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On the fifth anniversary of Seungcheol’s death, he returns.
He looks younger than he was when he died — his hair is dyed a soft pink, curling around his face. He’s bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and there’s no wedding ring on a chain around his neck like there was when he was laid to rest.
(He said when he got sick that he wanted to be buried with it.
“Wherever I go, I’ll never forget my Jihoonie.”
Then he cried, because he always cried when Jihoon did. That was just the sort of person he was.)
“Jihoon?” Pink Seungcheol asks, reaching a tentative hand outward, like touching Jihoon will burn him. “Is that… is that you? Why do you look like —”
“Who are — don’t fucking touch me!” Jihoon shouts, scuttling backwards on all fours until he’s pressed to the wall. His chest is heaving, and there’s blood on Seungcheol’s face, and his hair is pink and there’s no wedding ring and he’s getting closer by the second. “Go away! Who the fuck are you?”
“Wha — Jihoon, it’s me.”
That’s the last thing Jihoon hears before he faints.
—
Jihoon doesn’t believe in second chances.
Perhaps this is pessimistic, though he’s never claimed to be anything else. He doesn’t think people deserve them, because they rarely change in the ways that count.
Once you’ve found something, then you have it, and then you lose it, and it’s gone. That’s just the way it is.
He feels this way about love, too. It’s quite a miraculous thing that someone like Jihoon, prickly and unpleasant as he is, managed to find it even once. He didn’t find it easily, resisting and digging his heels in over and over again until, eventually, he gave in. Agreed to a date. Then another. Then many others, expecting that maybe he’d scare Seungcheol off someday. Seungcheol would see that he deserved someone better.
He always deserved someone better. Someone with more patience for touching. Someone who liked to have sex more than once a week. Someone without a tendency to nitpick. Someone who wasn’t Jihoon.
But, miraculously, Seungcheol stayed. He touched only when Jihoon wanted him to, he tolerated having sex only once a week, he braved all of the nitpicking with a starry smile on his face like he really could have done it for the rest of his life.
And he did.
Jihoon got lucky once with Seungcheol, and his luck ran out. He will not test fate again.
Even when Soonyoung comes to visit, tells him he needs to start socializing sometime, Jihoon doesn’t. He’s content in his bubble.
What would he do if he met someone? If they asked him on a date?
Jihoon doesn’t have it in him to accept — if he did, he’d experience things in a slow roll all over again. One date, and then another, and he’d be undeserving all over again, a greedy man who takes miracles and lets them happen to him. Who takes and takes and takes, and never gives back.
No, he’s okay. He’s okay in his house, where the walls press in on him, and the framed photo of Seungcheol on the mantle smiles at him.
He will not test fate.
—
When Jihoon blinks his eyes open, he’s staring at the ceiling of his living room.
There’s no more sunlight filtering in through the windows, instead the room is illuminated only by the lamp in the corner whose lightbulb direly needs a change. It flickers in and out, brightness wavering. The house looks the same, and Jihoon tilts his head to look at the mantle — Seungcheol, his Seungcheol, is smiling back at him like he always is. Gummy and cute and pretty.
Jihoon wishes he could see it again.
“Oh, you’re up!”
Jihoon bolts upwards and feels dizzy all of a sudden, heartbeat jackrabbiting and breath hitching. Pink Seungcheol is sitting on the armchair, fiddling around with his cellphone.
It’s a wonder, really, how much he looks like Seungcheol, and how much he doesn’t at the same time. His cheeks are fuller, so are his lips, and — are those veneers? The sight is so uncanny that Jihoon’s breath starts to quicken.
“Why are you doing this?” he asks, eyes wide.
“Oh — I was just checking if it still works. It’s stuck in Airplane mode, and I… I can’t get a hold of the company or any managers, and none of my calls to Jeonghan are going through, but you — ah. You’re different.”
Jihoon doesn’t know what any of that means. But he can’t — is he supposed to just sit here? This is Seungcheol, or someone doing a near perfect imitation. But Seungcheol is dead.
(He doesn’t hallucinate Seungcheol anymore. That stopped around six months after his death, when Jihoon could get a full night of sleep again.)
Seungcheol is dead. But Seungcheol is here, and Jihoon is dizzy and he’s not sure he can really breathe right, all of his inhales happening in choked off gasps. Seungcheol — or whoever the hell he is — is looking at him in mild alarm. His eyes grow wide as saucers when Jihoon’s hands land on either side of his face, testing. Making sure he’s real.
Hands meet unyielding skin. Jihoon doesn’t feel better even though he thought he would. He feels nothing but dread, nothing but five years of buried feelings unearthed, forced to the surface when all he wants is to swallow them down. It would be easier. Better.
“What — who are you? Why are you here?”
Seungcheol puts his phone down. He stares at Jihoon with his wide puppydog eyes, pleading for answers that Jihoon doesn’t have. “I don’t know,” he says. “Why do you — you look so old, Uji-yah, what happened to you? What happened to your hair?”
“Uji-yah?”
Seungcheol looks more alarmed, now, and his hands find Jihoon’s face too. “What — your teeth? Jihoon-ah, please —”
It doesn’t help when they’re both freaking out. Seungcheol looks horrified just looking at Jihoon’s face, and Jihoon feels the same, looking at heavy eye bags and an unnaturally smooth complexion. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Seungcheol stares at him some more. “There… there was a portal in my room. I landed here and… uh. I smacked the shit out of my head on your side table.”
“A… portal?”
Seungcheol nods, and he’s still holding Jihoon’s face in tight hands, like he might slip away any second. Jihoon can’t let go either, anchored to a time he lost. He wipes some of the dried blood from Seungcheol’s forehead with a harsh thumb to look at the cut. It’s thin and scabbing over already, which is a relief, at least.
He can’t see Seungcheol die twice. He really wouldn’t be able to survive it a second time.
“It was — it, like, glowed. It was pink and blue and it sort of… it just dragged me in. I tried to — I really tried to fight it off, but it just… it kept dragging and dragging and I couldn’t fight it anymore, and I —”
Jihoon shushes him, trying to process that. He doesn’t want to believe it.
He has never believed in the fantastical, or the mystical, or anything of the sort.
(He used to believe, abstractly, in some kind of god. Nowadays, he does not.
What sort of god would take a thirty two year old away just because they could?)
It’s a hard thing to avoid believing, though, when Seungcheol — or, a version of him, some kind from far away — is sitting right here, staring at him, scared out of his mind.
Jihoon knows what his Seungcheol looked like when he was scared. He always wore his heart on his sleeve, his feelings obvious the minute Jihoon looked at his face. In the five years since he died, Jihoon has had much time to figure out exactly what it was about Seungcheol that he loved so much. He has come to learn that Seungcheol never made him guess. He wore his feelings on his face and always meant the things he said. He was easy that way.
So is this Seungcheol.
Jihoon knows what Seungcheol looks like when he’s scared, and he’s fucking terrified right now.
(He’s reminded of the day the diagnosis came. The doctor gave him a month.
“I’m going to die,” he’d said, sobbing into Jihoon’s chest.
He lasted two weeks after that.)
“We can figure it out,” he says.
He remembers wanting to say those words to Seungcheol back then. But Jihoon never lied to his husband, so he didn’t. Death was one of the few problems Jihoon knew he couldn’t solve. So they spent their last two weeks in a hospice ward, writing music together. Jihoon brought his MIDI keyboard and his laptop, and together they made music for as long as Seungcheol could sing. And then when he couldn’t, he wrote the words and Jihoon sang them, just for the words to have somewhere to go.
“Can we?” Seungcheol asks, panic still on his face. It seems to quell a little bit when he hears the determination in Jihoon’s voice — like a determined Jihoon is familiar to him. “But — I’m not supposed to be here.”
“No, you’re not,” Jihoon agrees. “But you are.”
And that’s just the thing, isn’t it?
This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Seungcheol wasn’t supposed to die, but he did. Jihoon thinks of a song he used to listen to that said life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it.
So, they’ll just have to get over it.
—
Seungcheol sleeps in the spare room.
Jihoon took all of the boxes of his Seungcheol’s things out of the spare room and relocated them to the living room. The boxes are covered in dust — all things that Jihoon couldn’t bear to part with five years ago, but that he can’t bear to look at now. He doesn’t open any of the boxes, can’t do it, not when Other Seungcheol is peeking over his shoulder, unwilling to be away from him for more than a few minutes.
When he’s settled into bed, Seungcheol twists around as Jihoon watches.
“I won’t be able to sleep,” Seungcheol says. “Can you stay for a little while?”
So Jihoon does. He sits on the foot of the bed with his legs crossed and tries to pretend that his heart isn’t breaking all over again, being torn apart by the seams of fresh stitches.
“Do you miss him? Your Jihoon?”
He doesn’t know why he asks. Maybe he wonders if his Seungcheol, wherever he ended up, misses him too. Jihoon is sure he does, because Seungcheol never lied, and said in the weeks leading up to his death that he loved Jihoon so much. He’d miss him with every breath.
“More than anything,” Seungcheol says, fiddling with his fingers. “He’s — he’s very different from you, but kind of the same.”
His eyes change a little as he talks about his Jihoon. They sparkle in a way that Jihoon recognizes — it makes him smile, god forbid. “Do you want to tell me about him?”
Seungcheol’s face flushes a little bit. “I met him when he was thirteen,” he says. “Just before his birthday. He’s a really intense guy. We — we’re in a band, a K-pop band called SEVENTEEN. He produces our music.”
Jihoon can’t help snorting softly. “I’m a music producer. That’s what I do for a living.”
Seungcheol softens all over, going boneless on top of the bed, like his limbs have turned to jelly. “Of course you are,” he says, wistful. “I could never imagine him doing anything else, you know. It’s like our friend Soonyoung —”
“You know Soonyoung?”
Seungcheol stares. “He’s in the group. Is he — he’s your friend?”
“My best friend.”
Seungcheol laughs, bright despite the circumstances. “Some things really don’t change, huh? Wow.”
Jihoon smiles at the idea of Soonyoung being his best friend in every universe. As ridiculous as it seems, it also feels right. Soonyoung has been with him through thick and thin, and always will. “Is he obsessed with hamsters over there too?”
Seungcheol’s eyes widen. “God, no. He hates them. He thinks he’s a tiger and Jihoon — or, you, I guess — you’re always telling him it’s stupid.”
“Your Jihoon sounds like a good guy.”
“He’s the smartest person I know,” Seungcheol says.
“Should I take the compliment, even though it’s not for me?”
Seungcheol rolls over, facing the wall. His eyes close, and Jihoon gets his first good look at him that isn’t blinded by panic. It really is weird to look at him. He’s so Seungcheol, but he’s so not at the same time — how does that work?
Jihoon imagines his Seungcheol as an idol, but he can’t really reconcile what that would look like. This is what it would look like. But still, it’s strange.
“I’m sure your Seungcheol would say that about you,” Seungcheol says.
“Maybe,” Jihoon says.
He stands, flicking off the lights.
“Night, Jihoon.”
Jihoon’s heart squeezes painfully. “Night, Cheol.”
—
They find some form of normalcy over a few days. Jihoon cooks and Seungcheol does the dishes. Seungcheol goes for walks along the beach. Jihoon stays inside and makes more music than he has in years. At night, they sit together, and Seungcheol learns about Jihoon’s marriage. Jihoon learns about SEVENTEEN.
In other circumstances, it might even be nice.
—
Jihoon can’t help but watch. It’s fascinating to watch Seungcheol stare at this picture of himself — or, maybe not himself, but who he could have been, had he wandered a different path in his life. He watches Seungcheol trace the pads of his fingers over the framed photo, across his own lips, his own eyebrows, his healthy, dark hair.
After a profound silence, Seungcheol speaks. “Do you know Seungmin?”
“Huh? Of course I know Seungmin.”
“Did I… like him?”
There’s a story there. One that doesn’t match what Jihoon knows, clearly. Seungmin had been the best man at their wedding in Vegas — he’d gotten so drunk that he danced on a table with Soonyoung. Jihoon loves Seungmin, even though they don’t talk very much anymore. The sight of Jihoon used to make Seungmin cry, and that’s just not something a person can recover from.
“Of course you did,” Jihoon says. “He — you loved each other.”
“Oh.”
Then Seungcheol goes quiet again, staring at the photo some more. “What… Jihoon, what happened to him? Or — me?”
Jihoon goes quiet for a while. The Seungcheol he knew wouldn’t have waited so long to ask such an obvious question, but this Seungcheol seems more… cautious. Reserved, maybe? Or — no, that’s not it. He seems like he’s used to not saying the things he wants to.
“He died,” Jihoon says, though that has probably been obvious for a while. “He — um. He got sick. Something with his kidneys.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jihoon’s eyes start to water like they always do when he talks about it. He hates crying, always has — at the funeral, he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard that the skin around them was red and irritated for days. He’s never liked being seen that way, snivelling and weak, and he’s cried more in the last five years than he had in his entire life prior.
He wipes his eyes. “It’s just the way it is.”
“But it’s still sad,” Seungcheol says.
Jihoon wipes at his eyes some more, and the tears start to fall slowly. He hasn’t cried over Seungcheol in a while, because he tries not to talk about it anymore. But it’s just so hard, right? Here Seungcheol is, right in front of him, but he’s not quite right. Just familiar enough to hurt, but not familiar enough to soothe the hurt away. “It is,” Jihoon says, airy. “I — I wish we had more time. That’s all.”
When he looks up, Seungcheol’s eyebrows are raised, and he’s staring at Jihoon like he’s grown two heads. “You… you’re crying?”
Jihoon laughs humourlessly, wiping harder at his eyes and turning around. “Take a fucking picture, why don’t you?”
“No! No, I didn’t — I just. My Jihoon… he doesn’t cry. I’ve only seen him cry a couple times, and I’ve known him for sixteen years.”
Jihoon laughs again, but there’s more humour in it this time, and it basically chokes him as it comes out through the ugly tears. “He would if something like this happened to him,” he says.
Seungcheol nods slowly, squinting like he’s trying to make sense of that. He does that a lot — stares at Jihoon like a barn animal, trying to reconcile him with the Jihoon he knows. It’s a fruitless errand, Jihoon would know that. “Something like that changes a person.”
Jihoon nods. “It sure does.”
Then Seungcheol hugs him.
It’s different. His grip is tight, like he’s trying to squeeze Jihoon for everything he is.
Jihoon returns the hug, because no matter which Seungcheol this is, it’s a comfort all the same.
—
Seungcheol likes to go through old photo albums.
He’s particularly fascinated by the small book of photos of the wedding, unearthed from one of the boxes that sat untouched in the spare room for five years. He pores over the photos often, stopping on the one where they kissed, blurry and sweet and happy.
Objectively speaking, it’s an awful photo. Grainy with an unfocused Samsung lens, taken by Soonyoung in the middle of a drunk daze. But Seungcheol loves the photo so much that Jihoon takes it out of the album and hands it to him to carry around until he goes home. He likes to trace his fingers across the awful white suits in the picture, and Jihoon watches with a soft smile and eyes full of tears.
It’s a fascinating thing to watch.
It’s heartbreaking, sure. Jihoon feels his heart rupture every time Seungcheol smiles at him, because he knows this Seungcheol does not belong to him. This Seungcheol so very obviously belongs to that other Jihoon, the one that doesn’t cry and whose veins are probably full of Coke Zero.
Still, it’s fascinating. Is this how his Seungcheol looked from the outside? He’s so visibly enamoured — he talks about his Jihoon constantly. He tells stories about him, sings the songs he writes, associates everything with him. He’s a lovesick puppy, and Jihoon smiles.
It is proof that there is a Seungcheol out there who loves a Jihoon fiercely and wholeheartedly.
“You love him, don’t you?” Jihoon asks one day, while Seungcheol is sitting on the couch and staring at the wedding photo again.
Seungcheol looks up, and his eyebrows draw together like that question is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard in his life. “Of course I do,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“What do you mean, why wouldn’t you?”
Seungcheol squints. “I’m Seungcheol, and he’s Jihoon. So of course I love him.”
It’s such a simple way to think about the situation they’ve landed themselves in.
Jihoon would typically categorize this as the sort of situation that refuses easy answers. There are infinite Seungcheols and Jihoons, so how could they prove that every Seungcheol loves every Jihoon? There’s no way to do it. It defies science. Yet still, the idea persists.
Across universes, Jihoon is lucky again and again.
Lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice, but perhaps it strikes in the same place across different existences, over and over. Destiny is not a thing that Jihoon believes in — why would he? His destiny would be a cruel one.
But it’s nice to think about all of the different Seungcheols and Jihoons. The ones that love each other, the ones that loved each other, and the ones that will love each other someday.
“How many of us do you think are out there?” Jihoon asks. He sits on the armchair to give Seungcheol and the photo a bit of space.
(He doesn’t know the specifics of Seungcheol’s situation with his Jihoon. Seungcheol doesn’t like to talk about it, and he gets irritable when he does — it’s my fault, I just ask too much of him — and then he shuts down completely, and Jihoon can’t find a road back in.
His Seungcheol didn’t do that.
The gist of it, from what Jihoon gathers, is that they used to be closer than they are now, and Seungcheol grieves their younger years because of it. He thinks he missed his shot, spent too much time laying in wait instead of taking action.
Jihoon doesn’t know Seungcheol’s Jihoon. But he knows himself, and he knows that he’d give anything in the world for just another day with his Seungcheol. That has to count for something.)
“Infinite, right? That’s what all the movies say about alternate dimensions,” Seungcheol says.
“Do you think there’s a universe where we’re old and grey together?”
He doesn’t know why he asks. Maybe he’s a glutton for punishment, needs the knife shoved in just that much deeper so he can finally feel it. Maybe this Seungcheol will be old and grey, pink hair long faded out. Maybe someday they’ll move from Seoul back to Busan, and they’ll walk along the beach hand in hand. Maybe Jihoon will have a cane. Maybe Seungcheol’s knee will still hurt when it rains.
But they’ll be together. Hand in hand on the beach, old and weathered and grey, looking like proof of years that were stolen.
They’ll never know a pain like Jihoon feels. The thought would have made him irrationally jealous before, but now it soothes him, like balm over a burn.
“I think so,” Seungcheol says quietly. “They’d have an ugly cat with one eye and three legs or something.”
Jihoon laughs. “We used to foster cats, you know.”
“Really?”
“Mhm,” Jihoon says. “His favourite was this ugly grey thing called Gumbo. He had alopecia, so we had to put him in the bath all the time, and he always scratched the shit out of me, but he adored Seungcheol.”
Seungcheol stares. “You should try and do that again.”
“What? Foster?”
Seungcheol nods, scooting a bit closer to Jihoon. He doesn’t feel like a husband — he feels like an old friend, someone Jihoon hasn’t seen in a very long time. Someone Jihoon wants to see happy.
“I don’t think I could foster again.”
“But don’t you think if he was here, you’d still be doing it? He’d still want to help the cats.”
Jihoon huffs. It’s shaky and watery, leaving him in a shivering, terrible rush. He thinks of cats in his house, sniffing through the boxes of Seungcheol’s things. He thinks of them kneading his favourite blanket.
And then, again, he starts to cry.
—
The portal arrives two weeks after Seungcheol’s arrival — a shock of pink and blue, waxing and waning and warping itself into existence in front of the television in the living room.
“It’s not pulling me,” Seungcheol says.
He reaches a hand forward tentatively, as if maybe he’s expecting the portal to change its mind and pull him right through, back to where he belongs, back to the prickly, emotionally unavailable version of Jihoon that he adores so much. But the portal doesn’t.
“Wasn’t it pulling you before?” Jihoon asks, staring at the tear in reality in his living room.
“It was. I couldn’t grab onto anything. I guess — I can stay?”
Jihoon stares at him blankly for a long moment.
(He thinks of the first time he slept with Seungcheol, eighteen years ago.
Seungcheol had been so earnest about it, standing in Jihoon’s bedroom when they were done, one leg of his sweatpants on. “Can I stay?” he asked. “I really want to stay. I don’t want to leave.”
So Jihoon rolled over and let Seungcheol stay, and then he didn’t ever leave, not until thirteen years later, when he left in a hearse.)
“I’m not him,” Jihoon says.
Seungcheol’s face crumples, like he’d expected it, like he knew it was coming. He knows he can’t stay. It would only hurt the both of them. “I know,” Seungcheol says, quiet.
“Ask him on a date. You — time runs out. You can’t wait forever.”
Seungcheol frowns, lips wobbling. “What if he says no?”
“Then he says no. And then you can try again.”
“But — he’d get mad.”
Jihoon smiles. It’s the warmest expression he’s managed to produce in the last five years, a culmination of every tear he’s shed, every time he’s wanted to scream into a void of anyone who would listen. “My Seungcheol asked me out six times before I said yes.”
Seungcheol smiles. “You think he loves me?”
“He’s Jihoon, and you’re Seungcheol. Of course he loves you.”
Seungcheol smiles toothily as he backs up towards the portal. Then he stops, shuffling on his feet. “Will you be okay?”
“I’ll be okay, Cheol.”
“Call Soonyoung more,” he says, squinting.
“I will. I promise.”
Seungcheol stops again. “What can I do for him?”
“Ask him on that date,” Jihoon says. He feels his eyes start to water, and he rubs at them, emotions rubbed completely raw. “And live as long as you can.”
Seungcheol nods and leans backwards. The portal swallows him, and then it wanes and waxes and folds into itself, and then it’s gone.
Jihoon, once again, is left alone in his living room.
—
SOMEWHERE CLOSE…
Jihoon holds his books to his chest, wondering if this baseball brute was dropped on his head as a baby. Clearly, he’s sustained some kind of brain damage. He levels him as unimpressed a stare as he can manage.
“You keep asking.”
“You’ll say yes eventually!” Baseball Brute says. “Just one date!”
Jihoon sighs. This is the fourth time this guy has asked, and Jihoon isn’t a man of infinite patience. In fact, he is a man with very little.
“Will I?” he asks, flat.
“I’ll stop asking if you go on just one.”
Jihoon sighs again, long and drawn out. “Fine. One date.”
—
SOMEWHERE CLOSER, BUT NOT CLOSE ENOUGH…
Jihoon holds a bouquet of peonies in his hands, staring at them with his eyebrows furrowed.
“You don’t have to keep getting me flowers,” he says, squinting at a pink-cheeked Seungcheol. “I already married you.”
Seungcheol smiles, deepening the lines on his forehead and around his eyes. His hair is greying, and he’s just as beautiful as the day Jihoon first asked him on a date twenty years ago.
“I wanted to,” Seungcheol says, smiling his gummy smile.
Jihoon kisses him, just because he can.
—
SOMEWHERE JUST TO THE LEFT…
Jihoon always said he’d never date a fan.
It was too complicated a thing — he’s a professional singer thank you very much, and professional singers don’t entangle themselves in relationships with fans.
But Seungcheol really is just so goddamned cute. He’s hard to resist when he comes to all of the fansigns with his albums in his shaking hands, calling Jihoon Woozi-nim and completely avoiding making any eye contact.
Jihoon would never date just any fan. But Seungcheol isn’t just any fan — he’s the cutest person Jihoon has ever laid eyes on.
So Jihoon signs his phone number on the photo card this time, and smiles when Seungcheol flushes all the way down to his neck.
—
SOMEWHERE JUST TO THE RIGHT…
On the day Seungcheol starts his job as an Athletic Trainer, Jihoon buys him a box of nanaimo bars.
Seungcheol comes home from his shift, tosses his shoes and skates into the front closet, and barrels through the house to get the cat treats down from the tall cupboard. He feeds them to Mango Sticky Rice the evil cat, and then he kisses Jihoon.
“How was it?” Jihoon asks.
“I’m so happy,” Seungcheol beams. “It was such a good day, I got to — oooh, are those nanaimo bars?”
He pushes past Jihoon to open the box and grab one. Jihoon watches, unbelievably fond.
—
SOMEWHERE DIAGONAL…
They don’t always figure it out. Not at first. Not even after years of trying.
They always say if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Jihoon is jaded to it, and he remains jaded to it every time Seungcheol’s boat washes ashore, broken in the same way it was the first time.
It’s Seungcheol’s way of saying he misses him.
Jihoon wants him to stay.
—
SOMEWHERE FAR AWAY…
Jihoon stares in horror as a pink and blue portal opens up in the middle of the Universe Factory.
He stands up to inspect, but it’s pulsing and pushing outward in beats, pushing him back to his desk. For some reason, fear isn’t his first feeling. Maybe it’s because he’s tired — he hasn’t been sleeping since Seungcheol went missing. Sleep comes to him in fitful bursts, interrupted by vivid nightmares of all of the ways Seungcheol could be dying right now.
Alone in a ditch. Stabbed in the stomach. In a hopsice ward. Starving. Begging for someone, anyone he loves to be there with him.
Jihoon tries to write music, but the words don’t come.
So maybe it’s exhaustion that has him curious about the portal instead of terrified of it. He can do nothing but stare at it with wide eyes, joints locking, hands shaking, until it spits a pink haired mass unceremoniously onto the floor.
“Seungcheol!” he shouts, and the portal disappears.
Seungcheol sits up, his hair standing at odd angles, and Jihoon — he just… he cries. Hoarse sobs leaving him unbidden as he rushes across the room and drops to his knees, grabbing Seungcheol’s face roughly in his hands to make sure he’s not imagining it again.
“What the fuck — we’ve — I’ve been worried sick,” he says, squashing Seungcheol’s face in his hands hard. “Where were you? What the fuck was that, Seungcheol? You can’t — you can’t just fuck off like that!”
“Ow, ow! Jihoon, fuck, ow!”
Jihoon doesn’t let him go. Can’t. He’s still squeezing, still crying, and then Seungcheol is crying too, always such a big fucking baby. Jihoon’s heart squeezes in his chest. “You almost missed my birthday!” he shouts.
Seungcheol is babbling apologies that Jihoon doesn’t understand, but the sentiment is clear. Of course it is. For as much as they’ve struggled to get along, Seungcheol is easy to read. He means what he says, and Jihoon can tell what he’s feeling on his face. “I wouldn’t miss it, you know I wouldn’t!”
Jihoon does know he wouldn’t. Even when he was enlisted, Seungcheol sent him a text, offered to visit the camp, bought a cupcake and sent a picture of it with a candle lit. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he says, his voice returning to him only somewhat.
“Please go on a date with me!” Seungcheol says over Jihoon’s sobs.
Jihoon stops. He stares at Seungcheol.
He thinks of what it was like to lose him. He thinks of how hard for Seungcheol all of this must have been. His heart squeezes in his chest with the instinct to fix it, even though he knows he can’t. Mysterious portals are above his paygrade.
But he can go on a date.
“Okay,” he agrees.
And then he agrees to another.
And then he agrees to many others, over and over again.
He just can’t believe his luck.
—
HERE, NOW, AND FOREVER…
Jihoon thinks about it.
He thinks of Other Seungcheol, spilling his guts to Other Jihoon. He thinks of Other Jihoon agreeing to one date, then another, then many others. He thinks of Other Seungcheol’s smile, the one that wasn’t quite right to him, but is exactly what Other Jihoon wants to see.
He walks along the beach and thinks about the infinite number of Other Seungcheols and Other Jihoons. He thinks of them finding each other, over and over again.
He looks at the sky and sees a cloud shaped like a rabbit. He imagines his Seungcheol pointing at it, saying hey, it’s me! and doing stupid bunny ears with his hands.
For the first time in a long time, Jihoon looks at the sky and smiles.
FIN.