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Jaehwan hates instant coffee.
It tastes like nothing but ash on his tongue and his nose curls at the thought of drinking more of it, but he tosses it in his basket anyway, package upon package of it to accompany his eggs and milk and bread.
He hates it like he hates the feeling of drowning under perfectly clear air, for it may as well be the weight of the ocean suffocating him. And yet he buys the coffee anyway, sucks in a deep breath as he pays and pretends he’s really coming to some monumental discovery with that very chunk of air he’s stolen. For as much as he hates it, the cheap coffee is an acceptable way of keeping him awake, as much as the choked breaths of air keep him alive.
He’s fallen into a bit of a philosophical funk with these thoughts as of late, and it nags at his mind late at night. A small pull that grows until he’s in his tiny kitchen, pouring his freshly bought coffee and venturing to his tiny balcony, sitting hard on the chair there with a steaming mug in hand.
Because there are more important things at hand than the deep meanings behind cheap instant coffee, most of them lying in the maps that Jaehwan unfolds on his tiny table, adjusting his telescope so that he can see the stars.
The coffee burns his throat as he swallows a gulp, but it doesn’t really matter as the lights of the stars catch his eye, and Jaehwan scribbles tiny notes on his papers, his maps. For when he sleeps he dreams of tangled red strings and the dark abyss below, and mapping the stars seems much less complicated than deciphering the meaning behind these things. Thus, there is a schedule, of work, coffee and gazing across the universe that Jaehwan finds himself quite comfortable in.
Until he finds another man on the balcony next to his one late night, because this is an abnormality. It’s also a bad night to map, he notices, clouds thick and dark. Normally he would resign himself back to his tangled strings, but he instead decides to stay, sliding his eyes to the one who likely also has too many tangled strings.
He’s never really paid much attention to his neighbors, but he hadn’t realized their balconies were so close until right this moment, the other man probably within arm’s reach if he stretches. Jaehwan sets down his mug and stares, rather blatantly in hindsight, and the man seems to feel his eyes, turning from where his eyes were on the clouds in the sky.
He smiles tiredly at Jaehwan, and Jaehwan thinks he feels all his strings snap at once, nearly choking on the air around him. Superficial love at first sight tends to evoke a bit of a visceral reaction, he supposes, but this is simply unfair.
“I see you out here a lot,” The man throws at him, Jaehwan simply blinking as he isn’t sure how someone can smile so radiantly at three in the morning. He tries to smile back, but he thinks he probably looks less than that of a vision of beauty with his too large glasses and sleep spiked hair. He also thinks he may have left his charm and wit back in his bedroom. “But I guess there aren’t any stars out tonight, are there?”
“Maybe you can’t see them,” Jaehwan feels his lips curl up a bit more, and he takes a sip of coffee, letting it burn down his throat. It distracts him from the burn on his cheeks, which he refuses to attribute to anything other than the warm night air. “But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.”
The man smiles wide enough that twin dimples show on his cheeks, and Jaehwan feels the strings on his heart fall into place.
...
His name is Hongbin, freshly moved in, and he and Jaehwan develop a routine of sorts.
On the nights where Jaehwan drowns in red strings and Hongbin faces his demons in insomnia, they sit on their respective balconies and contemplate the stars. Hongbin doesn’t ask why Jaehwan maps them so insistently, merely drapes his arms over the small separation and steals sips from Jaehwan’s coffee, watching him draw the lines of the universe.
“It’s all relevant, you know,” He muses one night, Jaehwan taking a moment from his maps to watch Hongbin roll his words around his mouth, always somewhat careful about what he says. Jaehwan thinks he would most likely listen to Hongbin talk about the paint on the wall if that was what the other man so wished to rhapsodize about. “You, me, the stars. Even if they’re bigger than us, there’s always something bigger than them too. Galaxies, the universe even. Who is to say we’re that insignificant in the end?”
“Feeling philosophical tonight, are we?” Jaehwan wipes at his eyes behind his glasses and swipes the coffee from Hongbin’s hand, taking a gulp of it. He only ever makes one cup, finding it somehow right to share the awful stuff between the two of them. His nose still crinkles, but it’s worth it for a dose of caffeine to keep him conscious enough to process Hongbin’s words. He’s really brilliant under that stunning face, not that Jaehwan plans to tell him that anytime soon. “And you may be right. But that doesn’t make them seem any less big to me.”
Hongbin merely hums, closing his eyes, and Jaehwan studies him for a moment, and instead of the complexities of the milky way he wonders what Hongbin’s hair would feel like between his fingers. It looks soft, and for a moment he’s tempted, little red string tugging at his wrist, but then Hongbin’s eyes are open and the moment is broken.
“Tell me about your stars,” Hongbin murmurs, and Jaehwan feels his eyes crinkle. He draws map after map, pointing out little intricacies and facts until Hongbin’s head is nearly resting fully on his arms, and only then do they call it a night. Tired good nights passed between them until next meeting, and Jaehwan lays dead tired in his bed and wonders, wonders if he should be brave.
The days grow colder and force Jaehwan into sweaters and Hongbin takes to bringing two scarves along for their nightly meetings, habitually draping one over Jaehwan’s head so that he won’t catch cold. Not much changes all together, though Jaehwan thinks this may be a bit unhealthy for the both of them, bags beneath his eyes starting to make him look like he got punched. How Hongbin manages to still look ready for a runway is beyond Jaehwan’s comprehension, much like how Hongbin is willing to sit out here with him so much, talking about stars, life, and the universe. Never them, though, for that is a subject one delicately tiptoes around.
Tonight the stars are particularly shining, and Jaehwan thinks he might finally be able to cross that invisible line in the sand.
This night, when Hongbin rests his head on the pillow of his arms, Jaehwan prods at his arm instead of thinking to do or not to do, tugging Hongbin up. The other man’s eyes widen at the contact, but he says nothing, simply smiling when Jaehwan beckons him over the small barrier between them, laughing as Jaehwan tugs insistently.
“If I die, it’s your fault,” Hongbin laughs, getting a leg awkwardly over and relying on Jaehwan to tug him the rest of the way. Jaehwan just grins, and Hongbin thinks he sees whole systems of stars in his eyes as Jaehwan tugs too hard, the both of them landing in a pile of paper and pens. Jaehwan thinks his coffee cup may have been a casualty lost over the balcony, but he’s willing to trade it for an armful of Hongbin, grinning as he picks them up.
He wants to laugh, but he finds himself awfully caught in Hongbin’s eyes, like some moment from an awful love story, and tries to turn and pick up his maps, anything to redraw the line that he has stomped over and damaged irreparably. Hongbin doesn’t let him though, turning Jaehwan’s face towards him and studying him for a moment, fixing Jaehwan’s glasses and patting down his hair, fingertips lingering on the line of his jaw. Jaehwan’s red strings of fate tangle beyond measure, and he runs full force into the unknown.
He finds that he likes the taste of instant coffee much more on Hongbin’s lips.
Hongbin grins against his mouth like he’s been waiting for this, and Jaehwan sees stars behind his eyes as he twists his hands in Hongbin’s hair, nearly laughing when he thinks that it’s every bit as soft as he thought it would be. The kiss is lazy and sweet, a test of boundaries, and Jaehwan feels like he’s drowning in perfectly breathable air, thinking that this must be what living is really like.
Hongbin presses their foreheads together when Jaehwan pulls back, thumbs smoothing at the bags under his eyes, and Jaehwan is too busy staring holes into Hongbin’s eyes to care about his glasses long lost to the fray, buried beneath his maps somewhere.
Somewhere along the line, between whispers of scarves and stars and the universe and them, Jaehwan falls asleep. A blissfully dreamless black welcomes him, and he wakes up with a mouthful of Hongbin’s hair, sprawled on a scattered mess of his maps and Hongbin’s knee jabbing him in the stomach.
Hongbin’s eyes crack open when Jaehwan attempts to disentangle them, and his smile is blinding like the sunrise, Jaehwan absentmindedly grinning lopsidedly as he runs a hand through his hair. He thinks that today will be the day he asks Hongbin on an honest to god date.
Hongbin laughs at him, and his kiss tastes like too old cheap coffee and too little sleep. Jaehwan thinks it’s like his own personal chunk of the universe.
He breathes deep new beginnings.