Chapter Text
“If only one of us had been an omega.”
The phrase didn’t return like a memory, but like a wound that had never fully closed—one that reached Keonho at the most inconvenient moments, when the day began to unravel and the town hung suspended in that thick silence that comes just before nightfall.
It wasn’t a clear voice or an articulated thought; it was a pressure in his chest, a tightness that stole his breath just as the sun dipped behind the eucalyptus trees and the scent of damp earth mingled with the stale sweat of training. Something inside him would tense, as if his own body remembered what his mouth had never dared to name.
Sometimes it happened while he gathered the orange cones from the track, lining them up with almost obsessive precision. Other times, while he poured mate for himself, sitting alone on the wooden bench in front of the field. He would watch the boys run with the lightness of those who still don’t know who they will become, what place they will occupy in the world, which parts of themselves they will have to learn to disguise in order to survive. He watched them laugh, shove each other, compete—never imagining that sooner rather than later, their bodies would impose a label impossible to ignore.
“If only one of us had been an omega.”
The idea lodged beneath his skin like a splinter. It didn’t bleed, but it hurt. It always hurt.
Keonho was no longer young. His body was still strong—broad-shouldered, hardened by the countryside and years of disciplined work. Sun-bronzed skin, rough hands, a straight back even after long days. And yet there was a different stillness in him now, a heavy calm that wasn’t peace but resignation. He moved with the economy of someone who had learned not to waste energy, not to make unnecessary noise, not to ask for more than his surroundings were willing to grant.
He lived in the same town where he had been born—one of those small towns in the interior of Buenos Aires province that never make it onto tourist maps and seem to exist in a time of their own, untouched by the rush of the rest of the country. The low houses, uneven sidewalks, the central square with its rusted flagpole, and the church watching everything from above gave the impression that nothing ever truly changed there. But people changed. Bodies changed. Destinies were decided in silence, sometimes before one was old enough to understand.
He was the athletics coach at the town club. Everyone knew him. Everyone respected him. To many, he was an example: hardworking, proper, quiet. The kind of man who keeps his word and stays out of trouble. No one knew—or no one admitted to knowing—that every now and then, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, a single sentence would cut through his mind with the violence of inevitability.
“If only one of us had been an omega.”
The statement had embedded itself in his memory like a bitter truth never spoken aloud, and yet one that explained too much. It was a dull, persistent ache—a deep stab that neither the most rigorous training nor years of silence had managed to purge. He had learned to live with it the way one lives with an old injury: avoiding certain movements, pretending it doesn’t hurt, reshaping life around the scar.
And every time the phrase returned, time slipped backward without asking permission. The present blurred. The wooden bench, the track, the boys running—everything dissolved into haze. And Keonho became someone who still believed effort was enough, that love could be sufficient, that the world might bend a little if you insisted hard enough.
But the world had not bent.
The town had always been the same. Or at least that was how Keonho remembered it: immobile, compact, as if the passing years barely brushed its edges. When he was a child, the streets were dirt, and cars kicked up clouds of dust that clung to sweaty skin and freshly washed hair. That dust seeped into the house, into the sheets, into the folds of clothing. It settled without permission—just like certain ideas.
Summer afternoons were long and heavy, with a heat that seemed to suspend time itself. In winter, the cold slipped beneath poorly sealed doors and settled into the bones. Nothing was extreme, but everything was persistent. Like the town itself.
Families knew each other. They knew who had been born, who had changed, who had failed. And what wasn’t known was invented. There were unspoken rules that everyone understood from childhood: who could be what, with whom, and how far. No one needed to explain them; they floated in the air like summer dust, like the smoke from Sunday barbecues.
Second genders were one of those things spoken without being spoken.
They weren’t discussed bluntly, but they were everywhere—in casual remarks, in glances, in the way adults evaluated children as if they were construction projects in progress.
In that town, there were proud alphas, silent betas, and omegas who learned far too early to lower their gaze. No manual was needed. It was simply known. Omegas were meant to form families, to accompany, to bear children. Alphas were meant to lead, protect, and provide. Betas… betas existed in between, fulfilling their role without noise, holding the margins without claiming the center.
They weren’t categories. They were destinies.
A biological order turned into morality, into domestic religion, into sacred law. No one openly questioned it—because to question it meant challenging the very structure of the town. And the town was not built to question itself.
Keonho was born in a modest house just a few blocks from the central square. From the dining room window, you could see the rusted flagpole and, behind it, the church that seemed to watch over everything with its long shadow. His mother was a teacher at the town’s only school. She taught literature and social sciences. She spoke about revolutions, about rights that had been won, about voices that had resisted. The students liked her. The parents respected her.
His father was a farmhand. He worked on an estancia several kilometers away, where he spent the entire week. On weekends, Keonho would go with him.
From a very young age, the countryside had seemed immense to him. Not just big—immense. The smell of the animals, the sound of the wind dragging itself through the tall grass, the way the sky seemed endless. Out there, everything felt clearer, harsher. Simpler.
His father moved confidently among the corrals, body firm, voice deep. He didn’t need to announce what he was. He was an alpha without having to say it. You could see it in the way he stood, in how he occupied space, in how the other men listened without interrupting. Even the silence around him seemed organized.
“You’re going to be just like me,” he would say while they fixed a fence or checked the horses’ trough. “You can tell. You’ve got it in you.”
Keonho would nod. He felt the pride in his father’s voice like a rough caress. But he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant to “have it in you.” Have what? To be what?
“A strong alpha,” his father would continue. “The kind that commands respect. None of that soft stuff.”
The word soft always carried something extra. A warning. A threat.
When he spoke about omegas, his tone shifted slightly. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. His disdain was calm, almost instructional.
“Omegas are for what they’re for,” he would say with a naturalness that made Keonho uncomfortable even as a child. “To start families. To have children. To cook, clean, take care of things. They’re not good for anything else.”
He said it while they ate in the shed kitchen, or while the radio murmured distant news. He said it the way someone might explain the weather or the price of cattle. Something obvious. Unquestionable.
Keonho would chew in silence, staring at his plate, feeling a faint tension in his chest he didn’t know how to name. He didn’t fully understand why those words unsettled him beyond simple disagreement. It was as if something inside him reacted before his mind did. As if a still-undefined part of himself shrank at every verdict.
His mother never intervened. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t correct him either. When his father spoke that way during dinner, she kept eating, or changed the subject, or asked Keonho to pass the bread. She was a quiet, discreet beta, accustomed to not making scenes. At school she spoke about equality, about history, about rights. At home, however, she seemed to weigh every word, as if the family’s balance depended on not pushing too hard.
Keonho grew up listening to those ideas the way you listen to a song played too many times on the radio. At first, you notice it. Then it stops surprising you. Eventually, it blends into the background noise of your own life.
He never questioned them out loud. But he never truly felt they were his, either.
From an early age, Keonho couldn’t understand why second gender was supposed to matter so much.
At school, things didn’t align with the brutal clarity his father used to describe the world. He saw omegas solving math problems before anyone else, raising their hands confidently, explaining fractions with a patience even the teachers admired. He saw betas running faster than everyone else at recess, winning improvised races across the dirt yard without needing to shout to assert themselves. He saw alphas who, when they thought no one was watching, locked themselves in the bathroom with red eyes, swallowing tears they didn’t know where to put.
Nothing was as linear as it was supposed to be. Nothing fully matched that rigid order repeated at home like a prayer.
To Keonho, the world was simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than any caste manual. Simple because he liked or disliked people based on how they made him feel. Complex because he sensed there were invisible layers adults pretended not to see.
Unlike other boys who were already beginning to imitate their alpha fathers’ domineering gestures—the way they shoved first, spoke louder, laughed at whoever seemed more fragile—Keonho felt no such need. He wasn’t interested in classifying anyone. If he liked someone, he liked them. If he didn’t, he didn’t. It was that direct. He didn’t need to know someone’s second gender to decide whether to share his snack or pick them for his team.
But that difference, though still small, already set him slightly apart.
Sometimes, when his father criticized an omega from the town, muttering about their “weakness,” their “nature,” their “place,” Keonho felt a secondhand shame rise through his chest like a fever. It wasn’t exactly rebellion. It was something more confused. A discomfort he didn’t know how to translate into words.
Why was it wrong? Why did it have to be that way?
The questions piled up in his mind like knots, but he never dared to untangle them out loud. He learned quickly that in that town there were topics that weren’t discussed. They were accepted, inherited, and obeyed.
And he, still a child, didn’t want to disappoint anyone.
He was seven years old when he met Seonghyeon.
At that age, the world had not yet been divided into such heavy categories. Words had no edge. Labels didn’t hurt. Life was a succession of familiar routes: school in the morning, home at midday, the countryside on weekends. The body didn’t ache for things that couldn’t be named, and the heart didn’t yet recognize the exact shape of nostalgia.
Keonho was a quiet child. Not shy, not exactly. Just observant. The kind of boy who prefers to watch before speaking, to listen before giving an opinion. At recess he played with a few classmates, ran in improvised races, climbed trees with ease—and just as easily sat in silence afterward, drawing lines in the dirt with a stick.
He liked to understand how things worked. People included.
The town’s school was a low, aging building with white walls stained by dampness over time. The yard was large, packed dirt, with a flagpole in the center and a massive tree that cast shade almost all day. Beneath that tree, the children gathered during recess—some to trade stickers, others to shove each other around, others simply so they wouldn’t be alone.
Classes always ended the same way. The bell rang sharp and metallic, and the children burst out as if they had been holding themselves back for hours. Half-zipped backpacks, shrill laughter, pushes that brushed close to real fights. Dust rose beneath their shoes, and the air filled with overlapping voices.
Keonho never left first. He packed his things carefully, lined up his pencils, zipped his case slowly. There was something almost ritualistic in the way he organized, as if the small act of putting everything in its place gave him a sense of control he couldn’t find elsewhere in his life.
His mother taught at that same school. She almost always stayed after hours. She said she liked leaving everything ready for the next day, that she couldn’t stand disorder. Keonho had helped her for as long as he could remember. He swept the classrooms, erased the chalkboard, straightened crooked desks. No one asked him to. He simply did it.
He liked the school when it was empty. No shouting, no measuring glances, no expectations hanging in the air. Just the soft echo of his footsteps and the smell of freshly erased chalk. In that silence, the world felt less rigid.
That afternoon didn’t seem different from the others.
The sun was beginning to sink, pouring orange light through the classroom windows and stretching shadows across the floor. Dust floated in the air, suspended. Keonho was crouched down picking up crumpled papers left under the desks when he sensed his mother behind him.
“Keonho,” she said, in the soft tone she used when she needed something and didn’t want it to sound like an order. “I need you to do something different today.”
He looked up immediately. Different wasn’t a word he heard often.
“There’s a new student,” she continued. “His parents are running late. Can you stay with him in the yard until they come pick him up?”
Keonho nodded without asking questions. Not because he wasn’t curious, but because he was used to accepting what was asked of him. Besides, staying didn’t bother him. The empty school was one of the few places where silence didn’t weigh heavy.
He grabbed his backpack and stepped into the yard.
The big tree cast a long shadow over the concrete bench.
There he was. Alone.
Seonghyeon sat cross-legged on the bench, leaning forward, completely absorbed in an open box in front of him. A dismantled puzzle spread between his knees and the edge of the seat. His fingers moved with precision, separating pieces by color and aligning the edges.
Keonho had seen him before. The whole town had.
Seonghyeon was the recent enigma. The boy who had arrived from Buenos Aires—the great capital, always spoken with a mixture of admiration and suspicion—alongside his doctor parents, who, according to the adults, “had come to find some peace to raise their son.” To Keonho, Buenos Aires sounded as distant as another country. Something that existed only on television.
Since his arrival, Seonghyeon seemed to live on the margins of everything. He didn’t run with the others at recess. He didn’t play. Didn’t shout. Didn’t shove. He was always reading or assembling puzzles in the small school library. When another child approached and invited him to join a game, he would shake his head calmly, in a way that unsettled people. He never accepted invitations to join the group; he simply existed in his own world of fitted pieces and prolonged silences. It wasn’t disdain. It wasn’t obvious shyness. It was… self-sufficiency.
And that, in a town where belonging was almost mandatory, was unsettling.
Keonho thought he seemed arrogant. Not because he was unkind, but because he appeared to need no one. As if he were complete on his own.
He stood a few meters away, watching him. The distant sound of a car passing on the street was the only thing that broke the silence. Seonghyeon didn’t look up. He was completely absorbed in the puzzle.
Keonho swallowed.
He didn’t know how to begin. He wasn’t good at starting conversations, especially not with someone who seemed so comfortable in his solitude.
Finally, he walked toward the bench. His footsteps sounded louder than he would have liked.
“Hi,” he said, his voice lower than usual.
Seonghyeon lifted his head slowly. His dark eyes settled on him with full attention, unhurried. There was no smile. No rejection either. Just assessment.
“Hi,” he replied.
Nothing more.
The silence that followed wasn’t the peaceful silence of the empty school. It was tighter, more aware. Keonho felt heat climb up his neck. He looked down at the puzzle so he wouldn’t have to hold the other boy’s gaze for too long.
“What are you making?” he asked, trying to sound natural.
“A horse,” Seonghyeon said. “A racehorse.”
His voice was clear, measured. He didn’t have the town’s marked accent. He sounded… different.
Keonho tilted his head to get a better look at the picture on the box. He recognized the figure immediately. It reminded him of the countryside, of the horses he saw on weekends when he went with his father.
Something settled inside his chest.
“My dad works with horses,” he blurted out, without thinking too much.
Seonghyeon’s eyebrows lifted slightly, as if the information had sparked a flicker of interest.
“Really?”
“Yeah. He’s a farmhand.”
There was a second of pause. Keonho wondered if that would sound insignificant compared to city doctors for parents. But Seonghyeon simply nodded, slowly.
“My parents are doctors,” he said then. “We came from Buenos Aires.”
The word dropped between them, heavy.
Buenos Aires.
In Keonho’s mind, the city was a place of towering buildings, lights that never went out, and people who didn’t know one another. He struggled to imagine this serious, precise boy walking through crowds.
“It must be nice to live in the city,” he murmured.
Seonghyeon shrugged.
“It’s pretty noisy.”
The answer was so simple it dismantled any romantic idea Keonho might have had. For the first time, he saw him not as “the boy from the capital,” but as someone who had left something behind too.
The silence returned. Keonho felt an urgent need not to let it grow too large.
“Do you want help?” he asked, pointing at the puzzle.
Seonghyeon hesitated. It was a small gesture, almost imperceptible: his fingers paused over a red piece, his gaze dropped to the box and then returned to Keonho. As if he were calculating something more than the difficulty of the game.
Finally, he shifted the box a few centimeters to make space.
“Okay.”
Keonho sat beside him.
They didn’t touch. But the closeness was new, strange, almost electric. He could feel the warmth of the other body across the minimal distance. He became painfully aware of his own movements, of how he breathed, of where he placed his hands.
He picked up a blue piece and turned it between his fingers.
Seonghyeon watched him closely—not like someone keeping guard, but like someone trying to understand. Their knees nearly brushed. Every time Keonho brought a piece toward the center, he felt the other boy’s gaze on his hands.
He tried to fit the piece into an edge. It wasn’t the right one.
“It doesn’t go there,” Seonghyeon said softly.
Keonho pulled the piece back quickly, as if he’d made a mistake more serious than a simple puzzle error.
“Oh,” he muttered, uncomfortable. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” the other replied, and for the first time his mouth curved slightly—a shadow of a smile that appeared and disappeared too fast.
Keonho felt something strange in his stomach. He wasn’t sure whether it was nerves or relief.
They searched for pieces in silence for a few more seconds, but it was no longer the same awkward silence as before. There was something different now, a finer tension, like a thread newly strung between them.
“You picked the wrong sky,” Seonghyeon said suddenly, pointing to the blue piece Keonho was holding. “That blue is darker. It’s from the bottom part.”
Keonho looked at him, surprised.
“How can you tell?”
Seonghyeon shrugged again.
“I like to look first before I start.”
The sentence lingered in the air. It felt important to Keonho, though he didn’t know why.
Without realizing it, he smiled. And for the first time since sitting down, the nervousness didn’t feel like something he needed to hide.
They worked in silence for several minutes. The puzzle advanced slowly, as if there were no urgency to finish it. Keonho began to notice details: the way Seonghyeon turned each piece before trying to place it, how he sorted colors into small, orderly groups, how he seemed to enjoy the process more than the final image. There was no frustration in him when something didn’t fit. Only patience.
That calm unsettled him.
Keonho, on the other hand, felt every small mistake as a personal clumsiness. When he tried to place a piece and it didn’t fit, heat crept up his cheeks. Seonghyeon didn’t mock him, didn’t correct him with superiority. He simply observed.
“Do you live far?” Keonho asked, more to break the silence than out of real necessity.
“On a hill,” Seonghyeon replied without looking up. “My parents have a big garden.”
A hill.
Keonho imagined a house elevated, looking down on the town, separated from the rest. A house where the wind blew differently. Where no one knocked on the door without warning.
“Do you like the town?” he dared to ask.
Seonghyeon took a few seconds to answer. He lifted a piece, examined it against the light, then set it back down.
“It’s quiet.”
He said nothing more. Not whether it was good. Not whether it bored him. Not whether he hated it.
That ambiguity intrigued Keonho more than any clear answer. He was used to firm opinions, to definitive judgments. It’s good. It’s bad. It’s the way it should be. Seonghyeon, instead, seemed to inhabit the spaces in between.
When the puzzle was almost finished, the sound of a car filtered in from the street. Seonghyeon lifted his head abruptly. For the first time since they had sat down, his concentration broke.
“That’s my parents.”
The certainty in his voice held something different. More childlike.
He gathered the pieces with the same meticulous care with which he had arranged them, closed the box, and stood up. Keonho watched him, not quite sure what to say. It felt like something was ending too quickly.
“See you,” Seonghyeon said.
“Bye,” Keonho replied, barely audible.
Seonghyeon left without looking back, walking quickly toward the exit. The tree’s shadow swallowed him for a moment before the streetlight caught him again.
Keonho remained standing for a few seconds, his backpack hanging from one shoulder. He watched him walk away—small and upright at the same time.
He felt something strange in his chest. It wasn’t sadness. But it wasn’t exactly happiness either. It was a kind of warm restlessness, as if something had begun to move inside him without asking permission.
The next day at school, they pretended not to know each other.
They sat at different desks. They didn’t speak during recess. When their eyes met by accident, both looked away too quickly. Each returned to his usual orbit, as if that afternoon under the tree had been a parenthesis not meant to be repeated.
But something had changed.
Keonho began to look for him without realizing it. To register his presence in the classroom, the way he raised his hand, the tilt of his head when he read. He didn’t approach him. He didn’t know how to do that without exposing something he still didn’t understand.
Months later, Seonghyeon’s name crossed his life again in a different way.
The town’s athletics club was a few blocks from the square. A dirt track marked an imperfect circle around the field, and a shed stored cones, stopwatches, and deflated balls. The place smelled of dust, dry grass, and effort.
Keonho started going on his mother’s recommendation. “It’ll be good for you,” she had said. And it was true. Running organized his body. Cleared his head. When he ran, the world narrowed to the rhythm of his breathing and the steady pounding of his sneakers against the dirt.
That was where he saw him again.
Seonghyeon ran with the same concentration he used to assemble puzzles. He didn’t talk during warm-ups. He didn’t get distracted. His breathing was steady, measured. He didn’t have the arrogant explosiveness of some of the alphas in the group. Nor the insecurity of the younger boys.
Keonho recognized him immediately. He felt the same faint tingling he had that afternoon under the tree.
He didn’t approach him. But he watched from a distance, attentive to every movement: the way he set his foot down, how he clenched his jaw at the end of each lap, how he wiped sweat from his forehead with his forearm.
For several weeks, they exchanged little more than glances. They shared the track. Ran in the same direction. Breathed the same dust-heavy air. But they didn’t speak. It was a silent closeness, almost fragile, as if any word might break something still in the process of forming.
Practices began after school and stretched until the sky turned violet and then black. The club’s yellowish lights barely illuminated the gate. Beyond it, the town sank into shadow, and the road home became dangerous for children so young. Riding back alone wasn’t a good idea.
That was when their mothers, in a practical gesture unaware of the magnitude of what they were setting in motion, decided for them.
“They live in the same direction,” Seonghyeon’s mother said. “They can ride home together.”
Keonho felt an immediate flutter in his stomach. Stronger than the one from running.
He nodded without looking at Seonghyeon.
That night, the Pampas cold slipped through their clothes. The exercise still kept blood warm in their legs, but the air cut against exposed skin. They climbed onto their bicycles almost at the same time. They pedaled in silence for the first few blocks.
They left the club lights behind and entered dirt streets where the darkness was nearly absolute, broken only by the moon and the occasional lit window in the distance. The only sound was the crunch of earth beneath their wheels and the rhythmic turning of rusty chains.
The night seemed to stretch the distance between things.
Keonho could hear Seonghyeon’s breathing when the wind shifted. Sometimes their handlebars drifted too close, and he corrected his course abruptly, with a nervousness he couldn’t explain.
He wanted to say something. Anything. But the words piled up in his throat like puzzle pieces he still didn’t know how to fit together.
Keonho glanced at him as they pedaled. Beneath the silver wash of moonlight, Seonghyeon no longer looked like the distant boy from recess or the silent enigma in the classroom. The wind pushed his hair back, sharpening his features. His shoulders were slightly hunched against the cold, his hands steady on the handlebars, his body leaning forward as if balance depended on never letting go.
He didn’t look proud.
He looked… small. Vulnerable in a way daylight never revealed.
“You run fast,” Keonho said suddenly, breaking the silence that until then had felt obligatory.
His voice sounded too loud in the stillness of the night.
Seonghyeon didn’t answer right away. He kept pedaling, eyes fixed on the dark road unfolding ahead of them. The sound of chains and dirt beneath the wheels filled the space between them.
Just when Keonho thought he’d made him uncomfortable, Seonghyeon spoke.
“You do too.”
He didn’t look at him when he said it. But in those two words there was something different. It wasn’t politeness. It was recognition.
Silence again.
Keonho felt the urge to keep talking before the moment sealed itself shut.
“Do you like running?”
This time the answer came without as much delay.
“Yes,” Seonghyeon said. “It makes me feel free.”
Free.
The word struck Keonho in a strange way.
Free from what? he wanted to ask. From the noise of the city. From the town’s watchful eyes. From something else.
But he didn’t. He simply nodded, though Seonghyeon couldn’t see him in the dark. A tingling spread through his chest, an intuitive understanding he didn’t know how to put into words. He liked running for the same reason. Because while he ran, he wasn’t anyone’s son, wasn’t “alpha material,” wasn’t an expectation. He was just a body moving forward.
They pedaled on in silence for several more blocks. The night wrapped around them like a shared secret.
Before reaching the corner where their paths would split, Keonho spoke without looking at him.
“We can ride back together tomorrow.”
He said it with the feigned casualness of someone trying to make something important sound ordinary.
Seonghyeon hesitated, just barely. It was only a second, but Keonho sensed it in the uneven rhythm of his pedaling.
“Okay.”
Just that. But it was enough.
A wide, uncontrollable smile spread across Keonho’s face. He felt a joy wildly disproportionate to something so small.
“Great! I’ll come get you tomorrow,” he exclaimed, unable to rein in his enthusiasm.
He turned down his street with an awkward wave goodbye. The back wheel kicked up a bit of dust before he disappeared into the dimness.
Seonghyeon remained still for a moment, one foot planted on the ground. He watched Keonho’s silhouette recede until the darkness swallowed it.
The town air was still cold, still smelled of earth and deep night. But for the first time since he had arrived, it didn’t feel quite so suffocating.
A small, genuine smile curved his lips before he resumed the climb toward the hill.
The next morning, the air still bit at the skin. Keonho left his house with his bike as the town slowly woke. At that hour everything felt more honest. No murmurs, no appraising looks. The general store was still closed, the bakery let out the smell of warm bread, and dogs slept along the sidewalks.
He pedaled to the corner where the street began to slope up toward the hill and stopped. He wasn’t sure Seonghyeon would keep his word. Maybe he’d said yes out of politeness. Maybe in the clarity of daylight he would rethink the idea of riding together and regret it.
He waited. Looked at the ground. Adjusted the handlebars. Felt a little foolish for the anxiety coursing through him, for the way his heart seemed to beat faster than in any race.
Then he saw him.
Seonghyeon was coming down the incline carefully, his bike a little newer than Keonho’s, his dark brown hair moving in the cool morning wind. The early light wrapped around him differently than it had the night before.
When their eyes met, Seonghyeon lifted a hand in a brief, slightly awkward gesture.
“Hi,” he said as he drew closer.
Keonho couldn’t help smiling, an open smile that lit up his face before he could control it.
“Hi.”
Nothing more was needed.
They started pedaling together. At first they rode in silence, listening to the steady brush of tires against packed dirt. The sun peeked out from behind the eucalyptus trees, staining the sky a pale orange. The cold air stung their cheeks.
Keonho felt his heart racing. He wasn’t sure whether it was from the physical effort or something else.
“Do you miss Buenos Aires?” he finally asked, not looking at him directly.
The question hung between them.
Seonghyeon took his time answering. For a few seconds, all that could be heard was the turning of chains.
“Yes,” he admitted at last, in a whisper that carried more weight than it should have in a seven-year-old.
There was something in his voice that hadn’t been there the night before.
Keonho turned his head slightly. He saw how Seonghyeon’s expression dimmed a little, how his eyes lost some of their shine.
“A lot?”
Seonghyeon nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“I miss my friend.”
A brief pang pierced Keonho’s chest. He didn’t know why.
“What’s his name?”
“Juhoon.”
The name lingered in the cold morning air.
Juhoon.
Seonghyeon kept talking, as if the question had opened something long held back.
“We did everything together. We went to the same school since kindergarten. He lived two blocks from my house, and we could walk there.”
His voice wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears. But there was a new fragility, a barely visible crack.
“Do you still talk?” Keonho asked, making an effort to keep anything from showing in his tone.
“Sometimes we send messages,” Seonghyeon replied. “But it’s not the same.”
He looked ahead. His hands tightened around the handlebars, his knuckles turning white.
Keonho kept pedaling beside him after that confession about Juhoon, but something in the rhythm shifted. It wasn’t their speed. It was awareness. Now he knew that the boy who lived in the highest house on the hill—the one who seemed to walk across the schoolyard with an elegant distance—carried an absence that weighed on his shoulders.
He glanced at him. The wind tousled his dark hair and, for a moment, Seonghyeon looked younger than seven. Not the newcomer from the capital. Not the diligent student. Just a boy who missed someone.
And that image made something inside Keonho settle differently.
In the town, people talked a lot about what was expected of each person. About how a future alpha should behave. Steady. Reserved. Not prone to sentimentality. Keonho didn’t fully understand those rules, but he had heard them often enough to know that empathy wasn’t among the most celebrated virtues.
And yet what he felt wasn’t weakness. It was a clean, clear pang. He knew what it meant to lose something, even if he had never left town. He knew what it was like to realize the world kept turning the same way while inside, everything had shifted out of place.
He pedaled a few more yards before speaking.
“If you want…” he began, trying to keep his voice from trembling, “we could ride to school together every day.”
He said it while looking ahead, as if the offer didn’t matter. As if his heart weren’t pounding against his chest with a new insistence.
Seonghyeon tilted his head slightly.
“To school?”
“Yeah. I pass by here anyway,” Keonho half-lied. “It’s no trouble.”
The silence that followed was brief, but to Keonho it felt endless. He imagined rejection. A polite smile. An excuse.
“You don’t have to,” Seonghyeon replied at first, more out of reflex than conviction.
Keonho didn’t give up.
“I don’t mind,” he insisted, this time looking at him directly.
That was when he saw it: doubt giving way. Pride stepping down a notch. Need, just barely, surfacing.
“Okay,” Seonghyeon finally agreed.
And that single word lit up the morning.
When they reached school, they leaned their bikes against the peeling wall of the courtyard. The murmur of other kids was beginning to fill the air. Just before they parted, Seonghyeon spoke.
“Thanks.”
It was almost imperceptible.
Keonho shrugged.
“It’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t.
From that day on, the town—with its dirt roads, its watchful eyes, and its unspoken traditions—witnessed a small shift. There were no announcements. No promises. Just a corner on the hill where, every morning, two bicycles met.
At first they waited with a certain shyness. Sometimes one arrived first and pretended to check the chain or adjust the brake. Over time, they stopped pretending.
The silences stopped feeling awkward. They pedaled side by side as the sun painted the eucalyptus trees orange. They talked about simple things: math, the strictest teacher, who had won the last race at the club. But between those small words, something larger grew—harder to name.
One day, Seonghyeon mentioned the track in Buenos Aires.
“It was red. Actually red. Not dirt.”
Keonho pictured a smooth, perfect surface, without stones or uneven patches. He felt a faint sting in his small-town pride.
“But it’s good here too,” Seonghyeon added quickly.
There was no need to clarify who that correction was for. Keonho knew he was saying it for him, so he wouldn’t feel bad.
At school, they began sitting together almost without noticing. They shared supplies when one forgot something. They leaned close to whisper comments during class. During recess, Seonghyeon no longer stood alone under the tree; Keonho pulled him toward the ball, toward the noise, toward laughter.
“This is Seonghyeon,” he introduced one afternoon.
Martin looked at him curiously.
“The one who came from Buenos Aires.”
“Yeah.”
James, Martin’s older brother, was sitting on the curb, assessing the situation with a different kind of calm.
“Do you run fast?” he asked.
Seonghyeon nodded.
“Then you’ll be good playing forward.”
It wasn’t an effusive welcome, but it was enough. In the town, acceptance rarely showed up as hugs; it showed up as making space.
As the weeks passed, afternoons in the plaza became routine. After practice at the old athletics club, they would sit on the wooden benches, their legs still humming from exertion. They shared a lukewarm soda or an open pack of cookies between the four of them.
Seonghyeon listened a lot. Observed. But little by little he began to participate more. He told stories about the city and described endless avenues, crowded buses, buildings that seemed to touch the sky. Martin and James listened wide-eyed. Keonho didn’t watch the gesturing hands or the imaginary buildings.
He watched him. There was something in Seonghyeon’s face when he felt at ease. A discreet light. A looseness that didn’t appear in the classroom or during those first days of school. And every time that expression surfaced, Keonho’s chest expanded with a quiet, almost protective satisfaction.
The ride home after practice remained the most intimate moment of the day. Night fell slowly over the dirt roads. The air turned cold and sharp. Exhaustion made words less necessary.
They pedaled in parallel, so close that sometimes their elbows nearly brushed. They no longer talked only about school or the track. Sometimes they mentioned what went unsaid during the day. An uncomfortable look from an adult. A comment about hierarchies neither of them fully understood. Expectations that weighed more than they should on such small bodies.
They didn’t have the language to explain what was beginning between them. But they felt it. In the synchronized crunch of their wheels. In the unspoken agreement to wait for each other. In the certainty that, when they turned the corner on the hill, the other would be there.
And even if the town kept classifying everything into rigid categories, along that shared stretch of road the labels lost their force. They were just two boys pedaling beneath the open sky. And for now, that was enough.
As the months passed, the other’s presence stopped being a coincidence and became a certainty.
If one missed practice, the other trained restlessly, glancing at the track entrance every few minutes. If one arrived late to school, there was always a gaze fixed on the classroom doorway, waiting for the exact moment the familiar figure appeared.
It wasn’t something they talked about. It simply happened.
The mothers were the first to notice.
“You two get along well,” Seonghyeon’s mother observed one afternoon, leaning against the counter as she watched them review homework.
Keonho sat at the kitchen table, a glass of juice between his hands. He lowered his eyes, uncomfortable with how obvious it seemed.
“Yeah,” he replied, as if it were insignificant.
But it wasn’t.
Over time, he began staying for dinner some nights at the house on the hill. The place always gave him a strange feeling: it was larger than his own, quieter. Tall bookshelves lined the walls, and there was a lingering scent of rosemary, basil, and damp soil drifting up from the garden.
Seonghyeon’s parents spoke softly, with a calm that commanded Keonho’s respect. They asked about school, about races, about his times on the dirt track.
“You have talent for running,” Seonghyeon’s father told him once, studying him with almost clinical attention.
It wasn’t a grand statement. It was measured, nearly technical. And yet something in Keonho’s chest expanded. It wasn’t just athletic pride. It was the feeling of being seen. Of being validated in a space that wasn’t his own.
In the same way, Seonghyeon began going to the countryside on weekends.
The first day, Keonho’s father assessed him with a direct look, the kind used to measure strength and resolve.
“Do you know how to work?” he asked.
There was no mockery in his tone. Only a test.
Seonghyeon held his gaze.
“I can learn.”
And he did. He carried buckets heavier than he let on. Cleaned corrals without complaining about the smell. Held tools with hands that, until then, had spent more time between pages than among ropes and wood.
He got dirty. Scraped his skin. And came back the next day.
For Keonho, seeing him there—the boy who used to read beneath the schoolyard trees—adapting to the rough rhythm of the field filled him with a quiet satisfaction. As if each gesture were confirmation that he belonged. That he could belong anywhere… as long as he was willing.
In the countryside, they spoke differently. Lying on the warm earth after running through the tall grass, the sky stretched above them like an immense promise, words came more slowly, less filtered.
“Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll never really fit in here,” Seonghyeon confessed one afternoon, his arms folded behind his head.
Keonho turned toward him. The sun hit him from the side, tracing his long lashes, the still-childish line of his profile.
“You already do.”
He didn’t say it to comfort him. He said it because he believed it.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
There was something in the way Seonghyeon looked at him then. It wasn’t doubt. It was searching.
“And you?” he asked after a moment. “Have you ever wanted to leave for the capital?”
Keonho stared up at the open sky, the flat horizon he knew by heart.
“I don’t know.”
It was the truth. He had never imagined another landscape. Never felt the urgency to leave.
Until he began to wonder what it would be like to see the world from where Seonghyeon had once seen it.
The years started slipping by without them noticing. Their closeness outgrew the simple logic of childhood friendship and became something more rooted, more structural. Keonho stopped being “the friend from town” at the house on the hill; Seonghyeon’s parents treated him like another son, grateful—though they never said it outright—that their child had found an anchor in a place so different from the capital they had left behind.
The bicycle became ritual. The plaza, shared territory. The countryside, refuge.
Over time, Keonho began noticing details that had once escaped him. The way Seonghyeon furrowed his brow when solving a difficult problem. The veins that stood out along his forearms when he held a shovel. The brief, almost restrained laugh that surfaced when something genuinely surprised him.
He didn’t know why those gestures imprinted themselves so sharply in his mind. He only knew that when he didn’t see them, something felt missing.
One afternoon, they were riding their bikes home after practice. The sky was stained violet, and the air smelled of wet earth. They pedaled nearly in sync, as if their rhythm had calibrated itself over the years.
Without warning, Seonghyeon spoke.
“I don’t miss it as much anymore.”
Keonho turned his head.
“Buenos Aires?”
“Yeah.”
The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. It was thoughtful.
“I have things here now,” Seonghyeon added.
He didn’t say “friends.” He didn’t mention names. He didn’t point to anything specific.
But Keonho understood.
And that understanding filled his chest with a deep, steady warmth—different from the euphoria of races or the pride of praise. It was something quieter. More lasting.
That night, lying in bed, Keonho didn’t think about practice or school. He thought about the way Seonghyeon had said "I have things here now". About how he’d said it without looking at him, yet close enough for the words to fall between them.
The next morning, the town woke under a thick blanket of fog. The hill was barely visible from below. Keonho went out anyway, his cold hands wrapped around the handlebars, and pedaled to their usual corner.
For a moment, he thought he was alone in the world.
Then, through the mist, a silhouette appeared, descending carefully down the slope. They didn’t wave. They didn’t call out. They simply aligned side by side and began to pedal.
The fog wrapped around them, erasing the houses, the streets, the watchful eyes. All that remained was the steady sound of wheels over damp earth and their shared breath in the cold air.
They didn’t know what would change in the years ahead. They didn’t know what the world would demand of them.
But that morning, moving forward together without the need for words, the road felt like enough.
And for the first time, the town didn’t feel small.