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dongmin wants to say i like you when donghyun picks him up in his father’s old beat-up car but the snow is too thick and it needles the back of his throat. he opens his mouth and inhales white.
"it's fucking freezing," he says instead.
the door shuts beside him and his words are swept in the wind as the car seals the cold outside in another world. donghyun hugs him over the middle console because its been four months since they'd last seen each other. neither of them say i missed you, but they think it loud enough for the other to hear.
dongmin hugs him back and presses his nose against donghyun’s shoulder because he's warm and smells the same he always has.
he looks different. he doesn't, but dongmin's mind is a cruel player in this game and supplies everything that could come into it, logic and reason aside.
when the hug is finished and they're in their respective seats, dongmin can see that donghyun's hair is a bit darker than the last time he saw it. maybe it's the dark of the car, but he's fairly confident. the shirt donghyun is wearing is new (he knows this for certain) and he has a bracelet on that dongmin has never seen before. he's never even seen donghyun wear bracelets.
"it's cold in tokyo, no?" asks donghyun. he's holding his hands by the air vents now even though he wasn't the one outside.
dongmin shrugs. "sure. doesn't mean its not worth complaining about here."
donghyun laughs—eyes crinkling at the corners—and dongmin swallows something the size of mars. he should never have left. he should never have moved. he should become an artist so he could draw those crescents in beautiful ways with the most expensive tools money can buy. all of these regrets amount to nothing, though, because he has done what he shouldn’t and won’t do what he should, and he is an awful artist.
"have you eaten?"
"have you?" dongmin asks and thinks of every plant he has ever killed with too much water.
"my mom cooked," donghyun says, abandoning the repeat of his own question. "she wants to see you. we can go eat at mine?"
dongmin nods. he misses donghyun's mom and wants to see her too. he misses her cooking and everything that his life used to be. his dreams were too big for his body, but of course its too late now for him to realize this.
"that sounds good."
donghyun hums as he takes the car off of it's parking gear. "cool."
it isn't awkward. it's difficult for things to be awkward with donghyun. he's a person who is comfortable with just about anyone, especially with dongmin (dongmin would like to think so, anyway.) yet, he feels each word hit his ears and tie the knot in his throat a little tighter.
"i want to show you something first, though. you're not too hungry?"
"i can wait." helpless people love the thought of patience as a virtue. dongmin is hopeless and helpless both, yet he is good at waiting when he wants to. he will wait forever.
dongmin wants to say i like you too when donghyun puts music on and it's one of dongmin's favourite songs. they don't have very similar music taste, so it's one that he undoubtedly found because of dongmin's influence. dongmin wants the words to come out but the music is too loud and the snow is still falling and he swallows it back down and watches the city go white outside the window.
donghyun takes a turn he doesn’t recognise. not toward his house, not toward anywhere dongmin remembers, and he doesn’t ask. he’s been gone long enough that the city has rearranged itself in his memory, streets and corners gone soft at the edges, and he’s not sure anymore which gaps are real and which ones are just him.
four months is not an objectively long time. when he lived here, four months would pass in a blink and things would all be the same despite the changing of layers added or removed in preparation for the weather outside. dongmin would meet donghyun in a winter coat or in a shirt without sleeves and things would all feel timeless.
now, with the lights of another city behind his eyes and his right side gone cold it feels like the longest stretch of time he’s ever experienced.
is this what getting old is like?
each morning that he woke in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place, he would look at his hands and expect to see his skin torn and fingernails ripped in the result of how deeply he’d dug to search for something he’d left behind. each silhouette of donghyun’s familiar voice in his dreams the motivation to dig further into the soiled ground of his psyche.
his hands are always clean.
beneath layers of skin and flesh and bone, they’re bloodied and raw, deep in the wound that he refuses to let close. the intentional suffering is both deserved and desired.
“here,” donghyun says, pulling up to a stretch of road that backs onto what used to be the empty lot behind a convenience store. dongmin remembers spending an entire summer there when they were fifteen, the age where summers felt infinite and also somehow already over when they’d just started. they’d flattened the grass in one corner just by lying in it so often, until there was a shape of them pressed into the ground.
they get out of the car. the cold hits him square in the chest and dongmin is glad for it, glad for something that demands his full attention and isn’t donghyun’s face.
“they cleared it,” donghyun says. he’s standing with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the lot. the snow has settled evenly across it, unmarked. clean. “the city or whoever. soon after you left.” he pauses. “i asked if we could use it. if i could plant something here. for a garden.”
dongmin looks at him.
“come spring,” donghyun adds, like dongmin asked. he didn’t. “we’re going to plant things. make a garden if we wanted.”
snow keeps falling and sticks in their hair. it melts on the warmth of dongmin’s nose even though it feels so cold.
we, dongmin notes. he doesn’t know yet what the we means or who it includes. he is afraid to know. he is more afraid that it will include him than that it won’t.
“it was your favourite spot,” donghyun says, still not looking at him. his breath makes clouds in the dark air. “i don’t know. i just— thought you’d want to know about it.”
dongmin thinks again about every plant he’s ever killed. his windowsill in tokyo is full of them, small brown gravesites in terracotta pots, victims of too much or too little, victims of dongmin loving things the wrong way. he thinks about donghyun standing in the snow in the empty lot asking the city if he could plant something here. he thinks about four months of silence and the song on the radio and the bracelet he’s never seen before and the way donghyun still smells exactly the same.
he thinks about a night, before tokyo, when he swallowed down everything he’d wanted to say. donghyun’s voice saying things dongmin wasn’t brave enough to receive or return.
“donghyun-ah,” he says.
“hm.” donghyun turns to look at him now, and his face is open the way it always is, donghyun who has never needed to learn how to hide anything because everything that lives in him is good enough to show. dongmin has always hated him a little for this. loved him enormously for it. both at once, the way he does everything where donghyun is concerned.
“i’m sorry,” dongmin says. “about before. i’m—i was—” he stops. he is an awful artist and a worse speaker. the snow needles his throat again and he swallows it down and tries again even when it slices down the tender flesh. “i was scared. i am scared. but i think i—i’ve been trying to say something since you picked me up and i keep—”
“dongmin.” donghyun’s voice is very calm. it is the calmest thing dongmin has ever heard. it makes him want to cry, a little.
“i like you,” dongmin says. finally. into the cold and the dark and the snow settling on donghyun’s darker hair. “i like you too and i didn’t know how to—i couldn’t—” he exhales. his breath clouds between them. he feels stupid and sick and relieved. “i’m sorry it took me this long.”
donghyun is quiet for a moment. the snow falls. the empty lot is clean and white and waiting for spring.
“okay,” donghyun says.
dongmin blinks. “okay?”
“okay.” and then donghyun is smiling, not the crescent dongmin had wanted to draw, something smaller and more private than that, something that looks like relief, if he could guess hopefully. hope is a trusted companion of patience. “i’m not—i’m not waiting anymore, you know. i made my peace with it.” he looks back at the lot. “but i’m not gone either.”
dongmin understands this. he thinks he has always understood donghyun better than he understands himself, which is the thing that makes all of this so stupid and so inevitable at once.
“so,” donghyun says. “come spring. help me plant things?”
it is such a small thing to ask. it is the largest thing anyone has ever offered him.
“yeah,” dongmin says. “okay.”
donghyun bumps his shoulder against dongmin’s and they stand there in the empty lot that will be a garden, in the snow that will melt and be spring, and dongmin’s throat is finally clear and his hands are freezing and he is so stupidly, helplessly glad to be here. to be back. to have come back in time for this, whatever this will be, the slow and gentle we of it.
he reaches out and finds donghyun’s hand.
donghyun lets him. turns his palm up, holds on.
the snow keeps falling. a bit of it catches in donghyun’s hair, on the curve of his cheek, and dongmin watches it and thinks: okay. okay.
he lifts his free hand and brushes his thumb across donghyun’s cheek, slow, like he’s clearing something away. donghyun goes very still. he knows. he has always known, dongmin thinks, probably before dongmin did.
dongmin kisses him anyway. soft and a little clumsy and nothing like he imagined, better than he imagined, donghyun warm against the cold of everything around them. he kisses so gentle and sweet like this moment is too precious to not handle with the most care and dongmin wants to say i love you into his mouth but he saves that for later.
when he pulls back donghyun is looking at him with that small smile, the one that isn’t the crescent, the one that’s just for this.
“snow,” dongmin says, by way of explanation.
“right,” donghyun says. “the snow.”
“yeah.”
“okay.”
dongmin’s heart is enormous and stupid in his chest. the empty lot is quiet around them, waiting for spring, waiting for whatever they’re going to plant in it.
“i don’t think i had snow on my mouth.”
dongmin ducks his head. he’s smiling so wide it almost hurts and he can’t do anything about it, can’t arrange his face into something cooler than this, and he finds he doesn’t want to. donghyun squeezes their joined hands and laughs, suddenly, and dongmin joins him, full and unguarded, and it goes up into the dark and the snow swallows it whole.