Chapter Text
Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper.
— Sanna Wani, Tomorrow is a Place
Soobin moves through the building with silent familiarity, walking up and down flights of stairs, through courtyards and commons, muscle memory lighting up his way. Seven years of his life spent teaching here. Seven years, watching the shapes and forms around him deteriorate, achingly, devastatingly slowly. The roses outside slowly morphing into blotches of shadowy red. The clouds turning blurry as though impressionist brushstrokes.
Forty was the cutoff, the doctors had said. Some odd twenty-one years have passed now, from that hazy afternoon when he was seventeen and had been uprooted from his home to an unfamiliar country, an unfamiliar tongue. Thirty-eight years is a long time to live for the human psyche, maybe. But it’s never enough for the bird in your teeth or the ghost weeping outside your window. It’s never enough. It’s never enough.
His students are waiting for him, as usual. The postgrad, always with a cheerful smile and stickers of Molang on his phonecase. The woman, with clacking nails and wide, birdlike eyes curving up in small smiles. The highschooler, perpetually sweating through his clothes, having run here from home after scarfing down lunch. He doesn’t know these people. But he can tell.
He can tell who they are. The postgrad is definitely not fully Korean, not with that name and bone structure. The woman has scars on her fingertips like she’s bled for music time and time again. The highschooler has dark moons under his eyes like he never sleeps. Flesh and blood, each one. Just another lost being wading through the sea, hoping to reach the shore.
He takes his place behind his desk, greeting everyone with a smile. He sets his bag down with a heavy clunk, adjusting his glasses on his nose, feeling his vision wobble. He steels himself inside, and picks up the chalk.
“All right,” he coughs, already feeling the whispers of a headache seeping in from the harsh lights. “It’s noun cases again. We left at chaturthi last time, yeah? Panchami, or fifth, vibhakti is the ablative case. It’s used when we want to denote the preposition from. Say: He runs from house to house. Or, The fruit falls from the tree.”
फलम् वृक्षात् पतति।
The fruit falls from the tree.
He scribbles down the translation, heaving a miniscule sigh of relief when he sees it’s a day when he can see his own writing on the board. He hears the sound of scribbling behind him, no doubt the postgrad noting things down with painstaking tenacity.
He turns back around, sweating through his sleeves. He leans back on the board, grateful for the coldness of it against his back. He’s sure he’s running a low fever.
The woman catches his eye and smiles lightly. She looks away to squint at the board, then back down to her worksheet, lips soundlessly forming around the words. She frowns at her work for a few seconds more, before nodding resolutely to herself and scribbling down an answer in the blank in the chicken scratch he’s grown accustomed to over the weeks.
The highschooler frowns deeply at the verb forms he’s written down on the board, sounding out the harsh vowels and half-consonants with a heavy accent. Soobin makes sure to nod at him encouragingly, because truly, he’s not half bad for someone learning for the first time.
Then the smiley postgrad. The teacher with the marker stains on his hands has always been stumped by that man. He picks things up easily, always asking questions eagerly. Like right now, he’s asking him about the—
The door opens. Someone’s head peeks through, a black head of hair and the fox-like eyes that follow. Soobin stops mid-sentence, mid-word. Because, because—
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought this was my class,” the stranger, the terribly familiar stranger rushes out, hands trembling as he clasps them in apology. His eyes immediately zero in on them. They never used to shake like that. They never used to— “Um, actually. Could you please tell me where 14-B is?”
The teacher perpetually fixed behind his desk is unmoving. He is still, like the sun through layers of film. “Yeonjun?” he forces out, from a place deeper than tongue and throat.
The stranger stills, before smiling weakly. It only serves to make the lines around his eyes more prominent. “That’s me, yeah. Didn’t know you knew of me already.”
He shakes his head, the sun setting inside his chest. “Oh, I’m sorry. You must not— Oh. Forgive me. I’m really sorry. Uh, 14-B, you said? It’s in the east wing. This is west. I think you followed the wrong sign. Both say the same thing but lead to opposite wings.”
The stranger makes a humming noise, thanks him, and leaves, shutting the door quietly behind him. Soobin wishes he could have seen him. But with the garish LEDs beaming straight at him, there’d been no hope of making out anything other than his vague outline, his shifting shadow. The rest Soobin fills in with memory.
When he turns back around, his students are staring at him. There is something sad in the woman’s eyes, like she knows. Like she knows.
Soobin clears his throat. “Old friend of mine. Seems like he doesn’t remember me, though. Don’t blame him, really.” He laughs, bright and bitter. “Anyways, Kai, what was it you said?”
𓆰𓆪
He remembers the first week of the new term. New faces, new voices.
Why Sanskrit? he’d asked all of them, one by one. He remembers each answer.
“I have roots all around the world,” the postgrad had answered, unwavering. “Korea, Germany, Scandinavia, America. We moved around a lot when I was younger, jumping from east Asia to western Europe to southeast Asia, and I had to acclimate to each language, each environment. So really, what’s another language to the dozens more?”
“I’m terribly sorry if this seems a little shallow,” the woman had begun, fixing her plait, fidgeting. “But it’s the novelty for me. Of knowing a dead language. Well, I know most Indians still know how to speak Sanskrit, but no one calls it their mother tongue anymore, do they?”
“We had to read a translated version of the Bhagavad Gita for sociology,” the highschooler had shrugged. Soobin remembers his eyebags being even worse back then. “And I don’t know, I was fascinated. I wanted to read it in the original Sanskrit.”
Soobin listened. Soobin knew. Soobin ached for such a simple thing—I wanted to, so I did.
𓆰𓆪
It’s the fourth day of winter.
Yeonjun walks back home from the bus-stop, clutching the straps of his bag in one hand. The sidewalk, the skin on the back of his hand, the waxy surfaces of leaves—it’s all blue. The world in bluescale, something icy, something cold. Something abandoned.
It’s always cold in Seoul now. Especially in his house that’s so big and empty. He flips on the living room light, taking a deep breath. It sparks something awfully cold in his chest, something tightening around his lungs like a noose. A trap made of his own arteries. How fitting.
The windows face the woods. Yeonjun draws the curtains firmly shut against the shifting shadows of the branches and leaves purely out of habit, even though there’s no one to be scared by them anymore, even though there’s no one to hide their face in his lap and say, I’m scared of those things in the shadow, appa, will you protect me? There’s no one here anymore. Just him. Alone. Just him and the ghosts of all things.
He hangs up his coat by the rack, doesn’t look at the bookshelf with the colourful books she didn’t bother taking with her. She’s probably bought new ones for her and her tiny fists. He washes his hands and face, doesn’t look in the mirror. He hasn’t looked in the mirror since that day. He cooks himself a simple dinner and doesn’t even look in the direction of the square little dining table, beelining towards the couch and settling there with his plate on his lap. It’s all so horribly, horribly quiet.
He puts his feet up, spoons rice and eggs into his mouth. He turns on the TV, turns it off again. He washes and dries his plate in silence, in blue, socked feet silent on wooden floorboards. He stares at the glowing tungsten inside his light-bulbs until his eyes throb and ache as much as his limbs and insides do. Until it all melts away into emptiness and spots of light.
He walks robotically to his bedroom, shutting the door with a click. He doesn’t bother turning on the lights, he can still see in the bright blue haze of not-dusk-anymore-not-yet-night. He burrows under his blankets, tucking up his knees and hands with a shiver. He listens to the crickets outside. He tries to imagine the night-jasmines blooming stealthily under his window. He tastes the word on the tip of his tongue, three syllables, like clockwork. The ya, the rae, the hyang.
His mind inexplicably circles back to the Sanskrit teacher. Choi Soobin. Something—something there. Something hazy, indistinct, something very like memory. That look on the other teacher’s face, just for a split second, when he’d seen Yeonjun standing in the doorway. The way he’s avoiding him now, never meeting his eyes in the common room.
Yeonjun squeezes his eyes tight, unafraid of the thing hiding in the shadow but terrified of the shadow itself. The dark, the apocalyptic sun hidden away behind sulphur. The loneliness. The hand, reaching out to him, cold and warm and familiar and—
He thinks the world will end in silence.
𓆰𓆪
There’s the letter from you sitting torn open inside my drawer right now. It’s been three weeks since I received it in the mail, three weeks of writing and re-writing a reply. I’m sure I’m going to throw this one out too. But I haven’t, not yet. Until then, let me get the formalities out of the way: Hi, noona. How are you? I miss you. I hope you can come visit soon.
I watched your recent movie just yesterday. It was—I don’t even know what to say. You were phenomenal as always, of course, but there was this, this essence to it. This bittersweet, aching thing when she leaves the house behind at the end. She leaves behind all the pain, all the love, all the memories. It left me breathless, truly. The slow realisation of the leaving it all behind.
Is it selfish of me to say that I think you picked up the script because of our own childhood? Leaving Korea. Adjusting to someplace as alien as India. Returning “home” with a clouded sense of familiarity and a far overarching sense of unbelonging. I teach Sanskrit to sixteen people at some academy in Seoul. Isn’t that a surreal thing to say.
Noona, can I confess? (Remember each Sunday night when we would sit out on the porch and confess our regrets of the week? I do.) I feel like I’m growing blurry around the edges, like an old photograph. I don’t know who I am anymore. Seventeen years in Korea, thirteen in India, eight again in Korea—toeing the line between two different cultures, two different homes. It felt something like treason each time I remembered our old home in Ansan when we lived in India. It feels something like treason now to remember the scent of paprichaat wafting through the window, sat in the heart of Seoul. I’m so lost. I’ve never been scared of the dark, that was always you. But this terrifies me. The darkness of unbelonging.
I’m nearing the cutoff, too. It’s just two years away. How far away it had seemed when I was seventeen and still had twenty-three years left. Where did all that time go? Where did it slip through my fingers, when did it choose to pass me by like a deluge of moths? I’m sorry. I don’t know who I’m apologising to, I’m not sending this to you.
Ah, Choi Yewon. Dearest, dearest Choi Yewon. You will never see this. I’ll write you one that’s less personal. God. It’s arrived; the time when you do not know me like you used to but I’m still the same. When did I start to not tell you exactly what was in my heart? When did that thief time steal away the most precious thing of mine—familiarity?
It’s a stomach-turning thing. Realising you’re older but just never wiser. All those years and years and years upon more years… doing what? Doing what. You’ve changed, noona, you’ve grown, you’re a person with a footprint out there in the world, you’re a goddamn star. What did I do? I fled from there, I fled from here, I buried our mother and then I buried our father. And now I’m biding my time until I bury you, or you bury me. Maybe that’s morbid.
Maybe that’s morbid, but I can’t think. There’s the same scent everywhere. Night-jasmines. Out in the green green yard in suburban Calcutta, here in the middle of Seoul. Remember when we’d sit out on the bamboo chairs on the porch whenever it got dark, determined to see the flowers bloom? How we’d grow bored and start talking, then when we’d look back, the little buds would have bloomed already? It’s a scent that fills me with such an explosive nostalgia I feel I might be washed away in it. Blown to pieces. Reduced to ash and dust.
Oh. Oh, I nearly forgot him. The very day I got your letter, this crumbling academy found for itself a new philosophy teacher. And God, noona—it was him. It was Yeonjun. Can you believe that? I saw his face, all blurry under the stark LEDs but I knew it was him nonetheless. All the words were punched out of me. I redirected him to his class and I heard no recognition in his voice. Nothing at all. Remember the e-mail we got from his mother all those years ago? I don’t know, but he doesn’t remember me. That same day he approached me in commons and asked my name. You can’t possibly believe that, but it’s true. Choi Yeonjun asked Choi Soobin his name. That sounds like the beginning of a joke. (Which of us would be the punchline?)
Let me confess something else, then. I’ve been avoiding him. He suspects something, I’m sure, because I catch him staring at me across the room sometimes, frowning. I want to laugh sometimes, truly: What are the goddamn odds?
What were the odds I’d find him again and once again it would be all wrong?
𓆰𓆪
They run into each other in the hallway. The stark lights make it hard for Soobin to see on a good day, but today isn’t even a good one. It’s bad today, really bad. He walks straight into something solid, something very much like another human being.
“Oh, sorry,” he rushes out, adjusting his glasses, praying his vision focuses.
Yeonjun’s eyes, the odd, cheerful slant of them that Soobin thought he’d never see again, not after that day, the e-mail. “It’s okay.”
It’s a little easier after that, carrying on in silence. They pass by each other, pseudo-parallel lines. Intertwined irrevocably, somewhere in the past. Peacefully aware of the other’s presence, unmeeting on the grid of time.
𓆰𓆪
Yeonjun doesn’t remember a part of his life.
All the clear bits are from after the hospital and the blood—her, her, this. Everything that happened before is hazy, lit up a ruddy gold. It’s what Yeonjun finds himself mourning the most. That shimmering past lost in bits of shrapnel. A shadow here, dancing. A smile, bunny teeth. The click of a camera. The sun through layers of film.
He doesn’t like to think about those years. They leave him uneasy. He knows he will never get them back, in memory or otherwise. They are locked away from him, ever and ever.
After the blood, it was her. Everything was her—her teeth bared in a smile, her nails painted bold colours. Her voice, the way it carried, the way it drowned. Her smile. Her hands, how they nearly fit in the palm of his own. It was easy. It was nice until it wasn’t.
It was nice until it wasn’t. He’d like that on his gravestone. (He wishes he had someone to ask.)
“Hey, Beomgyu-ssi,” he calls, setting his bag down. The teacher in question looks up, elfin features twisting in a signature grin. “Uh, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but. Yeah, what do you know about Choi Soobin?”
“Choi Soobin,” Beomgyu muses, shifting to the side so Yeonjun can sit down. “Let’s see. He joined before I did, I think some seven, eight years ago. HOD of Sanskrit simply because he’s the only teacher in the department—be your own master and all that, God bless. Rumoured sister of Choi Yewon, y’know, the actress, the one from Starkiller. Lived in India for a part of his life, it’s where he got his degree. I think he has two PhDs. He told me he was bored and just sat down to acquire another one, which is a whole new level of classy.” Beomgyu’s voice drops to a whisper. “And he’s damn fine, isn’t he?”
Yeonjun hasn’t been here very long. But even he’s used to typical Beomgyuisms like these.
“Yes, yes,” he replies impatiently. “All that is okay, but do you know anything from before he joined the academy?”
It’s well-known that Choi Beomgyu, History Dept., is a bit of a gossip. Yeonjun has heard it whispered snidely, and heard it called out fondly in the open. Yeonjun now has stories of vodka in Disney character paper cups, colleagues puking out in someone’s backyard, all quite unwillingly. But he likes Beomgyu, like the little brother he never had. The way his eyes crinkle reminds Yeonjun of someone he can’t place.
Beomgyu hums contemplatively. “Not really, no,” he admits after a silence, twisting his fingers this way and that. “He lived in Korea for most of his childhood before he and his family shifted to India. Lived there for… close to fifteen years? Came back nearly a decade ago. Unmarried, never been seen with anyone in all his years teaching here.” He angles his head closer, hair falling into his eyes, voice dropping. “I think he’s a little short-sighted, but hiding it from the board. Honestly, he’s doing a damn good job of it.”
Yeonjun stores it all away in his mind, remembering that day the other teacher had simply walked into him in the hallway, the bright flash of panic in his stoic eyes. Like he’d never realised Yeonjun was there, too.
“Oh, wait,” Beomgyu says suddenly, unscrewing the cap of his Thermos. The scent of his sweetened tea wafts into the air. “There’s a photo of someone in his wallet. I never actually saw the photo, but I remember the vague… shape?” He squints at Yeonjun, turning his head this way and that. “Say… ah, nevermind.”
Yeonjun opens his mouth to protest, then lets it go. He’s suddenly so tired. He doesn’t want to know. Beomgyu offers him some tea. It’s as sweet as it smells like.
“My wife makes the best tea out there,” he promises. His grin makes him look younger.
Yeonjun watches the wedding band on Beomgyu’s finger glint. Something inside him aches.
𓆰𓆪
“Say, it’s a Saturday, right?” Soobin smiles. “Do you want to do something fun?”
The postgrad nods vigorously. The woman and highschooler lean forward with interest. It never fails to surprise Soobin, even after all these years—the simple respect. An extra syllable here, a right hand there. The silence when he’s explaining something.
The first class he taught, just a beginner lesson on the script and the language’s history, he’d been a nervous wreck. Stuttering, nearly mixing up the order of letters. It wasn’t a bad class, per se—a woman in his class came to him later, saying he’d categorised the history really well. He remembers her smile even now. She still sends him birthday wishes. No, it wasn’t a bad class at all, it just could’ve gone better.
That first batch of students is the one he remembers the most—the smiling lady, the middle-aged man, the young girl much like the highschooler he teaches now. He attended the man’s funeral. The girl wishes him a happy teacher’s day each year, without fail. He remembers that feeling, the day he handed them little purple graduation caps and handwritten certificates that were unprofessional but felt right, and shook hands with everyone. He remembers that day because it was one of the last good days before his vision started to fail in earnest.
Shrouded in warm afternoon sun. Laminated certificates glinting. A warm thing in his chest, something he hadn’t felt after leaving it all behind.
His parents were always afraid he’d end up penniless, because who showed up to Korea with a master’s in Sanskrit? But he insisted. He wanted to come back here, unbelonging or not, see this sunlit land once before he could only see it in dreams. And he’d like to think he’s okay.
“My Sanskrit teacher was this old lady, respected all throughout the school,” Soobin tells them, settling on his chair. “Her name was Gita. I’ll tell you more about her later, if you want. No, I wanted to tell you this. When I was learning, she’d break up the routine of remembering verb forms and noun cases and words in general by making us translate things into and from Sanskrit. They were funny stories, they were touching. They were the whole reason I realised that I wanted to learn Sanskrit, to be able to speak it like she did. Some things are exclusive to a language—how do I describe the sparks and flame of agni, how do I tell you about the flowers that bloomed in that eternal vasanta? Being able to read and understand wasn’t enough, I wanted to see the language for myself.
“Anyway. I still remember this one anecdote she gave us to translate from Sanskrit into English. A dutiful man, exhausted after cutting wood for his mother-in-law’s funeral pyre. He comes home, tells his wife to boil some water for him, he wants to bathe. His wife tells him to fill the handim, the pot, light the coals and boil the water himself. He places a hand on her shoulder, a tangible, silent grief. He washes away the wood chips embedded in his skin. Returning from the bathhouse, he picks a few parijaat flowers on the way—night-jasmines, shiuliphul, xewali, the tree of sorrow. I remember reading that so vividly, the heaviness in my heart. He touches the earth of the doorway and brings his fingers to his forehead before entering. They will be in mourning for a year. He tucks the flowers into his wife’s bun. She tells him to place the pot back in its original place. Then she says, Come, let us eat now.”
Soobin can hear every breath inhaled in his silent class, the beat of his own heart loud in his ears. Remembering that day brings a sharp stab of affection in his chest, something rooted far deeper into the earth of memory than nostalgia.
“I’d like you to each pick something from that anecdote you like—the traditional one year of mourning after the death of a parent, the significance of the night-jasmine, or simply the husband and wife. Was it the sacred duty of marriage or just an act of love when he tucked the flowers in her hair, when he placed a hand on her shoulder silently? I also suspect this was immediately after her mother’s death, so the wife wouldn’t have been allowed to cook. You could write about traditional Hindu mourning.” Soobin doesn’t know what it is. He feels light. He narrows his eyes, joking, “You know a lot more about Sanskrit than I did when our teacher had us translate that, I expect nothing short of poetry.”
The highschooler raises a hand, mischief in his eyes. “In Sanskrit?”
Soobin smiles fondly. “Yes, Riki,” he sighs. “In Sanskrit. Take the help of any book or lexicon you need. Or just ask me.”
From there, it’s the scribble of pens against paper, the occasional inquiry about which noun case to use, a lot of frowning and tilting their heads at an angle down at their notebooks. Soobin tries not to laugh at the deep frown on the woman’s face, the way she puts up her hair to lean over her work.
“Kai, Kai, Kai,” she hisses suddenly, leaning over to the postgrad.
He turns towards her. “Yeah?”
“Do you know what night-jasmines are called in Korean?” She frowns. “I can’t remember.”
He frowns too, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “Noona,” he says solemnly. “I’m so sorry. I speak four languages and yet I’m failing you here.” He pokes the highschooler in the ribs, laughing when the boy tries to tamp down a yelp. “Oi, Japanese boy, do you know what night-jasmines are called?”
He says yakouboku without being asked to. The highschooler frowns. “I was airdropped here… four years ago, hyung,” he deadpans, placing his chin on his palm. “How do you think I know what an uncommon flower is called?”
The postgrad laughs, a starlike burst of sound. “Oh, but you speak like a native already!”
The woman rolls her eyes at them, turning back to her desk.
“Yunjin,” Soobin calls quietly. She looks up. “Yaraehyang-deul.”
Her mouth opens in an o. “Thank you so much!”
Soobin closes his eyes. In his mind’s eye, his own disembodied hand, clipping a night-jasmine into someone’s dark hair. Their cloying, heavy scent clings to him still.
𓆰𓆪
Noona, do you remember the winters we spent without a hint of snow? Do you remember the unfamiliar language, the way it settled on our tongues like pollen? Do you remember the songs, the clothes, the festivals? Do you remember the yellow wooden swings in the school courtyard? Do you remember when one boy from my class flipped right over on a swing and cracked open his head? Do you remember the polymer skeleton in the lab, the way we used to joke this was that classmate of ours whose name I’ve forgotten now? Do you remember the sun setting between the cracks in that canopy of bamboo?
I do. I do, I do, I do. I cannot tear these memories out of me.
𓆰𓆪
There’s a bird trapped here somewhere. Yeonjun can hear the frantic beating of its wings, its highstrung chirping, as it attempts to weave its way through the ventilator out to open sky.
Yeonjun stares up at its tiny form, helpless. He doesn’t just want to let it die. But he has no way of rescuing it. He can’t coax it down and neither can he crack open the shutters of the ventilator wide enough for it to fly through. The bird is going to die. He turns away and tries to keep walking.
Then he hears a set of footsteps down the hall. He turns.
“Soobin-ssi!” he calls, waving his arm before realising that that’s probably no use. “Here, here! By EH-8! Can you come here for a minute?”
Soobin walks over, a drag in his steps. He always walks steadily, like he’s trying to maintain some fragile balance within himself, a weight upon which his soul is centred. Yeonjun has been watching him for a while, his quietness, the way his hands shake as much as his own do. There is something so unendingly familiar about him. Yeonjun feels like he’s missing something vital.
Sometimes, he’ll stop outside Soobin’s classroom door to just listen to him speak. His steady voice, sure of its own meaning, drifting out from under the door. That mannerism of his, tilting his head to the left, left eye squinting slightly. Yeonjun can’t pin it down. But he knows.
“Yes, Yeonjun-ssi? What… Oh, there’s a bird trapped here. Are you trying to get it out?”
“Yes,” Yeonjun admits, a trifle embarrassed.
Soobin doesn’t laugh, or simply leave, like Yeonjun is half-expecting him to. He just nods, glancing up at the bird. He tilts his head to the left, something tightening around Yeonjun’s heart. “Hmm. I could… eh. I could probably reach the ventilator and open it further.”
Yeonjun frowns up, dubious. “Could you?”
Soobin smiles slightly, the weight of his eyes settling on Yeonjun. “If we drag a ladder out here, sure.”
They can’t find a ladder, so they quickly heave out a wooden chair from the exam hall next to them. Yeonjun doesn’t want the bird to bash his head in by the time they even get close to rescuing it. Soobin rolls up his sleeves, stepping onto the seat of the chair.
Yeonjun sees the exact moment things go wrong.
Soobin’s hand cracks open the shutters, but the bird pecks at his skin, hysterical with fear. Soobin hisses, jerking back, overbalancing. He catches himself on the bars of the window, swearing. His glasses clatter to the floor and shatter. Yeonjun, still clutching the back of the chair, watches in open horror.
“Oh my God, I’m so, so sorry,” he rushes, placing a hand on Soobin’s arm to help him clamber down. The bird is gone. The silence in the wake of its absence echoes. “Oh. Oh, I’ll get you new glasses, I’m so sorry I dragged you here.”
Soobin doesn’t say a word. Yeonjun hasn’t felt this empty since the day his daughter looked him in the eye and said, They said I can’t come here anymore after October, appa. I… What does that mean? I want to keep coming.
The sun outside is setting. Soobin was probably heading home.
“Oh, good Lord, I hate myself,” Yeonjun mutters, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Here, Soobin-ssi, let’s go to the nearest optician’s, I’m sure we can make it before they close.”
Soobin still doesn’t say a word, letting himself be steered by the terribly, terribly familiar hand on his arm, the red of the dying sun a blotch in his unfocused vision.
𓆰𓆪
They don’t make it before the optician’s closes. Yeonjun’s hand tightens around his arm.
Soobin can’t see him. Everything in his line of sight is shapeless, an endless void of deep blue dotted with blurry orange flickers which he thinks must be lights from houses and shops. And yet Yeonjun looks stricken.
Soobin can’t see him. And yet he knows Yeonjun must be beautiful in this shade of blue.