Chapter Text
Taesan's earliest memory wasn't of his own house.
If anyone had asked, he probably could have described the paddock of the Haneul International Circuit long before he could have drawn the floor plan of his bedroom.
Every Friday before dawn, his grandfather would wake him with the same words:"The track doesn't wait for anyone.” By the time he was six, the racetrack had become less of a place and more of a second language. Every race weekend followed the same rhythm, familiar enough that he could have navigated it with his eyes closed. Transport trucks lined the paddock before sunrise like sleeping giants, their polished trailers catching the first streaks of dawn. Mechanics arrived carrying battered toolboxes that seemed heavier than the men themselves, exchanging sleepy greetings over steaming paper cups of coffee. Somewhere in the distance, someone would inevitably start an engine too early, and the quiet morning would dissolve beneath the sharp bark of an exhaust echoing across the empty circuit.
Most children woke to birdsong.
Taesan woke to rev limiters.
His grandfather liked to say that engines had personalities, that anyone who spent enough time around them could tell when one was happy and when another was asking for help. As a child, Taesan believed him without question. He would sit cross-legged on overturned tire stacks, swinging his feet while listening to motorcycles roar past the garages, convinced that each one sounded as different as the people riding them.
”This one needs a check up."
Taesan frowned. "How do you know?"
"It keeps climbing in the revs before settling."
The little boy tilted his head, listening harder.
"...Oh."
His grandfather smiled without explaining further.
There were certain rules everyone followed around the paddock.
1. Don't stand behind a motorcycle that has just been started.
2. Don't interrupt a rider before qualifying.
3. Never leave tools where someone could trip over them.
4. And absolutely never wander into Garage Three without permission.
Naturally, the last rule became Taesan's favorite.
He had been told so many times to stay out that curiosity eventually outweighed obedience. One Saturday afternoon, while his grandfather was occupied with sponsors and photographers, Taesan slipped away between rows of transport trailers, ducked beneath a length of caution tape, and pushed open the side door of the garage with all the confidence only an eight-year-old could possess.
The room smelled different from the rest of the paddock. Outside, the air was thick with gasoline and burnt rubber. Inside, there was the cleaner scent of machine oil, metal filings, and the citrus soap mechanics used to scrub grease from their hands. Radios hummed quietly from somewhere in the back while compressed air hissed intermittently across the room. Adults moved with practiced efficiency, speaking in half-finished sentences because they already knew what the other intended to say.
"Torque wrench."
"Caught it."
"Rear stand."
"Already here."
No one noticed the small boy lingering near the entrance.
Taesan wandered farther inside, weaving carefully between motorcycles balanced on stands, each one stripped open until their polished fairings rested neatly on blankets spread across the floor.
He stopped in front of a partially dismantled bike.
It looked... vulnerable.
Without its bodywork, the sleek machine resembled something alive, all exposed bones and hidden organs. Wires, hoses, bolts, and gleaming metal components intertwined in ways he couldn't begin to understand.
He crouched.
"You're standing on it."
Taesan jumped so violently he nearly fell backward.
Hidden beneath one of the motorcycles was a pair of legs sticking out from under the frame, sneakers tapping absently against the concrete as someone tightened a bolt. The creeper rolled backward, revealing a boy about Taesan's age. His safety goggles sat crooked across his forehead, and a streak of black grease ran from one cheek nearly to his ear. His oversized work gloves looked comically large on his hands.
The boy looked up.
Then down.
Then back at Taesan.
"My wrench."
Taesan blinked before realizing his sneaker rested squarely on the handle.
"Oh."
He hurriedly stepped aside.
"Sorry."
"It's okay."
The other boy reached over, grabbed the wrench, and stood with surprising ease despite being several inches shorter.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Taesan studied him with open curiosity.
Unlike everyone else in the paddock, this kid didn't wear team colors or branded clothing. His T-shirt was faded from too many washes, the knees of his jeans were permanently stained with grease, and a handful of zip ties poked from one pocket because he'd apparently forgotten to take them out.
The boy noticed Taesan staring.
"What?"
"...Nothing."
"You've been looking at me for like thirty seconds."
"I wasn't counting."
"I was."
Taesan couldn't help laughing.
"So you're weird."
"So are you."
The reply came so matter-of-factly that Taesan laughed even harder.
Before either of them could continue, a familiar voice echoed from the opposite side of the garage.
"Leehan!"
The boy immediately looked up.
"Coming!"
A man emerged from behind another motorcycle, wiping his hands on a rag tucked into the waistband of his coveralls. He looked tired in the way people who loved their jobs often did, with oil permanently embedded beneath his fingernails and smile lines deep enough to suggest he'd spent years laughing through long workdays.
His eyes landed on Taesan.
"Oh," his expression shifted into mild surprise, "I didn't realize you were here."
Taesan recognized him immediately. His grandfather often referred to him simply as the best mechanic in the country.
The man crouched beside the two boys.
"I'm sorry if Leehan bothered you."
"I didn't." Leehan frowned.
"I wasn't bothering him."
"I know."
His father smiled, "I'm being polite."
"...Why?"
"So people don't think I raised a gremlin."
"I am not a gremlin."
"You hissed at Mrs. Park yesterday."
"She touched my hair without asking."
"...Fair point."
Taesan bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing. Leehan noticed anyway.
"Hey, don’t laugh."
"I wasn't—"
"You were."
"...Maybe a little."
Leehan grinned.
For reasons Taesan couldn't explain, that made him feel oddly... lighter. No one at the track ever spoke to him like this. Adults straightened their posture around him because he was the founder's grandson. Other children became awkward the moment they learned his last name. Even older racers ruffled his hair with an exaggerated gentleness they didn't show anyone else.
But this boy had accused him of standing on a wrench before asking his name.
It was strangely refreshing.
Leehan's father rose to his feet.
"Leehan, finish organizing those sockets."
Then he looked at Taesan.
"And you should probably head back before your grandfather realizes you've escaped again."
"...Again?"
The mechanic smiled knowingly.
"You hide behind my tool cabinets somedays."
Taesan's ears turned bright red.
"You knew?"
"I knew."
"...Why didn't you say anything?"
He shrugged.
"You were quiet," then, after a brief pause, he added, "and it looked like you were trying to learn."
Taesan glanced back toward the dismantled motorcycle.
"I was."
"Good."
The mechanic rested a hand on the bike's exposed frame.
"Machines always have something to teach the people willing to listen."
As he hurried back toward the paddock before his grandfather could find him, he looked over his shoulder one last time. Leehan had already crawled back beneath the motorcycle, humming to himself as though the conversation had never happened. For the first time in his life, the racetrack didn't feel quite so enormous. Because somewhere inside Garage Three was another eight-year-old who seemed perfectly content to spend an entire afternoon talking to a stranger about misplaced wrenches.
The garage did not feel like a place built for children, yet Leehan moved through it as though it had been waiting for him specifically. There was a kind of unspoken rhythm to the space that most adults eventually learned, the quiet coordination of people who had spent enough time around engines to stop treating them as objects and start treating them as problems that spoke in their own language. Leehan already seemed fluent in it. Despite being eight years old, Leehan was weaving between tool chests and half-disassembled motorcycles with the absent confidence of someone walking through their own bedroom. He never seemed afraid of getting in anyone's way, perhaps because he'd spent his whole life learning exactly where everyone else intended to step before they did.
Taesan stood near the entrance longer than he meant to. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now that the initial moment had passed. Most interactions around him had a clear structure, introductions, greetings, expectations shaped by his grandfather’s name, but nothing about this felt structured at all. The boy in front of him had simply returned to the motorcycle without ceremony, as though Taesan was just another tool that had been briefly misplaced and then set aside.
It should have been insulting.
It wasn’t.
Leehan slid back under the bike, the rolling creeper squeaking softly against the concrete. A moment later, his voice drifted out again, muffled slightly by the machine above him.
“You’re still standing there.”
Taesan blinked. “I can leave.”
“You can,” Leehan agreed. “But you haven’t.”
That answer made no sense, at least not in the way adults usually made sense, which was to say it did not feel like it had been carefully arranged to avoid offending anyone. It just existed, simple and unfiltered, like a thought that had never learned how to become polite.
Taesan hesitated before stepping further inside.
The floor was colder than he expected. He could feel the vibration of distant engines through the concrete, a low constant tremor that seemed to sit beneath everything in the paddock like a second heartbeat. Somewhere deeper in the garage, a compressor kicked on and then off again, sighing like it was tired of being useful.
He stopped beside a stack of tires.
Leehan reappeared a moment later, rolling out from under the bike and sitting up with his legs crossed, hands still black with grease. He studied Taesan again, not with the quick curiosity adults used when they were trying to place him, but with something slower. Like he was trying to figure out what category Taesan belonged to and finding none of them quite fit.
“You’re the grandson, right?” Leehan asked.
Taesan nodded once.
Leehan didn’t react the way most people did. There was no sudden shift in posture, no careful politeness that made conversation feel like walking on glass. He simply accepted it, as though it explained nothing important.
“Okay,” he said.
That was it.
Just “okay.”
Taesan found himself unsure whether that was supposed to mean something.
Leehan stood, brushing his hands against his jeans in a way that only made them look worse. Then, without warning, he reached over and plucked a small rag from a nearby crate and tossed it at Taesan.
It landed awkwardly against his chest.
“You’re in the way,” Leehan said.
Taesan stared at the rag. “I am?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t moved.”
“That’s why.”
There was a pause.
Taesan looked down at the rag. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
Leehan tilted his head slightly, as if the question itself was unusual. “Hold it.”
“For what?”
“In case you decide to help.”
“I didn’t decide that.”
Leehan hummed softly, already turning back toward the motorcycle. “You might later.”
Taesan looked around the garage again. Nobody was paying attention to him anymore. That, more than anything, was unfamiliar. Usually, presence meant expectation. Attention meant performance.
He walked a little closer without fully realizing he had decided to do so.
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked finally, nodding toward the motorcycle.
Leehan didn’t look up immediately. “Nothing.”
Taesan frowned. “Then why are you taking it apart?”
“Because I want to know if nothing stays nothing under pressure.” Leehan slid a bolt into a small tray beside him. Each one had already been sorted into rows, lined up with an almost obsessive precision that didn’t match the chaos of his personality.
“You talk like my grandfather,” Taesan said.
Leehan glanced up at him for the first time with something resembling interest. “Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s honest.”
“I didn’t mean to be.”
Leehan smiled slightly, like that was the correct response anyway.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The garage filled the silence easily. Metal clinked softly somewhere behind them. Someone laughed near the entrance. A radio crackled and then stabilized into music that no one was really listening to. Taesan found himself watching Leehan more than the motorcycle. There was something oddly inconsistent about him. The way he focused so intensely on small things; tightening a bolt, lining up tools, checking a cable twice, only to suddenly stop mid-motion because something outside the open garage door had caught his attention. A bird landing on a railing. A scrap of paper moving in the wind. A shadow shifting in a way that seemed interesting for reasons no one else would understand.
At one point, he froze entirely.
Taesan followed his gaze out instinctively.
“What is it?” Taesan asked.
Leehan didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly:
"If motorcycles had feelings, do you think they get embarrassed when they stall?"
Taesan just stares.
"..."
"...What?" Taesan blinked.
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
Leehan shrugs.
Taesan stared at him.
Leehan seemed entirely unconcerned with being understood. Instead, he crouched back down beside the motorcycle like the conversation had been resolved. Taesan stayed where he was for a moment longer, then slowly lowered himself onto an overturned crate nearby. Outside, another engine roared to life somewhere down the paddock, shaking the air in a familiar way. Inside the garage, Leehan quietly hummed to himself as he worked, like the noise of the outside world was just something happening in another story entirely.
And Taesan, still holding the rag he hadn’t decided to use, realized that he was no longer thinking about the race that was supposed to matter tomorrow.
Not even a little.
***
Taesan did not plan to return to Garage Three.
At least, that was what he told himself the next morning when he woke up in the temporary paddock housing with the distant sound of engines already warming up outside. The race weekend had its own schedule, its own gravity, and everything was supposed to revolve around it—briefings, qualifying, the careful rituals of preparation that adults treated with a seriousness usually reserved for things that could not be undone.
Still, by mid-morning, he found himself standing near the edge of the paddock again, hands in his pockets, pretending he had no particular direction.
The entrance to Garage Three was open.
It looked the same as yesterday. It also didn’t. The space had settled into itself overnight, adjusting slightly to account for his presence the day before. He told himself he was just walking. Not going anywhere in particular. Just walking. And somehow, without deciding to, he ended up inside again.The smell of machine oil greeted him first. It was sharper today, mixed with something faintly metallic, like metal that had been sanded too recently. The garage was already awake. Mechanics moved between workstations with practiced speed, and somewhere deeper inside, someone was swearing under their breath at a stubborn bolt.
Leehan was not under the motorcycle this time. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside it, a notebook balanced on one knee. For a moment, Taesan thought he might be drawing. Then he got closer and realized the pages were filled with words instead. Not neatly written ones either. Some were underlined twice. Some were crossed out and rewritten in different directions. Small diagrams filled the margins, most of them incomprehensible.
Leehan didn’t look up immediately.
“You came back,” he said.
Taesan paused. “I didn’t say I would.”
“You didn’t have to.”
That was becoming a pattern.
Leehan finally glanced up, squinting slightly as if adjusting to the idea of Taesan existing again in the same space.
“You’re earlier today,” he added.
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“…How do you know that?”
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
Taesan frowned slightly. “You were expecting me?”
Leehan considered this for a moment. Then he nodded, as if deciding it was obvious.
“You left your rag.”
Taesan blinked.
“I did?”
Leehan pointed. On the workbench behind him, the rag from yesterday sat neatly folded. Taesan stared at it for a second longer than necessary.
“I didn’t mean to leave it.”
“You don’t usually leave things you’re done with,” Leehan said.
He didn’t respond right away, so Leehan went back to his notebook.
There was a brief silence between them as Taesan stepped further inside.
This time, no one looked at him at all, that realization should have made him feel invisible. Instead, it felt like being allowed. He stopped beside Leehan again, watching the notebook more than the motorcycle.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
Leehan didn’t stop writing. “Things I notice.”
“About engines?”
“About everything.”
Taesan waited.
Leehan finally added, almost casually, “Today I’m trying to figure out why some bolts loosen faster than others even when they’re tightened the same way.”
“That’s normal.”
Leehan shook his head. “It’s not.”
He tapped the page lightly.
“Nothing behaves exactly the same way twice. Not if you really look at it.”
Taesan leaned slightly closer before realizing he was doing it. On the page, among the mechanical notes, there were sketches of small fish. Simple, quick drawings. One of them was labeled in handwriting so messy it took Taesan a moment to decipher.
Corydoras.
“What’s that?” Taesan asked.
Leehan followed his gaze.
“Oh,” he said, like he had forgotten those were there.
“A fish.”
Taesan frowned. “Why is it in your engine notes?”
Leehan looked at him as if the question itself was slightly strange.
“Because it moves differently,” he said.
“That doesn’t answer anything.”
“It answers me.”
Taesan didn’t know what to do with that. Leehan turned the page and continued writing.
By the third day, Taesan stopped pretending he was only passing by. He didn’t announce it, nor did he ask for permission. He simply appeared.
Sometimes Leehan was under a motorcycle.
Sometimes he was talking to his father.
Sometimes he was feeding stray cats behind the garage with leftover food from the paddock kitchen, crouched on the ground as if the cats were negotiating something with him.
Every time, he acknowledged Taesan the same way.
“You’re back,” he would say.
And Taesan would respond, always slightly annoyed at how accurate it felt. “Apparently.”
One afternoon, Taesan found Leehan sitting on a stack of tires, staring at the sky through the open paddock roof.
“Don’t you have work?” Taesan asked.
Leehan didn’t look at him. “I finished.”
“You finished everything?”
“No.”
“Then why are you sitting here?”
Leehan finally looked down.
There was something almost thoughtful in his expression.
“Because the clouds look like they’re moving in circles today,” he said.
Taesan followed his gaze upward.
The sky looked normal.
“They’re not moving in circles.”
Leehan nodded. “I know.”
“…Then why did you say that?”
“I wanted to see if you would look.”
Taesan stared at him, he wasn’t sure if that was a joke.
Leehan didn’t seem to know either.
That was when Taesan realized Leehan didn’t experience the world the same way other people did.Like everyone else saw a straight road, and he saw intersections that didn’t technically exist. Later that night, Taesan’s grandfather found him sitting near Garage Three instead of returning to the housing unit. He didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there, arms crossed, watching the distant glow of the paddock lights.
“You like that garage,” he said eventually.
Taesan hesitated. “I don’t know.”
His grandfather glanced at him. “That’s a new answer.”
“What does that mean?” Taesan frowned slightly.
“It means you’re thinking instead of deciding.” He smiled.
Taesan looked back toward the open garage door. Leehan was still inside, sitting on the floor again. Talking to his father about something Taesan couldn’t hear.
Taesan didn’t answer for a long time.
Then quietly, “…he talks a lot.”
His grandfather hummed. “So do you.”
Taesan didn’t respond.
After a moment, his grandfather added, almost casually, “be careful around people like that.”
Taesan frowned. “Why?”
“Because they make you forget what you were supposed to be doing.”
Inside Garage Three, Leehan suddenly looked up, as if he had felt something shift outside.
Through the open door, he spotted Taesan standing still in the dim paddock light.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Leehan raised his hand slightly, not enough to be considered a wave, but rather just acknowledgment. Taesan hesitated. Then, almost reluctantly, lifted his hand back.