Work Text:
Fire.
Everything is on fire.
Gunpowder. Screams. He watches the way the flames dance, the way they rot at the wood of the ship. Ash. It’s a sickening sort of beauty.
A light show. Red, orange, yellow, and all the colors of the fall—
Screams. Yelling.
It looks like the water is burning from here, the flames reflecting across the waves and back onto his face, iridescent.
Broken glass. There, his reflection in the shards. His face is warmed by the flames, but the shadows have been cut with harsh delineation, dark shapes marking the gauntness of his face. He traces two fingers across his brow, down the edge of his eye socket to the bone of his cheek, pressing into the bruise there. He hisses in pain.
A gunshot.
Smoke.
He’s bleeding, he knows. He can barely breathe.
His crew—where is his crew?
He can’t breathe.
He searches for Seonghwa through the smoke, for Wooyoung or Jongho or anyone at all, but there is nothing here but fire and ash. Ash.
Fire, that rots away at the wood of the ship—his ship—the mast of which falls, crashing into the burning sea.
Hongjoong screams.
He wakes.
He chokes on the terror, nothing but a small whimper making it past his lips. Seonghwa is still sleeping peacefully next to him, curled up on his side with an arm thrown over Hongjoong’s waist, his nose pressed into Hongjoong’s shoulder. He can feel Seonghwa’s breath against his skin, soft and slow, each exhale falling at a deep, measured pace.
Hongjoong drags in a shuddering inhale, trying to calm himself. He can feel his pulse in his throat—throbbing, rising up like nausea—and he presses the flat of his palms against his eyes in an effort to swallow back the bile. Seonghwa is sleeping beside him, and Hongjoong doesn’t want to wake him. The man needs his sleep—desperately, he does—and it would be cruel to rouse him at this hour. The sun lies beneath the horizon, and the sky remains under the moon’s domain for many hours yet.
He stares at the ceiling, struggling to recall his dream. Fire. He digs his palms into his eyelids until blue spots begin to dance across his vision. Gunshots. There’s that itch again, that urge to create that exists just under his skin. It feels like some sort of parasite eating away at him from the inside, a disease that has crawled into his bones and carved a void into his marrow. Broken glass.
He pulls himself out of bed. He’s careful not to disturb Seonghwa, sliding out from under the man’s embrace as quietly as possible. He winces, somewhat, when he sees Seonghwa’s pout, the way he chases the loss of warmth even in sleep.
Paint. Where is his paint? The images are so vivid in his mind, the colors visceral, the fire bright, and he needs to get it down before it disappears. Paper. He thinks of grabbing a pen, of putting the scene into words—but no, words wouldn’t do this one justice. He needs color. Markers. Paint.
He doesn’t have any blank canvases, so he rips out a piece of paper from a sketchbook instead, smearing acrylic red across the white. The sea is in blue, highlighted with orange, shaded with a midnight indigo. A burst of yellow. He grabs another piece of paper, marking a harsh line across its face. Another. It’s a bit of a scrawl. There’s the shadow of a person there, a silhouette defined by the jagged lines of a fur coat, the dangle of jewelry.
There, fire around him. The glint of broken glass. There’s the suggestion of a ship in the background, flag missing, wood splintered.
“…Joong?” Seonghwa asks. “Hongjoong-ah…are you alright?”
Hongjoong blinks up at the man, dazed as if pulled from a trance.
“Why are you out of bed? Did you fall?”
“I’m okay,” Hongjoong assures him. “You can go back to sleep.”
The sheets rustle as Seonghwa pulls them back, climbing out of bed. A hand brushes against Hongjoong’s shoulder, trailing across his back to rest at his neck. He leans into the touch. Seonghwa’s skin is warm against his own, a comforting presence that grounds him in the reality of the floor beneath him and the whirl of the air conditioning around him.
Seonghwa picks up one of the drawings. “Another dream?” he asks.
Hongjoong nods against him, words suddenly failing. Another dream, another dream…it seems like every night now, he has another dream. Pianos. Pain. Flashing lights and abandoned warehouses. He has dark circles under his eyes from the nights spent on the floor, brush in hand, chasing the fading imprint of memories that he could have sworn were his own.
Mornings are spent in a haze of headaches and caffeine, too-bright lights and blurring words on a page. There’s ink stained across his knuckles, red tempera caked under his nails like blood and pastel smudged across his arms like a bruise. His friends say that he looks sick, like he’s down with a cold and should go back to bed.
Maybe he should take the day off tomorrow—today, is it today already? He could call himself in sick from his classes. Yeosang would tell him if he missed anything important, and Wooyoung would bring him homemade soup with a wish to feel better soon, hyung!
Hongjoong’s stomach jerks with a wave of nausea, and he thinks he might just throw up.
Seonghwa soothes a hand down his back.
The man picks up another one of the drawings, some inscrutable expression crossing his face. Hongjoong can’t tell if he’s happy, confused, appreciative, or something else. Is he disappointed? Does he dislike it? It’s hard to tell in the dark when lines of reality are hazy, and even Seonghwa’s happiest smiles appear somewhat pained. Hongjoong cants his head back, meeting Seonghwa’s gaze and asking a silent question.
Seonghwa just hums. “I like this one,” he says. “We should frame it.”
Late-night art already covered the walls, white-masked figures and high school blazers and pirate ships flying through the clouds. There are scrolls of half-scrawled poetry spilling out of the dresser, premonitions that have never come to fruition, logs from voyages that will never embark. There are half-reformed jackets hung on the back of the chair, patches scattered across the counter and a box of fabric scraps too full to close. Art is tucked between the nightstand and the wall, in the closet, on the coffee table, piled in boxes and on the floor where guests tend to trip over.
Seonghwa never lets him throw any of it away.
“Frames are expensive,” Hongjoong says, like he always says, and Seonghwa just smiles.
“Nothing is too expensive for you,” he says, and it’s a well-worn routine by now.
There’s an hourglass on the table, bought cheap from some department store, shattered, and reforged from Hongjoong’s own bloodied hands, inspiration—or rather, this mania—having consumed him one night and urging a sculpture from his delirium. Seonghwa had freaked out when he saw the blood, stained his own shirt to wipe Hongjoong’s pain away, and since banned him from doing anything so dangerous again.
Hongjoong tries his best to listen. Some nights are better than others.
“What was the dream about?” Seonghwa asks.
Hongjoong tucks his head beneath the man’s chin, squeezing his eyes closed. “The ship was burning. I couldn’t find you.”
“Oh, Joong-ah…”
“It was burning. I couldn’t—I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find anyone.”
Seonghwa wraps his arms around Hongjoong’s waist. “It’s okay,” he says. “It was just a dream.”
Hongjoong isn’t sure they are anymore.
He gave up on the idea of being a seer, the dreams being too erratic in setting and time period to be his own future—or, at least, not the future of this world. He doubts that it’s some sort of divine message, but can’t find any scientific reason beyond a mere overactive imagination. He sees the faces of his friends, the people he knows, but with makeup, scars, or different hair colors. He sees Wooyoung with red hair or Mingi with blazing orange, Seonghwa with white, sometimes pink, Yeosang with mint blue.
He sees broken things before he knows what they look like whole. He sees people he has yet to meet, others he never will. There are contingencies and continuities and yet no explanation ever given as to what it all means.
And the hourglass is always broken.
“Hongjoong-ah,” Seonghwa says, “let me make you some tea. Is chamomile alright?”
Hongjoong grips Seonghwa’s shirt, mumbling something along the lines of don’t want you to go into the fabric.
“I won’t leave you, Joong-ah. I’m right here. Will you let me carry you to the kitchen?”
“M’not a kid, Hwa.”
A soft laugh. “I never said you were.”
Hongjoong acquiesces, because he always does, and he wraps his legs around Seonghwa’s waist, letting the man piggyback him the twelve-odd steps it takes to reach the kitchen.
Of all the art, the paintings, the skirts and jackets and half-torn shirts, the songs and the poetry and run-on sentences of prose, his most consistent subject is Seonghwa. There’s Seonghwa on a beach, proudly hoisting a flag above his head. There’s Seonghwa in a warehouse, comforting a wounded San. There are better drawings of Seonghwa too, ones made in the soft light of the afternoon when Hongjoong had taken to immortalizing the lines of the man’s face in paper and ink, sharing a lazy kiss between each pose.
There, on the counter, is a painting of Seonghwa in bandages. His hair is bleach-white, his clothes rags of gray. Behind him stands a scarecrow, eyes empty and black, gold chains hung from its outstretched arms. It’s unnerving. In truth, Hongjoong hates it. Although, objectively, it’s a beautifully rendered piece of art, the sight of it makes him sick with emotion he can’t quite name.
It’s one of Seonghwa’s favorites.
“You should submit this in class for one of your assignments,” Seonghwa had said.
Hongjoong still can’t bring himself to.
The water in the electric kettle boils, then goes silent, the little blinking light on the side turning off. He watches as Seonghwa wraps a hand around the handle, lifting it from his base. The man pours the water into a prepared cup, tea bag floating to the surface, before he sets the kettle back down. A soft click. He uncaps the bottle of honey, squeezes a bit into the tea, then stirs it with a spoon, metal clinking against the porcelain.
Hongjoong takes the cup with a smile and a thank you on his lips.
Some days he thinks he’s going insane. His teachers, ever since he was young, have always said that he had a vivid imagination, that he really should go into storytelling or art as a career, but some days he feels less like an artist and more like a madman scribbling a series of delusions onto paper. Some days, his lyrics sound more like a fever dream than well-constructed verse when juxtaposed against reality.
But in all of his days, good, bad, grey or in between, there is Seonghwa. Seonghwa, who holds him through the night. Seonghwa, who only occasionally complains about the mess Hongjoong leaves behind. Seonghwa, who makes him tea at three in the morning despite his own fatigue and sleep deprivation.
Hongjoong presses a kiss to Seonghwa’s neck. “I love you,” he mutters.
“Love you too.” Seonghwa soothes a hand through Hongjoong’s hair, brushing it away from his face. “Will you come back to sleep with me?”
Hongjoong presses a kiss to his jaw: agreement.
In bed, Seonghwa nestles Hongjoong against his chest, fingers splayed over the dip of his waist, just beneath the last rung of his ribcage. Hongjoong reaches up to intertwine his fingers with Seonghwa’s own, giving a light squeeze.
A quiet settles around them, the sway of the trees outside lost to silence.
Hongjoong grounds himself in the pattern of Seonghwa’s breath and the slow, rhythmic beating of his heart, closing his eyes to the world.
“What do you want to title it?” Seonghwa asks after a while. “Tonight’s piece?”
Hongjoong glances up at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he says. “What should I title it?”
“Hm…”
A few breaths of silence pass.
“Fire.”
“Just…just Fire?”
Seonghwa pouts. “You’re the poet, not me.”
“Okay,” Hongjoong says. “Fire it is.”
He sleeps well for the last dwindling hours of the night, no further dreams plaguing his mind. When he wakes again, it’s to morning light spilling in through the windows and the smell of freshly made breakfast wafting out from the kitchen.
He smiles.