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6.
“There's a boy hanging from the tree outside your house,” Jonghyun announces as he walks in.
“No, there isn't,” Kibum says on reflex. He doesn't like to agree with Jonghyun as a rule.
“You're not even looking!” Jonghyun sounds offended, or as offended as a six year old child can manage.
Kibum takes a deliberately slow, cursory glance out the window. “No there isn't,” he repeats.
Jonghyun launches himself at Kibum and starts a mock fight and they forget about boys in trees for a while.
18.
There's a boy hanging from the tree outside your house.
Those words come back to Kibum 12 years later, when the boy who uttered them has become nothing more than a memory, a childhood friend turned into a stranger.
"I wonder what he saw."
He is old enough now to understand the implications of the words.
He wonders what Jonghyun would say if he called him now, 4 years since the last time they talked, just to ask "Remember that boy on the tree you saw when we were kids? What did he look like?"
Silly, Kibum mutters, not as if I can call him now anyway.
~-~-~
There is a boy near the tree when he gets back from school, but he isn’t hanging from it, and he seems less boy than man -- at least gauging from his height.
But height is rarely something you can use to determine anything. There is a small smile that lights on Kibum’s lips at the thought, faint echo of teasing laughter at the back of his head.
"Hello, can I help you?"
The boy looks like he's waiting for something, like standing on a string too taut, as if the future was rounding the corner, urgent message in hand. And Kibum almost wonders if there's something he's forgetting, something important.
"Hello."
The smile that unfolds is beautiful, electric; it's like Kibum is who he has been waiting for, this strange tall boy with eyes that seem to look through skin.
(There was someone else who had looked at him like that, once.)
14.
“Do you think,” Jonghyun starts.
Kibum waits.
“Nevermind.”
It feels like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing; almost whole, but not really. Kibum thinks the missing piece might be somewhere close, if only he knew how to find it.
It’s also the last time they really talk.
18.
‘Do I know you?’ Kibum doesn’t know why he thinks he does.
‘Maybe you do.’
It’s enigmatic and Kibum doesn’t like enigmatic. So he ignores the stranger and turns to walk into the house.
‘Wait.’
Mystery doesn’t suit this stranger, Kibum thinks, when he looks back. His face is far too open, still young, almost like innocence still hasn’t shed its skin, hasn’t withered. Almost like he thinks the world is still beautiful.
Kibum knows it’s not.
‘See you soon.’
~-~-~
Kibum is quiet that day, quiet as he eats, quiet as his parents talk around him, quiet as his father stares and mutters something about ‘today’ and his mother shushes him, quiet as the world swirls around him.
He’s been more quiet recently, different from the noise that seemed to emit almost instinctively when he was younger. He remembers a time when quiet seemed such a foreign word, a concept he never could grasp.
Now silence seems preferable, silence in the world that seems noisy for no reason, that seems to want to fill each piece of empty air with sound, because silence terrifies them. And maybe in his silence, Kibum terrifies.
10.
‘Do you ever shut up?’ Kibum snaps at Jonghyun.
‘Pot. Kettle. Black.’ Jonghyun responds, after an eyeblink of silence. And then he laughs.
Kibum struggles between getting angry and laughing along. Laughter wins out when Jonghyun pushes an elbow into his side.
"Your laughter is so weird," Jonghyun comments. Kibum hits him across the shoulders in retaliation.
But they both know it isn't really an insult.
18.
"Hello."
Strange boy is outside his door again the next morning, leaning against the tree. It would be scary except this boy feels like safety.
"Are you stalking me." Kibum accuses.
"Probably," the boy responds.
“My name is Minho,” he offers, after a pause.
Kibum raises an eyebrow. “At least now I don’t have to refer to you as strange stalker boy in my head.”
Minho laughs.
Kibum thinks he has a nice laugh.
~-~-~
Minho might be his friend, Kibum realizes a week later. Sort of, kind of, probably in the loosest form of the word. After all, spending time together in mostly quiet companionship on the way to school should count for a type of friendship. Maybe.
It ought to be creepy, honestly.
But it's hard to feel scared of Minho. Hard to see him as anything potentially terrifying. He was a bit like rice; wholesome, good for you and generally something you wouldn't mind keeping.
Kibum doesn't think Minho would like being called rice.
They don't actually talk about anything. Or rather Kibum talks and Minho listens. Kibum thinks that's something Minho instinctively does, quietly absorb other people's thoughts without interrupting with his own.
There are questions he should ask, answers he should find out. But it's easier not to ask and to just tilt in the alternate direction he's nudged towards when he tries.
~-~-~
("What do you study?"
"Life and death."
"What does that even mean?"
“What do you think it means?”
Kibum stares and Minho laughs.
Kibum wonders.
The him of another time would have asked until he had gotten concrete answers, until his curiosity was sated. But the him of now is a little more wary, a little more detached. There are reasons why you choose to separate yourself from the touch of other hands but maybe that is locked in a part of him he never wants to open.)
8.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
The question hangs in the air, buoyed up by childish hopes and aspirations, endless possibilities, infinite dreams.
"I don't know yet," Kibum says. "Everything, anything."
There’s something amused in Jonghyun’s eyes.
‘What do you want to do, then?’ Kibum challenges.
“Music,’ Jonghyun declares, simply.
Kibum snorts. “You gonna be one of those idol people?”
“You don’t think I can?”
A sliver of sunlight slants across Jonghyun’s face, and Kibum thinks You can be anything you want to be.
But all he says is “You’re too ugly to be an idol.”
And screeches as Jonghyun tries to grab his collar.
18.
Sometimes when the light in the skies collapse into darkness, Kibum wonders when his world had turned so silent.
His conversations with his parents turning into monosyllabic nothings, their eyes desperate but pitying; his friendships waning like the moon into the clouds, broken strings he is often too tired to mend.
There is acting still but nowadays words seemed to coagulate at the back of his throat, a lump of despair nestled between his mouth and chest. It seemed to stop him from speaking, from verbalizing feelings, things that might have meant something.
It all turns into ash in his mouth.
Minho seems to dissolve it though, like he is a kind of antidote to everything. But it feels temporal, an imaginary relationship. Because Minho divulges too little of himself, and what Kibum knows melts like frost in summer when stared at too long.
It seems safer though, that knowledge of temporary.
12.
“I’m scared of growing up,’ Jonghyun whispers when the world around them turns still and dark.
“Me too,” Kibum admits.
“Promise you’ll still be around when we grow up?”
It is tentative and raw.
“Yes.”
When Jonghyun’s fingers curl into Kibum’s, it almost feels like it could happen.
18.
Perhaps it is folly to pry now, nearly 3 months since the day they met. Three months of quiet companionship and that unlocking of the doors of quiet. But maybe Kibum just wants to push a lever and change something.
“I still don’t know who you are or where you came from,”
“I’m Minho,” There is amusement in the words but also a flash of danger for just that single instance, jarring in someone Kibum has always associated with kindness and calmness and that erstwhile elusive comfort.
“I meant-” Kibum starts again, but he isn’t sure how to continue or what it is he really wants. Except perhaps something concrete and real.
“Are you sure you want to know?” And it sounds almost like a threat, or a warning. That maybe he doesn’t want to uncover whatever it is, that has been hidden so carefully from him.
“Yes.”
Kibum hears something splintering in the distance, and he thinks maybe the artificially serenity that Minho had quietly pulled around them is falling apart.
Minho looks at him consideringly, a small smile playing on his mouth. Then he says the most unexpected thing.
There’s a boy hanging from the tree outside your house.
A sound like static begins in Kibum’s ears, like he is being dragged back into the past, into a world that was simpler, that held a boy who made him laugh, made his heart beat a little faster, made him feel like beauty was possible.
“I don’t want to know anymore,” he says, words catching on the spikes suddenly grown in his throat. It sounds like an excuse he uses regularly, sliding too easily off his tongue.
Minho winds fingers around Kibum’s wrist. “Come with me,” he says.
Maybe it’s because he still trusts Minho, misplaced as it might be, maybe it’s because there’s a sense that this needs to be done, but Kibum lets Minho tug him down an almost familiar route.
~-~-~
Places for the dead are strange, simultaneously sacred and so filled with humanness. Kibum thinks he knows why Minho has brought him here; death had touched his life once, far enough that many consider it safely in the past, but near enough that memories still feel like burns, at least when he lets himself remember.
He hasn’t let himself remember for a long time.
Minho stops them in front of one particular stone, carved with a name Kibum doesn’t want to remember, and dates he cannot forget.
14.
Jonghyun strides across the road before Kibum can grab his elbow, fingers just grazing the cloth of Jonghyun’s jacket. Typical really. Kibum rolls his eyes when Jonghyun turns back and yells, ‘Stop being slow!”
It’s just another day.
It isn’t his fault but it feels like it because that’s the moment a car screams past, running too quickly past the red light. Just as Jonghyun stands in the middle of the road, expression half fond, half exasperated.
A human body can be flung very far.
He’s heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and suppression of bad memories, but this one comes back too easily, almost like it’s been tattoo-ed to the front of his brain.
Blood looks more black than red when splattered on the road.
18.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“To remind you of life.”
But what kind of life could one understand surrounded by death?
14.
Kibum doesn’t cry at the funeral.
In fact, he doesn’t cry ever.
18.
“Humans are strange,” Minho says, breaking the silence that has fallen on them like a cloak. “You think hiding pain behind laughter is normal, you think denying bad things will make them go away. If you didn’t welcome the dark, how would you know how to recognize the sun?”
“You’re not human,” Kibum states.
“No I’m not,” Minho agrees, reaching over to dab at a tear that has escaped from the edge of Kibum’s eye. “I took your friend’s soul the day you watched him die, but I’ve been watching you both for a long time.”
The boy hanging from the tree, the one Jonghyun had seen, but Kibum hadn’t, the warning they were still too young to recognize.
“I loved him,” Kibum says, “We were so young, but I loved him.”
“I know,” Minho says.
And then he opens his arms, and despite himself Kibum goes to him. Somehow curled up there, Kibum learns how to cry again, the tears that have been kept under deep freeze for too long.
~-~-~
“Why did you approach me that day?”
“I was curious, and you had hidden too much of yourself away. And I like to know endings.”
“We aren’t characters in a novel,” Kibum mutters.
“I know,” Minho reaches out and his hand hovers over Kibum’s chest where his heart still beats. “You feel so much for so very little.”
Kibum laughs suddenly, a harsh shock of sound. “I haven’t felt very much for a long time.”
“I wanted to help you remember who you were!” Minho tells him cheerfully. Kibum looks at him searchingly, and thinks he's always been oddly positive for someone who takes souls away.
“You know, maybe you did,”
“Good.”
~-~-~
The pressure on Kibum’s chest feels a little lighter the next morning.
I wanted to help you remember who you were.
And maybe part of who he was died that same day a certain soul was taken from him, but maybe he could rebuild with what he still has now. Maybe he could start looking for the friendships and relationships he had laid by the wayside when he chose to ice up his emotions.
Maybe.
“Good morning,” he says to his parents, an almost smile curling past his mouth. And the way their eyes light up almost makes him happy. Almost.
~-~-~
There’s a boy hanging from the tree outside his house when he opens the door later.
Minho smiles.
Kibum waves.
When he looks back, the tree is empty.