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Sungchan sees him again in the hazy clouds of a dream.
He stands there, dressed in the same puffer jacket Sungchan bought him with his first paycheck. It doesn’t look like much, but the unassuming black padded jacket cost almost half of his convenience store pay. Yet, Sungchan’s father wears it religiously - even if it’s a teeth-chattering winter or just a light autumn breeze.
Sungchan squints through the odd brightness. Was it always this bright at home? Should he go to the store and finally get that lightbulb his mother had been nagging him about?
His father sits at the desk with his reading glasses on, a mug of freshly brewed black coffee half-drank beside his computer. There’s a song softly playing from the speakers, a tune Sungchan knows all too well.
“Appa?” he calls out. Sungchan’s moving, but he’s not really moving either. His feet are trying to take their steps, yet Sungchan stays rooted to the ground. Sungchan wants to pull at his legs, but he doesn’t feel them. He doesn’t feel anything, actually. Sungchan can only feel his heavy thumping heart against his chest, drowning out the song pouring out of his father’s speakers. “Appa? Appa, I can’t..”
Sungchan’s father continues to stay silent. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move either, just sits there with a small smile on his face. It’s the kind of smile that he only ever reserves for Sungchan - when they’re out together on his father’s walks, when his father tries to crack a joke, when Sungchan was five and feeding his father noodles made out of tissue paper. Sungchan’s vision blurs suddenly and his father’s face starts cracking, the gaps between his skin breaking off into the familiar curved lines of a jigsaw puzzle.
Sungchan stands and watches with horror.
“Appa!” Sungchan can only scream. His throat burns for some reason. The words struggle against the tide of his laboured breathing. “Appa! Where are you going? Appa, I can’t hear you!”
Why is he just sitting there? Sungchan wants to scream. No, no. He can’t leave like this. He can’t!
“Appa, please,” he can barely see his father’s face anymore. It’s faded - all gone, all cracked, all of his skin dispersing into the air. “Please.. Please, you can’t..”
The music stops when his father is gone.
On the chair, a padded jacket sits neatly folded - like it had never been touched in the first place.
Sungchan wakes up with the eerie sensation of fear clinging onto his chest. His eyes fly wide open, jolting himself out of his uncomfortable sleep. He flinches so hard that he knocks his arm against Eunseok’s cheek, knocking him awake.
“Huh?” Eunseok’s voice is groggy as he squints his eyes through the darkness, feeling for Sungchan’s figure. “Chan-ah?”
“Fuck, fuck,” Sungchan chokes. “Shit, sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to -”
Eunseok’s fingers find the bare skin of Sungchan’s shoulders, completely soaked in sweat. He’s shaking like a leaf despite the room being ice cold (per Sungchan’s preference). “Hey, are you okay? What’s wrong, baby?”
He moves back just to flick the switch on his bedside lamp, flooding the room with light.
“Hey, hey,” Eunseok coaxes, reaching down to gather Sungchan’s trembling body into his. His arms curl around his shoulders as he pulls Sungchan into his chest, forcing Sungchan to rest his ear against Eunseok’s racing heart. “It’s okay, Sungchan. It’s fine, you’re okay. You’re here.”
Sungchan screws his eyes shut, curling up into Eunseok’s body. He fists the soft material of Eunseok’s sleep shirt as he forces himself to hold the tears back. He doesn’t want to cry, Sungchan doesn’t really want to freak Eunseok out.
Yet, there’s a ringing in his ears. For a second, Sungchan wonders if he’s hearing the fading notes of the song. He shudders against Eunseok. He tries to remember what his father was doing in his dream. Was he sitting down? Or was he standing? The padded jacket is black in colour, but Sungchan can’t remember if he still had his moustache or if he had shaved it all off like how he did after his treatment? Sungchan’s grasping at the corners of his brain. He feels like he’s scrambling all over the place, the image of his father slipping from his fingers until all Sungchan can remember is a vague lump of body in his living room.
“Sungchan-ah,” Eunseok says softly. Sungchan finally feels Eunseok’s fingers running up and down his back comfortingly. He blinks, turning to look at the clock ont the wall. He doesn’t know how long he’s spent burrowed in Eunseok’s body, but it must have been a while since Eunseok’s voice drips with drowsiness.
Sungchan stops swimming in his own head when he feels Eunseok’s knuckles against his skin. Yes, this hand is real. Eunseok is real. Eunseok is with him right now. As if Eunseok can read his mind, he rests his lips on Sungchan’s forehead. “You’re okay, yeah?”
Sungchan tightens his grip on Eunseok’s shirt. “Yeah. Yeah, sorry.”
A soft whack on his back. “Stop saying sorry. You know I hate it when you do that. What do you need to be sorry for?”
Sungchan swallows heavily. “I can’t help it. I’m still sorry.”
“I won’t accept the apology then,” Eunseok purses his lips. “You have nothing to be sorry about so it’s going straight into the apology bin.”
Sungchan manages a small chuckle. “Apology bin?”
“Yeah, and it’s full just from you.”
Sungchan feels his breathing fall in tandem with the steady beats of Eunseok’s heart.
“He came to see me again.”
Eunseok hums. “I figured it was him.”
“I don’t remember anything,” Sungchan’s voice shakes when he speaks. “I don’t… He didn’t speak.”
“Does he usually say something?”
“I think so? Remember last year? When we won the small lottery prize because he told us the 4 winning numbers?”
Eunseok does remember. It was just a week past Chuseok, when Sungchan’s father strolled into his dreams and uttered a repeated string of numbers that ended up winning them $5000 in their local small scale lottery.
“We ate so good for two months,” Eunseok reminisces. Good is an understatement. They ordered all kinds of food through delivery apps, not caring how much anything cost. There’s also the fact that they shopped at Erewhon and bought Hailey Bieber smoothies at least three times a week. “So no lottery numbers tonight then?”
Sungchan shakes his head slowly.
“He was quiet. He just stared at me, I think.”
Eunseok hums again. “Maybe he just wanted to see you.”
Sungchan shuts his eyes tightly again. He tries to remember what numbers his father uttered to him a year ago.
When he comes up empty, Sungchan feels his heart drop to his feet.
No, there’s no way. Sungchan forces his body to clench into himself, screwing his eyes shut just so he can find enough silence in their room to seek out his father’s voice.
Why does Sungchan keep blanking?
“Fuck,” Sungchan mumbles hoarsely. “Fuck, I think I forgot what he sounds like.”
Sungchan searches his brain - he runs through the corridors of his mind, searches through every nook and cranny of his head - he finds nothing. Can’t find the low timbre of his father’s voice. Can’t find the tunes he used to sing.
“How do you forget your father’s voice?” Sunghcan asks, more to himself than anyone else. “He was alive for the first eighteen years of my life and now - I just can’t remember what he sounds like?”
It’s quiet for a very long time. Eunseok watches carefully as Sungchan’s chest rises up and down steadily, but it doesn’t take long for his eyes to start glassing over with unshed tears. Eunseok’s heart drops all the way to his stomach. He shuffles down a little bit on the bed so that he’s eye to eye with his boyfriend. When he reaches a hand up to gently caress Sungchan’s cheekbone, his thumb meets a stray tear rolling down Sungchan’s cheek.
“Oh, baby,” Eunseok mumbles. He lets Sungchan cry, just patting his back as the sobs fail to stifle. “My baby, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
It’s all too familiar - holding Sungchan close to his chest, wiping his tears away, letting him soak Eunseok’s shirt, mumbling soothing things into his hair, trying desperately to anchor down a Sungchan that feels lightyears away when he’s submerged in his grief.
Eunseok remembers the nights where he would just sit quietly with a crying Sungchan, watching as he tears pieces of tissues into tiny bits and pieces, until it’s just a pile of fluff in Sungchan’s lap that Eunseok has to clean up. Some nights, Sungchan would just stay huddled up in his bed for hours on end, not uttering a single word. He wouldn’t say anything, but Eunseok always knew what he needed.
Eunseok never got to meet Sungchan’s father - he passed away well before they even met, but Sungchan was always so good at holding himself together in front of all their friends that Eunseok never realised just how deeply his father’s death ate at him. Sungchan gets so caught up in his own guilt that he made Eunseok swear not to speak about it ever again, but he first cracked when Eunseok brought him home to his family.
All it took was one family dinner with Eunseok’s incredibly kind parents and bratty yet endearing siblings for Sungchan to break. Everything came flooding out of him like an overdue tsunami. Each wave hit both him and Eunseok harder and harder each time, until Sungchan was left a heaving mess, his eyes staring up at the ceiling with nothing in them.
Then, slowly - Eunseok coaxed it out of him. When he stopped denying that Sungchan’s grief was lifting with every heavy conversation they shared, Eunseok held his hand and followed him to a psychiatrist.
It got better, until it didn’t. Sungchan’s therapist had prepared Eunseok for it, telling him that healing was never meant to be a linear journey. Eunseok understands, even without anybody telling him.
And true to every promise Eunseok whispers to Sungchan late at night, he stays. He stays and he stands his ground and he holds Sungchan close to him on nights where nothing feels real.
“I don’t want to forget him.”
Sungchan breaks the quiet first. He opens his eyes, his wet eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks.
“You won’t,” Eunseok reassures gently. He traces his fingers up to Sungchan’s nose bridge, pinching at it lightly. “See? This is your father’s nose.”
His fingers move over his skin, stopping just below his eyes. “These are your father’s eyes.”
The photo in Sungchan’s wallet, one that he thinks nobody knows about. Eunseok had stumbled upon it one night when he was trying to order them some Chinese food. Sungchan had hollered over his shoulder to get his credit card from his wallet, busying himself in the bedroom as he put away some folded laundry. It was tucked into the same pocket as Sungchan’s Mastercard - and that was the first and only time Eunseok had ever seen Sungchan’s father.
It’s no question that Sungchan is his father’s son - they share the same doe-eyes and the same nose. Sungchan’s father might have been older then, but he was definitely younger in the photo, holding onto a baby Sungchan in his arms.
“Remember the playlist I first made for you?”
Sungchan does remember, because his eyes immediately widen at the mention.
“All the songs your dad used to listen to, right?”
He nods quietly. “Yeah. Every morning when I was still a kid.”
“Mhm,” Eunseok hums encouragingly. “You can find your dad in everything, baby. In your own face, in the songs you listen to every day. As long as you live and breathe, he’ll always be here.”
Sungchan sighs, closing his eyes again as he places a hand over the one under his eye. He interlocks their fingers before bringing it back down, laying it softly between their heads. “I know. Thank you, Seok-ah.”
“No need to thank me, Chan-ah, you know that,” Eunseok smiles a little, pressing one more kiss onto the corner of Sungchan’s mouth. “Let’s go back to sleep, okay? Want me to keep rubbing your back?”
Sungchan’s eyes get teary again, but Eunseok guesses it’s a good kind of teary since a cute little smile tugs at his lips. “Yes, please.”
When they wake up again the next morning, Sungchan’s eyes are puffy. Eunseok kisses them at the breakfast table as he hands Sungchan a towel wrapped around a bag of frozen corn. There’s a pot of seaweed soup on the table, two bowls of freshly cooked rice placed beside each other.
Sungchan frowns slightly at the pot. “How.. How did you..?”
“You told me on our first date,” Eunseok answers pensively. “You said that your dad would cook seaweed soup for you whenever your mum wasn’t around.”’
Sungchan stares at it harder. “But I told you it always tasted like shit.”
“I know. You know I’d rather die than feed you something that wasn’t edible, right?”
Eunseok really tried. He even called up his mother at six in the morning to ask for her recipe and he already feels so full from all of the soup he’s eaten just by him tasting.
For a second, Eunseok is afraid that Sungchan is going to burst into tears again.
Instead, he smiles at Eunseok, just as warm as the soup in front of them. He picks up the spoon and slowly starts eating.