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A storm is brewing. It lowers the sky so the clouds cover the horizon, giving the illusion that they're one with the tumultuous water.
He didn't give in his notice. They're going to call on Monday and he's not going to pick up. His phone is a dead weight in the bottom of his bag, a wet pebble tangled up in seaweed. They're going to call his emergency contacts and his parents won't know where he is.
Seonghwa digs around in his stomach for the panic that usually spurns him in moments like this—moments where he indulges something a bit too thoroughly—but all he finds is relief. Expansive, like the coastline in front of him, wrapping like an inevitability under the cusp of tree-lined mountains. Like the ocean in Autumn churning itself over and over, endless and constant and the realest thing Seonghwa's seen in a long time.
Nobody in their right mind would come here in the off season, yet here he is, at its wind-swept mouth. Down from the old outdoor station, unstaffed with open turnstiles, and past the weaving, gloomy roads of nowhere puddled with this morning's rain. The same rain, he assumes, came down against the train windows as he was leaving the city.
The closer to the ocean he walked, the less alive the houses looked: more and more summer cafés with closed signs and restaurants with peeling paint. Curtains drawn behind bolted windows, bicycles on their sides dripping rainwater into kerb-side dirt. A stray cat with a small fish between its fangs, round and damp, scampered away from the crunch of his shoes, and then there was nobody.
Closer still, the sparse town vanished altogether.
Narrow roads widened out, became unkempt grass and shingles. Wind-swept mountainous cliffs climbed up on Seonghwa's left, boasting trails that might be well-maintained some other time of year, before giving way to forest and streams and the rice paddies the train rattled in by.
He had a brief thought that maybe he'd gone the wrong way. There's surely a more well-marked route onto the shore with less risk of twisted ankles. He kept going regardless; he doesn't really want to see anyone, anyway. The cluster of the town is a blot high up in the mist behind his back now; and the shore is wide-open and unobstructed in front of him.
It's an overcast watercolour of cobbled greys and dark clouds promising further downpour. It looms, crashes, bares itself to Seonghwa, who un-shoulders his bag in response. Far away enough that the tide won't reach him, but near enough to watch it drench the shoreline. Far away enough from the autumnal ghost-town that nobody should trouble him but himself.
What if he took off his shoes, curled his socks up inside their toes, and ran into the next wave? The thought passes through him, intrusive and quick to flicker out. He knows he wouldn't. He isn't like that. He doesn't do those kinds of things.
Instead, in the cradle of the mountains and the endless breadth of the water, he sits down and brings his knees to his chest.
It looks desperate, he thinks. The water. It looks like it's trying to crawl ashore, or drag the shore back into its depths. Pushing and pulling. Not calming at all. Seonghwa doesn't exactly know if he was expecting it to be calm. It wouldn't really make sense to expect anything, he reasons, given he took the train to its last stop without checking its destination. It's not fair, then, to begrudge it any discomfort.
They've probably already called, now he thinks about it, staring into the middle-distance. Somewhere between him and the foaming waves, his gaze gets hazy and out-of-focus. It's been hours since he was due in. His fingers twitch on instinct, where each hand rests carefully on his knees, along the perfect crease of his slacks, but he doesn't reach for his bag.
He tells himself it's only for today. He tells himself he'll be back tomorrow to explain himself, after he's cleared his head. So he watches the water try to claw and clamber over the pebbled front, frothing and spitting and screaming, with these assurances deadening somewhere in his gut. A hazelnut shell held between his molars, yet to be cracked open hollow and fruitless. Just like his promise not to hurl himself into the ocean.
All at once, sat on the wet pebbles of a dead coastal town in his office job clothes, Seonghwa has the distinct feeling of having never listened to what he really wants before.
He realises at some point that he needs to find a place to sleep.
Evening is hovering somewhere beyond the storm clouds and he's been sitting outside for too long. His head is dizzy from the air. It's too fresh, like it's birthed where the angry ocean meets the rocks. It stings his nose and the sound is making him cloudy. He's not been to the coast in so long, let alone on a day like this. He didn't really know that water could roar the way it does here, cacophonous and violent like a nightmare.
He's shaking; noted. It's chillier here than in the city, and that's what he chalks it up to. Then there's a call down the shore: "What are you doing out here?"
The figure is barefoot on the rocks, closer to the tide than anyone should really be comfortable with. It makes Seonghwa's toes twinge with sympathetic discomfort. He doesn't know how to answer, and he's not sure if he can right now. His tongue is hiding from him. He thinks he was planning to sit there all night, maybe, but he can't be sure—he really can't be sure. It's so loud, and he's so cold, and he's feeling it all through murky, water-logged senses.
"Hellooo? Are you okay?" They're closer now. Seonghwa watches their feet and curls his toes in his shoes. He didn't dress for the seaside cold. That's not like him. He checks the weather before he lays out his work clothes, how warm it will be in the city and at home in the suburbs, in the morning when he leaves and in the afternoon when he comes back. He always carries an umbrella this time of year. He wears thermal socks all winter; he's a cold-blooded person, like his mother.
His ankles feel vulnerable in these socks.
"Oh." The person slows their steps, then stops altogether, just a few feet from him, to crouch. Seonghwa catches sight of their face then, too late to dodge their gaze. Sharp cheeks and eyes, and a mop of dark hair, whipped off their forehead by the wind.
Knowing eyes. Kind, warm eyes. Seonghwa doesn't look away because it would be rude, although he figures he's already being rude by staring without answering. He's not very good with these things. He tries, in the interests of propriety, to will a response onto his tongue, but nothing comes.
A smile, close-lipped and gentle, dimples this stranger's cheeks, like they're aware of it all. Like Seonghwa's a stray cat being backed into their crate. He's seen the feel-good rescue videos on YouTube. That was his thing to watch for a while, back in uni.
Is he being rescued?
"Are you lost?" the stranger asks, as if they know the answer. Seonghwa wets his lips, feels the chill sweep in to bite them as the answer evades him still.
Yes. Maybe. I know where I am, I guess. I think. I could easily find out. I rode the train to its last stop and nobody else got off– No, just one other person got off, but I don't know where they went. You're the only other person I've seen. I could check the timetable, if I knew what time I got the train. I could go home, if I could move. I should go home.
"I forgot to book a hotel," he says at last. His voice gets swept away in the waves, so he clears his throat, clogged with disuse, and stares at the backs of his hands on his knees as he repeats himself.
The stranger's still smiling when he looks up again. "A lot of them in the town only open during summer, you know. It gets pretty quiet this time of year."
Seonghwa blinks. He didn't know that. He didn't research a single thing. He just went as far away as he could. His first need in so long: go as far as possible. A thread pulled from something he isn't sure the fit of anymore.
"But luckily for you," the stranger says, cheery and lilting, crossing the few final steps up the shore to hold his hand out, "there's always a place here if you're looking for one."
Seonghwa wouldn't have taken a stranger's hand in the city. He does now, inexplicably. It feels like he's moving through water, when he brings his arm up and this person takes it, and he feels in his bones how long he's been sitting immobile in the noise of the ocean, in the salty bite of its air.
His hand is strangely warm as it pulls him up.
Then everything goes black.
Seonghwa must sleep the chill off, because he wakes up warm and comfortable.
For a split second, he thinks he's home, and the spotty memory of his train ride and the helping hand on the beach was a dream. He fumbles blindly for his bedside table, to grab his phone and check the time, the stomach-drop panic of lateness sharp against his throat. But there's no bedside table. Just a stack of books with a candle on top, old wax melting down its wick and sealing the pages shut.
Seonghwa whips his hand back from the flame, flickering half a metre from his head. There's another candle burning in the far corner, he realises when he sits up, atop a chest of drawers. It dances orange across the window beside it, drawing a stark contrast against the gloom outside.
He doesn't know how long he's slept in this unfamiliar room, pooled in heavy thread-count blankets, or when he even got here, but it's dark now. He can't tell if it's night-time or the weather—the sound of steady rainfall washes through the room like static.
What he does know is that he wouldn't have lit the candles and gone to sleep. The walls are wood-panelled. The furnishings are wood, too: wooden drawers, wooden wardrobe, wooden bed frame. It's careless. Seonghwa isn't careless. He blows out the one beside him before getting up.
He's not in his office clothes anymore. He finds his bag is at the foot of the bed with both his shirt and slacks folded on top of it, and looks down at an off-colour long-sleeve and wide-leg trousers swimming around his bare ankles. His shoes are lined up by the door with his socks tucked in. There's a pair of slippers ready next to them that he opts for instead, in hopes they were laid out for him. They look like they were. That seems like something that would happen at an inn, if this is an inn.
Did he pay for the room yet? Or was he too out-of-it, too cold and tired? Did he really pass out on the shore, far from home and inconceivably reckless, and let a stranger take him in without so much as giving them a name?
Seonghwa's tongue curls in on itself, sour and small. He blows out the other candle before slipping into the hallway.
There's a stretch of worn burgundy carpet, dimly lit by a couple sconces, along the length of the landing. Opposite, a wooden bannister stands between him and the downstairs, smooth and warm like the room he woke up in. It overlooks a lively, cluttered living area, full of plush but threadbare armchairs and overlapping rugs, with a large coffee table at its centre. Long, flickering shadows promise a fireplace tucked out of sight. It doesn't look like an inn; it looks like a home.
His voice evades him again when he tries to call out. A bird at the back of a tree-hollow, nervous of visibility. He has learnt to mute these instincts to the point of barely feeling them most days; his calls for help are a hammer finish in the back of his throat, pretty and diminished and well-pummelled. Instead, he swallows his spit, and his fingers hover above the railing, hesitant to touch what he doesn't know, characteristically reticent. His knuckles are dry and the skin on his face is too-tight. Chapped lips work around the nothingness on his tongue. He's suffering the loss of his nightly routine, somewhere so warm and unfamiliar that it feels fictional.
He tucks his hand back into his sleeve and glances around the landing again, for anything memorable, anything real. To his left, rows of closed doors disappear around a corner; they follow neatly on his right to the dead-end of a wide window, interspersed with wonky picture frames. Seonghwa steps, careful of creaky floorboards, towards the picture hanging nearest: fierce flurry of waves carrying a ship, with just a single lantern lighting the storm from its helm. A painting, he realises up close, with no signature.
Barely conscious of moving, Seonghwa straightens it out so it hangs parallel with the door frame. And, in turning away, wonders why it feels like he knows it.
In the far window, like some kind of spectre in the glass, he catches sight of himself.
The dark outside brings his silhouette into focus. Soft and unboundaried, he thinks, as he clenches his fists and takes a tentative step closer. Fluid. The trousers are so wide-legged they look like a long skirt—he feels hidden in the loose fall of fabric. It's like he's not really seeing anything at all.
For all of five seconds, something is quietened within him. The sensation is so foreign that he can't name its place in his body. Then, like a band snapping, he realises he's looking at himself and shakes his hair down in front of his eyes.
There's a light outside.
Seonghwa, with a furtive glance around him, leans in closer and focuses beyond his own face. The inn–house–cabin must be up one of the hillsides, judging from the dark promise of the ocean sitting low in the distance. Amongst the blurry blue-black dark, somewhere beyond the rain-streaked glass and the dance of surrounding trees in the wind, something yellow-orange-white is flickering. A pin-prick and a beacon. A lantern in the nest of a stormy sea.
A mrreow behind him jump-starts his voice box.
Mashing the tail-end of a yell between his mouth and hand, Seonghwa spins around to catch the flick of a cat's tail rounding onto the staircase. It meows again, further down and out of sight as he catches his heart on its way up to his throat. Seonghwa swallows, lets out a controlled breath. He wonders if he's projecting the idea it wants him to follow, before he inexplicably does.
The stairs sigh under each slow, tentative step until, as expected, a fireplace greets Seonghwa at the bottom. Steadily crackling embers, stroked by nothing, glow behind the intricate iron fireguard. The mantle is littered with books and sea-glass bottles in greens and blues; further assorted paintings and photos are tacked to the far wall with no real rhyme or reason. Seonghwa spots more oceanscapes and ships, and a few old light-leaked photos of black-and-white piers. To his left, a big dining table with mismatched chairs and glassware left at lived-in angles lines the back wall. Dried flowers are strung up above it, baby's breaths and lavender, disappearing into what Seonghwa assumes is a kitchen.
To his right is the front door, complete with a haphazard mountain of shoes, and two little arched windows for the living area. The cat who had beckoned him down sits in one.
It looks like the one he saw earlier in town. Maybe it is the same one, as absurd of a thought it seems—things seem less absurd than they should in this place. It fixes him with a wide, yellow stare, round and grey-white, and on the back of a large, deep couch barely a foot away, a tabby flicks its tail in half-awake acknowledgement, squinting green at Seonghwa when he notices.
The white cat meows again, perfectly framed by the dark, wet rainfall behind it, and the tabby's ear twitches as if annoyed. Seonghwa grips either hand tight behind his back the way he does when he's trying not to look nervous and out-of-place at work, feeling distinctly and unreasonably perceived by them both.
He has the strangest thought to ask them where the people are—the man from the beach and those that clearly live here—as if they can answer. Maybe he could dig out some cash and leave it under a coaster on the coffee table, find his way back to the station and wait for sunrise. Leave a note, a scribble to show his gratitude. There must be a pen hidden somewhere here.
Instead, he notices the window is open. Rain spits inside, dusting the sill, wetting the cat's paws. And Seonghwa thinks, he should at least close it. It's letting the draught in. What if the storm kicks up, soaks the flooring, blows out the fire? What if the cats escape, or get too cold, or someone tries to break in? If this is an inn, or someone’s home, the least he can do is keep it warm and stop their pets escaping.
Seonghwa steps close enough to reach. He can see every one of the cat's whiskers, the grey weaved through sections of its fur. When it doesn't move, and doesn't look away, he reaches out to shut the window; and the cat jumps smoothly over his arm into the bush outside.
"Don't–" Seonghwa's voice cracks its way out of his throat. His hand is still on the window latch.
The dread that supersedes him is physical and familiar, the first inklings of panic. He's fucked up. People are going to be angry at him. He's a stranger in someone’s home, taken in out of kindness, inconvenient and out-of-place, wrong-footed and irresponsible—a host of overcrowded commentary, like the swarm of a family dinner, floods his head and bleeds into his extremities. Icy tendrils up his back and along the sides of his face, and numbness in his fingers and toes.
No, no, no. He shuts the window, rushes to the door and flings it open.
"There’s a storm coming in," he says, wetting his lips. The white cat is paused several feet away, looking back at him from the first ring of trees. "You'll get sick."
It meows again. He looks back inside and makes eye contact with the sleepy cat on the couch, sitting up now and already staring at him, utterly unperturbed. “What do I do?” he asks it, cloudy with dread, fear, self-berating. Even if he gets close enough, he doesn’t even know how to pick up a cat. And what do they do if they both get locked out? Where the hell is everyone—where the hell is he?
The cat blinks, long and slow, before turning around and curling up facing the wall. Seonghwa grits his teeth and turns back to the murky darkness outside to see the cat perched further in, just visible enough to pin-point from the doorstep.
"Where do you want me to go?" he asks, weak. The cat flicks its tail and disappears around a tree.
When he steps out after it, Seonghwa hears the door swing shut behind him.
Mingi crouches under the weathered awning of an old butcher's in a town too small to have not seen anybody else, watching water drip and puddle near his feet. The shop front is peeling, faded by one too many summers, and the displays inside are empty, fogged up through the dirty window. He keeps one earphone in, but he isn't listening to anything. He's zoned into the rainfall, steady and all-encompassing, and keeps his backpack clutched tight between his legs.
It's too late to try and relocate now. The clouds are a heavy roll of textured charcoal and there's no lights on anywhere. He should've followed the man who he got off with, to see if that led anywhere. But, ever driven by stubborn pride, independence as armour, he thought he could find his own way. He thought he'd figure it all out alone.
His mind keeps wandering, encased by the rain. Thoughts, old and thorned, nick the insides of his ears like rose stems, play with such realism that he forgets he's staring down an empty lane hours from where he should be sleeping. Here, in the muddy sound of an autumn downpour, the first breaths of a storm sharpened by the ocean air, these memories keep on visiting him.
Mingi blinks, twitches like it might shake them off. That's when he spots, right down by the sea front, the needle-point glow of a fire.
It's not long before he loses the cat, or the cat loses him.
Seonghwa tries to listen out, but everything seems to have a sound in here. Hums and sighs, gentle rustling, the song of crickets in great bursts in pockets of long grass. Worry is a steady thump against the inside of his skull like the forest's bassline. Still, he keeps following the slope of the earth downward, hoping—or maybe knowing, in some way—he will be led to something.
The trees keep their distance the further in he gets. Grow thicker and older. Leafy plants flower from the detritus amongst their roots, along small creeks well-fed by the downpour, but sheltered as they run towards the sea. More light reaches the forest floor here, breeding more life. It falls through the misty air in streams.
Up ahead, the forest almost glows. A clearing, maybe, past the next line of trees. Seonghwa lifts the ends of his trousers and picks his way gingerly towards it.
It's not a clearing, Seonghwa realises when he gets there, but a felled tree. Its trunk is wide enough to be a small street back in the city. It runs like an underpass through the towering forest. Ferns curl around it, dyed blue-black by the night, and everywhere, in puddles of moss and cradled by shrubbery, rainwater glints and glitters, catching every last drop of moonlight they're gifted.
The moon has been stubborn tonight, in spite of the weather and the canopied high-ceiling of the forest. It spills forth here like a cold sunrise. Abandoning the house shoes with little thought, Seonghwa steps up onto the trunk and toes his way along the drier parts of it until, overwhelmed, he stops at its centre.
I am so small, he thinks, looking so far up that his neck hurts. Hands out at his sides, spread so the air can pass along each finger, the ghost of touch. The rain dripping on his skin is so light that he thinks it's being careful. He thinks the dead tree under his feet is whispering.
Why? he asks, maybe out loud. Why me? Here, now?
The forest just breathes around him; the forest doesn't indulge his insignificance. It just guides Seonghwa through to the other side of it, where the same untamed path he saw in the daylight winds downwards as an invitation.
The cat winds around his ankles. When Seonghwa looks down, surprisingly unsurprised, it almost, maybe, smiles at him, sharp, half-shut eyes and pointy ears.
Seonghwa blinks at it, dimly lit and dampened again. "Are you…" He hesitates. "You're not the person who helped me, are you?"
The cat slips between his legs and purrs, dragging the loose fabric with it. Seonghwa guesses that's answer enough before it pounces away again. He follows until the light he saw from the cabin window is right in front of him.
Now, he sees it's actually a fire pit. Nestled at the other end of the shore from where Seonghwa sat earlier, past an abandoned-looking shipping yard, and burning bright against the ultramarine darkness. Seonghwa steps around rusted boat chains, circles aluminium containers with peeling serial numbers and the gutted carcasses of old boats, to climb up the shorefront, where the rocks are larger and easier to navigate, to get a better look from further away.
In the cosy nook of the coast, the light burns so bright that it actually takes Seonghwa's eyes a second to adjust. He has no idea how they’re keeping a fire going in this weather at all, but there’s barely even a waver to the flames. People are gathered around it on what look like upturned crates. Bouts of laughter circle up through the rain like smoke.
The cat hesitates when Seonghwa stops walking, head tilted as if to ask if he wants to come. Seonghwa shakes his head and sits down for good measure, somewhere far up where his dark clothes blend with inky, rain-soaked rocks.
The cat springs down to join them, then. At least you're safe, Seonghwa thinks, when it gets close enough for the nearest man to notice. His elated exclamation echoes along the coast. Seonghwa settles into it; a small assurance.
He doesn't even register that someone else is approaching him until he hears his name: "Seonghwa?"
He whips his head around so fast it feels gale-force, and watches as the stranger, skipping up the shore towards him, raises both hands in apology.
"Don't be alarmed. I'm just good with names." He hops up the final few rocks, barefoot with his skirt knotted to avoid tripping up, and comes to a halt a couple feet away. His hair swings around his neck in two thin plaits, a dark inky-blue that matches the scenery. "Ah, I'm glad you made it. We've been expecting you for a while."
"Expecting me?" Seonghwa repeats, limp. He forgets how to ask anything else.
The man hums. His eyes glitter under strong brows and long lashes, fanned across his cheeks by the fire. "And another, but yes, you." When he crouches in front of Seonghwa, the blaze silhouettes him. "Now—Do you know my name?"
Hongjoong smiles. The corners of his mouth curl up, feline. He looks young, windswept by the salt-breeze, limned in orange and red. Seonghwa feels, somehow, cold and warm, burnt and frozen, as his name swells, unbidden, on the bed of his tongue.
"That's a good start. Come, walk with me," he says, standing again to offer his hand. "Let me welcome you."
The heat reaches further than he expects. The lilt of conversation barely touches them here, down by the edge of the tide, but Seonghwa still feels warm. Four people crowd the fire pit in total, San included—Seonghwa feels dizzy with new, unfathomable information, flowing like water between his ears. Connection, as Hongjoong puts it, sitting beside him.
The pebbles beneath them feel like they've been toasted. And while the seas and skies rage on, as angry as ever, Seonghwa doesn't feel more than salt spray on his skin.
"Why me?" Seonghwa asks for the second time tonight, turning one over and over in his hand. "I mean, why am I here?"
"Why do you think you're here?"
Seonghwa blinks at him. When Hongjoong catches his confusion, he laughs, light and airy. "I ask everyone first," he explains. "What I can tell you about this place is one thing, not even something I fully understand, but what you feel about it right now is another thing entirely. You're a fresh set of eyes, after all. Why do you think you came here, Seonghwa?"
"I don't know," Seonghwa says first, and is surprised by the fish hook in the back of his throat. Something is being dragged forward; something is being unearthed. "I just…"
He glances up at him. Flickering features, gentle and waiting. He wonders if anyone has ever been able to lie to him.
"I had to do something," he whispers. He takes in a shaky breath, blinks, reiterates, "I had to, or…"
Hongjoong tilts his head. His eyes squint a little, a searching dart across Seonghwa's face, like he can read what he means, even if it's barely known to Seonghwa himself.
His whole life, he's been the wrong shape. He doesn't know when he first realised it, or when he first started wanting to escape. Childhood hope turned teenage desperation, swallowed and flattened into a plateau he can barely feel his feet against.
A truth he's never been able to look in the eye is held in the air between them. I had to. He doesn't have to end the sentence. Another tug, another sharp cut along the roof of his mouth.
"This place," Hongjoong glances around him, from the sea to the fire, "has a pull. And I didn't understand it at first. Why I washed up here, why the ocean couldn't just do its job. I was maybe too young to get it, the whole… destiny thing. I was in so much pain that it… It drowned out everything this place was telling me. It's like, I didn't realise it was holding me until I stopped resisting. That, you know… This is where I was meant to end up. Just like everyone else here. Like you, Seonghwa."
He turns his gaze back to Seonghwa. "And sometimes, when people first get here, they think this is a place to hide from what drove them away. And it's true that this is a sanctuary," he tells him softly, "but you can't hide here. Here, you exist. And that hurts, at first, when you've been trying hard not to, but…" He smiles again. It's a small, tender thing. "You exist, Seonghwa."
Seonghwa stares at him, wide-eyed and aching. He feels it with such precision, this ache, a gaping cavity under his ribs. A kind of pain that demands filling, like hunger, or loneliness. It begs to be starved of sound and cold, wants to be cushioned and compressed and taken to someone's chest. It begs for more than a roof over its head and the pre-packaged pipeline of degree–enlistment–employment, than living at home, in the same place that first flayed him open, because it's the most sensible choice. It's the hole left after all this digging, knowing none of it has ever been, or will ever be, good enough.
He just wants to be moulded to. For once in his life, he wants to be wrapped around, by water, by fire, by air from another person's mouth, exactly as he is. So much it's like his bones are bleeding.
"I'm sorry," he whispers. He can feel every muscle in his face, strung tight and quivering like a bow. He can feel everything. "I don't know why I'm…"
"It's okay," Hongjoong says. Behind them, the fire is rekindled with a gust of wind, casting strong shadows across his face. Wooyoung laughs, high and clear. The clouds roll overhead as if in echo. "It's overwhelming at first."
Seonghwa nods jerkily. A second later, his face crumples.
Every morning, he looked at a stranger in the mirror, knowing he was meant to recognise him, then fixed his shirt and went to work. It became a fact, like the weather forecast, that he would wake up again, and again, and again in the same regurgitated autopilot of his life. All his stagnant unhappiness pushes for his mouth now, renewed and acidic in its dissatisfaction, sadness, his bone-deep sense of otherness. Every single relative and classmate and teacher who made him shrink, all their names and faces– It's not until he's crying that he remembers how much he used to cry as a child, before he learnt to be quiet.
How lost that version of himself is to him now—sensitive, and alive, and unafraid of bruising. How much love he had then, before it was all wrung out of him. Thinking about him feels like mourning. He tries to reach a hand down inside of himself and pull him out, but when he gets there, the child's skin is already cold and blue.
"I know." Hongjoong touches him: a hand on the back of his neck, a thumb on the hinge of his jaw. It feels like being poured into. Something symbiotic and unfathomably unconditional.
"I don't want to go home," he chokes, past wobbling lips and hitched breaths.
"Don't you?"
Seonghwa shakes his head fiercely. Hongjoong shuffles closer like a hearth or a thick blanket.
"Home isn't the place you were born, you know. It's where you're safe," he murmurs. His fingers curl in the hair at his nape; Seonghwa whimpers and, in reaching back to hold his wrist, feels his words lower him into warm, clear water.
The place where their skin touches flowers inside his body. He can feel every heartbeat in Hongjoong's pulse, every single one of their heartbeats, like rainfall. He closes his eyes, takes a stuttered breath in, and listens to it all: the sea, the sky, the fire and laughter, the blood, the names, and the huge fallen trees. There's an estuary for him here, too. There's a place, he realises with unbearable relief, to let it all go.
"You're home, Seonghwa," Hongjoong whispers.