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There was a weight in his chest, one that had built over days and he’d ignored, the pressure growing from a mild inconvenience to something oppressive. It curled like vines through his limbs, overcrowding his ribcage, threatening to choke his lungs of air.
Minho breathed in slowly as he came awake, the atmosphere holding a tinge of warmth even in his lover’s domain. It was scented with all that might be associated with life: damp soil, tender greenery, the sweet perfume of flowers.
It was time.
Minho’s eyes opened, finding the ceiling of the room to be staring back down at him with its painted constellations of stars. They’d spent hours doing it by hand, relying on memory.
He didn’t bother to roll to the side before sitting up; Jisung was already gone. In his place on the far side of the bed, petals were strewn in shades of yellow and white and pink. Beneath, the sheets were still warm. He’d not been gone long just yet.
Minho would have woken sooner if he had.
He let out a small groan, rubbing at his face. Minho hated this morning. Hated that it came every year and he was never ready to face it.
There was no use in putting off the inevitable. Minho rose, tugging on a robe to cover his nakedness before going to find Jisung.
Jisung would be in his gloaming. It was why Minho had been putting off his return as long as he possibly could, thinking maybe to ease the pain of their separation by pretending it wouldn’t happen.
They went through the same every year. Not once in the many years they had been together had it gotten easier.
Time moved different in the land of the dead. Minho both loved it and loathed it. Some days felt like years and he basked in them. Others passed in a blink, hours slipping through his fingers like grains of sand.
He’d been putting off his return to the human realm longer than he was meant to. His mother would begin her not-so-subtle reminders soon, if he didn’t return promptly. The humans needed spring, they needed a period of growth and warmth and rebirth, and only Minho’s presence there could kick-start the season.
To call him the god of spring was a bit of a misnomer. Minho was a god of life, growth, and rebirth. It was that he emerged in the spring, hailing the beginning of such things each year, that had given him the title. No one seemed to make the connection that it was his departure each autumn that brought the gradual slumber of the earth, the wither and rot that led to death.
Walking through their home, Minho paused at the wall of windows looking out over the surrounding landscape. They didn’t have a sun or moon—how could they, when Felix was not permitted to pass freely in this land?—yet the fields below glowed with the semblance of a pre-dawn sky. That perfect shade of deep blue-lavender to match its lord’s mood. Souls moved about the swaying silver-tipped grasses like boats on the tide. Hills rolled off into the horizon in all directions.
The landscape would change at Jisung’s will, one of his many gifts as the lord of this place. When he was joyous, it seemed to burst with life, and at times it did—supported by Minho’s presence and his power, making it real, if even for a short time. Vibrant flowers, crystalline blue water, endless expanses of cloud-flecked sky. When Minho departed, it would all become illusion once more.
Minho turned toward the direction he had come, a sharp pang in his chest at the trail of greenery leading back to their room. Pale shoots of spring greenery, stems rising and putting out flower buds even as he watched. A bluebell uncurled its stem at his feet, the buds opening as he watched.
Minho turned his back on the flowers. His power wasn’t meant to work without his willing it, especially here in the underworld. Another sign that he was pushing off the inevitable, the draw of the turning seasons.
Jisung wasn’t in his office with its dark-wood and glass furniture and wall of books. Nor was he in the kitchen making tea, or the living room on one of the plush couches. Minho wandered through the house in silence, listening for signs of his lover, trailing greenery and fresh growth in his wake, each step an imprint of new life. His magic did not care that it wasn’t soil beneath his feet, springing up from the hardwood floors around the rugs, coming up between the stone tiles.
Forget-me-nots joined the bluebells. A larkspur, too, when he rounded a corner and, at last, saw Jisung.
Minho stilled, watching through the open door onto the back patio. Jisung sat on the ground, the cats winding around him in a comforting manner. His back was to Minho, his head tipped toward the dim sky.
Beyond him was their private garden, encircled by a low wall. Flowers from across the realms of both the humans and the gods that Minho had spent years replicating resided within. There was a pond with a small islet in its center, crowned by the pomegranate tree. A single bridge spanned the water to reach it.
The islet served as their connection to the human realm in its own way. Just yesterday, the ground upon it had been covered in a thin dusting of snow. Now, new greenery was coming up around the lone tree, the same as what trailed Minho’s wandering through the house.
It seemed that the winter was growing shorter each year. Minho hated it maybe more than anything in his immortal life. Hated that his ability flared with the summons sooner and sooner with each passing revolution of the human realm, their influence on their world having effects on even the gods. Hated that it meant that Minho was pulled from the embrace of his love for longer and longer spans.
Minho padded forward, approaching Jisung. His bare feet passed over paved stones, chill against his soles from the night.
Jisung did not turn, nor did he open his eyes as Minho neared. Like Minho, he’d pulled a robe on when he’d risen, though he wore a loose pair of pants slung low around his hips. He’d left his robe open, his chest bared and showing off the curl of gods-ink in his skin, shimmering with an iridescent gleam.
Minho walked around to stand in front of him. Still, Jisung kept his eyes closed, even as his body leaned forward, shifting toward him unconsciously.
Minho had seen that before, in the human realm. When Felix, god of the sun, would walk past, the plants and flowers would bend toward him, seeking the light and warmth he radiated.
Jisung was his sunflower.
Though, if Jisung saw Minho as his sun, Minho saw himself as a bee. Always buzzing around because it must, yet always returning to its favorite bloom.
Minho lowered himself until he sat in Jisung’s lap, winding his arms around the other’s shoulders. On instinct, Jisung pulled him in by the waist, and his head came forward to press against Minho’s neck.
When Minho departed, anything he’d brought to life in the underworld would fade into slumber. It was an echo of the human realm, though it happened so much faster in a place like this. Despite the centuries he’d spent, his time split as it was, they’d not yet found a way for the land to hold the god-power he poured into it during his absence. The earth at least tried to cling to the vitality he left behind every autumn.
The first time Minho had departed to bring forth the spring, Jisung had told him it remained.
Seungmin had let it slip, a few years on, that that wasn’t the case. That the bundle of flowers Minho asked him bring to Jisung during his absence had wilted and died the second Seungmin crossed the threshold without Minho’s presence, without his magic to keep it alive. That the underworld’s vibrance was reduced to illusions, upheld only when Jisung had the energy to spare for it.
Jisung had lied to spare Minho’s feelings.
It hurt, sometimes, just how much he loved him.
Against his neck where they sat in their garden, Jisung spoke quietly. “We’ll find a way. One day. Be it in a year or a hundred or a thousand.”
The words were different from their typical mantra: Next year will be easier. The next year was never easier, no matter how many had passed, no matter how many times they had had to separate.
It was impossible for Minho to stay, though. The one time he had—unintentionally, before he’d been granted the ability to pass between realms unimpeded—the underworld had become overrun with an influx of souls, humans who had died of hunger and illness as a result of the never-ending winter. The other gods had been left frantic.
Only two gods possessed the ability to cross without restrictionThe first was Minho, who had eaten of the pomegranate tree during his initial tenure in the underworld, when the rest of the pantheon had thought him kidnapped against his will (it was strange, that the humans had taken up that version and romanticized it. Strange creatures, the lot of them). The second who had free range to pass without restraint, of course, was Seungmin. The trickster god who’d found his own way between each plane of existence as a result of curiosity or boredom or some combination of the two.
Jisung, as lord of this place, was not permitted to leave. Someone had to remain, to monitor the souls of the dead, to ensure they were not stolen back by some well- or ill-intentioned human in the land of the living. Each one was required to pass judgement, to determine whether they would remain in the fields of peace, be sent on to be reborn, or punished for crimes committed during their life. Even if he was not required to intervene with the systems in place himself, his presence was necessary to ensure those systems never faltered.
“One day,” Minho murmured in agreement, even if he wasn’t sure it was something he could quite believe. Even if he wasn’t sure that Jisung's one day meant we’ll both be free of this place or you’ll be able to stay with me always. He didn’t think it truly mattered.
He pressed his lips to the underside of Jisung’s jaw, relishing the quiet hitch of the other’s breath.
If there were more time, he’d make love to him. He tensed with the want of it, blinking at the slow, gradual brightening of the sky. He needed to prepare himself for the human realm. To dress like the humans did, to reign in the aura that each of the gods bore, leaving their skin glimmering, their eyes shining brighter than the stars. He was meant to emerge, to herald the coming of spring, when the first threads of morning light fell upon the earth.
Minho considered laying Jisung down there on the patio regardless. To slowly, gently, undo him one more time as the flowers of spring burst up from between the cracks in the stone, surrounding them with their vibrance. To piece him back together again after, taking his time. Loving and being loved.
They’d done so the night before, relishing the closeness of skin on skin, of holding one another tight. Hours spent pretending it wouldn’t be the last time they could truly hold one another for months.
Minho sighed through his nose. He cupped Jisung’s face between both of his hands, tipping his chin up to press their lips together. He breathed Jisung in through the kiss, noses bumping as they moved together.
It was funny, that Jisung was the one who made him feel the most alive. That he bloomed the most under his gentle caress and attentive care. That Minho, a god of life and living things, never felt more himself than he did when he was with the lord of the dead.
“I love you,” Minho murmured, pulling back just enough to tip their foreheads together.
Jisung’s hands tightened at his waist. “I love you, too. Always.”
Minho unfurled himself from Jisung’s lap, drawing the other up with him to stand. For another long moment they held each other, arms twined around each other’s torsos. It was the cats winding between their ankles that had Minho drawing back, sagging into motion.
More flowers had sprouted and bloomed along his trail through the house when they returned inside, their hands intwined. Tulips and daffodils and hyacinths. Lilies and irises and wallflowers. Spots of color that would fade all too quickly upon his leaving.
He dressed in jeans and a sweater, to help against the initial bite of cold when he would emerge. He put on socks and boots, though those would be removed before he stepped into the next realm to pass barefoot, to allow his power to saturate through the ground better.
Jisung held out a hand at their door. Because of his control over the land of the dead, he could reasonably make it so that opening the door would take them right to the boundary separating the realms. That would cut their time together even shorter, though, so they took the long way.
The climb to the gateway was in silence. There was nothing they could say that hadn’t been said a hundred or a thousand times before. Their hands were entwined the entire way, Jisung’s fingers tightening and loosening to a silent rhythm in his own mind.
They halted when the shimmering veil came into view. Minho took off his boots and socks, setting them aside.
“I’ll be back,” Minho said, fingers tightening around Jisung’s one more time. He spoke the promise every time, though he hadn’t needed to in so very long. “I’ll come back.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Jisung said, leaning forward and kissing his temple. He was took a small step back, brow furrowing.
Minho framed Jisung’s face, fingertips resting against his cheeks. “I love you,” he murmured, leaning in to give him a long, closed-mouth kiss.
Jisung gripped his waist.“I love you, too,” he said against Minho’s lips as they came apart. “So much.”
Then came the worst part of their separation.
Minho inhaled and stepped away fully. Jisung’s hands fell from his waist. Minho turned to face the translucent barrier, the world of the humans wavering beyond. Before he could talk himself out of it, he moved forward, out into the land of life.
Snowdrops and crocuses burst into bloom as he stepped onto the still-frozen ground, the soil thawing with each press of his bare foot. Sprigs of green burst from the earth, haphazard drifts of snow melting into cold puddles.
He longed for asters and cosmos and dahlias, the blooms that would come late in the summer, heralding the approach of his return to the underworld as his power began to ebb, to return towards its slumber within his core. He wished for the flowers that Jisung had once confided were his favorite, because they meant Minho would soon return home.
With each step, Minho fought against the tears burning behind his eyes. It wouldn’t do, for Jisung to know he was crying.
At a minimum, it would be six months. One-hundred-and-eighty-three days.
Minho stopped and looked back. Through the blur of his tears—would this ever get easier?—he could see where Jisung would be. Standing in the shadows of the entryway to the next realm, invisible from the human side. Unable to pass fully through the veil, to feel the sunlight or moonlight on his skin, to breathe the scent of rotting earth and the perfume of new life, of rain upon dry soil, mixed all together. A layer of warmer humidity and a sharp, biting cold that stung the nostrils.
Life and death intertwined.
Beneath Minho’s feet where he stood rooted in place, the flowers burst into color, and quickly continued on through their lifecycle, petals wilting and falling, seed pods swelling and erupting, before dying off again.
That was his real god-power, the one the humans either ignored or forgot. The full breadth of life, from birth to death and back again.
Minho had to keep moving. He had to allow his power to spread throughout the lands, to bring spring and life back to the world.
“Come, Minho,” his mother’s gentle voice reached him from behind. A reminder. He could feel her presence, her warmth and radiance, but continued to look back toward his home, his love.
He lifted his hand to his lips, then raised it in a wave. He imagined Jisung on the other side returning the gesture, a hand pressed over his heart. The same heart that had been thrumming beneath Minho’s ear as they lay together the night before.
Minho turned once more. Mother stood there, radiant with life, green things threaded through her hair, flowers encircling her head. Their faces were mirrors—she had crafted Minho in her own image, after all.
Mother held her hand out to him, heartbreak in her gaze. She may not have approved of his love for the god of the underworld in the early years, but she at least understood how much it pained him.
His feet crunched over the remains of the plants that had passed through their entire life’s cycle in the moments he’d been standing there. New growth sprung up immediately in his wake and he raised his head high, tears mixed with the rain. He took his mother’s offered hand, small like his own.
One day, he’d tuck flowers into Jisung’s hair and not have to worry that they would wilt and crumple to dust in his absence. One day, they would no longer have to part. One day, he’d be able to bring Jisung with him to the human realm without repercussion.
One day, not even the laws of the separate worlds—let alone the other gods—would be enough to keep them apart.
Even if it meant the end of the worlds entirely, he’d be happy to see it.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
Jisung had never loathed time and its endless march until he’d met Minho, for it constantly conspired against them. If it passed in a blink when Minho was with him, it crawled at the pace a mountain moved when he was gone.
Their separation had been the worst the very first time, when Minho had been yanked from him unceremoniously, before they’d understood the rules of his godhood. The necessity of his presence in the human realm as well as in Jisung’s domain, leading to the decision that his time would be split between them.
It had taken Jisung decades to get beyond the burbling panic that Minho wouldn’t return each time he left after that first—but return every autumn he did, as reliable as the earth’s slow turn, as the moon’s influence on the tides.
On day one-hundred-and-seventy-eight since spring had arrived and Minho had stepped through the boundary between worlds, Seungmin paid Jisung a visit. He visited as often as he could, which was admittedly not as often as he or Jisung would like.
This particular occasion was the thirteenth since spring’s arrival.
If it were up to Seungmin, Jisung knew without doubt, the trickster would be in the underworld every other day. Unfortunately he still had his own duties in the realms of the gods and the living; keeping Jisung company during his months of solitude was something he could only afford in his personal time.
As the only one of the gods who’d found his own way into and out of the underworld, coming and going at will, it made some twisted sense of universal balance that he was unable to visit more.
Perhaps is was part of the ruling that had landed Jisung there in the first place, millennia ago.
On this day, when Seungmin alighted on the patio at the back of the house, Jisung sat facing the bridge to the pomegranate tree on its islet. The tree was the only thing that remained fully alive when Minho was gone, the islet it grew upon tied to the human realm. The fruits on its branches were swelling toward ripeness, but it would be some time yet before they might be plucked.
“Your cats are multiplying again,” Seungmin said by way of greeting.
Jisung looked up with a frown, twisting in place to count the cats in the immediate vicinity. There was seven of them. No—there was the eighth. “They haven’t, though?”
It was the same number of cats that there had been for as long as Jisung could remember, though he’d be honest in saying he didn’t pay them nearly as much mind as Minho did. They came and went as they pleased, sometimes keeping him company but mostly just doing what cats did: existing in your vicinity until they grew bored. They didn't require the same attentive care here, in the underworld. Food or water. They were similar to the souls of the departed in that way, but Jisung didn't recognize them as having passed over from life, yet. If anything, he assumed that they had wandered through some gap between the realms. They only lingered because of Minho.
When Minho was absent, the best Jisung received from them was silent tolerance from a distance. Occasionally, one or two might sleep on the end of their bed, but he just as often didn’t sleep there himself with Minho gone.
It felt too big, too empty, without him.
“I swear that they are,” Seungmin muttered, coming over to sit beside Jisung. With a sigh, he held something out toward him.
It was a bundle of flowers from the human realm, their heads already beginning to droop for the minutes they’d been in the land of the dead. Salvias, monkshood, mums, cosmos, and aster made up the bouquet, in purples and reds, oranges and golds. Flowers that began blooming as summer began its slow slide into autumn.
Jisung grinned as he accepted the bouquet. His smile did not falter even as the blooms wilted in his grasp, their colors fading swiftly the more time passed since they’d been taken from the human realm.
Beneath his clothes, across his chest, he could almost feel the flowers imprinted in his skin begin to awaken, to slowly unfurl their leaves and petals.
(It was flowers that had been carved into Jisung’s skin, long before Minho had ever met him. Lilies and iris and roses with thorns etched in ashy-black ink. “To remind me of my duty as the god of the dead,” Jisung had joked, once.
Minho had kissed every inch of his skin that same night, and iridescent gold gods-ink had bloomed into being over every inch his lips had touched with tenderness. Daisies and carnations and tulips across his torso. Butterflies, too, flitting between the petals with each breath Jisung took. Sprigs of baby’s breath and a sunflower unfurling at the base of his throat, a bee kissing its center. Pomegranate flowers climbing up his spine.
In the morning, when he’d traced them with his fingertips, Minho had spoken with quiet reverence: “Then these will remind you that you are more than a god of the dead. That you are loved by life itself. That you are mine as I am yours.”)
He looked up to meet Seungmin’s gaze, the trickster smiling at him in that soft way he only reserved for those who were his closest friends. Maybe he could see the curl of a flower peeking out from beneath the collar of Jisung’s shirt, stretching in search of its sun.
“Soon,” Seungmin nodded, verbalizing the thrum in Jisung’s veins. “Just a few weeks more. A month at most.”
The next day, Jisung began the trek up to the doorway to wait. He knew he was early, but it was his habit. For all he knew, this time Minho would be permitted to return to him a little sooner.
Repayment for the last years that he’d been kept away longer, driven by the humans’ reckless impact on their earth.
It became his daily task to journey to the gateway when his mind could no longer focus on the necessary doings of running the kingdom of the dead. The only thing that was truly required of him was to exist within the bounds of his domain; what he did there mattered little. All it did was serve as a way for him to pass the time.
Two weeks and four days after he began the daily sojourn, Jisung was stepping into the space behind the veil where he waited for Minho’s return when he felt the shift in the air around him, thin so close to the boundary: a warmth he’d not felt in months surrounded him that had nothing to do with his proximity to the human realm.
His head lifted, hope swelling in his chest. Joy, fluttering like the wings of the butterflies imprinted in his skin.
Beyond the barrier, as the sun sank below the treeline, Minho stepped into view. He was bathed in the early evening light, a being of gold. At the sight of him, Jisung’s chest expanded with the first full breath since spring had first come more half a year ago.
Minho would know he was there, waiting, but he would not able to see him for the veil. Jisung took the opportunity to study him as he neared, eyes dragging up and down his form.
Minho was thinner, his face sharper than when he’d departed. It always was by the time he came back to Jisung, as if the world blossoming into life cost him his own vitality, withering him slowly. Forcing him to go through the same cycle as the humans, an imitation of mortality during the months he lived amidst them.
Jisung felt himself lean forward, ever-drawn toward the other half of his soul. His hand reached out to the magical boundary that separated his lands from those of the humans, the first brush of his fingertips against it sparking pain through his nerve endings. His fingers passed through, then his hand to his wrist, the sharp burn of it starting immediately and radiating up his arm. As he watched, the skin that had passed beyond the barrier began to burn, melting away slowly under the magic that was placed to keep him on his side.
Minho’s face lit in an impossibly wide smile, rivaling even the god of the sun for its radiance, his eyes creasing into crescents as he hurried the last steps toward the veil. Toward Jisung.
And then Minho was there, fingers closing around Jisung’s, soothing the burn with his touch alone. Jisung pulled Minho through the boundary between the realms and into his arms.
At once, he could feel the underworld burst into life, his burnt skin healing. The change was quicker than any other world would in response to the god’s presence, a reminder that this place was as much Minho’s as it was Jisung’s. That this was where he belonged.
Still entwined, Jisung leaned back to see Minho’s face. His bright, sparkling eyes, his crooked smile as he returned his gaze.
Minho surged forward, closing the space between them and bringing their lips together.
The flowers that made them—the ones etched into Jisung's skin and the ones that constituted Minho's very being—burst into bloom.
Jisung sighed into the kiss, arms tightening around his love’s waist. Home. He was home.
Minho was home and Jisung had no intention of letting him go.