”
“um, kang taehyun.” he was just about to say something else when soobin walked up.
“hold on,” beomgyu said, raising a finger, and turned to soobin. “that was actually worse than you made it out to be.”
“i told you it was bleak.”
“why do you bother with it?”
“i don’t know. it kind of helps?”
beomgyu leaned in so he thought taehyun couldn’t hear. “he’s a regular?”
taehyun couldn’t hear soobin’s comment, but beomgyu responded, “i’ll say.” he clasped soobin by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. “tell taehyun about clinic.”
soobin leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on taehyun. “okay, so i went into clinic this morning, and i was telling my surgeon that i’d rather be deaf than blind. and he said, ‘it doesn’t work that way,’ and i was, like, ‘yeah, i know it doesn’t work that way; im just saying i’d rather be deaf than blind if i had the choice, which i realise i don’t have,’ and he said, ‘well, the good news is that you won’t be deaf,’ and i was like, ‘thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf. i feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.’”
“he sounds like a winner,” taehyun said. “im gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so i can make this guy’s acquaintance.”
“good luck with that. all right, i should go. yeonjun’s waiting for me. i gotta look at him a lot while i can.”
“counterinsurgence tomorrow?” beomgyu asked.
“definitely.” soobin turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
choi beomgyu turned to him. “literally,” he said.
“literally?” taehyun asked.
“we are literally in the heart of jesus,” he said. “i thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of jesus.”
“someone should tell jesus,” taehyun said. “i mean, it’s gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.”
“i would tell him myself,” beomgyu said, “but unfortunately i am literally stuck inside of his heart, so he won’t be able to hear me.”
taehyun laughed.
beomgyu shook his head, just looking at him.
“what?” he asked.
“nothing,” he said.
“why are you looking at me like that?”
beomgyu half smiled. “because you’re beautiful. i enjoy looking at beautiful people, and i decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.” a brief awkward silence ensued.
beomgyu plowed through: “i mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.”
taehyun kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, “im not beau—”
“you’re like a millennial natalie portman. except you’re a guy, duh. like... v for vendetta style.”
“never seen it,” taehyun said.
“really?” he asked. “pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. it’s your autobiography, so far as i can tell.”
beomgyu’s every syllable flirted. honestly, he kind of turned taehyun on.
he didn’t even know that guys could turn him on—not, like, in real life.
a younger girl walked past them. “how’s it going, lily?” he asked.
she smiled and mumbled, “hi, beomgyu.”
“memorial people,” he explained. memorial was the big research hospital. “where do you go?”
“children’s,” taehyun said, his voice smaller than he expected it to be. he nodded. the conversation seemed over.
“well,” taehyun said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led them out of the literal heart of jesus. he tilted his cart onto its wheels and started walking.
beomgyu limped beside him. “so, see you next time, maybe?” taehyun asked.
“you should see it,” he said. “v for vendetta, i mean.”
“okay,” taehyun said. “i’ll look it up.”
“no. with me. at my house,” beomgyu said. “now.”
taehyun stopped walking. “i hardly know you, choi beomgyu. you could be an ax murderer.”
he nodded. “true enough, kang taehyun.”
beomgyu walked past him, his shoulders filling out his green knit polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly to the right as he walked steady and confident on what taehyun had determined was a prosthetic leg.
osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.
taehyun followed him upstairs, losing ground as he made his way up slowly, stairs not being a field of expertise for his lungs.
and then they were out of jesus’s heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.
taehyun’s mom wasn’t there yet, which was unusual, because his mom was almost always waiting for him.
taehyun glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy pink-haired boy had soobin pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively.
they were close enough to taehyun that he could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and taehyun could hear him saying, “always,” and yeonjun saying, “always,” in return.
suddenly standing next to him, beomgyu half whispered, “they’re big believers in pda.”
“whats with the ‘always’?” the slurping sounds intensified.
“always is their thing. they’ll always love each other and whatever. i would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in the last year.”
a couple more cars drove up, taking cheongsam and lily away. it was just beomgyu and him now, watching soobin and yeonjun, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning against a place of worship.
soobin’s hand reached for his nipple over his shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around.
taehyun wondered if that felt good. didn’t seem like it would, but taehyun decided to forgive soobin on the grounds that he was going blind.
the senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.
“imagine taking that last drive to the hospital,” taehyun said quietly. “the last time you’ll ever drive a car.”
without looking over at him, beomgyu said, “you’re killing my vibe here, kang taehyun. im trying to observe young love in its many-splendored awkwardness.”
“i think he’s hurting his nipple,” taehyun said.
“yes, it’s difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse him or perform a ab exam.” then choi beomgyu reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. he flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.
“are you serious?” taehyun asked. “you think that’s cool? oh, my god, you just ruined the whole thing.”
“which whole thing?” he asked, turning to taehyun. the cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.
“the whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. but of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my god, even though you had freaking cancer you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire yet more cancer. oh, my god. let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? sucks. totally disappointing. totally.”
“a harmatia?” beomgyu asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. it tightened his jaw. he had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.
“a fatal flaw,” taehyun explained, turning away from him. he stepped toward the curb, leaving choi beomgyu behind him, and then he heard a car start down the street.
it was his mom. she’d been waiting for him to, like, make friends or whatever.
taehyun felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of him. he didn’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and he wanted to smack choi beomgyu and also replace his lungs with lungs that didn’t suck at being lungs.
taehyun was standing with his chuck taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by his side, and right as his mom pulled up, taehyun felt a hand grab his.
taehyun yanked his hand free but turned back to him.
“they don’t kill you unless you light them,” beomgyu said as taehyun’s mom arrived at the curb. “and i’ve never lit one. it’s a metaphor, see: you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
“it’s a metaphor,” taehyun said, dubious. his mom was just idling.
“it’s a metaphor,” he said.
“you choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances . . .” taehyun said.
“oh, yes.” beomgyu smiled. the big, goofy, real smile. “im a big believer in metaphor, kang taehyun.”
taehyun turned to the car. tapped the window. it rolled down.
“im going to a movie with choi beomgyu,” he said. “please record the next several episodes of the kntm marathon for me.”