BTS FIC RECS (PART 9)

Jeon Jungkook/Kim Namjoon | RM

untimely spring by kimliping

Namjoon snatches his thumb out of Jungkook's mouth, brings it into his own mouth and sucks. He and Jungkook moan in sync, low shocked sounds that intertwine in the air and all Namjoon can think is mild sunshine and pitaya juice running down his lips, staining his hand, dry grass under his bare feet.

"You taste," almost ripe, he thinks. "Really weird," he says.

or: pack alpha Namjoon gets particularly cuddly during pre-rut. unpresented Jungkook is his favorite little spoon.

just want you to stay by ellemoonchild

PART 2 IN ROCKSTAR OMEGA JUNGKOOK & ALPHA NAMJOON SERIES

Omega Jungkook and Alpha Namjoon have been courting for some months now, blissfully and desperately in love, but as Jungkook's next big tour and his oncoming heat approach they have to decide whether they want this forever...or let their love affair become yesterday's news.

sing me like a bible hymn by raplinelover *

Jungkook is the perfect son, altar boy and Christian. Then Kim Namjoon walks into his life.

falling prey by cypheromone *

“I believe you may have something you want to talk about,” Jungkook drawls, and upon closer inspection, Namjoon finds that Jungkook’s pupils are huge. He’s on something yet again.

“Who are you?” Namjoon demands, voice low in the empty hotel hallway, barely loud enough to be heard over the air conditioning.

“Jeon Jungkook, the sweet, beautiful maknae of BTS,” says Jungkook, slurring slightly.

“No you’re not, try again,” Namjoon snaps.

Not-Jungkook sneers at him. “That big brain of yours and you still haven’t figured it out. Pathetic.”

(Or: in which Jungkook is possessed by a demon.)

Blue Ribbons on Ice by vminkookminv *

Jungkook has been watching the hot mechanic in the neighbourhood.

Alright, maybe he's a little obsessed. But who can blame him?

All the ways to burn by vminkookminv

Jungkook gets his knotting dildo stuck, and asks Namjoon for help.

The only thing is, Jungkook is an alpha. And he’s not supposed to own knotting dildos, let alone have one inside him.

Jeon Jungkook/Kim Seokjin | Jin

block, block, kiss by macabre

Really, it takes longer than it should for Jeongguk to realize that the amount of gifts and things done for him in their games goes a little beyond just friendly behavior, but Jeongguk's never been courted before, and he certainly has never been courted online before.

(Written for bunkoo x wolfjin fest.)

a star that doesn't shatter by cutiesexysaucie

"Let hyung do it."

or;

A series of snapshots inspired by Abyss.

Simulated Love by cypheromone

Jungkook made us in The Sims and he made us boyfriends, Seokjin thinks, realization making his pulse hammer, his cheeks warm.

Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V

Easy by creambunkoo

Jungkook ducks his head, face scrunching with sleepy disbelief, hoping the others won't realize what Taehyung is doing.

Jeon Jungkook/Min Yoongi | Suga

one and done by exarite

At this point in their relationship, Jungkook’s heat and Yoongi’s rut have long synced up.

Usually, a week before his heat is scheduled to start, Jungkook begins to feel the signs and symptoms of pre-heat, and like a domino, Yoongi’s behavior begins to shift in response.

There's something different about this cycle.

::

Yoongi is about to go into rut. Jungkook is supposed to match him with a heat.

For some reason, he isn’t.

As the stars watch me descend by vminkookminv

Jungkook gets curious about what's it like to bottom, and he asks the only person he can trust—Yoongi hyung.

And Yoongi... Yoongi wants nothing more than to see Jungkook blossom.

Jung Hoseok | J-Hope/Min Yoongi | Suga

fit for a king by macabre

The choice is clear for Hoseok; take up his sister's place as the mad king Min Yoongi's bride to spare her a life of cruelty.

Kim Namjoon | RM/Kim Taehyung | V

no one on earth by macabre

Only if you're lucky can you look into a mirror and see someone not yourself.

Namjoon grows up with the knowledge of his soulmate, seen every day in self-reflection. Even when his soulmate becomes all he can see around him, on billboards and magazines, he finds it hard to seek him out.

asynchronous by macabre (WIP) *

Idol groups are not formed for musical chemistry.

They're formed on compatibility for the subgender mix contained therein.

caught by macabre *

In just one night, Namjoon's life changes forever. His department executes a routine bust, but in the back room of the place of interest there's a door with more than one lock on it. All they find inside is an omega, and he's got a secret that not even he knows.

Kim Namjoon | RM/Min Yoongi | Suga

Provisional Eternity by loquaciousEscapist *

"But considering those words of that first song had been written as he’d cried angrily over the fact that it had been weeks since they’d last had a conversation lasting longer than two minutes, that he could feel their friendship slipping through his fingers even as he tried desperately to cling onto it, maybe there had been no universe where Namjoon would’ve been the first person to know about this particular album.

Maybe, in another universe, Namjoon would’ve been the first to know about a different first album. Maybe, in that universe, they had even worked on it together."

(Or - when they had pre-booked a holiday to Jeju together, all seven of them, Yoongi hadn't anticipated that his friendship with Namjoon would apparently dissolve in the year between booking and going on the holiday. Now, he's facing a trip with the man who is simultaneously a stranger to him, and the person he knows best in the world.)

cycle around (series) by cypheromone *

Summary from the first fic: 

If Yoongi weren’t famous, he’d have a pup by now, he knows. Even if he weren’t in a relationship, he would’ve gone to a sperm bank or asked a friend for help. He would’ve found a way.

But Yoongi is famous. He’s one of two omegas in their group of seven. Instead of spending his heats with any of the four alphas in the group, he passes every single heat clinging to the lone beta, because the sad reality is this:

None of the alphas want him.

under the expensive mistletoe by cypheromone

Seokjin nods, watching Yoongi and Namjoon thoughtfully. “So you've been stuck here for hours, huh? You’ve tried kissing, right?”

Namjoon and Yoongi both freeze.

“What?” Yoongi asks, sounding wide awake, voice strangled.

“You’ve tried kissing?” Seokjin asks again, blinking. “That’s what people do under mistletoe. If you kiss, that should do the trick, right?”

(Namjoon and Yoongi, both silently in love with each other, get stuck under some magical mistletoe.)

Namjoon's pack (series) by AiirJ (WIP)

Summary from the first fic:

Namjoon chokes on the warm liquid in his mouth. He sets his cup down and coughs. “Excuse me? My scent?”

Or Namjoon gets tasked with helping Yoongi continue hiding his omega status

Honey & Fire by bdxjimin

“What would the lessons be?”

Yoongi grins, and a small part of Namjoon feels off about it, expression a little different than it was before. “Simple chores, some etiquette corrections, nothing strenuous for an omega,” Yoongi answers. “But I have one final question, and you need to answer me honestly.”

Namjoon reluctantly nods, wary. He takes a sip of his drink.

“Are you a virgin?”

OR

Young omega Namjoon is struggling to pay for his next semester of college. His old-fashioned, alpha uncle Yoongi offers to pay it for him with only two stipulations-- Namjoon has to live with him, and he must follow lessons on how to be an acceptable omega to secure a future mate.

Namjoon thinks it'll be easy, if not just a little annoying.

He is mistaken.

Kim Seokjin | Jin/Min Yoongi | Suga

Heavy is the Crown by Hermit_Hanes (WIP)

Yoongi knows his fate was sealed the day his sire named him heir.

i flow the way water flows by mintaejin *

Seokjin swallows and blinks at her. "Do you . . . ?" he swallows again. "Would you fuck me?" He laughs nervously. "I don't really know how to fuck anyone yet. I guess I have to learn, but uh . . . if I can put that off another day, I'd be happy."

 Yoonji licks her lips. "Oh, oppa, as long as you're with me, you'll never have to learn."

 She knows that she isn't imagining how his eyes darken at those words.

yoonji takes home the prettiest oppa and fucks him senseless

POLY RELATIONSHIPS

OT7 - Relationship

seven stars by cypheromone (WIP)  *

Summary from the first fic:

After an electrical storm in an unstable wormhole near Earth, the I. S. E. Bangtan loses contact with the Institute, and is considered lost in space.

Four months later, the crew of the Bangtan is still stranded in an unknown galaxy. The ship is broken with no acting engineer to make repairs. The crew's doctor and life support specialist can barely cooperate professionally, and the captain is falling in love with the planetary explorer.

(A love story spanning galaxies.)

knot a problem by ellemoonchild  (WIP)

The youngest alpha in the pack has been unusually moody, bratty, and overly emotional as of late. He’s been all pouts and teary eyes and doesn’t want to listen to any of them, not even his pack alpha. Which is the biggest cause for concern. The pack is at a bit of a loss of what to do with their normally happy and behaved pup.

But it isn’t until the pack’s holiday retreat when pack alpha Namjoon and pack omega Seokjin realize just what’s been going on: Jungkook is about to go into his first rut.

Or ~

Alpha Namjoon and Omega Seokjin have to help tame and train their youngest alpha mate Jungkook on how to properly handle his rut before the rest of the pack can join them.

Clarity by creambunkoo

 "Do you want us to help you take your mind off things? No thinking, just being good for us?"

 Jungkook can already feel himself slipping just from the quiet rasp of those words in Yoongi's steady voice. "Please."

This is a love story about Jungkook's hyungs eating him out.

Jeon Jungkook/Kim Namjoon | RM/Min Yoongi | Suga

Largely Enough by sseoltangie

“Generally speaking, you’d be up for this?”

Jungkook shrugged. “I mean you’re both hot so yeah.”

Yoongi has a request.

(* Personal favorites)    

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 1

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 2

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 3

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 4

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 5

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 6

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 7

MASTERPOST FIC RECS PART 8

Irrepressible Desire

[Dean Winchester x Female!Reader]

Synopsis: Over the last couple of months, you found yourself struggling to contain the barrier between friendship and desire with your best friend. So far it was accomplishable, until a certain late night drive threatens to pulverize your restraint

WC: 2,796

Category: Lime/Steamy, Slight Angst.

And as always, if you enjoyed, please feel free to reblog and drop a comment or two. I’d love to hear your feedback!

『••✎••』

To have his hands glide down your waist as you reel into him further. Your fingers searching and gripping through his hair as he’s leaning down, peppering hot, open-mouthed kisses down your neck.

You longed for his steamy and moist breath to send shivers all around your collarbone. To feel his arms lift you up off the ground, gripping your thighs as he pivots and pins you against the nearest wall.

You begged to hear your name fall from his lips, to meet his pleading eyes for that brief moment. That pause in life where everything moves in slow motion, where it feels as if you’re the only two in the room — in the world. His green eyes, glowing a vibrant emerald in the moonlight, replicating the emotion that the both of you felt. All without a single word.

You dreamt for that day to come — for him to finally look at you different than what he saw. To share that first heart felt kiss. To have him look at you as if you were a dream.

Yet every day was the same.

He would flash his oblivious dazzling smile as you told him your daily ramble. It was mostly minor stuff that had happened on your way to work. Nonetheless, it was something — anything that gave you a reason to stop by in the afternoon.

At times, you’d find yourself daydreaming about him right there on the spot, listening to him babble about a new hunt he investigated. He’d talk about the odd encounters he had with Sammy while all you could think about was his arms wrapped around your waist, holding you close. His soft, tender lips meeting yours — molding in sync perfectly as pillows.

It was only on rare occasions where you’d find him irritated with life. His plaid pullover hung limply over his shoulders, despite being supported by such a strong base from all the hunts he’ve done. He had such a determined look on his face even with dark, sunken circles under his beautifully bloodshot eyes. The eyes that were flicking back and forth over his father’s journal of secrets. He sat there with his hands resting on his temple — making you wonder what he thought about, other than the hunts. It’s almost as if you could hear the nonstop clunking of gears turning in his head.

On those days, you were there solely as his friend. A buddy to listen, share, and ease the stress. And he carried loads of it.

You’ve always admired him for his determined attitude. He and his brother saved countless of lives, including yours on occasion. The compassion and loyalty he has for people was what made you fall in love with him to begin with. No matter what he seemed like on the outside.

You did avoid him at times, finding the days harder to withstand around him. A part of you felt as if he knew. The gleam in his omniscient eyes.

It pained you to keep up with the denial and the lie you’ve told him. What you’ve told yourself. It made you scream out into your pillow at night, begging your dream to come true. But, of course, it hasn’t.

It was late, about an hour after midnight. You hadn’t slept due to picturing him in your mind repeatedly as if his face were a bunch of snapshots. That made matters worse with the fact that he was beside you the entire time of you doing so.

You were in the passenger seat of his Impala — Baby as he calls it, staring out into the abyss of your mind. The faint but prominent midnight blue of the night sky stared back at you in awe. The moon glowed softly onto the darkened pavement, seeming as if the twinkling stars were encouraged as they dashed behind the tree tops. Then, suddenly, popping back to greet you once again.

The car itself stayed at a comfortable temperature allowing you to relax into the seat. If he weren’t clouding your thoughts, you might’ve drifted off — at least for an hour or two.

Sighing to yourself, you turned to the man in question, Dean.

His eyes were focused on the desolate road in front of him, humming softly to the music of your choosing.

When his eyes flickered over to you, noticing the pondered look, you had forgotten to breathe once again.

“Hey,“ he murmured, soft as a whisper. His voice alone was deep and full of drowsiness, yet it held an angelic tone to it. That alone sent shivers down your spine. “Something on your mind?”

Your imagination started back up again as you peek at him from the corner of your eye in guilt. You couldn’t help yourself but envision him as if you were the only two people in the world. He was the most enchanting man you’ve ever encountered in your life. The way his pink lips were slightly quirked up on one side. How his impressive biceps tense and relax with every gear shift he made. The way his alluring green eyes flickered back and forth from the road, then to you like he was waiting for a reaction of some sort.

Wait, had he asked you something? You couldn’t remember… It was like all of your coherent and reasonable thoughts were carelessly tossed out of the window.

All you could think about was you and him. Him touching you; kissing you. Your lips, your jaw, your neck… how badly you wanted him to pull and drag you to the back and show you what it’s like to open your heart indefinitely to one man. This man. Your man.

You heard him call out your name, slowly pulling you back to reality. With a blink you were back in the passenger seat. He was still driving, but his glances were more rapid now. More concerning.

Shit, what did he ask?!

“Uh, sweetheart?” With the nickname rolling off his tongue with unease, you could feel the tension rising in the car. “You, alright?”

“F-Fine.” You hesitated.

He noticed. “You sure? You’re looking at me like you’re ready to devour my brain, zombie girl.”

You mentally scolded yourself, looking down in guilt, as he turned back to the road with a chuckle. Fortunately for you, he seemed completely oblivious of the lustful yearning you had for him.

As excuses go, you were lousy. You weren’t as quick-witted as the boys, stumbling over words to find a simple lie to cover your tracks. It was one of the reasons why you still worked at the coffee shop, rather than helping out with the hunts. That and they physically didn’t allow you to.

“I’m just… hungry.” You finally answered, too embarrassed to look him the eye. “That’s all.”

“Want a burger? I’m sure Mickey D’s is still open.”

“No, it’s okay—“

“Seriously, sweetheart,” you could tell from his voice, he was smiling. “I don’t mind.”

“No, Dean—“

“We could pick up a number one for Sam too—“

“I don’t want a burger!“ You finally snapped, glaring at him in the driver’s seat. It took you a few seconds to realize what you’ve done, immediately shrinking in size once you had.

The sudden anger made him pull a full 180 to look at you in shock, causing the car to swerve. He frantically regained his posture, guiding the car back to his lane, before taking quick glances at you once again.

It fell in an unnerving silence between the two of you. The tension was so high, yet you could feel his body heat caressing your skin, as if to reassure you that he wasn’t upset. You felt yourself subconsciously inching towards him, unable to turn away.

After a minute or two, he grabbed hold of his steering wheel with his palm, spinning it lightly in his hand. He was supposed to make a left turn, as you were nearing the dingy motel, but instead he effortlessly parked off to the side. Once he straightened his wheels back out, he reached over and turned off the radio.

Now it really was just you and him.

You stared at him in bewilderment as he flipped on the courtesy light, allowing you to finally see his face properly.

His was slightly sweaty, mostly due to the humidity outside. His messy hair stuck to the side of his head, the tips dripping down from his temple to his neck. You imagined what it would feel like to run your fingers through that hair. To cling onto it as his hands rummaged against your waist, pulling you in.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t in any layers. Only the hiking boots, jeans, and the plain cotton tee that hung tightly around his shoulders, outlining his toned physique. If you squinted hard enough, you could see the faint outline of his abs poking through.

Then, of course, was the amulet that hung loosely on his neck. You remembered asking him the importance of it on the day you’ve met. He had walked into the coffee shop, ordering the most disgusting coffee on the menu, with it dangling on full display for everyone to see.

At first he lied, as you were just a barista, but he later informed you that it was a symbol of his bond to his brother, Sam. It was a present that he’d cherished since they were younger. Despite its sweet backstory, It truly was an odd-looking thing. A humanoid head with bull-like horns aiming upwards held together with a black cord.

From what he told you, he never takes it off.

“You’re not really hungry, are you?” He eventually asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between you two. He rested his arm against the back of the seat, slouching his leg over his knee to face you directly.

You slightly frowned at him, already giving him the answer without saying the word.

“Figures,” Dean sighed in response, rolling his head back in annoyance — making you go feral on the inside. “You’re a shitty liar, sweetheart.”

“Why do you call me sweetheart?”

The question rolled off your tongue before you could stop yourself. You felt his eyes linger on yours, the soft freckles on his nose staring daggers at you. Then the unexpected happened, he snorted.

He snorted like pig. “Really? Out of all the questions you could’ve asked, you pick that one?”

“I… I just—“

“Stop,” Dean reached out to grab your shoulders. You instantly melted into his touch, barely holding yourself back from collapsing into him. “Just, stop.”

His thumb caressed your bare shoulder as he stared deeply into your eyes. You felt yourself lean closer into his touch as his thumb became a palm, rising up to cup your jaw.

“Dean…?” You muttered softly into his ear, realizing you were only inches apart from one another. The smell of whiskey that was stained deeply into his shirt, blessed your nostrils, filling you up with euphoria. For the first time ever you felt the heat of his breath touch your cheek — sending shivers all throughout your body.

Was this really really happening? After all those nights of crying into your pillow, this moment didn’t feel real. You felt as if you were going to wake up back in the passenger seat with the motel sign outside the windshield.

But that didn’t happen. You didn’t wake up. You weren’t daydreaming again… it was real. It was all real. He lowered himself down to your lips, slightly lifting your chin to an angle, hovering his over yours for a moment. Just a moment, as if he was searching for some kind of assurance. An okay to go forward. Your eyes closed with ambition as he finally collided them together.

You took it slow, plucking intimately at his soft mouth — not knowing how to proceed. His lips rolled back slightly as you ran your fingers through his hair.

Dean kissed you again, now cradling your head more securely, his other hand easing up your side. He drew back enough to turn your head, changing the angle. He did it slowly, your noses brushing. You blinked drowsily, mirroring him, parting your lips slightly in anticipation. You caught the unsteady shudder of his breath against your skin before your mouths met again. Your lips moved haltingly.

You followed Dean’s press and retreat, over and over.

Your fingers were still in the boy’s sweaty, soft hair when he had slicked your lower lip with his tongue. You shuddered, pressing nearer as he slid his tongue into the willing heat of your mouth, easing deep, sliding out wet. You found yourself panting softly as Dean kissed your mouth again, again, and again. Your lips kneading, inflamed, with the press of his tongue again. He didn’t make a sound, he wouldn’t allow himself a low rumble of pleasure, not while you parted your lips wantonly, not while your tongues met, slick, rolling lazily.

He eventually pulled you towards the drivers side, letting you straddle his lap as he gripped a handful of your hair gingerly. It allowed you what you wanted, sucking the wet twisting root of your tongue deep into his mouth. Then, and only then did he make a soft noise, a low sigh as you parted for quick air before intertwining together again, straining against each other, rubbing clothed skin, warm fabric under your flexing hands.

Dean touched your back, the curve of your spine, encouraging you closer. The slobbery kisses never calmed, getting rougher and rougher to the point where you had to pull apart for a breather.

For a moment you both sounded like dogs that ran a marathon. Panting and sweating in sync as your foreheads collide. Dean’s hands found their way to grip your waist to keep you safe and stable on top of him as he pulls away to look at you.

He murmurs your name underneath his breath, panting between words as he pulls a strand of hair out of your face. You stare at him enchantedly, resting your hands on his shoulders.

“God,” he huffs, “it’s a good thing I pulled over, huh?”

You smiled in response, quietly chortling, as your luxuriant eyes glossed over the man you’ve come to love. Your breaths mended in sync, both exasperated from the sudden jolt in energy.

“You remind me of my dog.”

His blunt statement had you give a double take, raising your eyebrows. You couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, his neutral eyes staring into yours. “A dog?”

“Yeah, my dog.” His tone made it sound as if it were obvious.

“My kissing reminds you of your dog?”

He rolled his eyes at your statement, raising his hands towards the center of your waist. “When my dad was learning how to become a hunter, we owned a dog for a while. Sammy was too young to remember, but her name was Sweetie. A golden retriever that we rescued as a pup.” His eyes glimmered at what you believed to be the memory of him and his dog. A smile formed, “Dad hated her, he hated everything, but I didn’t. She was the thing that made the first few years without my mom, not a living hell.”

“That’s… that’s beautiful, Dean, but why are you sharing this with me?”

“You asked me before why I called you sweetheart, that’s why. Her name was Sweetie, but I called her sweetheart as a nickname.”

“Dean—“

“Please, let me finish,” he cupped your face, forcing you to look into his pleasing eyes. “No matter how many times I deny it, you’re special to me. I’ve come to realized that. You’re it for me, hun, and you’ve always had been. I knew you felt the same for a long time — like I said, you’re a shit liar — but I was too scared to act, in fear of your safety.”

You raised an eyebrow, rubbing your thumb against his wrist. “My safety…?”

“Everyone who gets involved with me, gets hurt — one way or another. And I can’t seem to stop it no matter how hard I try. I’ve seen the way you’ve look at me, the way I look at you, so I constantly made an effort to stick you with someone else. Someone better than I am. But, that, obviously didn’t work.”

You knew this was it, all the pain of wishing you were good enough was over. Because the truth was, you were always good enough for him.

He sighed, taking his hand into yours. His swollen lips kissed the palm of your hand, allowing the slightest dent of his lips to curl upwards.

“It just made it harder to let you go.”

Lost in Paradise | Yakou Furio x Reader

i love him and so I want him to hurt me

A glimpse of the afterlife, lying in the cold. You wrap your arms strife with teardrops around your form, brittle fingertips brushing against the hairs of your skin. Your teeth grind and chatter, every breath you exhale out into the world. A count to three becomes another inhale, yet your breath becomes so ragged; the cold attempts to pull you down under, into the abyss, so far below the tub you’re situated in becomes a gateway from this world to the next. Atop the ice cubes that float above the deep is a lamp above your head, a low buzzing driving you to your slumber. The bulbs flicker behind your closed eyelids as your neck falls against the edge of the tub, the water a rising wave brushing against your chin. The hand that beckons you to the other side is the one wrapped around your throat, dragging you under so the privilege of your visit is all theirs.

All you have to do is die.

“Die? What’re you, nuts?”

The breeze is sound; the ring of sand around your toes remain still despite the rolling waves edging toward your feet. No longer are you without clothes, a bathing suit hugging your figure beyond your volition, damp as if you had just stepped out of a tub. You inhale the sea salt, air so weightless, yet you are distracted by a scent that guides you like a moth to a flame. Before your eyes the sun sets over the horizon, behind mountains whose name escapes you, and it is a sight so breathtaking you blink to take a snapshot as if you can keep it to yourself forever. Yes, the hot pink and violet hues above are meant to be awed upon, but beside you is a man whose chest rises and falls as if by a miracle and there is no averting your eyes from him.

But the sun. Before you is relief, a breath of fresh air; you’ve become so used to seeing passerby shrouded in the darkness under their hoods, or beneath puddles of rain atop their umbrellas. The clouds would draw ever so closer to one another, teardrops muddling the neon lights illuminating the city. Walking down the street and never seeing your shadow was debilitating, as if some part of you never existed or left your imprint on the world. The footsteps you left behind then would be replaced, or driven past, so that you could never make your mark in a place never to be left behind. There was no choice but to pull at the zipper at your jacket, hands then venturing toward your pockets, sinking into your clothes so no one bothered to perceive you. The hairs on your skin long for the sunset now, to venture out into the sea to chase after the warmth.

His hands rest behind cobalt blue tufts of hair, unruly strands falling behind swaying in the wind. The ocean crawls past seashells, brushing past his ankles, faltering just before the swim bottoms that are deflated around his knees. The sand latches at the heels of his feet, glistening as he stretches his legs and his arms with a yawn that is contagious. His chest tattoo is on display, an all seeing eye resting over his heart. His own are shut, humming a tune he once heard traversing the streets of his home. The wind chimes sing along. He remains impervious to the world you are from, the horrors you have witnessed, instead living in relief in a world you wish was yours as much as it was his. 

Yakou sits up to cup your cheeks in his hands, then shrieks, palms retreating to the warmth of his armpits. “C-Cold! Very cold! Ice cold!” He shakes his head. “Was planning on giving ya’ a kiss but your lips are probably cold too! Some forte you’ve got, they got you walking around like a corpse.”

Your brilliant idea to drown yourself in a bathtub during your teenage years had granted you a superpower, and the World Detective Organization the means to another end; Near Death Experience, they coined it. Rather than whatever followed, your eyes fluttered open to a crime scene and a soul weeping over the loss of its body. Clothes were thrown across the floor, bracelets and clip-on jewelry a cloak over a life gone too soon. A crimson splatter stained the walls like the remnants of a firework. A little girl’s bedroom, the moon and the stars trapezing above your head, her eyes welling up upon the sight of her killer. Her father, who instead kneeled for her forgiveness, picked her up in her arms for a snapshot that was toppled over upon the little girl’s nightstand. She was the headline of the week, an ongoing investigation bordering on unsolved, her name left unsaid.

You had to hold a memory of them, however small. Your forte could nonetheless only be activated when your heart was beats away from flatlining, unlike others whose activation fee was but a small price to pay. Submerging yourself in a bathtub filled to the brim with crisp ice cubes and water granted you peace, a silence enough to slow your heart rate down to levels mimicking none. The afterlife you entered was not yours, but of the person whose death was most important to note, and your first happened to be the subject of the seven o’clock news the night you thought life was best without you a part of it. She took hold of your hand that night, guiding you to her killer and exhibiting more of your skill, so that the story to be told when the water no longer flooded your lungs was quite the riveting one. Perhaps your frequent dance with death was the reason for your skin cold to the touch.

So much to tell him. The stroll he accompanies you on before the rising tide is silent, the grip of his fingers wrapped around yours tight. Ahead of the two of you is a cabin, a cabin that looks an awful lot like the hideout for his fellow master detectives, and is one that you’ve found yourself in many times. The walks with him feel like forever, perhaps because Yakou doesn’t mind forever. He raises his free hand to his lips, inhaling the tobacco of a cigarette that inhabits his little paradise. He exhales the smoke opposite from you with the scent that sets your nostrils alight, but he is unaware that your gaze strays to the way he taps at the ash that lingers. He must have a lifetime supply, one that lasts for eternity. His soul exists within a world that longs for you, despite the boundless desires that inhabit his paradise, little bits of you enticing you to stay even if he relents and lets you go.

Is it time yet, to let him go? Does his soul finally belong to his wife, a woman he sought revenge for, a woman whose love cost him his life? Can you finally accept reality without him, the stolen glances atop rooftops in Kanai Ward? Can you bear the loss of his lips upon yours, his arms no longer closing the distance between the two of you so that the spark can last longer? You’re no longer able to perceive him like others do, like another man lost to the crumbling of Kanai Ward’s secrets. You can’t fathom people no longer able to see him like you do because that meant he was alive and people were aware he belonged to the world just as they did. If you are the only one who can see him, touch him, love him… well, how is that fair to anyone?

The receding waves rise above your ankles, desiring to swallow you whole. “I miss you, Yakou. You’re not there.” He stops, his hand caressing your trembling fingertips. ”I hate you for doing this to me.” I love you. I love you I love you I love you. 

So much unsaid. You choke out a sob, your quivering free hand wiping at the taste of salt beneath your nose. The breeze nips at the corner of your eyes, soaked and tight with your tears, and your heart aches with the reality that the sunset he sees is a fabrication of the future he yearned for. He has that regretful look on his face, the one where he wishes for the hood of a rain coat to hide his shame. His eyes are downcast, unable to meet yours, unable to fathom what next. His grip doesn’t falter, however, as if preparing for his hand to be the one you take when you exhale your last breath. You want to let go. You want to be indignant; you want to ask him if he regrets it. You want your clouds to roll in on his nirvana so he knows how much he’s ruined your life. “Didn’t take you for a liar.” 

He edges closer to your lips with a grip of your chin. “For starters, don’t start crying on me now.” He smiles, forcing you to surrender into his arms with a kiss. “And… stay with me a little while longer, okay?”

Lost in paradise.

HD-Remix 2021 REVEALS

Thanks again to everyone who participated this year!

(Our closing remarks including complete acknowledgements and fest stats can be found here.)

_________________

FIC inspired by ART

Feather (E | 36K) by @orange-peony

The Man With the Koi Fish Tattoo (E | 9K) by @themightyflynn08

Captivated (E | 8K) by @doubleappled

_________________

FIC inspired by FIC

Snapshots of a Pregnancy (T | 4K) by @anaxandria-writes

both that morning equally lay (T | 4K) by @janieohio

touch me with the lights off (and my chains on) (E | 7K) by @epsilonargus

Owl of a Sudden (T | 3K) by @onbeinganangel

Echoes (T | 5K) by @static-abyss

you killed me in the gloom (T | 2K) by @fw00shy

The Ferret's in Love (or 5 Times Draco didn't say I love you + 1 Time he did) (E | 4K) by @frenchmarshmalloww

All Will Be Well (E | 6K) by @greenmegsnoham

Consummāre (M | 1K) by @lower-east-side

Little Star (Be My Anchor Remix) (M | 40K) by @ladderofyears

before the bond (T | 4K) by @hogwartsfirebolt

Of all the promises I broke (G | 2K) by @tedahfromtayla

An Unexpected Courtship (E | 8K) by @maraudersaffair

Desert Rose (Sex On The Beach Remix) (T | 1K) by @greaseonmymouth

Distilled (T | 5K) by @itsjamethyst

i carry your heart in mine (M | 1K) by @glittering-git

And History Repeats (M | 9K) by @agentmoppet

Forest, for the Trees (G | 2K) by khalulu

Uncle Harry and the Overly Wise Six-Year-Old (T | 2K) by @snowgall

The Coldest of Days (E | 55K) by @thesleepiesthufflepuff

Of Mirrors, Myths, and Men (E | 5K) by @the-starryknight

melodies pure and true (T | 3K) by @pineau-noir

break my heart, set me free (T | 4K) by @nv-md

Touch Me (E | 1K) by @veelawings

Living for a dream...loving for a moment (M | 10K) by @sassy-cissa

Unsubtle (G | 1K) by albuss

Raspberry Sundaes and Sunflower Bouquets (T | 5K) by aminathescorpio

can’t put this feeling into words (M | 2K) by @floydig

Can’t Hide From The Sun (E | 1K) by @veelawings

what if, but if, we could kiss (and just cut the rubbish) (E | 10K) by @swisstae

_________________

ART inspired by FIC

It can be up to me. Us. (G | ART) by @digthewriter

I'll wait (even though I want you now) (M | ART) by @sugareey-makes-stuff

H/D Remix Challenge vol.11 (2021) :

@hd-remix || official masterpost || AO3 || stats = 35 works The Mods : @snowgall & @veelawings Banner © : @sugareey-makes-stuff's I'll wait (even though I want you now)

All Will Be Well by @greenmegsnoham [E, 5k] — Remix of All is Well by @/aminathescorpio

And History Repeats by @agentmoppet [M, 8k] — Remix of The Rest Is History by @/tedahfromtayla

before the bond by @hogwartsfirebolt [T, 4k] — Remix of A Different Kind of Heat by @/themightyflynn08

both that morning equally lay by @janieohio [T, 4k] — Remix of Auror Conley On The Case by @/frenchmarshmalloww

break my heart, set me free by @nv-md [T, 4k] — Remix of Overground/Underground by @/onbeinganangel

Can’t Hide From the Sun by @veelawings [E, 1k] — Remix of Wolves by @/hogwartsfirebolt

can’t put this feeling into words by @floydig [M, 1k] — Remix of Feels how it feels to feel by @/fw00shy

Captivated by @doubleappled [E, 7k] — Remix of Captivating by @/digtheshipper

The Coldest of Days by @thesleepiesthufflepuff [E, 54k] — Remix of December Never Felt So Wrong by @maesterchill

Consummāre by @lower-east-side [M, 1k] — Remix of Transsubstantiato by @/glittering-git

Desert Rose (Sex On The Beach Remix) by @greaseonmymouth [T, 1k] — Remix of Desert Rose by albuss

Distilled by @itsjamethyst [T, 5k] — Remix of Lights on the River by @/doubleappled

Echoes by @static-abyss [T, 5k] — Remix of It’s You by @ohdrarry

Feather by @orange-peony [E, 35k] — Remix of Untitled Veela!Draco by @swymsuyt

The Ferret's in Love (or 5 Times Draco didn't say I love you + 1 Time he did) by @frenchmarshmalloww [E, 4k] — Remix of In Love With The Ferret by @/pineau-noir

Forest, for the Trees by khalulu [G, 1k] — Remix of In a dark quiet place by @/itsjamethyst

i carry your heart in mine by @glittering-git [M, 1k] — Remix of Blush by @/floydig

I'll wait (even though I want you now) by @sugareey-makes-stuff [M, art] — Remix of Brick by Brick by @/agentmoppet

It can be up to me. Us. by @digtheshipper [G, art] — Remix of If It Were Up To Me by @/the-starryknight

Little Star by @ladderofyears [M, 39k] — Remix of Be My Anchor by @/maraudersaffair

Living for a dream...loving for a moment by @sassy-cissa [M, 10k] — Remix of One of His Few Treasures by @timothysboxers

The Man With the Koi Fish Tattoo by @themightyflynn08 [E, 9k] — Remix of Sensitivities by @/sugareey-makes-stuff

melodies pure and true by Pineau_noir [T, 3k] — Remix of Hope | It’s Okay to Not Be Okay by @/janieohio

Of all the promises I broke by @tedahfromtayla [G, 1k] — Remix of Rose Trees by @/greaseonmymouth

Of Mirrors, Myths, and Men by @the-starryknight [E, 5k] — Remix of Into the Potter-Verse by @/veelawings

Owl of a Sudden by @onbeinganangel [T, 3k] — Remix of What the Werbelande Wind Blew In by khalulu

Raspberry Sundaes and Sunflower Bouquets by @aminathescorpio [T, 4k] — Remix of Love in Three Parts by @/static-abyss

Snapshots of a Pregnancy by @anaxandria-writes [T, 3k] — Remix of A Star Danced by @/ladderofyears

Touch Me by @veelawings [E, 1k] — Remix of Heal Me by @/greenmegsnoham

touch me with the lights off (and my chains on) by @epsilonargus [E, 7k] — Remix of choke me like you hate me (but you love me) by @/swisstae

Uncle Harry and the Overly Wise Six-Year-Old by @snowgall [T, 1k] — Remix of Harriet Evans and the Happily Ever After by @/lower-east-side

An Unexpected Courtship by @maraudersaffair [E, 8k] — Remix of An Expensive Courtship by @/anaxandria-writes

Unsubtle by Albuss [G, 900] — Remix of Just Stay by @/nv-md

what if, but if, we could kiss (and just cut the rubbish) by @swisstae [E, 9k] — Remix of Into the Potter-Verse by @/veelawings

you killed me in the gloom by @fw00shy [T, 1k] — Remix of you killed me on the moon by @/epsilonargus

---

✔ other fests in 2021 ✔ fests in other years ✔ H/D Remix Challenge : 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | ‘That Picture’ | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2007 | 2006

tuesday, two in the afternoon

fallen hero / 2.1k words / chargestep (nb!sidestep + m!ortega) / cw: smoking

mostly below the cut!

--

“Why did you bring me down to the beach? It smells awful down here...”

Pollux kicks a rock across the barren sand, watching it roll into the lackadaisical waves lapping at the meager shoreline. The sand squishes beneath his shoes, water leaking through the crappy canvas.

It rained not long ago—almost caught the both of them in the downpour.

His head is still damp from the few fat drops that landed from between the slats in the boardwalk they used to take cover. He runs his hand across the fresh buzzcut, forgetting for a second there’s no curls to tuck behind his ears.

“I thought you liked the beach.” Ortega comes up beside him, keeping pace as they wander through sand and rock, passing by tiny tide pools refreshed by the rain. The sun will dry what the waves can reach soon, but for now they thrive under the cloudy grey sky.

“I don’t mind the beach, but it always stinks like garbage and wet dog down here after it rains.”

“At least it keeps the place private.”

“If you don’t count the seagulls.”

“They’re worse than the tourists.” 

Ortega smiles and Pollux turns to walk backwards, cocking a brow over his sunglasses. Of course Ortega is overdressed to be taking a walk on what passes for a beach these days—a fancy shirt and slacks and the watch he’s got on costs more than four months of rent on Pollux’s shitty apartment.

(Disregarding the sunglasses he’s toting around that are without a doubt the third most expensive thing he owns and even then they were a gift. From Ortega, obviously. He disregards the invading thought that the most expensive thing Ortega has won’t ever be his clothing or a watch, but his spine. Pollux thinks *if*—not *when*—he dies if they’ll pry it out and stick it inside someone else; a replacement for an accident of their own.)

Ortega is always dressed to impress, the silly man. Pollux it’s a habit, or he doesn’t have anything else to wear that isn’t something higher class or luxury, or if he genuinely enjoys silk shirts. The tailored slacks with fancy watches and Italian leather shoes. There’s no one to impress but Pollux and he hasn’t fallen for that trick in years.

“Worried about your shoes?”

“They’re...squishy.”

“You’re gonna ruin them.”

Ortega kicks another rock off towards the waves, stuffing his hands in his pocket as an answer. Pollux snorts, rolling his eyes, and he turns back around, falling into step beside him. He’s always been a fast walker--a faster runner.

Silence stretches out between them and apprehension feels like just another word for awkward, this gap between them. The few pointed inches—enough for static electricity to jump between them, for Pollux to anticipate Ortega’s touch and deftly pull away, leaving air beside his fingertips.

It’s still so hard to let him close.

“Why did you want to meet up here?” Pollux asks just to have something to say, anything to avoid Ortega looking like he’s going to throw his arm over his shoulder and pull him in to mumble something fond, or a terrible joke.

“Just to go on a walk?” Ortega tries and oh he tries so hard. More than he used to.

“Since when did you start walking for fun?”

“When you decide to come along with me. It’s fun, Lux.”

Pollux frowns—he knows this game. Ortega’s got this little tell of looking away just the right way.

“You just wanted to get me out of the house then.”

Ortega shrugs—he’s avoiding, nor is he saying no...

“Okay so I lied. I don’t have anything to talk about. But, if I just wanted to spend time with you then you would’ve said no.”

“True...” Pollux hates how he’s right more often than not. Asshole. “So you picked the beach?”

“I didn’t plan on it raining.”

Pollux sighs, tired of the sand and he wanders away--further out of reach--towards the rocks near the pillars holding up the promenade. 

It’s deserted right now, the rain and the fact that it’s two in the afternoon on a Tuesday keeping the crowds away. Give it a Saturday on a cool summer’s evening and it’d be packed to the gills; people screaming on the small roller coasters, the stink of fresh fried food and the lights--the dizzying array of red, blue and yellow. All the people and all the thoughts buzzing through his head; there were so many bombarding him--all of them, just as aggressive as the lights. He’s braved that terrible crowd--all because Ortega asked. 

He used to do that, do things because Ortega asked nicely. Because they were fun--he had fun. Does he still remember what that felt like? Being on that promenade, breathless and young, laughing like he knew how to laugh? 

They walked down to the very end once, away from the bright lights where it was just the ocean stretching out in front of them like a black abyss. All alone. Ortega asking him, pleading for one ride on the ferris wheel. “Come on Lux just one little ride.” Pollux calling his bluff, shoving his face away because it was all just a ploy for a kiss. Like this is some snapshot romance movie still.

It’s stupid to think about bygones.

There’s no temptation to jump into old times down here, just the water swelling against the rocks and the concrete walls. Trash hiding in the crevices, old green beer bottles that will break and turn to sea glass; left to wash up on the shores of Hawaii.

The beaches there are still nice--worthy of memories. Not this smog stained grey sand.It’s just a hop skip and a jump up onto the slick brown rocks smeared with algae and something that shines like oil. It stinks like it.

Pollux stops, shaking a cigarette out of the package and he cups his hand to protect the fragile flame, watching Ortega clamber up onto the rock beside him. He flops down on a relatively dry spot, free of the worst of the gross.

“What are you doing?” Pollux asks with a faint laugh and a cocked brow, letting his cigarette go unlit. It droops between his lips.

“What does it look like? I’m sitting down.” Ortega replies, smoothing a strand of hair back into the salt and pepper waves at his temples.

“Mr. Ralph Lauren is gonna be pissed you ruined your pants?” A raise of the brow and Ortega looks up at him with a look in those brown eyes.

“My shoes are wet, Lux.” Ortega whines and Pollux is *this close* to kicking him off their rock.

“I think you’re getting old.”

Pollux squats beside him, arms draping over top of his knees.

“Now you’re just being cruel...”

Ortega adjusts, grimacing when he inevitably puts his hand on a wet spot. He untucks his shirt, and he’s rather reminiscent of those “aged like fine wine” men on old magazine covers he found in shitty motel lobbies. He’d fit right on a sandy beach in Florida. These aren’t the right beaches for any of that anymore, still mostly rock. Their original glory immortalized in photographs on the fronts of travel brochures.

But they are healing—slowly. The sand creeps up the shoreline more and more each year.

“I’m not cruel. You just an oversized sun hat and a lounge chair. Maybe a nice hot beer.” Pollux teases and Ortega grimaces.

“It’s January.”

“That doesn’t stop people in Florida or Hawaii.”

“Have you even been to Florida?”

Ortega asks so harmlessly and Pollux pauses.

He’s been there half a dozen times before—fuzzy memories from over a decade ago. Rooftop gardens on top of high rise builds off the coast of Miami, galas with thousand dollar dresses and caked on makeup in the low light from crystal chandeliers. It was all for work, watching and scanning, nimble mental fingers coaxing and teasing truth from the mind’s eyes. He would watch, take in the sights and the sounds through other people’s minds. Take the truth and puzzle over the rest. Ask the dangerous questions: why and how?

He still believes the biggest mistake they made was allowing him to learn.

“I’ve watched movies.” He says instead of lying and he knows he isn’t getting away with it. “Besides, have you ever been to Florida? Or Hawaii even?”

“No, but I’ve watched movies before.”

Ortega grins and Pollux groans, resisting the urge to yet again so shove him off his rock and into one of the tide pools below.

“You’re an asshole.”

Pollux fishes around in his pocket and grabs out a matchbook, flipping it open and fuck he grabbed the wrong one. There’s nothing but the empty packaging in this one, uneven lines from tearing out matches without much grace. He flips it over onto the back and nothing--even the striker strip is shot to hell. Fuck. 

“Are you out?” Ortega peers over and he grumbles.

“Grabbed the wrong matchbook” Pollux huffs, about to grab his carton back out and stuff the poor cigarette back in.

“Wait, I still got--here.” Ortega pulls a small matchbox out of his shirt pocket, holding it out to him. It’s much nicer than his ten cent books he frequently gets for free from the gas station because the cashier thinks he’s cute. 

“You...still carry them around?”

His voice stalls in his chest: it’s meant to be more of questioning incredulity, but it comes out much softer. Forlorn and sticky at the front of his mouth.

Ortega sheepishly looks down at the matchbox, flipping it between his index and forefingers.

“Old habits die hard.”

He ran out of matches a lot, even the crappy little packages where the matches broke more often than actually struck. Ortega started carrying them around, little inch and a half boxes of matches tucked in his coat or shirt pocket. He doesn’t remember when the habit started. But it evolved into a habit of stealing them, seeing how easily he could sneak one away without him noticing.

Ortega protested whenever he caught him and the two of them scrambling for the box until Pollux tucked it away like magic, or Ortega tried tickling him enough times to get an elbow to the nose.

He got him back: a sufficient enough shock and Pollux complained about having a numb hand for the next week.

Pollux had a little stacked collection of them all lined up against the baseboard next to his mattress. He kept the fun ones, the brightly colored and eclectically designed ones--neon blue and mustard yellow. Held onto them until they were falling apart and he painstakingly cut them apart and glued or taped them in the pages of notebooks.

Even now, seven years later Ortega still carries them around and that tugs sharp in the back of his throat and deep in his belly—a sort of nausea that stings his eyes.

He blinks several times and fuck there’s the logo of the cigarette shop Ortega dragged him to once in a blue moon. The floor was some cheap old green motel carpeting--the windows covered in layers of advertisements and wood paneling everywhere else. But god it smelled fantastic--like a humidor stuffed to the brim with anything from cheap cigarettes to fancy and illegal cigars in glass cases. 

(Fuck, it was the best place to buy cigarettes--they still had the little machines with the tokens he’d pay five bucks for at the counter.)

“Yeah...” Pollux mumbles, tearing his eyes away. “Kinda literally, you know. Dying.” He chuckles bone dry and Ortega cringes.

“You still recognized the matchbox. I can’t call you a lost cause yet.” 

He looks over at him, salt and pepper black hair blowing in the breeze, the little white spots where the scars cut through his beard. The soft smile on chapped lips. Even with all the anger in the world rushing under his skin, he can’t be mad.

There’s just that wistful empty ache and he blinks, looking away. The distant shoreline etched on the horizon of a dark ocean and the patchy grey sky above. He lights the cigarette with a single match, the sharpness of the sulfur and the sweet menthol cloud of smoke the breeze dissolves into nothing. 

“Here...” Pollux offers the matchbox back to him.

“Keep it. You need it more than me.” Ortega says, pushing his hand back towards him and he pulls his hand away.

Pollux fixes him with a with a long look before he heaves a sigh and looks back out towards the coast and the ocean further beyond. Smoking the cigarette, filling his lungs on the menthol and tobacco until it burns out at the filter. Ortega sitting beside him, bouncing a leg but he’s quiet. And he doesn’t look over at Pollux.

The sun barely peeks in through the clouds and it looks like this is all the rain they’ll be getting.

Honestly, your writing reminds me a lot of the buffyverse. Just the perfect balance of humor and sadness and romance and heart that just feels like a vivid window into the world you've created.

God the Body...the best forty minutes of television I may never watch again. I've rewatched Willow and Tara's kiss (because I'll adore them forever), but just...the weight of it. It took me a full month to work up the nerve to watch the episode, to be ready to cry that much.

What you said about not wanting people to suffer, because of your work...It's never once felt like that for me. And I've cried a LOT while reading your work. I'll try to explain it the best I can

Grief can be so isolating, and disorienting. Your world goes topsey-turvey, supports you took for granted go flying into the abyss and suddenly it's a minefield of those glass shards. And no one's grief is identical. No two circumstances are the same. It's not possible for anyone else to know exactly how you feel, because no two hearts break alike.

Sometimes, it's because people just don't understand. Sometime's it's because they no longer want to. But some days, that feeling of aloneness can be crushing.

Then one night, I stumbled upon Let These Shadows Fall Away Like Dust. That one hit me way harder than I was ever expecting. The question of how to grieve the living, the dilemma on when forgiveness is deserved...Alex's anger, his devestation, the rawness of it all....That's my broken glass. Those are concepts I've been struggling for over a year. I'm still picking up pieces every day.

I sobbed, because it was such a relief. To see the feelings that had been scrambled up in my mind just reflected there, on my screen. The reminder I had desperately needed, that I was not alone. That even though my circumstances were different, I was not the only one trying to unravel those messy emotions.

Then again, I also read your deathfic for fun, so maybe I'm not the best judge of this. I tend to like angst. I tend to get a lot of "WHY WOULD YOU MAKE IT THAT SAD" in group chats :D

Please don't feel any pressure to respond to me quickly or anything. I never mind the wait. I'm so sorry for the rough times. Wishing that you and your family gets whatever you need to help ease your storm. Sending love and support as well.

(sorry for all the metaphors. I'm super sleepy and apparently, I resort to purple prose when tired lol)

I know exactly what you mean about Emily. I understand why people don't like her, but I just love to see her written as such a grey character. It's just so much more powerful when the love is so clearly there.

I mean, that's what a tragedy is, really. Love cut short. Grieving a future that could have been everything, if fate had not been cruel. I don't know if you know musical theater, but I like to think about the Barber and His Wife, from Sweeney Todd: the whole tragedy of that show, is that they were happy all together, and then permanently broken. How their paths keep crossing, but they never connect to heal. Never lost, but never found.

And that's the tragedy of Luke and Emily: too stubborn and too late. You find that grey area, the messiness so well, and just bring it all out so wonderfully. You do the same with Bobby/Trevor, ESPECIALLY in the horror and the wild. God, that absolutely devestated me. I'm not a big fan of horror in general, and I haven't explored the genre that much but...if all horror is like yours then DAMN, I might just have to become a fan.

This got super long (lol) so I'll wrap it up now but! THE SIC FIC QUEENS TOGETHER???? When I tell you I lost it.... all too well Bobby and what you've lost reggie in the same story are killing me. I am hooked and incredibly hyped. Loved both updates so far, and cannot wait to see where the story goes!

Oh yeah and I forget: I have to ask, do you have a fan cast of the one, the only, the incredible Keith Richards? (and that goblin is so cute!!! I really want to pet the blood thirsty monster. So badly)

Love, your totally-not-undead-pen-pal, :D

-Vampire Anon

Know musicals? Vampire Anon my beloved, I am a musical theatre bitch. Take a look at my high school graduation cap! (Anastasia is my favorite musical... something about the themes of home, love, and family, the idea of always finding a place in the world even after enduring incredible hardship, that anything is survivable with faith and love in your heart... I'm also a Romanov history bitch, and Christy Altomare is such an incredible talent and human being.) Literally, talk to me about musicals anytime!

And yeah, I definitely see your metaphor... the tragedy of The Barber and his Wife was how close they came to each other throughout the whole show, existing within reach the entire time, after being separated for so long. But it wasn't the same; it never could be. Time and trauma had changed them both into something unrecognizeable, and when they came face-to-face, they could only hurt each other. At a certain point, the ghosts of your past are meant to stay ghosts. Sure, you might want them back more than anything --- but what would it mean? What would you truly be getting back?

Luke's "back", of course, and he comes home to visit his parents multiple times... but they're not the same people he left. They're older, greyer, changed by grief... while he's just the same. A snapshot forever frozen in time, a memory crystalized in amber. You can't hold memories in your hands. You can't pull them close and refuse to let them go. Eventually, they'll slip away... and to Mitch and Emily, a memory is all their son is, now. That's what's so heartrending about the situation we see in the show, especially --- so much love still exists between all of them, but it has no place to go.

Okay, sorry, it's 3am here and I'm rambling too, haha --- mentioning musical theatre was a mistake.

I'm so glad my stories have been able to connect with you, especially 'shadows' --- that one resonated with a lot of people, more than I ever realized it would. It's not the most personal story to me... but definitely one that needed to be told, and the emotion in it... hits home for a lot of people. It means so much to me knowing that story, and Alex's internal struggle, has made people feel less alone.

I think I'm going to have a hard time looking back on that one, though. We were staying at my aunt's house for the weekend where I wrote most of it; I read a few excerpts to her, and she said she liked it. She was always interested in my writing... I kind of wish I'd gotten the chance to share more of it with her.

Like you said. Grief's a funny thing. Disorienting, relentless, and crushing.

Please just remember, though --- whatever you're dealing with, you're not alone. You don't have to cut yourself on those broken pieces... one day, you'll wake up, and realize you feel whole again. It will never feel the same, and the pain will always be there... but healing around it is what makes us stronger. You don't owe anyone your forgiveness; it's okay to grieve when you've lost something, regardless of whether death has taken them from you. Grief doesn't have to be earned, it simply has to be felt.

You'll be stronger for it, in the end. I'm sorry you've been hurting so much.

Anyways! Oh gosh! On to lighter, happier topics! Please tell me...

What are your favorite fics? (Like, my fics, obviously, which fics of mine do you just go gaga over? Please praise me or else my ego will shrivel like a worm on hot pavement.) No, okay, I'm kidding --- what are your top fics for this fandom? Like, what are the ones that really resonate with you, that you could read over and over? The JATP fandom has so many greats, but I'm always drawn back to Some Killer Queen You Are by pearlcaddy (buffyverse meets jatp!! iconic!!), Lantern's Light by thefairhero (literally the SOFTEST reggie), the sky's not empty tonight by firefall (just... devastating and beautiful in a dozen ways), and literally anything by foundfamilyvevo.

How long have you been in the JATP fandom? Who are your favorite characters? What's your favorite JATP song?

And finally, most importantly... what are your favorite musicals?

(also... since u asked... behold keith richards and tremble)

international year of plant health

hi. i made a playlist of a snapshot of the stuff i’ve listened to this year if you’re looking for some recommendations! xoxo mae

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0VkfnggwpC1TEj2wsaHyZr?si=4JJd6Z-kRoCHuHypRtWK3g

1. little simz - might bang, might not 2. jean deaux - recipe! 3. logic - open mic\\aquarius iii 4. spittzwell - the lesson 5. ivy sole - kismet 6. vel the wonder - fine art 7. megan thee stallion - shots fired 8. kari faux - look at that 9. rico nasty - own it 10. flo milli - beef flomix 11. kodie shane - 2 many 12. kali uchis - ¡aquí yo mando! 13. tkay maidza - shook 14. bree runway - atm 15. yung baby tate - i am 16. almondmilkhunni - grapefruit 17. princess nokia - soul food y adobo 18. bosco - attention 19. kiana ledé - movin. 20. diamond white - secondhand 21. queen naija - i’m her 22. danileigh - mistreated 23. parisalexa - 2 optimistic 24. qveen herby - farewell 25. jhené aiko - p*$$y fairy (otw) 26. chloe x halle - forgive me 27. kehlani - water 28. umi - pretty girl hi! 29. rimon - i shine, u shine 30. disclosure - birthday 31. phora - cupid's curse 32. roy ayers - synchronize vibration 33. thundercat - unrequited love 34. thelonious coltrane - perfect timing 35. [ k s r ] - passion 36. alina baraz - more than enough 37. alayna - glowing 38. savannah cristina - self love 39. paloma ford - rain 40. nakala - she interlude ii 41. orion sun - lightning 42. jaz karis - hold you 43. cleo sol - when i'm in your arms 44. keiyaa - do yourself a favor 45. alicia keys - me x 7 46. yazmin lacey - morning matters 47. be steadwell - succulent 48. daniela andrade - k.l.f.g. 49. yung lean - dogboy 50. bladee - sun 51. blackwinterwells - algae 52. sullii - moonlight 53. misogi - heart chained 54. aminé - talk 55. tobi lou - lingo starr: drunken master 56. busta rhymes - look over your shoulder 57. 2 chainz - southside hov 58. atmosphere - the future is disgusting 59. meltycanon - moody blues 60. alfred. - sheeshfred 61. love-sadkid - ephemeral 62. jay squared - vision like you! 63. tuamie - you needed time you said 64. oatmello - blue 65. wun two - a noite 66. kuranes - calm 67. omaure - drama 68. dust and moonlight - sleeping or sinking 69. phlocalyst - image 70. ocha - r33 71. sugi.wa - love u 72. palm - memories of winter 73. goosetaf - tripwire 74. bryzone_ybp - the count 75. orancha - smoky banana 76. evil needle - midnight 77. eevee - romance 78. chief. - can't explain 79. ngyn - aerith 80. fujitsu - move on 81. meitei - nami 82. swum - breezy 83. chris mazuera - perspective 84. jinsang - maybe 85. tesk - cascades 86. saib - nautica 87. mf eistee - uprising 88. kaskade - when you’re dreaming 89. tatsuya maruyama - love you - lo-fi remix 90. towerz - before i gave in 91. baechulgi - abyss 92. underbelly - glitchwater 93. notsure - icecoffee 94. yutaka hirasaka - arise 95. akisai - ecossaise 96. nom tunes - missing piece 97. sweet dove - on the viewless wings 98. park bird - new place, same people 99. city girl - ji-eun's favorite 100. katie dey - loving 101. mary lattimore - sometimes he's in my dreams 102. teen daze - peaceful groove 103. pacific coliseum - turquoise 104. tycho - outer sunset 105. [.que] - glimmer 106. lights & motion - separated hearts 107. roger eno - celeste 108. talsounds - opening 109. alva noto - xerrox voyage 110. 36 - stasis sounds for long-distance space travel (stage 2) 111. stan forebee - bedscape 112. daniel avery - illusion of time 113. arbee - 2sum - charlie dreaming remix 114. okada takuro - waterfront (up-01) 115. gabriel ólafs - lóa - bing & ruth rework 116. warmth - the creek - mixed 117. rhucle - rev 118. com truise - surf 119. sarah davachi - still lives 120. gastón arévalo - sur les traces des explorateurs 121. peter bark - ascension 122. kara-lis coverdale - flutter 123. totally enormous extinct dinosaurs - brockley 124. green-house - peperomia seedling 125. four tet - green 126. morimoto naoki - aru 127. kaitlyn aurelia smith - remembering 128. dj python - te conocí 129. ocoeur - glow 130. christina vantzou - snow white 131. alonefold - strange rainbows 132. savoir adore - dancing temples 133. tengger - water 134. suzanne ciani - a sonic womb pt. 3 135. mogwai - major treat 136. this will destroy you - entrance 137. sleepmakeswaves - time wants a skeleton 138. elsa hewitt - rebird 139. ulla - i think my tears have become good 140. aether - she isn't here 141. zoe polanski - the last frontier 142. lyra pramuk - witness 143. ana roxanne - a study in vastness 144. julianna barwick - nod 145. the leaf library - about minerals 146. gia margaret - barely there 147. lucy gooch - my lights kiss your thoughts every moment 148. briana marela - forgiveness 149. loma - homing 150. mree - open arms 151. ellis - saturn return 152. alexia avina - fit into 153. fenne lily - to be a woman pt. 1 154. noble oak - evaporate 155. mint julep - blinded 156. rush week - best laid plans 157. mini trees - slip away 158. winter - bem no fundo 159. yumi zouma - cool for a second 160. laura veirs - burn too bright 161. terry vs. tori - keepsake box 162. castlebeat - shoulder 163. candace - still phase 164. tiny deaths - if i'm dreaming 165. lydia - heavy 166. caspian - nostalgist 167. nova one - lovable 168. corey flood - heaven or 169. hazel english - off my mind 170. bantug - dizzy 171. tops - colder & closer 172. the hidden shelf - miracles 173. ruru - 99 174. widowspeak - even true love 175. cheerleader - providence 176. wild nothing - blue wings 177. deradoorian - corsican shores 178. strfkr - second hand 179. mint field - contingencia 180. ringo deathstarr - god help the one's you love 181. no joy - dream rats 182. white poppy - orchid child 183. keeps - swiggum 184. flung - firstly zested 185. the bilinda butchers - rie 186. sipper - kid 187. radiator hospital - imposter syndrome 188. addy - equinox 189. boyo - dogma 190. alexandra savior - the archer 191. phoebe bridgers - chinese satellite 192. soccer mommy - circle the drain 193. routine - numb enough 194. quarter-life crisis - comfortable 195. madeline kenney - sucker 196. layne - linnea 197. wilsen - align 198. pynkie - you 199. bandanna - ghost home 200. waxahatchee - can’t do much 201. crisman - portrait 202. liza anne - i wanna be there 203. purr - gates of cool 204. honey cutt - hung up on me 205. the beths - out of sight 206. the ophelias - grand canyon 207. sjowgren - flip phones 208. haim - gasoline 209. thanya iyer - i forget to drink water (balance) 210. sad13 - good grief 211. porridge radio - give/take 212. lannds - not in a good way 213. katie von schleicher - wheel 214. hey cowboy! - detective farmer brown 215. tombo crush - pink 216. eliza moon - tell me / why'd you 217. anna mcclellan - raisin 218. this is the kit - this is what you did 219. snarls - walk in the woods 220. blushh - deal with it 221. long neck - cicada 222. chloe moriondo - ghost adventure spirit orb 223. momma - biohazard 224. varsity - runaway 225. land of talk - footnotes 226. bully - stuck in your head 227. diet cig - stare into the sun 228. expert timing - gravity 229. slow pulp - track 230. maddie jay - shakes 231. beabadoobee - together 232. luna aura - crash dive 233. sorry - perfect 234. torres - good grief 235. partner - honey 236. beauty queen - this time around 237. maggie lindemann - knife under my pillow 238. bryde - paper cups 239. mundy's bay - sleep away the summer 240. squirrel flower - red shoulder 241. mourn - stay there 242. dream wife - so when you gonna... 243. illuminati hotties - superiority complex (big noise) 244. l.a. witch - true believers 245. hinds - burn 246. beach bunny - cuffing season 247. suzie true - idk u 248. bacchae - hammer 249. peach kelli pop - stupid girl 250. oceanator - heartbeat 251. pins - read my lips 252. best coast - different light 253. muncie girls - take steps 254. kailee morgue - this is why i'm hot 255. beach slang - let it ride 256. silverstein - take what you give 257. new found glory - scarier than jason voorhees at a campfire 258. the lawrence arms - quiet storm 259. mikey erg - bon voyage 260. pet symmetry - had a name, don't remember it 261. thank you, i'm sorry - backpack life 262. ratboys - alien with a sleep mask on 263. joyce manor - leather jacket 264. jeff rosenstock - scram! 265. the aquabats! - aliens and monsters! 266. the used - the lighthouse 267. hidden hospitals - how amazing 268. dikembe - all got sick 269. time spent driving - trust no 1 270. the casket lottery - more blood 271. record setter - someplace 272. emma ruth rundle - out of existence 273. gulfer - blurry 274. options - don't mind 275. i love your lifestyle - stupid 276. orchards - stealing your sleep 277. no tongues for quiet people - lake house lake house 278. into it. over it. - hollow halos 279. mountains for clouds - full disclosure 280. joan of arc - destiny revision 281. no thank you - saturn return 282. the front bottoms - camouflage 283. ride your bike - make like a tom and cruise 284. dragon inn 3 - yer brothers 285. the goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick - jars filled with rain 286. mansions - laser beams 287. waveform* - hello goodbye 288. owen - headphoned 289. cassino - tacoma 290. ajj - normalization blues 291. penelope scott - sweet hibiscus tea 292. angel olsen - (new love) cassette 293. trace mountains - fallin' rain 294. johanna warren - part of it 295. frances quinlan - lean 296. tomberlin - hours 297. samia - triptych 298. field medic - better way 299. adrianne lenker - my angel 300. jack m. senff - another day 301. lomelda - polyurethane 302. rosie carney - high and dry 303. brigid mae power - i had to keep my circle small 304. overcoats - new shoes 305. anna burch - not so bad 306. hop along, queen ansleis - the cactus 307. mandy moore - easy target 308. laura marling - held down 309. lisa loeb - doesn't it feel good 310. trixie mattel - gold 311. lilly hiatt - move 312. molly tuttle - sunflower, vol. 6 313. sarah jarosz - pay it no mind 314. katie heckel - help you mend 315. katie pruitt - my mind’s a ship (that’s going down) 316. in love with a ghost - trans rights 317. snail's house - imaginary express 318. isuka hino - dreamin' adventure!! 319. 4s4ki - nexus 320. lapix - loneliness 321. you - painter 322. aice room - dreary planet - yukiyanagi remix 323. zekk - oxygen 324. lu-i - loved happiness 325. synthion - volt switch 326. sanaas - polestar - junk remix 327. mameyudoufu - fluffy 328. awfuless - redemption 329. rejection - around you 330. toriena - getting into a pose 331. cosmo@bousoup - mow*mow*abduction!!! 332. yunosuke - ziqqurat 333. android52 - lovin', scratchin' 334. サクラsakura-lee - nobody else 335. desired - emotions 336. mikazuki bigwave - sakimashita bloomin'!! 337. skule toyama - smooth 338. adrianwave - goodbye 339. macross 82-99 - melt 340. cape coral - 707 hotline 341. 80kidz - heat 342. night tempo - baby 343. yaffle - lng, before 344. greyl - let me be with you 345. serph - palmtop tiger 346. happy kuru kuru - natsu no hi no labyrinth 347. couple n - earmie 348. airuei - magic sign 349. somunia - non player girl - nyankobrq 2p ver. 350. cosmicosmo - those that we once loved 351. maeshima soshi - the terminal 352. kijibato - 1room 353. yuc'e - ghost town 354. neko hacker - erased 355. jam2go - apotrope 356. mizuki ohkawa - cosmic cleft 357. singto conley - flora 358. 2tonedisco - shoelaces 359. cy8er - もしもしじゃぽん 360. nayuta - connect 361. t+pazolite - himitsu cult 362. milkoi - higher, higher, and then... 363. freezer - caramel rain (sanaas remix) 364. kotonohouse - pitter, patter 365. aika - superstar 366. yukiyanagi - love overdose 367. nanahira - twinkle password 368. ducky - hyper bloxxd 369. porter robinson - something comforting 370. moshimo - シンクロ 371. bish - スーパーヒーローミュージック 372. scenarioart - it's all right 373. base ball bear - ポラリス(c3 mix) 374. majiko - エスカルゴ 375. akaiko-en - ジャンキー 376. the peggies - weekend 377. lovely summer chan - more light 378. polkadot stingray - sp813 379. shishamo - フェイバリットボーイ 380. aimer - run riot 381. österreich - i'll take you everywhere 382. sora tob sakana - 夜間飛行 383. the shes gone - ふためぼれ 384. aimyon - marshmallow 385. cö shu nie - supercell 386. kensei ogata - violin case 387. せだい - yellownola 388. yonige - あかるいみらい 389. bearwear - i think 390. hitsujibungaku - ロックスター 391. cidergirl - 飛行船 392. room97 - faq 393. she's - ugly 394. bbhf - tokenai mahou 395. alisa takigawa - 夢 396. satomoka - glints 397. radwimps - shinsekai 398. pinoko - コリドー街 399. helsinki lambda club - you are my gravity 400. lucky kilimanjaro - 君とつづく 401. dish// - sauna song 402. zombie-chang - snooze 403. mizuki ohira - 無重力 404. みゆな - 歌おうよ 405. iri - come back to my city 406. aya a.k.a panda - i miss u 407. chelmico - disco (bad dance doesn't matter) 408. seiko oomori - 絶対彼女 409. yaeji - my imagination 상상 410. daoko - zukizuki 411. eill - night d 412. cifika - déjà vu 413. yeye - step in time 414. saevom - just like i dreamed then 415. cheeze - today's mood 416. stella jang - reality blue 417. younha - one day of twenty 418. jeong eun ji - whoo 419. fromm - aliens 420. crush - tip toe 421. heize - 1/1440 422. femm - level up 423. awich - poison 424. jessi - nunu nana 425. (g)i-dle - luv u 426. summer soul - tinder 427. taeyeon - worry free love 428. boa - l.o.v.e 429. fromis_9 - feel good (secret code) 430. faky - re:chase me 431. monsta x - night view 432. twice - up no more 433. loona - hide & seek 434. wjsn - pantomime 435. iz*one - fiesta 436. exid - ddd jpn ver. 437. gfriend - crème brûlée 438. april - lalalilala 439. weki meki - 100 facts (cool eng. ver.) 440. momoland - starry night 441. steve aoki - play it cool 442. bts - dynamite 443. sakurako ohara - shine on me 444. sumin - zaza♡ 445. onepixcel - lagrima 446. little glee monster - i feel the light 447. celeina ann - purikura 448. アイラヴミー - そのまんま勇者 449. okkyung lee - here we are (once again) 450. luca - lune 451. hakushi hasegawa - hikari no rock 452. haruka nakamura - your sonnet 453. itoko toma - shade 454. rina katahira - hoshizora* 455. ichiko aoba - easter lily 456. satoko shibata - 変な島 457. 角銅真実 - 6月の窓 458. 熊川みゆ - sixteen 459. 眉村ちあき - 緑のハイヒール 460. 竹内アンナ - striking gold 461. saucy dog - film 462. kaede - -ending- night blue 463. aseul - paradise 464. 박혜진 park hye jin - like this 465. charlotte is mine - road movie 466. plastic plastic - ฮัม - (hum) 467. clams - shiny rider 468. seventeen years old and berlin wall - no paradise 469. nuit - nightbirds 470. fulusu - ghost 471. rammells - sennengo 472. stargaze shelter - emulation (mode:totonee) 473. ヨルシカ - 昼鳶 474. nakamuraemi - 大人の言うことを聞け 475. kenshi yonezu - ひまわり 476. tk from ling tosite sigure - reframe 477. penguinrush - 色彩 478. lee jin ah - candy pianist 479. mei ehara - どちらにピントを 480. jizue - because 481. mouse on the keys - room 482. fox capture plan - stand my heroes - groove version 483. ryutist - girls 484. yeti let you notice - bouquet 485. tricot - 真っ黒 486. madison cunningham - giraffe 487. covet - atreyu 488. floral - maybe not one day 489. envy - eternal memories and reincarnation 490. baths - mikaela corridor 491. sufjan stevens - run away with me 492. fractures - feel 493. the 1975 - frail state of mind 494. dan mason ダン·メイソン - everytime i cry 495. brothertiger - cannonball 496. porches - rangerover - bonus track 497. tame impala - instant destiny 498. washed out - paralyzed 499. pink skies - portland 500. so below - bone 501. purity ring - silkspun 502. llll - breathless 503. slow magic - somewhere 504. kasbo - lune 505. cloudnone - let the music in 506. jody wisternoff - blue space 507. drama - hold on 508. satin jackets - meridian getaway 509. direct - opal 510. lane 8 - road 511. baile - jlm 512. yuni wa - starships 513. nora van elken - sakura 514. geotheory - the day i left you 515. yota - hazy paradise 516. spencer brown - chance on us 517. the avener - conscious shadows 518. kalbells - mothertime 519. bella boo - in love 520. kirara magic - neon 521. mija - digressions 522. cuushe - emergence 523. transviolet - rituals 524. keep shelly in athens - steady to go 525. young ejecta - ah ha 526. annie - in heaven 527. lany - good guys 528. dominic pierce - glad xoxo 529. tender - what you're missing 530. alice jemima - binge love you 531. kitty - baby pink 532. faye meana - like honey 533. lunadira - am i gonna die? 534. loony - white lie 535. justine skye - fav 536. wafia - good things 537. victoria monét - jaguar 538. malia civetz - love thing 539. keiynan lonsdale - i confess my love 540. deaton chris anthony - tuethday 541. kallitechnis - body&soul (ish d remix) 542. talitha. - ineedsomeone 543. keke palmer - thick 544. kesha - birthday suit 545. l.e.j - pas l'time 546. selena gomez - rare 547. the aces - daydream 548. jessie ware - mirage (don’t stop) 549. joan - try again 550. melanie c - blame it on me 551. astrid s - dance dance dance 552. little mix - holiday 553. justin bieber - yummy 554. ariana grande - positions 555. bea miller - feel something different 556. lady gaga - rain on me (with ariana grande) 557. raye - regardless 558. the weeknd - hardest to love 559. andrea valle - lovergirl 560. k/da - the baddest 561. allie x - susie save your love 562. terror jr - dinner plate 563. shawn wasabi - halo halo 564. benee - snail 565. sevdaliza - oh my god 566. gupi - modest 567. six impala - sweetsweetsweetlikebubblegum 568. charli xcx - i finally understand 569. golin - hanakotoba 570. shygirl - freak 571. madge - ethanol 572. arca - afterwards 573. kelly lee owens - re-wild 574. ari mason - pangaea 575. gabrielle aplin - dear happy 576. taylor swift - the 1 577. awfultune - buds 578. sneaks - scorpio on your side 579. izzy camina - kill your local indie softboy 580. mxmtoon - ok on your own 581. wens - giant bat 582. billie eilish - my future 583. tash - when you leave 584. fletcher - the one 585. silver sphere - ghosts! 586. tei shi - ok crazy 587. dounia - sucked all the fun 588. tatiana hazel - carmen sandiego 589. magdalena bay - killshot 590. kllo - insomnia 591. leisure suite - closer 592. morgan saint - i dreamt that i knew you 593. ayelle - got love 594. michi - escondida 595. lyrica anderson - lyfted 596. sasha sloan - lie 597. niki - plot twist 598. sarah reeves - heart first 599. salt cathedral - caviar 600. chelsea cutler - sad tonight 601. rituals of mine - heights 602. e^st - flight path 603. sara diamond - great together 604. phem - stfu 605. carlie hanson - daze inn 606. lauren aquilina - latest ghost 607. caroline rose - command z 608. misterwives - oxygen 609. ella vos - turbulence 610. austra - i am not waiting 611. triathalon - you 612. phoebe ryan - icimy 613. katzù oso - kiss u better 614. luwten - control 615. raveena - heartbeat 616. oohyo - 2020 617. oklou - another night 618. jouska - bring you back 619. fleur east - easy to love 620. soft glas - overbite 621. jaden - muted sunrise 622. snny - better to leave it 623. saint mela - alkaseltzer 624. mia gladstone - ego 625. helena deland - truth nugget 626. oh wonder - oceansize 627. steven padin - sashimi 628. kacey johansing - i try 629. treasureseason - spinning plate 630. landshapes - drama 631. tennis - matrimony ii 632. pomplamoose - morning waterbug 633. soko - being sad is not a crime 634. the big moon - barcelona 635. shamir - diet 636. knox fortune - static 637. carly rae jepsen - let's sort the whole thing out 638. real estate - the main thing 639. hayley williams - roses/lotus/violet/iris 640. nada surf - something i should do 641. bombay bicycle club - is it real 642. the seshen - faster than before 643. thao & the get down stay down - how could i 644. marla hansen - path 645. christine and the queens - la vita nuova 646. half waif - siren 647. malena zavala - ritmo de vida 648. bendik - himmelen 649. hanna järver - kalmar slott 650. frida sundemo - anything 651. kate nv - telefon 652. ambar lucid - questioning my mind 653. coco reilly - mirror 654. ghostly kisses - lydian 655. kacy hill - told me 656. lianne la havas - can't fight 657. donna missal - how does it feel 658. felivand - gone 659. jordana - divine 660. empress of - void 661. banoffee - ripe 662. vanessa carlton - i can't stay the same 663. fiona apple - heavy balloon 664. poppy - concrete 665. rina sawayama - stfu!

Second Thoughts: A Fan Sequel to First Times

[Author’s note: Final part of Chapter 8 done and dusted. I’m working on Chapters 9 (the one everyone’s been waiting for) and 10 (the wrap up). Thank you for sticking with me on this crazy ride. Do let me know what you think!

I wrote this chapter to: A New Beginning (Extended) by Alexandre Desplat]

Links to: Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5 (Part I), Chapter 5 (Part II), Chapter 6 (Part I), Chapter 6 (Part II), Chapter 6 (Part III), Chapter 7, Chapter 8 (Part I), Chapter 8 (Part II)

Chapter 8: Lights (Part III)

It’s quiet.

Very quiet, save for the frantic rhythm of Aliya’s heartbeat tapping out a warning that this is a mistake. As nerve-wracking as it may be, it’s a mistake Aliya is willing to make, because it feels right.

Though Aliya was certain she wanted to be on this side of the door, what to do once she followed Aly inside was far less clear. She had made it two steps past the entrance before coming to a hesitant stop. Blinking to adjust to the darkness, she notices the temperature is much warmer in here than the hallway they had just come from. It might have something to do with the memories her mind is unhelpfully conjuring up of her and Aly in enclosed spaces.

The sound of something - a glass? - being knocked over onto a hard floor shakes Aliya out of her daze.

“Oops.”

Grateful for the distraction, Aliya watches in silence, lips twisted in amusement, as Aly throws out an arm and happily slurs out “Welcome to ‘merica”. She sways and fumbles her way over to what appears to be a bedside table, miraculously avoiding knocking anything else over. The faint outline of a lamp is just visible in the corner, and a dim band of light is thrown across the room once the girl manages to switch it on.

Aliya takes the opportunity to let her eyes wander, absorbing the homely messiness that makes it obvious the lefthand side belongs to Aly.

There are clothes spilling out of a half-zipped suitcase, a chaotic smattering of makeup on top of a set of wooden drawers. A mug stamped with the words ‘Sassy And Just A Bit Bad Assy’ is rolled on its side at the foot of an unmade bed, one of two in the room. Pushed up against the far wall between the beds is a modest desk, on top of which several framed pictures are neatly arranged.

One of them looks very familiar.

Smiling, Aliya walks past Aly and up to the desk. She reaches out to brush fingertips over the glass panel of the picture that’s caught her interest. Her smile broadens as she takes in the grinning, freckled girl with the shiny metal braces, arms wrapped around her siblings, soft brown eyes blown wide and brimming with love. The image stands in stark contrast to Aliya’s old photos. Most depict the ferocious scowl she would hurl at whoever was unlucky enough to be tasked with making her smile for the camera.

Aliya can make out the sounds of Aly shuffling and rustling behind. She expects the girl to erupt in protest at her rediscovery of that particular childhood snapshot, the way she did the first time in London. When no protest comes, Aliya spins around, of half a mind to get a rise out of Aly with some well-placed teasing.

Her jaw drops before she can formulate a single word.

What is she -

Aliya sucks in a wet, ragged breath at the sight of Aly’s plaid jeans, now thrown into a crumpled heap on the bed; at the realization that Aly is dressed only in her underwear and button-down shirt.

Briefly snapping her eyes shut, Aliya reminds herself that she is nothing if not disciplined. She works to contain the dull ache that starts pulsating in her veins. Next, she resolves to not stare too much, nor to catalogue in detail the strong, shadow-painted lines of the muscles in the girl’s bare legs. She almost succeeds too, until Aly casually starts peeling her shirt off like she’s completely forgotten there’s someone else in the room.

Aliya’s heart shoots up into her throat, a tiny gasp flying from her lips quicker than she can kill it.

At the sound, Aly freezes. Realization seems to jolt through her the instant she glances up to see Aliya gaping at her. Even in the dark, Aliya catches how Aly’s features flush a deep red.

The girl clears her throat uncomfortably. “I’ll go into the bathroom to change.”

“No,” Aliya whispers, cursing how her voice cracks. She takes a step forward, only to halt with a jerk, her body and mind warring furiously over just how much closer she should get to Aly. “Stay.” A small voice orders her to at least avert her gaze to give Aly some privacy, but she ignores it and stays rooted to the spot, unable to move a muscle, heart straining painfully against her chest.

Aly takes a moment to search Aliya’s face with unfocused eyes. Eventually, she nods and continues the process of shedding her clothes, but it isn’t long before she encounters a new obstacle. “Damn it. I knew I shouldn’t have worn this,” the girl mutters.

Aliya swallows hard as Aly’s fingers flutter uselessly over the buttons that are preventing her from just slipping the shirt over her head. She guesses by how tightly Aly is gritting her teeth that the aftermath of too much vodka is starting to kick into high gear. And really, maybe the drinks Aliya consumed herself are starting to affect her too, because she moistens her lips, exhales a shaky breath and says unthinkingly, “I help you.”

The hesitant offer barely brushes the air, and for a moment Aliya isn’t even sure she said it at all. But then Aly looks blankly at Aliya and echoes in a low voice, “You’ll help me?”

Putting on an air of nonchalance, Aliya straightens her back and strides towards the American, motioning for her to sit down on the bed. “Either you break nice shirt, or I help you take off,” she says, tone brisk and all business, like there is nothing more to her proposal than simple practicality. And it was, wasn’t it? She had already dragged Aly halfway across the Olympic Village and firmly discouraged strange attachments to lamp posts - this was just one more thing that fell under her duties as a friend.

Yes, that common duty all friends have to help undress each other, Aliya thinks sarcastically to herself.

A dazzling smile lights up Aly’s face.

Aliya lifts a brow. “What?”

“You think my shirt is nice,” the American repeats in a tone caught somewhere between gratitude and smugness.

Aliya rolls her eyes. Without waiting for outright permission, she steps closer, shivering a little as she reaches for Aly and moves into her space. Forcing herself to be calm, Aliya brushes her fingers over the top button of Aly’s shirt. She deliberately avoids any eye contact, but that hardly prevents a thrill from rushing down her spine when she pops the button open and hears Aly’s breath hitch roughly in her throat.

“Aliya.”

The breathiness with which Aly utters her name stirs something in Aliya, something dizzy and wild. She looks up to find the girl staring wide-eyed at her, and for a moment, it feels like they’re perched dangerously on the edge of an abyss, both waiting for the other to leap in first. The slow pounding beneath Aliya’s ribs grows to a painful, thudding pace. Aly’s gaze is half-lidded and hazy, and the unspoken passion in it sends ripples of heat through Aliya’s system, from her throat, to her stomach and then further down.

Aliya isn’t thinking. Only reacting.

So she lets her hands drift away from the buttons and starts sliding them slowly down Aly’s sides, drawing a gasp from the girl. She dips her fingers lower, wrapping them around the curve of Aly’s waist, timidly at first, but the tremor that races through Aly’s body quickly turns the touch into a fervent grip.

And then she leans forward to press her trembling mouth to Aly’s.

The girl is so stunned, Aliya can almost taste it. Her muscles go still, almost rigid, beneath the trail of Aliya’s fingers over her hips.

For the life of her, Aliya can’t think of a single reason why she didn’t do this sooner. It’s like rediscovering fire and the missing breath of her heart, along with every perfect thing they’d sacrificed to the distance between them.

The relief is overwhelming and makes Aliya’s eyes sting.

She tilts her head and pushes further in, shuddering at the small sob Aly releases against her. Aly’s hand flies up to cup Aliya’s face, the fingers of the other seizing the back of Aliya’s neck to tug her in with equal intensity. A wordless understanding passes between them; that if forever wasn’t in the cards, then they could at least have this moment to take back with them, to die with the memory of it branded on their lips.

Inhaling sharply through her nose so as not to break the kiss, Aliya makes short work of the rest of the buttons. She pushes open Aly’s shirt with surprising speed and hungrily runs her hands over the girl’s stomach, loving the tautness and smoothness and familiarity of her skin, reveling in the way Aly hisses at the contact and quakes beneath her fingertips.

Aliya wraps more fully around Aly’s bottom lip and sinks her teeth in. The soft moan that rips up from Aly’s throat fuels a heady mix of adrenaline and desperation, causes Aliya to dig involuntarily into the girl’s hips, makes her want more, more, more.

“Aliya - ”

Through the heated haze, Aliya hears Aly gasp her name out a bit louder. It’s the pressure of Aly’s hands against her cheeks, holding her with so much tenderness and yet somehow also holding her at bay, that snaps Aliya back to attention.

“Aliya, wait.”

Wait. Did she say…?

It takes all the discipline Aliya can muster to pull back, momentarily disoriented. Breathing hard, faces only inches apart, Aliya locks her eyes onto Aly’s: they are soft, heated, beautiful… grave. Aliya draws her brow together in a sharp frown. At once, she remembers where they are, what they were doing - what she had done - and her stomach suddenly clenches into a ball of doubt. Her hands drop from where they were clutching at Aly’s waist, as if they had been burnt.

“I am sorry,” Aliya says abruptly. “I should not have - “

“Don’t. I’m not sorry.”

Aly slips one hand down around Aliya’s lower back, giving her a reassuring squeeze and bringing her forehead to Aliya’s. With a small sigh, Aliya can’t help but to press closer, to breathe in her scent and savor as much as possible everything about this girl she’s missed so much.

“I want you,” she hears Aly murmur, warm breath stuttering across Aliya’s lips. “More than you know. But I want this… you… when I’m not - ” Aly’s head tips back, eyes squeezing together as a flash of pain crosses her face.

"Aly."

“If tonight is the last night we have together, I might regret not having you,” the other girl continues after drawing labored breaths. Her words are no longer slurred, but spoken with the emphasis of someone who has yet to recover full control of their faculties. Aly reaches up to run shaky fingers through Aliya’s hair, and a painful lump rises in Aliya’s throat. “But I know I’ll regret it more if I have you when I’m… like this. If I do have you, I want it to be right. I want to show you that I - that you - “ Aly takes in another unsettled breath. “I want it to be perfect.”

Perfect is you being with me, Aliya wants to tell her.

Instead, she just nods and whispers, "Okay."

Aliya closes her eyes and leans into Aly’s touch, shoulders sagging weakly as Aly strokes along her jaw. She isn’t aware that she’s crying until Aly lifts a thumb to gently swipe away a hot tear that’s managed to slip down her cheek.

When she opens her eyes again, she finds Aly looking at her, through her, like she sees the entire galaxy held within her depths. Aliya stares back, breath frozen, unable to believe there is someone like Aly for whom she had fallen, who had fallen for her.

The moment is broken by a sharp groan from Aly. The American lets go of Aliya, stumbles and falls back down onto her bed, as if she’s been hit by a jet of cold water. She passes a hand over her eyes.

“Ugh. I think we made a good call. If I had barfed while we - oh God. I feel like someone’s just punched me in the stomach.”

Despite everything that’s happened, Aliya emits a soft laugh. The immense heat burning a path through every inch of her body doesn’t let up, but she can feel the more rational side of her returning slowly, if reluctantly, to the fold. She doesn’t know if she’ll regret that they didn’t take things further, but she does know how to take care of a girl suffering the early onset of a bad hangover.

With practised efficiency, Aliya helps stretch Aly’s legs out and reaches over to anchor Aly’s pillow more firmly beneath her head. Another rumbling groan is all the response she gets. “Be still,” she soothes. “It will be passing soon.” She carefully works the blanket out from under Aly and tucks it around her legs (she judges it too hot to draw it all the way up to the shoulders). Finally, after reaching over to switch the lamp off, Aliya steps back to admire her handiwork.

Brilliant whitish moonlight streams through the window, spilling over Aly’s pale face and the exposed skin underneath her open shirt. Aliya tactfully averts her gaze, sweeping it instead over trembling eyelids and the cute sprinkling of faint freckles over the bridge of her nose. Breathing shallow but steady, Aly already looks to be out for the count.

That has to be some kind of new record.

The girl mumbles something inaudible and shifts, a rich tangle of hair spilling across the pillow, and Aliya’s fingers twitch with the desire to touch.

Just as Aliya is debating whether that’s her cue to make an exit, Aly’s eyes snap open. She blinks them once, slowly and deliberately, as if wiping cobwebs from her mind, before latching them onto Aliya.

Aliya unconsciously holds her breath.

“Do you think you’ll ever feel this way about someone else?” The hesitant way Aly asks it turns the question into a half-desperate plea, and it breaks Aliya.

“No.”

The hot promise in Aliya’s voice astonishes even herself, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Any other answer would have been an outright lie.

The tension in Aly’s body relaxes. “Me neither. I guess there’s that.” She sinks back into the bed, the lines in her face smoothing out. Another long silence lapses. Aliya remains standing beside the bed, restlessly shifting her weight from foot to foot. Waiting…

“Would you… do something for me?”

Aliya raises her eyes to find Aly staring again. She tilts her head questioningly, her curiosity intensifying when the girl blushes.

“I mean, only if it doesn’t bother you, and if you don’t have to be getting back to your team. I’m sorry you had to leave the party early. I know it’s not that often we get time off, and you’re here looking after me, and I really shouldn’t ask for anything more. Besides, it must be late, and you must have to get up early tomorrow for training…“

Even when done at a slower, more inhibited pace, the babbling is so quintessentially Aly and so very obviously broadcasts her vulnerability that it makes Aliya want to climb straight into the bed and wrap the girl up in a tight, protective embrace.

She doesn’t, of course.

“What I can do?” Aliya cuts her off gently, settling for inching a bit closer.

An odd mixture of apprehension and boldness appears in Aly’s expression.

“Will you stay with me?”

Aliya’s chest constricts, like there’s suddenly not enough room for her heart to pump under her ribs.

“Just until I fall asleep,” Aly says softly, holding Aliya’s gaze, as if aware of the emotional terrain her request is putting Aliya through. “If you leave now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”

Silence for an interminable moment.

Then Aliya dips her head in quiet assent.

And then, she has to tear her focus away from the shy smile now radiating from Aly’s face while she quickly analyzes the safest way to do this. She considers sitting on the edge of the bed at Aly’s feet, but dismisses that as too forward. She could settle on the floor, but surmises the hardwood boards would soon become uncomfortable. Aliya swings her head around and catches sight of the round plastic chair pushed under the desk.

She can work with that.

Before she can execute her decision to drag the chair over towards the bed, she spots Aly biting her lip, still staring at her with that intense look that makes Aliya want to squirm. There’s a flutter at the base of Aliya’s throat as she swallows, and she knows Aly sees it, because the girl’s mouth curls into a knowing grin.

Narrowing her eyes at Aly and crossing her arms with a huff, Aliya tries to communicate how much she doesn’t appreciate the fact that an American has managed to reduce her to this unrecognizable, indecisive, awkward version of herself.

It doesn’t have the intended effect, because the next thing she knows, Aly is flipping the blanket open and patting the empty side next to her. Her eyes never once leave Aliya’s face.

“Please,” Aly whispers, the grin on her face slowly fading, replaced with a look of quiet pleading.

A shiver crests on Aliya’s skin. Something about how that particular word falls from the girl’s lips gives it power over her, makes surrendering herself to Aly the only viable option.

“Okay, Aly.”

With what sounds like a sigh of relief, Aly scoots over on her side to make room, putting her back against the wall the bed is wedged against.

Aliya stares at Aly for awhile longer, captivated by the soft jut of her shoulders where her shirt has fallen away. Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, Aliya kicks off her boots. She slips underneath the blanket gingerly, wriggling down the length of the bed as she tries to get comfortable without bumping into the other gymnast.

The bed isn’t really made for two, but it’s wide enough that they can simply share the space without touching. The stillness of the air belies the hammering of Aliya’s heart. She’s a little crestfallen that Aly appears to be respecting the invisible boundary she had felt obligated to draw between them.

Until the bed dips with a jolt.

“Aliya.”

“Hm?”

“I have to compete in event finals tomorrow.” Aly’s words are infused with slight panic.

Aliya frowns. Today is Friday -

She’s distracted by more movement, then the tickle of soft breath against her ear.

“If Martha finds out I’m competing with a hangover, she’ll skin me alive.”

Aliya turns her head to meet huge round eyes filled with worry. They’re gorgeous, and so easy to get lost in.

“I am not thinking your” - Aliya fishes around for the English term for ‘team coordinator’ but gives up - “she, is wanting your skin.”

The pillow makes a swishing sound as Aly shakes her head against it. “You haven’t met Martha.”

So the inexplicable fear of this Martha character hasn’t changed since London, either.

“Aly, I know many coach in Russia who is ten times Martha. Remember she is needing you more than you need her. You are one who is doing hard work, who will bring home the medal.” Sensing further argument, Aliya places a comforting hand on Aly’s shoulder. “And you are not needing to fear. It is Friday.” Her mouth quirks. “Your event final is on Tuesday. You are having many days to get well.”

“Oh. I could have sworn it was tomorrow,” Aly replies wearily. “Time just goes by so fast.”

Aliya is about to offer more reassurance when she’s startled by the pad of Aly’s finger carefully tracing over her cheekbones, her lips, then down the curve of her neck. Her breath stills in the echoing darkness and her eyes drift shut, trying to carve every sensation into her memory forever. When Aly’s arm drops away, Aliya has to bite down on her tongue to prevent a disappointed whimper from escaping.

“We need more time,” Aly murmurs.

We will never have enough time.

There’s only time enough for one last important concern before the girl finally drifts off into a deep sleep.

“I should brush my teeth,” Aly muffles into her pillow.

“Tomorrow, Raisman.”

“… It’s not civilized.”

Aliya shushes her.

“Sleep now.”

She counts each second it takes for Aly’s breathing to slow to a lumbering pace, making each one last for as long as possible.

-----

Time is a strange paradox.

If Aliya thinks about how she should pry herself from Aly before her teammates return, it flees from her at the speed of a falling star; each moment flames bright and meets a quick death. But if she concentrates on the way her arm is wrapped snugly around Aly’s waist, time slows almost to a complete stop.

Oh that. That had just… happened.

Thirty minutes in - or maybe it was ten minutes, or two hours, Aliya can’t be sure - Aly had rolled onto her side, putting her back towards Aliya. Without warning, she had also grabbed hold of Aliya’s hand in one swift unconscious act and wrapped it around her middle. And kept right on sleeping.

That’s how Aliya finds herself reflecting on how she got here, treasuring the slow burn of Aly’s body pressed against her front.

At one point, Aliya had thought she could hate Aly.

It was after the girl had heartwrenchingly told her she couldn’t keep their relationship going, couldn’t stand loving her anymore. It was then, that Aliya thought hate was inevitable. When it didn’t come naturally, she categorically tried to hate her, and when that failed, she vowed to at least never put her trust in Aly, ever again.

And yet…

For all the times she claimed herself distant and imperturbable, Aliya never truly doubted the fact that Aly cared for her, just as much as she cared for Aly. They were each bound to the other in ways she will never completely fathom. The pain of the past might still weigh on Aliya’s heart, but it had become impossible to bury it without also burying the best, most precious parts of herself. The two are intertwined, and she is slowly beginning to accept that.

It helps that the residual hurt seems to be fading to a dim memory; that the calm rise and fall of Aly’s breathing next to her is now layering something else over it, something that feels incredible and wonderfully alive.

Aliya does what she does next to feel alive.

“Aly,” she breathes into the darkness.

She thinks she hears a barely perceptible sigh, but other than that, Aly’s deep breathing continues uninterrupted. Still, she should make certain.

“I only let you winning silver in all-around final because I know you will being a big baby if you lose to Russian again.”

Aliya counts to thirty.

When no indignant outrage ensues, a wave of trepidation and exhilaration sweeps over Aliya. It allows words she has kept locked away for too long to well up and rise to the surface in one resurgent tide.

“Aly, I… I love you.”

It’s surprising, how much it quickens her pulse to say it for the first time, how it blocks her throat with something between a sob and a laugh. If it wasn’t so impossible, Aliya could believe she had loved Aly before they even met, before they had been given names, or shapes, or lives, because it feels like love for her had always been.

Saying it once isn’t enough. So Aliya draws the words up from the depths of her soul, releases them more fervently the second time round.

“I love you.”

Aliya tightens her hold on Aly, breathing in the sweetness of her hair, presses a light kiss to the nape of her neck.

This time, no one wipes away the lone tear tracking down her face.

-----

The second thought Aly has when she wakes to the sound of her own pained groan is how empty her bed feels. It was a miracle she’d even had a second thought, because her first was pure confusion over why little fuzzy dots were taking turns stabbing at her eyeballs with white lightsabers.

It takes another few moments before Aly realizes what, or rather who, is missing from her bed, and then she is instantly and violently awake. Her swollen bladder promptly forgotten, she stiffens, fully alert, swiveling her head back and forth like she’s at a tennis match.

The fuzzy dots in her head pick that exact moment to swap their lightsabers for raging jack hammers.

Forced to flop back down onto the covers, Aly feels her heart race, even as she tells herself to calm down, she can’t have imagined Aliya in her room last night, in her bed… it’s all too vivid to have been some crazy dream…

She sucks in a deep breath before turning her head to the side, wincing as she does. Madison is tucked into the bed opposite, fast sleep.

Aly tries everything she can to remember the details of the night before. She runs her hand over the crumpled space next to where she had woken, squished against the wall. She thinks she detects the faint indent of another body pressed into her sheets. When she squeezes her eyes hard enough, she swears a light hint of Aliya still lingers on her pillow and her blanket.

As soon as she feels well enough to run her gaze over the room, hoping it will help jog her recall, she’s immediately drawn to the English-Russian dictionary placed on top of her bedside table.

Aly frowns. That was definitely not where she left it last time. The oddity makes her reach towards it, and sure enough when she flips the dictionary over onto its side, there is a particular page with its corner folded. Dog-earing books is something Aly has always thought should be outlawed, not least because it grates on her to ruin a perfect piece of paper.

Except this time she welcomes it with a slow-spreading grin and an unexpected flood of hope.

Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if what happened last night was dream or reality, because the one word circled in light pencil on the open page in front of her confirms that it was both.

 всегда:

Always.

HD-Remix 2021 Anonymous Masterlist

This is the anonymous masterlist of all the fic and art produced for the 2021 HD-Remix fest (33 fics, 2 artworks).

Reveals will be posted on Friday, November 19, at which point we will also add the author's names to all the header and quote posts and reblog them :)

You can find the complete participant list here, if you're interested in trying to guess who wrote what before then!

________________________

Fic inspired by Art

Feather (E | 36K)

remix of Untitled Veela!Draco by @swymsuyt

The Man With the Koi Fish Tattoo (E | 9K)

remix of Sensitivities by @sugareey-makes-stuff

Captivated (E | 8K)

remix of Captivating by @digthewriter

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Fic inspired by Fic

Snapshots of a Pregnancy (T | 4K)

remix of A Star Danced by @ladderofyears

both that morning equally lay (T | 4K)

remix of Auror Conley On The Case by @frenchmarshmalloww

touch me with the lights off (and my chains on) (E | 7K)

remix of choke me like you hate me (but you love me) by @swisstae

Owl of a Sudden (T | 3K)

remix of What the Werbelande Wind Blew In by khalulu

Echoes (T | 5K)

remix of It’s You by @ohdrarry

you killed me in the gloom (T | 2K)

remix of you killed me on the moon by @epsilonargus

The Ferret's in Love (or 5 Times Draco didn't say I love you + 1 Time he did) (E | 4K)

remix of In Love With The Ferret by @pineau-noir

All Will Be Well (E | 6K)

remix of All is Well by aminathescorpio

Consummāre (M | 1K)

remix of Transsubstantiato by @glittering-git

Little Star (Be My Anchor Remix) (M | 40K)

remix of Be My Anchor by @maraudersaffair

before the bond (T | 4K)

remix of A Different Kind of Heat by @themightyflynn08

Of all the promises I broke (G | 2K)

remix of Rose Trees by @greaseonmymouth

An Unexpected Courtship (E | 8K)

remix of An Expensive Courtship by @anaxandria-writes

Desert Rose (Sex On The Beach Remix) (T | 1K)

remix of Desert Rose by albuss

Distilled (T | 5K)

remix of Lights on the River by @doubleappled

i carry your heart in mine (M | 1K)

remix of Blush by @floydig

And History Repeats (M | 9K)

remix of The Rest Is History by @tedahfromtayla

Forest, for the Trees (G | 2K)

remix of In a dark quiet place by @itsjamethyst

Uncle Harry and the Overly Wise Six-Year-Old (T | 2K)

remix of Harriet Evans and the Happily Ever After by @lower-east-side

The Coldest of Days (E | 55K)

remix of December Never Felt So Wrong by @maesterchill

Of Mirrors, Myths, and Men (E | 5K)

remix of Into the Potter-Verse by @veelawings

melodies pure and true (T | 3K)

remix of Hope | It’s Okay to Not Be Okay | (from Draco's POV) by @janieohio

break my heart, set me free (T | 4K)

remix of Overground/Underground by @onbeinganangel

Touch Me (E | 1K)

remix of Heal Me by @greenmegsnoham

Living for a dream...loving for a moment (M | 10K)

remix of One of His Few Treasures by @timothysboxers

Unsubtle (G | 1K)

remix of Just Stay by @nv-md

Raspberry Sundaes and Sunflower Bouquets (T | 5K)

remix of Love in Three Parts by @static-abyss

can’t put this feeling into words (M | 2K)

remix of Feels how it feels to feel by @fw00shy

Can’t Hide From The Sun (E | 1K)

remix of Wolves by @hogwartsfirebolt

what if, but if, we could kiss (and just cut the rubbish) (E | 10K)

remix of Into the Potter-Verse by @veelawings

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Art Inspired by Fic

It can be up to me. Us. (G | ART)

remix of If It Were Up To Me by @the-starryknight

I'll wait (even though I want you now) (M | ART)

remix of Brick by Brick by @agentmoppet

Hollow Mondays

Today I woke up and I looked at myself in the mirror.  There I stand. I spend minutes studying the contours of my body, my face, my eyes.  Today I cannot imagine how anyone would find me attractive, desirable...how they would want my naked arms around them beneath the covers.  With time, remembering how I used to be adored and appreciated begins to fade.  I try to remember better the days when my ass got slapped, when passionate hands ran the marathon of my skin with the adoration of a collector. I look at myself and the words that come to my mind are “Not enough.”.  Not enough to keep my life together, my marriage.  Not enough to hold friendships or interest.  I have worked hard to open myself up and autopsy the cancer that destroyed trust and fractured foundations.  But removing it isn’t enough.  I cannot remove the time or the hurt, I can only offer bloody hands and black-laced sutures across the skin of my mind and personality.  “Do you see?” I cry out to the sky, “I am working on me as much as I can.”  There is silence that answers silence and again I speak, “Our history is like a precious vase we shaped together.  Even cracked we have the gold of self-work we can slip into its cracks.  Do you remember that?  We were going to be stronger in spite of our differences and hurts.  They would leave the channels for understanding that we could pour a river of gold within.  Please, I have collected so much to pour.”

I want to say so many things that I do not.  Those words go to dig themselves graves. watching me with limestone eyes as the earth of silence swallows them up. Sometimes waking up is like looking off the edge of a cliff.  It doesn’t always feel like there can be ups and dizzying highs.  I sit at the edge of that abyss and I dangle my feet over the edge.  I remember when there wasn’t a cliff here.  There was a mountain.  The going was sometimes hard and some days it seemed like we would never scale to the peak.  But the peak was there, the promise of a life we both wanted and I wanted to keep climbing with you. Sometimes it is hard to see where the mountain went.  The new one I traverse alone. Sometimes I want to run away with you.  From all our friends.  All our responsibilities.  Just dash into Florida and live with the gators making up silly songs in the bogwater.  Time has done so much to teach me the language of loss and the melody of regret.  I try not to get caught in that madness, the what if’s and the maybe if I had’s but they are always waiting for me. Sometimes I wonder if you feel the same magnetism I feel when you’re around.  There are these brief moments, snapshots of a second where I have this soaring feeling in my chest.  In those moments I want to kiss you.  Straight on your lips. I never do.  I never try.  I always wonder if sometimes you also feel that movement, like shifting tectonic plates in the deep deep of our minds, a desire to be close and together again.  I can imagine that has diminished with time. I know there is no way back.  No collection of words or revelations, developments or understandings that would make trying again a possibility for you.  I have no way to guarantee it would be different outside my own emotional revelations and understanding.  I do not believe in irreconcilable differences between us...nor do I believe my parents and family need to have influence over our lives. I want to spend Christmas with your folks and go to their holiday party together.  I want to spend more evenings with your mother and father playing games together, footsie under the table. The past is painful and there are so many memories of communication breakdowns and fights that can easily be summoned, but I cling mostly to the memories of tenderness and kindness, the light we shared so many days together...the hardships we navigated and the ways we tried to protect. Today I am lost, wandering in the hurt of wanting.  I want to wrap myself around you while you play animal crossing and watch shows. I want to just experience you, give thanks for you. I know sometimes it sounds like I look at the past with rosy glasses.  I ignore the hurt and the pain to see something better than what it was.  All I can say to that is through reflection and therapy I saw beneath the pain to the real emotions and the depth of love that motivated all my actions.  The fear of losing that love that profaned and ruined timeless moments together. When that song came on last night I was caught in the stormcloud of memory and desire.  I wanted to press my skin against yours and hear your heartbeat, feel the warmth of you pressing into the warmth of me as if we might hug each other into one being, aligned.

I wouldn’t fuck up another chance at happiness with you.  I would approach it with love and understanding, aware of my mistakes and the hurts of before.  I would step gently, listen louder and my actions would prove me different and dedicated. I know such words will not move mountains or alter fate.  I am happy at the opportunity to draw closer to you as a friend, a confidant, someone you are excited to see and spend time with. You have worked so hard not to hurt me.  You have bent action and will to make me feel safe and heard. I wish to do the same.  I wish to take up the broken pieces of trust discarded in the past, the pain and hurt and smooth gold against them.  Set them back and make our pottery beautiful. We answer to no one but each other. Perhaps it is stupid and I feel stupid for hoping there is a small part of you deep inside that misses the way we kissed and held each other.  That yearns for the casual ease we spent together, our adventures and our jokes.  That there is a part stronger than the fear and pain that still persists in you. That the person who looked at me with wonder and adoration and desire is still somewhere inside you, that she hasn’t washed away bit by bit as the months grow longer. But I don’t know.  Even if she did exist you would keep that part far away to avoid leading me on, hurting me, messy moments of mistakes.  Is it silly that I wish we could trust each other with all of us?  The messy and the together?  That we could be ourselves around each other...even if those parts didn’t always fit or make sense?   That we could talk about them, understand each other, and repair trust once shattered and discarded...fill love into the dark places where hurt and insecurity dwelt? I am so happy to work on our friendship together.  I am so happy you remain in my life.  I am so happy you care about my thoughts and opinions so much.  I want you to want me, you know.  I want you to want to see me more, to come surprise me with morning hellos or phone calls. I want to visit your new home, be the first allowed inside to meet your birbs and cat.  For you to feel safe that I will not judge you or your surroundings...that I have seen to the flaws that once made me so controlling. All I want.  All I ever want is to spend time with the person I love the most.  To laugh with her.  To adventure with her.  To see her triumph.  To be part of her journey. I want to be wanted as well.  I want her to ask me about my feelings, my thoughts, what I want and how we could arrive at those places hand in hand. I want to talk for hours with my best friend again, excited about the wonders of her mind and flattered she wants to know so much about mine. Are these silly things to want?  I don’t know. Every moment I spend with her is a triumph and a treasure.  Each moment is cherished.  Snapdragon, if you read this, the one important thing I want you to take away is that it is NEVER that you are not enough for me.  That you cannot be enough or spend enough time with me. It is simply that I am most happy when I am spending time with you...so I look forward to our adventures and time together.  I am happy to spend it with you.  Each time is enough.  Each moment is enough. But I am a greedybeb and I am always eager for the next treasured memory or moment of time spent with you. I’m sure sometimes that must feel like I don’t appreciate the time I do spend with you...because I always want more...but I cherish each moment and look forward to more. And the more you show me you want me.  Want to spend time with me.  Are interested in my thoughts and my head.  Want to talk to me, the more happy I feel and confident being honest and myself around you...the less fear I have. You have done enormous work.  You have made me feel safe.  Now all I want is to feel like I am making progress healing past hurts and restoring your trust in me.  I want the opportunity to show you I am different now and ready to listen to you. Even if things do not end the way I want them to, the journey will be worth it because at the end is my best friend in the entire world.  If I can find my way back there, it will all still be worth it.  If she can stay in my life, be a big part of it...I won’t have lost too much. I love you more than galaxies and exploding stars.  I love you more than puppy sneezes and birdsong. I love you more than Autumn magic and Summer bonfires. I want to end this note well because I do write uplifting blogs here...even if they are tinged in sad. And today I am just deep inside myself feeling unattractive, unwanted and unworthy.  They’re just feelings and I’m sure they will fade in time.  Remarkable how listening to a song one evening can have such a carryover into the day. And I feel clingy.  I feel like a nuisance.  I feel like I should disappear...but I know those are just emotional fractals of grief processing and I’ll be ok. I will be happy again.  Time will pass and I will be whole.  My love and appreciation for you, snapdragon, is unmarred.  Our communication has improved so much and I’m so excited to sit down with you and talk about communication again this week maybe...to see you, hear from you, maybe get some short visits from you and hope hope hopefully a reschedule on our pizza movie evening :). Your texts today.  Connecting with you has helped keep a lot of the sads at bay.  When I started this entry I was very low but a few texts later from you and I’m feeling a lil more like I’ll make it to tonight with a smile. Just thoughts a bub-bubblin. Needed to get them out...even if they were sad times.

I’m super intrigued to know what your favourite scene from sun sinks down, no curfew is?

this question has been on my mind all day and i think i’ve finally narrowed it down to a super short scene in the last chapter, england, when the two of them are eating breakfast outside in the manor garden:

They eat scones in the morning. Glasses of fresh orange juice cool their fingers. They sit in the garden in their pyjamas watching the peacocks rise from their slumber. The early morning sun is rich on their weary eyes and paints them with a thin lining of butterscotch orange.

Albus kisses Scorpius’ cheek. Scorpius points out the shapes of the clouds that slither past in the great abyss above.

Albus decides there and then, lips tacky with juice and fingers curled around Scorpius’ wrist and bare feet pressed firmly on the granite step below, that this is how he wants to spend the rest of his life.

this scene has always stuck in my head for some reason. to this day i believe that “the early morning sun is rich on their weary eyes and paints them with a thin lining of butterscotch orange” is the best sentence i have ever written, so maybe that’s why it’s my favourite? so much of the fic is description and places and action and activities; this is just a moment of peace, a little snapshot into what their life is going to be from now on. i just happen to think it’s a really nice passage, so i’d definitely say that one is my favourite :D

any good kalex fic recs? read any recently? thanks in advance

Hi there!

You also messaged me on eloquentdrivil, cause you weren’t sure if I checked this one often. I wanted to let you know I did see both messages cause this blog is hooked up to my main, so messages from both go into the same inbox. So if anyone else has that concern, you can reach me on either and I’ll see it, regardless of how much daily activity seems to happen on this one.

(Which was weird to put into perspective, cause I spend 8+ hours every day doing work for this blog, so it only kinda just hit me that it might seems somewhat neglected from the outside.)

Anyway, so fic recs. I’ve got them.

Before I start the list of individual fics, I’m gonna just sum up beaglesinbowties into one, cause she started taking up the whole damn list, so:

Everything she writes is gold (literally, check out everything, even her non-Kalex stuff, cuz god), but my stand-out faves are:

Collide series (which, no lie, I have open in at least one tab on my phone, at. all. times.)

It's all fun and games until somebody falls in love series

Another Sun

Noumenon

and Something Like a Fairytale

(it’s really hard to cut this short, cuz I just keep wanting to list everything)

Fic List (ordered as they came to mind):

1) Coffee on Wednesdaysby dare121

400k worth of utterly captivating, AU gold. Every character will suck you in and you’ll get lost for days. (Speaking of, I still owe dare121 a breakdown of my fav parts, but that list is already 3 pages long, and I accidentally started rereading the whole fic, so, yeah, high recommendations, for sure.)

2)  the most wonderful time of the year and kissing under the mistletoe by dare121

Grouped together, because they’re both 24-day-of-christmas anthologies written at the same time. I actually printed both out and bound them into an actual, for real book cuz I loved them so much

3)  of heat visions and foster sisters by dare121

Teenage Kalex, so well written, just the right amount of longing.

4)  nothing but troubleby dare121

I know dare121 is taking up the whole list, and I’m sorry, but I had to include this one, cuz it was my first Kalex fic. It was the catalyst that sent me spiraling into the pairing so hard. I actually only watched Supergirl so I could read S*percat fic, cuz I was between fandoms and just looking to eat up some time with new fic while other things were in hiatus and had absolutely zero intention of having it be anything more than a passing, casual thing, and then this one was just there in the main AO3 tag and I just got curious, so I took a glance at it and BAM, Kalex for life.

5)  Danvers times Danvers by silverwriter01

Unnecessarily good baby fic. 13/10 would read Too Often.

6)  Symbolization by justanexercise

I’m trash for Soulmate AUs, so 21 chapters of Kalex-oriented “the first words your soulmate says are tattooed on your skin” is exactly my kinda shit.

7)  Beyond Worlds by justanexercise

Longing and angst and secrets. It’s fuckin’ brilliant.

8)  One time Alex Danvers hated herself but got laid anyways by Alsike

Alex angst and self-loathing. It’s wonderful.

9)  Nowhere to Put This Great Happiness by Alsike

So good, so much self-loathing. So. Fucking. Perfect.

10)  I Didn’t Intend To Kiss You by wily_one24

Again with the angst. I really love the stuff. This one’s a bit lighter, more longing and confusion and confrontation and stuff.

11)  Secrets and Teenage kicks by Acidbuk

Jealous Kara and secret relationships. A+

12)  The Comfort of Touch by trancer

Such a nice build up and a really great way to show how they grow into each other over time.

13)  The First Time, All Over Again by trancer

God, it’s just a good story. Just, so good. I love the hints of past events, and the way Kara longs for Alex in that little snapshot we get of it, and honestly, “a dream dangling over an abyss” seeps into my mind out of nowhere, all the damn time.

14)  Busted Out by awomannotagirl

The angst and being forced to out themselves, the way everything is just saturated in detail, the memories are so vibrant. It’s wonderful.

And that’s my list. It’s not in any way complete, but I could list, like, fifty and still need to cut it short, so this is what I’m throwing out there now. May make a more comprehensive list later on.

Hope this helps you out, and thanks for the ask!

ANTEROGRADE TOMORROW     Title: Anterograde Tomorrow Pairing: Kaisoo Rating: R (currently pg-13) Genre: Romance, Tragedy, slight angst Length: Three-shot Summary: Kyungsoo is stuck in the hours while Jongin begs the seconds, because time stops for someone who can't remember and runs from someone who can't miss the last train home. prologue: daisies; word count: 759 

  Sunlight drifts into Kyungsoo’s dream, refracts into something cool and salty and maybe involving heels digging into the soft overlap between ocean and beach. He turns and the wet sand transforms into cold linens. When he opens his eyes the cocktail of seagull wings and shades of blue is replaced by a ceiling, meters too low, a small window at the end of a narrow bedroom, and peeling wood floorboards under worn rugs. It’s his room, albeit not exactly the same as it were yesterday, because there are green sticky notes pasted over every inch of every wall that he can’t recall having placed. Second skin of colored texts and diagrams, numbers and dates. A breeze lifts the curtains and ruffles the notes, plays a melody in the tune of drizzled paper applause. The sight is unfamiliar but not strange, like something that must have happened once before and slipped through his memory. Maybe there has been a day between today and yesterday. Maybe there has been more than a day. Somehow he doesn’t have to read the notes to know that they will explain how many days has passed, and what he’s meant to do today. But the little specks of yellow notes amongst the green, some on the floor and walls and table and one on the pillow next to his, strike him most. The handwriting is different. There are no dates. Just words. Kyungsoo props himself up slowly, habitually reaching to clasp the night table as he slides out of bed. Rug fuzzy under bare toes, scent of six o’clock coffee brewing in the café downstairs gentle on the palate. He picks up the yellow sticky on his pillow and reads it, “Your name is Do Kyungsoo. You have short-term memory loss, antesomething amnesia, so you won’t remember what happened last night. But let me help you out.” And the one on the pillow neighboring, “Last night I put my head on this pillow and my arms around your waist. My name’s Kim Jongin. I call you hyung. Yesterday you loved me. Today you’ll love me again.” He takes a step back, eyes wide and mouth cracked open. His heel crunches on another. “This is where you undressed me.” “This is where I undressed you,” is posted on the wall, right on top of a green note that says ‘Mijin’s no longer serves rice cakes—05/05/2008’. A few inches beside another one says, “And here I pushed you up against the wall and kissed you really hard (approximately, it was kind of dark) and we thought we should have sex.” Over the table is posted, “Here you sat, dangling your legs. I put my palm on your kneecap and you bent forward and kissed me first.” By the treasure chest at the end of his bed: “We talked about ballet. You hummed a tune and my fingers did an arabresque here (because your ceiling is too low and I’d rather not hit my head, okay) here, grand jeté onto the floor, fouetté en tourant and then sissonne on the back of your hand. Pas de valse fast up your arm and you smiled.” At the back of his bedroom door: “I leaned on this and read your green sticky notes while you went around cleaning up invisible messes. It came to me that all the green looks like grass, and grass is boring without daisies. So I hope you like yellow?” And as he opens the door, one smacks him on the forehead: “And here’s Kim Jongin. Say hello to me?” Kyungsoo looks up, gaze flicking uncertainly up the contours of sharp collarbones, tanned flesh, defined jaws. One millimeter at a time. The urge to slam the door and call the police because there is a stranger in his apartment and this stranger has written him unquestionably creepy notes hits him in the face. Thick pulse and dizziness make his head light and stomach turn. He really can’t feel his fingers, or knees for that matter. But everything settles down again—almost as if it were always meant to—when his eyes graze a dumb grin and a pair of glittering eyes. “Hi, hyung,” Jongin says, the corners of his lips falling, though features still soft. His voice is new, certainly, and Kyungsoo can’t recall precisely when he’s heard it before—if ever. Still, it’s almost too natural to rekindle Jongin’s smile with a tiny “Hello,” and somehow the syllables are perfect on his tongue, perhaps because he’s said it a thousand times already. Perhaps because they’re meant to be.     prologue: daisies; part one: lost and stuck; word count: 6,489 
  Kyungsoo has a scrapbook of faces and dates. Polaroid collage with little sentences inscribed underneath. This is Zitao, new Chinese waiter doing Wednesday night shifts (6 June 2010); here is Yifan, model requesting Rhapsody in Blue with a dry whiskey every Sunday (19 December 2009); Baekhyun there, but he moved out (6 July 2008). It’s a synopsis of Do Kyungsoo: neighbors, acquaintances, old friends, new strangers, presented with military precision. Near the end is a snapshot of a hunched figure, leaning on a brick wall, with one knee bent and the other propping his entire weight. A cigarette rests idly between long, thin fingers. Monochromatic grey ghosts along his countenance. White smoke twirls from the ends of his lips, diffusing through hair and drizzled rain into a strange sense of solitude. Two words are scratched underneath. Neighbor, smoking. -- The newspaper is dated 12 July 2012. But more than the fact that Kyungsoo can swear it was only 24 November 2008 yesterday, his shirt takes up a good quarter the front page photo. His favorite shirt. The one that he’d gotten for being employee of the week, with a lopsided, hand-sewn Pororo logo, right up in all of its magnified glory on the cover story. Hastily scanning over the headlines of ‘massive disorder in downtown Seoul caused by raining money’, Kyungsoo focuses back on the picture. It’s certainly his shirt, the one that he’s wearing right now and has rolled out of bed in twenty minutes ago, in fact. More precisely, the one that he can’t remember wearing to any expensive penthouse, which apparently the picture was taken in. According to the article, “Esteemed novelist Kim Jongin has just been bailed out for destruction of public order, after literally blowing a storm of hundred-thousand won bills out the window of his Seoul penthouse with an unnamed accomplice. Calling it a ‘billion-won confetti display’, he has caused the largest traffic jam in Seoul history, effectively blocking off streets within a two-kilometer distance as city residents rushed to collect the money.” But according to Kyungsoo, as he shoves the newspaper under Minseok’s nose, “National Post is pulling really elaborate pranks these days—but where did they find my shirt?” Minseok frowns hard at the article, and really hard at Kyungsoo, and then towards the other end of the bar. Kyungsoo is too busy re-reading the article and double-checking his shirt to notice it, or the fact that there is someone exceptionally well-dressed seated at the end Minseok’s wide-eyed stare, someone hiding an amused turn of the lips behind a glass of whiskey. -- They meet for the first time, Kyungsoo thinks, in the apartment elevator. It’s early Friday morning, 13th of July, an hour when the world runs on uncertain lamplights, drunken howls, and the occasional punch of laughter. There are just the two of them at this hour, and an obtrusive kind of silence. Having just returned from the bar, Kyungsoo tries to fight off the cocktail of metallic smoke and the thick scent of alcohol caught in his hair. The last ringlets of saxophone nestle over his fingers and cinquillo beat lingers under his skin, but none of it is enough to fill the abyss that stands between him and the stranger. The stranger, with an unlit cigarette between his teeth, turns first. The unflattering elevator lighting enshrouds him in jaundice yellow and a heavy veil of lethargy. Kyungsoo wonders, with the cinquillo pounding into his veins, if the man’s skin is as plastic as it seems. “Hot. The weather. It’s hot,” he says, proffering a hand that Kyungsoo grabs with hesitation. His grasp is surprisingly cold, long fingers and nails cut short and sharp, leathery skin stretched taut over gaunt knuckles. “Um,” Kyungsoo balks, as soon as he catches the stranger staring holes into his face. The handshake suddenly feels more of a deliberate judgment than an abrupt greeting. More frightening than tense and more awful than awkward. Between the creaks of the elevator flooring and sputters of the fluorescent light bulb, Kyungsoo’s voice comes out as a squeak two pitches higher than it’s supposed to be, “Yeah. Hot tonight.” The stranger says nothing. Instead he leans back on the elevator walls and stares, eyes flickering up and down the length of Kyungsoo’s figure. It’s the kind of stare that makes Kyungsoo draw back behind his jacket, though a thin layer of cashmere does little to hide him from the other’s glaring fixation. Time stands on its toes until the doors open, when Kyungsoo lets out a gasp of air he didn’t know he was holding in. Only later, after Kyungsoo has worked his way down the apartment corridors and noted that the stranger has trailed after him, does he realize that it’s probably not the first time they’ve met. “Do I know you from somewhere?” He finally asks, voice echoing uneasily down the long hallways. The stranger has stopped at the neighboring door, twirling a keychain around his forefinger. A sliver of moonlight works in from the railings and gleams off of something on his suit. Kyungsoo notes a pair of cufflinks, shiny and expensive-looking, too expensive-looking to belong to someone who would live in this kind of residence. “Do you?” The stranger’s lips work into a slow smirk. Kyungsoo picks the lint in his pocket. He doesn’t remember coming upon the stranger’s face while reviewing the memory book earlier. But perhaps he skipped a page. It’s happened before. He hurriedly reaches for his bag, and is stopped with a bark of laughter, “So you weren’t kidding about the amnesia.” “What?” “Interesting. Cool. Really. What’s the last thing you remember doing?” The stranger interrupts, in no apparent hurry as he slumps against his door and regards the way Kyungsoo is fumbling with the lock. Even in the dark, the twinkle of sadistic amusement gleaming from his grin is distinct. It makes him look older than he seems, almost sadly so. Kyungsoo thinks so hard he forgets to answer, and by the time he turns around again, the stranger has gone. -- They meet again for the first time in the staircase. The sun is breaking into a Monday. A gust of summer blows away the last rays of moonlight. Kyungsoo rushes down for his job at the factory and the man with an unlit cigarette between his lips works his way up. Their gazes collide, and maybe their shoulders graze, and that’s enough for Kyungsoo to freeze mid-step. But the man doesn’t spare a second to acknowledge Kyungsoo’s flabbergasted stare. He simply keeps climbing, wheezing and panting, face pale and beaded with perspiration. Kyungsoo watches his legs quiver and wobble with each step, as if they’re no longer strong enough to support the invisible, enormous weight on his shoulders. As if he would quake and topple over with the smallest tickle of a breeze. It’s almost breathtaking how broken his back looks from this angle, all fabrics caving over blades of bones, sharp angles and emaciated lines. Half a thought passes about maybe taking a photo of this man, but Kyungsoo doesn’t know what he would label that photo, and plus he’s late for work, so he runs on. For Kyungsoo, summers in suburban Seoul are made of mezzo voices threading deep into midnight, cardboard boxes of leftover toys dragging across rubber conveyor belts, red bean slush and wrinkled newspapers under soft kisses of dusk. There are more entries in his scrapbooks now. His life is surging with columns of black notes; Zitao and Yifan are now more than friends, Minseok has found a new tune; there is a stranger living in the vacated apartment to the left, and they might have spoken before. -- They meet for the last of first times when Kyungsoo swings open his door and comes face to face with enormous, dilated pupils. “Hi,” the man grins, cigarette bobbing limply from the corner of his mouth, “My name is Jongin. I’m a writer. Novelist. I moved in next door a week ago. For the sake of inspiration, artistry, discovering poverty, avoiding the press mob at my usual place, so on. The point is: we’ve talked before. Twice.” “Oh,” Kyungsoo immediately falls back on his usual response, “Sorry—I have anterograde amnesia so—” “You don’t remember me. I know. You forget everything by the end of each day so you won’t remember me by tomorrow.” Jongin steps back, nurses a flame from his zippo onto his joint, takes a deep drag, and lets the smoke gush viscous and white from his teeth, “Anyways. Listen. I need to get a manuscript into my editor—Oh Sehun—if you knew him you’d know how much of a fucking douche he is, but the point is: if I don’t get in something in a month he’s going to nag like a bona fide bitch—and, to be frank, I’m out of ideas. But not really. I have an idea. And the idea involves…” It’s not until Kyungsoo is coughing back smoke does he realize he hasn’t been breathing the whole while, “Um, yes, involves what?” “You,” Jongin smiles. The thing about Jongin’s smile is that only his mouth moves upwards, so all Kyungsoo sees is a beautiful picture of pricey starched white shirts and grinning misery. A whole lot of suffering wrapped up in exposed teeth and narrowed eyes. The prettiest adjectives to dot an abandoned soul, most delicate epithets to cross a closed heart. Kyungsoo writes that down on the Polaroid he takes of Jongin that night. This is Jongin, new neighbor, novelist, sad smile (17 July 2012). We will have interviews. He wants to write a book about me. -- During Wednesday’s dinner, Kyungsoo decides that although his daily rituals are simple and repetitive, it’s best that way. His memory doesn’t last long enough for him to keep up with long-term changes and it’s not like he can grow tired of doing something he can’t remember doing, in any case. “So what do you do?” Jongin interrupts, a pen tucked behind his ear and another one between his fingers. Kyungsoo says that he works at the neighboring toy factory from nine to five, gluing little shiny little marble eyes onto stuffed cartoon characters. A breath of artificiality for the sparkle of life. The job is purely for financial support, albeit Kyungsoo thinks that he might have grown attached to his coworkers and the plushness of the toys, the soft fabrics, the forever cheerful smiles. The job makes just enough for rent and necessities. Still, it’s alright because seven o’clock fixes everything. At seven, he heads for the bar to nurse transient melodies from his soul. Technically the hour is about demurely collecting change under drunken chaos, but for Kyungsoo, it’s about molding words out of thin air, gasps of smoke and shudders of music, closed eyes and faint sighs embracing the crop circles of sawdust in the carpets. It’s about muses slipping through fingers and curling around his toes. Seven is about passion. A dream. Kyungsoo lets all the two hundred and six bones of his body fall in place as he breathes, “It might be lackluster, I guess. But it’s hard to feel the lackluster when you’ve never really felt the luster. Felt alive, I mean.” “So you’re like a walking corpse?” “More like a walking fossil.” Minseok, his childhood friend and fellow singer in the bar, always jokes that because time has stopped for Kyungsoo four years ago, he must be perpetually twenty years old. But it’s not really a joke, and people have stopped laughing a long time ago. “I think it’s funny though,” Jongin remarks, dropping his cigarette stub in the beer can before taking an appreciative sip. Kyungsoo tries not to wonder how it tastes, nicotine and tobacco drowning in fizzling wheat. Instead he peers over at Jongin’s notepad, and the little illegible lines of black ink left sprawled over the edges. Jongin explains that they’re for a book he’s writing. A romance about a man who erases himself at the end of each day. Kyungsoo questions the romance in that. Jongin says no worries, writers are certified bullshitters; just kill someone and it’ll end up romantic. They met for second time twenty minutes ago, when Jongin banged on Kyungsoo’s door with a six-pack of Hite and a joint poking out between lax fingers, “Hi, I’m Jongin, your new neighbor. We’ve met before—” at which point Kyungsoo promptly reached for his book and Jongin commented, “I’m on the last page, I think. The guy wearing a suit.” Kyungsoo stared at the photo, and back at Jongin, and then twenty minutes later here they are: sitting on the fire escape, talking about large philosophies and sub-ideal romances that Kyungsoo can’t quite loop his head around. Their knuckles and shoulders are bumping, which makes Kyungsoo uncomfortable, and even more so that Jongin doesn’t seem to care. In fact, Jongin doesn’t seem to be the type to care about anything. “What do you mean, it’s funny?” “More importantly, how does it feel to be perpetually twenty years old?” Kyungsoo contemplates, “Good.” “But isn’t it terrible? You’re caught in time but time moves on. You can’t remember people coming or leaving. The world diminishes around you while you’re stuck in the center. All of your old friends leave or die and you can’t make new ones. You can’t love. You can’t hate.” “So why is it funny?” “It’s so sad it’s funny,” Jongin shrugs, “People tend to feel bad for poor, harmless souls like you. Carrying a larger-than-life burden with smaller-than-life ambitions. Like watching an ant die under a magnifying glass and squealing in joy over the sadness of it all. It’s hilarious. Well I mean, I make a living off exploiting it for all it’s worth, but it’s still hilarious.” Jongin flicks off the end of his cigarette and they watch ashes swirl down three flights of stairs together. A breeze. Jongin inhales summer, exhales toxins. Kyungsoo picks at his toes and fingers and the little bits of rust in the steel staircase before saying, decisively, something that he isn’t sure he wanted to say, “You sound so miserable.” “All novelists are.” “Is that why you smoke so much?” Jongin writes ‘inexplicably Good Samaritan and consequently nosy’ in the column headed under Character Traits. Pretending not to see it, Kyungsoo nudges him for the answer until eventually Jongin complies with a sneer, “You don’t need to know. Why don’t we talk some more about how you keep track of—” “No,” Kyungsoo snaps firmly, “No, I want to know.” “Listen the book is about you—” “This conversation is about us.” Lowering his head, Jongin mutters something about pains in the asses before ripping his face back up with a blank smile that curdles Kyungsoo’s guts, “Okay. About us.” “I won’t remember it by tomorrow, anyway,” Kyungsoo reminds him. Hollowing his cheeks in on the joint until the little flicker of orange disappears, Jongin lets the words flood out with white vehemence, “I’ll tell you what makes me miserable,” Jongin looks somewhere into the distance, and that is when everything falls apart, “I have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It means that my lungs are drowning in snot. I’m dying. That makes me fucking miserable, alright?” The noise of street vendors and traffic and children playing suddenly becomes unbearably soft. Kyungsoo stares at his knuckles and feels the blood rushing out of his face, “I’m—I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were—” “In other words, god is suffocating me in slow motion. In three years my heart is going to be lopsided trying to pump enough oxygen through my body. I’m going to have organ failure. Eating is going to be impossible because how do you eat a meal while breathing through straws? And why do I smoke, you ask? Why do I smoke. Why.” Kyungsoo watches his knuckles go bloodless. He wants this to end. He’s sorry. He’s sorry and he doesn’t understand—but Jongin doesn’t really want him to. “I smoke to die faster. I smoke so that when I’m etherized on the hospital table I’d go out with a swoosh instead of a swish,” Jongin nods, speaks of misery in the form of discursive gray, “But this isn’t funny, you know. This is just plain sad. I’m the saddest fuck on the planet. Miserable, isn’t it?” And a shriek of dry laughter to punctuate the monochromatic anger, “Nah, I’m just fucking with you. It is funny. It’s funny because my life is full of this: you think you’re escaping, until you run into yourself. Twenty-three years later it turns out that the longest way round is the shortest way home, and I’ve been running in circles since the get-go. What a riot, huh?” Neither of them laughs, though Jongin does snort when eventually Kyungsoo finishes things off with a gentle, “I’ll forget by tomorrow.” Their interview dawdles until it’s seven. Kyungsoo sings tonight, like any other night, but the words and tunes are coming out of his mouth and not his heart and the only thing he can remember is smoke. The liquid pain seeping from Jongin’s seams. He goes home at half-past midnight and sticks a note up on the wall, a bright yellow one smack in the center of everything, so he won’t miss it tomorrow: “Grab a toy from work. Leave it by the apartment next-door. (19 July 2012)” -- Kyungsoo comes home from the bar, two days later, to find a stuffed Pororo by his door. It’s the same toy that he stitches at work, and if he squints hard enough he can almost be sure that he’s the one who glued the eyes on because he’s the only one who manhandles superglue that way. There is a Thank You card underneath Pororo that says, in angry black ink, “Pity’s pretty fucking expensive from someone who can’t care.” He has no idea what those words mean, but the pang in his heart is too loud to be dismissed. Suddenly all the melodies and rhythms fade away into an overwhelming silence. More sour than disappointment, more bitter than loneliness. Tonight the apartment next-door is buzzing with strident, uneven laughter that sounds something like sobs. A whole multitude of voices and chatter, vague shouts of Luhan Jongin Sehun under the semi-buzz of never-empty bottles of scotch and vodka. While passing by to take out the garbage, Kyungsoo catches a glimpse of three very beautiful faces floating beyond the curtains, a sharp glare of chandelier lights, the pungent scent of alcohol and cologne and luxury. His own apartment looks particularly desolate at this hour. Dimness swallows all of the walls and corners. He re-writes all of his sticky notes in green instead of blue, and Friday passes with the silent clicks of gel pens against neon paper. -- Though technically Kyungsoo can’t remember having met the writer nursing what must be his fiftieth cigarette of the hour, the card in his hand says that they’re supposed to have regular interviews. More than the card, he knows that they’ve met before. And the thought’s not surprising—nothing is really—perhaps due to the messy haze of cigarette smoke that puts everything out of focus: coffee cups, moist windows, the fraying and tarred edges of the writer’s notebook; it slows everything down, dulls all of the shines into glows and all of the corners into curves. The writer smokes, hastily, and Kyungsoo feels this alien, emptied sensation watching him. Like something cracking slowly, deeply, irreversibly within him. The coffee shop during the evening of July 21st is a low rumble of clinking porcelain cups, the continuous drone of tired students, whipped cream murmuring into cappuccinos. It’s not particularly loud, but the noise is the kind to quicksand someone. Drown them slowly and leave nothing except clawing fingertips and air bubbles breaking the surface. Kyungsoo builds half a question over whether or not all writers look like this, with dark circles bruising eyes and complexion caught between yellow and white and occasional twitches of the brow. The question collapses as soon as the writer stubs out his joint and catches Kyungsoo’s gaze. One long, hard line from one pair of eyes to another. “You okay?” The writer, who introduced himself as Jongin, demands briskly. Jongin doesn’t seem to have the time or patience to accept any alternatives, so Kyungsoo only nods, “Yeah. I’m fine.” “Tell me about the accident four years ago. Or well, yesterday, as you would remember it,” Jongin prompts. There’s a hint of anxiety in his voice. Kyungsoo can’t help but notice the ugly smattering of bandages over his knuckles. The purple and green smudges around his wrist. And suddenly he wonders if it’s a writer’s thing at all, those angry eyes and bloody knuckles and unconscious flinches. “It was just a typical accident,” Kyungsoo says. Though he can’t remember days having passed from the particular evening, somehow the shock no longer registers, “I was coming home from the factory—the one I work at right now, got hit by a fruit truck. It was carrying apples. Red ones.” “You’ve always been working at the factory?” “Ever since I was eighteen. I went as soon as I finished high school. My mom passed away and my dad was sick so I had to foot his—” “Yeah, okay,” Jongin interrupts. Kyungsoo can see the look of exasperation on his face and wants to protest and no, it’s not just a typical sob story about just another kid playing hero. It’s a story about family and warmth and hard-earned cookies by the bedside and counting the drops of IV and praying to cartoon characters for happiness. But Jongin is not in the mood to entertain any clarifications, “So if you weren’t such a responsible human, you would’ve become a singer?” “I guess so.” “And then you got hit by a truck. Terrific luck,” Jongin quips and scratches something out on his notepad. Furiously. Kyungsoo chews on his lower lip, a bad habit. “Are… you angry?” “No,” Jongin snaps, a beat too quickly. Kyungsoo falls quiet while Jongin reads the next question, scarcely looking up from his pen, “How do you keep track of your life? All the details.” “Usually, I take pictures of new people I encounter, put them in a notebook and list what I’ve learned about them. I re-read it at the beginning of every day and update it at the end. Other things, I write on my walls, and my planner. The temporary issues I put on sticky notes and paste them wherever. Usually on my walls.” Kyungsoo peers at his coffee, and back up again when nothing returns except the noisy grinding of pen against paper. “Do you find that you have to relearn things? Like if you figure out how to walk to the coffee shop today, by tomorrow would you forget how to walk here again?” “Well, no. I can remember the answers. I just can’t remember learning them. Tomorrow I wouldn’t remember walking here with you. I would only know where this place is.” “Convenient.” “Are you really not upset?” “No.” “At all?” “Listen. We’re writing about you. A novel about you. Let’s not talk about me, okay?” “Why are you upset?” Jongin’s shoulders sag and he drops his notebook, pen, everything with a clatter. Rubbing a coarse hand through his crumpled features, he stares at Kyungsoo with worn exasperation. Perhaps he reeks a little of guilty conceit as he mutters, “Issues. Okay? People with actual memories have issues.” Kyungsoo doesn’t acquiesce to Jongin’s impatient tapping, “If you need someone to talk to about the issues, you know that I’m—” “You’re the perfect person to dump everything on, of course, because nothing would ever burden you because you’d never fucking remember, right?” There is a vague feeling in Kyungsoo’s guts that maybe he’s said that previous line one too many times. Maybe they’ve been in this situation before: Jongin frustrated and tattered on the fence of art and reality, Kyungsoo confused and worried, trying to help Jongin down with no idea how. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally, when Jongin has stopped retching for oxygen. He doesn’t take his eyes off the way Jongin’s fingers are trembling, “You’re right. I’m sorry if I asked you this before and I’m just reminding you of something unpleasant, I really don’t mean—” “It’s about hands,” Jongin suddenly decides. It takes Kyungsoo a long time to recognize Jongin’s voice because it’s low, monotonous, and awfully quiet. It’s nothing like what is usually and diffuses through the air like ether. “Listen. My life is about hands. It’s about shoving your diamond-ringed hands down my bile-washed throat. It’s about shredding my soul with a pair of your expensive gloves. It’s all about hands. Nails drawing crescent blood. Ink-smudged fingerprints down thighs. Knuckles crushing reflections behind a thin layer of paint and glass. Hands, hands, hands.” A sip of coffee and Kyungsoo presents an apologetic grin, “I still don’t really…” “I’m dying, okay?” Kyungsoo feels his heart plummet as Jongin continues, with the numbness of a man who has announced the same thing thousands of times already, “I’m going to be dead in three years, maybe two. Probably less. But you know, people won’t love me when I’m dead. That’s a fact. People might pity me. Worship me. Say that I was a genius mind, revel in the great performance art that was my life. And what do I do with all that? Can I sell it? Can I have a future and a white-washed house and argue about what plants to put in the front yard with their fucking assembly-line pity?” Jongin’s eyes are red. His lips are white. The silence is black. “You know what I think,” Kyungsoo has no idea what he’s saying, only an inkling that he probably shouldn’t be saying it at all—but the words come out on their own, “I think that you’re just afraid.” Jongin doesn’t speak for a long time, and when he does, he doesn’t look up from his notebook anymore, “So if you can retain memories of how to do something, do you also retain feelings? If you fell in love with a woman today, would you still love her tomorrow?” “I don’t know,” Kyungsoo gnaws on his lower lip again, “But I suppose if I can’t remember doing anything with her, then I can’t really—you can’t love someone you have no memories of, right? Isn’t love based on memories and actions?” “Is it.” Kyungsoo fidgets with his sleeves, “You’re still upset.” “No.” “You—I—am not your friend—or your therapist—or—I guess I don’t even qualify as an acquaintance but—Jongin,” Kyungsoo stammers, unsure again of what he’s saying, “You can talk to me. I won’t judge you. I can’t say I understand everything but I—just—wouldn’t you feel better if—” “Shut up,” Jongin snaps, eyes still fixated on burning holes into his notebook, “Do not lecture me.” “No, Jongin I just—” “You don’t have any right to assume what makes me feel better because you don’t understand pain, do you? What makes you think you can judge me? You can’t even love. You said it yourself. You can’t love so you can’t be hurt, can you? Tomorrow you’ll wake up and everything will be fucking fine. Everything will be fucking dandy like it’s always been and hey, do you ever think that you’re only so happy each day because you’d forgotten about all the times you’ve hurt everyone else? Do you ever think about that? What if you hurt someone yesterday? At least normal people have the decency to feel guilt. You can’t feel anything, can’t understand shit, Do Kyungsoo, because—you, are, just, a, walkingcorpse.” When Kyungsoo feels something welling in his eyes, Jongin has already slammed his notebook down and stormed out of the cafe. And it turns out that the notebook doesn’t actually have any writing on it, just massive twines of ink balled into ripped pages. -- “You look depressed,” Minseok comments one day, sometime by the end of July, when red bean slush is no longer enough for the heat. While they wait for the musicians to unpack their instruments and tune, he turns to Kyungsoo with arched brows, “What happened?” Kyungsoo frowns, thinks back all the way to when he rolled out of bed this morning, and shakes his head, “Nothing. I had a pretty normal day. Why?” “I don’t know,” Minseok shrugs, “You just look kind of solemn is all.” As Kyungsoo chews on his lip and ponders over why he would look solemn when everyone has been perfectly amiable, Minseok chats with Zitao about how the rich writer guy hasn’t shown up to the bar for days. They sing their usual song, a few new improv lines, before Kyungsoo realizes that Minseok was right. His heart is not in the music. -- The night washes tides of motorcycle hums and human chatter over Kyungsoo’s immobile figure. Midnight has passed hours ago, and his eyes are burning with fatigue, but Kyungsoo simply couldn’t fall asleep, so here he is, gnawing on his lip and flipping through his scrapbook. At some point before he’s realized it, he began counting the number of new pictures to the number that has been crossed out. And, to his disappointment, almost all of his old high school friends have moved out and away, and he hasn’t made any new notes on any of them since years ago. He tries to dial Baekhyun’s old number, and of course, it’s out of service. It’s probably been out of service for months, years. How long? “Hey,” a voice pops out from the dimness. Kyungsoo bolts a meter and a half and nearly shrieks. But somehow the person standing on the neighboring balcony doesn’t look all that unfamiliar. He has an awkward kind of smile, like it physically hurts to move his face that way, “What are you doing there?” Kyungsoo hesitates about telling the truth. He does it anyway, “Counting the number of people I’ve lost contact with.” “And?” “There’s a lot,” and he feels awfully like sobbing. The distant rumbles of friendship and laughter and camaraderie, things he no longer possess, push out his tears and he turns his head back to the scratched photos in his book. The old, fading smiles and the pain seeps in one molecule at a time. He doesn’t want to cry, and he doesn’t know why he’s crying, “Just yesterday I… I was friends with all of them but… it says here that… they moved away? They left? They’re gone? Why? Am I really alone?” The guy on the neighboring balcony breathes out fogs and glitter clouds, hiding a strangled laugh, “Yeah, you’re really fucking alone. We’re all alone, except you don’t live long enough to realize it.” Kyungsoo puts his head down in his arm and cries harder than he’s ever cried before, and he knows this because this is not the kind of pain that can be forgotten by tomorrow. He doesn’t see the blank look on the other man’s face, doesn’t hear the man’s cigarette falling out from between his fingers and onto the ground three floors below. -- The next morning Kyungsoo wakes up with swollen eyes and a sour aftertaste in his mouth. There is a scrapbook in his arms, paper cuts over his fingers, and the wall of green notes makes him sick to the guts. 
  -- “I’m not a very good human being. I haven’t been one,” a stranger in the elevator begins when Kyungsoo stumbles inside. Kyungsoo almost flinches, except somehow he’s not surprised to hear this voice. The low timber and the cracks around each syllable. A kind of grudging reluctance, shy naivety despite the words, “I’ve hurt everyone who has ever really tried for me. Even myself. I’m a coward, and I take it out on other people because… I’m afraid of admitting it.” Kyungsoo nods, and takes in everything about this man before him—the loosened tie, the heavy shadows under his eyes and the caved cheeks, the hunched back, the painful elevations of his chest, straining against a white-pressed shirt. Somehow his swollen eyes the taste of battery acid that wouldn’t wash out with mugs of milk disappears so easily. His heart clenches as he reaches out and touches the man’s arm, “You’ll be okay.” “My name is Jongin.” Kyungsoo might not have heard the last syllable. Still, the name is familiar on his lips as he echoes it, “Jongin.” “I’m a writer,” Jongin says, and the elevator doors slide open as if on cue. Kyungsoo doesn’t move. They revel in the stillness, the drone of the ventilator and their uneven, noisy exhales. And as the doors close again, Jongin tells a story about a boy who fell in love with dancing, and a dancer, and fell too hard, too fast. A story about someone named Jongin who was trampled under expectations and pressure and gave himself up and stopped loving people, himself, passion, aspiration. It’s not a long one, and it ends with a new story. “So he became a writer, and he wrote about that dancer who he loved and cast away. The innocence that crumbled in his hands, inevitably. People gathered and paid for the pity party and it made him rich and famous and sad—someone called him miserable, once—and he wrote more about corroding dreams and despair and moon-watching from well bottoms, and it made him richer, and sadder, and more famous, and eventually god decided to put him out of his misery. But he had to write one more book, because he’s become the kind of bastard who lived on misery. Parasitic dependency on sucking the agony out of others’ bones.” The elevator opens. This time Kyungsoo takes a step forward, and pulls Jongin after him. Their steps form a nice kind of rhythm. “And there was this particularly interesting person he met, who practically begged to be written about. He was everything sad, but he was so happy chasing after impossible dreams. He worked at a factory and wanted to be a singer—even though he couldn’t remember shit. He was an amnesiac forced to abandon himself at the end of each day and who refused to comply. Someone who struggled against the overwhelming odds of loss, for a dead-end. It was kind of funny, like watching a hamster run itself to death in a wheel, for an exit that didn’t exist.” “They met one day in July. The day the writer found out he was going to die. He invited this guy up to his house, where they turned up a giant fan and let it snow cash from the windows—big crisp bills. That day the writer was angry at the world, and jealous, and he wanted to show the amnesiac that he’d never achieve his dreams. That becoming a singer was the stupidest idea on the whole fucking planet for someone who couldn’t even live, couldn’t ever experience love or loss or agony or happiness. That him becoming a singer was like a robot talking about writing love songs. Absurd and fucking hilarious.” “Jongin wanted to show off how rich he was, how awesome life could be after losing himself and giving everything up. He was someone who cared more about protecting empty pride than his own life. People said big-ass parties with champagne towers and chocolate fountains make a person happy, so Jongin rinsed and repeated in all of those, and people said that he was happy. He was god fucking happy and—” “The amnesiac couldn’t see it. Here he was, this guy who couldn’t even remember losing his fucking best friends and parents, this guy who lived off of tips and counted pennies, the most pathetic kind of earthworm, and he couldn’t fucking understand when glory was thrown in his face. Glory, fame, wealth, power, status. Everything that Jongin—that I—have ever worked for.” Jongin runs a hand through his hair, shivering despite the heat. “That was when I realized it wasn’t because you were stupid. It was because I, Kim Jongin, was a moron. The whole time I was just trying to prove to myself that I was happy, that throwing away all I’ve ever wanted to be, to wallow in despair, to make a show out of myself, was the right thing to do. I moved into the shithole of an apartment building you lived in not for inspiration, but to watch you suffer. To confirm that you were suffering. I watched you sing night after night and prayed that you’d fuck up and go out of tune and get splashed in the face with a tub of beer. I tried to blitz your little cocoon of bliss because—because—I… I just wanted someone with me. In the quicksand. But you didn’t sink. I was wrong. I am wrong, and a fucking moron.” “But you’re not a moron,” Kyungsoo interrupts. They’re leaning on the railing on Kyungsoo’s tiny balcony. Kyungsoo is bent over the metal, estimating the shadows splayed across the grass, with arms tucked under his chest and head bobbling occasionally. Jongin is next to him, propped up on his elbows and facing the other way, legs crossed and gaze on at the stars as Kyungsoo whispers, “You’re just lost.” Jongin looks at him for the first time, really, from under his lashes. The moonlight runs down his face, highlighting all of the soft creases and the plastic flesh, and Kyungsoo thinks that Jongin’s so remarkably frail like this, so remarkably beautiful. “I’m going to be more lost. Lost, and lost, and then,” Jongin whispers, “One day, poof, I’ll be gone. I’ll be to the world like those photos in your scrapbook are to you. The world won’t remember losing me.” Kyungsoo’s voice is cracking all over the place and nails are digging up rust when he finally speaks, “No, no don’t gopoof.” Jongin snorts, the dismissive kind of mockery that snarls you’re just saying it, and makes Kyungsoo want to grab him by the shoulders and scream that he cares, that he really means it—Do Kyungsoo won’t allow Kim Jongin to go poof. Except he has no idea why he cares, and Jongin might be right. He might be just saying it. He might not care. He doesn’t really know this Kim Jongin, after all, doesn’t have any memories of what has happened between the two of them. “I just really want to remember you, for even one extra minute…” But if it were as simple as that, his chest wouldn’t hurt nearly as much as it does now. Their shoulders touch a little, but neither of them moves away. prologue: daisies; part one: lost and stuck; part two: invisible walls; word count: 7,442     “I’m Jongin, and I’m here to—” “Write.” Jongin’s jaw swings open, shock registering slowly on his tilted eyebrows. The seconds come and go, skittering along a thin line of hesitation. Outside the window the grass dissolves into the sky, burred colors and bright chaos. Kyungsoo waits. It’s not until Jongin spots the scrapbook lying open on the kitchen counter does he relax into the doorframe, “Oh. So you’ve read up on your notes already?” “Yup,” Kyungsoo nods, and doesn’t quite notice the look of fleeting disappointment over Jongin’s expression. Today the conversation resumes in Jongin’s apartment next-door. It’s a white-washed box cluttered full of balled papers, half-empty cans of beer, a myriad of achromatic shapes: sheets brittle and distorted over the nude mattress; tapestries dangling limply like surrender flags. Little cigarette stubs and yellow pills are arranged on a plastic coffee table to spell, “KYUNGSOC”. Everything is a thin veneer of white fragility, barely holding away the post-modern asbestos. It ostracizes Kyungsoo but takes in all of Jongin, laps up all of his lethargic steps and long lashes. Kyungsoo thinks that Jongin herds everything in the room together. Splayed out against the couch, Jongin is the kind of guy to belong in this sort of place, probably, or the kind of guy who has gotten used to this high class superficiality. A kind of stuffed, hollow man, shadows falling between the emotion and the response. “You don’t like this place, do you?” “It’s all black and white. It doesn’t look like anyone’s ho—” “Here,” Jongin calls suddenly. Kyungsoo almost doesn’t turn around fast enough to catch the bundle of still-packaged yellow sticky notes that Jongin tosses him. “What’s this?” “Come on, really. You’ve got to recognize these.” “No, I mean, why are you giving them to me?” “You were the one who said my room is black and white,” Jongin shrugs, leans back onto his couch until the hollow of his throat is fully exposed and suddenly he’s all jagged edges of chins and cartilage and elbows, knuckles, nails, “So color it. I bet you’re dying to. And look, it’s the color of the sun. Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?” “You’re awful.” “Your admonishing stare,” Jongin grins, “is my favorite.” So Kyungsoo gives in, though only after ordering for Jongin to, “Call me hyung from now on. It’s ridiculous how unmannered you are.” Jongin laughs dismissively, smoke exploding like glitter clouds over his head and mouth wide with glee. Pulling a chair up against the nearest wall, Kyungsoo helps himself up, half-tottering as he tears open the first package and slips his thumb under the first note. Aligning it at perfectly perpendicular angles, Kyungsoo runs his thumb over the edges and smoothes down the corners. The wall is toasted warm from the sunlight and Jongin’s voice comes in a comforting hum from behind him, mists of little insignificant words drifting over wistful grimaces. “Do you ever wonder this—how many ten o’clocks have you spent doing the same precise thing, with the same glue gun and same bucket of marbles and the toy from the day before the day before the day before all of yesterdays? How many times have you sat down at your empty dinner table and wondered if tomorrow you will remember today?” With time Kyungsoo notices that Jongin is really not asking questions. He’s answering them. Filling the footprints that Kyungsoo had left behind. Gentle and entrancing, consonants broken full-stop and vowels tapering to infinity. Gaze dipping far, far, away, lost somewhere in Kyungsoo’s as Kyungsoo lights his walls ablaze in a field of golden conflagration. “Do you ever think that you can’t remember because there is nothing to remember? If you do the exact same thing every single day of the week, every week of the month, all twelve months of the year, doesn’t memory lose purpose? What do you think will happen if you begin breaking the routine?” They spend the night like this. Kyungsoo doesn’t go to the bar and he doesn’t sing, just listens to the course of Jongin’s whispers and the murmurs of the parchment under his skin, the beats of his pulse seeping into the invisible cracks of white-washed room. The process of letting Jongin break him out of his routine is almost too easy. At some point Kyungsoo finishes with the notes and Jongin with his questions. They’re on their old spots on the couch and the arm chair, basking in the dusk, when a tune settles between them. It grows, fluid and effortless, starts from the end and ends at the start, and it makes an invisible string from Kyungsoo’s tongue to the Jongin’s fingertips, lifting them like marionette strings over his lap. On their way to sleep, Kyungsoo molds the melodic lines, the a-flat, the b-sharp-minor, the Jongin look your hands are dancing, the Jongin I like you a lot; Jongin defines the meter, the four-four, the four-three, the hyung are you happy, the hyung fossilize me in your time. Jongin’s last question is a soft one, and he mutters it just as Kyungsoo’s eyes flutter closed, “How many times have you neglected something really important?” -- July is the cruelest month, and its last day the most bitter. “The people,” Kyungsoo says, and he’s so exhausted today. His bones ache and his ribs cut into his lungs and he can’t breathe and everything hurts, spins, hurts, spins. “The people are gone. All of them are gone.” Jongin keeps staring. Kyungsoo trembles and grips onto his scrapbook for life, paper crushing under his nails but maybe he wants to crush it. Maybe he doesn’t really want to remember. Maybe he can get in another accident and make all of it go away, “Baekhyun he—I—I tried to find him—says here,” he flips open the book and points to a weathered page, face in the photo barely distinguishable from too many glossing touches, “says here that he moved away. See, it says his number isn’t in use anymore. But Baekhyun was my high school friend. Best friend. I just—I really wanted to know why he moved. Where he moved to. All I wanted to do was patch things up in case we had a fight.” “So I called his mom, and I could remember how she hugged me during graduation and told me that I’m just like a son to her, and that I’m much better behaved than Baekyhun, and that if I ever need some motherly advice I should go to her—and Baekhyun punched my shoulder and everyone was laughing and it—but when I called today she just… it was still her but she sounded… she was so… tired. Frustrated. Jongin she was sick of me.” “No,” Jongin blanches, “You didn’t really ask for Baekhyun, did you?” “And she screamed at me, said to never call her again and then she apologized. To me. Because she couldn’t even blame me for calling her to remind her that Byun Baekhyun’s dead. That he was killed in the same accident as me. That I was the one who survived instead of him.” “Listen, hyung, it’s really not your fault—” “How many times have I done this, Jongin? How many times did I have to call her and ask her about where her dead son went? Jongin what have I been doing? Why didn’t anyone just… why didn’t I write it down? Why?” Jongin doesn’t answer. He shifts, barely, and slumps against the staircase railing. “Did you know about this?” Kyungsoo asks, finally, after the seconds have stumbled into minutes, and his nerves erupt into a frantic shout when Jongin fails to answer again, “You knew about this, didn’t you? Why would you let me do this?” With a sigh, Jongin pries the scrapbook out of Kyungsoo’s hand, “You weren’t planning to write it down today, were you, hyung? You’re upset but that doesn’t mean that you’ll do it, will you? Are you thinking that maybe all of this can go away when you wake up again?” Though Kyungsoo makes a noise to protest, he really doesn’t have anything to say. Jongin’s probably right. Heavy guilt, and maybe a little rage, precipitates from the dampness in his palms. “Afraid. You’re afraid. It’s better reopening someone else’s wounds than running the risk of reopening your own, because time heals pain like hers, but it sure as fuck is not going to heal yours. While the rest of us move on, you’re going to be stuck here all by yourself, crying about the same thing everyday. You know that. And you hate yourself for knowing it and—” Jongin grips Kyungsoo’s wrist, lowers his voice until it’s all ebbs and flows, “It’s not your fault. Trying to protect yourself is not wrong.” Kyungsoo takes a ragged gasp and before Jongin can start again, he jerks his wrist out and snatches back his scrapbook. Swallowing back the sting in his nose, he scribbles “died four years ago (31 July 2012)” over Baekhyun’s cheerful grin. Maybe the handwriting is a little broken, a little shaken, blurred with little plops of saline liquid. Maybe Jongin is shaking his head. Maybe he’s going to regret this every single morning from today forward. But at least he won’t be left behind. -- Jongin carries in the first morning of August and two grease-stained brown paper bags, throwing both carelessly across the tiny dining table in Kyungsoo’s kitchen as he turns around to explain, “You gave me the key to your apartment yesterday.” “I know,” Kyungsoo points to a note on the wall, except he thinks that he might’ve known even without the note. Everything about Jongin is new but familiar, abrupt but warm, in a way, like something evasive to the mind but fossilized in the sap of the soul. “How much do you know?” Jongin asks, while pulling egg toasts out of the bags and helping himself with great familiarity around the kitchen. “Your name is Jongin, you’re my neighbor,” Kyungsoo follows the beeline that Jongin makes from the cupboards to the dining room, “You used to dance, but you gave that up to be a novelist, and you have a sad smile and you’re always smoking because… because you’re dy—” The sound of paper ripping out of metal, as Jongin fetches the scrapbook from the kitchen counter, flips to the last page, and rips it out, is almost too raw for the ear. Kyungsoo falls silent and watches Jongin whip out a zippo and kindle a flame onto the sheet, “You don’t need to know. I’m one of those pages that’s going to be abandoned one day. It won’t even be a pretty page. It’ll be blood and tears over pulp and paper and, honestly, it’s better not to have a page of me at all.” “But—” “Just forget it.“ When Jongin leaves, Kyungsoo secretly rewrites the page, dusts up the ashes and puts them in a jar. He does this not because he wants to remember Jongin from today, but because he wants the Kyungsoo tomorrow to know of the boy behind Jongin’s secretive smiles today. He wants the Kyungsoo tomorrow to know that behind the Jongin who ghosts along cigarette stubs, who tosses back pills with glasses of milk, is a Jongin who can laugh with his whole face and body. A Jongin who puts his baseball caps on backwards and blows his cheeks up at unexpected moments. He’s a child with an old man’s scars, the gentlest romanticist hiding within a shell of hard cynicism. Though Kyungsoo doesn’t have a picture this time, he thinks that he doesn’t really need one. The words come out on their own, wishes at the end of every stroke, and Kyungsoo thinks that they’re more representative than any picture could be of that rare flicker of stardust in Jongin’s eyes. Of the way he calls him hyung. Of the way he pulls both of their baseball caps backwards and points out how they match. He doesn’t write that Jongin is dying. -- The man on the last page of his scrapbook is Jongin on certain days, a writer on others, and a stranger during brief elevator rides. On good days he has a smooth olive complexion; on bad days he wears jaundice over his flesh like a punishment. Sometimes he is a boy sitting on the neighboring balcony, legs dangling off the ledge and cigarette hanging on parched lips, arms poking out from behind rusted fences. Sometimes he is the tired man leaning against the wall, drowning in the rain with hair damp and back hunched. Sometimes they share a quiet second in the corridors, others countless hours speaking with lidded eyes, over thick divides of indigo smoke and ringlets of blues. Occasionally it hurts to see him, makes Kyungsoo’s chest throb with something heavier than pity, but most of the time seeing the man makes Kyungsoo’s head light and dizzy. And although Kyungsoo doesn’t record the details, there is always something when they come into contact. Every time their eyes catch, when they sprawl themselves out against the night sky, telltale grazes of knuckles between shallow breathes. It’s something inexplicably warm, light, transient. A little like fireflies. The kind of something that lingers just long enough in his palms to disappear by the time he learns to want. The kind of something that tells him this has happened before, and that next time, too, they’ll fly away. Slip between his fingers like fleeting memories. But this kind of something is probably not romantic. “Love you,” are two words that are never said. They’re too definitive, too abrupt without motive, solid evidence, rationalized explanations because at the end of each day sometimes Jongin is a stranger, sometimes Jongin is a book, but he is never more than a friend. Time keeps them at arm’s length, an invisible and impenetrable divide. Days come and go and Kyungsoo finds the border between don’t go and good night. Of course Kyungsoo is always dying to reach out and draw Jongin back in. He thinks that they’ve fit before, even though between them there is no entangling of toes or mazes of interlocked fingers. There is only the tsunami of text and slow wave of music. And maybe that’s all they are. With a tick of the second hand he always steps back into, “Good night.” With Kyungsoo and Jongin there is probably no romance, not in the usual definition of the word. But maybe there is a little of something else, between comfort and need, between hope and faith, between the nape of Kyungsoo’s neck and the creases of Jongin’s palm. -- They’re two souls floating on a rooftop of Samsung Tower, seventy-three floors up into the night, almost high enough to blow stars into constellations, yet still too close to earth. Kyungsoo counts the number of pills left in Jongin’s plastic orange bottle while Jongin watches smoke ripple into the air and dissipate. “What’s it like?” “What’s what like?” “Being forgotten.” Jongin tucks his hand underneath his head, and they gaze up together at the obscured moon and stars embedded in the clouds. He works his jaw up and down silently for a few seconds before the answer finally pops, a croaked, “It’s like being killed. Wiped out and deleted against your will.” “And what’s it like forgetting?” Kyungsoo looks deep into the sky, “It’s like dying, too,” and never before has he wished so bad to live just a little longer. Their knees touch. Kyungsoo inhales the smoke that Jongin exhales. Tonight they smell of ink and rain and cotton and street-side snacks, metallic fall, and each other. “You know,” Jongin turns, a flicker of absence over his expression, “hyung, when I used to dance, I liked the assistant. He was Chinese. Lu Han. My first love, I suppose. I respected him, followed after him, and he took care of me. And then one day I broke. Cracked under the pressure and pain and I was sick of everything. I took it out on him. He tried to fix me. Everyone tried to fix me. But you know, fixing a person isn’t like fixing a toy. When you fix a person you put yourself up to be broken.” One of them swallows, louder than Jongin’s whisper, “And I shattered him into too many pieces.” “My editor—Oh Sehun—he’s an ass. But he’s efficient. Puts me back together even if it’s in the wrong way and my head’s glued on backwards. The point is he shoves all of my pieces together so I don’t lose anything. We stick together. He keeps me like a stray dog, I guess, he’s good for me.” “And, then one day he tells me, he’s dating someone from a ballet company. I go, okay, cool, but dancers can be melodramatic. And he goes, no, this one’s great, his name is Lu Han, you two should meet up, didn’t you say you used to dance?” “Oh—” “So we met up. It was inevitable. But you know what? He still remembers what kind of coffee I drank. Eight years and he didn’t even try to forget me. He looks like crap even if he’s in love with Sehun. You know why? It’s the memories. They’re killing him. I can’t save him from them. Neither can Sehun,” Jongin grimaces, and suddenly the smoke no longer flows but sputters from his teeth, “No one can save anyone from their memories.” It’s clear what Jongin is getting at. Kyungsoo attempts fighting his next words, but it’s ultimately impossible. “It’s good that you won’t remember me, really, because this way I can save you. This way when I fuck up, you won’t have to carry it. Being forgotten isn’t unbearable compared to being remembered. I can stand dying at the end of each day, hyung. It’s okay to forget me.” Kyungsoo doesn’t hear Jongin’s loud, “I’m dying anyway,” that gets lost somewhere in the stars; instead he hears the muted, “don’t let me die,” in the fingers that Jongin laces into his own. So he leans over and presses their noses together, gives Jongin his oxygen and the scent of tic tacs on his tongue, and takes away a lungful of nicotines shadows and ground pain killers and bitter opioids. “You know why you always look so old? Because you think that nothing is worth remembering, because nothing is ideal, and you’re right—nothing is ideal. But every moment is worth remembering, Jongin. Every time you fuck up I’ll get to see a human, every time you fall I’ll get to see love washing you ashore… and I don’t care if in eight years I’ll look like crap. It might be because I don’t have any memories, and I can’t really be hurt, but—for me—to love and hurt and break myself down for someone worth it—” Jongin cups Kyungsoo’s jaw and tilts his chin and their first memory is of one kissing away the disquiet. And strangely, it is one that Kyungsoo cannot bring himself to record. -- “Listen, there was a time before when I said that I wanted to write about you,” Jongin says. The sand shifts over their toes; distant mutters of the sea carries his voice away, “The thing was, though, I didn’t really want to write about you. I wasn’t trying to write at all, I mean. Writing is about observing, but I was trying to persuade and… this time I want to observe. I want to learn about you.” Kyungsoo waits for Jongin to stop coughing to respond, “But I’ve been telling you about me. All afternoon. And if I’ve been telling you about me for two months, I’m not sure what there is left to—” His sentence stops on a verb when Jongin puts his hand on his neck. Jongin rekindles it on a conjunction when Kyungsoo gapes with surprise. A grin lights up his entire face, small and somehow ear to ear, no teeth but brighter than the moon and all of the stars, as Jongin says, “But there is still a whole character you haven’t told me about. You’ve told me about the Kyungsoo at twenty years old. Kimchi spaghetti, dry jokes, lunches by the tree trunk. The one who died. You haven’t told me, though, about hyung, the one who is living, who sings perfectly off-tune songs in a bar, who lives every single day like his last and first.” “I—” Kyungsoo begins, and that is when it dawns that he has nothing to say. Jongin’s hand is warm and heavy and perfect on his neck. “I want to learn about you, hyung. Not the you yesterday, or the you tomorrow. I want to learn about the you today. I want to know how you feel, why you didn’t go to the bar today, what your first thought was when you woke up, if you’re ticklish…” “Yeah.” “What?” “I’m ticklish,” and Kyungsoo has no idea what he’s doing when he puts his hand on top of Jongin’s, and feels the flux of warmth into his palm, “And I like your hand here. It’s horrible. In a nice way.” Jongin probably meant to laugh, but at some point the laughter decomposed into coughs that double both of them over. And while they sprawl out over the beach side by side, sand in hair and ocean in their fingers, Kyungsoo caresses Jongin’s neck, feels the air wheezing in and out, and closes his eyes, “I want to learn about you, too. Today, I don’t want to forget you.” So Jongin helps him remember, traces all of the lines and angles and pasts and futures of Kim Jongin into Kyungsoo’s skin with lips and lashes. Sleep is like wax, polyester, styrofoam, wool, graphite, and it wraps him up before he can reach back and try to grasp the ends of Jongin’s toes and fingers. “Tomorrow,” Kyungsoo says, at the periphery of dream and reality. Jongin’s hand ghosts along his collarbones, soothing his prayers, “I want to see you dance.” “Why?” “When you talk about it, it’s like you light up a little… I want to see you light up completely. Glowing. Overflowing with it. Like fireflies?” When Kyungsoo wakes up again, there is sand in the ridges of his toes, the ocean in the ends of his hair, and fireflies in his room. Dozens of little fireflies in the darkness before dawn, twinkling like stars in the water, shining into his little bedroom with the ceiling too low and walls too close. He stares perplexed at their presence, but even more by a strange urge to fall back on his pillow and laugh. -- “I’m here to pick you up,” says the man at the door. His name is Jongin, Kyungsoo thinks, but he can’t remember where he’s heard that name before. And as he frowns and checks his notes, Jongin grabs him close and pecks him on the lips, “This should be a better reminder.” Before Kyungsoo has a chance to push him away, though whether or not he would have pushed him at all is doubtable, Jongin has gotten his arm slung around Kyungsoo’s neck and began dragging him out the apartment, “Come on, let’s go.” “Where are we—” Kyungsoo yelps as Jongin practically throws him over the window pane of a filthy-rich looking convertible, a treacherous little thing parked up against the curb, all black exteriors and plush white interiors, not even bothering to open the door, “going?” “To see fireflies,” Jongin says, muffling coughs in his sleeves, and it’s only when Kyungsoo buckles up and looks over does he realize that the boy is grinning from ear to ear, “Real ones.” “Where are we going? Is there a field around here?” He asks, but Jongin doesn’t say much, only turns up the radio and blasts pop tunes to fill up the air, and maybe to obscure his obscenely pleased smile. The car speeds from lanky alleys to the shadows of skyscrapers and the grassy suburbs, deeper into the night. Somewhere along the lines Kyungsoo notices Jongin sticking his free arm out the side, dangling loosely off the window pane, and finds the nerve to do the same. The wind rubs away the nerves in his skin and breathes in sparks in their hair. It’s a small thrill, but big enough of one to make his heart beat a tad faster. Kyungsoo begins singing, voice excited and distinct over the radio, and he knows that Jongin is watching how the invisible currents swirl behind his digits. Ebbs and flows with the color of his wandering melodies. Except instead of driving to a field, or even a park, Jongin cuts the ignition in front of an abandoned warehouse. Kyungsoo turns to him gaping, “I thought you said we were going to see fire—” “Wait,” Jongin interrupts, and Kyungsoo understands that he’s not going to be briefed on this until after it happens, so he lets Jongin drag him out the car with fingers looped almost too easily between his, promising things about colored smoke and light and magic that seem to have very little to do with actual firebugs. Indeed it has virtually almost nothing to do insects, and almost everything to do with a pair of transparent gloves and an explosion of flames over them and an uneven smirk over Jongin’s lips as he orders Kyungsoo to pay attention. The door slams, moonlight dims, and Kyungsoo loses his breath. Jongin is a fleeting glimpse of hard muscles and fluid grace gliding through space, but more than that, there are literally lines of fucking light streaking out of his palms. Rivers of glowing green and yellow and blue light gushing out of his hands and floating like neon smoke and water. He paints his fingers with a close, shimmering precision. There’s no music, just the hushed melody in their lungs: Kyungsoo’s infinite inhales, long diminuendos when he remembers to breathe at all; Jongin’s quick exhales, sharp crescendos when moist heels slide against wet cement and palms slice the ebbs and flows of liquid fluorescence into the night. And then Jongin makes a gesture for Kyungsoo to come closer, a simple tilt of the forefinger really, but Kyungsoo’s heart is in his throat as he wobbles up and it nearly jumps out when Jongin suddenly runs his hand down the front of his shirt, a sweeping line from his neck to his chest with open palms. Though the colors are ethereal and vanish into the air, Jongin’s touch lingers behind hot and unforgettable. “Real fireflies,” Jongin grins, “Light people up from the inside out.” “What are you even saying?” Kyungsoo laughs, and even harder when he catches Jongin flushing from the neck up. Jongin’s answer begins with a stammer but disappears under a bout of fitful coughs and shaking, folded shoulders. There are beads of perspiration over his forehead. Somehow, it doesn’t look right. -- There are one hundred and twenty-two kilometers from Jongin’s midair mansion to Kyungsoo’s rundown bar, and somewhere in there Kyungsoo grips Jongin’s hand over the steering wheel and pulls them over, “Are you okay?” “What do you mean?” “The pills—Tessalon Perles, Phenergan, Codeine, and how do you even pronounce this one? And your coughing, and what’s—?” Kyungsoo tugs the little plastic half-mooned thing in the glove’s compartment, “You—is this a—vomit container?” Jongin blanches, “No, it’s not.” “You’re sick, aren’t you?” The drone silence is the loudest thing Kyungsoo has ever heard. Finally Jongin shifts away, looks into the distance. Kyungsoo watches the way his Adam apple jumps up, hesitates, and drops, and he suddenly regrets asking. Everything breaks, crackling along the seams as he croaks a tepid, “What is it? It’s not terminal, is—” “My lungs.” There is nothing in the air but heavy breathing, and maybe a hinge of a sob in Kyungsoo’s throat. “How many, how many months—days—?” He asks, wearily, more tired than the ashes crumbling off the end of Jongin’s cigarette. Lighting up and fading into gray. Lighting up and fading. Fading. “The doctor said, two years,” and Jongin tries to smile, with the joint between his lips, hanging like mockery and sadness, “It’s a pretty long time, considering I’ve only been alive for twent—” “No. Stop smoking.” Blinking slowly, Jongin falls into a little trickle of cracked sniggers. The uneasiness is tangible. “What are you going to do about it? I’m dying anyway. Two years, two and a half years, what’s the big difference? It’s just a matter of time, and it’s not like it would matter for you, anyway, it’s not like you can remember what we did—” His jaw is blunt and hard against Kyungsoo’s knuckles and Kyungsoo almost can’t believe that he’s just punched Jongin as the man flies back and bumps his head against the headrest. His cigarette falls and settles on the seat. “This,” trembling, teeth chattering, Kyungsoo picks the joint up and watches the smoke twirl, “this is what I’m going to do about it,” and stuffs it in his mouth. The flame is still there and the pain of being burnt is not the searing kind, but the spearing kind. It’s the sort that rips through Kyungsoo’s flesh, the kind of pain that slices every nerve and hurts, really hurts. Jongin’s eyes are unwavering as Kyungsoo chews and swallows the cigarette, flints of tobacco and paper and filter rough as knives across burn wounds. Smoke seeps down his throat and he chokes a little, tears welling up cold behind his eyes. The tobacco tastes of dirt and medicine and it tastes worse under Jongin’s expressionless stare. “The next time I see you smoking,” Kyungsoo gulps it all down, tongue screaming in agony as it presses against the roof of his mouth, “I’m going to do this again. Because, yeah, yeah, it’s not like time matters to me. It’ll be the same if I die today or tomorrow, really, wouldn’t it? If you think you’ve got the right to cut yourself off from me, why wouldn’t I?” “You’re so fucking dumb, hyung.” Kyungsoo is in too much pain to answer, but he kind of agrees. -- “It’s weird, that writer guy doesn’t smoke anymore,” Minseok remarks the first night that Kyungsoo shows up to the bar in weeks, apparently. He takes a quick sip of water and glances at the musicians before turning back to Kyungsoo, “He used to smoke them by the handfuls, I swear. And the expensive suit, too. It’s like he’s a different guy.” Curling his tongue absentmindedly to stroke at the burn mark that he’d gotten some time ago, Kyungsoo traces Minseok’s gaze to a man biting down a patronizing grin, seated across the room. It’s half-past twelve, and the bar is bustling full of people and chatter, but the seconds their eyes catch all Kyungsoo can see is that man and the shape of his lips, the dark glint under his lashes. The entire room empties in the flash of a second until all that is left is Kyungsoo and the man in the leather jacket. Quiet, colorless, surreal. At some point the music starts and Minseok nurses a tune. Kyungsoo moves his jaw up and down on instinct, because he knows that it’s his cue to join. The microphone heavy in his palm and he waits for his voice, only nothing comes out. Dry croaks and quick blinks and panic seeps in, further when he hears Minseok tapping the floor in impatience. The man across the room arches his brows, mouths something that Kyungsoo doesn’t quite understand, and lifts a hand tentatively. Perplexed, Kyungsoo watches his fingers dance through the air, and then somehow the sound of a piano ghosts from nowhere, glitters loud and clear and it all comes together, everything sinks in. The melody travels through the man’s body, guiding it into corners and curves and Kyungsoo thinks that he is the most beautiful man, most beautiful artist on the planet. The melodies flow from the man’s fingertips and into his heart almost as if that was the sole purpose of its existence. It’s a night in a month like September, or maybe October, when Kyungsoo delivers his best performance to a dancer in a leather jacket. And afterwards, as Kyungsoo waits for Minseok to divide the tips, the dancer makes his way past the tables with a bashful smile, “I don’t have an umbrella.” Kyungsoo blinks, suddenly aware of the rain drumming against the window. Minseok nudges him, “He says he doesn’t have an umbrella.” Kyungsoo keeps blinking until eventually the dancer sighs and slings his arm around Kyungsoo’s neck carelessly, clearly a gesture that he’s done more than once before, and begins dragging him out, “Come on, come on. Walk me home, hyung.” At the mention of ‘hyung’, Kyungsoo immediately thinks of the last page in his scrapbook, the one without a photo, about a man who is really a boy, a writer who is really a dancer, a neighbor who is really much more. Kim Jongin. The page had a note on the side that said to pretend to have never read it, because Kim Jongin doesn’t want to be remembered. So Kyungsoo pretends that he doesn’t know that Jongin is his neighbor, “Where do you live?” “I know you know.” “I swear I don’t.” “In your apartment.” “No really.” “Yes really.” Kyungsoo grumbles, Jongin smirks, and Kyungsoo knows that he has no alternative but to take him there. Seoul at one o’clock smells of damp earth, drenched windbreakers, and Jongin’s fabric softener. Kyungsoo offers to hold the umbrella, perhaps so that his knuckles can brush against Jongin’s shoulder when they come too close in their unparallel lines. They’re in a relationship appropriately summarized by two slender silhouettes, shoulders barely grazing, feet pattering down wet sidewalks somewhere between dusk and dawn. It’s a picture full of adolescent naivety, adolescent blushes and anxieties and sudden pronouncements of, “I like you,” and “what are you saying,” and “I’m going to kiss you,” and rough lips, gentle caresses, mouth smiling and fumbling against knuckles and wrists. -- “Isn’t it kind of boring using only one color?” Jongin remarks as Kyungsoo darts from one end of the bedroom to the other, straightening out and reorganizing and dusting off all of the details because everything looks horrendous with a guest around. “It would be a headache otherwise,” Kyungsoo responds, smoothing out the last wrinkles in his comforter. “Yeah, but you can’t tell what’s important like this. Everything’s green. Like a lawn. You’ve got grass on your wall,” Jongin laughs awkwardly at his own joke while Kyungsoo gives up on cleaning and slumps down on the rug, “Alright, humorless today, are we.” “So you… what… are you?” Kyungsoo doesn’t exactly broach the subject, because he already knows the answer and really it’s all formalities, pretending not to know Jongin when he feels like he does and when he has memorized every line about him in the scrapbook. “I’m a writer.” “I thought you were a dancer?” “I used to,” Jongin picks his way across the room, bending his neck slightly because the ceiling is too low, and drops himself next to Kyungsoo. Their feet fit together perfectly, toes scarcely bumping and all the lines aligned, “When I was young, I did some ballet.” Kyungsoo asks for Jongin to explain what ballet is like, because he’s never seen it before, and Jongin decides to do a live demonstration with his fingers, “So here’s the head and these are the legs and, ready, set, go—,” an arabresque, he calls it, “and when they jump like this,” it’s called a grand jeté, and “give me your palm,” a twirl of the wrist, spinning nails dig laughter out of Kyungsoo’s palm, “fouetté en tourant,” and his smile disappears into curious fixation as Jongin’s fingers skitter to the edge of his palm and over to the back, “here a sissonne, one, and a two, and—,” they both stop breathing momentarily, when his fingers cross Kyungsoo’s wrist and up his forearm, arm, shoulder, collarbone, neck, lower lip, stop. Jongin pries a smile open on Kyungsoo’s mouth with a thumb, and leans in to smear it away with his own and it’s a sweet, chaste kiss that Kyungsoo reels in. But when Jongin’s hand slips around his waist to bring him in closer, Kyungsoo jerks away with a gasp, “Wait, no.” Still dazed, Jongin stares holes into Kyungsoo’s mouth as he scampers away, perches on the side of his worktable uncomfortably, “I don’t even… I don’t know you. I mean—I mean, I don’t really remember…” and he trails off when Jongin stands up, grabs his hand, and raises it over his chest. He feels Jongin’s thundering heartbeat, and Jongin’s thin pulse, and Jongin’s whispers over his earlobe. “Listen,” Jongin says, “this is me, in love with you,” and he brings their hands over Kyungsoo’s chest, and Kyungsoo is suddenly aware of how hard his own heart is pounding out of his chest and the sudden heat in his cheeks, “and this, it sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” There is game in Jongin’s eyes and a challenge in the small partition between his lips and Kyungsoo has no idea what he’s doing, but the moment Jongin puts his hand over his kneecap everything combusts, turns into fingers digging into back of necks and messes of tongues and breathlessness and bumping knees against hips. It’s almost natural to break all of the invisible barriers between them, reach across and touch the reality over one another’s flesh. Guide hand over hand and lips over lips and they fit so perfect together, crevices into slopes and speed into hesitation. Fall in one another endlessly until they’ve hit the pit bottom, until Jongin has gotten him backed up against the wall, legs bumping the inner seams of his thighs and breath scalding over the base of his neck. Kyungsoo forgets to breathe when Jongin shocks the silence, ripping his zipper open and pulling down his jeans and briefs at once. He doesn’t know where to look, really, because he’s never done this before, and Jongin seems more than familiar with the procedures as he fists Kyungsoo, dragging hot fingers until Kyungsoo is so hard it almost hurts. He bucks, on instinct, and Jongin seems to notice the way he’s gripping back and studies Kyungsoo from under his lashes, “It’s okay, we’ll go slow.” Though the definition of slow might be subjective, Kyungsoo is positive that Jongin is stepping out of bounds when he opens his mouth and closes it around his cock, immediately sliding further down the shaft, lips furious and scalding and intoxicating, tongue flicking across the slit and rubbing impatiently up the underside of his cock. Throwing his head back, Kyungsoo thrusts uncertainly into Jongin’s mouth, though the uncertainty ends the moment Jongin moans and the knot of pleasure unravels into his guts. From there it’s about heat and moans, nail bed scraping against scalps and whimpers prefixes to sharply gasped, “Jongin, Jongin,” and low moans suffixes to muffled shudders behind clenched teeth. When Kyungsoo is about to come, Jongin pulls away and crushes him against the wall, mouth fervent and hot and whispering fast instructions about, “take my pants,” between, “off, now” jolts of, “hurry,” electricity, “hyung.” As Kyungsoo follows his orders to the syllable, Jongin peels away his shirt, throwing it anywhere before awarding Kyungsoo with a light trail of kisses from his mouth to his jaw and lower, down his neck and off his shoulder, skittering along the length of his arm until he finds the junction between the fingers. Slowly, with his eyes squared in Kyungsoo’s, he sucks off their fingers together. As Kyungsoo reels in the warmth of Jongin’s tongue, Jongin pushes him over the bed. The first digit that Jongin inserts into Kyungsoo hurts, the second one is blind agony, and Kyungsoo waits for Jongin to nip the pain away, distracting little pecks spiraled along his neck. He relaxes in time for Jongin to thrust in deeper, and that is when his hips jerk up on their own. A strong wave of pleasure punches him numb and inarticulate; his jaw drops but nothing comes out. Jongin remembers the spot and when he replaces his fingers with his cock it’s the same damned spot that he hits, the same spot that makes Kyungsoo let go of everything. A noise between a grunt and a scream comes out from his throat. Jongin squeezes his thigh before thrusting in again and faster, rougher, over, and over until Kyungsoo comes in streaks of white over his stomach, and keeps going until a sudden, sharp, grunt. As they fall back onto the bed together, Kyungsoo worries himself about perhaps folding up the clothes that Jongin has tossed everywhere, and Jongin about wrapping his arms around Kyungsoo’s waist in the perfect way. The rim of Kyungsoo’s starched shirt, scented of cigarette fumes and the wet transition between fall and winter, wrinkles at the ridge between their hips. Jongin slowly slides his hand down the buttons, unclipping each one with the leisure of time and the faint buzz of pleasure in his throat, “You know, I never told you my name was Jongin. How did you remember?” Kyungsoo flushes, face turning pink to red as he tries to bury his head into the pillow, “You knew, didn’t you, that I have a page about you in my book?” “Of course I did,” Jongin mutters, and Kyungsoo wonders why it sounds as if he’s been wheezing—wheezing this whole time, maybe since the beginning, “I have the key to your apartment, and no sense of privacy or obedience. But you don’t seem to have any either, seeing as you wrote us down even though I told you not to.” “But I would keep writing,” Kyungsoo says, “I want to remember us. I really—I want to have—I want to just—a relationship. I want to have a real relationship with you, where we can talk about what we did yesterday or the day before that…” Jongin says nothing, only buries his nose in the nape of Kyungsoo’s neck, breathing heavily still. “Tomorrow, tomorrow please, don’t let me forget you, Jongin. I want to remember this, I want to remember us.” “Don’t worry, hyung. I’m a writer. I remember things for a living.” They stay up all night. Jongin makes cups of over-soaked tea and they drink them on Kyungsoo’s balcony, legs extended and overlapping, toes fidgeting against toes. Kyungsoo tries to talk about everything he can think of, anything to keep awake because when he falls asleep it will all be over, the beautiful stars and the warm fuzz in him and the amazing smoothness of Jongin’s skin gliding down his own, the stark contrasts. He rambles about how nice Jongin looked when he danced in the bar like that, how perfect their voices and movements fit together, how the sky is so clear and how the weatherman said it would rain tomorrow. But eventually, Kyungsoo’s eyes grow unbearably heavy and he slumps against Jongin, semi-conscious of the cool breeze teasing his skin and the lines Jongin draws into his neck. Jongin puts Kyungsoo’s head in his lap and strokes his hair, continuing Kyungsoo’s words as if they’ve never stopped, because maybe things don’t have to end so quick. Because he, too, is hoping. Sleep takes Kyungsoo away, anyway. -- In the last seconds of summer, hours are always too short and seconds too long.  The days are growing shorter and though Kyungsoo can’t say that he has any proof, trepidation gnaws at him with every sunset and he can feel it lingering over him. Filling the creases of his skin, gliding down his spine, dripping off his toes. A longing. A fear. The sinking cold of winter, the rain without a beginning, the same hours that he knows he’s passed once before. And then night swarms in and paints everything blank. prologue: daisies; part one: lost and stuck; part two: invisible walls; part three: tomorrow; word count: 8,425 

  Sunlight drifts into Kyungsoo’s dream, refracts into something cool and salty and maybe involving heels digging into the soft overlap between ocean and beach. He turns and the wet sand transforms into warm linens. When he opens his eyes the cocktail of seagull wings and shades of blue are replaced by a ceiling, meters too low, a small window at the end of a narrow bedroom, and peeling wood floorboards under worn rugs. It’s his room, albeit not exactly the same as it was yesterday, because there are now green and yellow sticky notes pasted over every inch of every wall. Notes that he can’t recall having placed: a second skin of colored texts and diagrams, numbers and dates. A breeze lifts the curtains and ruffles them, plays a melody in the tune of drizzled paper applause. Though Kyungsoo is unsurprised by the state of his room, somehow he is taken aback by the overwhelming number of yellow notes. The confusion, however, fades automatically into a smile when he climbs onto the balcony and notices a figure leaning on the adjacent railings. “Have you read the yellow ones?” The stranger asks abruptly, glint in his pupils turning mischievous as he notes Kyungsoo’s matte stare, “Go back and read them. And open your door when I knock.” So Kyungsoo goes back, reads them, and opens the door when Jongin knocks. Ten minutes later they’re bent over the kitchen sink making breakfast while Jongin pokes his stomach, counting the ridges of his ribs, ruining everything the perfect way. Uneasy stops and easy goes, crawling along with arms around waists and chins sunk into shoulders. Maybe this can repeat forever, Kyungsoo thinks. Maybe one day he’ll wake up an old man and Jongin will still poke him in the stomach, breathe incoherent teases into his ear, and make a mess out of everything just like today. They’ll eat breakfast over the balcony, wrinkled feet in fluffy slippers and gray hair too thin to hide bright smiles. He would like that. -- Lovemaking between Kyungsoo and Jongin is summarized by nondescript etches over fraying pages, compiled in a little list that Jongin has titled Things that Turn Do Kyungsoo on. On odd days there are spontaneous combustions at the drop of a pen, even days there is Jongin molding his hands to the texture of Kyungsoo’s goosebumps. Mainly they’re made of regular nights at the bar, when everyone else has abandoned them to a glass of untouched Scotch as arbitrator. Kyungsoo finds himself staring stupidly at Jongin’s face while he sings, contemplating how it’s possible for someone to look so flawless and broken at once. Beautiful as inkworks, happiness spilling over the contours like aged tea, Jongin is like an artifact of lost perfection—though the perfection part bites the dust as soon as he looks up and, catching Kyungsoo’s wide-eyed gaze, winks. There’s something about Jongin’s wink that makes Kyungsoo almost drop his microphone, and certainly the time signature of the song. It doesn’t take long before Kyungsoo crops off entirely, because that is when Jongin has closed the distance between them, pretty lips breathing blues over sleek perspiration. Kyungsoo’s heart thuds against his chest with every semi-intentional bump of the wrists and whisper of, “I dare you, really.” The game of dares turns lethal when the lounge door shuts and leaves Jongin crushing Kyungsoo into the wall, “Say that again? You dare me?” Palms and knees skimming up thighs, incoherent mumbles punctuating every whine and whimper. Urgency runs everything over while frustration guides hands down metal zippers. Or maybe not frustration. Maybe just urgency, because they’re always in a rush for the grains of sand vanishing from the creases of their palms. Because as winter folds into spring, lovemaking is less about sharp thrusts and smoldering gazes, and more about humid silences trapped between the sheets in Jongin’s apartment. Because as spring comes, the crests disappears and leave only a steady stream of troughs. -- Kyungsoo stretches over Jongin’s mattress, watching the curtains blow life into hundreds of yellow sticky notes over the walls, while Jongin meets the hollow of his throat with both thumbs. A distracted whisper fractures the calm, “I’m sorry.” The air resonates not of Jongin’s little apology, but of the gasps of air whistling into his lungs. Sliding his hand under Jongin’s starched shirt, Kyungsoo counts the number of Jongin’s ribs with his forefinger. He leaves behind little prints of sticky perspiration and come, soothing “one, two, three—”s. Jongin jumps, startled, while Kyungsoo pecks the surprise off his lips, “Shhh. Don’t be sorry.” It takes Jongin a very long time before he relaxes into Kyungsoo’s ministrations, allowing the other to smother his palms down his sides and paint him in warmth and comfort, “It’s just that I can’t even, properly, love you.” Kyungsoo snorts, digs his finger sharply between the ribs, and Jongin erupts with laughter, which Kyungsoo skillfully cups with both hands and caps under a longer, fuller kiss. There is a faint shadow of violet under their bodies as Kyungsoo pulls away, letting the hues of his sigh drift lethargically. “Jongin, listen. I don’t care about sex. It’s more than good enough, like this. We’re already making love.” Jongin buries his face in the pillow. Kyungsoo pries him out. Jongin looks away. Kyungsoo forces his face back. Eventually Jongin breaks into an embarrassed chortle, “You’re killing me, hyung. You’re really killing me.” “Why?” There is no response, so Kyungsoo thinks that maybe it’s just another one of those things that Jongin says for no reason. One of those things that comes and goes. As the sky darkens, the question dissipates together with the light, and it doesn’t return again. -- “Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?” “I don’t know. Away?” “That’s vague.” “I’m not a writer.” “Don’t be vague.” “Well, it dies. The thought dies.” “What if I don’t want to?” Jongin flicks his zippo open and shut, watching the tongue fire flick around the steel cap. “Don’t let me die, hyung. Promise me you’ll remember me.” “Okay. I promise. I’ll remember you.” “Forever.” “Forever.” There are times that the truth hurts more than the lie, and times when the lie itself is painful enough to rip Kyungsoo apart. “Will you love me tomorrow?” “Of course.” “Promise me that.” “I’ll love you tomorrow, and I’ll remember you forever. Just give me the lighter before you burn my apartment down.” Jongin writes him a note to hold him to their promise, “My name is Jongin. I’m the writer who lives next door. See you tomorrow, hyung. Don’t forget!”Kyungsoo laughs at the exclamation mark and Jongin punches his shoulder and they roll together, under the covers, over a slight slope of hope. Kyungsoo figures then that lies are also what pieces Jongin together, so maybe he can lie a little. The hope ends, eventually, and the lies fail. Jongin’s voice is small and lonely as he mutters into Kyungsoo’s hair, “I only have two things in this world, hyung. It’s just you and dancing. That’s all I’ve got going for me, and soon, they’re going to carve the dance out of my bones, and, eventually, they’ll take you, too…” Kyungsoo lets Jongin snake his hand around his neck and draw him into an embrace. The fire flicks off and the darkness settles. It’s raining out. Pitter-patter on the windowsill. -- There are moments when Kyungsoo watches Jongin dance that he notices how Jongin’s movements lag behind, not significantly but just enough. Hesitant bucks of the joints, fear and desire in the tell-tale hesitation. It’s as if his muscles are straining for something that his tendons hold back, as if he’s caught perpetually chasing some melody that is always a beat faster. Jongin probably knows it himself; the glimmer of frustration and grief dilating in his pupils is unmistakable. But eventually, even those moments disappear. There is no more frustration or grief, no movement, no struggle, not really. Just an apparition sitting on the other end of the bar. Disintegrating slowly into particles of dust and light. Then there are the moments when Kyungsoo sings that he notices the clenching and unclenching of Jongin’s fist. The bite marks in his lower lip, the downcast eyes, the surrendered shoulders. Everything comes apart not with a shout, but with the inevitable gasp for air. Gently, steadily, inevitably. And ultimately, the sentence that describes Jongin as a dancer in the back of the scrapbook becomes something like a lie, because Jongin doesn’t dance anymore. He’s not really a writer, either. He doesn’t seem to be the man in the page. He doesn’t seem to be a human at all, perhaps just a corpse repeating at the end of every hour, “Hyung, do you remember when…?” -- Kyungsoo is hanging between being suffocated and scalded by a midsummer’s night as he steps into the elevator. The stranger already inside nods a terse greeting. It’s the 12th of July, a moment when the world runs on uncertain lamplights, drunken howls, and the occasional punch of laughter. There are just the two of them at this hour, and an obtrusive kind of peace. Having just returned from the bar, Kyungsoo tries to fight off the cocktail of metallic smoke and the thick scent of alcohol caught in his hair. The last ringlets of saxophone nestle over his fingers and cinquillo beat lingers under his skin, but none of it is enough to fill the abyss that stands between him and the stranger. The stranger, with an unlit cigarette between his teeth, turns first. The unflattering elevator lighting enshrouds him in jaundice yellow, a heavy veil of lethargy. Kyungsoo wonders, with the cinquillo pounding into his veins, if the man’s skin is as plastic as it seems. “Hot. The weather. It’s hot,” he says, proffering a hand that Kyungsoo grabs with hesitation. His grasp is surprisingly cold, long fingers and nails cut short and sharp, leathery skin stretched taut over gaunt knuckles. But more than that, he’s trembling, Kyungsoo realizes. His teeth are chattering and he can barely make eye contact. “Um,” Kyungsoo balks. He wants to ask if the stranger’s okay, why he’s shaking like that, but between the creaks of the elevator flooring and sputters of the fluorescent light bulb, the words are lost, “Yeah. Yeah. Hot tonight.” The stranger says nothing. Instead he leans back on the elevator walls and lets his eyes glide down the length of Kyungsoo’s figure, as if he’s waiting for Kyungsoo to recognize him. It’s the kind of attention that makes Kyungsoo draw back behind his jacket, though a thin layer of cashmere does little to hide him. Time stands on its toes until the doors open, when Kyungsoo lets out a gasp of air he didn’t know he was holding in. Only later, after Kyungsoo has worked his way down the apartment corridors and noted that the stranger has trailed after him, does he realize that it’s probably not the first time they’ve met. “Do I know you from somewhere?” He finally asks, voice echoing uneasily down the long hallways. The stranger has stopped at the neighboring door, twirling a keychain around his forefinger. A sliver of moonlight works in from the railings and gleams off of something on his suit. Kyungsoo notes a pair of cufflinks, shiny and expensive-looking, too expensive-looking to belong to someone who would live in this kind of residence. “Do you?” The stranger frowns, and it resounds much more of a plea than a request. Kyungsoo picks the lint in his pocket. He doesn’t remember coming upon the stranger’s face in the scrapbook or the rows of green notes on his walls. But perhaps he skipped a page. It’s happened before. He hurriedly reaches for his bag, and is stopped with a bark of laughter, “So you don’t remember. Nothing at all?” “What? What am I supposed to remember?” “Nothing. Really, nothing,” The stranger laughs, or maybe sobs, as he slumps against the neighboring door and slides down, down, down. Even in the dark, the twinkle of fear gleaming from his crooked grin is distinct. It makes him look younger than he seems, almost sadly so. -- The watermelon tastes of grimy windows and the air of some kind of invisible, dimming melody decomposing at the veins. Kyungsoo finds it hard to swallow. Everything is imperceptible today, teetering by the edge of existence. “Jongin,” he says, picking out the black seeds with careful forefingers, “Why are you so quiet?” “I’ve always been quiet,” Jongin responds. They’re sitting cross-legged on Kyungsoo’s balcony, mildewed walls behind them and an unending country of suburbs etherized before. Kyungsoo feels like all of it is just a film set built out of dust and cracking dreams. There must be a real world somewhere out there, where laughter doesn’t seem an impossibility on the barren desolation of Jongin’s face. “No you haven’t.” “You wouldn’t know. It’s not like you remember.” “Why are you so upset?” “I’m not.” “You are.” Jongin bites angrily into a chunk of watermelon. Trickles of juice run down the side of his mouth and he smears them away roughly with the back of his hand. He’s upset, that much is clear, Kyungsoo decides, or perhaps a little more than upset. Waiting patiently, Kyungsoo picks up the sound of Jongin biting, chewing, swallowing, hitching for air. But Jongin doesn’t break out of the routine, only continues eating faster and faster. “Look, what did I say wrong? Jongin, I want to have a relationship with you but you can’t be like this—” “No, hyung. I can, because we don’t even have a fucking relationship,” Jongin suddenly snaps, brittle and cold, “And we’re never going to have a relationship. You get it, don’t you? You can keep trying but you’re never going to remember me. That’s just the way it is.” Kyungsoo doesn’t want to cry, but a little whimper cracks his poker-faced façade and screws everything up. Jongin grows angrier, “You don’t even have a right to be upset. You wake up each morning and you’re all fine and dandy but what about me?” “I’m sorr—” “I’m in love with you, damn it, but I still have to introduce myself to you every fucking morning and do you even understand how that feels?—No, you don’t, because you don’t actually love me. Without all my notes, there is nothing. There is actually, exactly, really nothing. I’m really just a stranger to you, and this relationship is all just a play. It’s just another novel. Fabrication. Everything. I’m not even writing a fucking novel, fuck, I’m living it.” After a long pause, “I’m sorry,” unwinds eventually, from one of them. Maybe both of them. “Two nights ago, I went through and took off all the notes about us in your apartment, and yesterday, I tried to see if you would remember the night that we met for the second time—even a little spark of recognition—but of course…” Jongin laces his fingers into Kyungsoo’s and holds them together, sticky smudges of watermelon juice smearing over sweaty palms. “Here are the facts. I’m going to die. One day you’re going to forget us. And then, the day after that, you’re going to forget me. Not even because of your amnesia. Just because of time. Because that’s what time does. It takes the little pieces. The insignificant ones first, and then it sneaks the significant ones… But then by the time you do realize it, they’ll be gone, and you won’t know what’s missing until—” “No, no Jongin, it’s not like that—my head is bad, but my heart,” Kyungsoo presses both their hands against his chest, and breathes in deeply, as if the air can fill the gap between them. Jongin’s warmth seeps through his shirt and it makes his stomach light, unlocks the words from somewhere he had not known existed, “My heart is good. I’ll remember you there. I can’t remember anything about you, but when you hurt, my heart hurt. When you laugh, my heart laughs. I can love you even without memories so just hang on. Hang on, please?” After a long struggle, Jongin manages to force a smile onto his face but it quivers, and ultimately cracks as he says, contemplatively, brutally, “This isn’t a romance novel, hyung. It doesn’t work that way.” He inhales, and the final nail comes not with a bang but a sorry whisper, “Don’t you see it, hyung? Our ending is so clear. It’s all been drafted from the very beginning, before we ever met.” Though Jongin is waiting for a rebuttal, though they’re both waiting for a rebuttal, Kyungsoo doesn’t have anything to say. The sobs wrack through his body heavy and awful and he can’t manage the slightest protest as Jongin rambles on, “You know—one day, I won’t be able to touch your face, talk to you. I’ll just—lay there, watching you cry with eyes wide open, body numb, and, and my hand, around yours… You’ll hold my hand like right now, but it’ll be cold, and it’ll hurt, more than it does now. And when that day comes, hyung, promise me you’ll let me go. You’ll go home, take away the daisies—” “No.” “Because, listen, hyung. You don’t deserve to…” Jongin’s Adam’s apple bobs up, stops, and doesn’t come down. His voice breaks. Kyungsoo suddenly realizes that Jongin’s been crying, too. He’s been crying all along, perhaps before Kyungsoo woke up, “see daisies wither…” “No,” Kyungsoo grasps both of Jongin’s hands, collects all of the crumbling bones and the threadbare tendons, and gasps little prayers onto the feeble knuckles, “No, no, no.” -- Between the months and the seconds, Kyungsoo loses track of the hour hand and forgets how to read clocks and calendars. Sometimes he forgets the date. Other times he looks out the window and wonders what season they’re in. His scrapbook is no longer updated and he’s not sure if he’s twenty or twenty-five because it doesn’t matter either way. He’s always going to be caught in the same spot, that’s just how things are. But when Jongin comes in everything settles back together. It’s the last months of fall. 2013. He’s twenty-five, almost twenty-six three months, and so deeply in love that it hurts. It hurts because it’s already the last months of fall, because summer was over and he can’t even remember it, because he’s in the kind of love that makes him greedy and angry and sad for everything that he can’t have. The kind of love that makes him cling onto Jongin at the end of every night and beg for him let him remember all of today, and yesterday, and— “Tomorrow,” Jongin interrupts. Kyungsoo thinks that he smells a little of iodine or antiseptics, double-printed hospital sheets. “You can remember tomorrow. I’ll remember all of our yesterdays, and you can remember all of our tomorrows. It’ll be great.” Kyungsoo deadpans, “That makes no sense. How do you even remember tomorrow?” “Well,” Jongin relaxes into Kyungsoo’s arms, lets his back fill the curve of Kyungsoo’s chest and cheek glide over Kyungsoo’s, “Tomorrow I remember that we will go to the beach, and?” “And what?” “And what do you remember we’ll do?” “Jongin what are you even saying, how do you remember something that’s never happened—” “Shush. Let’s see. I remember that the water is going to be ablaze with light. The sun will be setting, all violet and red into the clouds. But it’ll be quiet, mostly just the sound of water and wind, and your voice. You’re going to sing My Lady and bury your feet in the sand while watching me kick around in the water. I’ll dance, you’ll sing. I’ll trip over, you’ll pluck your feet from the sand and try to catch me. Noticing how nice you look, I’ll get the sudden urge to put you in a compromising position. I’ll make love to you right there and then so that there will be sand all over the place and you’ll freak out, of course, and do the laundry four times, scrub everything down—but that’s later, of course—first we’ll have dinner sitting on the roof of the car, lazy and slow. We can have hamburgers, with lots of cheese...” Kyungsoo contemplates, “And we’ll watch the dusk. I’ll keep singing and you’ll grab my hand, drag me off the roof. We’ll dance together. Laugh. You’ll laugh harder but I’ll laugh longer. Mosquitoes everywhere, probably. I’d like to go but you want to stay longer, because you’re like that, and I’ll drag you back and you’ll shrug me off but eventually you’ll give, because I’ll hit you. Or maybe I’ll give, when you grab my hand and pull me in and kiss me really hard.” Jongin grabs his hand and pulls him in so close Kyungsoo can feel his exhales on his tongue, “Like this?” “What are you thinking right now?” “How much I want to stay like this.” There are questions Kyungsoo doesn’t ask Jongin. He doesn’t ask Jongin if they can stay together forever, or how many tomorrows are really left, because sometimes the truth is too bright. He can only hold onto the seconds, each gesture, each contact, each syllable. Jongin comes in seconds. Everything comes in seconds. If only the seconds could last long enough. -- When Kyungsoo wakes up the next day, however, they don’t go to the beach. In fact, there is no ‘they’. There are no yellow notes on his walls, no words on the last page of his scrapbook, no compromising positions or hamburgers over car roofs. There is only Kyungsoo rushing down the stairs for the factory, eating supper before an empty dining table, waiting for seven o’clock to come with eyes peeled on the neighboring balcony and a strange feeling that something might be amiss. As he nurses a tune under the hazy stage lights, he stares at the empty seat on the other side of the bar and contemplates what that hollow pit in his chest means, why every note is coming off on the wrong key. Minseok tries to adjust his volume to cover for Kyungsoo’s mistakes. He gives up by the time they hit the break, “What’s up with you?” “I don’t know,” Kyungsoo mutters. Nothing out of the ordinary has occurred today. Everything has gone according to the notes in his scrapbook. “Where’s that writer guy? Kim Jongin?” “What writer guy?” is what Kyungsoo meant to ask, but it somehow comes out as a gasp of inexplicable panic and pain almost too loud to be registered. On instinct, he reaches for his scrapbook, goes through the pages once, and again, and again with the same shaking whimper, “I don’t know any writer guys.” A bundle of dry-pressed daisies slip out from the back cover. Kyungsoo breaks. There’s no one to catch him this time. -- He wakes up in October to green on his walls, the color of synthetic grass that never dies. October withers the world at each sunset, until it reeks of decomposing leaves and forgotten promises. With October arrives endless rain that washes out immortal footprints and brings new customers into the bar. He wakes up in November to snow piled thick and high outside his window. A familiar urge to bury his face in his pillow and cry like tomorrow will never come curdles in his guts. November carries days that vanish into thin air and nights that become the beginning to the end and the ending to the beginning. In November the tomorrows stop coming. In November he wonders how long he’s lived like this, how much longer he’s going to keep living like this, how many tomorrows there are left before time will let him go. He wakes up in December, four days to Christmas, to a knocking at his door. Darkness swallows his apartment as he makes his way through the corridors, fingers outstretched to read the walls as he undoes the chains and pulls it open and— “Hyung,” whimpers the boy at his door. What Kyungsoo takes in is a conflation of ashen lips and swollen eyes, shivering under a thin hospital gown with nothing save for snowflakes on his hair and plastic slippers under his feet. The boy might have been trying to smile, the traces of which are left tugging sadly at the corner of his mouth, but it all thaws away when he tries working his jaw again, “Hyung,” and it’s a sob, “hyung, hyung…” An enormous, inexplicably warm tide of relief washes over Kyungsoo, except it’s not enough to stop him from croaking, hesitantly, “Who are you?” A pause. “Of course, of course you’d forget. How silly of me...” Kyungsoo watches something well up the boy’s already reddened eyes with breathless curiosity, or perhaps a prick of indefinable empathy. It’s terrifying how easily this perfect construction of bones breaks down in slow motion. The boy gives in a tremble at a time, unwinding at the seams, into an eruption of noiseless wails. Forearms rubbing away tears and whole chest shaking with inconsolable grief, he eventually gulps everything down, hard. He makes a little gesture of a wave, and it looks so fragile, “Sorry to disturb you. I just thought—in case you remembered—but, just, never mind. I’ll just…” There is nothing but the hush of colliding snowflakes, gleaming little spheres of light, like fireflies, as Kyungsoo wraps his hand around the boy’s wrist. He isn’t really thinking of fragility when he pulls the boy in closer to the door. In fact he isn’t sure what he’s thinking as he says, “No, it’s snowing. Let me get you a jacket. You’re going to catch a cold.” “A cold,” the boy parrots, and his laugh sounds like the saddest thing this side of the universe, “I’m going to catch a cold.” -- On their way to the hospital, the boy introduces himself as Jongin. He gives Kyungsoo four facts in the backseat of a taxi. One, he’s a writer. Two, they’ve met before. Three, he’s dying. Four, he’s taken himself out of Kyungsoo’s notes or scrapbook because of those facts. “They said I had six months left. Maybe a year if I behaved,” Jongin says, eyes reflections of the dawn flying past the windows, “So I wanted to play a hero. Let myself be forgotten, to save you from all the yesterdays and leave you with all the tomorrows but… then I heard that I had pneumonia. It wasn’t six months. I had four weeks. Maybe three. And I cracked. Being stuck with the yesterdays while you moved on without me suddenly wasn’t all that appealing anymore and—really, I’m sorry. I lied. I’m not a hero. Just a coward.” Their knees touch. Kyungsoo doesn’t move away, “Do you… like me?” “Like you,” the boy echoes, and he’s laughing again as he says, “No, I just want to be in all of your tomorrows. I want you to remember me.” Kyungsoo knows the truth, and he can tell that Jongin knows it too. Wishes are only wishes, and prayers are only prayers. The city flying past the windows might glow with Christmas and the warmth of New Years but it doesn’t change the fact that too much is too much. Some things are simply not possible. “I mean, you don’t have to remember me. I'm not delusional. Really you can just drop me off at the hospital and… just… I just wanted to see you one more time, and I guess I did so… I’m really sorry for bothering you,” Jongin laughs, and each time he laughs Kyungsoo thinks that it sounds more like a cry, “You must think I’m a freak or something, randomly popping up at your door like this.” “I don’t think you’re a freak,” Kyungsoo interrupts, and the tension fades a little when he manages a grin, “I think you’re a moron, for running out of the hospital in this kind of getup when it’s snowing outside.” The car stops. It takes a few moments before either of them realizes that they’re already at the entrance, and that the time has come for Kyungsoo to leave and Jongin to stay. For their last second, they’re all polite smiles and awkward bowing of the heads, as if they’ve only just met for the first time and that Jongin’s red eyes mean nothing. “So,” Jongin says, not quite shivering with Kyungsoo’s jacket over his shoulders, but still chattering nonetheless, “I just, I have one last request?” “Yeah?” “Will you say my name? One last time.” Kyungsoo clears his throat and tries to replicate the syllables, but somehow they’re stuck to the sides of his throat even as he opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. By the time he reaches up to touch his neck, he realizes he’s shaking and that there is something wrong with him. The world is coming down on him in slow motion and his heart hurts really, very bad. “Jong...” Kyungsoo gulps down the hesitation and focuses on the bare syllables, “Jongin.” “Thank you. Thank you,” And the second thank you is said softly, almost as if it’s meant for more significant things. Perhaps something of a, “Thank you for meeting me, finding me, digging me up from the debris of broken pieces. Thank you for giving me life, tears, wishes, rows and rows of yellow sticky notes lighting up my room when the tapestries have shut off the sun. Thank you for teaching me how bright fireflies can shine.” But Kyungsoo doesn’t hear any of that. All he hears is Seoul at dawn, the whistles of a breeze and Jongin wheezing for oxygen. “You’re welcome,” he returns stiffly. It’s a cold today. Jongin doesn’t shiver as he crawls out the car, slams the door, and looks back. Rolling down the window, Kyungsoo wonders why it feels like his whole world is collapsing. Outside, with the wind sharpening his bones and coursing through his hair, Jongin smiles meekly. Kyungsoo nods. A few shreds of snow make it down from the sky, and disappear. “Well.” “Okay.” They’ve given up words, because there is a mutual understanding that words are clumsy. Words are like little comets, streaking behind them a reign of tears and hesitation. They can’t afford words. No tears or comets or hesitation in this exchange between a stranger and a memory, only glimmers of snow. Kyungsoo extends his hand awkwardly across the window pane. Jongin takes it, laughing at something funny that Kyungsoo can’t understand, and then he turns around and walks. Legs too thin, back too bent, head held too pitiably high despite his trembling fingers. Kyungsoo turns to the driver with a grin two shades too bright, “Drive me back, please.” He’s trying to pretend that it’s all natural, because it is. After all, he doesn’t know this Jongin. He doesn’t understand the meaning of tomorrows or yesterdays and on top of that, he’s already late for work. With a deep inhale of crisp winter, Kyungsoo tells himself that he doesn’t want to run at all, that there are no tears threatening to fall, no tears blurring his vision even though— They fall, anyway, one by one, as does Jongin. Kyungsoo screams so loud he doesn't recognize his own voice. -- Standing at the back of the room, Kyungsoo gathers leftover words from the doctors. Something somethings about oxygen treatments not being enough, antibiotics but the liver is shutting down, keep him in the ICU maybe but it’s not like it’ll change anything, at least down the fever in an ice bath but his lungs won’t hold up. He doesn’t understand any of the big words, the multi-syllable Symbicort or Theophlline or corticosteriods, but he understands the ticking of the second hand in between the lines, the incessant beeping of the monitors, the meaningless apologies about, “there’s nothing more we can do.” “I don’t want to die,” Jongin says, muffled under the oxygen mask. Kyungsoo settles in the stool beside his bed and studies the plastic veins extending out of Jongin’s ankles. Somehow he looks so tiny, so full of emaciated edges. “You’re not going to die. They said you’ll be fine.” “Liar,” Jongin laughs, shifting his head away, and that’s when Kyungsoo realizes that he’s not really laughing. That he’s crying. “There’s going to be a new guy in this bed in three weeks. Four, tops. I’ve got pneumonia. On top of the fibrosis I have fucking pneumonia.” “You’re going to be fine,” Kyungsoo insists, even though Jongin is wrong about the three weeks, because it’s really something more like two. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” “No,” Jongin screws his eyes shut. Kyungsoo doesn’t know what else to do but stand up and drag his fingers over Jongin’s chest. Jongin quickly flinches away, “Now what?” “Writing god a note. I have to. He can’t take away these lungs. You need them,” Kyungsoo decides, pulling Jongin closer to continue scribbling invisible lines into Jongin’s flesh, “You really need them.” The silence falls, and after it falls it never lifts again. Jongin’s murmur is just a ghost behind the hum of the air conditioner. “When I first heard I was going to die, I thought—finally, thank you—but now, now I just—I just want one more minute, one more millisecond—I want more time, with you, hyung… I haven’t loved you yet, I’m not done…” and his eyes close before Kyungsoo has a chance to grab his hand and tell him that they have enough time. That there’s no rush, that it’ll be fine, because he’s going to go home and write all of this down—Kim Jongin, west wing, room two-twenty, Seoul Hospital, take the taxi to the southern entrance, we’re not finished yet—so that he can come back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after… -- “Mm, we can try tattooing my name… onto your face,” Jongin says, taking a long drag of oxygen from his mouthpiece. The nurse had let him into a wheelchair earlier, said he was doing much better and should get out of his room. Try walking down the hallways, she said. And so here they are, two little figures wrapped up in big bundles of wool and cashmere, bracing the stale air down endless corridors. The steady tap of Kyungsoo’s heel is comforting, almost, a testament to the reality of their existence: they’re still together, the two of them; they’re making it through one more day. “I can’t see my own face though.” “Well it can’t go on mine. I’d look… awful with my own name on my… face,” Jongin chuckles, sputtering for air and waving away Kyungsoo’s concerned hand, “I mean the press already thinks… I’m a narcissist. Just imagine… them finding out about a fucking… tattoo—ha.” They say nothing, merely watching the other patients pass. It’s a welcomed kind of peace that they’re no longer afraid of, though eventually Jongin breaks it again, “Are you going to… the bar tonight?” Kyungsoo shrugs, “Maybe not tonight.” “You said… the same thing… yesterday,” Jongin grins, eyes a little melancholy under the occasional moan of the oxygen tank, “Tomorrow, go to the bar. You… have to sing. It’s what… you do. Sing. Live life.” “I’m living it with you,” Kyungsoo protests, “I can sing right now.” “No don’t make an idiot out of—” But Kyungsoo sings, melodies frosting delicate and translucent despite the suffocating atmosphere, breaking the Jongin’s scowl one scoff at a time. Hesitantly, Jongin’s fingers begin tapping on the arm of the wheelchair. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that Jongin isn’t just nursing a beat, that his fingers are dancing some kind of magic into the cold. And as Kyungsoo kneels before him, coming head to head and eye in eye, everything perfectly in sync, Jongin’s fingertips skitter up his knuckles. Light and easy. “Arabresque,” he whispers, words surfacing as white mists over the plastic. His hand does a little leap. “Grand jeté,” and a twirl of the wrist, spinning nails digging laughter out of Kyungsoo’s palm, “fouetté en tourant,” to the edge of his palm and over to the back, “here a sissonne, one, and a two, and—,” they both stop breathing momentarily, when his fingers cross Kyungsoo’s wrist and up his forearm, arm, shoulder, collarbone, neck, lower lip, stop. They share a smile, during which Kyungsoo presses his lips against Jongin’s fingers, molding easily over the cold, pruning flesh. Jongin’s flush is almost too bright against the white backdrop of his hospital gown. Kyungsoo thinks that he could be glowing, perhaps a little like a firebug. With time their song ends, and the nurse calls Jongin back into his room because the unfiltered air isn’t kind to his lungs. Nothing is kind to his lungs. “Night hyung,” Jongin breathes, as they hook him to his daily dose of morphine. His eyes are beginning to flutter closed, and Kyungsoo knows that he’s grasping at the seconds when he says, “I love you.” “No, Jongin. Tell me that you’ll see me tomorrow.” “Hyung I might not make…” “Just. Tell. Me. That you,” and Kyungsoo’s voice falters all too suddenly, words and thoughts collapsing at once. He remembers the way Jongin’s fingers had danced so adeptly up his arm, so naturally, as if they were born for the single purpose only minutes earlier, and it all feels so surreal to this Jongin lying etherized under blankets of fluorescent lighting, this Jongin who will probably never dance again. “…tomorrow. Tomorrow…” Jongin puts his hand on Kyungsoo’s neck, draws him a little closer, smudging Kyungsoo’s tears with a thumb, “Okay. See you…” The trickles of fluid dripping into his plastic veins take him away before the last word. -- There are no more yesterdays, and gradually no more todays either, just tomorrows. They’re running out of time. The shadows are becoming too long, the lights blinking too slow, the monitor’s song always on the verge of a fugue. Giggles always erupt from under Jongin’s frown, swelling slowly into raucous laughter. Too loud. Too rushed. He’s laughing as if he’s afraid he won’t get a chance to laugh again. As if he’s afraid all the lights will turn off if he doesn’t keep up his display. So Kyungsoo wraps his arm around Jongin’s waist, when no one is watching, and presses their foreheads together. He tells Jongin that it’s okay. That he doesn’t have to laugh so hard. That he understands, whatever it is. “I’m on borrowed time... How much do you think the interest is?” Jongin muses one day, contemplating the thought as the nurse slides a giant metal tube into his back. He takes a long drag of oxygen and holds it while blood and puss pours into a plastic container. “I don’t know,” Kyungsoo answers quietly. “At the last moments you begin… praying for things… will I make it for the winter… can we make kimchi together…” “Do you want kimchi?” “And then you want more… Will I make it… to kiss you under the mistletoe. And… will I make it… for New Years, because I want, I want to eat… rice cakes, with you. Will you… make it for our birthday… I want to see… the mole on your tragus… when I lean, in, to… whisper in your ear… show you… true fire… flies…” “Stop it, Jongin, you’ll make it to all of them. We’ve already made it for the mistletoe, today,” Kyungsoo insists, pointing to the neon-wrapped boxes at the other end of the room, “We have Christmas. If we’ve gone through Christmas we can do New Years, too, and our birthdays, and I can show you my mole right now if you—” “And it’s never enough, because… the more I have of… you the more I… realize that I’m still missing… so much of you… of us…” “We can celebrate it together,” Kyungsoo interrupts, “We’ll celebrate everything together, okay? Okay? Just, don’t cry, Jongin—” “You’re the one… crying, hyung.” “Shut up.” “I don’t want to die yet, hyung,” Jongin chuckles drily, droplets of liquid rolling down the creases of his eyes. Kyungsoo isn’t sure if they’re the tears that have fallen onto him, or the tears that are falling out of him. -- He can’t talk anymore, the head-nurse explains in hushed whispers, as if it were some terrible secret, his lungs don’t supply enough oxygen as it is and it’s best not to agitate him. But to Kyungsoo it doesn’t really matter, because he doesn’t need to hear Jongin speak. He doesn’t need to touch Jongin, either, or the see him. He just needs to be near him. To know that Jongin is breathing, still, that Jongin can hear him when he sings for him, that his lips can twitch a little with every lame joke Kyungsoo throws at him. Kyungsoo doesn’t really understand how he knows this guy, or why his knees automatically buck when he sees the stranger’s room number. Then again, he doesn’t understand a lot of things. And by the number of questions Jongin pass him, scratched out sloppily over little yellow sticky notes, neither does Jongin. “One day you’ll look to the balcony next to yours and you won’t see an asshole draining cigarettes. During those days will you be sad?” Kyungsoo looks up from the note, blinking reluctantly, “I’m already sad. I miss seeing you on that balcony,” and he doesn’t fail to recognize the shock registering on Jongin’s expression. “How did you know that it was me?” Jongin writes, so quickly that the handwriting is illegible but Kyungsoo knows what he’s asking, because he’s asking the same question himself. “It was just a feeling,” Kyungsoo grins, and he’s so glad that he’s finally caught something in memory. Maybe they’ve got hope after all. Maybe tomorrow Jongin will get his lungs and Kyungsoo his memory, and the day after that they can talk about what they did tomorrow. About silly notes, trembling hands, glassy eyes. Tonight he goes home with Jongin’s name on his lips. Repeating it like a prayer, again and again and again until it’s as natural as breathing, he carries it into his dream, begs a million times for god to please at least let him keep the name. Please at least let him have Jongin, let him struggle out of those dreams without taking Jongin away. He doesn’t need to know anything, not of their past or their future or their virtues and vices. All he wants is just a name. Any little piece of Kim Jongin. -- When Kyungsoo wakes up he finds a whole assortment of crumpled sticky notes in his pockets, littered in barely legible scribbles of pen and pencil. They’re written by a practiced, albeit shaken hand, with lines spiraling and barely hanging on. He smoothes the first note over his palm, carefully smothering away the wrinkles. “Do you think there is a god?” “If there’s a god, do you think he’d give me some extra time? It doesn’t have to be a lot. Just an extra week, or even day. Anything. I wouldn’t mind an hour. A second. I want more time. I just want more time.” “You’re crying.” “I should’ve stopped smoking earlier, huh?” “Stop being so brave, hyung.” The last note is green and, with edges fraying, corners dog-eared and yellowing, clearly older than the other two. The handwriting is more determined, pressed down with so much force that the words are physically imprinted into the paper. However, it’s still distinct enough for him to recognize: “My name is Jongin. I’m the writer who lives next door. See you tomorrow, hyung. Don’t forget!” -- Sometimes when Kyungsoo looks at Jongin in the hospital bed, he’s not sure if he’s looking at a reflection or the original. It’s almost as if time has worn away him from the outside, turned him transparent, left just enough of him to be a shadow. Kyungsoo wants to talk to him, but the nurse says that it’s unlikely that Jongin can manage, so he can only look down at the “Jongin” scribbled loosely on the back of his hand, and match it to the “Kim Jongin” nameplate hanging at the end of the bed. The seconds refract into kaleidoscope souls over the bedsheets, and Kyungsoo counts them one by one as Jongin drags his body around. Feeble, whistling moans inflate the hush between them as he lifts an arm, which Kyungsoo immediately clasps with both hands. Jongin’s first murmurs are nearly indistinguishable from the gush of air rushing out of his plastic mask, and he repeats himself with painstaking determination until Kyungsoo makes out, “Will you be here tomorrow?” “Why?” “Be here tomorrow, the thirteenth,” the boy says, negotiating for each syllable with deep inhales of air, “Our birthday… tomorr… average… twelfth… fourteenth…thirteen…” Kyungsoo balks. Jongin winks. Everything ends too easily, but they hold it together with a thin string of hope. Kyungsoo doesn’t go home tonight. He begs for the nurses to let him stay overnight and by some miracle they relent, though they tell him to keep quiet, because Jongin needs his rest. Because Jongin is really hanging onto life by nothing by that thin string of hope. He tries to stay up all night, to be able to look Jongin in the eye tomorrow morning and be the first to tell him, “Happy birthday, to Kim Jongin and Do Kyungsoo,” without looking at any notes. Tomorrow he needs to save Jongin. He has to save him. Remember him. -- Sunlight drifts into Kyungsoo’s dream, refracts into something cool and salty and maybe involving heels digging into the soft overlap between ocean and beach. He turns and the wet sand transforms into cold linens. When he opens his eyes the cocktail of seagull wings and shades of blue is replaced by a frail green line jumping through a black screen, a small window at the end of a narrow hospital room, and plastic floor tiles. Plastic everything. It’s not his room, and he has no idea how he could have woken up by a stranger’s bedside. There are words written on the back of his hand, a loose, fading “remember Jongin; our birthday tomorrow (13th January 2014).” Kyungsoo drags himself upright, back cracking and neck sore from slumping over the bed all night, and that is when he notices that the stranger on the bed has been watching him, a twinkle of a smile lingering over his indistinct features. “Hello?” Kyungsoo blinks. The stranger doesn’t respond, though maybe the corner of his eye flinches. Maybe his thumb twitches. Kyungsoo looks at the nameplate on the end of the bed. Kim Jongin. There is an unsettlingly even stream of air gushing in and out of a bizarre metal apparatus by the bedside. Kyungsoo traces his gaze over the plastic extending out of it and into Kim Jongin’s nose. He’s about to ask a question, probably about the strange message on his hand, when something strikes him and he blurts a, “Happy birthday, to us.” The stranger named Kim Jongin seems to take an extra sharp gasp of air. His hand twitches in Kyungsoo’s grasp, and gradually, he falls back asleep. Kyungsoo almost begins thinking that it’s natural, that the stranger is probably just tired, but the constant beeping from the monitor with green lines stops, and some kind of alarm goes off loud and noisy and a slew of doctors and nurses rushes inside and shoulder him away, too far away, as they try to wake the stranger back up. And he realizes that this is wrong. All of this is wrong. Wrong “Kim Jongin, time of death nine twenty-seven, January thirteenth, year two-thousand and fourteen. Monday.” Wrong. It’s not until Kyungsoo has made it out of the hospital that the tears slam him in the face, knocks him off guard and shatters his whole body into a thousand irreversible pieces. He has no idea why the world seems to have ended on such a beautiful January day, or why he’s sobbing in the middle of the street as if tomorrow will never come. Why the name on the back of his hand burns harder than any goodbye. -- It’s early Friday morning, second week of July, an hour when the world runs on uncertain lamplights, drunken howls, and the occasional punch of laughter. There are just the two of them in the elevator at this hour. Having just returned from the bar, Kyungsoo tries to fight off the cocktail of metallic smoke and the thick scent of alcohol caught in his hair. The last ringlets of saxophone nestle over his fingers and cinquillo beat lingers under his skin, but none of it is really enough to distract him. But today he feels awfully empty, like someone has taken him apart while he was sleeping, stolen something from his core, and put the rest of him back together again. The stranger, with an unlit cigarette between his teeth, turns first. The unflattering elevator lighting makes him look tired, and thin, and generally awful. Kyungsoo wonders, with the cinquillo pounding into his veins, if the man’s skin is as plastic as it seems. “Are you Do Kyungsoo?” The stranger asks, turning around just in time for the elevator to slide open. “Yes,” Kyungsoo responds, hesitantly stepping out with the other after him, “Have we met before?” “No, not really,” the stranger smiles, extending a hand, “I’m Oh Sehun. I was Kim Jongin’s editor?” Something in Kyungsoo stirs, but not enough. “Nice to meet you.” “I’m kind of busy, so I’m just going to cut this short,” Sehun says, dislodging something bulky from his briefcase and handing it to Kyungsoo. It’s a notebook, Kyungsoo realizes, an old one weathered and dog-eared from use, smeared all over with runny ink and graphite, “This is Jongin’s last novel. Hand-written and everything. For you.” Eventually Sehun disappears down the corridors and Kyungsoo finds himself sitting on the balcony, moonlight grazing the notebook in his lap. He flips to the last page on a whim, just to check if it’s a sad ending, because he doesn’t like sad endings. “My name is Jongin. I’m the writer who lives next door. See you tomorrow, hyung. Don’t forget!”