Archive of Our Own

Do not go gentle into that good night;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

PART I 
WHAT A WASTE OF ARMY DREAMERS

Most times, Soobin wonders. 

How people move on with their lives as the world speeds by. One breath, one step, one blink at a time. How people deal with the fact of being fleeting creatures in an ever-moving world. Living in a world with an amnesiac God. Things are slipping. Lights flashing. Cracks through the mica, little threads of something sublime. I promise my flesh is all mine. I promise. I swear. Believe me. 

Believe me when I say… we’ll reach across the sky and pluck the sun out of the tree we cannot see. Then we’ll swallow it whole, white hot lava-rind and flesh of fire. That is how we will be whole. That is how we will make sense, how we shall turn ourselves into empty streaks of dead light. And snatches of memory. 

… Happy December Fools, fuckers. He’s just joking. 

He mostly wonders about how people find the fucking time to ponder existential horrors. 

Between classes and assignments and exams and the shift down at the café and his (fake) friends, he hardly had the time to stand and stare at the pretty wooden decorations he saw hanging at the antique shop the other day. He had to commit the red curves of the butterflies’ heavy wings to memory, and move right along the jammed asphalt, melting under teeth of snow. 

He’s still only an English major, though. He can dissect The Necklace down to its pearls and bones, can recite entire passages from Untouchable Spring while hanging upside-down, has a copy of The Secret History so heavily battered and annotated people mistake it for a bag of mutilated flesh whenever he sets it down next to him on the bus. And Little Women, can never forget that one. (Wooden halls and seasalt shins, growing up and growing apart and growing together. All the things Soobin longed for when he was a child, shut up in a stone house with only bookshelves for company. Empty streaks of dead light and snatches of memory.) 

But that’s nothing compared to whatever the hell Taehyun does in his basement. There are always reports of minor explosions down there. And on one memorable one, a major one. Kai says he cooks meth down there, but Soobin has long since learnt never to believe Kai. (“Taehyun, I swear on all hells, if you’re trying to bring the plant back to life—” is a sentence Soobin has heard flower from Huening Kai’s mouth, so he can hardly be blamed.) Hell, that’s still nothing compared to the elaborate projects Beomgyu complains to him about over bowls of ramyeon, entire sentences like The fucking corolla fell apart, hyung, that absolute nutter Heeseung superglued it back together and we just prayed old Cha wouldn’t notice or questions like Hear me out, boiled cockroaches or raw cockroaches? 

Soobin likes to think only Kai is as useless at college-ing as he is. They stay up until dawn arguing over the finer plot points of the Hidden Inventory Arc and then pass out, shoulders to ribs to knees pressed together. He has quietly watched opaque blocks of orange sunlight light up Kai’s cheekbones and then dissolve into dead blue light. He has watched him wax and wane. From the (two fingers pressed to the left side of his chest) You don’t know how much it hurts right here right to the (palm pressed over his cardiac plexus) I feel like there’s a sun growing inside me, hyung. I feel so happy I could be light itself. 

Which is what brings him to today. 

“Hyung,” Kai begins, toying with a ziplock bag of pink glitter. Soobin thinks it’s Beomgyu’s. 

“No,” Soobin denies flatly, spinning in the spinny chair Kai and Taehyun own. 

Kai’s mouth falls open in offence. “You didn’t even hear what I had to say.” 

“You’re going to ask me if cutting holes in the ziplock bag and then boomeranging it across the commons courtyard from the third-floor lab would be a fun idea. No. No, it wouldn’t be.” 

The silence stretches thick, quivering at the edges with defeated resignation masquerading as annoyance. Like an alien in a trench coat attempting to speak Welsh, like the sleeves of Soobin’s hoodie stretching down to Yeonjun’s pink knuckles. (But they don’t talk about that.)

Finally, “Fuck you, what if that wasn’t what I had to say?” 

Soobin spins harder, scuffing his heels against the floor. It’s mildly disorienting, the pale yellow walls blurring to near nothing. “I do not concern myself with the hypothetical.” 

Kai smiles that crocodile’s smile of his. The one that paints in glitter glue, I know you’re lying. 

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re an overthinker.” 

Soobin rolls his eyes. “Bold of you to assume I care what you think.” 

Kai does this empathetic hand-gesture-thingy where he stretches his fingers like the legs of a spider and holds them out in front of his heart like he’s presenting something rare. (Like Jordan bringing the first pineapple to England, Soobin would say. Like that scene from The Lion King, Beomgyu would say.) “See, hyung,” he begins, and Soobin immediately closes his eyes to the dizziness and splatters of pictures on the spinning yellow, “that sentence is inherently rooted in overthinking. You’re telling yourself you don’t care what I think because you have this idea in your head about the picture you have to paint.” 

Soobin cracks open one eye, burning the soles of his feet on the floor to slow down. The world settles back into order, the furniture and the flowers wiggling around in Soobin’s spinning vision to fit into their own definitions. “I feel like that says more about you than me.” 

Kai throws his hands up in the air. “Exhibit A!” 

Soobin laughs, tired and dull. He shouldn’t have spun around. Something is crawling up his oesophagus like a mote of dust stuck inside a grasshopper’s tracheal tubes. The sunset splatters itself through the translucent glass of the window, the shifting shadow of the slender orange tree reaching out to caress the pictures on the wall. Kai laughs with him, because that’s what he does. Sees a speck of vulnerability and makes it something shared, something whole. 

Winter holidays are soon. Term is nearly over, only a week left. 

“Say, hyung…” Kai begins, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. Soobin knows he won’t open them any time soon. “What the hell is Taehyun doing right now?” 

Soobin rolls the chair forward and bangs his forehead against the desk. There’s all sorts of clutter on it—from hastily stoppered-up pots of ink to empty chewing gum wrappers to magazines about house plants to dying roses in copper pitchers. Soobin smacks his head so hard a few dried petals fall right off the rose. “How would I know? Don’t you two share a conscience or something?” 

Kai’s nose wrinkles, deep-set lines marring his face, off-set in golden hour. “We don’t.” 

“Could’ve fooled me.” 

Kai’s phone goes ding! He picks it up and unlocks it without opening his eyes, only cracking them open to read whatever message he’s just gotten. Soobin idly circles a dried spot of midnight blue ink on the desk. God knows what the two of them do with fucking quills. 

Kai’s sunshine laugh paints itself over Soobin’s ribs. “Ah, hyung, you’re in for a bad time tonight.” He laughs again, folding his long legs over and burrowing under the blankets. “Taehyun invited Yeonjun-hyung because they ran into each other in the parking lot. They’re about… seventy-six seconds from bursting in through the door.” 

Soobin doesn’t respond. He bangs his head against the desk one last time, dry rose petals catching in his hair, and doesn’t respond. 

He can hear the frown in Kai’s voice. “I really wish you’d tell me what the deal is with you and Yeonjun-hyung. You have the same best friends, how can you hate each other? Like, it’s nearly impressive. How you’ve managed to abhor each other’s skins while routinely going through the same roster of friends and parties.” 

Soobin really shouldn’t rise to the bait. He really shouldn’t. “Oh, I don’t know, Kai-yah. I think you’d be better off asking him.” 

“Oh, dishonour upon your cow. You’re both the same. Hyung said the exact same thing.” 

Soobin opens his mouth to retort— 

But apparently Soobin’s seventy-six seconds of peace are up, because there’s one perfunctory knock on the door before it swings open. 

Shafts of sunlight light up dust particles like lanterns through an August sky, light up Yeonjun’s face when he steps in through the door, starkiller grin on lips painted red like a beating heart. Taehyun steps in after him, quietly shutting the door. 

Kai frowns, sitting back up. “Hi, hi. Where’s Beomgyu-hyung?” 

Yeonjun snorts, a delicate hand coming up to hide his mouth. Soobin wants to rip it away and scream Let me see you. Soobin wants to break his nose and watch the blood drip onto his already red lips. “Old man Cha found out he plagiarised his entire biochem end-of-term from a 1979 Cambridge paper. He’s currently retaking the exam in the old science building. Can you imagine? Alone amidst dusty ass broken beakers and decades-old lizard brains or some shit, retaking an exam with only your crackpot professor for company?” 

Soobin’s eyebrows rise up. “Goddamn. That’s brutal.” 

Yeonjun sets down his bags on the bed by Kai’s bony knees. “Why thank you, Captain Obvious.” 

Distantly, Soobin hears Taehyun mutter Here we go again but it’s all lost when the blood rushes straight to his head. “I guess things are just never obvious enough for you, hyung.” 

Yeonjun’s sharp eyes narrow, overgrown hair peeking out from behind his ears in such a becoming way it makes Soobin sick. It’s such a shame he’s so pretty. Really, truly, such a shame when his lips bitten-red and cracked part in a sneer. “What, like you could know a sign if it slapped you in the face and told you you were bearing its child?” He sighs theatrically, a shuttered, affected little thing that makes Soobin want to, want to, want to, “If you could, maybe you would’ve—” 

Taehyun waves a hand between them. “All right,” he says cheerfully, pocketing his phone. “That’s enough footage for today. You two are officially banned from talking to each other.” 

Soobin opens his mouth to protest but Yeonjun’s already talking to Kai, laughing and smiling like their little spat never happened at all. All unaffected, like Soobin is a child holding a tantrum. But Soobin knows. He sees the strain around his eyes, the slight way they’re wider than normal like he’s fighting to keep cheerful, sees how he’s physically forcing the syllables of laughter out his throat like he’s coughing up blood.

It makes Soobin understand the appeal of meditation, truly. This fake cheerfulness. 

(His blood sings in his veins. High and tinny. Sings of a light that never fades, a rush like stepping out into the first snow barefoot and red-nosed with someone laughing by your side.) 

“Wait, what?” Soobin’s eyebrows furrow abruptly. “Footage for what?” 

He sees Taehyun and Kai do their creepy telepathy thing. “Nothing,” they say at the same time, smiling, teeth cracked in sugar-stained grins like guilty old Johnny. 

Soobin’s gaze snaps to Yeonjun’s. For a split second, he considers asking, Do you know what the hell they’re talking about? but bites his tongue at the last second. 

Because that’s not how they work. They yell at each other and then shelve the aching mouths behind the coffee beans up on the highest shelf, where no one can reach. Soobin has listened to Yeonjun happily twittering on about Carmen Kass, high as a kite, and told him he got the video from Beomgyu. But they don’t have things. They don’t ask something as esoteric as concerning the Kai-and-Taehyun entity, something as personal as concerning them. 

Yeonjun glares at him once before looking away. 

Soobin groans, screwing his eyes shut tight. Maybe he really is an overthinker. 

₊ ⊹

Soobin is on his sixth packet of chips by the time Beomgyu barrels in through the door, swearing up a storm. His bleary mind thinks Sing me like a sailor song and he can feel Yeonjun’s birdlike eyes on the side of his face, always there. A pomegranate stain on white fabric, like the untrimmed lace curtains of his childhood, casting coarse shadows of sunlight on his textbooks. 

“Fuck old man Cha,” Beomgyu groans, sinking right to the carpet and settling there like a glow-worm. “All my homies hate old man Cha.” 

This gets mixed responses. Kai shrugs (“Oh, I don’t know, he gives me kimbap whenever he sees me and it’s really good”), Yeonjun smiles the smile he reserves for Beomgyu and Beomgyu alone, Taehyun rolls his eyes (“Call me your homie again and they’ll find your body in pieces across the country”). Soobin stuffs the last oversalted potato chip into his mouth and throws the empty packet at Beomgyu’s head. 

Beomgyu wails pitifully when it makes contact with his frazzled hair. Yeonjun benignly stretches out his foot and nudges the packet further into Beomgyu’s face with his socked toes. 

“Let’s run away,” Kai sighs dreamily, head in Yeonjun’s lap. 

“Where,” Taehyun deadpans, frowning down at his hexagonal Rubik’s cube. 

“The sea,” Yeonjun pipes up, eyes on the dusty ceiling fan, unseeing. “I haven’t been in so long.” 

“Yes,” Beomgyu agrees into the Persian weaving pattern, vigorously nodding his head and hissing when the carpet burns his nose. “Take me to the sea and hold my head underwater until I bloat up with salt like those fuckass lizard brains Cha was using as paperweights.” 

“See!” Yeonjun rounds on Soobin, triumphant. “I told you there’d be lizard brains!” 

Soobin pulls a face. “When did I ever disagree?” 

“You thought about it.” 

“Because you know me so well.” 

“Well, I know you’re a prick, so—” 

“Everyone, shut the fuck up before I throw up,” Beomgyu groans into the carpet. 

Yeonjun and Soobin explode simultaneously. “It’s his fault—” 

They cut off, glaring at each other when they realise they’re saying the same thing. The niggling little voice in Soobin’s head is whining He copied me! but even his petty ass doesn’t go to such lengths. The sun sets on Yeonjun’s face, lighting up his open mouth like a spotlight and Soobin contents himself with visions of setting his hair on fire. 

“I’m ashamed to know you two,” Taehyun says serendipitously. 

“Oh, woe is me,” Soobin replies, stealing the last bit of mayonnaise. 

“The first time that you touched me,” Yeonjun intones drily, his perpetually tired voice scratchy like bones stretching beneath skin. When Soobin turns on him blankly, he stiffens up in defence. “What, they’re song lyrics. You, of all people, would know.” 

“No one mention Call Me By Your Name in front of me,” moans Beomgyu’s voice from the floor. “I’m this close to showing my cerebral cortex the riveting wonders of that piss yellow wall.” 

“First of all,” Kai interrupts, turning stone-cold stern as he always does when someone insults the colour of his walls. “They’re Daisy Yellow—” 

“—#F8DC75,” Taehyun gets in, still fiddling with the Rubik’s cube. 

“Yes, thank you, love, and second. If any of your blood gets on my walls that I painted and I can’t get it out, you’d better be thankful your cerebral cortex is already pulp splatter.” Kai smiles, eyes crinkling. “Hypothetically.” 

Yeonjun doesn’t hear a single word, reaching over his head and switching on the lamp by the bed without looking. The bedroom lights up like a cloud shot through with sun. “Hmm. Does anyone else know that the Queen of Persia once mistook Hephaestion for Alexander? Then, when she tried to rectify her mistake, Alexander just forgave her and said that this man too was Alexander. Like, he literally called Hephaestion by his name. And a song written for a movie named Call Me By Your fucking Name references them. Like. I— I have no words left.” 

Silence settles, singed at the edges with incredulity.

“What the hell,” Beomgyu comments delicately, which pretty much sums it up. 

“Thanks!” Yeonjun chirps brightly. He really is like a bird, Soobin can’t help but think. Eyes wide and shiny, mouth sharp like the point of a beak, so light and airy it’s as if he truly does have hollow bones. “I read Genius annotations at 2 AM and cry.” 

Soobin isn’t even surprised anymore. He woke up to two texts from Yeonjun today, going hear me out let’s stick pink glitter up his ass and oh shit wrong number i meant let’s make the sunset through the mountains that looks like an asscrack shiny with glitter I am So Mortified. (Don’t ask.) 

So he says the only thing he can. “All of you have some serious issues.” 

Yeonjun nods. “You, mostly.” 

“Oh, why you—” 

“Don’t you all agree that I deserve some pho from the hole-in-the-wall?” Beomgyu interrupts with no inconsiderable amount of risk to his status as alive-and-breathing when Yeonjun looks down at him with fire pouring out his flared nostrils at being interrupted. “You do. All of you do, my pretty hyungs and dongsaengs. Please, someone get me my pho order. I am begging on my knees. … Please don’t picture that.” 

Apparently the warning was too late. “Oh, ew,” Kai says in distress, “oh, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew.” 

“All of you belong in mental asylums. All of you are circus clowns. All of you need to be studied in a lab,” Taehyun says lovingly. He places his solved Rubik’s cube on a precarious perch on the goddamn candelabra that he and Kai own for some mysterious, unspecified reason. “Soobin-hyung, come get Thing 1’s pho with me.” 

Bang. More petals fall off the shrivelled roses. 

“Oh, look,” Yeonjun’s faint voice says. “He’s like a broken TV. Give it a good few smacks and it starts running again. You can do it, darling, bring it down harder and maybe you’ll develop a competent thinking capacity.” 

“You would know how to fix a broken TV, wouldn’t you,” Soobin says crossly, standing up and snatching his jacket from the hooks on the wall. They’re carved like butterfly wings, the signature CBG etched onto their grooves. “Since you’re prehistoric and all that.” 

“Hey, Yeonjun-hyung,” Taehyun’s voice interrupts again, this time from under the covers, head on Kai’s pillow. “Go get Thing 1’s pho with Soobin-hyung. My bed has bound me down.” 

Kai’s head moves out of Yeonjun’s lap with a speed that’s impressive. Taehyun’s hand jabs at the small of Yeonjun’s back so incessantly that he’s forced to get up, swearing. Beomgyu screams out all his woes into the carpet, unaware. Soobin would find it funny if he wasn’t feeling like defenestrating into a moshpit of glass shards and salt and lemonade. 

“What the fuck,” Yeonjun complains, hands on his hips, lips pursed. For all that he denies the stereotypical Asian mother role of the group, this is not helping his case. “Why him and me.” 

“Do you think Beomgyu is in any state to walk the four blocks to the hole-in-the-wall? Do you think me and Kai are about to get up from under the covers when it’s December?” 

“Just make him get the pho alone,” Yeonjun says, grabbing his scarf off the floor. (He’d thrown it over Soobin’s jacket when he came in. It flopped sadly to the ground when Soobin snatched his jacket out from under. Sure, he’d considered picking it up, but they don’t work like that.) 

“Why?” Kai’s voice pipes up, muffled under Taehyun’s hair. “Because you’re getting your scarf with all the intentions of letting him walk the perilous four blocks alone?” 

Soobin pauses on his way to the door, fully expecting to have to go alone. He’d already deliberately erased Beomgyu’s pho order from his brain to get it wrong. He looks back, the words dying in his throat. Because this is what he sees: 

Beomgyu, by all accounts, dead on the floor. Kai and Taehyun watching something on Kai’s phone, expletives blaring. Yeonjun, wrapping a red scarf around his neck, and no, that’s not the problem. The problem is his fingers bitten pink and shaking from the cold, fumbling uselessly with the wool. The problem is his pouting mouth, frustration etched in the furrow of his brow. 

Soobin is moving before he realises he is. He slaps Yeonjun’s trembling hands away and winds the scarf securely around the pale column of his throat himself, deftly tying the knot he’s seen him wear before. He flicks the jut of Yeonjun’s jaw for good measure, stepping back.

“If this is what happens to you when you’re still inside,” Soobin hears himself say as though from far away, vision narrowing down to the irritated flare in Yeonjun’s eyes, the one that hates being made a spectacle of, “maybe you should stay here.” 

Yeonjun doesn’t reply, inhaling once and not letting go. 

Soobin turns away. “Honestly, it’s just pho. Not to mention, Choi Beomgyu’s. Don’t be stubborn.” 

The problem is the footsteps he nears padding behind him, their cadence like they’re not touching the ground at all. Flying, weightless, heavy butterfly wings carved of glass. Like a dancer’s. The problem is Yeonjun’s voice, soft suddenly. Like his heart has crumpled to snow. “Fuck off. It’s just a little cold inside.” 

The door shuts behind them with a click. 

“... Holy shit, Kai, you got that on camera, right?”

₊ ⊹

They walk the four blocks in silence. Soobin listens to the scuff of Yeonjun’s shoes beside his on the frozen asphalt and can’t help but feel like something is about to happen, like you’ve accidentally solved a hexagonal Rubik’s cube, like you’ve split apart an atom. Like you’re waiting on the edge of letting someone matter. 

Yeonjun tells the young girl behind the counter Beomgyu’s order. And after a moment, everyone else’s. Soobin stands by quietly, thinking. Yeonjun’s nose is pink and his eyes are shiny. His lips are parched like alien fault lines reaching through soil. They halve the bill after having a stranger flip a coin. (Yeonjun, heads. Soobin, tails. They halve it because the coin went up in the air, a flash of copper, and was never found again.) Soobin nearly trips over his shoelaces on the slick sidewalk and says, Fuck, you’re beautiful. 

They walk the four blocks back in silence. Soobin listens to the scuff of Yeonjun’s shoes beside his on the frozen asphalt and can’t help but feel like something is about to happen, like you’ve accidentally mixed together a colour that didn’t exist before, like you’ve plucked a star out the sky. Like you’re holding your fingers up to the heat of someone’s gaze and feeling something spark.  

₊ ⊹

By the time they get back, Beomgyu is squished onto the bed between Taehyun and Kai. The smell of food immediately makes their heads turn up, smiles lighting up their faces. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that, Soobin thinks begrudgingly. He’s more glad he knows these idiots than he can ever care enough to admit. (Excluding Yeonjun. Definitely.) 

While Yeonjun and Beomgyu take out the bags and pretend not to steal portions from everyone, Soobin turns to Taehyun and Kai, settling cross-legged on the bed with the frayed old blanket thrown over his lap. Good God, he hadn’t realised how cold he was until his ribs stopped shivering. He places his frozen hands above his mouth and blows air into them, rubbing them together before just giving up, lacing his fingers and shoving them under the blanket. 

Yeonjun melts onto the spinny chair like his spinal cord has turned to water, discoloured hands plush around a maroon ceramic bowl he’s sure Kai made that one time he joined a pottery class. He’s the only one who doesn’t eat straight from the take-out container, for reasons that were never clear to Soobin. Beomgyu sits on the carpet, leaning back against the bed-frame, clutching the take-out container like it’s his last saving grace. 

Which means Soobin, Taehyun and Kai play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets up and gets theirs. Kai loses. He doesn’t seem to mind all that much, Cheshire grin never once dimming, even as a full-body shiver wracks through him the second he gets out. It makes Soobin suspect something.  

But whatever. The pho is always undercooked. That’s why it’s the best. 

“Hyungs, oh my God,” Beomgyu gets out around a mouthful of pho. His cheeks puff up with the effort of holding it all in and Soobin would’ve taken a picture if he wasn’t half-dead. “You won’t believe what we found on the old USB!” He pauses for dramatic effect, eyes imploring. Yeonjun indulges him, asking what. “We found the old audio files from the interviews! You know, the ones we forced you and Soobin to take after we found out you had History with a capital H.” 

A speck of soup sprays from Soobin’s mouth. “You made him take one too?”  

Yeonjun’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, face twisted like he’s witnessing the most idiotic spectacle of time immemorial. “Don’t talk while chewing, you brutes. And what the fuck. I nearly forgot about them, oh my God. When did we record them? 2021?” 

“2021,” Taehyun confirms, container placed neatly on the bedside table, with Kai’s stacked on top. “We didn’t tell you we were making both of you take the interviews at the time. We thought it’d be a fun graduation surprise, like, oh hey, remember all this shit you said about the other, well, it’s back to bite you in the ass, but, well. You three are leaving next year. It’s making me restless to get all the things I’ve always wanted to do done. So here. You have no choice.” 

“Don’t spill blood over my Daisy Yellow walls,” Kai chimes in, which is always comforting. 

Choi Yeonjun, on Choi Soobin 

Date Filmed: 2021-14-04 

BEOMGYU: Hi, hi, hi, Yeonjun-hyung, the hate of my life, my worstie. Thank you for agreeing to this, I was so sure you’d just brush me off. 

YEONJUN: Don’t be so full of yourself. I only agreed to free food, not you. 

BEOMGYU: Ouch? Improve your bedside manner, Yeonjunnie. 

YEONJUN: Choi Beomgyu, I’ll have you know you’re in optimal slapping distance. My palm is one wrong comment away from high-fiving your face. And you know how hard I hit. 

BEOMGYU: [Coughing] Uh, yes, of course. [A sound like paper rustling] Well, here are my questions— 

YEONJUN: [Laughing] Oh, you loser, you actually fucking wrote down— 

Click. 

Q. Go on, then, tell us. 

A. That’s not a question. 

Q. Ugh, fine. Tell us why Soobin hates your guts and why you hate him back. 

A. That’s still not a question, you know. That’s an imperative. And one that I’m not willing to answer in graphic detail, it involves a lot of snot and crying and breaking-of-hearts. … Uh. That was a joke, I’ve just realised this audio could be used against me, let me just clear things up. No, whoever from the future Beomgyu is forcing this upon, me and Choi Soobin are not exes. We met in highschool, which I think makes us the only people in the group to not have met in college, but anyway, uh. Yeah, no, why does he hate me? The long and short of it is that he thinks I scammed him once in senior year, which I did not. [His voice moves closer to the mic] Here, I’ll have you know, I can see the future because I was bored once in sophomore year. And our darling Soobin-ah didn’t like the reading I gave him. That’s it. 

Q. What was this “reading” Choi Soobin so disliked? 

A. I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep that between me and him. It’s a… it’s a little embarrassing in hindsight but I’m taking that with me to the grave. … Oh, don’t look at me like that. Put the puppy dog eyes away right this instant, Choi Beomgyu. … Oh, fuck you. You can have a hint. [His voice moves closer again] It was very homosexual. 

Q. Gasp, is Soobin-hyung homophobic? 

A. … Did you just say “gasp” out loud? God, you’re so gay. And no, he isn’t homophobic. He’s just Yeonjunphobic, which checks out. He never liked me much in highschool either. 

Q. Is there highschool drama you’re keeping from us? 

A. No. Truly, cross my heart. He was in the year below mine, we never had any reason to interact. He was mostly just the Weeb™ in highschool. [Laughs] I remember he had dark circles all the time from staying up late reading mangas. He had these ugly glasses, too, they made him look like a fly. Actually, remind me to go get Kim Chaewon’s yearbook next time I go home, he was in her year, you will not believe your eyes. 

Q. Seems like you think back quite fondly on those years. What did you think of Choi Soobin while you were still in school? 

A. Hmm. That’s a weird one. I told you, he was my junior. We had no reason to interact, nor were we part of the same clubs or anything like that. I didn’t really know him, I just knew of him. [Earrings clack, like the wearer is shrugging] I don’t know, he was cute, I guess? He was Class Captain for all the three years I saw him, and apparently Student Prez in his senior year. [Laughs] What, why are you pouting, am I not answering your questions the way you wanted me to? I’m so sorry, Gyubear, I have no pining, no dramatic rejection to prom, secretly-I-loved-him stories. I just… didn’t have a single reason to like him or dislike him. He was just there. 

Q. Really? Like, not a single incident aside from the fortune telling? 

A. Nope. … Hmm, there was the time he came and asked me for help remembering his lines for the school play he was being forced to participate in. There, that’s an incident. The great Choi Soobin asking for help. [Sighs] For fuck’s sake, Gyu, stop wiggling your eyebrows, nothing fucking happened. I stayed behind in the gym and we sat there on the bleachers, speaking to empty air. There’s your juicy highschool romance that ended in flames. 

Q. Well, you obviously graduated before him. How did you feel when you ran into him on campus? Actually, oh my God, how did you run into him here? 

A. Yep, batch of 2018. He was 2019, but I took a gap year. And apparently it’s a small world, because I walk in during freshman orientation, and the first person I see is him, all seventy-three inches of him, hanging a few heads taller than the local populace. I hadn’t seen him in a year but I recognised him instantly. He hadn’t changed all that much, really, he’d just— Anyway. Yeah. I was just shocked, really. … I was kind of excited, I guess. To see a familiar face in an unfamiliar city, but, you know. Dear future listener, I’m currently doing jazz hands. Do with that what you will. But honestly, I didn’t even fucking remember that goddamn fortune telling debacle, but apparently, he did. [Laughs] Oh God, get this, I went over to say hi, right, and he just said “you.” And ran in the other direction. The next time we met was through you, Beomgyu. You surely remember. 

Q. That’s it? Like, genuinely? Kai is currently in disbelief. 

A. Yes, that’s it. I don’t know why you expected drama. 

Q. Both of you act like bitchy old lovers around each other, that’s why. … Are you really, really, really sure you can’t tell us about the reading? 

A. Positive. Maybe you’d have better luck asking him. … You are asking him to do an interview, too, right? 

Q. Oh, uh, osteoporosis. 

BEOMGYU: Thank you for this, hyung, it’s actually a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. I mean, I’m still disappointed with the lack of failed romance, but. This works. 

YEONJUN: I’m so glad your nosy ass is satisfied. Now, pay up. 

Click. 

Choi Soobin, on Choi Yeonjun 

Date Filmed: 2021-14-04 

BEOMGYU: Soobin, my life’s greatest blessing— 

SOOBIN: Yeah, yeah, get on with it. 

BEOMGYU: Asshole. 

Click.

Q. Go on, then, tell us. 

A. Tell you? Tell you what? A piece of my mind? Here: Drown and die. 

Q. Who pissed in your Froot Loops this morning? 

A. Not a valid question. 

Q. Wasn’t even a fucking— Oh, I hate you. Okay, no, deep breaths. Tell me about how you and hyung met. 

A. This lowkey sounds like those weird interviews people call social experiments, all How did you meet your first love and all that. Okay, hmm. I’ve known him for far longer than anyone should, actually. Highschool, could’ve been middle school for all I care. But I think it was highschool. I’d transferred to the one he went to in freshman year, he was in sophomore. I think? 

Q. Could you tell me what he was like in highschool? To you? 

A. [Laughs] That’s a loaded question. What was Choi Yeonjun not? Marching band, resident choreographer, fucking designed that one miniature space-shuttle for his graduation. You knew him, all right? Once you walked in through the doors, there was just this boy with bubblegum pink hair and you just knew the entire school revolved around him. Like, like he was the fucking sun to our heliocentric school. Half the teachers loved him and half of them wanted him expelled. It was a weird time to go to highschool. All of it was like watching Choi Yeonjun repeatedly crash a wedding with the same guests everyday and gaslight them into thinking they’d never met him before. … Yes, that’s exactly what it was like. 

Q. What was he to you? 

A. … There’s no one answer to that question. Next. 

Q. Your brain needs to be studied in a lab. Anyway. Go on, tell us why you hate him. 

A. I don’t— ugh, wait, I kind of do. What the hell. I don’t hate him. There’s just… a principle to all things, you know? Am I making any sense? Well, I will. The long and short of it, he scammed me during junior year. [Laughs] He had this shady fortune telling business going all throughout the years we overlapped. It was funny until goddamn Kim Chaewon made me go for a reading myself. And oh, sure, hyung’ll tell you he didn’t scam me because there’s no way what he said could ever be proved untrue, but here. I’ll fucking tell you. It’s untrue. Because I know. I would know. And it’s not—it’s not like I’m mad he scammed me or anything, you gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but. [Sighs] I don’t know. You just… you need some goddamn principles. 

Q. Well, what the fuck, tell us what he told you? 

A. Uh, no. We’re taking that to the grave, thanks. 

Q. You’re no fun. What about now? I mean, what do you feel now? 

A. [A long pause] What do you mean? What would have changed? His hair is back to black, he’s gotten more annoying, he’s apparently put the fortune telling in the past. But he’s still the sunbae from highschool. He’s still Choi Yeonjun. Now please don’t ask me to define Choi Yeonjun. 

Q. Seriously, this is lowkey dry. Can’t you spill some tea? 

A. Tea? There’s no tea to spill because we aren’t in fact old lovers who ended up in flames. Why can’t a person hate someone without it having been something else before? Like, no, he did not trample my heart to pieces and spit on it to have me dislike him, I do it just because. Fuck empathy being altruistic, everyone is a good person to feel better about themselves, and that’s okay. Really, hate is the most altruistic emotion of all. Just for the thrill of it, I’ll wish lighter fluid upon your capillaries, and you can wish them right back. 

Q. … Woah. I see why you’re called the mad scientist of Creative Writing. 

A. [A smile evident in the speaker’s voice] Thank you. 

Q. Hyung, come on. One instance. Just one. 

A. Was complimenting me just a technique to mollify me into spilling all my homosexual pining after Yeonjun-hyung? Because no. Get over it. … Oh, don’t give me the eyes. Fine. Fine. They called him the weatherman in highschool because he was more accurate than the goddamn forecasts were. It’s why most people even signed up for a reading from him at all. 

Q. Better. Did he ever predict that the two of you would end up under an umbrella together? 

A. Quoting Neil Gaiman will get you nowhere.^[1] … And no, he didn’t. 

Q. Hyung, just one tiny little poem about Yeonjun-hyung. I’ll add in an extra five thousand won. My life is so dull, please do it. 

A. [A pause, the click of a pen] … He was the eternal question. Elegy or eulogy? 

BEOMGYU: There’s a difference? 

SOOBIN: All right, I’ve already lost a few decades of my life. I’m leaving. Pay up. 

Click. 

Silence settles like cigarette smoke, clogging up Soobin’s lungs. A rush, a rush, like filterless nicotine settling into the pores of his skin. Yeonjun’s cheeks are steadily bleeding pink through the gaps in his fingers over his face. Soobin can feel his own ears flaming. 

“I still don’t know the difference between elegy and eulogy, by the way,” Beomgyu says indelicately, picking at a hangnail. 

Everyone ignores him. Taehyun types something out on Kai’s phone and hands it to him, Beomgyu’s mouth falling open in an o as he reads through. 

So yes, Soobin is fucking embarassed. This is the most traitorous thing his fake friends could’ve ever done to him. He takes his shame and points it right at Yeonjun’s own. A battle of egos? Not quite. A battle of shames, shrines and oceans and infinities apart. (But then again, what’s the difference anymore?) 

Soobin grins, lips splitting apart to expose his gums. “You were excited to see me?”

Yeonjun rolls his eyes. “Well, God forbid if that crippling excitement has waned marginally after seeing your face everyday for the last four years, Mr Heliocentre. O mad scientist of Creative Writing,” the gentle, cruel slant of his mouth, twisting in a sneer, “write me like an elegy.” 

“Didn’t you know this would happen, hyung?” Soobin mocks, something hysterical in his voice rising higher, higher, higher like a downdraft whistling in his ears. “Since you knew I’d—?” 

Something flares in Yeonjun’s face, a wild thing he’s trying to tramp down. “Shut the fuck up.” 

Soobin reels back like he’s been struck. Something trembles in the air, something meant to fly plummeting. “Really, I think you should say that to a mirror.” 

Something invasive in the air. Silence, not a single breath. 

“Right, well…” Yeonjun laughs, a burst of bitter noise. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.” 

No one stops him when he storms out the door, the quiet click of it somehow more contemptuous than if he’d slammed it, made it rattle on its hinges. 

It sets something inside Soobin on fire, a madman reaching for a muse, a medium. He wheels to the others, frozen still. “What?” He barks. “What, now you have nothing to say? Wow, good fucking going, everyone. You’ll never fucking learn to just keep to yourselves, will you?” 

Beomgyu’s hand reaches for his, and Soobin can see the regret on his face. He twists out of the way, pausing when he sees the red scarf on the floor. “Great,” he says, unfeeling. “He forgot his goddamn scarf. And now he’s going to get a throat infection and our entire friend group is going to fall apart. What am I saying, it’s already in tatters.” 

Soobin snatches the scarf up, grinding his teeth together. “See you later.” 

No one tries to stop him, either. Soobin decides his stinging face is because of the cold. 

He hurries down the steps to the parking lot, chasing after the odd things that linger wherever Yeonjun goes. Motes of light and specks of dust lit-up, traces of the apple-scented perfume he uses. 

There’s only one person in the entire parking lot, but Soobin would know that silhouette anywhere. (Not even in, like, a gay manner. Choi Yeonjun is Choi Yeonjun and there’s something so recognisable about his entire frame anyone could know him just from the back of his head.) 

“Yeonjun!” Soobin calls out, out of breath and frankly, still angry. “Yeonjun.” 

Yeonjun slows to a stop like it pains him to do so. He doesn’t turn to face Soobin immediately. “What do you want?”  

Soobin squeezes his eyes shut before he does something like punch Yeonjun between the eyes. “Take your fucking scarf. It’s cold out here.” 

Soobin watches the surprise light up Yeonjun’s face before stuttering back into cold, dead anger. “What,” he spits, voice pulled taut over his own anger, “is your fucking problem?” 

“My problem? Mine?” Soobin laughs, incredulous. “I’m here to give you your ugly scarf back and there’s nothing more to it. Stop, really. Stop trying to wring meaning out of things that mean nothing just to make yourself feel less lonely.” 

Yeonjun blinks. Once, twice. There’s an unbridled rage kindling in his face that Soobin has never seen before. Really, ruthlessly, recklessly, Yeonjun has never seemed more beautiful than now. “How does that concern you? How is that hurting you?” 

A mosaic. A thousand-piece puzzle, a hexagonal Rubik’s cube. Now picture it all shattering down the middle like a pomegranate. Soobin opens his mouth. “Because I—” 

—’m your friend. Because I’ve known (of) you for years and years and I know nothing about you at all but I do know that you are not this vitiated being. Because I don’t want you to be lonely. Because I’m right here. Because I’m right fucking here. 

“Good God.” Yeonjun’s laugh curls up in a smoke angel. “Make up your fucking mind, Soobin.”

A snowflake settles on Soobin’s knuckles. “Because that’s a thing you get to ask me to do.” 

Yeonjun’s expression closes off. He wrenches open the door to the driver’s seat. “Well, then. Seems like it’s already made. Don’t ever come back if it happens to change.”  

It’s a long time that Soobin stands there, staring at the spot where the light faded away, trachea solidifying into a tree. It’s a long time for a heart to harden to steel, for nerve endings to grow numb from something colder than winter and more biting than ice. It’s a long time before Soobin realises he’s still clutching Yeonjun’s scarf in his hands. 

₊ ⊹

listen, beomgyu, tell the others i’m sorry—is what Soobin’s lit-up phone screen reads the next morning, opened on his and Beomgyu’s chat-log. He’s sat at the very back of the lecture hall, trying not to glance at his phone every five seconds, an irrational crawling under his skin. 

Fuck confrontation, man. All his homies hate confrontation. 

“Okay, you know what, all of you look so sad,” vibrant, loud Dr Kim pouts, flouncing in through the doors exactly six-and-a-half minutes late. Yeji-From-The-Front holds up a thumbs-up, which means the tardiness is right on schedule according to the timer they all set up before his classes. “Holidays are soon, cheer up! But you know what’ll make you feel better?” He pauses, boxy grin making Soobin smile in spite of himself. “... Retrospection!” 

Those near the front flinch back at the volume. Soobin swears he hears a pen drop in surprise. 

“Isn’t it amazing?” Dr Kim sighs dreamily, settling into the air around him with all the poise of a ballerina. When he tilts his head back, the arch of his neck is like that of a swan’s. Soobin gets why some people’s margins are scrawled with doodles of their professor, he really does. “Retrospection? Regret? Learning that all regret is explosive and then learning to handle it with care, one wrong move and you’re smithereens?” 

Really, the only explosive thing in Soobin’s vicinity is Dr Kim. All that energy fizzing up into his arching hands and dancing feet, that constant tremor to his mouth like it’s aching to smile, to open, to speak. Dr Kim is so jumpy Soobin fears for his heart most of the time. 

“But we’re not here to regret,” he continues, mellow suddenly, behind the teacher’s podium like he should actually be. “We’re here to remember. We’re here to see how we’ve grown. This is your last year, you know?” His face slowly splits apart in a manic grin, a shift so drastic Soobin has to blink several times. “I think it’s going to be a share-with-the-class day today!” 

“Oh, no,” Soobin groans, slumping into his seat. Renjun groans back in brotherhood. 

Fuck share-with-the-class day. All his homies hate share-with-the-class day.

“Tell me about the first time you wrote something and realised, wait, this could be it.” Something glints in Dr Kim’s eyes. “This is right. Like a puzzle piece.” 

That’s not half-bad, actually. Soobin thinks back on all the winters gone, goes past the teenage angst and the moonish longing and the Is this what I should be doing? Is this really who I’m meant to be?, past the first tentative poems about the shape of someone’s lips or the way their skin pulled taut over their knuckles, past all his history—and lands somewhere. 

“Ah, Soobin, dear, you look the most morose. Why don’t you start?” 

A highschool gymnasium. Sunlight gleaming off the floor, refracted in that odd, golden tint memories adopt. The incessant click of a pen, soft breathing. A catharsis bottled up in a few words, a growing-up distilled into shame. 

“Oh, uh, hi.” He wants to roundhouse kick himself. But then Dr Kim and half the class say hi right back, waving. “Gosh. I was in freshman year. It was—it was a poem about the weatherman. I mean, not like the man on TV, no. There was… there was this senior who could predict the weather more accurately than the forecasts did. If he told you to bring an umbrella when the news told you it’d be sunny, you’d better bring that umbrella. He… he was something else. I didn’t know him that well at all, but I knew of him. It was the first time I’d ever tried to write anything about someone else. I mean,” he laughs, scratching his throat, “it was kinda bad. But I still think of that poem fondly. It made me realise I liked writing. Whatever writing means.” 

Dr Kim hums. “Fascinating,” he says, and Soobin marvels at how he doesn’t sound condescending, “It was a really fun little thing to learn, wasn’t it? I’m sure this weatherman character would’ve been really happy if he knew about it.” 

Soobin slumps back down in his seat, an odd unrest starting in his heart. Like a wingbeat. 

me
choi beomgyu im only going to ask once 
where is hyung like right now
for science purposes

parfait 
at tyunning’s 
fighting!!! 

₊ ⊹

Soobin walks into Kai-and-Taehyun’s, shutting the door behind him. The hazy contours of the cluttered area shine in the weak midmorning light. The place reeks of cigarette smoke. 

“Your scarf stinks, by the way,” he says by way of greeting. Something heavy hangs low in his chest, like a tired star drooping in space-time. He likes the image of an old star. Sipping dark matter, greying around the corona, drooping with the force of gravity. 

“You peaked in highschool, by the way,” Yeonjun says lovingly, blowing him a kiss. He’s by the window that looks out into the woods, curtains pinned away with butterfly claw-clips. The setting sun hangs between his fingers, drowsy and blood red, acrid smoke curling up from the tip. Yes, Soobin thinks. An old star, sipping dark matter, smoking a comet or two. Greying around the corona. And no one comes to visit. 

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Soobin lies, setting Yeonjun’s scarf over the spinny chair.

Yeonjun doesn’t look at him, shoulders wired with tension. “Sure,” he hums, stubbing his cigarette out. He turns around, the huge graphic tee he wears around the house sliding off his shoulders. It’s a plain white one, with blocks of red text that reads SOME DAYS I’M IKEBANA AND SOME DAYS I’M GYOTAKU. Soobin has never understood what that meant. 

They don’t talk about it. Soobin settles onto the spinny chair, Yeonjun perches on the white window-sill, and they don’t talk about it. 

All of a sudden, Soobin feels very cold. This was a very stupid idea, coming here without a plan, what the fuck, no, he should return later—

“Oh, are you leaving?” Yeonjun asks, frowning. 

Soobin looks at the hand that definitely belongs to him, reaching for the door knob out of its own accord. “Oh,” he says intelligently. “Am I?” 

“No, you’re not.” Yeonjun rolls his eyes. “I made brownies. Try them.” 

Soobin looks at the batch cooling on the desk. The roses are fresh this time, traces of dew lingering. He knows Yeonjun must have picked them and put them in the pitcher today. No one else would choose a shade of maroon so specific. “Are they normal or am I going to take a bite and find myself thinking I’m Lee Hyori?” 

Yeonjun’s face pinkens. Standing in sunlight, he’s a shade of lovely Soobin doesn’t want to describe. “That was one time,” he seethes, “One; I didn’t know those were spiked! And these are normal, family friendly, wholesome, might-be-a-little-bitter-but-that’s-why-you’re-here brownies.” 

Soobin goes and takes out a square of chocolate. “So I’m just your guinea pig?” 

Yeonjun snatches a claw-clip from the curtains, snapping it open and shut repeatedly to prove a point. “One more word and clipping this over your mouth.” 

They’re a little bitter when Soobin bites into them, but the sweetness explodes inside his mouth a beat later. They’re horrible, naturally, but of course, they’re not. Yeonjun’s cooking never is, they just like to pretend it is, to see that displeased curl to his pouting lips or the way he huffs and says he’s never going to cook for them ever again, thank you very much.

“These are horrible. I feel the notes of rat poison mixing with chunks of sodium bicarbonate,” Soobin promises, reaching for another, a smile threatening to break free and pirouette over his face. “I should’ve known this was just a ploy to poison me. I’m dying.”  

Yeonjun scoffs, eyebrows furrowing. “Oh, fuck you.” 

It makes Soobin pause. The way Yeonjun’s listlessly flicking the, ahem, Daisy Yellow walls with his fingers spells out something close to actual hurt. His eyes are travelling all over the room like they always do when he doesn’t know what to do. Searching for ways to escape. 

“Hyung,” Soobin says, eyeing the brownie crumbs stuck under his fingernails with distaste. He crosses over to the bathroom door and wrenches it open. He washes his hands in the basin, standing outside, bent at an awkward angle. When he speaks, his voice echoes. “You know they’re good. What’s the point of asking?” 

Yeonjun sticks his whole head out the window, red blooming down the arch of his nape. “Well, what the fuck,” he replies, muffled, “Excuse me for wanting to hear it from someone else?” 

Soobin wipes his hands on his jeans. “And you always get what you want, don’t you?”  

“Does anyone ever get what they want?” Yeonjun replies after a stagnant pause, something sticky lining his words. Like honey. Like hands reaching for a heart to tear it apart, over and over. 

It sobers Soobin up. “No,” he sighs, “I guess they don’t.” 

“Tell me something,” Yeonjun says, rolling his neck around like something has burrowed inside his bones. “When you got exactly what you wanted. And it was something golden.” 

Soobin sits back down on the spinny chair. He closes his eyes. Feels the words light up inside him. Exhales fireflies and stars when he opens his mouth and speaks. “Once, when I was little, my parents took me fishing. It was a lake in the woods. We went when the sun hadn’t fully come up yet, and I still remember watching the sun rise between the gaps in the trees. Reflecting off the still surface of the water. My father taught me how to fish, right there. With the rod, or just sticking my hand in the water and grabbing. My mother taught me how to gut and clean the fish, how to scrape the scales away quickly.” Keeps his eyes closed. Conjures up images of pines and fish and the muted joy in his mother’s eyes. Laughs out a molten sun. “I don’t know. I remember that day so vividly. It wasn’t even that happy of a day, really. I can think of happier ones. But— yeah. It felt like I got exactly what I wanted.” 

When Soobin opens his eyes, Yeonjun’s face is pinched in a quiet sorrow. “You don’t eat fish.” 

“No,” is the only reply Soobin can give, helpless and tethered, “I don’t.” 

Soobin takes another brownie. Yeonjun laughs at him, incredulous. Something feels correct. 

“You look like you have something to say,” Soobin notes. 

Yeonjun rolls his eyes so hard his entire head rolls around in an irritated circle. “Because you know me so well.” 

“Asshole,” Soobin grumbles, dusting his hands. “Can’t even say anything in this economy.” 

Yeonjun’s hand clenches into a fist, eyes on the horizon line. The glinting dials of the clock say it’s 1 PM. Soobin waits. 

“I told my mother I liked both girls and boys,” he says at last, turning around and settling on the bed. He takes one of Kai’s plushies and hugs it to his heart. “She smiled, took my hand in hers, and told me never to breathe a word of it to my father to save my life.” His eyes slip shut, frame stiffening. Soobin finds it sad. How whenever people speak of something they can’t let go of, their first instinct is to squeeze their eyes shut and hide. “I— I loved my father. He loved me, he’d never given me a single reason to believe otherwise. Good grief. I told him. He stood up and walked away. I don’t know— You want to believe it, right? Something in you will always want to believe they’ll love you regardless. I never brought it up again. He never said a word. I don’t fucking know,” he pronounces harshly, an phoenix-like anger borne out of hurt smothering the syllables to ash, “It’s been years and we don’t talk about it. He’s the same as he ever was and I like to think he’s just trying to process it, but I just. I feel so ashamed every time I think about it. How I sat there at the dining-table for so long after he’d walked away. I truly believed he’d come back. But he didn’t. And I don’t think he ever will.” 

Soobin can hear his own pulse in his ears. 

“Hyung,” he says, horrified. Like something broken. Over and over. “Hyung.” 

Yeonjun tilts his head towards him, a half-turn, a smile flickering on his face when he sees whatever expression he’s making. “Soobin. Soobin.” 

“How is that a story where you got everything you wanted?” he hisses, a hand reaching for his bare shoulder, drawing back, fingers flexing, “How is that an acceptable thing at all?” 

“It’s not. It’s not a story where I got everything I wanted.” Yeonjun looks away, drawing hearts onto the plushie. All of a sudden, it strikes Soobin. How gentle he’s always been. “Saying it out loud makes it seem bad, which it wasn’t. It made dinners a little awkward before we all chose to forget about it. I mean, it’s not like he kicked me out. He’s still my father. The same one who carried me on his shoulders up a mountain because I got tired halfway through. The one who got me a camera for my birthday after saying photography would ruin me. Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t it?” 

When Soobin doesn’t speak, Yeonjun continues. “You don’t understand, Soobin. It has to mean something. It’s the only way I can ever return home every break and face them.” 

Soobin gets up and sits down next to him on the bed. He doesn’t reach out to touch like he’s burning to. “When was this?” 

“Sophomore year.” 

A lightning strike through his skin, an epiphany that shatters. “That’s the year you started your fortune telling business.” 

“My God,” Yeonjun whispers, smile not reaching his eyes. “Saying the name out loud?” 

Soobin doesn’t laugh. Something is crawling over his ribcage, a thousand suns and a million words and an uncountable number of sparks. “Tell me about the weather tomorrow,” he blurts out. “Talk to me about Carmen Kass or string theory or art conservation or whatever the hell you’re obsessed with this week. Tell me about the goddamn gap in the mountains that looks like an ass crack. I’ll fucking listen. And I won’t go anywhere.” 

Yeonjun looks at him. Such a simple thing. Yet it sets his heart on fire. “I already do that.” 

It horrifies Soobin, what comes out of his mouth next. “Let it mean something for once.” 

It startles a laugh out of Yeonjun, sudden and bright. “What; changed your mind?” 

It’s the first time they’ve even referenced last night. Soobin fights to not close his eyes, stares straight at Yeonjun’s cheek, doesn’t linger over the stray eyelash stuck there. It’s a difficult thing, admitting that one is wrong. Especially when one has been wrong for a long time. Like swallowing pills dry, like digging up a grave. 

It splinters inside Soobin’s throat. “Yes.” 

Yeonjun looks away, something frigid washing over Soobin’s heart. “I thought I said no take-backsies.” 

“You also said it yourself,” Soobin replies, cold and warm and everything explosive. Something is slipping through the cracks. Shadows on the wall. “You still want to believe it. That that… that person will look past what you said and see you for what you are.” 

“I don’t know, Soobin,” Yeonjun says, bitterness twisting his mouth. “Is that what you did?” 

It’s a difficult thing, admitting that one is wrong. It’s harder still to ask for more as the tears pile up behind white-knuckled hands like bodies striking the shore. “No. And I’m sorry. I really am.” 

“I know you are,” Yeonjun whispers, as helplessly lost as he is. It isn’t forgiveness, it isn’t just acknowledgement. It’s a secret third thing, an I know you but I do not wish to. “I know you are.” 

“Is it enough, do you think? To be sorry?” 

“Is it?” Yeonjun’s eyes, how they nearly look sleepy. “God. Soobin. Just tell me. What do you want?” 

Soobin feels like a little kid; you say it, no, you. Like they’d known even as children that things would be terrifying. Like waiting on the edge of a cliff for a hand that might not come. “Is it what you want?” 

Yeonjun’s mouth settles into a thin line. “I don’t want to be your friend.” 

“Oh,” Soobin says, because really, what do you— 

“Do you know what ikebana is?” Yeonjun talks over him swiftly, pink rising to his face like seafoam peeking over the coastline. “It’s the Japanese art of arranging flowers. Emphasising form, composition, colours. It’s delicate, it’s beautiful. Then there’s gyotaku. Fish-printing. Slap an ink-washed fish onto a piece of paper and watch the print form before your eyes. I just thought—what’s the point? Arranging flowers, preserving a fucking fish? It’s the intent behind it. It’s the knowledge that someone saw a few flowers and was like I could make something beautiful. That someone saw a fucking fish and decided it needed to be preserved. We can all arrange flowers, we can all catch a fish. It’s the name, it’s the intent which makes a being.” 

Soobin still doesn’t close his eyes. “What are you getting at here, hyung?” 

“Sometimes,” he replies, voice rising, hands arching in the air like sprites, “Sometimes people don’t mean what they say. And sometimes they say something and mean something else. Because they’re scared. Because they know. I don’t want to be your friend. But you—you get what I mean, right?” 

Soobin has never seen Yeonjun this frazzled, wide-eyed and desperate to mean something, to make him understand. Slowly, achingly, Soobin gets it. “I do. I do, I promise.” 

“We’ve all— we’ve all known loss, right? Sometimes, you become all it is.” Yeonjun says it so simply. Something inside Soobin, something delicate, shatters. “And there’s no way back.” 

“Yeah. I… I get what you’re saying.” 

Silence stretches like an infinite expanse of nothing. The sea cradled under his elbow, all things reflected back at him, washing each other out until everything is nothing. Nothing at all. 

“… Be something to me,” Yeonjun whispers at last. “Mean everything in my visible world for all I care. But don’t put a name on it. Never make the mistake of putting a name on it.” 

“I’ll be your friend,” Soobin says, testing it out loud, starting to understand just how deep the hurt runs. “But we must never call it such.” 

Yeonjun nods, hand shaking when he tucks his hair behind his ear. “Exactly.” 

The hands on the clock continue their endless game of fetch. Their shoulders don’t brush. 

The sun sets. They sit there in silence, watching the blocks of orange light up each other’s skins. Your shadow, flat on the wall. Your knuckles when you held them to your face, pink and gold in that astonishing light from eight minutes in the past. Erstwhile light blooms underneath your nail-beds and you are beautiful and I could tell you so, but it would mean nothing. It would not ease your sorrow nor smooth down the jagged cliffs of your eyebrows. It would not be a place to lie down and sleep. It would be a site of ruin. Of the things I could not do. Of my failure and your pain. A sleepless wreck. Your shadow, flat on the wall. Your pink knuckles, holograms and centimetres and infinities away from caressing my face, reaching for my heart line. 

“It’ll snow tomorrow,” says Yeonjun. 

₊ ⊹

A SLIP OF PAPER TUCKED INSIDE A BATTERED COPY OF Little Women
[The top right corner of the front page reads a scrawled Choi Soobin]

There was a cherry tree in the school courtyard, right by the four wooden swings. I remember how rusted the chains were, the way the younger kids would run to them after the final bell. They were let off an entire four hours before us, which was nice until it wasn’t. Isn’t everything that way? Nice until it isn’t. Even the unassuming swings at school. 

11:45, on the dot, the little ones’ bell would ring. I watched them from my classroom window on the first floor, watched them run and scream and fight over the swings—I let you have a go yesterday, it’s my turn now; come on, listen to me. Be fair. For once, be fair. I remembered being one of them, just a few years ago. It didn’t quite seem possible. That I could have been that carefree, those rusted chains had been held by my fingers once. 

I looked up. You were beside me, separated by nothing. Our hands did not brush. Our breaths did not mingle. You were looking right where I had been, tracing that same spot where the cherry leaves had fallen on the swings.  

(You weren’t there. We weren’t in the same year. But maybe I wished we were.) 

₊ ⊹

They’re well into their fourth hour of They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard (10 Hour Version), the next evening, when Beomgyu says it. “Let’s all pile into hyung’s car and go to the beach.” 

Yeonjun, sprawled across the carpet, frowning at his phone. “Which hyung.” 

Soobin kicks him in the flank. “You’re the only one who has a car, use your brain.” 

Beomgyu ignores them both, singing along for a few seconds before breaking off again. “Are any of you going home for the holidays? Cancel if you are.” 

“Hyung!” Kai reprimands. “Oh, what the hell. I’m not. My sisters can’t come back this year, and, well. It’s not Christmas without them. I’m just not going home.” 

“I’m not, either,” Taehyun says. 

Kai turns to him, perplexed. “Since when?” 

Taehyun shrugs, erasing a line from his drawing before etching it in darker. “I don’t want you to be alone.” 

Yeonjun sits up on one elbow, closing his eyes in disgust when he sees the two of them kissing. “Blegh. I hate love. I’m coming out as homophobic. Down with the gays,” he gags, dropping back down and squeezing his eyes shut tighter. “I spoke to my mother. I said I didn’t want to come home this year, and she said okay. So. My car is free real estate right now.”  

Soobin doesn’t even bother saying anything. Not one winter break has he gone back home. He watches in mild amusement as everyone collectively seems to realise that wait, they can actually do this. Sit inside a car and scream along to TWICE with the windows down, the heater on. Barrel straight into the horizon and explode into the sun.

“Y’all,” Beomgyu says, wide-eyed. “Tell me how to cancel Choi Christmas this year and quickly.” 

₊ ⊹

It snows. 

Yeonjun throws a snowball straight at Soobin’s nose. Soobin gathers up all the snow his numb palms can hold, and hurls it at Yeonjun’s frame. Yeonjun crumples to the snow-slick ground, red-nosed and snow in his hair like tangled stars, mouth wide open in loud laughter. Beomgyu and Kai continue rolling the body of their snowman peacefully, Taehyun standing by, chewing on a carrot to shape it into a perfect nose. 

As Yeonjun wheezes on the ground, Soobin settles down by his hip, packing snow over him. 

“Oh, fuck you,” he gasps, breath high, eyes narrow and warm when they zero in on a spot by Soobin’s red cheek. “Don’t you dare. Choi Soobin, don’t you dare!” 

Soobin dares. He’s never seen Yeonjun look happier. 

It ends when Beomgyu accidentally eats a fuckton of snow and might possibly catch hypothermia and die. Kai mourns the unfinished snowman, sadly pushing the (chewed on, shaped to a point) carrot into its unsmiling face. Taehyun bundles Beomgyu in all the jackets he can find and takes a picture of him like a proud mother, ushering him into the apartment. 

Soobin slings an arm around Yeonjun’s shoulders, laughing. There’s a scrape across the bridge of his nose from when he was the one to nearly eat a fuckton of snow. Soobin thinks it makes him look pretty. It’s a fucking problem, but whatever. 

“Would you look at that,” he calls, letting Yeonjun disentangle himself from his clutches and move up the stairs faster. “It actually snowed.” 

“Well, obviously.” Soobin can hear the eye-roll in Yeonjun’s voice. “I can see the future.” 

Soobin’s the last one in. He locks the door, shakes out the snow from his hair, small little pockets of laughter stuck somewhere inside his trachea. “Sure you can. Oi, Beomgyu. What happened to Choi Christmas?” 

Beomgyu is only recognisable because of a few strands of black hair peeking out from under the blankets. His voice is molasses-thick when he speaks. “Bold of you to assume I have the power to cancel Choi Christmas. I just told them I wouldn’t be there this year and they kicked up a fuss but you know, relented, in the end. I’m their darling. This roadtrip shit better be locked in, I’m going to be so pissed if one of you bails.” 

“Where are we going?” Taehyun deadpans, at the stove. The strong scent of tea leaves fills the air. “When are we going?” 

“The beach, keep up,” Yeonjun replies, picking at his nails. “When… well. After term ends, let’s just pack ourselves in and fuck off.” 

“Wow. Such elegance. Such forethought.” 

Soobin watches with mild fascination the way Yeonjun’s top lip curls up in a mock sneer. They’re parched from the cold. “O great forethinker,” he croons. “Please, pray grace us lowly ones with your profound wisdom. And thy elegance, oh, thy forethought, how it makes mine own beating heart swoon.” 

“I see why Soobin hates you.” Taehyun’s face betrays open disgust. Yeonjun catches Soobin’s eye at that, shooting him the tiniest of smiles. Like Cupid’s arrow, it lands. Point-blank to the centre of Soobin’s heart. A false hope, a small, kindling flame. “You’re so obnoxious, hyung. But oh, well. Listen well for I grace thee now in the hopes of bringing peace. And making all of you more efficient, because what the hell. Here’s what we do: We pack ourselves into your car on the 25th, drive down to the beach and set up camp. We can look at hotels, Soobin-hyung and I can micromanage the fun out of it for everybody involved. Do whatever it is we want to do, Kai and Yeonjun-hyungie, you’re in-charge of the bucket list, I’m pulling out all the stops. Christmas the mulled wine down our gullets and have an orgy for all I care. Deal with the consequences. Drive back to campus on the 1st and hibernate until school reopens.” 

For once, even Yeonjun doesn’t speak. “Be still my beating heart—an orgy?” 

The sigh Taehyun lets out is so long-suffering Soobin wants to pat his back and say there, there. He pours the tea into five variously-sized mugs, an oven-mitt around the handle of the saucepan to prevent burning his hand. Kai gets up and fetches the round little container of sugar from the top shelf, spooning heaps of it into each cup exactly as he knows each one of them drinks it. (Yeonjun, unsweetened. Soobin and himself, enough sugar to force a small child into a coma. Taehyun, the Goldilocks amount. Beomgyu drinks his with salt, but they don’t mention that.) 

“That’s not a bad idea,” Soobin says finally, taking pity. “Today’s the… 15th, right? Sunday. Which makes the 22nd a Sunday—ew, Christmas is on Wednesday?” 

Beomgyu grunts his assent from under the mass of blankets. Kai sits down next to him and gently bonks his head with the mug. Beomgyu sits up, much like a disgruntled cat, blinking at the stark light bulb Yeonjun has been begging them to change for months. He snatches the tea from Kai’s hands, the Gremlin Posture™ never failing to impress Soobin. 

“Do you have undiagnosed ADHD?” Taehyun asks, staring at him. “Like, truly.” 

Yeonjun snorts, cradling his mug between sweater-paws. Soobin blinks at the sweater he’s wearing, large and knitted crimson. “I’d say he has a lot more than undiagnosed ADHD.” 

Soobin nods sagely, raising his cup in cheers. “As far as I know, I have a self-diagnosed allergy to idiots.” He rubs his nose furiously until it blooms an angry shade of red. “Look, I’m already breaking out in a rash.” He tips his forehead towards Yeonjun, biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smiling. “I wonder why.” 

“... You are an actual asshole. What the shit. What the hell. Fatherless behaviour.” 

Soobin laughs, bright and full. “Get thee to a nunnery.” 

“Are you…” Yeonjun squints at him. “Are you quoting something at me?” 

Soobin shrugs, downing all of his tea in one scalding gulp. “Am I?” 

Beomgyu gives up on life, mumbling obscenities into the side of the black cat on his mug. “Get those two away from me, I can’t stand this shameless flirting any longer. You two are so far from the light, the light isn’t even a fucking thing.” 

Yeonjun blinks at him, eyebrows knitting together. “I’m trying to parse whether this fuckass LED has finally made you blind or if you just called us ungodly.”  

“Both,” he groans, “Both.” 

“I still remember that one paper we had to write for Theo,” Kai comments, dipping a cookie into his tea because he’s the ungodliest of them all. “Five thousand words on what I thought caused religion. I bunked that exam so bad I still get nightmares of all the letters I used to write that thing rising up and braining me between the eyes.” 

Yeonjun’s eyes widen in empathetic horror. He looks like a Dresden figure, powdered white under that goddamn LED, cheeks rosy. “Oh no, baby, what did you write?” 

Kai winces. “Something about—like, evolutionary processes? Functionalism, that’s what it was called. I still haven’t wrapped my head around it fully. States are defined by their functional roles, not what they’re made of. And. Like. That tied into how religion was used to enforce a sense of spirit while maintaining this structure or form.” 

Yeonjun starts giggling, this low, soft sound that’s going to haunt Soobin for the next three business days. “Ah, Hyuka, you should’ve just thought like a poet.” 

Choi Soobin’s literature major ass, metaphorically, bristles. “What is that supposed to mean?” 

Yeonjun’s eyes settle on him. “What’s the entire selling point of any religion?” When Soobin opens his mouth, he talks over him, waving his unoccupied hand. “No, think about it. All religions propound an afterlife, right? If you follow this code of conduct for your life, eventually, you’ll end up at this place where all the pain and suffering is gone and you are one with all things. That’s like, it. Damnation or absolution. Rest, or otherwise. … Who’s to say we weren’t just kinda. Lonely. Things can’t have been that interesting in that transitory period between hunter-gatherers to farmers, maybe someone saw sense in it. The idea of a Creator. Maybe it started small, an esoteric thing. Cult-like. Really, who’s to say religion didn’t start in barbarity? It could have. But no, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I mean, I’m just blabbing right now, but— isn’t it poetic? To think that hundreds and thousands of years ago, someone looked up at that same star and was just as lost, just as real as you are right now? The same search for meaning that drives people to coastlines and mountains and cliffsides, why couldn’t it have manifested in the prehistoric in the form of religion?” He shrugs, bashful suddenly, realising he’s spoken a lot. “We ourselves gave rise to religion. Loneliness is the mother of God and all that.” 

They sit on that for a few seconds, five pairs of lungs contracting and relaxing inside five bodies. Soobin likes to imagine them talking. Kai’s lungs say, I swear, this is getting so tiring. And what do you mean I’ve only completed just over twenty years inside this one? Yeonjun’s sneer, Oh, shut up. This one smokes. Can you imagine? Taehyun’s pair spouts wisdom, things like expand and contract at a uniform rate and keep heart between two lungs. Beomgyu’s are probably asleep. Soobin doesn’t know what his own lungs think of him, which is kind of sad. 

… So maybe Soobin is losing his mind, just a little. But then again, who isn’t? 

He frowns, lips pursing in thought. “That’s only if you treat religion as an—an end, you know? Religion isn’t the finish line. Religion is what you do to get there. Christianity isn’t heaven or hell, Hinduism isn’t swarga or narak. Religion is— well, what the fuck, what’s the exact definition? A God, the gods, the worshipping of them. Building an image of divinity with clay.” 

“Yes, but that must have come later, right? God and gods and mythology came later.” Yeonjun shakes his head. “It must have started with just an idea.”

“You’re saying that religion started without a god,” Soobin states, wrinkles forming in his brain. “You do realise that, right?”  

Yeonjun pauses, tonguing his cheek. When he speaks again, he speaks slowly, like he’s stringing the words together. “... Not really. We’re getting mythology and theology mixed up here. I’m saying that religion could have started as a way of keeping peace and maintaining a structure of society. You’re talking about religion as it is now, people making sense of themselves through figures of divinity. They’re different things.”  

The only sound is Beomgyu’s soft snoring, his head drooping onto Kai’s shoulder. 

“Hyungs, why the fuck are you having conversations meant for 3 AM at 8 PM?” Taehyun interrupts. “Shut up, my brain is actively concussing itself.” 

“I was literally about to agree with him,” Soobin whines. “You’re actually so rude.” 

Taehyun glares at him. “You raised me.” 

Soobin stares at Yeonjun’s sweater again. It’s stupidly large on his already broad frame, layered over what Soobin knows is another sweater, more tightly-knit than this one. It slips down to mid-thigh, hiding jeans printed with stars and what Soobin swears is two pairs of socks. “Is that…” He squints harder, curling a loose burr of wool around his finger, “Is this mine?” 

(“Quick, Kai, daily footage! … Oh, Beomgyu-hyung is going to be so mad he missed this.”)

Yeonjun laughs, high-pitched. “Why would it be yours? It’s not. It’s not.” 

Soobin tucks a smile into the corners of his eyes and presses his lips into a thin line. “Right.” 

Yeonjun huffs, dusting cookie crumbs off his lap as he stands up. “Well. It’s time for the temple.” 

Time for the temple essentially means a smoke break. Soobin isn’t really sure how, but the irony strikes him as funny. He follows him out onto the dusty balcony, the courtyard below hidden underneath Kai’s veritable army of plants. Yeonjun looks at him weird, but allows it nonetheless. 

It’s quiet, for once. They can hear the soft sounds of Taehyun and Kai arguing about dinner through the curtains—but we had take-out the other day; well, I don’t want to cook. It’s the same thing every single time. Sometimes, Kai wins and Taehyun grumbles and gripes but cooks anyway. Sometimes, Taehyun wins and it’s another take-out night. 

“What?” Yeonjun asks, taking out his strange purple lighter with the sticker of the unicorn barfing up glittery rainbows on it. “Have you suddenly decided you want to smoke?” 

“No.” When Soobin says it, his breath blows out into mist. “I don’t know. Why do you call it time for the temple?” 

Yeonjun laughs. “It was what my dad and his colleagues used to say. Whenever they’d come home, one of them would say It’s time for the temple and half of them would troop out like little ducklings out into the backyard.” He must see the look on Soobin’s face, as his own closes off. “Don’t. It’s not that big of a deal, truly. I’m over it.” 

Soobin shakes his head. “I’m not pitying you. I just wish… it didn’t happen. To you, to anyone at all.” 

For a long time, Yeonjun doesn’t reply. The drowsy red flame between his lax fingers fights to keep burning in the cold; an apocalyptic sun heaving its last dying sighs. “I wished that too. I mean, Soobin. It’s not like I did nothing at all. I was a teenager. To me, it was world-ending. The flippant dismissal. I was angry for so long. Angry at him, I was his only child, goddammit, couldn’t he have looked past this one thing about me? I was angry at myself, too, why hadn’t I just listened to my mother and kept my fucking mouth shut? Every day was like swallowing the earth whole.” His eyes slip shut, head knocking against the wall. His cigarette hangs half-forgotten. Soobin wishes he could do something, anything. “It didn’t stay that way. I buried it inside me the day I came here. What lies at the bottom of the heart stays at the bottom of the heart, or whatever.” 

“Hyung, that still doesn’t…” Soobin doesn’t think he’ll ever get it. Doesn’t think he’ll ever truly understand anything at all. “That doesn’t make it okay.” 

Yeonjun scowls, gathering the folds of his (Soobin’s?) sweater tighter around himself. “I’m not saying it was. I’m just telling you what it was, as it was.” He looks away, flicking the cigarette butt off the balcony. “Drop it, Soobin. I’m sick of it.” 

“Okay,” Soobin exhales, a heaviness inside his lungs. Second-hand cancer must be a bitch. “Okay, I’m sorry if I pushed it.” 

For a second, Yeonjun simply looks at him, something unreadable in his eyes. The world stills on its axis, the snow melting in his hair freezes back up. That curl of black hair by Yeonjun’s temple, so clear in the faint orange light shining through the curtains. 

For a second, all is still. Soobin can hear the rush of blood in his arteries, pounding by his ears. 

Then Yeonjun’s harsh, open-mouthed exhale is right into Soobin’s own, a hand fisted in the front of his shirt to drag him forward. Yeonjun’s hair slots into the divots of Soobin’s face, ragged heartbeats expelled in staccato bursts of winged beings made of smoke. All goes still. 

“Would you consider yourself a very religious person?” Yeonjun asks, like this is perfectly normal. Like he isn’t looking up at Soobin through his eyelashes, so close he can count each and every single one of them. Like his breath isn’t touching Soobin’s face. 

“Not really, no,” Soobin gets out. Like he isn’t staring at the mole underneath Yeonjun’s right eye.

“I tried. And it all broke apart somewhere along the way.” His grip on Soobin’s shirt loosens, like he’s not getting it either. Why he’s doing this, why they’re doing this at all. Discussing God and all the things that come with the person they know the least but feel the most. “I couldn’t stand it, watching those smiling people with their cookie-cutter wives and husbands and perfect little rosy children preach about who I wasn’t allowed to love. I tried to bear it, I— I want my father to know, but he’s never going to hear it. I did try. It wasn’t always so… always so hurtful. It hadn’t hurt for a long time before it did. But I… I guess I did it in vain.” 

Soobin isn’t sure what to do with his hands. When he gingerly touches Yeonjun’s side, he can feel the imperceptible shiver of his skin. “I’m sorry.” 

Yeonjun laughs lightly. It’s like the sound caresses Soobin’s cheek. “You’re always sorry. You don’t have to be, you know. You don’t have to be sorry for things you had no fault in.” 

Yeonjun lets go of him, though he doesn’t step back. He stays in where he is, like he’s daring Soobin to step away first. Soobin doesn’t. He does nothing and hopes Yeonjun’s eyes stay. 

“You can tell me, too,” Yeonjun says, cupping his hands over his own face. “If you want.” 

Soobin shakes his head, amused. “Mutual therapy.” 

“Eh.” Yeonjun shrugs. “More like mutually assured destruction.” 

Soobin swallows down the ache. His body in a bottle and the message his parents never read. “I haven’t talked to my parents in four years. It’s not… yeah, it’s not. I don’t know. I’m fine with my siblings, but I just don’t know what it is with them. I was home when I was little and everyone was just cold. Weighed down by their own problems. I don’t…” He clears his throat, something stinging. “I’ve realised I don’t even care enough to resent them.” 

“Yeouchies,” Yeonjun comments, knocking a shoulder into his. 

“Yeouchies,” Soobin confirms, something lighting up inside his ribs. Strangely, he doesn’t want to go back inside. He wants to live inside this quiet stop in time for just a few seconds longer. “Go on, then. Give me one more piece of Choi Yeonjun lore.” 

And oh, Yeonjun’s smile feels like a trap. He leans closer again, eyes bright and clear.

“Sophomore year,” Yeonjun tells him. “I went searching for a creation myth inside the school library and ended up kissing a boy. He made it good for me.” 

Soobin’s hand clenches into a fist. 

PART II 
WHEN THIS LOVE IS OVER

Folktale Friday 19 [HNK] 

Dated Filmed: 2023-10-27

Hi, hi, hi. It’s Huening Kai here this time, because it’s finally my turn for Folktale Friday! I can’t believe it’s already been nineteen weeks of this, what the hell? It actually seems like just yesterday when Jaeyun came barrelling in through the door and decided we needed to compile stories from our childhoods. We’ve had stories from as far as the elusive Compsci Dept., from Park Jongseong, nonetheless. … Oh, what? His boyfriend forced him to? Welp, nevermind.

Last week’s speaker was… Shin Yuna, if I’m not mistaken. Yes, hers was a certified cult classic. Who doesn’t remember crying over The Crane Wife when they were younger? … I remember when my mother first told that story to me, I— No, nevermind. I’m here to tell my own. This week on Folktale Friday, we have… The Cowherd and the Weaver! The years we lived in China, this one was truly inescapable. I mean, I carry a lot of things with me from my time there, but this one I hold most dear. Anyways. 

Long, long ago, back when tigers still smoked pipes, there lived seven princesses in the court of Heaven. Each was employed by the Queen Mother, their grandmother, in a different job. The oldest danced for all the planets and the stars. The second sang for a season until her sorrow made the heavens weep and brought down rain upon mortals, and so on, so forth. The youngest was the most beautiful, as is customary in folklore, for some reason. Like, actually, look at the other side of the globe for The Little Mermaid, or— 

No, no. Stay on track. Yes, the youngest of the seven princesses, Zhinyu, was the most beautiful. Her task was weaving colourful clouds, which she excelled at. It’s why she’s the Weaver, pretty self-explanatory. She wished to visit the mortal realm, and the Queen Mother relented, under the condition her sisters accompany her. And so, they flew down to Earth. They frolicked in the glittering streams full of stars in the bright sunlight, and Zhinyu fell in love with the hills and valleys. She let herself entertain the idea of staying. 

Meanwhile, there was a cowherd nearby. His name was Niulang. He took his bull to the fields through the path by the river everyday, because it’s where his parents were buried. By the river. He paid his respects to them each day, and told the bull, his only companion, of all his sorrows. He spotted Zhinyu by the lake and like, his heart exploded. Not literally, though that is kinda common in folklore. No, I mean, he fell in love with her. But he was too shy to do anything about it, until the bull was all like, “You’re being stupid, just talk to her.” What a real one. No, the bull told him that the princess’ robes were her ticket back to Heaven. It told the cowherd that if she wanted to stay, she would ask for his own garments. 

But yes, encouraged by the bull, Niulang approached the princess. All the six others immediately bailed it out of there in terror, which, wow. One job. But Zhinyu wasn’t scared. She saw in his eyes the reflection of all earthly things she could grow to love. Hiding her magic robes, she requested that he give her his own. (Well, I suspect Niulang could have kissed his bull on the mouth then.) After gaining her trust, the two of them strolled around the river together, Niulang pointing out and explaining all the things Zhinyu asked about, Zhinyu giving him her own romantic perspective on mundane things. 

It didn’t take long for him to ask her to marry him. She agreed. It was a quiet life they built together, the weaver from the stars and the cowherd made of clay. Their crops were bountiful and Zhinyu taught the villagers how to weave. They had two children together. Put a pin on those two, they’re weapons of heartfire later. 

Years passed. Zhinyu was happy, but she found her thoughts returning to her other family more and more often. Finally, unable to bear the longing anymore, she got out her robes from that first day and stole away to Heaven. No one was particularly surprised to see her, which was when she realised with horror—time didn’t move the same. All those years on earth were barely a day here. (Which I find interesting, too, how so many stories depict time as moving differently for different realms. In Hinduism, one day of Brahma is 4.32 billion years.) 

She quietly tried to slink away, but the Queen Mother divined everything that had happened. In her rage, she ripped a golden hairpin from her hair and tore a seam across the sky, which bubbled up into a river of stars between the two lovers. Or more commonly known as the Milky Way. Zhinyu could never cross the river. But she tried anyway, fighting through the current of surging stars. 

On Earth, a distraught Niulang could see the lights in the sky. He knew what had happened, his wife wasn’t there and his bull was dying. As he cradled the bull’s head in his lap, the bull told him to take his hide and use it to get to Heaven. Putting each child in a basket, Niulang did just that. The hide made him fly up, up, up in the air, right to the molten stars between him and Zhinyu. 

A long time, they floated there stranded. Reaching for each other, infinites apart. On one shore, Zhinyu weaved her clouds while on the other, Niulang took care of their kids. 

Finally, the Queen Mother took pity on them. While she never fully forgave her granddaughter for wasting her love on a mortal, she allowed them to meet once a year. On the seventh day of the seventh month, a bridge of magpies forms between the gulf, and the family is reunited once again. Each year on this day, people pray that it doesn’t rain so that the magpies can make the bridge and the lovers do not have to wait another year all over. 

Talk about star-crossed lovers, eh? They’re the myth used to explain Altair and Vega. There are two stars flanking Altair, which are said to be those two children. Tell me that doesn’t make you want to walk into the ocean. 

Well, this was me, Huening Kai, better known as the one who once accidentally spray-painted an entire room in the Arts building bright orange. Godspeed, brothers and sisters and all those who come in-between. Thank you for listening, next week’s speaker will be the one and only… Miyawaki Sakura! 

₊ ⊹

Now, see, it’s not as if Soobin likes micromanaging the most micro of all things. No, it’s just that it’s kind of necessary, being nearly (but not yet) postgrad students in their mid-twenties living through eight routine quarter-life crises in seven days. 

… Fuck. Maybe he is an overthinker. 

“I can hear your brain overheating, you know,” Beomgyu says, perched on Soobin’s bed with what looks like one of those mini-DIY bracelet kits in his hands. Soobin is in abject terror that those beads are going to spill all over the room and then Renjun will have his head. “You thinking is always a dangerous thing. Wanna share?” 

“No,” Soobin snorts, folding up a sweater and pausing. 

Because that butterfly claw-clip on his tiny desk definitely does not belong to him. He snatches it up, frowning. The glitter trapped inside its transparent plastic body glints in the light. “Hey, Gyu,” he calls, turning around. “Isn’t this hyung’s?” 

Beomgyu looks up from his instruction manual, frown etching deep lines into his forehead. “Huh? … Oh. Sweet Jesus. He’s started leaving things at your place already?” 

Soobin side-eyes him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing. Say, Soobin… Are you going to return it to him?” 

“Eh, I don’t know. He has, like, an army of these.” Soobin turns it this way and that, marvelling at the way it changes colour under different light. He’s instantly a little ashamed of himself because, you know… it’s just a fucking claw-clip. But still. “It’s so pretty.” 

“Mhmm.” Beomgyu types something on his phone furiously, kit forgotten in his lap. “Well. Are you going to give it back?” 

Soobin squints at him, placing the clip back on the table. “You’re being oddly insistent.” He sighs. “I will, I will. I don’t want him breaking down my door decades later demanding I give this back just because he found it missing from his fucking catalogue or something.” 

The typing sound ceases. “That’s… specific.” 

Soobin spreads his hands. “I am a man of detail.” 

“Disgusting,” Beomgyu deadpans. “A man of detail for Yeonjun? I hate gay people.” 

Soobin rolls his eyes, back to folding clothes. “Your asperity wounds me so.” 

There’s a beat of silence, before the glee in Beomgyu’s voice makes Soobin pause. “... You didn’t deny it.” 

“Don’t you have shit to do?” Soobin asks, twisting around to face the gremlin with a deep scowl. “Like, I don’t know, changing clothes? Full offence, you stink. Or if that’s too much work, how about flipping through the Bible?” 

Beomgyu shivers. “You’re like my father, good grief.” 

Soobin throws the leather jacket he’s not sure why he owns in the Maybe pile. It looks nice, but it weighs him down like a ton of bricks. (Something tells him Yeonjun would look stupid good in it. Soobin stomps that something to death and yeets it into the sea.) “Why exactly are you trying to make a bracelet here?” 

Beomgyu threads a pastel blue bead through the string, teeth sunk into his bottom lip in concentration. “I’m summoning a demon. Good ol’ Cthulhu demands plastic jewellery.” 

“Why go through all that trouble?” Soobin shakes his head, snatching the jacket from the Maybe pile and tossing it on the bed by Beomgyu’s feet, slowly forming the Yes pile. “Just look into a mirror, you’re guaranteed to find a demon.” 

“What fucking circle of Hell did you crawl out of, is the question.” 

“I’m sure it was still the one above yours.” 

“Eh-heh. You can never let me win, can you?” Beomgyu pouts. 

“No.” Soobin shakes his head sanctimoniously. “It would prove fatal.” 

Beomgyu goes quiet. Soobin folds more clothes into the Yes pile, something sealing itself up inside his bones with a clack. Something that seems final. Like the goodbye spoken without sight of the mouth to remember by. Like a river of stars tearing reaching hands apart. 

“Hyung,” Beomgyu calls, an odd tinge to his voice. 

The use of honorifics makes Soobin turn around. He moves over to his side of the room, where Beomgyu isn’t smiling. “What is it?”

“Hyung. I don’t want to have to take sides. Don’t do that to me.” Something gives in Beomgyu’s eyes, a pearl of uncharacteristic gravity. Soobin stands very, very still. “It’s our— I mean, it’s our last year and everything, I— Just. … Don’t fuck each other up.” 

Soobin exhales out a slow, heavy breath. “Nothing’s going to change, Beomgyu-yah. Nothing’s going to happen.” Over and over, settling over him like the bitterness of a lie. “I promise.” 

Beomgyu looks away, because of course he knows that Soobin is lying. It tastes bitter on his tongue. The knowledge that the only person who will know he lied will be Beomgyu. 

There’s nothing else to say, not really. They talk about old man Cha and the atrocities he committed against his biochem students this time. They talk about the way the sea will be tomorrow, hatch devious plans to have Taehyun room with Yeonjun at the hotel. They giggle over the image of Kai trying his damnedest to be polite as the old aunties on the beach pinch his cheeks and try to marry him off to their granddaughters. Soobin finishes packing, letting the artificial light warm his bones. No flower more beautiful than an artificial one. He’d read that somewhere; maybe he heard it from Kai.  

Before Beomgyu leaves, he presses a string of beads into Soobin’s hand. Pastel blue ones, snapping around Soobin’s wrist perfectly. “For you,” he says simply. 

“Did you just call me Cthulhu? Bitch.” Soobin traces his eyes over the beads, finding little differences between each one; a groove here, a star there. “I’ll never take it off. Happy?” 

Beomgyu nods, grinning. The door shuts behind him, and Soobin is alone again. 

Something cracks inside his bones. Something that seems final. Like writing an elegy for something yet living. Like holding a heart in your hands and knowing you do not care for it. 

₊ ⊹

“Hyung,” Soobin finds himself saying the next day, standing there in front of a puffy-eyed and sleepy Choi Yeonjun. He will go into cardiac arrest if Yeonjun rubs at his cheek like an irritated cat one more time. Fuck that, he’s… he’s wearing Soobin’s sweater again. Soobin is going into cardiac arrest. “Your claw-clip.” 

Yeonjun yawns, taking it from his palm. The pads of his fingers brush against Soobin’s palm, soft as pulverised stars. 

Soobin wants to feel his fingers against his face. Touch for the sake of touch. Have him push a thumb into the divot of a dimple and watch him smile. It’s violent, how much he wants. For once. Just once. Yeonjun could crush his lungs to dust beneath his dancer’s heel after, if he wants. But once. Just once. 

“Oh, you found Bartholomew!” Yeonjun trills, his eyes now devoid of sleep and spray-painted with joy. “Goddamn. Now I owe you.”

Soobin blinks. “You… you named the clip Bartholomew?” 

The glare he receives is crushing, though the tips of Yeonjun’s ears are scarlet. “Got a problem with it?” 

“No, I have a problem with the entirety of you.” 

“The entirety of me,” Yeonjun croons, wagging his eyebrows, arching up into Soobin’s space. 

Soobin pushes him away, feeling something thump against his ribs. “Please stop.” 

“I hate both of you and I hope you die before getting to bone,” Taehyun states. 

“Foul,” Beomgyu replies, delighted. “Imagine Soobin dies when hyung gets a hand on—” 

“Merry fucking Christmas to us, yo.” 

Soobin kicks Beomgyu’s shin as Yeonjun puts him in a headlock. Kai yawns to the side, blinking at the display, completely unbothered. Birds squawk at them, concerned. 

Taehyun sighs, pulling Yeonjun away from Beomgyu. “It is 7 AM. Please, for the love of me.” 

The amount of patience inside Soobin is astronomical. Didi and Gogo could never.

“I like shiny things,” Yeonjun says to no one in particular, pocketing his clip. 

He says it to no one, but maybe, maybe Soobin laughs, opening the door to the driver’s seat, Yeonjun’s face painted with dawn lighting a fire inside his heart. “You’re like a magpie.” 

Yeonjun calls shotgun, arguing vociferously that it’s his car. He gets what he wants, as always. The kids pile into the backseat, Taehyun grumbling Just say you wanna be with Soobin-hyung. By some stroke of misfortune, he ends up jammed between Kai’s and Beomgyu’s long limbs, which he seems to be in a fit over. Beomgyu calls, As it’s your car, you should be the one driving, but hey-ho, Choi Yeonjun is a pillow princess, who was surprised? Yeonjun reaches an arm over his seat and gives Beomgyu’s ears the boxing of their lives. Kai takes a video and does nothing to help either party, smiling angelically. 

Soobin sends a prayer to the heavens and starts the ignition. 

“You need a bigger car, hyung,” Taehyun grunts, squished between Beomgyu and Kai. Soobin spares them a glance from the rear-view mirror, snorting. 

Soobin signals for Yeonjun to look at them, lips pursing to bite down a smile. He does, twisting around in his seat. 

Yeonjun bursts out laughing. “Oh, look at him!” He giggles, and Soobin follows the white lines, just follows the white lines. “Like a slice of cheese between toast, they’ve squashed him—” 

Taehyun hurls what appears to be a wooden keychain. It hits Yeonjun’s forehead with a dull clunk. Beomgyu says, Oh, shit. And that sums it up. 

The amount of patience inside Soobin is— 

“I will drive us into a ditch,” Soobin states, knuckles white on the steering-wheel. “I will crash this fucking car. All of you, sit.”  

(“Well, that was hot,” Beomgyu comments. Soobin nearly throws up to the lovely background music of Beomgyu’s shameless cackling.) 

Yeonjun sits. At least Taehyun has the decency to look a little ashamed. Yeonjun has no such concerns, huffing out little laughs as he settles back, curling his body closer to the window. 

“It’s still my car, bitch,” he says after a while. “I’ll hold you accountable for any and all repairs.” 

“It’s still your car, hyung,” Soobin quips, “You should be driving.” 

He can see Yeonjun turn to look at him in his periphery. “We could take turns if you get tired.” 

It catches Soobin off-guard. “No, it’s all right, really.” 

Soobin spares him a glance through the quiet suburbs. Yeonjun’s eyes snap away, caught looking. A dark blush spreads through his face, the sun alighting on his face as if on sunflower petals. Willingly. Something that feels right. 

Kai’s voice pipes up from the back. “When did you two sort your shit out?”  

“What shit?” Yeonjun replies innocently, before Soobin gets the chance. 

“The—” Kai breaks off, incredulous, “—the shit you’ve been forcing us to be an audience to for the past three years?” 

(“Four years for me,” Beomgyu wails.) 

Soobin follows the white lines. Yeonjun laughs in lieu of a reply, and something in Soobin knows he’s looking right at him.  

₊ ⊹

CHOI SOOBIN’S NOTES APP 
[In a file titled tentacle hentai beomgyu look away] 

Do you remember the cherry tree in the school courtyard? Do you remember when you were in junior year, me in sophomore, and that senior who showed up one day wearing a hotdog costume? Remember the temple bell in school they’d ring instead of an electric bell? 

You were no one to me. I was no one to you. But I watch you now, by the windowsill, smoke angels curling up from that setting sun you hold between your fingertips. Your T-shirt says something I never understood. Will never do. Oh, July sun to withering flowers, they tell me. O miracle shaped of singing limbs and structured bones. 

I see no one when I look at you. I see my shame, moss over your skin, curling over your lashes like disease. You are the only one who remembers the same things I do. What am I to do once you leave? There will leave the last of any trace of me. 

Do you remember the afternoon sunlight glinting off the gymnasium floor? The light was so astonishing I never quite saw your face. I read my lines to you and pretended you were no one. Do you remember that first, last time—you pushed your thumb to the crescent beneath my eye. Slotted our wrists together like two antlers, pulse to pulse, artery to artery. Planted your roots in the dips of my face. A fortune teller once told me, Someday you will love me. 

I’ve been cursed ever since. 

Who will sit down next to me and tell me the difference between fate and purpose? Who will tell me it’s okay? Who will listen to me breathe in silence and meet me halfway? I left you there that day, underneath the cherry tree. I let you go that night, festering in the parking-lot. The missed trains rattling by me crackling with bones made of creation myths, your voice mocking the moon. 

What do you do when no one becomes something so unendingly familiar? 

₊ ⊹

(Midmorning. A petrol stop. Yeonjun drags Beomgyu away to buy snacks for all of them, though not before making Soobin swear on his future wife that he will not pay for any fuel. If you pay, she’s dead, he said severely, a hand brushing Soobin’s shoulder. And I can see the fucking future! 

Since when did you see the future in conditionals? Soobin called after them.  

There’s no conditional there, I’m giving you a choice, Yeonjun’s receding voice yelled back, just before they rounded the bend and were out of sight. 

A choice. The irony twists his mouth into something outsiders would call a smile. 

In the rear-view mirror, he watches Taehyun watch Kai. The bright sun casts blocks of shadow on both their faces, the cool grey imprints of leaves sliding down their waists and hands. 

Taehyun’s head thunks against the window, no longer suffocating. “If you could describe love as a tangible object, what would it be?” 

“All of a sudden?” Soobin says, amused. 

Taehyun shrugs. “Indulge me. I love listening to you.”  

Soobin whistles. “You’re laying it on thick today, aren’t you?” He turns it over in his head, staring at the roof of Yeonjun’s car. There are random stickers of maroon stars in one corner. Rapidly, but perhaps all too slow, the words string themselves together. “Waking up and you’re not sure of your own humanity, because of the lengths you’d go to just to see them safe. Walk your feet right down to the bones to get them a flower. Gouge your eyes out at their command. You have, you have a—vitiated memory. You remember some things vividly, down to the flutter of their eyelashes; and other things you remember only flashes of, the flash of a knife slicing a blood red apple. You see the world in different colours; rose-blush, nights brushed ultramarine. Vignettes of afternoons replaying inside your head singularly like—like incomplete lifeforms. There. … An animal,” he says slowly, “An animal.” 

(But underneath there’s something human slowly dying.)

Taehyun’s lips part. Soobin sees his gaze travel to the passenger seat before slowly crawling up to meet his eyes in the rear-view. Soobin can see the realisation form, that shuttered silhouette of a dancer taking shape in his eyes. 

Soobin looks away, back out the window. Where Yeonjun went. Motes of light and the honey scent of apples in wintry air. 

“Oh, hyung, you make love sound like something violent,” Kai scolds, reaching over and touching Soobin’s shoulder with a tap. “A plushie is what love is. Right up there with Taehyunnie’s cooking.” 

Taehyun leans his head on Kai’s shoulder, closing his eyes, reaching closer and closer to the warmth. “No,” he says gently, “he’s not saying it’s violent. He’s saying that it’s sad.”  

“Maybe, yeah,” Soobin acquiesces, licking his teeth. He’s not sure how his heart beats normally. “But I think I’m saying that it gets lonely sometimes.”

The stillness of the air pushes at his skin. He stares at the steering-wheel and repeats it to himself. Follow the white lines. Follow the white lines home. 

“Love shouldn’t be lonely though,” Kai says, frowning. He looks like he might lean forward to look at Soobin’s face. Soobin knows he only isn’t because it would jostle Taehyun. 

“Yeah,” Taehyun agrees, opening his eyes. Soobin can feel their weight on the back of his head. “That’s like… the opposite of love. Loneliness. Or absence.” 

“You two love each other,” Soobin says curtly, looking out the window to see Yeonjun and Beomgyu returning, arms laden with polythene bags. “That’s the difference.”  

The silence feels like a slap in the face. But then Beomgyu collapses in the car, wielding about a dozen gleaming pink packets of Pocky in each hand and waving them about. Yeonjun settles in with all the grace of a crashing paper airplane, asking Soobin how much it was. 

Soobin had already paid. Yeonjun screams in anguish, but Soobin shrugs. Rather kill her now than doom her to being unendingly unhappy with the likes of him. 

Dusk. Soobin follows the white lines home, a loneliness marching into a greater loneliness. They get there right as the setting sun dips into the sea, the gulls arcing over their heads in great, sweeping streaks. The sky over their heads is a sweeping dark blue, lightening into a weak purple in the western sky. The first few stars blink over their heads. 

Beomgyu hands out the bracelets he’d made for the others. Soobin’s own is still on his wrist. 

Yeonjun snatches Beomgyu into a hug, meeting Soobin’s eyes over his shoulder. Crescent moons speaking of a smile. Like they’ve created something special here, a song only they know of. I promise you’re nothing to me. Come here and say it back. 

Soobin smiles back. He doesn’t look away until Yeonjun lets Beomgyu go. 

Evening. The plaster of the hotel’s entrance is cracked and peeling, but so are the ones back home. Soobin looks out of the large windows to the glittering sea. 

Kai pushes their wrists together, bracelets clacking. “Hey, hyung, look. We’re matching.” 

Soobin laughs. “All five of us are.”  

Kai shoves his shoulder, giggling. “Like the five points of a star.” 

Something grows inside Soobin. It has thorns. “I’m going to miss you, you know.” 

Kai goes quiet, before sighing. “You could just stay. Get your master’s here.” 

Of course Soobin has thought about that. Lain awake staring at the water-stained ceiling, listening to the clock tick uniformly. Staying another two years would be so easy. Just enrol in one of their university’s postgraduate programmes. 

Then why does that I will lodge in his throat so? He shrugs. “Maybe.” 

“You know, you made me think, back at the petrol pump,” Kai muses, shifting. All restless hands and feet. “About what happens when love is lonely.”

Soobin watches the distant lighthouse’s lantern flash and flicker like a pulse. “And?” 

“If you— If you love and you’re lonely, that just means you have no one to give it to.” Kai’s eyebrows furrow, flitting back to the receptionist’s desk, where Taehyun is getting their keys. Beomgyu and Yeonjun twirling around on the tiled floor, hands meeting and unmeeting. “Like an, an untapped reservoir inside you.” 

Soobin’s chest tightens. “My reservoirs are very much tapped, Hyuka, I assure you.” 

“Why would you word it like that, hyung, oh my God.” 

Soobin laughs, the thorns inside him poking at tender flesh. “You said it first!” 

Their laughs splinter and break into shuttered sighs. The receptionist fumbles with the keys, pink fingers frozen stiff. Taehyun waves her off when she apologises, thanking her.

“Will you tell us we’re the lucky ones?” Moths circle up up up. Kai’s face is like a lone star. “Me and Taehyun?”  

But then they’ll be the ones to tell him, Oh, you poor soul. It’s not your fault. No one gets a choice, you just got the short end of the stick. Let it go and it will recede like the tide. 

“No.” The sea melts and crashes on the rocks. “There’s nothing lucky about love.” 

Kai looks away. Soobin knows he’s broken something delicate. 

They play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets the single room. Taehyun wins, because of course he does. The losers of the second round draw lots to decide who rooms with whom. 

Soobin doesn’t even need to look. Kai and Beomgyu aggressively shaking hands. Taehyun’s quiet, hopeful hand touching the back of his. Yeonjun’s eyes like autumn moons. 

He’s never been all that lucky. 

Midnight. A voice says, “You don’t look all that happy to be here, you know.” 

Soobin would’ve laughed. He swears he would’ve. “I’m just tired from driving, hyung.” 

Yeonjun huffs, by the window again. When all of this is just salt with no memory, Soobin will still remember him like this. The boy by the window. “I told you we could’ve taken turns.” 

When Soobin doesn’t reply, he says plaintively, “You’re the weirdest man I know.” 

“Thanks.” Soobin sets his bag down on his side of the room. “I learnt it all from you.” 

Watching Yeonjun is a treasure. The light hitting his broad back as he moves around, spinning and spinning with a partner made of air, a hummed tune only they hear. 

(Soobin hears. Soobin knows what he’s singing.) 

Yeonjun sits down on his bed with a flourish only he can manage, crossing one leg over the other and dumping his chin on his palm. Soobin wishes it was his, Soobin wishes— Yeonjun’s eyes watch his face. “You gonna tell me why you’re so sad or…?” 

Soobin doesn’t reply, toeing his shoes off and settling with his back to the wall. It’s cold against his back, beige and dry. When did they get this way? 

“Say, someone prophesised your death once.” Soobin spies the catch in Yeonjun’s breath, his eyes flickering to the windows. “You were determined to not make it happen. And you fought it for years and years and years, you thought you, fuck, you thought you were free from it. You thought you’d escaped it, you were immortal now. That’s exactly when a fucking fish flies at you and guts you half to death.” Yeonjun snorts. Soobin tries not to let himself smile, because fuck, that’s going to ruin it. “And you’re just fucking there, bleeding out and knowing you’re going to die and wondering how you ended up here. The very place you’d fought not to be in.” 

The clock ticks on. For a second, Soobin thinks Yeonjun’s just going to laugh and brush it off. Tell him to go to sleep, or something. But he doesn’t. 

His tone is deceptively measured when he speaks, but Soobin is realising he knows him. Can hear the undercurrent of nervousness hiding away as radio interference. “Why did you fight it in the first place? If you knew it would happen anyway?” 

Point-blank at the heart of the matter. “Because you thought it would mean something, if you defied his words. But it didn’t. It never meant anything to you at all. That was never the point.” 

Yeonjun gets up. Soobin watches him get closer, the setting sun crawling up his throat and lighting up his oesophagus. If he pressed a hand to his chest and pushed down, maybe he’d glow. Maybe, for once, just once, he’d be worth looking at. Just once. 

“Because you still want to believe,” Yeonjun whispers, his shins stopping a lover’s caress away from Soobin’s knees. 

“That if you’re the exception, just once, it’ll all be worth it,” Soobin finishes, looking up at him. 

Yeonjun sits down next to Soobin, pressing himself into his side. Soobin goes still. The warmth by his side feels like something that should not be named. Something so sacred their clumsy mouths could not name it if they wished to. 

“You’re holding your breath,” Yeonjun says, words sticking to his throat. 

“You’re here,” Soobin replies. 

“Should I leave?” 

“... No. It’s okay.” 

Yeonjun takes Soobin’s numb arm and wraps it around his own shoulders. Soobin curls his fingers, itching. “What are you doing?” he grumbles, holding him tighter regardless. 

Yeonjun glares at him. Soobin watches the mole beneath his eye. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m cold.” 

Soobin opens his arms. Yeonjun nestles in with a sigh and Soobin pretends there isn’t something splintering inside his chest. He’s so warm when he wraps his arms around his middle in return. He’s so, so warm. Hot flesh and stinging bones. Sinew wrapped around Soobin’s heart.

“When did you even steal this, the fuck,” he says instead, pinching the fabric pooling at Yeonjun’s elbow. “I know this is mine, don’t even deny it.” 

Yeonjun pulls his knees up, tucking all of himself away into Soobin’s frame. “No,” he whines, “I stole this from Kai and it was just my luck he’d stolen it from you.” 

Even Soobin is surprised at the laugh that bursts out of him. “So you didn’t know this was mine until I said it that day?” 

“No, I didn’t.” Yeonjun presses down a laugh. Soobin wishes he wouldn’t. “I thought this was Kai’s and I was so confused over the smirks and kissy faces and eyebrow-wiggling Beomgyu kept sending my way.” 

Soobin tightens his hold and shakes them both. “You’re actually so stupid.” 

The silence mellows out. Then Yeonjun says, “Did you know Beomgyu talks in his sleep? About geography exams, no less?” 

Soobin snorts. “He was bargaining ferociously with a fishmonger that one time. Haven’t heard about the geo exams before.” 

“He’s so weird.” The unadulterated affection in his voice makes Soobin smile. “Not even in like, an, uwu way, that boy is genuinely strange.” 

Soobin wrinkles his nose. “Never saw uwu ever again.” 

Yeonjun shifts, his hair tickling Soobin’s jaw. “Did he tell you, too?” he says bluntly. “Not to fuck each other up?” 

“Yeah,” he breathes, ears going white-hot. “I think we’re already a little fucked up here.” 

Yeonjun hums, tilting his head up to look at Soobin. How will he ever get used to that sad look in his lively eyes? “You called it a battle of shames, right? My shame and yours. But I think we were just sad. … Are you—is it still there? Are you still sad?” 

There are times when I am so sad I feel full with it. I cannot eat. “As if any of you give me the space to breathe, let alone be sad. But sometimes it, it comes back with a vengeance.”

“It always hits you when you’re alone. Like you’re fucking eating your Neopolitan ice-cream in the sun and the sunlight hurts you and you sit there, thinking back on everything.”  

Soobin laughs. “Spot on. You should be a poet.” 

Yeonjun shifts again. “But that would leave you jobless.” 

Soobin lets his lips brush Yeonjun’s hair. He will never forgive himself for it. “... What is this, then? What are we doing here?” 

“Never put a name on it,” Yeonjun chides. But his voice is warm and maybe Soobin wants to stay here forever. Speaking in sepia tones, the world bleeding grey. “We’re… we’re being lonely together. This is your sadness and this is mine.”

“And we’re making them battle it out?” Soobin suggests, wiggling his eyebrows. 

Yeonjun looks up and blanches. “Christ, that angle is unflattering. Ooh. Uh. Ew. But yes. Like, like—oh, one of your stupid fucking games I hear you and Beomgyu arguing over. League of Losers, or something.” 

Soobin gasps dramatically, jostling Yeonjun. “You did not.” 

Yeonjun turns his head to smile at him and Soobin very quickly forgets what this was all about. “Oh, but I did.” 

Yeonjun’s smile fades the longer Soobin doesn’t look away. Neither of them will say it. Neither of them will put a name to it, festering between them like moths. Soobin wants and he wants and he wants. Heartfire and suns made of moons. He’ll find it all and then he’ll bury himself with it and he’ll hope Yeonjun cries. He’ll hope someone misses him. Isn’t that life-ruining? 

“It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to,” he whispers, a hand splayed on Soobin’s heart, starfish legs closing around an empty seashell. 

Soobin brushes imaginary sand away from Yeonjun’s lips with his thumb, his nail catching on a split. Yeonjun shivers, and Soobin tells himself it’s just the cold, it’s just the sea. Just the tempest in his heart. 

“Never put a name on it, right?” he replies. The thorned creature inside him thrashes. 

Yeonjun presses his ear to Soobin’s heartbeat, exhaling, squeezing his eyes shut like he can’t fucking bear it either. “I can’t hear that well in this ear. Some stray firecracker from when I was little. Uh. Y’know the red ones that look like little dried chillies all strung together?” He lifts his head and waves his hand by his left ear. “Kinda exploded right here.” 

“Red chillies stru—? You mean the— oh my God.” Soobin’s face twists in incredulity. “No. No, actually. You would go deaf because you were a dumbass fucking child. That’s on brand.” 

Yeonjun pouts at him. “You’re so mean to me.” 

Soobin rolls his eyes. “Your job description these past few years was bullying me, I think you’ll be fine.” 

The clock across the room says it’s 2 AM. Yeonjun’s eyes glitter like no sea ever could, grinning with all his teeth. “Wanna go down to the beach?” 

Time is nothing now. 

Yeonjun presses Soobin into the seafoam. 

The frigid water washes
 the iridescent stains of his hands from Soobin’s face 
until there’s no trace left of him 

at a l l .) 

₊ ⊹

Soobin thinks if he actually sleeptalked, he’d talk about death. But he doesn’t. 

“You do!” Yeonjun snaps over breakfast. Breakfast being street food from the stalls slowly starting to crop up along the coastline, fires kindling somehow. Taehyun didn’t want to eat the heavy hotel food first thing in the morning, and now they’re stuck here, wind lashing at their faces. 

“Oh, yeah? What the fuck did I talk about? Word for word, or it didn’t fucking happen,” Soobin hisses through the food in his mouth. 

“Don’t fucking talk with food in your mouth, you animal,” Yeonjun scolds, long since done with his own food. He’s been eyeing Kai’s roll for a while now. “And here. Since you’re so adamant that I’m lying. You talked about combinatorics for a while—completely inaccurate, Taehyun’s ears would’ve bled—and then you talked about the utilitarian philosophy of Robin Hood or—something, mumbling on about morality and corrective justice and Lord knows what else. And then you said, and I quote: Elephants are just big rats. Like, stupid big.” 

Soobin’s hand stops in its progress towards his mouth. “... What.” 

Yeonjun shrugs, smiling secretively. “I don’t know, you said it.” 

Maybe Soobin caught the flu last night, sinking into the icy sea during the wee hours of morning. Or maybe Soobin hit his head too hard some time in the past and this has all been a long, lucid hallucination. He says, completely seriously, “You know, hyung, your smile is far too sweet for the terror that you actually are.” 

Watching the red spread across Yeonjun’s cheeks at what seems to be slow motion is a little too much. He’s never really seen it before, not in this harsh morning light. Blotches of blood underneath soft skin like the winter sank in a little too hard into his face. The day is overcast, blanketed white and grey. It’s the exact type of weather Yeonjun loves. 

Soobin will always think about how self-contradictory Yeonjun is. Walks around smelling like an apple orchard but will take the apple slices out of anything and everything. Acts all unaffected and prim and proper when he’s the softest person Soobin knows. Loves the cold and the wind and the rain and the snow when one smile of his could make the sun peek out from behind a cloud, just to look. Just to stare at a fellow star and feel the wonder mortals feel. 

“Jesus,” Beomgyu mumbles. “It’s too early for this.” 

“Get the bucket list, Kai,” Taehyun says. “Before Yeonjun-hyung has a stroke.” 

Kai hands his half-eaten egg roll to Yeonjun and takes out his phone. Yeonjun presses their faces together, cheek to cheek, a token of thanks so Yeonjun. Kai looks up and catches Taehyun’s eyes for a split second, tilting his head towards their hyung, as if to say, Look at him. 

Soobin looks. Look at all the love inside you. Will you leave some for me? Soobin sees. 

Beomgyu leans over Kai’s shoulder and snorts. “Walk along the beach collecting seashells?” he reads out, mood brightening with mirth. He nearly weeps. “Which one of you wrote this?” 

Kai raises the hand of shame. “I did,” he admits, scratching the back of his neck. 

Beomgyu dissolves into a fit of cackling. Taehyun slaps the back of his head. 

And so they walk.

“Does anyone have, like, anything to say?” Yeonjun bursts out after seventeen-and-a-half minutes of walking. His hands are bruised raw in the cold, cuts blooming all over from the sharp edges of the seashells he still stubbornly holds in his palms. Yikes. Soobin is going to have to take care of that because God knows Yeonjun isn’t.

“Good job, hyung,” Taehyun drawls, pocketing his phone. “You lasted 17.34 minutes of silence.”  

“Oh, fuck you. Fuck all of you.” 

Kai takes pity on him as Soobin and Beomgyu laugh at his agony. “I woke up and watched the sunrise, it was really pretty.” 

Beomgyu squawks, affronted. “Your put-togetherness is the last thing anyone wants to hear about in the ante fucking meridian.” 

Taehyun plants himself between Beomgyu and Kai. “Don’t be mean to him.” 

Beomgyu stares for a long time, left eye twitching. 

Soobin leans over to Yeonjun, dropping his voice. “Do you think Kai saw us?” 

“No,” Yeonjun snorts, “It’s winter. The sun rose at like 7 AM today, he’s just deluding himself into thinking he woke up early.” 

Soobin shakes his head. “Are we too mean to him?” 

Yeonjun glances up at him, plush mouth falling open in offence. “That’s my baby.” 

He offers no further elaborations. Soobin decides not to ask. 

And so they walk. 

Somewhere down the coastline, when their footprints stretch far enough for Soobin to start entertaining fancies of murder, Beomgyu says, “Are we going to talk about the fact that, Soobin and Yeonjun-noona, like, totally want to fuck?” 

Soobin huffs a “no” at the same time Yeonjun says, “No, we’re not.” 

Beomgyu throws up his hands in the most pitiful gesture Soobin has ever seen. “They’re not even denying it, the fuck.” 

Soobin blinks. “No, I do not want to fuck Yeonjun-hyung. Yes, I could be lying.” 

Yeonjun blows him a kiss, winking. “You know you want it, baby.” 

Beomgyu stares in open-mouthed disgust. Taehyun doubles over laughing. Kai wraps an arm around him, cackling into his spine. Yeonjun cringes immediately, face twisting like he’s swallowed down something sour. Soobin doesn’t even fucking bother anymore. 

And so they walk. 

The lighthouse towers over them, its lantern unlit. Yeonjun says, “Woof.” 

“Woof-woof,” replies Beomgyu. 

And so they walk. 

Soobin bends down to pick up washed-up starfish, throwing them back into the ocean one by one. He’s holding a palmful of seashells in his other hand, the others coming back once in a while to deposit a few in his hand. Kai calls him Seashell Bank now. It’s not that bad of a nickname to have.

Yeonjun falls into step beside him, the kids ahead of them. “Hi.” 

“Don’t talk to me,” Soobin grumbles, cursing when the seashells nearly fall. 

“You can’t hold them all, bitch,” Yeonjun replies, iron lacing his voice. 

Are they still talking about shells? “I’ll hold them all.” 

Yeonjun rolls his eyes. It’s like a Pavlovian response to seeing Soobin’s face. “Just give me some.”

“Your hands are already all sliced open, like hell I’m giving them to you.” 

A hand creeps up his arm. “But you’ll take care of me. Give me some.” 

Soobin gives him some. 

“It’s no use, you know,” Yeonjun says after a while. “You can’t possibly get them all.” 

He’s talking about the starfish. Soobin throws another one back home. “I know I can’t.” 

And so they walk. 

“So… his smile is sweet, huh?” 

“Kai Kamal Huening, I swear to God I will show Taehyun the thirst tweets. Even the sock one.” 

And so they walk, circling back to where they started.

Soobin looks to his left, and it’s Yeonjun again. A stray block of wan sunlight hits his hair and Soobin wishes he could take a photo. What he’d give to keep him like this, squinting and red-cheeked, hands laden with seashells and a sadness in him that Soobin can understand. Soobin can know. What he’d give, what he’d do. 

When he speaks, he’s almost disgusted at how soft his voice is. “Hi, hyung.” 

“Oh, now he wants to talk,” Yeonjun bites out, pouting. His grin returns full force, the sun casting its wan face away in shame. All that’s left is the white sky and the wingbeat shadows of gulls. “Hello to you too.” 

“Are your hands okay?” 

Yeonjun immediately shoves them into his pockets. “They’re stinging a little, but it’s okay.” 

Soobin bottles it up and follows their footprints home. It’s quiet, for once. The kids are still walking ahead, all three of them arm-in-arm and giggling over something. Kai’s dying seagull laugh carries over the waves clearly, something in that familiar sound making Soobin smile. 

It slips off his face as quick as it came. Fuck. He’s going to miss them. 

“But you’ll take care of hyung, won’t you?” Yeonjun asks, smiling something gentle enough to make Soobin turn away. 

“I will,” he replies anyway, the waves leaping up inside his chest, “Of course I will.” 

And there’s nowhere else left to go. They’ve walked the entire coastline, from the rocky crags splitting ocean from land on one end to the lonely lighthouse on the other. When Soobin looks, their footprints have already been washed away. 

“Beomgyu-hyung yeeted wet sand at me,” Taehyun laments as Kai laughs. “I really, really, really need a shower. Regroup in… two hours?”

Beomgyu does his best I’m-just-a-kicked-puppy look. “Look, Taehyun-ah, I’m sorry. You were just in the way.” 

“Don’t you dare start,” Taehyun snarls. Kai has to hold him back. 

The seashells fall back to Soobin. He cradles them the way he holds gentle words close to his heart, the entire open breadth of the sea yawning beneath him. Yeonjun opens the door to their room and Soobin closes it with his foot. Sink or swim. 

Soobin takes Yeonjun’s tiny tote bag from his bed and starts piling seashells inside. He pulls the drawstring tight just as he hears the tap running in the bathroom, Yeonjun’s breathy humming echoing through the open door. It makes something inside his ribs pull as tight as the string—I know you. I know you, you’ve been with me all this while. 

“Hyung,” he calls out, “check if they have antiseptic in there. The bottom cabinets always have some.” 

Clanging sounds issue from the bathroom so ferociously Soobin wonders if he should go check.   

“Ah-hah!” Yeonjun exclaims. “I found some. Ooh, they have cotton too. It’s almost as if this happens a lot.” 

Soobin places the bag on Yeonjun’s pillow and makes his way inside the bathroom. The basin is already cluttered full of Yeonjun’s shit, some of which Soobin places on the shelves right there to make room. “Sit there,” he tells him. “And give me your hands.” 

Yeonjun hauls himself up and nearly cracks his head on the wall. Soobin curses, hands reflexively coming up to shield him, shaking his head when Yeonjun wiggles his eyebrows at him. He giggles when Soobin starts tearing out little chunks of cotton and dabbing them in antiseptic liquid. “That’s exactly what I said to you during the,” his voice drops lower, “Incident.” 

Soobin takes Yeonjun’s wrist and tries not to think about how his pulse feels under his fingers. He starts with the little cuts lining his knuckles. “Don’t say the Incident like it’s capitalised.” 

Yeonjun kicks his shinbone with scary accuracy. “It deserves to be capitalised, though.” 

Soobin hesitates once before gently dabbing the cotton over the gash over his palm. He apologises softly when Yeonjun hisses. “By virtue of what.”  

“For screwing our budding romance over for, like, a decade?”

Soobin pauses, considering. He pretends like the word romance isn’t about to make him faint and crack his head open on the tiles. “... Okay, yeah, that checks out.” 

Yeonjun bites his lip to stifle a noise when Soobin goes over the cut on his left palm again. His thigh tenses up, and Soobin immediately pauses. 

He places a hand on Yeonjun’s thigh, squeezing it in apology. “Sorry, does it hurt a lot?” 

Yeonjun grins, wolfish. “Why don’t you kiss it better?” 

Soobin sees the wince of pain he’s hiding behind clenched teeth. Before he can think too much about it and screw himself over forever, he lifts Yeonjun’s wrist and presses his lips to the faint pulse hammering at his wrist. Yeonjun startles, a tiny noise slipping from his mouth. Soobin flips his hand and presses a kiss to the centre of his palm, a rushing sun. 

He crouches before he has to see the look on Yeonjun’s face, pushing his hundred miles of legs away from the cabinet doors. He yanks them open, rummaging around. 

“... Hyung, oh my God, I found Molang bandaids.” 

“What.” 

“You only need one, right? There’s only one big gash, the others won’t need any.” 

Yeonjun hums. Soobin pushes back up to his feet, snapping his teeth at Yeonjun’s fingers when he wiggles them in front of his nose. Yeonjun’s bright laugh echoes and takes Soobin’s crumbling resolve with it. 

“Is it… is it true?” Yeonjun asks, trying to catch Soobin’s eye as he peels off the backing. 

Soobin whistles through his teeth, carefully placing the band-aid over the cut. He smooths Molang’s glossy face down, laughing at it. “What is?” 

“The—” The uncertainty in Yeonjun’s voice makes Soobin pause, hands hovering in the air. “The… fortune teller’s prophecy coming true?” 

Soobin’s eyes rise up to meet Yeonjun’s. He can’t do this. Can’t have him right here in front of him, knees bracketing hips and hands endlessly circling hands but never quite meeting. “You would know, hyung.” 

Yeonjun’s chest heaves up and down as he sucks in a harsh breath, spine loosening like someone has pulled the string. His eyes are so, so sad. Soobin wishes he knew what to do now. 

“Do you regret it?” he asks quietly, entire histories in the slant of his mouth, “Saying it?” 

Yeonjun’s hands tremble when they reach up to hold Soobin’s shoulders. Soobin doesn’t dare hold him back, simply curling his torso closer, hiding his face away. 

“It all ends and begins right there on our fucking dining-table, you know.” His voice is thick and muffled from where he’s hiding, too. Neither of them can bear to look at each other. “It’s where I told my father about my being bisexual. It’s where I decided I could see the future. I decided I’d fucking seen the way he’d react, actually, it was just me getting it out of the way. Soobin-ah.” His voice breaks on his name and Soobin gives in, wrapping his arms around him tight. If anything, Yeonjun's voice gets shakier. “I was being fucking stretched in all directions and I— I wanted a fucking voice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I hurt you. Is that what will make this all better? Soobin, I’m sorry. I really am.” 

A month ago, this would’ve made it all better. The apology Soobin might as well have been waiting his whole life for. But now, feeling Yeonjun tremble in his hold, his red-rimmed eyes refusing to meet Soobin’s—all he wants is for him to rest. To close his eyes and not see this shade of blue painted across his eyelids. 

“You never hurt me,” Soobin tells him. “You were a kid.” 

Yeonjun’s hands leave his shoulders to press themselves tightly into his eyes. “Then what else did I do?” His voice is as quiet as first snow. “What do I fucking do?” 

I did it all to myself. Soobin lets himself cup Yeonjun’s cheek and forgives them both for it. For hurting, for being teenagers. For wanting. “Forgive yourself first. Forgive yourself for being a kid, and for all the things you haven’t let yourself feel.” 

Yeonjun closes his eyes, but Soobin already saw them turn glassy. 

(Yeonjun slips under his covers that night, endless apologies spilling from his lips. Soobin touches his face and tells him to shut up. He quietly holds him through the shaking and carries him over to the dawn breaking through the windows.)  

₊ ⊹

It’s just a week. But Soobin has it all tucked away in an album on his phone, videos of Beomgyu nearly lighting himself on fire, videos of Taehyun and Yeonjun slowdancing around a fairy circle made of seashells, cult-style. There are more photos of their mega-sandcastle in there than Soobin would like to admit—shut up, he was really proud of it, okay? 

Yeonjun shows up the most. Yeonjun mid-sentence, frowning etching deep lines into his forehead. Yeonjun laughing, eyes pressing up and disappearing, bunny teeth. Yeonjun looking back at him, smiling, a marker on the map of the city where they fell in love. 

Soobin lets himself have it. For once. Just once. 

It’s just a week. But Soobin knows this will be the one week he will remember, standing in a stone house years down the line, aching and alone. Just as he was always meant to be. 

₊ ⊹

“It’s New Year’s Eve!” Beomgyu crows, kicking open the door to their room, Kai and Taehyun following a step behind. Perhaps wisely in abject terror for their hearing.

Soobin looks up from his phone slowly, gaze catching on the time. 5:53 PM. “I can see that, Beomgyu. And so can the other people here whom you’ve doubtless woken up from siestas.” 

Beomgyu wrinkles his nose. “Siesta? Lord Christ Almighty. I hate you; where are you hiding Yeonjun-hyung? He’s so much better than you.” 

Soobin tucks his knees up to make room for Kai, who drops onto his bed with all the grace of a catapulting helicopter. “He’s doing his 25-step skincare routine in the bathroom, sorry to disappoint. Don’t disturb him, he throws vials of cows’ toenails if you get too close.” 

“I can hear you, Choi Soobin!” 

Soobin grins. “Quick, everyone hide.” 

Yeonjun emerges, his face so devastating Soobin might as well just give up. His head thunks on Kai’s shoulder in despair as Yeonjun makes his way over, scowling. “Those weren’t fucking cow toenails, those were cashews, you degenerate lifeform. And no, fucking listen to me, all of you.” Taehyun startles away from him at the volume. “I was showering! Showering! And all of a sudden, I hear the door open, and Soobin’s voice just going, ‘My eyes are closed, I swear, my eyes are closed.’ Because that made me feel any better. I mean, obviously, I screamed. I kid you not, this fucker screamed back. And then he had the audacity, the gumption, to tell me, ‘Stop screaming, hyung, it’s just me, I swear I have my eyes completely closed. Just… where did you put the Cheerios?’ The fucking Cheerios. I pelted him with the first thing I saw and if that was a bottle of cashews, so be it.” 

Kai blinks. And blinks again. And doesn’t stop.

“Is that what those screams were?” Beomgyu’s eyes bug out. “I thought those were… Nevermind. Yeah, never-fucking-mind.” 

Soobin feels the need to defend himself under Taehyun’s judgemental stare. “My eyes were closed!” 

Yeonjun turns, teeth bared, nearly climbing over him. “Who the fuck sticks their head in an occupied bathroom?” 

“Who the fuck leaves the bathroom door unlocked?” 

“That— That wasn’t an invitation?” 

Taehyun coughs. “Knowing you two…” 

Kai sits up and clamps his hands over Taehyun’s ears as Yeonjun starts yelling at them. Soobin quietly adds another video to the album.  

“Out, out,” Yeonjun snaps, shepherding them towards the door. Soobin gets up with them. “Wait for me, not a single one of you steps outside the entrance. … Soobin, where do you think you’re going? Stay here.” 

The door slams shut, like they couldn’t wait to get out. Soobin gapes, circling back regardless. “What do you need me here for?” 

“Shut up.” Yeonjun holds up two shirts that probably can’t be called shirts anymore. More like… strings of mutilated fabric. “Which of these looks better?” 

Soobin’s eyes widen. He can feel his cheeks turning red. “Uh—that one?” he says weakly.

Yeonjun looks at it, humming. He slips Soobin a small smile. “What? Do you think I’m gonna walk around in this? Put your teeth away, it’s winter. I won’t.”

Soobin sputters. Yeonjun laughs at him, ruthless. 

And so it goes. Soobin gives him useless advice about his hair and hypes him up and nearly faints dead away when Yeonjun pulls on the sweater over the dubiously-termed shirt. 

“Oh.” Soobin’s voice cracks embarrassingly. “You—you’re going to wear that?” 

Yeonjun grins, all too knowing. “What; I thought you liked seeing me in your clothes?” 

The heat flares to Soobin’s face like a solar flare. Yeonjun doesn’t let him talk, handing him a handful of tiny hairclips. Rubber butterflies and bees and flowers, barely taking up any space in Soobin’s palm. “I’m trusting you here,” Yeonjun warns, eyes sparkly. “Go ham.” 

Soobin grimaces as he takes the comb from his hand. He yaps while twisting sections of hair back, just to think about something other than the boy sitting before him, trying to meet his eyes in the mirror. “When we were kids, my female cousins would sometimes let me watch them play dress-up,” he tells him, clipping the flowers and butterflies close together. “All my knowledge comes from watching them, hyung, I’m so sorry.” 

Yeonjun turns his head this way and that. “Hey, it looks really cute though.” 

Soobin reaches and twists a few wisps of hair at Yeonjun’s temple around his finger, curling them in front of his eyes. “Beomgyu would’ve done this better.” 

Yeonjun catches his eye and smiles, toothy. “I wanted you to do it.” 

Soobin leans down and presses his lips to the corner of Yeonjun’s eye. Yeonjun holds his face there with a warm hand, inhaling the air Soobin exhales. Small dream-shaped lifeforms they cannot see, floating towards somewhere warm. How infinitely quiet it is. 

“We should probably go,” Soobin mumbles. 

“Hmm,” Yeonjun huffs, letting go and standing up, dusting himself off. “Chances they’re right outside the door trying to listen in?” 

They’re not. True to their words, they’re standing one foot from the entrance and arguing over something inane. Soobin hears snatches of conversation like “did we all actually fucking—” and “I can’t stand this anymore” and gets the niggling feeling that they’re talking about them. 

(“Your sheets smell like apples,” Kai tells him, walking to the little restaurant by the crags. 

“Hyung steals them,” Soobin lies, “says they’re more comfortable.” 

It sounds ridiculous even to Soobin. He winces as soon as the words leave his mouth. 

The look in Kai’s eyes isn’t pity. Soobin will forever love that it never is. “I hope you know what you’re doing, hyung. Don’t hurt each other. I love you two.”

Dinner is laughter. Yeonjun takes all the fish from Soobin’s plate without being asked to. Beomgyu divides the bill by five in his head and tries not to look smug when it turns out he’s correct. The clock ticks down. They see sparkler flames all up and down the coastline, wandering aimlessly because none of them want to let this go. None of them have the strength to let this go.) 

₊ ⊹

Yeonjun stares at his right hand like he’s trying to see what he’s made of. For all of a second, Soobin considers touching him. “It’s ending soon, huh?” 

He doesn’t. Something in the air is too delicate. “Is it the 1st yet?” 

“Five minutes,” Taehyun replies, eyes cast to the black waters.

A shadow, a shadow of happiness flitting over their throats and their lips. Invisible clouds, all stars hidden. The sea tearing itself apart on the jagged rocks they’re standing on. Five silhouettes, encloaked in something they do not know how to name. 

Beomgyu is always the only one brave enough. “Why are we here, really?”  

Taehyun turns towards the rest of them, eyes flitting over each in split-frames. “Kinda feels like saying goodbye, doesn’t it?” 

Kai scoffs, reaching for him. “As if any of you would be rid of me. No, we’re locked in this shit for life. I’ve burnt the receipts, the door is locked. You’re all hostages.”

Yeonjun smiles. “In your anime dungeon? Are there handcuffs?” 

Soobin talks over them, eyes tracing the time on his lockscreen. “It feels like time is slipping. Lights flashing. Things missing. Speeding up and slowing down to eternities.” 

When Yeonjun meets his eyes, it’s— “And you never want this confusion, this riot to end.” 

“Because joy is searching for the missing things with the people you—you want to be with.” 

Beomgyu laughs, lacking any of its normal supernovae of brightness. “You can say you love us, hyung. About damn time, if anything.” 

Soobin opens his mouth. He inhales. And— 

Taehyun does a little shimmy, leaning on Soobin’s shoulder. “00, everybody.” 

Somehow, it’s Soobin who cheers first, when no one else wants to. “Happy new year.” 

₊ ⊹

Yeonjun’s eyes are closed and his hands are held above his head. 

The air that surrounds him is one that suffocates, pokes its miasmic fingers into Soobin’s lungs until he’s aching, bursting to say something, to do something, anything, anything. 

One of Yeonjun’s clammy hands clings to Soobin’s wrist, keeping his larger hand manacled over the one remaining of his. There’s a sharp thing in Soobin’s throat. He reaches out with his other hand, swallowing it down, and coaxes Yeonjun’s hand away and under, holding both his shuttered pulses under a grip he hopes is grounding. 

I will be heavy as the sleep in your eyes when the morning sun tries to peep at you, Soobin doesn’t say. Heavy as the flesh that clings to your bones, heavy as the ache of holding back tears. I will hang with heron wings above your heart and I will croak my dreamscapes of delusions. Listen to me sing and crush my wings to dust as you please. As you wish. I will stay. 

“Are you okay?” he whispers, because it’s dark and the shape of Yeonjun’s eyes is an unfathomable anomaly. Soobin traces their shape, the curve of them like a sweet sprig of night-jasmine slowly unfurling itself into the night air. Opening its arms to the sky and saying, I’m alive. I willed myself into existence. I’m here, I’m here.

“You’re keeping yourself locked inside a cage,” Yeonjun replies, unmoving, unflinching. 

Soobin blinks, nonplussed. “Me? I’m keeping myself locked inside a cage?” 

Yeonjun’s hands twist inside the cradle of Soobin’s, just infinitesimally pushing outwards like stubborn blades of grass through cement foundations—but Soobin has already slackened his grip, far too keyed-in to every tiny shift, every tiny breath in the room. Yeonjun’s eyes are now unreadable, even in the soft light of the bedside lamp he reaches over and switches on. 

“Yes. Yes, you are,” comes the simple reply. Too simple, in fact.  

It lights that old singing fire in the crux of Soobin’s skull, the tender, weakly-protected spots at his temples flaring with a pain so familiar he wants to laugh. Back here again. Right back here. 

“Nice of you to say,” Soobin says quietly, quietly still. Superimposed upon Yeonjun’s frame he still sees his fingerprints. “You won’t allow yourself to go back home because you’re afraid of the apathy you’ll hypothetically find.” Hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite. “You’re afraid of change, hyung. And I don’t—I don’t mean that unkindly. You’re afraid of the things you could just go and do, out in the world, so you’re here, using us as the rope to hold yourself back.”   

Yeonjun stiffens, spine straightening until he’s taller, taller than a slouched Soobin who wishes, who wishes, who wishes— “You’re a goddamned hypocrite and you know that. You don’t give two shits about your family and they can say the same. Isn’t that infinitely more messed-up?” 

Soobin laughs, bitter, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What the fuck are we doing? I don’t want to fight and I don’t want to compare family issues.” 

Yeonjun’s foot touches his knee on the bed. He’s quick to draw away. “Oh, I don’t know. You were the one who started attacking me out of nowhere.” 

Soobin swallows it down. Watches Yeonjun blink, his eyelashes and how they’re long and curled enough to make any self-respecting girl on campus jealous. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, curling a hand over Yeonjun’s ankle and pressing onto the knob of it because he knows it makes him smile every time. “I don’t— You’ve always had that effect of… reaching into people. Like you know exactly what they do in the dark. The fortune teller. The weatherman. It doesn’t matter what was an act or what was real. You told people exactly what they wanted to hear and so you could also tell them what they absolutely did not want to hear. It’s how… it’s exactly how and why you were so effective, you know? The sun at the centre of a solar system. You knew everything. You saw everything. And that is so fucking terrifying; it’s like I’m stripped down bare to the bones here and you could say anything. Anything at all.”

Yeonjun snatches the hand absent-mindedly drawing circles on his shins and presses his face to it, muffling some sort of soft noise into Soobin’s knuckles. 

Soobin doesn’t move. Doesn’t even breathe, actually. 

“Funny you say that, really.” Yeonjun looks up and there’s that smile again, the glossy pink splintering open to reveal pearly whites. “I told myself I knew and saw everything but by God if I never learnt to see past you.” 

Soobin draws closer, heart beating louder louder louder still, lungs popping and cracking like he’s swallowed Poprocks dry and now they’re stuck. They’re stuck. Yeonjun’s knees loosen down from his chest until he’s sitting cross-legged, arms hanging useless, fingers curled. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” Soobin says, stumbling over his own tongue, knowing within himself that there are some things they’ll never say.

“I’ll kill you, bastard,” is Yeonjun’s only reply, eyes flickering shut. The night-jasmine withers by the morning. It shrinks into itself, fighting against its own entropy in a war it knows it cannot win, fuming, Time, you bastard, oh, you bastard. You bastard, when this selfsame noose tightens around your throat— But then it is already dead.

Soobin still stops, just a scant few centimetres from Yeonjun’s face. He can’t help himself. He drinks his face in, standing still on the precipice, an imperceptible shake in the lines of his cheeks and his jaw. Something trembling. Something so very blue. 

Roots plant themselves in the cracks of his bones. Yeonjun opens his eyes. 

“What is it?” he asks, a warm hand sliding up his shoulder to curl into his hair. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, somewhat ashamed under those eyes. Those damned eyes. “You’re just—kinda. You know. Uh. Beautiful.” 

Yeonjun sighs, lips quirking into a smile in spite of themselves. He sighs, that same affected little thing from that golden afternoon just a few weeks prior. It made Soobin want to do violent things. Now, in this endless shade of firefly, it’s just so unendingly endearing. “Should’ve known you’d start spewing nonsense, blockhead.” 

It’s all the warning Yeonjun thinks is necessary. 

The hand in his hair gently draws Soobin down and there are another pair of soft lips slotted between his own, still, unmoving, waiting. Soobin presses in deeper, daring himself to fucking believe it for once. Just once. Yeonjun’s mouth falls open in a sigh, a searing press of butterfly wings over his own. 

And oh, oh, oh. Entire planets implode inside Soobin’s skull. Entire planets made of precious metals, of cotton-candy, of methane. The spin of a wheel he’s never heard, the thrill of a chase he’s never experienced. Above it all, the sheer wonder surrounding their melding lips. No tongue, just chapped lips turning soft with prolonged contact, his nose pressing into Yeonjun’s cheek. Sharing air. Those miniature lifeforms again, tumbling in the aether.

Perhaps Soobin goes a little lightheaded. He draws himself away, the sound of lips parting against lips unbearably soft. Yeonjun’s choppy breathing stakes into his heart. 

“We’re kinda pathetic, aren’t we,” Yeonjun says drily, after a pause. He laughs when his words register in his own brain, playfully messing up Soobin’s hair into something only a lover could’ve accomplished. 

That thing inside his chest grows thorns. Soobin leans down, pressing his forehead to Yeonjun’s chest and shaking his head vigorously, Yeonjun’s bubbly laugh at the ticklish feeling rattling through his own body. “You’re the pathetic one. The first fucking thing you ever said to me was that I’d love you. When we were sixteen.”

Yeonjun wraps his arms around him and squeezes. His sharp cheekbone presses into the top of Soobin’s head, his voice muffled against his hair. “Don’t say that like it’s an accusation. It’s not like you do.” 

I could, Soobin mouths into Yeonjun’s soft hoodie, I could. I’m nearly there. One more sweet word from your mouth and I’ll be there. “Hmph.” 

Yeonjun punches Soobin’s side with a sweaterpaw. “So eloquent, oh, my prince.” 

Soobin lifts up the hoodie and blows a sickeningly wet raspberry on the skin of Yeonjun’s stomach. No, he is not thinking about how firm his torso actually is, fuck you. No, he will not be judged for his decisions either, thank you for asking. 

Yeonjun shrieks, loud and echoing. His dollish eyes are dragged down, fixing Soobin with the full, crushing weight of their horror. “So disgusting,” he emphasises, “my prince.” 

Soobin snickers, dropping his chin back onto Yeonjun’s sternum. “Now they’ll think we’re doing some nasty fucking.” 

Yeonjun raises one Victorianly sardonic eyebrow. “They already think that. Should I scream some more? Throw a ‘Soobin’ in there for extra spice?” 

“Maybe not,” Soobin is quick to say, but still somehow never quicker than the maroon that rushes to his ears, “Taehyun already hates me.” 

Yeonjun pouts. “He hates me too. Can’t say I can reasonably see why.” 

Soobin shifts off of Yeonjun, flopping onto his side to rest his head on Yeonjun’s shoulder. The joint there digs uncomfortably into his ear, but please shoot him between the eyes before you tell him to move. “Hmm. You sure you can’t think of a single reason why?” 

“No,” he huffs, insulted at the very notion. “How could anyone hate me?” 

“I did,” Soobin points out, turning to look at him. “Those were, like, a solid eight or nine years of my life I spent despising you.” 

“No.” It’s apparently so simple for him to shake his head. “You were only pretending.”

Soobin rolls his eyes, digging his fingers into the soft spots of Yeonjun’s back. “Why would I need to pretend?” 

Yeonjun’s voice, it… it knows. It knows the front Soobin is putting up, the exterior made of quick, uncaring denials and rolled eyes, because that’s the same one it uses all the time. “To keep yourself locked inside that cage of yours.” 

It isn’t unkind. For once, Soobin lets himself accept that. “And what am I doing, pray tell, locked inside this torturous cage of mine?” 

Yeonjun shimmies down and down until his head is tucked under Soobin’s arm, his voice kissing his clavicle. Wrapping his arms snugly around his middle, speaking these words straight to his heart. “You have this—this dilemma inside you. Is it still fate if you know where it leads? Is it purposeful, a choice you make on your own, if it turns out to be true? You’re this, this monomaniac obsessed with determinism but all your manias are about the aetiology of free will and how you’re trying to tell yourself you can find a definitive answer somewhere.” 

In this silence, Soobin can hear the waves. The wind against the sails of the ships carrying all his backlogged dreams, finally, finally—quiet. “Didn’t think you thought about me that much, wow, hyung. I’m flattered.” 

Yeonjun glances up, maybe to look at Soobin with that reproachful look in his eyes, but he can’t bear that. Soobin leans over him, hooking his chin over Yeonjun’s shoulder and closing his eyes. He presses his palms to Yeonjun’s back, some backroom in his brain delighting in how much space he can cover. The others wishing his hands weren’t so cold, so that he might not have to pull them away. 

Yeonjun waits. It’s the first time anyone has ever done so. 

(With a pang, Soobin realises he was the first one to wait for Yeonjun. Because no one else thought he’d need to catch up. To them, he was already there, waving the chequered flag from the finish-line for everyone else. It was Soobin who stopped for him, two hares watching that pesky tortoise Time padding by, snickering at its back.) 

“Do you want to hear a story, hyung?” Soobin murmurs. The skin of Yeonjun’s nape is sticky when Soobin’s lips brush against it, but that just leaves him so acutely aware that this is real. They’re here, they’re warm (one of them), and warm means real. 

“My mother used to tell me bedtime stories,” Yeonjun chirps in reply, patting Soobin’s shoulder blades to what is probably the beat of a song. “She stopped when I was a teenager and there were so many times when I wanted to call her back and get her to tell me one more, just one more. But I never did, because big boys didn’t go crying to their mothers for stories. Go on, Binnie. Tell hyung any story.” 

“Back when tigers still smoked pipes,” Soobin begins, and Yeonjun makes a little noise, cut off immediately. He pauses, fighting with himself not to draw back to look at Yeonjun’s face. “What?” 

“You took that from Kai’s Folktale Friday episode, right? When tigers still smoked pipes?” When Soobin nods, uncertain, Yeonjun laughs, shaking his head. “It was what my mother used to start her stories with, actually. I told him one night and he ran with it.” 

“Wait, that’s so…” Soobin shakes his head, somehow speechless. “I don’t know.” 

“You don’t have to.” Warm, warm, warm. “I give you full permission to use it. On with your story.” 

“Back when tigers still smoked pipes,” Soobin repeats, grinning, “there was this boy. His parents, his siblings and him lived in a stone house by the sea. There was nothing to do, so he read all the books lining his father’s study. There was nothing to do, so he collected sand-dollars. There was nothing to do, so he read all the books on his mother’s bedside table. The first time he wrote something, he realised it made him feel free. This is where he could speak. He realised what he wanted to do. He sat his parents down on their dining-table, and put it all between them. Laid down all his cards. Bared his heart. And they said no. They said no, so he abandoned that house and left anyway. Years passed. And now he feels stuck. In the claws of a machine meant to tear him apart; he must move. Pack up his bones and leave again. But there’s… there’s a piece of his heart here. He’s grown to love this place and its people more than he ever loved the house by the sea. … He doesn’t care for existential questions anymore. If it’s fate, then it’s fate. If it’s not, it’s his choice anyway.”

Yeonjun is humming something sweet under his breath. “Should we start a club for people with dining-table trauma?” 

Soobin laughs, holding him tighter. I’d do anything if I did it with you. “Let’s do it.” 

“This boy…” Yeonjun starts after a pause. “I wish I could meet him. I could tell him just to ask himself what he wants. If fate is a construct then that machine is an illusion. Staying is never imposing and asking for more time isn’t a crime.” 

“Maybe he’s afraid of what will happen if he stays behind,” Soobin says, heartbeats quickening. Staying is never imposing. “He’s scared to be alone. He thinks letting go and forgetting are the same thing.” 

“Well.” Yeonjun draws back to look at his face, odd star shapes clinging to his eyelashes. “That piece of his heart he feels he’s leaving behind. It’s—it’s found a home inside the people, hasn’t it? Why doesn’t he ask them, then? What’s stopping you? We’re right here. I’m right fucking here, Soobin. Ask me to ask you to stay.” 

Soobin swallows, looking away. “It’s not that simple.” 

“How is it not that simple?” Yeonjun argues, scowling, trying to get Soobin to look at him again. “Do you want to get your master’s here? Do you want to stay? Or, no, are you thinking this is just pity? Simply circumstantial comfort, because you think you’ve sprung this upon me out of nowhere?” 

No, he wants to protest. No, he doesn’t. He isn’t fucking blockheaded enough to think Yeonjun’s affection is circumstantial. But Yeonjun seems to take his silence as an apparent answer. 

“It’s not. You haven’t sprung this upon me out of nowhere, and even if it feels like you did, that wouldn’t make a difference. My answer would be the same. God, I—” Soobin gathers his wrists in his hands and hides his face away in his pulse. “Do whatever you want to do. I’ll… I’ll be there.” 

“Would you stay because I did or because you wanted to?” 

And there it was, between them. 

“What would it matter?” Yeonjun replies, words sticky with discomfort. “I could just wait.” 

I could just wait for you, goes unsaid. But Soobin hears it. And there are some things that people do not mean. No matter how fair their intentions, no matter how much love festers between two people—minds change. People change.

“I can’t just fucking ask you to wait if you don’t ask me to stay first,” Soobin says, feeling lost. 

“And I won’t ask you to stay if I don’t know what it is you want from me, really,” Yeonjun bites back, lips parted, wild confusion in his eyes. 

“Never put a name on it,” Soobin whispers. 

Yeonjun closes his eyes. 

Soobin tilts his head down and kisses him, knowing it won’t fix anything, knowing that when Yeonjun kisses him back like a man starved, it’s out of some feeling that he doesn’t want to name. Knows that he doesn’t want to admit defeat now, twice over. 

“You’re a very mean person,” Yeonjun decides to say into his mouth, like that’s completely normal. 

When Soobin laughs, he doesn’t think he does it out of any happiness. “You said it first. Do you stick to your principles or do you not?” 

Yeonjun kisses him again in reply, eyes squeezed tight. And maybe Soobin should stop him. Fuck, he should stop this. But he’s already kissed him back, a hand pressed to the small of his back, aching, reaching closer. Soobin would like to burrow himself away in Yeonjun’s ribs, construct a house inside his cerebral cortex. He would like to hold him as a lover would.

Yeonjun pulls himself away, breathing choppily. “You’re a horrible kisser. I bet your stroke game is weak. I’m… I’m sorry I’m like this.”

“Okay, okay, and you don’t have to be,” Soobin replies. He has no idea what to fucking do. He regrets saying it like a physical thing. “Hyung, it’s me who should be sorry.” 

Yeonjun sighs. “Let’s not do this.” 

It makes Soobin laugh. “Are we okay then?” 

Soobin sees him hesitate, just a fraction of a fraction of a second, before saying, “I think we will be.” 

Soobin breathes in once, burrowing closer to the heat of Yeonjun’s body. When he speaks, he says it into the well-worn material of Yeonjun’s hoodie. “We spend so much of our lives afraid of love, of making connections, all stemming from this, this greater fear of being hurt, you know? You’re scared and I’m scared and we’re getting this wrong over and over and over. But just—don’t give up on me. Wait a while. There, I said it. I’ll wait with you.” 

Yeonjun sucks in a sharp breath. “I don’t—I don’t deserve this, please. You’ll, you’ll. I don’t know. One of us is going to hurt the other.” 

“Just because you can see the future, hyung, does that mean you’re going to be afraid of it?” Soobin asks, feeling the words take shape in his heart. “I could love seafood tomorrow. You and I could hurt each other years down the line. But, well—you still want to believe, don’t you?” 

Yeonjun’s fingers touch his jaw lightly, something giving in his face. It’s not like admitting defeat. It’s admitting that one has been wrong for a long time. But that’s okay. “Okay,” he whispers at last. “Okay, Bin-ah.” 

This is what they are, Soobin knows. Museums. Echoing, filled to the brim with things from secret golden years. Somewhere, someday, observers will see these completed acts of love they store inside their bodies, in their eyes and in the lines of their palms, and see them for exactly what they were: meaningless. 

₊ ⊹

(Yeonjun drives them back, Beomgyu in the passenger seat this time. Taehyun sulks at being stuck between the two tallest people. Soobin and Kai probably make things worse by cooing at his size constantly. It’s the same routine, passing around Pocky and giggling over their accumulated blackmail material. 

Soobin watches the sea fade from the rolled-down window, uncaring of the biting wind lashing at his face. When he’s alone, he’ll write something, he decides. Anything. Ungrammatical, plain bad. He’ll write about these people and this week and the love so carefully given to him. He’ll write about the sea and how it speaks without words, staticstaticstatic. He’ll write about the shape of someone’s lips and how a person can mould themselves into a home so soft. 

“Yeonjun-hyung?” Taehyun says, lying down across Kai’s knees. Yeonjun hums to show that he’s listening. “If you could say that love was an object, what would it be?” 

Yeonjun puts a name on it, loveshaped lips forming around two words: “A museum.”) 

₊ ⊹

Campus is exactly as they left it, if not quieter. With still a week left, most people haven’t returned. Soobin likes it that way, silent and empty. The hyacinths outside the library seem to greet them when they pass by, turning their multicoloured, cheerful faces towards the sun. 

It’s easy to settle back into their lives. Disturbingly so. If Soobin didn’t know better, he might have said that week never happened at all. Things go as they always did. Uniformly. Him and Beomgyu argue about the tiniest things, Taehyun tries to resurrect his house plants. Him and Kai hold a wedding for two of the younger’s plushies. Him and Yeonjun talk about things which mean nothing, circling and circling like two moths falling into fire. 

Then suddenly, it’s Sunday, and Yeonjun is gone. 

He picks up when Beomgyu calls for the fourth time, saying he’s just gone somewhere and will be back by sundown. His voice sounds clouded over, clogged up by something he’s been keeping pressed down. 

Soobin isn’t all that worried. Yeonjun will come back. He has faith that he will. 

So Soobin waits, watching time pass him by in great, sweeping strokes of blue turning burnished orange. In the delicate blooms of gold dust enveloping campus during golden hour. In the fading scent of apples clinging to his skin. 

₊ ⊹

It’s a man who opens the door. 

“Hi,” Yeonjun says, a thin smile on his lips. 

They have the same eyes. (One has laugh-lines, and the other will have them sooner or later.) The man ushers him inside, the door shutting behind them with a soft click. 

₊ ⊹

Wooyoung is endlessly fun to talk to, sprawled out upside-down across Yeonjun’s bed, Soobin sitting on the floor by the tall, vintage lamp the two have for some odd reason. 

“Tell me the story behind this lamp, actually,” Soobin says, still clutching his stomach from previous fits of belly laughs. He knocks on the stem of that thing, raising a concerned eyebrow at Wooyoung when it echoes. 

Wooyoung snorts, overcome by giggles again. “Okay, so, Yeonjunnie was shopping online for something, I don’t know, right? And apparently he’d have gotten a 50% discount if his total purchase ended up being over fifteen thousand won. So to get there he bought this fucking lamp, and you know that like, these sites always use shady pictures and shit? He bought this thinking it was a bedside lamp. Like, put on that desk material. But then it actually came in the mail and it was this big and we had to fucking move our other furniture for it to fit.” Wooyoung sighs, rolling over onto his stomach, looking at Soobin with his chin in his hands. “It was a good day.” 

Soobin laughs. “Wow. I— wow.” 

Wooyoung hums. “You know, Soobin, I thought you hated Yeonjun. But… then you showed up here and all I see on your face is homosexual pining.” 

“Oh, no, I did hate him.” Soobin smiles, knocking his head against the wall. He looks at the pictures on the desk. “Before I… before he became someone who mattered, I hated him with all of my heart.” 

Wooyoung rolls over onto his back again, doing the impressive feat of shrugging in the position he’s currently in. “I suppose there’s a kind of love in that, too.” 

₊ ⊹

A SCRAP OF PAPER SMELLING SUSPICIOUSLY LIKE CHOI SOOBIN  
[Found by Choi Yeonjun inside his copy of Mrs Dalloway]

The Photographer of the Past

Perhaps in the year 2103, they will have developed a way to look at the past. Anamnesic photography. A graphene lens only ten nanometres thick, pointed at somebody’s light-cone, should they wish to have it made visible. A young, starry-eyed photographer, boyhood still clinging to the contours of his face. 

What would the photographer see in my light-cone? A birth, sterile rooms and soft cotton swaddles. Two pairs of brown eyes meeting their collision made human. I have brown eyes, too. Textbooks, the bone in an arm breaking in a flash of red, pink and yellow flowers clutched in a chubby fist. Break, break, break. A battered old copy of Little Women without a back cover, long since torn out by an older sibling’s uncaring hands. Pianist fingers gliding over the glossy front cover, crescent smile made of suns. Many, many things in-between. Running from a house not a home, all his life packed away in neat piles in one bag. A mother standing by the front door, clutching air between her fingertips. Cluttered dreams, enemies made and enemies lost, the benches by the Han more of a home than that dorm breaking apart. He will not understand half of these things, but he will sense the pulsing pain. The ache, the tremor. 

And then there’ll be you. All of it will be you. 

Your smile like watching the sun rise above the treeline, blotches of gold striking against skin. Your eyes, how they’d press up, the laugh lines around them so darling. Your laugh like the wind learning the piano on the surface of a timeforgotten lake. All of you and a sliver of me. When no one tells the story of me, you will feature more than I ever will. 

And by the morning, we’ll be nothing but the outlines of our hands. Do you think, my dear, that photographer of the past from the future will see us there, my hand reaching for your face, frozen still in film grain? The left side of your chest, your eyes, your lips will be the darkest. Any phantom traces of fondness will have been lost to light shadows. You might be smiling, but he will never be able to tell, you and I will be so faded into the wisps of amber sunlight circling us. (I was right there, and you were real. You were not a faded projection seen in the past with some new, advanced technology. You were real in my hands. But even I could not tell whether you were smiling.) My face will not be seen, only a flash of the side of my face, my nose. I will be smiling—there will be nothing left to hide from time. I can smile at you if I wish to.  

(He will take the photo and gently place it in the album titled lovers that went wrong.)

By the morning, we will have grown back. A single morning you were there when I woke up, your lungs working next to my beating heart, your hand splayed across my collarbones. Your peaceful face in the weak light just beginning to filter in through the curtains made something painful thud against my ribs. I wondered what you were dreaming of. I swallowed down the truth and it came back up as bitter guilt. For all it’s worth, I want you to know this: I’m sorry. 

Tell me, lover. One thing only. Do you know who I am? Do you know who you are? 

“You’re Choi Soobin,” Yeonjun mutters, fingers sliding over the page like he can feel Soobin’s hands still, writing across this sheet to him, for him. “I’m Choi Yeonjun.” 

And he can see the fucking future.

₊ ⊹

They run into each other in the parking-lot, which Soobin thinks is kind of poetic. This is where Yeonjun greeted him back in their first year, where they fought that time, arguably the catalyst for everything. And now, now there’s— 

Yeonjun barrels into him, breathless, wrapping his arms around his middle. “Holy shit, holy shit, Soobin. I— I might be hyperventilating. Hold me back, bitch, I think I’m shaking.” 

Slightly confused, Soobin holds onto him in return, patting his back. “Uh. Hi? I was just coming back from your room actually, Wooyoung-hyung is my new favourite, can’t believe you kept me from him all this while.” 

Yeonjun laughs, the sound shaky against Soobin’s chest. “Bitch.” 

Soobin sways them back and forth once before letting go. “What happened, hyung? Where did you go?” 

“I took your advice,” Yeonjun rushes out, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I mean, not your advice, I guess more of what you said. You were… fuck, you were correct. We spend so much of our lives being afraid of love—the love we think won’t be reciprocated, the love we’ve already given so long ago. That was it, I think. A love given so long ago that now it’s something obsolete. And you’re—you’re scared to bring it back up because you don’t fucking know what the other is thinking, it’s been so long. Fuck, Soobin, I… I talked to my father.” 

Soobin blinks at him. “You what?” 

Yeonjun laughs, spinning around in place. “I know!” 

“And I’m—” Soobin’s eyebrows furrow, trying to understand. “And I’m guessing it went well?” 

“Yeah,” Yeonjun breathes, eyes wide. “Soobin, it did. He—he said he’d had a lot of time to think, the years I’d been gone, and—” He doesn’t, he can’t go on, sucking in one deep breath and not letting it go. “I didn’t believe it. I thought I’d walked into a dream.” 

“Oh, hyung,” is all Soobin says, a love inside him close to the sun. “Hyung.” 

“I know,” Yeonjun repeats, face in his hands, “I know.” 

“Come to my room,” he says before he loses his courage. “Renjun’s still not back.” 

“Okay,” Yeonjun replies simply. As if he knows something is about to spill over. 

Yeonjun gets in before him, so Soobin closes the door. Then Yeonjun is spinning around and there are fingers closing around his jaw and Yeonjun’s lips on his. Soobin doesn’t even need to think. He curls a hand around Yeonjun’s waist and tilts his head to kiss him back. 

It’s a fire, it’s a goddamn blaze in the dark. Yeonjun kisses like he has something to prove, hungry for something not yet known, searching and searching. He makes it sweet, closed mouths pressing against each other just for comfort. Just to be. 

Yeonjun’s forehead rests on his. “Have you ever had to not speak a name in front of your parents because you knew you would smile while saying it and then they would fucking know you liked somebody? Very highschool. But I admit, I hesitated before saying your name.” 

Soobin opens his mouth to— 

“No, no, let me finish. I’m… I’m a fucking asshole. I told you I didn’t want to put a name on it because I was scared after that—that disaster with appa. You—you get what I’m saying, right? After such a… a betrayal of love from someone who was supposed to be there for you—well, I just proved him right. I fucked up all my friendships at school, did that to you and told myself it was okay. Which it wasn’t, the years have let me know. You have let me know. You’re the one who taught me that not winning could be a good thing because shit, I could never win against you. I’m sorry. I saw that note of yours. The photographer of the past. I don’t even know when you put it there, I’m so sorry. I’m putting a fucking name on it because I want to be here, with you. Be my boyfriend, take me on a date to that café you work at and make your coworkers sick of us. You hate seafood now, you might love it tomorrow. Taehyun and Kai could break up next week. Beomgyu could sit an exam without cheating one of these lives we’re going to live together. But I want to see that happen with you. I want to watch you and us change.” Yeonjun sucks in one sharp breath, standing there in front of Soobin, showing him all his skin. “This is… long overdue. I love you. I’m sorry.” 

Soobin closes his eyes, opens them again. Stares at Yeonjun’s red face, his slightly open mouth. Pink. Always fucking pink. 

“Come here,” Soobin says. “Do you know those… internal frameworks you have for conversations? Like, this is how the other person will reply and then you’ll reply with this and so on?” 

Yeonjun nods, stepping forward and ducking until the top of his head fits under Soobin’s chin. “Yeah?” 

Soobin wraps his arms around him, all his warmth seeping into him. “Love is when these frameworks match up. What are you thinking right now, hyung?” 

“We should kiss,” Yeonjun’s muffled voice replies. “And you should totally tell me you love me back. Uh. If you do, of course. No pressure.” 

Soobin draws back, tilting Yeonjun’s chin up with a finger. He leans in and kisses that pout of his into a smile against his own mouth, until they’re smiling too hard to salvage the kiss, teeth clicking together and gasps of shuttered, disbelieving laughter. Soobin makes sure every action of his bleeds out what he doesn’t say. I love you, run with me to the end. 

“I think I’ll enrol in the master’s programme,” Soobin tells him much later, sitting on the floor with their backs to his bedframe. 

Yeonjun laughs. “Oh, Taehyun and Kai are going to be so sick of us.” 

Soobin’s eyes widen. “... Fuck, we have to tell the kids.” 

₊ ⊹

A highschool gymnasium. Two boys sitting up in the gallery, one with bubblegum pink hair, the other with decidedly not. They are facing each other, but their knees are tilted apart. 

The pink-haired boy pushes his thumb gently into the space beneath the other’s eye, slots their wrists together once. Takes his palm and traces his fingertips over the lines. 

Choi Yeonjun tells Choi Soobin: “Someday you will love me.” 

Mute bird, they’re finite, as you know, the days.
But sing to us. Sing of the light that stays.
— Mauri Creech, Goldfinch