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The blue was the first thing he’d ever stolen from Go Hyuntak. Not a theft, not exactly. More like an osmosis of longing. Something had crossed over in silence, in the space where their shadows touched. And now the blue lived in him, bewildered and shimmering, as if unsure it belonged.
It started with the jacket. That stupid, cheap, nylon thing the color of a fading twilight. Hyuntak had worn it constantly their first year of middle school, before he’d filled out, when his shoulders were still sharp angles under the fabric. It was the blue of a shallow sea over white sand, a transient, vulnerable color. Seongje saw him in it one afternoon, standing by the school gates, head tilted back laughing at something Baku had said, and the thought arrived, fully formed and absolute: That’s his color. That’s the color of him.
From then on, the world began to sort itself into a new taxonomy. Blue was no longer just blue. It was Hyuntak.
It was the brittle, robin’s-egg shell of a sparrow’s egg they found cracked on the pavement one Friday. A thing of delicate, stupid hope, smashed by the indifferent heel of the city. Seongje had nudged it with the toe of his boot, a quiet funeral for a potential that never was. Hyuntak had looked away, his mouth a tight line. See? Seongje thought, That’s you. That fragile.
It was the bruise that bloomed on Hyuntak’s jaw after a fight Seongje hadn’t been there for. A deep, stormy purple-blue at the center, bleeding out into a sickly yellow-green at the edges. A galaxy of pain painted on his skin. Seongje had wanted to press his thumb into it, not to hurt him more, but to feel the truth of it, to map the topography of that violence. He’d settled for a sneer. “Looks like someone finally connected. Took them long enough.” But his eyes kept tracing the edges of the color, memorizing it.
He found himself cataloging it, this new Hyuntak-blue. The flat, chemical blue of the Gatorade he chugged after practice, his throat working, Adam’s apple bobbing. The serene, impossible blue of a postcard someone had tacked to a bulletin board, a Greek seaside he knew neither of them would ever see. The cold, electric blue of a police sitter’s light spinning in the rain, a color that meant trouble, a color that made Seongje’s pulse pick up because trouble was their native habitat.
It was in the mundane, too. The flaking blue paint on the handlebars of a rusted bicycle chained to a fence. The specific, dusty blue of the notebooks Hyuntak used for classes he barely paid attention in. The guy was a whirlwind of temper and motion, but his notebooks were a calm, consistent blue. A lie. A beautiful, pathetic lie.
He saw it in the veins on the inside of Hyuntak’s wrist, a delicate, blue river-map of life just under the skin. He’d stared at them once while Hyuntak was sleeping, the two of them crammed into Seongje’s too small bed, the city lights painting the room in streaks of orange and white. But all Seongje could see were those blue veins, a secret geography of vulnerability. He had the sudden, insane urge to press his lips to them, to feel the pulse point against his mouth, to drink the life right out of him, to have it inside him. He didn’t. He just lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl up to the ceiling, the moment passing.
The blue was a claim. A secret language only he spoke. He was in a convenience store, buying the same brand of cheap coffee he always bought. His hand hovered over the lighter he usually picked. Next to it was a disposable lighter of a transparent, oceanic blue. He could see the fluid inside, the little metal wheel. He took the blue one. It felt different in his hand. Cooler. More serious. When he flicked it, the flame was normal, yellow and orange, but the casing was Hyuntak. He started using it to light his cigarettes, the act feeling less like a habit and more like a ritual. A small, controlled invocation.
He noticed the blue stitching on his own black jacket. He’d never paid it any mind. Now, it was a secret. A tiny, threaded piece of Hyuntak he carried with him, a seam of him woven into his own armor.
His computer, his sanctuary, was a monstrosity of rainbow LEDs. He spent an hour in the BIOS, disabling the riot of color. He set it all to a single, static, deep cobalt. The room felt different. Calmer. More focused. The blue glow on his glasses as he gamed was no longer just light; it was an atmosphere. A mood. His mood.
It was a possession so complete he was surprised other people couldn’t see it. How could Baku sling an arm around a blue-hoodied Hyuntak and not feel the significance? How could Sieun look at a blueprint, all its cool, logical blue lines, and not have his thoughts turn, inevitably, to the illogical, messy boy who was the human embodiment of that hue?
The confrontation with the color, the one that made the ownership real, happened on a roof. It was winter, the air sharp as a knife. Hyuntak was wearing a beanie, a stupid, knitted thing. It was blue. A different blue. A deeper, navy blue, the color of a midnight sky just before the stars come out.
They were arguing. About what, Seongje couldn’t even remember later. The subject was irrelevant; the argument was the point. The familiar, comforting dance of insult and retort. Hyuntak was getting worked up, his voice rising, his hands chopping the air. And Seongje, bored of the words, found his focus narrowing to that beanie.
It was a shield. A pathetic, woolen shield trying to contain the heat and fury of the boy underneath. It was trying to make him look calm, contained, normal. The arrogance of it. The sheer, fucking audacity of that piece of blue yarn to think it could domesticate the hurricane that was Go Hyuntak.
Without breaking eye contact, without changing the bored, flat tone of his voice, Seongje reached out and snatched the beanie from Hyuntak’s head.
Hyuntak stopped mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open. His hair was a mess, flattened and then sticking up in random directions. He looked younger. Exposed. The cold air hit his bare head and he blinked.
“What the hell?” he demanded, his anger redirected, confused.
Seongje didn’t answer. He held the beanie. It was soft. It still held the shape of Hyuntak’s skull, the warmth of his head. It was, in that moment, the most intimate object in the world. He crumpled it in his fist, feeling the wool give, then stuffed it into the pocket of his own jacket.
“Give it back, you asshole!” Hyuntak took a step forward, his hand outstretched.
Seongje just looked at him, a slow smile spreading across his face. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s mine now,” Seongje said, and it was the truest thing he’d said all day. He wasn’t talking about the beanie. He was talking about the blue. He was stating a fact of the universe, as simple as gravity. The sky is up. The ground is down. Blue is Hyuntak. And Hyuntak, in all his messy, infuriating glory, was his.
Hyuntak stared at him, a complex storm of emotions on his face—anger, confusion, and a flicker of something else. Understanding, maybe. A recognition of the game, the territory being claimed. He didn’t ask for it back again. He just shoved his hands into his pockets and shivered, his bare head bowed against the wind.
Seongje kept the beanie. He never wore it. That would have been too obvious, too sentimental. He just kept it. A trophy. A relic. A tangible piece of the color he had stolen and defined.
After that, the blue was everywhere, a constant, quiet hum in the background of his life. The flat, institutional blue of the school’s gym mats, where Hyuntak’s body hit with a thud during practice. The deep, endless blue at the bottom of a flame. The hottest part. The part that didn’t flicker or dance, but burned with a steady, concentrated intensity. That was the loyalty he had for his friends. For Baku, for Sieun, for Suho. A fierce, silent, burning thing that Seongje observed from the outside, a arsonist looking at a hearth fire he could never warm himself at.
He saw it in the tired circles under his own eyes in the mirror after a night of no sleep, a blue tinge of exhaustion. Even his own body was not immune to the colonization. Hyuntak was in his bloodstream, a low-grade fever, a persistent, blue-toned ghost in his peripheral vision.
The flaking blue paint on the shutters of the closed-down chicken shop where they’d had their first real fight, and their first, even more real, fumbling make-up session against the damp brick. That blue was the taste of his own blood and the salt of Hyuntak’s skin.
The neon blue of a 24-hour tanning salon sign, a siren call to vanity and artificial health. That was the version of Hyuntak that preened in the mirror before a basketball game, all sharp angles and competitive fire. The version that knew he was beautiful and wielded it like a blunt instrument.
The dull, metallic blue of a discarded soda can, crushed in the gutter. That was Hyuntak when he was defeated. When a test score came back bad, or when his mom was on his case, or when the weight of being the ‘angry kid’ got too heavy. A crushed, used-up thing. Seongje hated that blue most of all. It made him want to find the person who’d put it there and break their hands.
He found himself curating a museum of Hyuntak in his mind. The cerulean thread in his school uniform tie, pulled loose at the end of the day. The sapphire glint of a puddle of spilled engine oil in their alley, iridescent and toxic. The pale, almost white blue of the milk he poured over his cereal in the morning, a mundane detail Seongje had filed away after watching him through his kitchen window once, a stalker gathering useless intelligence.
He was in a department store with his mother, a torturous exercise in boredom, when he saw it. A sweater. A cashmere sweater, folded and stacked on a table, in the most perfect, devastating shade of cobalt. It was the blue of a deep lake, of Hyuntak’s face when he was trying not to cry. It was his blue. The essential, platonic ideal of it.
His mother was haggling over the price of a rice cooker. Seongje stood, transfixed. He reached out and touched the sweater. It was softer than anything he’d ever felt. It felt like forgiveness. It felt like a surrender he would never get.
He had to have it.
It was an insane thought. He didn’t have that kind of money. What would he even do with it? Give it to Hyuntak? The idea was laughable. Hyuntak would look at him like he’d grown a second head, then probably set the thing on fire. Keep it for himself? Wear it and feel like a fraud, a ghost wearing another boy’s skin.
But the compulsion was a physical ache. This object, this stupid, overpriced piece of dyed wool, was a piece of Hyuntak made manifest. A relic. A holy artifact of their fucked up religion.
He didn’t buy it. He stood there until his mother dragged him away, his fingers tingling from the touch. For weeks afterward, he thought about that sweater. He dreamed about it. It became the one that got away, the pure, uncorrupted version of the color that the world kept offering him in cheap, broken imitations.
The world, he realized, was full of imperfect, pathetic blues. The washed-out denim of a stranger’s jeans.They were echoes. Ghosts of the main event. They were reminders of the real thing.
It was wrong. He knew that. A synesthesia of obsession. He’d reduced the most complicated, infuriating person he knew to a wavelength of light. But it was the only way he could hold him. Hyuntak in the flesh was a storm of contradictions—sweet and vicious, loyal and fickle, strong and fragile. But Hyuntak-as-blue was a constant. A fact. You could rely on blue. The sky was blue. The ocean was blue. Hyuntak was blue.
It was the only poetry he understood. The only prayer he knew.
He was walking with Baekjin, discussing a territorial dispute with some guys from the neighboring school. Baekjin was talking about leverage, about pressure points, about the most efficient way to apply force. Seongje looked past him, at the massive tarpaulin covering a building under renovation. It was a vast, rippling sheet of the most perfect, profound blue. The color of strategy. The color of cold patience. The color of Hyuntak when he was thinking, really thinking, his brow furrowed, his lips slightly parted, calculating the angles of a physics problem or the trajectory of a fight. Baekjin had to say his name twice to get his attention.
“You’re distracted,” Baekjin stated, his mind noting the irregularity like a software bug.
“Just looking at the sky,” Seongje lied.
Baekjin glanced up at the smoggy, gray-white sky, then back at Seongje, his expression unreadable. He said nothing. He knew it was a lie, but he didn’t say anything.
The food. He found himself picking the blueberry out of a muffin, eating it separately, letting the tart-sweet burst explode on his tongue. It was a concentrated essence. He started buying those small, expensive bottles of blueberry juice, not for the taste, but for the color. Drinking it felt like consuming a liquid metaphor for Hyuntak’s spirit: sweet, sharp, and staining everything it touched.
He saw a boy on the subway with hair dyed a shocking, electric blue. It was arrogant. It was a statement. It was wrong. That wasn’t Hyuntak’s blue. Hyuntak’s blue wasn’t a shout; it was a low, resonant hum. It was the blue of the deep ocean, not the neon sign advertising a cheap club. The boy’ hair was an insult to the very concept. Seongje looked away, disgusted.
The worst, and the best, was the water.
He was standing on the bridge, the wind trying to steal his cigarette. He looked down at the Han River. It was a sluggish, gray-brown sludge, carrying the city’s filth out to sea. But then the sun hit it at a certain angle, and for a breathtaking moment, it transformed. It became a sheet of dark, swirling, mineral blue. A deep, churning, powerful thing. It was the color of Hyuntak’s sadness. Not the hot, messy tears of a moment’s frustration, but the deep, cold, enduring sadness that Seongje knew lived in him, a current under the surface of his temper. A sadness Seongje felt responsible for, a sadness he was also helpless to fix, a sadness that was as much a part of him as his fierce loyalty or his stupid, beautiful pride.
He had to look away. The truth of it was too bright. It was like staring at the sun.
He started to crave it. This blue. He’d find himself staring at the blue-ringed logo on a delivery truck, at the brittle, electric blue of a popsicle stick left on a park bench. The same blue as the handle of Hyuntak’s favorite toothbrush. Each one was a tiny hit. A reminder. A piece of a whole he could never entirely possess, only observe and catalog.
It was in the cold, blue-white light of the refrigerator when he opened it late at night, illuminating the empty kitchen. That was the loneliness Hyuntak left behind when he walked out after one of their fights. A sterile, electric loneliness.
Sometimes, late at night, Seongje would think about the blue and it felt like a kind of warmth. It was the blue of the blanket his grandmother had, the one they would huddle under in the winter. It was a comforting blue, a blue that held you. He saw it in the well-worn cotton of Hyuntak’s favorite t-shirt, the one he slept in. He saw it in the soft, hazy light of the pre-dawn sky when they found themselves walking home together, exhausted and wordless. This blue did not ask for anything. It was just there, a quiet companion.It was the blue of simple, unremarkable things—a ceramic mug, the stitching on a schoolbag. And in these moments, the sharp edges of Hyuntak, the anger and the defiance, would seem to soften, and Seongje would feel a strange, almost peaceful ache, as if he were homesick for a place he had never been.
He was in a stationery store, buying a new pen. He bypassed the reliable black, the assertive red. He chose a blue one. A deep, navy blue. He started using it for everything. His notes, his game strategies, the little diagrams he sometimes drew for Baekjin. His world, on paper, was now written in Hyuntak. It felt more honest. The words, his thoughts, were his. But the color, the vessel, was Hyuntak.
The blue was a witch’s color. A poison. A cure. He had drunk it from Hyuntak’s skin, from the river of his veins. It was the blue of the Virgin’s robe, but it was a lie, for there was nothing pure about it. It was the blue at the heart of a fire that consumes. He saw it in the bathroom mirror, the blue tint of his own lips in the winter, a kiss of death from the boy who haunted him. The blue was a needle, stitching his eyelids open. It was the color of the room where terrible, wonderful things happened. It was the blue of a forgotten bruise, a flower of pain that had blossomed under his own hands. He was a keeper of this blue, a curator of its many violences. He owned it. It was his crucifix and his crown of thorns.
One day, the blue disappeared. It was winter. The first real snow. A thick, blanketing silence fell over the city. The sky was a flat, uniform gray. The world was monochrome. White, black, gray.
He saw Hyuntak from across the street. He wasn’t wearing the blue jacket. Or his blue hoodie. His blue scarf. He was wearing a thick, black parka, a red scarf wrapped around his neck. He looked like a stranger. A generic person in a winter crowd. The red was a violent, shocking slash in the grayscale world. It was wrong. It was all wrong.
Seongje felt a profound sense of dislocation. As if the world had tilted off its axis. The fixed point was gone. The navigation star had winked out.
He stood there, on the sidewalk, the snow melting on his shoulders, and felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the cold of a world without its defining color. A world without blue was a world without Hyuntak. And he realized, with a clarity that was as brutal as it was simple, that he did not want to live in that world.
The hate, the fights, the beautiful mess of it—it was all just noise. The signal was the blue. The signal was him.
He crossed the street. Hyuntak saw him coming and tensed, his face already settling into its familiar, defensive scowl. The red scarf was an affront.
“What do you want?” Hyuntak grumbled, his breath a cloud.
Seongje didn’t answer. He reached out, his fingers numb, and touched the scarf. It was cheap wool, scratchy.
“This color,” Seongje said, his voice rough. “It’s shit. It doesn’t suit you.”
Hyuntak blinked, thrown. “What? It’s a scarf. It’s warm.”
“It’s red. You’re not red.” Seongje said it like it was a fundamental law of physics.
“What the hell are you talking about? Since when do you care about fashion?”
Since now. Since the entire chromatic spectrum had been reorganized around his existence.
Seongje dropped his hand. “Wear the blue one,” he said, and it came out not as a suggestion, but as a command, a plea, a confession all rolled into one.
He turned and walked away, leaving Hyuntak standing in the falling snow, looking down at his red scarf with a bewildered expression.
The blue returned, of course. It came back on a Thursday, in a fine, misty rain that made the city look like a faded photograph. Seongje was under an awning, waiting. For a fight. For a sign. For something to happen.
And then he saw him. A figure cutting through the veils of rain. And he was wearing it. The blue hoodie, the hood pulled up.
Seongje’s breath caught in his chest. It was like seeing a ghost. A beautiful, beloved ghost.
Hyuntak stopped a few meters away, his hands shoved deep into the pocket. The rain had darkened the fabric to a deeper, more profound navy, the color of the ocean at night. Water droplets beaded on the shoulders.
They looked at each other. No words. The fight, the accusations, the hatred—it all hung in the air between them, as real as the rain.
But the blue was back.
Hyuntak’s eyes were cautious, guarded. He was waiting for another attack.
Seongje just looked at it. He looked at the way the wet fabric clung to Hyuntak’s shoulders. He looked at the familiar stretched-out cuffs. He looked at the small, frayed spot near the left pocket.
He didn’t say a word about it.
Instead, he said, “You’re getting wet.”
Hyuntak blinked. “No shit.”
“My place is closer,” Seongje said, his voice rough.
It wasn’t an apology. It was a capitulation. A surrender to the power of the blue.
Hyuntak hesitated for a moment, then gave a short, sharp nod.
Seongje turned and started walking. He didn’t look back, but he could feel the blue following him, a quiet, steady presence in the rain-soaked city. A color he had tried to hate, but had instead learned to navigate by. A color that was, and would always be, the only map he had to the treacherous, beautiful, and utterly necessary country of Go Hyuntak.
He owned all of it. Every last, fucking shade.
It was a sickness. A beautiful, chronic sickness. He was a man living in a world he had deliberately, painstakingly repainted. Every shade of blue was a whisper, a shout, a prayer, a curse. It was the color of a fresh bruise and a distant horizon. It was the color of a shallow sea and a deep vein. It was the color of a cheap jacket and a stolen beanie and the touch of the only person in the world who made him feel anything at all.
He had stolen the concept, and in return, the concept had colonized him. The theft was a life sentence.
The world was not green. The world was not black and white. The world was a thousand shades of blue, and every single one of them whispered the same name. Everywhere, now, was Hyuntak. And the world was blue, blue, blue.
───────────
The hate began, as most things did with Seongje, without warning and with total ownership.
It wasn’t a dramatic thing. Hyuntak was in the convenience store, buying a strawberry milk and a pack of gum. His knuckles were still scabbed from a stupid fight over a misplaced insult about Baku’s sister. The fluorescent lights hummed a headache into existence. And then he saw it. A lone, perfect, obscenely bright orange in a bowl by the counter. A plastic sticker with a happy little leaf.
His stomach clenched. A hard, physical fist of revulsion.
It wasn’t the fruit. It was the color. That specific, violent shade. It was the color of the lining of Seongje’s favorite jacket, the one he wore when the nights got cold. It was the color of the cheap, neon sign for the PC bang where Seongje spent his hours, a digital hearth he warmed his hands at. It was the color of the pills his own mother sometimes took for her nerves, a fact Seongje had unearthed and weaponized in a single, casual, devastating sentence months ago: “You’re as jumpy as your mom without her little orange helpers.”
The orange sat there, pulsing under the sickly light. It was a little sun of pure Seongje. His arrogance, his artificial glow, his chemical-bright cruelty. Hyuntak paid for his things, his hand shaking slightly as he took his change. He didn’t look at the fruit again.
But the seed was planted.
The world, he quickly learned, was a minefield of orange.
It was the warning cone placed around a leaking pipe on the sidewalk. A caution. A danger. Keep away. He’d step into the street to avoid it, earning a blare of horns from a pissed-off taxi driver.
It was the garish, tiger-lily pattern on the dress of a woman on the subway. Loud, demanding attention, impossible to ignore. Just like him. Hyuntak would stare at his shoes, at the grimy floor, anywhere but that dress, feeling a hot flush of shame and anger, as if Seongje himself were in the car, watching him, knowing.
It was the label on a bottle of cheap cleaning fluid under his sink. He was trying to scrub a stain off the counter. The orange logo seemed to mock him. You can’t clean this up. You can’t scrub him out. The stain is permanent. He threw the bottle in the trash, the liquid sloshing, the smell like poisoned candy.
His little cousin came over, a hyperactive ball of energy, clutching an orange plastic toy spaceship. “Look, Hyung! It zooms!” The kid made whooshing noises, crashing the spaceship into the sofa, into the table, into Hyuntak’s shin. The color was an assault. An invasion. A tiny, shrieking piece of Seongje’s chaos in his living room. He had to physically bite his tongue to stop himself from snatching the toy and hurling it against the wall. He went to his room and put his headphones on, the music loud enough to drown out the whooshing and the high-pitched giggles that felt, suddenly, like taunts.
Baku, the oblivious idiot, showed up one afternoon with a bag of those little fish-shaped pastries. “Got the ones with the sweet red bean paste! Your favorite!”
Hyuntak looked in the bag. The pastry was a perfect, golden brown. But the paper bag it came in, the one Baku was now cheerfully crumpling, was a vibrant, shouting orange.
“I’m not hungry,” Hyuntak said, his voice tight.
“Since when?” Baku asked, his mouth already full. “You love these.”
“I just don’t want one.” He couldn’t explain. How could he? Sorry, your snack bag is the same color as my toxic ex-boyfriend’s soul, and it’s killing my appetite. He’d sound insane. Because he was. He knew he was.
Sieun, of course, noticed. Sieun noticed everything. He didn’t say anything for a week. Then, as they were walking home from school, passing a construction site fenced in by orange mesh netting, he said, entirely without preamble, “You’ve developed a pronounced aversion to wavelengths between 585 and 620 nanometers.”
Hyuntak stopped. “What?”
“The color orange. You flinch. Your pupils constrict slightly. You alter your path to avoid it. It’s a classic conditioned response.” Sieun looked at him. “The stimulus is obvious. The reinforcement schedule is… persistent.”
Hyuntak just stared at him. Sometimes, talking to Sieun was like having a conversation with a very smart, very blunt encyclopedia.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.
“Yes, you do,” Sieun said, and kept walking.
The worst was the food.
His mother, trying to be healthy, made a salad with carrots and orange bell peppers. The peppers were sliced into cheerful rings. They looked like little edible warning signs. He pushed them around his plate.
“You need your vitamins, Hyuntak,” his mother chided.
“I don’t like peppers,” he mumbled.
“Since when? You used to eat them.”
Since they started looking like they could bite back. Since they started tasting like the metallic tang of a split lip. He forced one down. It was crisp, sweet, and it made him want to vomit. It was a lie. A sweet, crunchy lie, just like the moments of false tenderness Seongje would sometimes offer, right before he’d say something that cut to the bone.
He started avoiding the entire produce aisle. The mounds of oranges, tangerines, persimmons in the fall—they were a landscape of betrayal. Pumpkins at Halloween were not festive; they were grotesque, leering faces reminding him of Seongje’s mocking smile.
He was at a fried chicken place with Baku and Wooyoung. The chicken arrived, golden and glorious. And right there, on the side, a little cup of pickled radish. Daikon. Which was usually white. But this place, this fucking place, dyed it a faint, sunset orange.
“Ooh, fancy,” Baku said, popping one in his mouth.
Hyuntak stared at the cup. The radish cubes floated in their lurid brine, little icebergs of contamination. He could feel the others looking at him.
“You okay, man?” Wooyoung asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He hadn’t seen a ghost. He’d seen a color. It was worse.
“I’m fine,” he said, shoving the cup to the far edge of the table. “Just… not a fan.”
It got into his dreams.
He was standing in a field, a vast, endless field under a gray sky. And the entire field was growing oranges. Not on trees. Just growing from the dirt, like tumors. He had to walk through them, and they squelched under his feet, bursting, not with juice, but with a thick, black tar that smelled like Seongje’s cigarettes. He’d wake up gasping, the phantom smell in his nostrils, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Another night, he dreamt he was in his room, and everything was normal. Then he looked at his walls, and they were slowly turning orange, the color seeping in from the corners like a slow, toxic tide. He tried to stop it, painting over it with white, but the orange always bled through, brighter and more aggressive each time.
He started wearing headphones on the street, not for music, but to block out the sound of the world that was increasingly painted in a color he loathed. But the color was silent. It didn’t need sound. It was a visual scream.
He saw a poster for a new action movie. The hero, some rugged American, was holding a giant gun, an explosion blooming behind him. The explosion was a fireball of orange. The tagline: “Fight Fire with Fire.” Hyuntak felt a hysterical laugh bubble in his throat. That was the problem. You couldn’t. Fighting fire with fire just left you with more fire, more ash, more of the same scorched earth. He and Seongje had been fighting fire with fire for years, and all they had to show for it was third-degree burns.
He started seeing it in the digital world. An ad for a new phone, showcased in “Sunset Orange.” A loading icon, a spinning wheel of fire. The profile picture of a classmate from middle school, now a stranger, taken on a hiking trail with a filter that saturated the entire world in a warm, orange glow. He’d scroll past, faster, faster, a frantic thumb trying to outrun the spectrum.
His own body betrayed him. A minor cut on his finger, a paper slice from a textbook. He reached for the antiseptic. The liquid was a clear amber, but the plastic bandage strip, the one that promised to seal and protect, was a thin, sticky strip of orange. He stared at it, this tiny prison for his wound. To use it would be to let that color, that him, touch his raw skin, to seal the hurt with a memory of the hurter. He let the cut bleed, a tiny crimson bead welling up, a more honest color. He wiped it on his jeans.
He was trying to have a normal life. He was trying. He was on a date. With a nice girl from his English class. Her name was Soojin. She was sweet. She liked indie music and taking pictures of her food. They were at the Han River, sitting on the grass, and the sky was putting on a show. Streaks of pink and purple and gold.
And orange.
A thick, vulgar slash of it right across the horizon, bleeding into the water.
Soojin sighed happily. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?”
Hyuntak couldn’t speak. He was staring at the orange. It was the exact shade of the cigarette pack. It felt like the sky was taunting him. The whole goddamn universe was in on the joke.
“Yeah,” he managed to choke out. “Beautiful.”
But all he could think was that Seongje was probably somewhere in this city, under this same orange sky, doing something terrible and fascinating. Probably winning a fight. Probably making someone cry. Probably thinking about him. The orange was a connection, a filthy, unwanted tether that stretched across Seoul, tying them together.
He ended the date early, claiming a sudden headache. He wasn’t lying.
He found himself in art class, a requirement he usually slept through. The teacher was droning on about color theory. “Orange,” she said, “is often associated with energy, enthusiasm, and creativity.”
Hyuntak let out a short, sharp laugh that earned him a glare. Energy? Yes, the kind that fueled a fistfight. Enthusiasm? The kind Seongje displayed when dismantling someone’s ego. Creativity? The endless, inventive ways he found to weave himself into the fabric of Hyuntak’s life.
The teacher held up a painting. A Dutch still life. A peeled lemon, its curl a vibrant yellow, but next to it, a half-eaten orange, its flesh exposed, pulpy, and violently, offensively orange. It was the color of intimacy turned inside out. The color of something beautiful being taken apart. He had to look away.
It was in the most banal of places. The flip-flops an ajumma wore to the public bath. The handle of a utility knife in a hardware store. The stripe on a cheap ballpoint pen. Each one a tiny, unexpected jab. A cut to the soul.
The hate was a creature that needed to be fed, and the world, in its infinite, mocking variety, provided an endless buffet.
He was at a convenience store, late, buying a sports drink. The coolers hummed. He reached for a blue one. His hand brushed against a bottle of Fanta. Orange Fanta. The bottle was slick with condensation, a beacon of cheerful poison. He recoiled as if burned. The guy next to him, some random drunk, saw it.
“Whoa, kid, it’s just pop,” the man slurred, laughing. “It’s not gonna bite ya.”
Hyuntak just grabbed his blue drink, paid, and left, his heart hammering. It does bite, he thought. It bites all the time.
The confrontation was inevitable. It happened in the one place he couldn’t escape.
Seongje himself.
They were in the alley behind the noodle shop. The sky was the color of a fresh bruise, purpling into night. The argument was the same as always, a record stuck in a groove of accusation and denial. Seongje was leaning against the wall, his posture a study in casual dominance, backlit by the neon sign from the love motel down the street.
The sign.
It was usually a garish, electric pink. But a bulb was out. A crucial one. Now, instead of spelling “VACANCY” in pink, it spelled “V CANCY” in a searing, unmistakable orange.
Orange.
The color pulsed, staining the side of Seongje’s face, catching the lenses of his glasses, making them glow like embers. It haloed his dark hair. It was his color. He was standing in a pool of his own essence.
Hyuntak couldn’t hear the words anymore. Seongje’s mouth was moving, that sharp, clever mouth that could deliver a kiss or a curse with the same effortless precision. But all Hyuntak could see was the orange light eating him, claiming him, revealing him for what he was: a walking, talking warning sign. A chemical spill. A toxic, beautiful poison.
“—are you even listening to me?” Seongje’s voice cut through the haze, annoyed.
Hyuntak pointed a trembling finger, not at Seongje, but at the sign behind him. “That,” he choked out. “That fucking color.”
Seongje stopped. He glanced over his shoulder at the malfunctioning sign, then back at Hyuntak. A slow, dawning, deeply amused smile spread across his face. It was the most terrifying expression Hyuntak had ever seen.
“What about it?” Seongje asked, his voice dropping into a purr. He knew. Of course he knew. Sieun had figured it out with cold logic; Seongje figured it out with the predatory instinct that connected him to the deepest, most vulnerable parts of Hyuntak’s psyche.
“I hate it,” Hyuntak whispered, the confession torn from him.
Seongje pushed himself off the wall and took a step forward. The orange light enveloped him completely now. He was made of it. “Do you?” he said, his voice low and intimate. “It’s just a color, Tak-ah. It’s the color of life vests. Of safety cones. Of… what’s that stupid fruit your mom always buys? Clements? It’s a happy color.”
“It’s not,” Hyuntak said, his voice cracking. “It’s the color of you.”
The smile on Seongje’s face widened. It was a victory. A total and complete victory. He had colonized not just Hyuntak’s life, his friends, his body, but now his very perception of the world. He had infected his retina.
“Is it now?” Seongje murmured, taking another step closer. He was so close Hyuntak could smell the nicotine on his breath, see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes illuminated by the orange glow. “So everywhere you see it… you think of me? The construction netting? The traffic cones? The fucking… pumpkin spice latte at that weird café?” He laughed, a soft, cruel sound. “That’s hilarious. That’s perfect.”
He reached out and touched Hyuntak’s cheek. His fingers were warm. Hyuntak flinched, but didn’t pull away. The touch was a brand.
“You can’t get away from me, Hyun-ah,” Seongje said, his thumb stroking just under Hyuntak’s eye. “I’m in the warning labels. I’m in the fruit bowl. I’m in the goddamn sunset. I’m everywhere you don’t want me to be. Because I’m everywhere you are.”
It was the truth. The most awful, undeniable truth. The hate for the color wasn’t a separate thing. It was just the hate for Seongje, refined and distilled into a pure, pervasive wavelength. It was the physical manifestation of his inability to escape.
He was trapped. Not just in the alley, not just in their cycle, but in a world that had been repainted in the colors of his own obsession. The world was a canvas, and Seongje had splashed himself across all of it in the boldest, most violent, most unforgettable color he could find.
Seongje leaned in, his lips brushing Hyuntak’s ear, his final words a whisper that was also a curse, a promise, and a sentence.
“You’re stuck with me.”
The hatred for the color wasn’t a simple thing. It wasn’t just disgust. It was more complicated, more intimate than that. It was the feeling you get when you hear a song that was playing during a car crash. It was the smell of a hospital. It was a trigger.
Orange was the color of his own weakness. It was the color of the craving. The craving for the fight, for the chaos, for the brutal, honest clarity that only Seongje could provide. Everyone else offered him beige. Calm, safe, boring beige. Seongje offered him this screaming, toxic orange. A color that hurt to look at. A color you couldn’t ignore.
He was in the art room once, for some mandatory elective he was failing. The teacher was talking about the color wheel. About complementary colors. How blue and orange were opposites. How they made each other brighter, more intense, when placed side by side.
Hyuntak looked down at his own blue school uniform. He thought about Seongje’s black clothes with their orange secrets. Opposites. Creating a more intense, painful contrast.
That was it. That was the whole fucking story. He was the blue, trying to be calm, trying to be stable. And Seongje was the orange, the violent, brilliant, destructive opposite that made his own existence feel more real, more vivid, even if that vividness was just a more colorful kind of pain.
He didn’t hate orange because it was Seongje’s color.
He hated it because when he saw it, his heart beat faster. His breath caught. The world snapped into sharp, painful focus. It reminded him that he was alive, and that being alive, for him, was a messy, complicated, orange-tinted war. And he was a soldier who, despite all his better judgment, missed the battlefield every single day he was away from it.
The color would never let him go. It was the leash. And Seongje was holding the other end, kilometers away, probably not even thinking of him, yet still pulling, pulling, pulling.