Chapter Text
Summer bathes his skin in hopes and dreams of something new this time around. Sharing an apartment with three other guys from the same company strains any semblance of work-life balance more than the ache in his neck, in his throat from all the presentations Seokmin was forced to put together for them. Being the youngest in the apartment, being one of the youngest in the entire department, Seokmin always questions the legality of it all and if staying back in his hometown for a couple of weeks would make him forget the battle of it all. Seokmin did pack most of his drawers and his closet.
Head prodding against the warm bus window, sunshine pooling at the crown of his head, he thinks about how each of his apartment mates threw him cautionary advice more than wishes of safe travels and a fulfilling pause in the nine-to-five, threw him the possibilities of being thrown into those reincarnations that their high school classrooms and university lecture halls all forewarned them about. The claps on his back that “It could be from anyone back home that you never met before.” The heavy sigh of truth that when he comes back from his vacation, he might just return as a completely different person, perhaps even unrecognizable in character and newly formed scars in his heart. The hushed-out rule of never asking how many lives the other person has, if he and that person match in numbers and they would just have to gamble with their extra lives to figure out which identity to end up with. The risks of having a life cut short or completely taken away in the reincarnations and the real world.
There’s also the fact that the person running the whole circus of reincarnations will feign having the capacity of a heart and a soul, and no one can ever really guess when or if that façade will unwind.
During those days when Seokmin chugged coffee for that extra required class in preparation for reincarnations, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to fall into one of those less-common cases. An entire lecture day passing by with recounts of people who never had anyone to be tested with. He thinks he wouldn’t mind being a topic of discussion for this particular lesson just to save him the heartbreak of living the rest of his life with the absence of someone he should have, would have, and could have known many more years after or before.
He jolts himself out of the thought of the person running it all, refusing to even think about the person's name, because he only associates that person with the nightmares he’d wake up to, whimpering in the dark in his lonesome dorm.
The bus ride from the city to his home is short enough to stop him from slipping into a deep slumber at his seat. With clothes and books filling up a duffel bag, the drop-off for the bus and the extra half-kilometer to the actual roof he calls home isn’t so bad for his lungs nor his legs, either. His home is even better for his lungs; it’s the first time he can indulge his lungs with a full, chest-aching breath, oxygen slitting stretched skin with the help of trees lining up the streets to welcome him home. Off the main road, the way back home kicks sand and pebbles around. And upon reaching his gate, he hops on his toes, just enough to graze his periphery over the gates and towards the front door, until he hears his mother shriek of excitement and nearly drop the metal bowl of strawberries in her hand.
“Seokmin!” rings throughout the garden, between tomato vines and squatting baby lemon trees. He hears the smile in her voice as she makes her way over to the gates, the top of her hair and forehead bobbing above the edges of repainted metal. She speeds through how long it’s been since he last visited home, how much everyone misses him here, and that his father will be coming home from work later since he's helping with payroll today. She loops her arm into his and tugs him inside. “Let’s give him an hour, maybe?”
With the gate closed behind him, palms basking at his cheeks, soft and forgiving as always, he needs to lower himself for her lips to peck his cheek, his forehead. He pinches his smile and closes his eyes, allows his mother to kiss him as many times as she wants.
He may be twenty-five, but he still misses his mother all the same.
“I asked your dad to buy some meat from the market before he comes home,” she adds on their way to the front door. “Are you tired, Seokmin? Your room is the same way as you left it. Maybe you can sleep a little before your dad comes home.”
____
When he wakes up from his nap, the light clouds against an otherwise bright, clear blue sky tell him he’s missed out on waiting for his father to come home. His phone tells him it’s already ten in the morning. A message from his father, a blurry picture of him sleeping on the bed from sometime last night, has him rubbing most of the sleep from his eyes but not the grin off his face for the caption.
You slept like a baby. Didn’t want to wake you up
If his mother still routes the same schedule as the last time he visited, she must be filing back home from her own morning job. His father must be at work, too. He showers off the long ride home and heads to the kitchen, where half of the dining table harbors up breakfast and a yellow sticky note of Eat Seokmin. We’ll eat more tonight! in her precise, welcoming penmanship under a pink felt marker.
But his mother emerges from her room, in that green dress she usually wears out gardening but black slacks still on. When he puts his arms out for his mother, she cups his elbow and begins to guide him back to the dining table, tells him that there’s another person she and his father want to invite over for their first dinner all together tonight. A neighbor who has been helping them out while Seokmin drills himself in his studies, his work.
His mother’s smile beams, especially with the clouds passing the sun. “Do you remember Kwon Soonyoung? He lived just down there before moving closer to-what was his sister’s name?” She breaks his gaze before shaking her head in dismissal. She then returns his gaze with raised eyebrows, perhaps expecting an answer that Seokmin can’t give. “Well, he came back after graduating.”
His nod wears out as his mind sifts through the memories of many years ago. He doesn’t know the Kwon Soonyoung of now but with the two of them back together in their hometown like this, it wouldn’t hurt to take a step backwards from the label of strangers and something closer to acquaintances, or perhaps even friends before he sends himself back to the city.
He waits for his mother by his parents’ bedroom door to change out of her slacks. “When I told him you’re coming to visit,” she pipes the second her door opens, “he was excited to see you again.” They retrace their steps to the kitchen, rid of the black work pants. At the sink, she rinses carrots and off to the side, he starts peeling them for her. “It’s been so long, hasn’t it?”
Seokmin’s nod rusts a second time. He feels kind of awful that his heart doesn’t leap as high nor as far to see Soonyoung again. And it never helps that the last time they saw each other ended with tears, with a broken promise of keeping in touch as Seokmin and his sister continue their education cities away.
Kwon Soonyoung, sitting across from him at the low table, just at the other side of the portable grill, is all sharp eyes that freeze him in worries of stepping out of line at every other sentence that leaves his mouth. He looks paler, no longer wearing the light tan from their days of playing outside. His cheeks have worn away the baby fat, too, that he’s so used to greeting him up until he was five years old.
Seokmin’s feet wriggle for something to do, to ease the awkward air between them, because after all those years, Soonyoung still hasn’t mended that promise, but he doubts he remembers it.
But Soonyoung’s eyes soften above the crooked smile on his face once Seokmin's parents ease themselves at his sides. He can’t help but become a mirror of him.
The smile is all it takes, along with his father standing up to grab more bowls of rice and a pitcher of cold water, for Seokmin to tell him, “Thank you for looking after my parents.”
Soonyoung nods, like a duty ingrained in him, like no burden at all. “They look after me, too.”
Seokmin is weighed down by another slap of guilt. In the past few years, Soonyoung has been more of a son to his parents than he is. More filial in the sense of being there for his parents. More present in filling in the gaps that Seokmin has wished to patch up on his own during his visit. While Seokmin grinds away hours on his timecard, he struggles to even call his parents once a week.
As they share the task of washing dishes together, he learns that Soonyoung moved back into his old home a few houses down not long before Seokmin’s return for home, something about his current clinic opening up another branch in the next town over drawing him back to home. The age gap of one year must have played a part in it, since Soonyoung returned home after graduating university. At the end of the night, with his mother piling on containers of leftovers and side dishes into Soonyoung’s arms, Seokmin offers to walk him home, to offer company and to get to know how much the place he called home has changed, just exactly how much Soonyoung has changed.
____
The next time he sees Soonyoung comes sooner than he expects. He’s not prepared to see Soonyoung hauling bag after bag of groceries into the kitchen the first thing in the following morning. At the doorway, as Seokmin still scratches the countryside morning from his face, his mother explains, “Soonyoung buys groceries for me and your dad sometimes.” The glimmer in her eyes and the fullness, the gratefulness in her voice punch Seokmin hard in all the right and deserving ways. “I just give him a list of what I need and the money to buy them, and there’s nothing to worry about.”
Breakfast helps subside the guilt, even if it’s only momentarily.
They fill each other in with their lives that they’ve missed out on, beginning from Soonyoung at six years old and when he began to grow fond of a second home. When they were younger, Seokmin swore the older would become a taekwondo champion, the pride of the nation.
A heavy smile of a fractured dream passes over Soonyoung, sends Seokmin hunching into himself at such an ambition when Soonyoung admits he remembers Seokmin telling him that same thing. “My current job is nowhere near that.”
“Where do you work, then?”
“I work as a physical therapist,” Soonyoung says lowly, flipping the seafood pancake on his bowl over and over again with his chopsticks. Green onion side up then the shrimp side up. Green onion, shrimp. Green onion. Shrimp. “Your mother said you’re taking time off work because of stress, and I thought it was funny because I’m doing the same. Staying closer to home helps me forget about the stress.” Seokmin nods to that.
“What about you, Seokmin?” Soonyoung offers the question back to him. They make it to Soonyoung’s home and settle at his front steps there, glass rim of Coca-Cola refreshing to his tongue and down his throat. In the city where Seokmin lives, these glass bottles are a rarity.
Seokmin fills him in with his job that turns him into business, a behind-the-desk job that requires too many numbers all at once, but he enjoys the challenge, the eyebrow-wrinkling frustration of not knowing exactly where those numbers will be heading off to but trying to predict them down to the decimals. But the source of his stress, the sole reason for escaping to his hometown, is nothing about the main duties of his job. He just wants to get away from the people he sees in and out of the offices.
At the end of his answer, he realizes they’re both much different than what they remember, what their younger selves wanted to believe. Strangers, almost, but not quite.
____
Starting his days with Soonyoung becomes more of a routine than anything since he’s returned home. He catches his mother’s faint smirk as he walks around the house, tries to ignore it the first time around. He’s searching for the key to the bathroom because before Seokmin even knew the time of day, his father accidentally locked the bathroom door somehow. When he meets his mother’s eyes once more, right after Seokmin digs out the key from the kitchen drawer and holds it in front of his face in discovery, he stops his tiny celebration for the smirk still lingering on her face.
“What?” he asks through a nervous smile, the corner of his lips faltering to keep it up.
“You and Soonyoung are spending a lot of time together again,” she eases out like a suspicion.
He shrugs. He blames it on the time lapsed between their last meeting and the present, how they’re at least twice as tall and more than four times as old as they last saw each other. “Is that a bad thing?”
She shakes her head. “Just enjoy your day with him.”
Down the road, Soonyoung settles at a picnic table in front of someone’s house, not exactly the one he grew up in before and moved back into recently. A neighbor that Seokmin has never been familiar with owns the house, and he watches Soonyoung lift a baby girl onto his lap and comb through faint wisps of her hair, continue on the conversation above the pigtails he attempts to tie for her. When he does look away, looks down to catch her drooling onto her bib, Soonyoung’s eyes meet on his way back up to talk to the neighbor. Soonyoung waves him over.
“He was my best friend when we were kids” is Soonyoung’s way of introducing him to the neighbor, Saetbyeol, and he’s not sure why the past tense hurts something in him.
“You can hold her, if you like, Seokmin,” Saetbyeol assures him after noticing his poking the softest cheeks of her daughter and freeing out the cutest giggles. “Don’t be shy just because Soonyoung is holding her.” Her daughter’s name is Rawon and with her energy spiking, Saetbyeol admits that she’s thankful that Soonyoung comes over to play with her sometimes.
But the offer doesn’t end with the energy depleted out of the baby girl. With Rawon cradled in Seokmin’s lullaby and in Seokmin’s arms, the conversation of the past and how much Rawon has grown up since is interrupted by Soonyoung’s “You still like to sing?”
Saetbyeol leans in closer across the picnic table. “Still?”
“You sang when we were kids.” Soonyoung reaches over to unbutton the bib from her neck and drapes it over her small sun hat on the table in front of him.
He chances a glance at him from the corner of his eye as Rawon shifts in his arms. Somehow, the fact that Soonyoung remembers this tiny detail flutters his heartbeat. “You still remember all of that?”
Soonyoung smirks. “Of course, I do. You were the best singer my kid self ever heard.”
Another punch of guilt, he doesn’t realize he’s pushed away his memories of Soonyoung without meaning to, letting them get crushed under all the pavements they’ve skipped across and under all the beds they’ve hidden under, under all the roads they've parted ways from.
He basks in the solitude of strolling around the neighborhood at night. Crickets chirping seemingly at his ears because of the lack of car horns, shoulders bumping to make it to the other side of the street, just the lack of the city. The fine layer of clouds that don’t curtain off the stars completely from his sight. Passing by the houses, he doesn’t mean to eavesdrop into the hearty laughter abound, the kids singing nursery rhymes and their voices carrying through screen doors.
On his return home, he stumbles upon Soonyoung sitting on the front steps of his porch, knocking back a green bottle by himself. When he waves at Soonyoung, the older raises the bottle in the air in a greeting before patting the spot on the porch beside him. But the second Seokmin takes up the spot, though, Soonyoung gets up and slips through his front door. Halfway out the door, returning back with another bottle, he hands it over to Seokmin.
“Six-year-old me never thought I’d be drinking with Seokmin” eases out so seriously between them that Seokmin cracks at his demeanor, sputters the soju around the rim before he can gulp it down. “I’m serious, Seokmin,” but the tipsy squeak of his name out of his lips doesn’t stick true to his words.
“You didn’t even know what drinking was at six.”
Soonyoung juts his lips out until it forms into a pout of a thought. “But I’m right, right?”
He finally feels the alcohol cooling a river down his throat, the lightheaded buzz making the stars twinkle brighter and some burden in his chest disappear. “Yeah-” he sighs out defeated, grin lingering as he places the bottle between his feet- “yeah, you’re technically right.”
____
With the clouds barely crossing horizons behind the green, tree-speckled mountains, he heads over to Soonyoung’s house this time. All his breakfast overfills his stomach up to his neck, and his bowl of seaweed soup still sits on the low table to be finished once his stomach settles. Breakfast always leaves behind leftovers, so much so that today’s breakfast can become their lunch, if they want to save some time from cooking. Containers of unsliced rolled omelets and seaweed soup, not forgetting seasoned squid and his mother’s village-famous green onion kimchi and the path at the back of his hand, Soonyoung greets his morning with a slight scowl across his eyes and sleepy pout on his lips, shocks of hair from waking up so early.
Seokmin bites his lip to stifle his laugh at the sight because it’s been years since he’s seen this. And even after all of these years, Soonyoung still wakes up with the words Can you wake me up later? all over his face and with the sun beating down his skin. Seokmin doesn't know what hits him then, but he wonders what holding Soonyoung's face in his hands would be like. Soonyoung opens his door wider and invites him inside, grumbles about promises of plucking some fruit from his back garden and to ensure that Seokmin leaves his house with at least a bag of them.
The inside of Soonyoung’s childhood home holds up as much as he remembers. The plaques of taekwondo competitions engraved with Soonyoung’s name. Marker stains against white walls from when he and Soonyoung flattened construction papers on the walls and were convinced using the wall as a table was a smart idea. The same glass cups and slightly chipped blue and orange mugs lining up at the drying rack.
Stepping inside Soonyoung’s home is a jump into the past, and Seokmin wishes time can only move on if his heart wants to.
“Hey,” Soonyoung calls out by his kitchen window, washing the oranges he’s gathered at the sink there. When Seokmin chances out a glance to the world, they wince against the shard of lightning, clap of thunder. “You should probably wait out the rain.”
They’ve spent the leftover sunshine of the day filling up a plastic bag of the fruit from Soonyoung’s backyard, sometimes balancing Soonyoung on his shoulders because neither of them wanted to dart back inside for the stepstool. A drop that they first dismissed that eventually walled into a gray sheet, the rest of their morning and early afternoon was spent scrubbing the mud tracks from Soonyoung’s floors, occasional fits of laughter when they reminded themselves of the absurdity of their plans and lack of it.
Seokmin turns his head to the side, pinching his smile away from thought.
The underlying premise of being childhood best friends must serve them this kind of closeness, Seokmin thinks. Waking up besides Soonyoung scratching his head because when they were kids, when they threw in “best friend” instead of the other’s name when it came to describing each other to strangers and to even people they knew, sleeping besides Soonyoung wasn’t out of the ordinary. Passed out on the floor, draped over the couch, nowhere close to Seokmin or Soonyoung’s beds when it was time for a nap.
He's not exactly sure why his heart skips a beat when Soonyoung sits up, shirt still caught in the fit of sleep and the hemline sinking lower down his chest. He lets the darkness of the room form the outlines of Soonyoung rubbing the sleep out of his eyes before heading out of the bedroom and into the hallway.
But being twenty-five means being able to dismiss his mother’s old warnings of staying out in the rain. It means being able to stand out in the rain, umbrellas abandoned and lost behind Soonyoung’s door, long forgotten behind the gates to his own home. Not a single soul savoring the rain, not even a speck of headlights in the midst. He closes his eyes, lets the train trickle everywhere his skin allows and through his clothes, lets the rare summer chill crawl up his spine. When he opens his eyes, Soonyoung stares at him through the scowl into the sheets of rain, damping his hair above his eyes.
And he can’t read what Soonyoung is thinking, can’t pick out the message in his eyes.
A tug of his shirt forward, the rain can’t stop his hands from wandering far from the line between friends and acquaintances as he slips his hands over the back of Soonyoung’s neck. Soonyoung, the person he once swore as his best friend before trickling away into strangers. Soonyoung, the person he swore to never fall back into strangers.
But his hands don’t falter, either, when they reach the border of skin and short strands, for someone who has become much more than that. The rain slips into crevices, even the ones between their lips when they part for a second.
A raindrop clinging onto Soonyoung’s eyebrow, Seokmin whispers a quiet, “You’re going to get sick, Soonyoung.”
Soonyoung’s smile melts against his at the second kiss.
“Maybe I should have waited until we got inside.” Soonyoung’s chuckle falters just as a shiver runs through his back. Bundled up in a thick blanket, hair wet this time after taking a hot shower and raiding Soonyoung’s closet while their drenched ones hang on the racks, Seokmin thinks it won’t be too bad.
Bundled in his own blanket because sharing a blanket means kicking into each other’s space for the warmth of wool, Seokmin smiles, ducks his head from the sight of Soonyoung burrowing deeper and smaller into his blanket, before the sight can send his heart beating light and fast.
____
Every time they meet, whether it’s Soonyoung dropping by a bag of vegetables or calling Seokmin over to help, they manage to sneak in a peck or two on the cheek or straight on the lips, sometimes bringing a palm up when they can’t make it look too obvious. The list of groceries to buy diffuses into wordless conversations. With his mother asking him to write down what to buy from the market today, he misses some items on the note, a litter of dots at the corner and in between bananas and hot pepper flakes from the moments where Soonyoung holds his gaze captive.
He shoves the bashful blush down his neck when he asks if she can repeat what to buy one more time.
Summer rain continues to pelt all around the edge of their shared umbrella. They should have brought two, but the hurry to the store before the owner flips the sign closed and before the storm wears them down and the precarious shoves of slippers on, there was no room for that thought at all. Walking down the sidewalk, avoiding puddles and mud splashes on their calves as plastic bags swing from their elbows, from the corner of his eye, he catches Soonyoung glancing all around them. For what, he’s not sure.
Closer to home, Soonyoung points at the center of the road, to a soccer ball that belongs to one of the village kids. He feels Soonyoung press the handle of the umbrella into his hand and watches him step into the depths of the road with an “I’ll bring it back” over his shoulder.
He waits just a step behind Soonyoung, guards him with the overhanging umbrella as he crouches down and gathers the ball in his arms. White rubber wipes mud slides across his shirt. Seokmin winces at the color of the laundry water and cupfuls of detergent later.
But between the battering of rain, he barely makes out the car coming in the dark.
He doesn’t know if the “Soonyoung? Soonyoung!” out his lips is loud enough for Soonyoung to hear, doesn’t know how far he dives into the road.