Work Text:
Lighting the candles he’s just set on the forest floor, Jeongin glances up to the sky. He was able to see the stars from here, once. He remembers how they would glitter. Remembers the way he’d find them reflected in dark eyes.
The stars don’t shine here. Not anymore. He doesn’t know if it’s because of the pollution or something other, but the effect is all the same. There aren't any stars, anymore. At least, none that he can see. They still exist—of course, they do—but there’s a blanket thrown over them, smothering his view.
The woods are quiet tonight—unnaturally so. Stagnant where they usually rustle with the wind’s whispers. He can’t hear anything beyond the leaves, now. Maybe the spirits are mad at him for leaving.
For what it’s worth, he’s sorry. He didn’t want to leave, but Yeji was getting married and the shop’s winter preparations kept him busy. He was caught up and his hands were tied.
(Even though it’s the truth, it feels like he’s making excuses. What was it Minho always said? Be a Creator rather than a Victim? Something about personal responsibility, he remembers.)
The candle lights flicker. He watches as red, yellow, and orange dance on the wicks. They’re a muted ballet, bland without their orchestra.
“Sorry,” he whispers, dragging a hand down his face and breathing in deeply. It almost smells like home.
(Home set in the past tense, immeasurably distanced from the present.)
He wonders what’s changed. He’s never been gone so long—save for the few years after they died. He promised the forest that he’d always be there to protect it, but Changbin’s call made him reconsider himself. Maybe he failed. Maybe the thread broke somewhere, and maybe he’ll have to watch this home crumble beneath his feet too.
Maybe the forest doesn’t even care, forgiving as it is. He thinks that’d be the worst thing, honestly—being forgiven for a wrong he’ll never be able to right.
Fish have died, and that in itself is irreparable. He’ll never be able to fix that. He can do a lot of things, but bringing back the dead is not one of them. When Changbin called, he made sure to mention the river pollution. Jeongin knows it wasn’t a dig at his neglect, but—well. Jeongin always overthinks things.
It’s been years since they died. Centuries. He should be past it, should be moving on, but every time he takes a step forward, the memories waver and blur under the water. Every small detail he loses burns sharp and metallic in his mouth, coppery like blood.
That was their one flaw, wasn’t it? They were human. They were mortal.
They could have stuck it out for years more—decades if they were lucky—but they were never meant to last forever. They had an expiration date and they couldn’t stay. Jeongin had known it wouldn’t be forever, that he would’ve had to say goodbye one day, but he didn’t expect to have so little time with them.
Jeongin mourns.
“Sorry,” he says again, a little louder, “I didn’t think I’d be gone so long.” It isn’t a lie—not really. He’d meant to come back sooner. “If it… if it helps, I brought some things.”
Jeongin takes the stones from his pockets—absentmindedly wondering how long he’s been out here for them to have gotten so cold—and sets them near the candles. He still wears iron rings. Hasn't taken them off for centuries. At this point, they might as well be an extension of his skin.
Jeongin sighs, folding in on himself. The wind whistles past his ears, whispers catching on the breeze and floating with the pine needles. “I know, I should’ve told you I was leaving. I’m sorry.” A small, bittersweet smile tugs at his lips. “I’m here now.”
He can almost feel their touch, strong from age-old memories. “Are you there?”
As always, they don’t respond. They’re down by the river where Jisung asked to be buried when he died. Jisung liked to swim there when he was alive. Minho’s only there because he wanted to be with Jisung; he’d never swam a day in his life.
Them dying within hours of each other made sense in a cruel, twisted way. Before it was Jeongin and Minho and Jisung, it was Minho and Jisung. They were special to each other in a way Jeongin would never be able to understand.
He remembers Seungmin saying once that Jisung could live well enough without Minho, but that Minho could never live without Jisung. He guesses Seungmin was right.
(Privately, he wonders if they could have lived without him. He wonders if they would have been able to keep going the way he hasn’t. He hopes they would have been. He wouldn’t wish this grief on anyone, let alone them.)
They never speak to him. If it weren’t for the fact that he can sense them—can catch small glimpses of them—he’d think they moved on. Maybe he should feel worse about that—the fact that they haven’t moved on yet. He can’t bring himself to. He’s a little too selfish for that.
Jeongin’s eyes burn, but he wills himself to stay calm. “I miss you a lot.”
Leaves rustle.
“But,” his voice slips, “I have to let you go, don’t I?”
The candles flicker, uncaring. The wind howls in his ears, a quiet rage, but he’s never heard a silence more deafening.
“I just don’t know what to do,” he whispers, blinking back tears. “I don’t know how to remember you the way I’m supposed to. I don’t want to hurt like this anymore, but I can’t let you go.”
After another minute with no response, he blows out the flames and watches the smoke rise in the air. It’s wiped away moments later, swirling into nothingness and dissipating with the breeze. He sits and waits for the wicks to burn out completely, helpless to do anything but watch.
He bites the inside of his cheek and stands up, wrapping the blanket tighter around himself. He leaves the stones on the forest floor, knowing a spirit will pick them up once he’s left. He doesn’t think, just walks back to his cabin and ignores the trees’ pulsings. When they reach and wrap around his skin, the magic feels a little like pity.
He ignores them. He’s gotten used to being alone, to breathing out into an empty cabin where there used to be two bodies working and sleeping and living beside him.
—
Jeongin writhes, cracks spider-webbing up his back. He looks out his window to the sky obscured by the dust on the glass and the sleep in his eyes. The color is a shade too dull, he thinks. It’s supposed to be brighter, more luminous. The sky used to steal the breath from his lungs, but now it’s just… unremarkable.
Sometimes he forgets what the stars used to look like. Have they changed? He thinks they have, but he’s not sure.
Time spins incessantly, and the room is bathed in neon lights—technicolor—only for it to flip on its head. A coin with a monochrome tail and a fluorescent head tossed over and over and over.
Sometimes everything is so dull that the concept of vibrancy seems fake—like a taunt. He’s dull and washed out in the scope of what should have been such a colorful life. He remembers being young and being taught that he’d live to see the rise and fall of civilizations, that he’d live to see the end of everything. He remembers being taught that he was born to protect the realm he’d eventually oversee. He remembers being taught that one day, everyone he loved would be dead. That he would lose everyone but he would never end.
He’s a run-on sentence because his Writer never cared for punctuation. His Gods were uncaring ones, leaving him trailing, seams unsewn. He’s bleeding across the page, a spilled ink cartridge.
It’s painful.
The sky is blue, the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and it hurts. Sometimes it doesn’t, though. Maybe I’m happy now, he’ll think. Maybe he’s happy when the pain stops and he forgets. Maybe it can always be like this, he’ll think. If I just keep this up, maybe it’ll stay away.
Maybe the day death knocked on his door—foreign to him in his immortality—the feeling was spun inside him like a web, perched and waiting for something to fall into it like a fly. Maybe every stone and every cultivation pushed him one step closer to it and, somewhere along the way, he fell. He’s trapped, and it pulses.
His head pounds.
Maybe the sky had been red at some point. Maybe the sun rose in the north and set in the south. Maybe the backs of his hands were unrecognizable.
Maybe people never got sick and wasted away, veins sputtering and tendons snapping. Maybe they never existed in the first place.
Jeongin was something a little too bright—a little too vibrant—and, like all things with the universe, he had to be balanced out.
The oxygen is running out now, he thinks. Everything is blurred, painted in that fleeting technicolor. Everything pulses and everything lags. Water pushes over his face, pressing down, down, down into his lungs, and he can feel his magic rot. If he were a tree, all his branches would be falling off, necroding. He’d be turning to dust from the inside out, leaves scattered across the ground.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
While he’s immortal, he’s not undying.
(He fades.)
—
But not entirely.
“You dick.”
Jeongin wakes with a start, feeling like he’s been doused in a bucket of ice-cold water. The sheets chafe against his skin, feeling more like sandpaper than soft cotton. Jeongin groans.
“What the fuck.” He opens his eyes, blinking at the familiarly unfamiliar ceiling. “What the fuck,” he says again, more emphatically. He feels a flick against his forehead and looks over to find Changbin glaring at him, Felix peeking over his shoulder with wide eyes. They both look a little worse for wear. Jeongin winces.
His skin feels like it’s been pulled apart and sewn back together, stiff where it lies over his bones.
A soft, monotone voice speaks up from his left, startling him, “You almost faded, but I stopped it.” Jeongin squints at the unfamiliar… person. Maybe creature would be a better description, what with the translucent blue fins and webbing adorning their hands and ears. Their hair is a startling shade of navy.
They’re one of the most beautiful beings he’s ever seen. They remind him of Minho and Jisung. There’s something glittering behind their eyes that’s familiar in a way he can’t place.
“...You’re a river nymph,” he says dumbly, not so much apropos of nothing as definitively world weary. He can’t remember the last time he saw a river nymph.
They blink, glassy blue eyes shuttering like blinds. Jeongin pretends he isn’t unsettled. “You’re the Deity of this region, aren’t you?” Jeongin stares, and they take this as a sign to continue. “My name is Hyunjin. I owe you my life. It was only appropriate for me to aid you in your time of need.”
Jeongin glances at Changbin, who’s staring at Felix with an expression Jeongin can’t read. Jeongin wishes he knew what was going on. “Um,” he starts, uncertain, “I’m its Deity, yes, but you don’t owe me anything. It’s my job.” At the nymph’s—Hyunjin’s blank look, he explains, “You owe me nothing, it’s my responsibility to provide for those under my protection.”
Changbin snorts at his formality. Jeongin mentally knees him in the groin. He’s never been good at interacting with the creatures of his realm.
(If he can still call it his.)
Everything comes rushing back, his light mood dropping. He sobers, biting the inside of his cheek. “Thank you, really. I haven’t been in,” he tries to find the politest way to say that he’s been miserable, “peak condition lately. I heard about the river. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect it.”
Jeongin looks down at his hands. His veins are white again, the silver blood unpolluted. He knows fading isn’t pretty. His skin would have cracked, the magic in his blood blackening and finding its way back to the earth.
Hyunjin looks at him, eyes swirling like a tide. “It is no fault of your own, only the humans’. You have protected me for many years, and I am confident in your ability. You have never let me down, despite what you may think.”
Jeongin swallows, his throat suddenly dry. “Oh. I—thanks. Thank you.” He says, finally. Lamely.
He wonders, briefly, why river nymphs speak like the Old Fae of Jeongin’s childhood. Despite his curiosity, he knows better than to pry. Nobody speaks of the Fae anymore. Even four centuries after their extinction, they remain a sensitive subject.
Their magic still lingers in those like Jeongin, though. And, apparently, the customs of eastern water nymphs. Legacies work like that, he thinks. They make it so magic never really dies. It keeps moving and changing, but it’s never truly gone.
—
Jeongin watches Seungmin set the kettle on the stove, droplets of water still clinging to the metal and sizzling, evaporating in the heat. They’ll leave the silver scorched brown. It’ll be easy to scrub away, though Jeongin knows.
Seungmin sighs, and Jeongin’s fingers twitch anxiously.
Seungmin looks back at him, pulling on the edges of his sleeves. He looks older than he did the last time Jeongin saw him, but Jeongin supposes that comes with the territory of not talking for two centuries. Seungmin’s hair is shorter, with streaks of blue scattered throughout. It reminds Jeongin of Yeji, back when she first came to the shop a couple of years ago, strands of pink mixed into the brown.
“You almost faded,” Seungmin says, voice soft and nasally. That hasn’t changed, at least.
Jeongin sniffs, feeling so much guilt he could drown in it. “Yeah.” He looks down at the counter, picking at a nonexistent stain. He’s kept his nails short recently, now that he’s gotten into gardening. It makes him feel closer to Minho.
“You almost faded,” Seungmin says again. Jeongin nods. “Do you remember what you said the last time I saw you?”
Jeongin shakes his head. He doesn’t. Almost all his memories have grayed with age. It was probably something inconsequential and meaningless.
“I don’t either,” he says, and Jeongin swallows. Tries to bring himself to meet Seungmin’s gaze. Fails. “You were one of my best friends, you know? I knew you needed space. Time. I just thought that you would come back eventually. I knew it wasn’t gonna be the same, it just,” he sighs. “You almost faded. You could have.” Seungmin grips the dishrag, eyebrows furrowed. He’s all sharp lines, now—high cheekbones and a defined jawline. He’s different from before. Maybe another Jeongin would want to find all the ways he’s changed, back when they were nineteen and planning out eternity together. Now, he’s too tired.
Jeongin has changed just as much as Seungmin.
Jeongin nods, folding his hands in his lap. “For what it’s worth,” he begins, “I’m sorry. Losing them just—I couldn’t really… deal. With that.” Jeongin’s throat feels like it’s been scraped raw. “You remember them. How I was with them. You just—I didn’t forget about you. I didn’t, I was just, just gone. I didn’t know how to function after Jisung. And then Minho. And then there was the river, and then the only thing I could do was run the shop. I’m sorry.”
Seungmin eyes him like he’s checking Jeongin’s face for any trace of a lie. Jeongin hopes he looks as sincere as he feels.
The kettle whistles, steam blows out the top, and the tenseness of the atmosphere dissipates. Jeongin can still feel the foam under his skin, but it’s thinned a little with the shock of almost fading.
After taking down two mugs, Seungmin asks, “You still like peppermint?”
Jeongin nods, feeling the corners of his lips tug upwards. “Yeah.”
When Seungmin sets the tea in front of Jeongin, it feels a little like forgiveness.
—
“Minho—”
“We can’t, Jisung.”
“I know. I know, but is this even helping? He isn’t moving on. He isn’t forgetting.”
“…”
“Maybe with a little more time—”
“Bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it. Jeongin would have let us go by now.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, Jisung, we just… we need to say goodbye, yeah? Properly, this time.”
“Yeah.”
“…”
“One last day, huh.”
“One last day.”
“I’m gonna miss him.”
“Me too, Jisung.”
“…Will we ever see him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope we do.”
“Me too, Jisung.”
—
Jeongin turns on the faucet, numbly filling the plastic tub with water. There are cups and plates scattered across the kitchen counter, and he’s running out of clean silverware. He glances at Chan, who’s sitting at his kitchen table, separated from him only by the island counter. “So… what’d you come over for?”
He pumps a bit of soap into the tub, swirling it with a sponge while he waits for Chan to respond. He takes time to formulate his words. He’s always been like that—calm and considerate. He’s a better man than Jeongin could ever hope to be.
The silence between them is comfortable, if not a bit loaded.
“You know we care about you, right? Seungmin and I?”
Jeongin pauses, hand frozen near the faucet handle. He looks to Chan again, swallowing, “Of course I do.”
Chan drags a hand down his face. He looks tired. Some parts of Jeongin ache, distant and buried. Somewhere—under all the layers of foamy dissonance—he misses more than just Minho and Jisung. He misses his friends and their gentle reassurance. He longs for Changbin’s guidance and Felix’s tender affection, for Seungmin’s easy sincerity.
“I just—we’re worried about you. We haven’t seen you in years, Innie. We care about you a lot. Minho and Sung—” Jeongin looks away, jaw clenched tight. “Jeongin, please. I knew Jisung. He was my brother, Innie. I know I wasn’t the best one, but I knew him. I knew him. I was friends with Minho. They loved you too much for this. It’s hard. It’s fucking awful, I know. We just—you can lean on us. You can lean on us and you don’t have to be here alone all the time. They loved you too much for us to just—just let you go. We love you too much for that. We’re family, remember?”
Chan is begging, Jeongin realizes. The foam is still there, and he hears the bubbles pop like the pebbles that click together under the river. It’s not clearing, not dissipating, but the top layer is thin enough to feel the hurt. It hurts like when Jeongin broke his leg when he was mortal, bones fracturing in a spiral, shards splintering and jamming into nerves, slicing. It hurts for a split second and then it gets pulled away, leaving nothing but wrong, wrong, wrong. The structure is all sideways—all unset—but it doesn’t hurt anymore. He just knows that it’s wrong, and he knows that he’ll topple if he tries to stand.
Jeongin sets down the glass he’s washing, dries his hands with the towel set near the sink, and presses his back to the cabinets. He slides to the ground. He’s wearing an old pair of shorts. The tiled floor is cold against his bare skin, but he barely feels it. It’s distant like everything else. The feeling’s come and gone like boulders crushed to sand.
“They aren’t here anymore,” Jeongin mumbles, eyes locked on the scratch on the silverware drawer. Jisung had been messing with the potato masher and accidentally nicked the paint. Minho laughed, kissing him on the forehead as Jeongin whined about the damage Jisung was inflicting on their kitchen. It feels fresh as if it happened yesterday.
Chan inhales, breath whistling through his nose. “I know that. They aren’t here, but you are.” Jeongin shakes his head, but Chan plows on. “You’re still here, Jeongin. I’m not letting you slip away. They aren’t here, but you are. If I forgot everything about Jisung—if I knew nothing but the most important parts—the only things left would be about you and Minho. Fuck, Jeongin, I grew up with him, but you know more about who he was than I do.
“He wasn’t the most open person—especially not with me—but if there’s one thing he never fucking shut up about, it was how happy you both made him.” Chan’s voice cracks and Jeongin feels—cold. He’s just cold. He's shaking, even though he turned the thermostat up hours ago. It’s like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over him, the chill soaking his shirt and seeping through the fabric down to his bones. It’s a tattoo. A brand.
Chan sobs wetly, “They loved you, and we lost them, but we won’t lose you. I won’t let that happen. You can—you can kick Seungmin out of your house. That’s fine, Jeongin. You can ghost Changbin’s calls. You can ignore us all the fuck you want, but we aren’t gonna let you fade.”
Jeongin flinches, pressing his head to his knees. His eyes sting and he’s shaking. It’s like there’s an earthquake at his center, tectonic plates rubbing together until he’s crumbling, collapsing like the roads above a sinkhole, rods and wires sticking out at odd angles. Talking with Seungmin was better than this; it was easier when he wasn’t reminded of them. “Get out.”
“No,” Chan says, voice raspy but firm. Strong, even now, even in the face of Jeongin’s ugly, sharp-edged grief.
“Get out.”
“I won’t. I’m not leaving you alone anymore. I’m not leaving.”
Jeongin jolts, and the world turns crimson. “Why not? Why fucking not? Do you—do you think it’d be the first time someone left? Gods, I know you’re not that stupid,” he tastes vermillion. The color blurs his vision and drips down his face and to the floor. “They’re gone, Chan. They left, and they’re not coming back. So just—fuck you. Fuck this. Get out. Just—leave. Leave me the fuck alone.”
Jeongin’s voice is brittle, and he can barely speak through the hoarseness, but he does. Chan doesn’t understand.
“I get it, Jeongin—”
“No, you don’t. Don’t—don’t do that.” Jeongin lifts his head, glaring at Chan through the ocean in his vision, through the salt blurring everything’s edges. “They were—they were my forever.” They were his forever, even if he knew they couldn’t be. He was supposed to have those years with them. All he wanted was a life with them. “We were supposed to have decades, but we didn’t,” he spits. He scrubs at his face like the grief will rub away with the tears. “You say you understand, but you don’t. You say it like you know what it’s like, but you don’t!
“Think about Seungmin,” Jeongin says quietly, and Chan flinches, but Jeongin can’t bring himself to feel apologetic. He’s angry, and the foam clears just enough for him to feel it.
There have been many moments where he’s been angry. He’s lived for centuries—almost a millennia. He’s had a pile of stones set on his doorstep, back when he was young and freshly donned. There had been slurs painted on them in red paint, and he remembers how the edges chipped and weathered with the years. Eventually, the paint turned to dust, and the rocks were bare and clean, fresh and innocent and unassuming, but the memory stuck. He’s been mocked and berated. He’s been belittled for something so small—something so inconsequential—but, even then, he hadn’t felt rage like this. He can’t yield here.
“Think about Seungmin. Think about having someone that important to you, and then think about building a future with him. You agree that you’re it for each other. There’s nothing but him. And then think about him just—disappearing. Gone with no warning. You watch it all fall apart, and you can’t do shit.
“And then you have to bury him by the river. And every single plan you had is ruined. There’s no future, and there’s no Seungmin, there’s just you and the house you used to live in together, and there’s nothing but what you could’ve had. What you did have. There’s no more waking up next to him, no more anything. You get nothing because he’s gone.”
Jeongin inhales. It’s sharp and ragged, edges serrated like the shards of something broken. He shakes his head, pushes himself off the floor, and grabs the sponge again. When he dips it back in the tub, he finds that the water is cold with little splinterings of frost crawling across the surface. Jeongin reigns in his magic and breathes out.
Jeongin doesn’t look back to Chan as he says, “You can think about that, but you’ll never understand it. You don’t want to. Just—” he braces himself on the marble countertop—the one Minho had picked out—and feels the foam seep back. “Just go, Chan.”
He doesn’t watch Chan as he leaves, but he does hear him pause by the door.
“I’m not leaving you behind.”
And then he’s gone.
—
The first September 14th after Jisung died, Jeongin had taken a trip up one of the few mountains in his realm. He had been younger, then, and the wound of losing Minho and Jisung was fresher. Now it feels a bit like bumping a nearly healed bruise. It still twinges and the skin is still discolored, but it doesn’t hurt as bad as it would have days prior.
Loss is still carved into him, but as he climbs up and weaves through familiar trees, it feels like the wound is beginning to scab over. When he looks left, he can see the rock that Minho used to sit on to rest, before he would jump up and yell about continuing with the hike. About fifteen minutes up, there’s a sequoia with woven branches that Jisung used to love climbing.
While the goal is always to reach the summit, he thinks that his favorite part is the hike up. There’s memory along each pathway, different stories etched into each tree, new and old.
Being immortal has a fair amount of perks, but Jeongin wouldn’t say wisdom is one of them. Wisdom does not come from age, it comes from experience. Age and wisdom don’t go hand in hand. Jeongin has watched humanity evolve. He watched a child grow old, shielded from reality, and discovered that no matter how many years they lived, they remained ignorant. Without living, there is no wisdom; being alive does not necessarily mean one has lived.
Immortality is, for the most part, confusing. Everything blurs together, after a certain point, save for the most important things. His single most important memory, he thinks, was Jeongin’s last day with them both.
Jisung had been delirious with a fever almost the entire week, and Minho was slipping into the same condition. Illness had been running rampant and—despite Jeongin’s attempts to keep them home—Jisung and Minho needed to go to work. There was no way they could have stayed afloat on just the money from the shop, not with winter burning through their wood and a good deal of their finances. Jisung was a nurse, and hospitals had overflown.
It was simple: they both got sick and they both died.
The majority of the week prior to Jisung’s death, Jeongin had flitted around the cabin, trying to gather everything he could. He thought he could take them somewhere, take them to someone who could do something. He wanted to write to everyone he knew and call in every favor he could, but mail was slow back then. There was no chance the letters would make it in time. Seungmin and Chan were out of his realm, so he couldn’t contact them through the Earth. The rivers had frozen over, cutting him off from the nymphs and the power resevoir there.
On The last day, Jisung was awake and seemingly healthy.
Jeongin knew what terminal lucidity was, though there wasn’t a name for it back then. Jisung had always called it ‘Bright Day.’ Some of his patients were brighter before they died, he said.
Jeongin was a lot of things—hopelessly optimistic, hopelessly in love—but he wasn’t stupid.
Jisung said he wanted to see the stars, and Minho agreed, so that night, Jeongin carried them down to the river wrapped in blankets, and they watched the stars. He tucked Jisung between Minho and himself, and they talked about what they wanted for dinner the next day.
(Neither of them had made it to dinner.)
Now, he looks up at the stars and remembers the crinkling at the corners of Minho’s eyes and the shape of Jisung’s lips when he smiled. He wanted to have an eternity with them, and he didn’t. He was supposed to wake up next to them for decades upon decades, and he wasn’t able to. But now, remembering what it was like to love them, he breathes out and is content with the fact that he had them at all, even if it was only for a short while.
Tracing the stars with his eyes and holding cold opal and sapphire, he decides it’s time to stop being selfish.