Chapter Text
♾️
They’ve barely set foot in the apartment before Sieun finds himself being dragged inside—Suho’s hand clamped around his wrist, over the sleeve of his gray hoodie. It’s the first time Sieun has felt his touch again after a while, and the weight of it undermines the shock to see Suho awake and on his feet, hands in his pocket and standing in wait for Sieun in front of his apartment on a Friday night. He doesn’t offer any explanation, doesn’t even look at Sieun as they get inside. Sieun stares at the back of Suho’s head, then casts a quick glance over his shoulders at the city view outside as the door shuts close.
He lets Suho shepherd him all the way to the living room adjoining the kitchen. It’s a small space—a 27.00 meters squared mitosis, a single bedroom with a mattress that stretches just enough for two bodies, the blanket halved on its side. He’s moved here to be closer to Eunjang after everything. As soon as the door closes behind them Suho drops his wrist and practically speed walks to the other side of the room, sorting through the cupboard. Sieun doesn’t miss that Suho is very pointedly not looking back. He clears his throat, and Suho pauses.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
Suho goes a little still at that, combing a hand through his hair and tipping his head back. There’s a harsh stutter to his breathing. The tanned curve of his neck shines under the dimmed room lightning.
He doesn’t say anything, just makes his way over, and that’s Sieun’s cue to sit down on the couch. He wants to protest, but the look in Suho’s eyes visibly hardens, and Sieun finds himself seated with a hand out—the one with split knuckles—cradled in Suho’s. The antiseptic stings like a bitch through the fresh wound, but Suho doesn’t warn him. Consider it a little punishment.
They don’t talk for a while. And usually Sieun would be fine with it, except he hasn’t seen Suho in approximately one month and three weeks, not since he woke up. It’s hypocritical—the person he wants to see the most is the person he’s been trying to avoid. But the guilt guts him like a hook, and Sieun can’t bear to take it.
Ahn Suho. It feels surreal, like Sieun has split universes and they’ve just collided together. Here, Suho is in front of him, sitting cross-legged with Sieun’s hand in his lap. Sieun knows by the delicate arch of his brow; his voice, coming past him plucking its deep, blue notes. It’s Suho, alive, awake, in the flesh.
It’s hard not to look. For the first time in a long time, everything in Sieun is suddenly alive, skin prickling with sparks. He’s deprived, maybe, not sure if it's of Suho's or any kind of care, though it’s probably the former.
From the window, moonlight touches him and the sharp line of his jaw; cuts him by the corner of his eye. His hair is longer now, but still neatly shaved at the sides, bangs falling over thick eyebrows. He’s still got that sharp nose; small, squinty dark brown eyes. Sieun can tell some weight has been lost, but the muscle definition is still painfully evident. Suho’s shoulders are filled out, straining against his windbreaker as he applies the band-aid on Sieun’s hand.
It’s not like this effect didn’t exist before. Ahn Suho has managed to make everything go haywire in Sieun’s mind, tearing down the wall brick by brick. But now, he’s come back with something else—riding his cut jaw and his long, slender neck, sloping wide shoulders. Just that—the line from his neck down to his collarbones—makes something twist in Sieun’s stomach.
Suho being here. It’s a curse and a blessing.
He can’t hide forever.
Sieun doesn’t know what happens first: him calling out Suho’s name or Suho looking up and locking him down with those sharp eyes. All of it is too much, and suddenly Sieun can’t decide if he wants to run or get it over with.
A short moment of silence passes between them, until—“Yeah, hey.” Suho’s face morphs into a smile, a slight curl that makes Sieun feel something again. The room fades around them. “How have you been, Yeon Sieun?”
♾️
It’s easier to be preoccupied by simpler things—things he already knows. Back then when Beomseok and Youngyi were still around they would be out almost every weekend, from a bulgogi restaurant to a pool hall or karaoke room, drinking soju from a nearby convenience store. It used to be Suho who would ask them to go places, Suho who would tap on the frosted glass walls of Sieun’s tunnel vision and pull his arm along. Nowadays, things are different. A coma and few broken friendships make a difference.
Life carries on. During weekends, Sieun always feels like time is warped, a blackhole pocket of existence where nothing inherently matters. At least at Byucksan, at Eunjang, he can focus on the notes, the textbooks, the thirst for violence that shakes to his core if anyone comes too close. With Suho here, now, Sieun has been sitting outside on this bench for two hours.
“Here.”
He looks up, and Suho is there, half shadowed out by the streetlights. They’ve come to a park near his apartment complex after a text from Suho. It’s close to midnight on a Saturday, but there’s no one at home to stop Sieun from going out this late, anyway.
He accepts the can of soju with a small thanks. Suho only hums in reply, and swiftly occupies the seat next to him, cracking open his own can.
Sieun is weak to what he wants.
He curses himself for being like this. But he’d like to believe, placing bets on the small fact that they still keep in contact, that even after everything Suho, too, wants to stay close.
“How’s Eunjang?”
“…It’s fine. Nothing special.” Sieun stiffly replies and he grimaces internally. “You?”
“The usual. Exercise, physiotherapy, all of that shit.” Suho licks his lips, blinks short lashes. “I’m tired often, but okay overall.”
Suho has his arms out, t-shirt’s short sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, and Sieun tries incredibly hard to ignore the veins lacing his forearms, going to his hands. It’s the last few days of spring, and deep into the night the cicadas drone on, cars and shops buzzing from afar, voices turning more distant as people move to rest for the day.
Suho’s hand lies between them—broad palm, knobby knuckles, tendons standing out.
“I don’t know where I’m going next,” he says, “if I’m being honest.”
Sieun feels like he should hold Suho’s hand, instead. Some comfort, or resolution. But he’s been broken for so long. Suho is like the seal that keeps him airtight.
“When are they discharging you?”
He’s been going back and forward to the hospital for weeks. A miracle, the doctors have apparently said, with how much Suho has improved since he woke up. There’s still holes in his memories—punctures from wounds unhealed and untouched. He remembers most of Byucksan, just not the details after Beomseok turned on them. Yeon Sieun is the last tie to Ahn Suho’s old life before it ended.
“Next Friday,” Suho says. There’s a pause. Sieun understands this. He doesn’t think he’s flaring any better. Life to him is getting by. Friends to him are now close to none. Love is when he hopes they remember his name.
Sieun is not a good friend, but he’s also not a good person, so it doesn’t matter in the end. Suho, at least, deserves love. He deserves so much, and Sieun would give it all to him if he could.
“Go back and finish school. It’s what your grandma wanted.” He offers.
“Eunjang?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You can do better.”
He feels something catch in his throat when Suho darts eyes to his mouth.
“You think I can do better than you?”
It’s like a firework has burst a hole in his chest, burning clean through, blasting him open for the entire world to see.
“You can try,” Sieun says, because it’s all he can do.
“Right,” Suho hums, but his gaze doesn’t waver—staring at him from the side, and Sieun feels something overflow inside. He’s not sure if it’s tears, or blood.
♾️
Suho is always the exception to the rule. The only non ‘never’. The only one who stays. The only one Sieun allows close to now. The only constant. Eb and flow, like the sea.
Ahn Suho comes back to Byucksan, and is dearly missed more than ever before—if the notifs that keep blowing up his phone were any indication. Jeong-chan and Tae-hoon have already been transferred. Youngbin is still in a cast at his new school, while rumor has it Wooyoung has stopped posting and pausing MMA altogether, so any hindrance to Suho’s well-being is now close to none. It’s like Sieun was never even there.
Almost.
Suho uses the bus and subway more than he ever has in his life, the scooter turning old and dusty parked at his house. Almost every Friday Sieun would come back to a looming figure at his door, a support guard around his left leg, wearing the exact same clothes and bright mocking grin.
They eat dinner together in Sieun’s living room, Suho showing off whatever dish his grandma has taught him or ordering delivery in. Then afterwards when Sieun is washing the dishes Suho would be crashing on the couch, flipping through the channels and unceremoniously falling asleep right there by the time Sieun returns. His infamous stamina just a shell of what it used to be.
Sieun stares. He can go to his room to study, but he doesn’t. He pulls out his textbook and notes—spreading them on the living room table—and studies there. The gentle breathing of Suho behind keeps tickling in his ears.
♾️
On Saturday, Suho sleeps over at his place.
It’s not acknowledged out loud, but once Sieun noticed the pattern he’s cleared out his schedule for it. Suho always complains if he sees Sieun is studying, or doing anything that’s not accommodating his Youtube or movie binge-watching. He’ll ring the doorbell with a “Delivery” call, hands heavy with Korean take-out and soda, and washes up using Sieun’s shampoo and soap like they’re basically his own.
They sleep almost-next to each other. Sieun in his bed, Suho on the floor next to his bed. Snoring away in a guest futon. Sieun in his sleep shirt and shorts, Suho’s chest is bare and he has arms out over his head. The knobs of his elbows. Lines of his shoulders peeking through the blanket. Suho mumbling in his sleep. Sieun doesn’t know what he says. He stays awake for half of the night—things heavy on his mind—and he counts every breath Suho takes, every crease on Suho’s palms, until sleep overcomes him too.
♾️
They spend a lot of their time doing nothing in particular; talking about nothing at all. It’s the summer before his last semester. There’s not a lot to do when it’s the dead of August and it’s too hot to move too much. Suho is finally at the closest stage of pre-coma healthy. He settles down next to Sieun in the shade of the tree and lets out a groan. “It feels like an oven.” He whines. His baseball cap falls off his head when he knocks it against Sieun’s shoulder, running a hand through the sweaty strands of his freshly undercut hair.
It’s just the two of them on a sweltering afternoon that is similar to all the ones before it. They—named: Suho—have gotten bored of the selections on Netflix and decided to come out to Han river to walk around and hopefully find something to do.
It feels like the whole world is paused here. The blue-gray water moving under Seoul bridge. The birds in the trees. The ladybug on the ground. “At least it’s not humid.” Sieun says, and the cool breeze that fans over them agrees. The air smells like after-rain and fresh mown grass. He closes his eyes and feels it ruffle his hair and caress his sweat slicked skin. Suho lets out a sigh of relief next to him.
“Y’know Sieun, you’re kinda pretty.”
It’s so unbidden that it feels like a critical hit to the gut. Sieun turns to him with a quick blink. “What?”
“Especially just now, when the wind blew through your hair? It was all like...so delicate. You looked like a Ghibli movie character.”
“…What’s a Ghibli movie?”
“Oh my God—”
♾️
On his eighteenth birthday, Sieun has his first beer.
The frothy yellow liquid in a bottle is disgusting, but he likes the way it settles in his stomach, a burn that festers on. Suho has decided that since today is so special, they should celebrate it until the sun rises. Although it’s just the two of them in their home clothes, sitting on the living room floor of Sieun’s apartment with a deck of cards, empty pizza box and a dozen beer bottles. Sieun is hot all over from the alcohol coursing through his system and the humid summer evening, and now he also has to worry about a giggling, drunken 145 pounds of mass. Suho’s pupils are blown and swimming with enough wild emotion to make a familiar heat pool at the bottom of Sieun’s stomach. When Sieun wins the fifth time in the row, Suho groans so loudly his entire body rumbles with it, and he falls back to lay his head on Sieun’s legs.
Sieun forgets what they were talking about.
Suho smells like mint shampoo and sweat mixed with the sharp scent of his cologne. His hair is soft where it brushes Sieun’s arm, and he’s so, so close.
“Nerd.” Suho pokes his tongue out at him. His breath carries something sweet. “Idiot.” Sieun says back. He lifts a hand up to push Suho away, only half-heartedly. Their proximity is unnerving him, but Suho keeps at it. He moves his head again until he’s comfortably settled on Sieun’s thigh—eyes half-lidded—before his breathing evens out, and he crosses an arm over his face. Close to sleep.
When Suho touches him, Sieun thinks of dying: of all his neurons going off all at once and flooding his brain with so much sensation that he only understands it metaphorically. It's like that, the weight of Suho—his body, his words. The way he’s so easy with Sieun.
It’s almost perfect, too much.
♾️
Although they keep close contact, their lives stay on parallel lines. As summer fades into fall, the days start getting shorter and there is less sunlight. Suho goes to his appointments and comes home to his grandma. Sieun brawls through a rolodex of names and comes home bloody, bruised and alone.
He can’t escape forever, of course.
“What?”
Suho sniffs and directs his gaze from the scrapes on Sieun’s knuckles to look him in the face. His eyes are too bright, a shining hazel that looks down at Sieun as if daring him to continue talking back. Suho’s stubbornness is not a thing easily browbeaten.
“I told you not to fight.”
“...I didn’t.”
“What’s that then?”
“I fell down the stairs.”
There’s a pulse of silence, as if Suho needs a few seconds to digest what Sieun says before looking up to hold his gaze again. The overhead light captures his eyes all at once, casting his irises in an ethereal glow as Suho takes only two steps, although they feel like a million strides towards him. He stops when he’s within arm’s reach. Confused, Sieun looks up to ask what his problem is, but before he knows it, Suho is grabbing his wrist, and pulling him inside.
It’s like playing with fire—watching Suho move around him, all that strength yet he can still touch and hold so gently. At this point Suho can probably perform medical surgery on Sieun’s hands with his eyes closed. Sieun's got his jaw set—teeth gritted so tightly together—he's afraid he will chip one. But that's the only thing he can do to hide the existence of that pitch black void inside of him, growing bigger and bigger and sucking in all things nice in his oh, so awful life.
He doesn’t know how long Suho will stay.
“This will probably scar.” Suho comments, as he presses on the band-aid on his hand to flatten it against the skin.
Sieun nods, and puts his hand back to his lap. He’s sitting on the couch again. The sun spills through the blinds, and the TV keeps spitting random sounds, white noises against the storm brewing in his head.
“Are you gonna tell me what happened?”
“…It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I know you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
It stops Suho on his rant, and he blinks, eyelashes shuttering. “What?”
Something in Sieun’s chest seizes, tight, as if trying to keep himself from falling out of his body.
“Nothing.” He clears his throat, and stands up. “I’m gonna go take a shower.”
Suho says nothing to that, and Sieun passes by him without another glance. He showers, trying to clear his mind and only succeeding half of the time. When he comes out, steam slipping into the room, Suho is quiet on the couch, deep in slumber. The TV isn’t on, like he wasn’t watching, just sitting, maybe thinking.
Suho, who falls asleep whenever and wherever. As if he’s making up for all the time he’s lost being an adult when he was only seven-teen, and it hurts. It hurts just looking at him. Suho takes his breath away.
Sieun doesn’t know what to do.
♾️
It’s the final term before national entrance exam.
Sieun is busier than ever before. Everyday he goes to Eunjang at eight in the morning and to revision classes at six in the afternoon; coming home only when the moon hangs bright in the dark sky.
It’s not the only thing keeping him occupied, of course.
“I never see you anymore,” Suho mutters into the phone later that night, voice pitched higher from the static.
Sieun is slumped over at the dining table, too exhausted to walk all the way back to his room. That's how he's been ending most of his nights these days. His phone crackles to life again as he speaks. "Sorry." He says, looking at the fresh cuts over the knuckle scars Suho has warned him about. They sting.
“Why?” Sieun straightens up, mentally imagining the frown on Suho’s face. “I already know you’re always holed up inside.” There’s a crash somewhere in the background and Suho shouts out to his grandma that he’s fine, though it comes out all echoey through the phone. “And I get it, it’s not your fault exam season is brutal, but…I don’t know. Is there something else?”
“What do you mean?”
Suho lets out a long sigh, except it comes out stifled, as if Sieun wasn’t supposed to hear it. “Sieun, are you okay?”
It’s like deja-vu. Sieun gets up and winces at how his back cracks in the process, pressing his phone up against his ear as he turns off the speaker. “I’m fine. What happened?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” Suho laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “We haven’t met in weeks. You take days to reply to my texts lately. Last time I saw you you got a busted lip and blood all over your hands. And,” he continues, voice quivering slightly, “it sucks that we both know you’re not okay but you pretend you are, Yeon Sieun.”
“...That’s not true.”
“How?” there's a tiny crack in Suho’s voice, but he pays it no mind. “How do I know that, when all you’ve been doing is avoiding me? And don’t you dare say you haven’t.”
Sieun glares into the wall, shoving his hand in his hoodie. The fabric rubs against the wounds, raw, but he ignores them. “I’m not like how I was in Byucksan anymore, Suho. I have more things to deal with now.”
“Did someone hurt you?”
Sieun flexes his fingers. “No.” It’s only half-true. Hyoman started this first, for all it’s worth. He only retaliated, for all they deserved.
“Right,” Suho huffs out, exasperated. “See? This is what I mean. You spend all your time holed up by yourself now. And it’s just…really upsetting to see.” After a moment Suho is speaking again, voice softened around the edges, like he’s afraid he’ll scare Sieun away. “Sorry. Look, just forget I said anything—”
“Yeah,” Sieun cuts in, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Maybe it’s good then, that we’re going to different places now.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath, and Sieun is about to double-check if Suho hung up on him, until he hears—
“You really think so?”
“…Yeah.”
“Okay then.” Suho says, quiet, but his words are clipped at the ends. “Good luck with the exam, Sieun-ah.”
And then the line goes dead.
♾️
Suho’s life is wet on his skin, bleeding slick and hot with too many things to say and too little time left to them. “See you tomorrow” yet tomorrow never came with him. It’s everything Suho should have had but already lost. Time his life could have saved wasted in a hospital bed.
“I’m sorry.” Sieun wishes he could hold him together with his bare hands and sheer will. He has so much in himself—feelings, power, rage—but none of it is going to solve this.
“For what?”
“Just…everything.”
♾️
Sieun breaks a finger punching Baekjin to the ground, and has to go to the hospital for it.
The nurse keeps looking over at him pointedly while she puts down notes. Sieun knows he’s already quite the sight: blood smears all over his blue uniform shirt, scrapes on his elbows, and a long gash on his cheek. Usually he can treat them at home, but his thumb is crooked at a really uncomfy angle this time, and everything else throbs like crazy.
Suho would probably laugh at him right now, if he could see this.
The thought stings, and he promptly shakes it away.
He knocks back a few painkillers on the way out, and it’s late into the night on a Thursday. There’s still school tomorrow, and he’s debating stopping by a convenience store to pick up a kimbap roll or just heading straight home to sleep the pain off when something in front catches his eyes.
Sieun stops in his tracks, the same time as Suho, and flames start searing through him like a burn.
The double realization is nearly instantaneous. Sieun knows emotions, has trained in the art, but all he can divine out of Suho’s face now is something he’s been suppressed for weeks—a shadow chased away by the warm glow of something almost extraordinarily open. Suho is looking right back at him, amber-eyed, transfixed, tracing over every dirt and blood fleck sewed onto him. Like the way Suho had looked standing in front of his door that day all those months ago—everything darkened by the shadow cast over his eyes—that sharp glint in his eyes, its buzzing intensity.
Taking blows to the face hurts less than this.
(TBC)