Chapter Text
The village of Seorim had always been a place the world forgot to modernize. Tucked between the folds of misty mountains and echoing streams, it smelled of petrichor and old magic. No one questioned why the sun lingered longer here or why the flowers bloomed even in autumn. The villagers said it was just the way things were.
At the edge of Seorim stood two cottages: one cloaked in ivy and the other freshly painted and still a little shy in its roots. The older belonged to Lee Taeyong, a man with gentle eyes and fingers that knew how to coax life from soil. His herb garden spilled over with chamomile, basil, rosemary, and lavender, all humming softly with something more than chlorophyll. Rumour said he speaks to the plants. Others said they spoke back.
The new house next door had stood empty for years, until one spring morning when Jeong Jaehyun arrived, a suitcase in one hand and a sketchbook on the other. He wasn’t running away, he told himself. He was just… searching. For quiet. For clarity. For something unnamed.
Taeyong first saw him while pruning his lavender, a crown of blossoms around his head. Jaehyun paused, caught by the strange, ethereal image. Taeyong looked up and smiled. Warm, wide, like an old friend returning.
“You moved into the dreaming house,” Taeyong said.
Jaehyun blinked. “The what?”
Taeyong nodded toward the cottage. “It dreams. You’ll see.”
And Jaehyun did see. At night, the house sighed as though it slept. Sometimes it wept morning dew on the windows even when the skies was dry. And his sketches. He couldn’t explain why he woke with pages filled with drawings he didn’t remember making: a boy with silver eyes in a garden, moons tucked into tea leaves, and a pair of hands cupping glowing soil.
Curious and unnerved, Jaehyun wandered next door. Taeyong is as usual, tending to his garden. He offered him jasmine tea with cloves and the moment he brought the cup to his lips, the scent grounded him like gravity. As they sat in the garden, butterflies circled their heads and never left. Taeyong told stories of herbs that healed broken hearts, of a vine that whispered secrets when the moon was full, and of how his cottage once grew from a single rosemary sprig planted after a heartbreak.
Jaehyun listened, half-smiling, half-believing. Magic is at best, a fairy tale his mother told him during bedtime. But here, listening to probably the mosg beautiful man he's ever seen, he doesn't know if he will laugh at him or to himself. But he returned, day after day, drawn to Taeyong’s quiet magic and the way his presence felt like balm.
One evening, after a thunderstorm had painted the garden in silver droplets, Jaehyun confessed, “I think my house is showing me things. Things I haven’t admitted to myself.”
Taeyong set down his cup. “Dreaming houses do that. They remember what we try to forget.”
Jaehyun looked at him then, eyes unreadable. “Do you remember everything?”
“No,” Taeyong whispered, brushing his fingers over a patch of mint. “But the garden remembers for me.”
That night, Jaehyun walked back home and the walls seemed to hum a lullaby. His sketchbook fluttered open on its own. He drew without thinking. His pencil few across the pages and it has one singular subject: Taeyong. surrounded by flowers glowing with stardust, a heart blooming from his chest like a peony.
The next morning, he found a sprig of lavender on his windowsill with a note:
“Come back when you’re ready. Some hearts take longer to bloom.”
And Jaehyun did return. Not once, not twice—but every morning with fresh questions, new drawings, and a look in his eyes that Taeyong eventually stopped pretending not to see.
By midsummer, the space between their cottages had grown wild with herbs neither of them had planted. A new plant bloomed there. Wisps of violet and silver, soft as moonlight. Taeyong didn’t know its name.
But Jaehyun did. He called it serenara, the flower that only grows when two people quietly, inexplicably begin to fall in love. Rooted in dreams, blooming in silence.
And every night, the two houses exhaled together. Two lungs, two hearts, side by side.
And Seorim, ever watchful, simply kept the secret.