Work Text:
Riki types the title into the Reddit post box and then sits there looking at it for a solid thirty seconds.
how do i (15m) call my new foster parents (35,36m) as mom and dad?
It sounds worse written down than it had in his head, which is saying something because in his head it had already sounded pretty bad: that is, needy and small, something you weren't supposed to want at fifteen. He is almost an adult. He has lived in seven different houses across two cities. He knows how to do laundry and cook three meals and navigate public transit alone and handle a meeting with a social worker without crying, which is way harder than it sounds. He is not someone who needs to sit in his room at eleven at night wondering if it is too much to want to call two men he has known for less than two months mom and dad.
He posts it before he can talk himself out of it. Then he closes the laptop, puts it face-down on his nightstand, and tries to sleep.
He can hear Jake and Heeseung downstairs. He can hear the low sound of their voices, the television playing something at low volume, and the occasional sound of Jake laughing at something. It is background noise that a house makes when people are comfortable in it, when nobody is walking on eggshells or performing a calm they don't feel. Riki has lived in enough houses to know the difference between that sound and the other kinds – quiet because everyone has run out of things to say to each other or quiet because being otherwise may mean a strike across his palms.
This house sounds like people who actually want to be in it.
He stares at the ceiling for a while, and then gives up on trying to pretend to sleep. He opens the laptop again.
There are already four replies.
Let's go back to the beginning, because the beginning matters.
It is a Saturday in August, just before seven in the morning, and Nishimura Riki is crouched at the edge of a stranger's sidewalk with a can of silver spray paint in his left hand and a can of deep blue in his right. The street is quiet. The neighborhood is one of those places where people have gardens they actually maintain and cars they actually wash, the kind of place where a fifteen-year-old with a backpack full of spray cans is either invisible or extremely visible depending on what time of day it is.
This early, Riki is invisible.
He tilts his head the way he always does when he is looking at a blank surface and deciding what it needs. His art teacher at his last school — before the move, before the new placement — said he had an "instinctive compositional eye," which was the nicest thing a teacher had ever said to him and which he has thought about maybe three hundred times since. He doesn't know much about composition theory. He knows what a space is asking for, the way you can sometimes know what a sentence is missing before you can name the grammatical rule.
And well, this sidewalk is asking for water.
He starts with the outline. Silver first, a wide curve that sweeps from the left edge almost to the right, and then the blue comes in to fill behind it, building pressure and weight. He works fast but not sloppily — he has been doing this long enough to know the difference between confident speed and carelessness. The paint goes down clean. He leans in close and adds the fine detail at the crest, coaxing the silver into something that looks like light hitting the top of a wave, the way the foam goes almost white just before it breaks.
He is so focused that he doesn't hear the front door open.
"Hey."
He stands up so fast he staggers, spinning with the paint cans raised instinctively, and finds himself looking at a tall man in pajama pants and a dark university hoodie, holding a coffee mug with both hands and looking at the sidewalk with an expression that is genuinely hard to read. He has dark hair, still slightly flattened on one side from sleeping, and he looks surprisingly calm even when it probably should be, well, mad. He looks like he is in his mid-thirties. He does not appear to have fully woken up yet.
Again, he also does not look angry, much to Riki’s confusions. He looks like he’s trying to decide whether to be angry, which Riki has learned is actually sometimes worse.
"I — " Riki starts.
"Is that a wave?" the man asks.
Riki stares at him, dumbfounded. "What?"
The man points at the sidewalk with his mug. "What you were painting. Is it supposed to be a wave?"
Riki looks down. He looks back up. He scratches his head. "Yeah."
"Hm." The man sips his coffee and looks at it for another moment like he’s looking at painting in a gallery, instead of the graffiti a random kid has vandalized on his pavement. "I think I’m still half-asleep. I’ll come back when you're done so I can see the whole thing."
Then he goes back inside.
Riki stands on the sidewalk for about ten full seconds without moving. He looks at the paint cans in his hands. He looks at the closed front door. He looks at his half-finished wave and then at the door again. He considers making a run for it, because who knows how the man may react once he fully wakes up, but some reason, he feels like he should stay. He shrugs his shoulders.
He sits down on the front step, picks up where he left off, and finishes the wave.
It is the most baffling interaction he has had in recent memory, and he once had to explain to a social worker why he had spray-painted the phrase LOAD-BEARING FRIENDSHIP on the side of a parking garage. At least that one had made some kind of narrative sense and it was funny to him even though it wasn’t funny to the garage owner.
He works for another twenty-five minutes. The sun comes up properly while he is finishing the detail work, catching the wet paint and making the silver really sing. He adds the bird last — it isn't planned, one of those things his hand decides on its own. It’s a shape tucked into the curl of the wave where the shadow is deepest, barely visible unless you are looking. He doesn't know why he puts it there but it feels right.
When he is done, he caps the paint cans and sits on the front step and waits, because for reasons he can't quite articulate he wants to see the man's face when he sees the whole thing.
He doesn't wait long. The door opens again, and this time there are two of them.
The second man is shorter than the first, with warm brown eyes and a broad easy smile that appears to just be his face's default setting. He is already smiling before he has even looked at the sidewalk, aimed at Riki like some kind of automatic welcome. He is also in pajamas. And he is also holding coffee. He and the first man stand together on the front step and look at the sidewalk, and then the second man crouches down to get a better look.
"Oh," he says softly.
The wave stretches almost the full width of the sidewalk, silver fading through deep blue into a darker shade at the base. The crest catches the morning light at the perfect angle, the way Riki had planned it — or hadn't planned it, exactly, but had felt toward. And in the curl of the wave, if you are close enough and looking for it, the small dark shape of the bird.
"You did this?" the second man says to Riki.
"Yeah."
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
They exchange a glance, quick and full of something Riki can't really understand. Then the second man stands up and sticks his hand out, grinning like Riki has done him a favor.
"I'm Jake. This is my husband Heeseung. We're not going to call anyone, just so you know." His handshake is firm and warm. He is Australian, Riki realizes from the accent. "Are you hungry? We were about to make breakfast."
Heeseung looks at Jake with an expression of mild exasperation, but he can tell there’s fondness behind it.
"We have food," Jake continues as if this settles everything.
"I know we have food, Jake — "
"Then there's no problem."
Riki's stomach makes a sound. An honest, embarrassing, perfectly timed sound which he knows the couple hears because Jake's face splits into a grin. Riki feels heat crawl up the back of his neck. Heeseung looks at both of them and then steps aside to hold the door open.
That is how Riki ends up at their kitchen table, eating fried rice with kimchi and spam and eggs while Jake sits across from him asking questions with the focused curiosity of someone who is actually listening to the answers. Heeseung makes a second pot of coffee and occasionally adds things to the conversation, refilling Jake’s and his mugs and then pouring orange juice for Riki.
It is the best breakfast Riki has eaten in a while that he doesn’t realize he stays for two hours. He walks home with paint-stained hands and a feeling in his chest that he doesn't examine too carefully. He has learned the very hard way that one should not hope for anything when one meets good people; not everyone wants to become family, no matter how interested they seem to be.
He goes back the next Saturday anyway.
Nishimura Riki has been in the foster system since he was eight years old, and he has worked very hard over the years to be okay about that.
Genuinely okay in the way that it came from having spent a long time with something until it wasn't a wound anymore. He thinks of it the way you think of a scar: it is real and a permanent part of you, but it’s not the thing that hurts anymore. It is his history. He carries it the way he carries his literal everything in a backpack: present but not in the way.
His parents were in a car accident when he was eight. He doesn't remember the hospital very well — just shapes and light and a lot of adults talking in voices pitched too low for him to make out the words. He remembers his grandmother more clearly. Her hands were always dry, smelling of the hand cream she kept by the sink. He remembers the way she pressed them to his cheeks when she said goodbye. She tried for two years, raised him until her own health made it impossible, and the day she had to let go is one of the days Riki keeps in a box in the back of his mind that he doesn't open unless he has to.
He was ten when he entered his first placement. He is fifteen now, which means five years and seven houses across Busan and Seoul. He has learned things that most fifteen-year-olds don't know, and he has lost some things that most fifteen-year-olds still have. He has bad days too, days when he thinks about it too directly that it becomes genuinely heavy, so he tries not to think about it too directly.
What he has learned instead is how to read a house. You can tell within the first forty-eight hours whether a placement is going to be okay. You look at things like where they let you put your bag, on whether they make eye contact at dinner, and especially how the air feels when there is a disagreement. Some placements are fine in a gray, functional way, in that specific neutrality of people who have agreed to a responsibility and are keeping to the terms of it. Over the years, Riki has decided that that is enough and he’s grateful for that because some of the alternatives are worse.
A couple have been genuinely good. The Busan family is the one he thinks about most: five kids total including Riki, a mother who cooked huge pots of things on Sunday afternoons that carried them through the whole week, a father who worked night shifts and slept until noon and spent his evenings in the backyard doing absolutely nothing with a very peaceful expression on his face. The dog was enormous and had no discipline and destroyed three pairs of Riki's socks over the course of the summer, and Riki had loved him. The backyard had a wall just the right height, and the oldest kid — a sixteen-year-old named Jiyeon who treated Riki like a younger sibling from the first week — taught him to do backflips off it. He spent that entire summer getting better at them, working until he could do them clean, and Jiyeon watched and coached and eventually declared him ready for a running start, which had not gone well but which they had laughed about for three weeks. He misses that house. When they sat him down and told him he had to be placed in another home was Riki’s first full experience of heartbreak, after losing his family.
There had been a woman in Seoul, just him and her, who taught university literature and kept every flat surface in her apartment covered in books in various stages of being read. She had given him the kitchen table for his art supplies without asking for anything in exchange, and when he got paint on the wood she had looked at the colors and said that's actually nice and gone back to her book. He lived there for eight months. When he left, she handed him a new sketchbook at the door — a good one, heavyweight paper, spiral-bound — and said, with very little ceremony, that she hoped things worked out for him. He thinks about her too. He hopes she is still reading too many books at once.
Some houses he tries not to think about, and he is good at that by now. He has a system.
The thing he has never learned to read, or has learned to stop trying to read, is whether a placement is going to become something more. Adoption has stopped being a word he lets himself use sometime around thirteen. He has watched it happen to other kids — babies, mostly, and little kids who still have the soft edges of not knowing yet what the world can do. He has nothing against those kids. He is glad for them. But he has watched the math long enough to understand how it works: the older you get, the less likely, and by fifteen you are so far past the statistical sweet spot that hoping is almost a form of cruelty you are doing to yourself.
What he has instead is a plan. He is going to art school. He has a folder on his phone with forty-seven scholarship applications and he adds new ones whenever he finds them and crosses off the deadlines he misses and moves on, because that is what you do. He is going to graduate, get into a program, find a cheap apartment somewhere, build a life out of whatever is available. He knows how to build things out of limited materials. He has been doing it his whole life.
Fine is enough. Fine is more than enough, actually. Fine is functional, and functional is what he needs to be.
He does not account for Jake and Heeseung. Nobody could have.
The new placement comes through in October, which means Riki has spent the months between August and October going back to Jake and Heeseung's house on Saturdays without knowing that is where he is going to end up. He hadn't known they were in the system at all. He had just gone back because the house was warm and the breakfast was good and Jake asked him questions like he was interesting and Heeseung made him feel, somehow, like he was allowed to take up space.
He brings Jungwon once. Jungwon declares Jake his second-favorite adult within twenty minutes, which Jake receives with visible delight, and has a very serious conversation with Heeseung about picture books, which Heeseung receives with what Riki now recognizes as Heeseung's version of visible delight (slightly wide eyes and a softer, shyer smile; he reminds Riki so much of a deer just as much Jake reminds him of a puppy).
It is on the third Saturday, on the back porch with his sketchbook, that Heeseung tells him.
"We've been talking to a social worker," he says, setting his coffee down on the porch railing. It makes Riki nervous because the thing about Heeseung is that he’s very direct. "About fostering. We specifically talked about older kids."
Riki looks up. He keeps his face even, which he is good at. "Yeah?"
"I grew up in a foster home," Heeseung says. It surprises Riki because neither Heeseung nor Jake has ever mentioned this. "Not for as long as you. I went to my aunt at eleven. But I know what it feels like to be in between things."
Riki presses his pencil lightly against the page. He draws a line that has no purpose, drawn just for the movement, just so his hands have something to do. "Why are you telling me?"
Heeseung looks at him. He has this way of looking that feels less like being watched and more like being considered, as if he’s really trying to truly understand. "Because I didn't want you to find out later and feel like we'd been keeping it from you."
From inside, Jake's voice rings out: "Heeseung, did you move the dish soap again?"
Heeseung shakes his head with an exasperated fondness before calling back out, “It belongs next to the sink."
"The counter next to the sink is not the sink, Heeseung — "
Riki can’t help himself – he laughs. It comes out short and surprised, and Heeseung looks at him with warmth in his expression and doesn't say anything else, and Riki looks back at his sketchbook and the line he has drawn and tries to understand what he is feeling.
He doesn't fully manage it, he thinks. But he draws the rest of the morning and eats lunch there and walks home at three in the afternoon feeling lighter than he has felt in a while, which is something, even if he can't name it.
The call from Ms. Kim comes on a Tuesday. Riki is in the middle of math class and he feels his phone buzz twice in his pocket, which is the signal they have agreed on for important calls, and he slips out to the hallway and listens to his case worker's voice tell him that Jake and Heeseung have formally entered the process and that she needs to set up a meeting. Her voice is exactly as it always is, practical and warm in a professional way, and Riki has heard this multiple times over the years, but this is the first time that he actually feels hope bloom in his chest.
"Do you have feelings about this, Riki?" Ms. Kim’s tinny voice asks.
Riki stands in the empty school hallway and looks at the fire extinguisher on the wall across from him. "I think so," he says, finally.
"Do you want to talk about them now or later?"
"Later."
"Okay." He hears her making a note. "I'll set up the meeting for Friday."
He goes back to math class and writes down numbers until the bell rings and then goes to find Jungwon.
Finding Jungwon generally means checking the following locations in order: the spot by the gym where the vending machines are, the bench outside the library, and the classroom of whatever teacher Jungwon is currently obsessed with. Today it is the library bench, and Jungwon is there with his lunch and his earbuds in, and he pulls one out when he sees Riki's face and says, with no preamble: "Sit down and tell me."
This is what Riki likes best about Jungwon. He doesn't make you build up to things.
Jungwon is not in the system. He has a mom and a dad and a sister and a grandmother who makes him soup when he is sick and calls him on his lunch break to ask if he has eaten. He has that stable, ordinary, loving life that Riki thinks is probably more common than people admit and less common than it looks from the outside. He is not someone who has experienced what Riki has experienced, and he never pretends otherwise, which is part of why Riki trusts him. He doesn't try to relate; he just listens well.
They met two years ago in their homeroom, on Riki's first day at this school. Riki is doing the thing he always does on first days, which is watching, assessing, keeping his face pleasantly neutral and his guard pleasantly up. He has learned by then that there are two ways to come into a new school: visible or invisible. Visible means people will decide things about you quickly, and you will either fit or be working uphill all year. Invisible means you get to take your time but you also sometimes end up alone. He has tried both, and he usually lands somewhere in between, which is its own kind of work, but he’s decided it was the best spot to be in.
Jungwon sat down next to him, looked at the sketchbook Riki had opened on his desk, and asked, without any introduction: "What's that going to be?" Riki, albeit surprised, answered, "Not sure yet." And Jungwon nodded like that was a perfectly satisfying answer, introduced himself, and spent the rest of the homeroom talking about something unrelated as if they have known each other for years.
Two years later, Jungwon knows everything. It comes out in pieces, the way trust works, slowly and then more quickly. Riki told him of the accident that took his parents, his grandmother, the houses in the last 3 years, the Busan family and Jiyeon who taught him backflips, the Seoul woman with the book-covered apartment. He told him their art teacher who had said instinctive compositional eye, which Jungwon makes Riki repeat twice because he says it deserves to be said more than once. He tells Jungwon of The Plan: art school, forty-seven scholarships, his own, and making someone and something out of the scraps he has.
Jungwon listens to all of it without trying to fix any of it, which is the hardest thing to find in another person and the thing Riki is most grateful for. He doesn't offer solutions and he doesn't reach for silver linings. He asks good questions and lets things be what they are.
"Ms. Kim called," Riki says, sitting down on the bench. "Jake and Heeseung are officially in the process."
Jungwon lowers his lunch. His expression does a complicated thing, surprised and happy and careful all at once, like he is trying to calibrate how excited to be. "How do you feel?"
"I don't know."
"That's okay." He picks his food back up. "Does it feel like a good I-don't-know or a bad one?"
Riki thinks about it. He thinks about Jake's question on that first morning — is that a wave? — and how that simple thing had felt like being seen. He thinks about Heeseung holding the door open without making a big fuss of it, as if he has and always will be welcome. "Good," he says. "Mostly good."
"Then let's start there," Jungwon says, and bites into his bread.
They talk about it more over the next few weeks, as the process moves forward in the way these processes do. There are meetings and home visits and paperwork that Riki has seen enough versions of to sign without having to read too carefully. He meets with Ms. Kim three times. He has a long conversation with Heeseung one afternoon on the back porch that starts as a check-in and turns into something more honest, where Heeseung tells him in plain terms what he can expect and what he can't promise and what they are hoping for, and Riki listens and nods and feels that tightness in his chest again, the one he has learned to breathe around.
Jake, during this period, mostly communicates through food. This is not a coping mechanism — it is, Riki comes to understand, just how Jake expresses care. There is always something on the counter when he comes over. Heeseung explains this with the patience of a man who has spent years translating. "He made eight types of banchan on the day we signed the mortgage," Heeseung says, once. "I don't think he knew why either."
He moves in on a rainy Tuesday in October. His things fit in a duffel bag, a backpack, and a medium cardboard box. He has moved enough times to know how to keep his life portable. He knows how to pack in a way that means nothing is too hard to carry, too fragile to be moved quickly, or too dependent on any particular shelf or drawer to work somewhere else. He has gotten very good at this, and he tries not to think about how good he has gotten at it.
Jake comes to pick him up in his car, which is sensible and slightly too cheerful a color for October, and talks the entire way there about something he has read about architecture. Riki listens and answers and feels his heart doing somersaults in his chest. The rain comes down steadily. The windshield wipers go back and forth. Jake keeps talking.
When they pull up home, the house looks the same as it always does from the outside, warm-lit and ordinary and now, his. That is the part that gets him, sitting in the passenger seat while Jake parks: the casual, unstartling fact of his. He has lived in other people's spaces for seven years and he is good at it, at fitting himself into the shape of someone else's life without taking up too much room. He has not been sure what it would feel like to arrive somewhere and have it already be shaped around him.
It feels, he realizes, like the moment just before you finish a piece of art — when you can see what it is becoming and it is more than you had planned.
The room is ready. He stands in the doorway and looks at it, and it looks back at him. It is clean and organized and clearly thought about, the desk positioned by the window where the light is good, a stack of fresh sketchbooks on its surface. He recognizes the brand immediately; he had mentioned it, once, in passing, weeks ago, not even as a hint, when he was talking to Heeseung about his “artistic process”. He is completely sure he hadn't made a thing of it and completely sure Heeseung had written it down within about thirty seconds of hearing it.
"Is it okay?" Jake says, from just behind him.
"It's good," Riki says. He keeps his voice level. "It's really good."
Jake claps him on the shoulder, brief and warm, and goes back downstairs to get the box from the car, and Riki stands in the doorway of his room — his room — and lets himself breathe. He breathes until the feeling in his chest settles into something he can carry comfortably. Then he goes in and starts unpacking, and the first thing he puts on the desk is the sketchbook from Seoul, the one the woman with all the books had given him at the door, which he has never used because he couldn't decide what was worth starting it with.
He thinks, looking at it, that maybe he has figured that out now.
Jake Sim grew up in Brisbane, in a house that is always slightly too loud and always slightly too warm and which he has spent his entire adult life trying to recreate. His mom had run a grocery, his dad worked in an office, and his brother is four years older and has taught him everything worth knowing about stubbornness. He has grown up believing that the most important thing you can do for someone is make them something to eat and ask about their day. He is the kind of person who has always had a lot of friends, not because he works at it but because he is genuinely curious about people, and people tend to open up to curiosity.
He came to Korea at eighteen on an engineering scholarship, planning to stay for four years, and has stayed, so far, for seventeen. He will tell you, if you ask, that he stayed for the work — bridge infrastructure and the elegant and complicated physics of how a structure holds itself up over nothing. This is true, and it is the actual work that genuinely occupies him, that he can talk about at dinner and at breakfast and sometimes in the middle of conversations that have nothing to do with bridge infrastructure, which Heeseung has learned to navigate by making a specific face that means I'm listening even though you've been talking about load coefficients for eleven minutes. He will not immediately tell you that he also stayed for Heeseung, although that is truer. That is, if he is being completely honest, the primary reason by year three.
Lee Heeseung was in his engineering cohort in second year. He had sat two rows ahead of Jake in their structures class and took notes in handwriting so small Jake once joked about it requiring a magnifying glass, and he looked over his shoulder at this comment with the particular expression Jake will later come to recognize as Heeseung deciding not to say something devastating. He switched to education by the end of that year, which meant they no longer in the same classes, but by then they were studying together in the library every other day, eating convenience store ramen together at one and two in the morning, arguing about which outlet to use in the study room like it is a matter of international diplomacy. Jake had never been in the habit of becoming deeply attached to people quickly, but Heeseung seemed to be the exception — not because he is easy, exactly, but because he is real in a way that makes everything else feel slightly less real by comparison.
Jake had fallen in love the slow way and then the fast way. He had fallen in love with the way Heeseung reads, completely absorbed, like the outside world has been put on mute. He had fallen in love with the dry precision of Heeseung's humor, which arrives quietly and usually three seconds after everyone else has moved on. He had fallen in love with the way Heeseung looks at things he cares about: with this particular stillness, total attention, like you are the only thing in the room that exists.
It took him about a year to figure out what to do with all of this, because Jake is impulsive in most areas of his life but not, it turns out, about the things that matter most.
Heeseung figured it out at about the same time and then took considerably longer to say anything about it. This was deeply, entirely in character. Heeseung is the type of person who measures twice and then measures again and then sits with the measurement for a while before cutting. He is careful with things. He is especially careful with things that matter.
He said it during an argument about takeout. Specifically, in the middle of a fairly heated disagreement about whether dry ramyeon or soupy ramyeon is superior, he stopped in the middle of his sentence and just blurted, "I love you," in the tone of someone who has just finished deciding he had enough keeping it.
Jake kissed him before he got the chance to do anything else. Which is, they both agree later, the most Jake thing possible and the most Heeseung thing possible, as a combination.
That was almost 15 years ago. They moved in together at twenty-four, into a small apartment where the kitchen is barely big enough for one person and they made it work for two, before moving to a bigger one when they both found their footing in their jobs and stayed there for another four. And then six years ago they bought this house, which has a kitchen big enough for people to move around in and a fourth bedroom and a back porch with afternoon light, and Heeseung alphabetizes the spice rack the day they move in.
The fostering question comes up in different forms over the years, never quite becoming concrete enough to become a plan. Jake had grown up in a house full of people and never quite adjusted to a house with just two. Heeseung's reasons are quieter and more specific: he had grown up with his parents until he was nine, in a house that looks fine from the outside. He was then in a foster home for two years before his aunt found out and took him in. It’s just two years, which is nothing compared to some people's stories, but it was enough to teach him things he can't unlearn about what it feels like to be somewhere you haven't chosen, with people who are doing their best but whose best stops at a certain point that you can see clearly from where you are standing.
He is also an elementary school teacher, which means he has spent more than a decade watching what it looks like when kids are okay and when they aren't. He is very good at knowing the difference. He knows which kids ate breakfast and which didn't, which kids do their homework in the morning because the evenings at home aren't quiet enough to concentrate. He knows which ones relax in his classroom in a way that suggests school is the safest part of their day, and he tries, as much as he can, to make it worth relaxing in. It is the work he cares most about — because he knows what it had meant, at nine and ten and eleven, to have an adult who paid attention.
When he sees Riki on the sidewalk that first morning — crouched over the concrete with complete focus, hands moving like they know something his brain hasn't figured out yet — he recognizes something. He isn't sure what, exactly. Something in the set of his shoulders, the particular quality of his concentration. Something about a kid who is fifteen and alone in the early morning and finding something worth being careful about in a blank piece of concrete. He tells Jake about it later that night, lying in bed, and Jake says "yeah," before pressing a kiss on his cheek, like it is obvious, like there is nothing more to say. Yeah.
The process, when they finally start it formally, is long and careful and full of paperwork. Heeseung reads every document twice and asks every question he has written down and a few he thinks of on the spot. Jake brings food to every meeting with Ms. Kim, including one they have via video call, where he sets a plate of cookies in front of the laptop screen before realizing the problem, which Ms. Kim seems to find charming. They have been ready for a long time. It turns out they are just waiting for someone specific to come along and paint a wave on their sidewalk at seven in the morning.
Living with Jake and Heeseung is different from what Riki expected, which is embarrassing to admit because he has told himself he wasn't expecting anything.
It is different in small ways, mostly. Jake cooks on weeknights, carefully and with planning. He has a rotation of about twelve dishes that he executes with the reliable precision of someone who has made them enough times that the recipe exists in his hands rather than his head. Heeseung cooks on weekends with enthusiasm and varying degrees of success, and the quality of Heeseung’s cooking is inversely proportional to how ambitious he is being, which means the simple things are genuinely excellent and the ambitious things are usually an adventure. He made a very good doenjang jjigae three Sundays ago. He also attempted a complicated layered dessert the Sunday before that, which Jake eats with an expression of careful diplomacy. Riki eats it and says honestly that it tastes better than it looks, and Heeseung seems to find this deeply comforting, which it probably should not be.
The coffee situation is taken seriously by both of them and is a source of ongoing low-level disagreement that Riki has started to understand is less about the coffee and more about the fact that they both find it privately amusing to disagree about it. Heeseung's process is specific and calibrated; Jake's is looser and he describes his own technique as "vibes-based," which drives Heeseung to a contained exasperation that is clearly the point. The result is that they make very good coffee, between the two of them, combining both approaches.
Heeseung keeps the house organized with the same methodical attention he applies to everything, and Jake operates in mild organized chaos and has apparently made peace, long ago, with the fact that Heeseung will quietly re-order things behind him without comment. This is, somehow, the most functional system Riki has ever witnessed in a shared household. Jake does not fight the re-ordering. Heeseung does not announce it. They have arrived, over years, at a kind of domestic equilibrium that works because neither of them needs the other to be different.
Riki finds this remarkable. He has never quite seen it before: two people who have made enough room for each other's differences that the differences aren't friction anymore. They are simply part of how the house runs.
Heeseung brings work home on Fridays. He teaches second grade, and his bag is always heavy with small papers covered in the handwriting of children who are still learning how letters work, still mapping the distance between what they want to say and the marks they can make on a page. He sits at the kitchen table grading them after dinner. Riki looks at some of them once, holds up one where a kid has drawn a sun with what has to be fifty rays extending off the edges of the paper, and Heeseung says, without looking up, "Her name is Yuna and she's going through a maximalist phase." Which makes Riki laugh so unexpectedly that Jake comes in from the living room to see what has happened.
"What's funny?"
"Heeseung," Riki says.
Jake looks at Heeseung, who is still grading. "Yeah," Jake says, like this explains everything. "He does that."
Jake is easier to read than Heeseung on the surface — he says what he is thinking, feels things quickly and loudly and recovers from them just as fast. He asks Riki questions about art with genuine curiosity, and Riki knows it comes from wanting to understand rather than wanting to seem interested. When Riki explains why a certain technique works — the way glazing changes light, why you sometimes need to draw the wrong thing first to find the right one — Jake listens with the focused attention of someone who finds things genuinely interesting and isn't embarrassed about it. He once pulls out his phone mid-explanation and looks something up just to see a picture of what Riki is describing. It is not the smoothest conversational moment, but it is honest, and Riki trusts honesty.
Riki learns about the mom thing on a Wednesday evening, about two weeks in, when Heeseung comes home from school and says to Jake, without any particular ceremony, "My wife made too much rice again." Jake looks up from his laptop and says, "I always make too much rice, that's a feature," and goes back to what he was doing. Riki sits at the table and processes this for a moment. He knows Jake is genderfluid — Jake had mentioned it early on, plainly, the way he mentioned most things about himself. He presents masculine almost all of the time, wears the same rotation of hoodies and jeans, answers to he without pause. But wife sits differently on him than husband would, and Heeseung uses it gently and lovingly, and Jake positively beams whenever he hears it. Riki doesn't ask about it that night, but he turns it over quietly while he does his homework, and somewhere in the turning he understands that if there is ever a word for Jake in that direction — in the direction of parent — it would be mom, and that this would be right, and that Jake would receive it the same way.
Heeseung is harder to read and more consistent. He is quieter, but his quiet carries a quality of presence rather than absence. He notices things: he notices the sketchbook brand, and the way Riki holds his pencil differently when he is stressed, and the fact that Riki doesn't drink coffee but will drink tea if there is already a cup sitting somewhere near him. He never points these things out. He acts on them, as if it is simply obvious that this is what you do when you pay attention to someone.
On Riki's second week, he comes home from school on a Tuesday to find Jake in the kitchen starting dinner and a mug of tea on the counter, steam rising, already at the right temperature.
"How was it?" Jake asks.
"Fine." Riki sits down and wraps both hands around the mug. It is the temperature that feels like it was made about three minutes ago and left to cool slightly, which is exactly the temperature he prefers. He doesn't know how Jake calculates that; must be his engineer brain. "We have a chemistry test next week that I'm not sure about."
"Do you need help?"
"Probably not. Maybe."
"Okay." Jake doesn't push it. He moves something on the stove. "If you do, tell me."
That is the whole conversation. The door is open, and Jake doesn't need Riki to confirm it. Riki sits there with his tea and thinks about all the ways that kind of moment could go wrong — a follow-up offer that he could’ve taken badly, the reassurance that makes you feel like you have been a problem — and feels oddly relieved by the plain completeness of what Jake has offered instead.
He does end up asking for help with the chemistry, on a Thursday night, standing in the kitchen doorway with his textbook. Jake has been reading but sets the book down without commenting on it and spends forty minutes at the kitchen table going through the unit with him, drawing small clear diagrams in the margin of Riki's notes. He is good at explaining things and Riki senses that it is less about tolerance and more about knowing how to sit with someone inside their confusion without rushing them through it.
He gets a 91 on the test. He tells Heeseung and Jake at dinner, and Jake breaks out in a whoop of joy. Heeseung smiles fondly at him and immediately takes his phone out to order ice cream and cake because they needed to celebrate.
Riki goes to sleep with a mild tummy ache and full heart.
He calls Jungwon almost every night, at least for the first month. There is a lot to process, and Jungwon is the person he processes things with.
"He alphabetized the spice rack," Riki says once, very earnestly, "and Jake keeps un-alphabetizing it and then re-alphabetizing it wrong, and Heeseung just fixes it without saying anything and it's been going on for apparently three years."
"That's the most domestic thing I've ever heard," Jungwon says.
"It's insane. It's somehow sweet. I don't know how it's both."
"It's a symptom of loving someone whose chaos you've decided to accept," Jungwon says, with the sage confidence of someone who has read too many novels.
"... I can’t prove it but I know you read that somewhere."
"I may have read something like it somewhere."
"Jungwon."
"The point stands."
Riki is lying on his floor, his preferred position for phone calls, with one arm behind his head and the other holding the phone to his ear. His room is quiet. The sketchbook on his desk has seven pages of new work in it, which is more than he has done in the previous two months combined, and he has been trying not to think about why.
"Can I tell you something weird?" he says.
"Everything you tell me is weird, that's why I like talking to you."
"I — " Riki presses his lips together. He says it fast: "Sometimes when I'm about to say Jake or Heeseung, my brain gives me a different word first. Like it gets there before I do and I have to — redirect."
Jungwon is quiet for a moment, then his voice crackles over the speakeer. "What word?"
Riki doesn't answer.
"Oh," Jungwon says.
"It's dumb."
"It's not dumb."
"I've known them for less than two months, Jungwon, it's — "
"Riki." Jungwon says his name in the particular way that means stop doing that thing where you argue against yourself before anyone else gets the chance. "It's not dumb. It's actually the least dumb thing you've told me in a while."
Riki stares at the ceiling. "What if it's too much?"
"Do you think it would be too much for them?"
"I don't know. That's the problem." He shifts on the floor. "What if they didn't sign up for that? Like what if they wanted to help a kid, which they're doing, and I make it weird by turning it into a whole — "
"You think wanting a family is weird?"
"I think wanting one at fifteen when you're almost an adult is — "
"Still wanting a family," Jungwon says flatly. "Which is allowed. At any age."
Riki is quiet. Outside his window he can hear the street, a car passing, the distant sound of someone's music. Inside the house, the background music he has learned to love: the low easy sound of the television downstairs and, barely audible, Jake laughing at something.
"Okay," Jungwon says. "So here's what I think. I think you should say it. And I think the reason you haven't is because you're scared of what it means if they're okay with it, not if they're not."
Riki blinks. "What does that mean?"
"It means if they're not okay with it, you can handle that. You've handled things. But if they are okay with it — " Jungwon pauses. "That's scarier. Because then it's real, and you have to let it be real."
Riki doesn't say anything for a long time. He hears Jungwon on the other end, patient, steady.
"I hate when you're right," Riki says.
"I know," Jungwon says pleasantly.
Which brings him back to the laptop, the throwaway account, and the post sitting in a subreddit he has found at ten-thirty at night after an hour of convincing himself he is not going to do this.
how do i (15m) call my new foster parents (35,36m) as mom and dad?
Then, below it, the longer part:
i've been in foster care since i was 8. i'm 15 now and i've been living with my current people for almost two months. they're really good. i don't want to mess this up by asking for something that's too much. i don't know if that's even what they want, or if it's weird to want that at my age. has anyone done this? did you just say it? did you ask first? how did it go?
He reads it over twice before posting. It sounds like what it is: someone asking for permission to want something. He posts it before he can think about it any more and closes the laptop.
He lasts eight minutes before he opens it again.
There are already four replies, and by the time he finishes reading them, there are seven.
The first reply is from someone who says they were twelve. They were at the table doing homework when they called their foster mom "mom" by accident, a slip, a word that came out before they could stop it. Their mom stopped completely. She set down the pen she was holding. Her eyes went wet. She said, I've been waiting for that since the day you got here, and they both pretended not to be crying for about thirty seconds before giving up entirely.
I was so scared before it happened, the person wrote. Afterward I couldn't believe I'd been scared of it. It was the best accident I ever made.
The second is from someone who was sixteen, three months from aging out, who never said it, and not because they hadn't wanted to. They had wanted to very badly, and they kept waiting for the right moment, and the right moment didn't come, and then they aged out, and now they are twenty-three and they still think about it.
Don't wait for a perfect moment, they wrote. There isn't one. There's just moments, and you either take them or you don't.
The third is from someone who was fourteen and asked first. They sat their foster parents down, which in retrospect they find kind of hilarious, and formally asked if it would be okay. Their parents said yes so fast it was almost funny. They'd been trying to figure out how to bring it up themselves, the person wrote. Turns out everyone was just scared of the same thing.
The fourth reply is from a foster parent. Riki reads it twice.
I want you to know something. Every foster parent who is doing this for the right reasons is hoping for that. When a kid finally says it, it means they feel safe enough to. That's the whole thing. That's what we're hoping for. If your people are good people, and it sounds like they are, they won't think it's too much. They'll probably have to sit down for a minute. That's a good sign.
The fifth is short. Just do it. You're going to wonder why it took you so long.
The sixth is from someone about his age, who writes in the uncertain grammar of someone figuring out how to say something true: i was scared too. i did it anyway. my dad cried in the car for like 20 minutes after but he said it was happy crying. just say it. they want you to.
The seventh is from someone who says only: You deserve to have people to call mom and dad. I hope you say it.
Riki closes the laptop.
He lies back on his bed and looks at the ceiling of his room — his room, the one with the window positioned for good light and the brand of sketchbook nobody had told Heeseung about, prepared for him by Jake and Heeseung — and feels something change in him. The feeling is large, and it has texture, and edges, and he lets himself feel it without trying to name it or put it away.
He thinks about his grandmother's hands, dry and warm, pressing to his cheeks. He thinks about the first house, and the third house, and the Busan family with the dog and the backyard. He thinks about his art teacher saying instinctive compositional eye like it is a real thing, like it belongs to him.
He thinks about a wave on a sidewalk, and a man asking is that a wave?, and the bird tucked into the curl where the shadow is deepest.
He thinks about how his hand had added that bird without deciding to. How some things find their shape before you know you are looking for them.
He turns toward the wall and cries for a while. He cries quietly and contained, because he has learned to cry in houses full of people who weren't his people. It is a cry with grief at the edges of it, yes, but it is also something else at its center: the feeling of something you have been carrying for a long time being finally allowed to be set down, and your arms shaking a little because of how long they had been holding it.
He falls asleep with the lamp still on.
He wakes up before his alarm. He always does this, which annoys him sometimes, waking up before his alarm when he knows he has something to do.
The light through his curtains is pale gold and early. The house is quiet. It is early Saturday morning, before anyone has to be anywhere, so there’s no loud noises from school buses or cars from their neighbors. Riki lies still and listens to it, and he can hear, faintly, the sound of movement downstairs. It’s the specific sound of someone being careful not to wake anyone up, which means at least one of them is already in the kitchen.
He sits up and pushes his hair out of his face and sits on the edge of the bed for a while, doing nothing, letting his eyes adjust and his breathing settle. On his desk, the sketchbook is open to yesterday's work — the beginnings of something large, shapes that haven't decided what they are yet. He has been thinking about the back fence. He has been thinking about it for weeks, actually, looking at it every time he is in the backyard, measuring it in his head.
He looks at his phone. Six fifty-one.
He checks the Reddit post. There are thirty-eight replies now.
He already knows what he is going to do. He has known since last night, or maybe since before that, since the night when Jungwon said that's scarier, because then it's real, and Riki understood that he was right. He has spent seven years getting through things. He has gotten through things that were harder than this, and none of those things had been hard in quite this way, where what scares you is not the bad outcome but the good one.
He is scared. His hands, when he looks at them, feel less steady than usual. But fear, Riki has learned a long time ago, is not a reason to stop. It is a sign that something matters.
He stands up. He goes to the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face and looks at himself in the mirror — a fifteen-year-old boy in an oversized grey hoodie, hair messy, eyes slightly too awake for 6 AM. He looks at himself until the person looking back feels like someone who can do this.
He goes downstairs.
The kitchen is already warm. Heeseung is at the counter with the coffee, which is his job every morning, and he approaches it with the focused ritual of a man who has opinions about the temperature of the water and the coarseness of the grind and the exact duration of the bloom, all of which Jake once times with a stopwatch out of genuine curiosity and which Heeseung clocks in at exactly four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The kitchen smells like coffee and the faint warmth of a house that has been heating up for a while.
Jake is at the table with his phone, scrolling through something, his chair angled slightly the way it always is in the mornings, like he sat down in a hurry. He is wearing the green hoodie Riki has decided is his default off-duty outfit. His hair is doing several things at once.
They both look up when Riki appears in the doorway.
He stands there for a moment. His chest feels like it is a space he is yet to paint — full of everything it is about to be, waiting for the first mark. He looks at Jake, who is already pouting a bit but with sparkling eyes, his face having that signature openness before the smile. He looks at Heeseung, who is still holding his coffee and is just watching him with his clear doe eyes, patient in that particular way of his, like Riki is a deer he doesn’t want to spook.
Riki takes a breath. He lets it out. He says it.
"Good morning, Mom." He looks at Jake.
He turns. "Good morning, Dad." He looks at Heeseung.
The kitchen goes so quiet it is like someone has turned a dial.
Jake's expression does something Riki has never seen it do before. His smile is just gone — dissolved by something bigger than a smile, something that comes from further back. His eyes go bright and then wet, and he makes a sound that isn't quite a word, something that gets out before he has thought to keep it in.
Heeseung sets the coffee mug down very carefully, with both hands, like he cant trust his hands not to shake and spill its contents. He looks at Riki. He doesn't say anything. His eyes are doing what eyes do when a person is feeling too many things at once and the body can't hold all of them still.
Riki feels his throat tighten. "Sorry," he says. A reflex. An old reflex, worn into him over years of being somewhere he wasn't sure about, of taking up space and then apologizing for it. "Sorry, I just — "
"Don't," Jake says. His voice comes out rough at the edges. He pushes his chair back and crosses the kitchen and Riki barely processes what is happening before Jake's arms are around him, solid and warm and very real. "Don't apologize for that." He says it into Riki's hair. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
Riki's face is pressed into Jake's shoulder and the tightness in his throat breaks open and he is crying — quietly, like always, but it is a different kind of quiet this time. This one is the kind that happens when you are being held and you are safe and you don't have to keep anything contained for anyone's sake, including your own.
He holds on. Jake holds on. Jake is also crying, which Riki can tell from the way his breathing has gone uneven, and which somehow makes everything easier rather than harder.
Then there is a second pair of arms.
Heeseung, who has crossed the kitchen without any of them hearing him, wraps his arms around both of them. He doesn't say anything, because Heeseung understands that there are moments that don't need words, that words are sometimes a way of filling a space that is better left full of the thing itself. He holds on, and the three of them stand in the kitchen in the pale Saturday morning light while the coffee sits cooling on the counter and nobody moves.
Riki doesn't know how long they stay like that. Not long, probably. It feels longer than it actually is, if Riki is being honest. Eventually Jake pulls back first — because Jake processes feelings quickly and then needs to do something with the energy — and he holds Riki at arm's length and looks at him with red eyes and a smile that is still slightly crooked and wet around the edges.
"Okay," Jake says. "I'm good. Are you good?"
"No," Riki says honestly.
Jake laughs, surprised by it, and swipes at his face with the back of his hand. "Yeah. Same." He pulls Riki in again briefly, a short fierce hug, and then steps back and does the thing he always does when he needs to recover, which is turn to the most immediate practical matter available. "Tea. We need your tea, and we need breakfast."
"I already started boiling the water," Heeseung says. His voice is rougher than its usual register. He is back at the counter, hands occupied with the kettle, doing the thing he always does when he needs to recover, which is find something to do with his hands.
"You walked away from the kett;e, Heeseung — "
"I had somewhere to be."
"The boiling waster is just sitting there — "
"Jake." Heeseung turns around. His eyes are still slightly bright. He looks at Jake with the particular expression that means I love you and you are exhausting, and then he looks at Riki, and his expression changes into something quieter and more direct. "Thank you for saying that," he says.
Riki just nods because he doesn't trust his voice entirely.
"Now," Heeseung says, "I'm going to finish making Riki’s tea, and then we're going to have breakfast. Riki, come here. I'll show you how I do the eggs. Jake, I love you, but I need to teach our son how to feed his mother actual good food.” which makes Jake laugh so loudly he started wheezing.
Riki goes to stand beside him at the counter, close enough to watch. He gives him a little bump on the shoulder and whispers, "Dad" to which Heeseung beams and ruffles his hair.
Heeseung does the thing and lets Riki watch, and when Riki asks a question, he answers it directly. Heeseung hands him a bowl and shows him how he likes the eggs beaten, properly, until the yolk and white are fully one thing. Riki does it. Heeseung watches without correcting him, which means he is doing it right.
Jake, from the table, is already texting someone. "Jungwon's going to want to know about this," he says.
Riki looks up. "Mom, since when did you have Jungwon's number? And what do you know?" He narrows his eyes.
Jake lets out a delighted laugh, which suspiciously sounds like he knows something about Riki, or Jungwon, or maybe even both. "Since he visited! And you tell me something Jungwon said almost every day."
"I do not."
"Three days ago you told me a twelve-minute story about something Jungwon said in biology."
Riki considers this. "That story had good pacing." It was fun, although Riki did skip the part where he and Jungwon almost got sent out of the lab because they decided to free the frogs.
"It did," Jake allows. "I'm just saying. Invite him over dinner sometime. He can eat with us."
"He eats a lot."
"So does Jake," Heeseung says, without turning around.
"Excuse me — "
"You had four pieces of toast last Saturday."
"I was hungry."
"You are always hungry, that's my entire point — "
Riki laughs, and it comes out loud and unguarded that startles even him, because he has forgotten he can do that. He laughs while he beats the eggs, and Jake argues about toast, and Heeseung argues back in the calm steady way that means he has already won, and the tea finishes brewing and fills the kitchen with its smell, and the morning light moves across the floor the way it does when the day is going to be a good one.
Riki looks at the eggs in the bowl, properly beaten, yolk and white together.
He thinks about the Reddit post and its thirty-eight replies. He thinks about the person who said you deserve to have people to call mom and dad, and how he had read that twice. He thinks about Jungwon saying it's scarier when it's real, because then you have to let it be real.
He lets it be real.
He stands at the counter in the kitchen that is his kitchen, in the house that is his house, next to a man who is — who is Dad, and across from a man who is Mom, and he beats eggs for Saturday breakfast and doesn't brace himself and doesn't wait for something to go wrong and doesn't keep the feeling at a distance. He lets it be exactly what it is.
The bird in the wave. The shape his hand knew before his head did.
Three months later, Jungwon comes for dinner on a Friday.
Dinner is Jake's doenjang jjigae, which is genuinely good, and Jungwon eats two bowls, which makes Jake glow in the particular way he glows when someone appreciates his cooking without him having to ask. Heeseung watches this happen with the private fond expression that Riki has started to recognize as the one he wears when something is going exactly as it should and he doesn't feel the need to comment on it. Riki eats and listens and lets the conversation move around him and feels, for the whole of it, like a person who is exactly where he is supposed to be.
After dinner, while Jake washes dishes with enthusiasm and Heeseung rewashes them with precision, Jungwon and Riki go out to the back porch. It is cold enough that their breath shows, and Jungwon has borrowed Jake's spare jacket from the hook by the door, and they lean on the railing and look at the back fence. It is wide and plain and slightly weathered, and it has been waiting.
"What's it going to be?"
Riki looks at it for a moment. Blank surfaces still do the same thing they always have — ask questions he has to stand with for a while before he can answer. He has been standing with this one long enough to know. "A field," he says. "Something with a lot of sky in it. Room for things."
Jungwon nods. He is quiet, letting what is already in the air stay there rather than filling it. Then: "Are you happy?"
Riki lets the question settle. He looks at the fence, and beyond it the darkening sky, and he thinks about the answer honestly, the way Heeseung has taught him to think about things without rushing them.
"Yeah," he says. "I am."
Jungwon bumps his shoulder against Riki's, brief and warm. "Good," he says.
From inside, Jake makes a crashing sound that is followed by a minor disagreement about the correct sequence for washing pots, Heeseung's voice arriving measured and exact through the kitchen window. Riki hears the specific word Heeseung uses and laughs out loud. Jungwon asks what is funny, and Riki tells him, and Jungwon laughs too, and the back porch light is on, and the fence is waiting, and Riki looks at it and thinks about the field he is going to make — the wide sky, the room for things — and thinks about how his hand always knew before his head did, and thinks that maybe that has always been enough.
He has time to find out.
He has, for the first time in a long time, somewhere to find out from.