Chapter Text
The rain that fell on Seoul that evening wasn’t a vicious rain. It murmured, the way someone on a subway car swallows their sob so it won’t carry. Eunhyuk stood by the train door, right hand on the pole, left hand closing a leather notebook whose corners had begun to peel. Neon light cast a pale double across the window. Faces slid by like the pages of a magazine flipped too fast. Above his head, the map’s green, orange, and blue lines curved like snarled twine leading everyone somewhere. At each lit dot he thought: everyone has a destination; everyone has a name being called by someone. Except—on evenings like this—that name seemed to carry from far away, from a time when plans weren’t complicated and his own name was still Lee Hyukjae.
He closed his eyes. In the clatter of wheels came the slap-slap of flip-flops through puddles—the loudest sound at the end of their old alley. “Hyukjae-yaaa!” A small voice, stretching the last syllable like pulled candy. Little Hyukjae turned; there was that boy—sun-browned skin, hair mussed like beach grass, full lips that broke easily into a grin—running with a tissue-paper kite painted like a fish. Donghae.
Outside the train window the rain stitched tighter. Hyukjae drew a breath and opened his eyes. On his phone, a message from his senior at the publishing house—Park Jungsu, though everyone called him Leeteuk—typed in immaculate punctuation: “Eunhyuk-ssi, tomorrow’s jacket meeting for the short-story collection is moved up to 10 a.m. We need to decide the final illustrator. Please bring two additional options.” He wrote back, “Got it, hyung,” and slipped the phone into his coat pocket.
Hapjeong Station greeted him with the smell of damp fabric and kiosk tteokbokki. Eunhyuk rode the escalator past a young couple debating, gently, which movie to watch. A single word escaped the woman’s mouth—“fish”—and somehow it bit deeper than anything else: fish. Donghae meant “East Sea,” but to young Hyukjae he’d always been “the little fish,” because his eyes roundened with wonder whenever he saw a pond.
—
In Brooklyn, it rained too. Colder, heavier; drumming the tin roof of a corner café on 5th Avenue and 10th Street. Aiden watched umbrellas press past the big window, then returned to his laptop. At the table’s edge lay a brown notebook—just like the one a stranger was holding across the world—open to a page cluttered with scribbles. “Short Story Collection: Working Title — ‘Rain Village’,” he’d written. And beneath it, a slash and a note: “Return to memory; don’t get too sentimental; let small objects do the talking.”
The barista who knew him called softly, “Aiden, refill?” He lifted his tumbler with a smile. “Thanks, Jess.” He looked back at the screen, and—without knowing why—opened a new tab and typed the words not mentioned in any contract but always climbing into his fingers when it rained: Lee Hyukjae. Immediately he felt foolish. That name—the one he’d kept in his mind, under his childhood pillow, between schoolbooks that had long since vanished—should have become a tame ghost by now. Hadn’t he crossed an ocean, adopted “Aiden,” pressed “Donghae” into a passport and half a life before sealing it with official glue?
But on humid days like this, those flip-flops came back. A voice calling from the end of a narrow alley in Goyang in the early 2000s. “Hae-ya, hurry! The clouds are perfect for flying!”
And there he was years ago, little Donghae yelping when the kite string snagged on a neighbor’s TV antenna. Hyukjae laughed, then clambered up the fence, his thin legs searching for purchase. “I’ll do it!” he shouted. Donghae held the line, his face a tangle of worry and pride. Their short pants—one striped blue, one patterned with dinosaurs—stuck to their thighs in the damp. Grown-ups yelled for them to get down, but the world of children spoke a language that muted adult noise: “just a little,” “wait,” “I can.”
Aiden typed the sentence: “The world of children has a language that mutes adult voices.” He paused, looked at it, and smiled wryly. An editor in Seoul might strike that as too lyrical. Or maybe not; they’d said the book would be bilingual and they wanted to keep the tone “wild yet intimate.” He checked his phone. An email from the Asia coordinator—last name Choi, if he remembered—asked practical questions: flight schedules, promo duration, potential university talk—SM Entertainment’s new creative program wanted him too. He answered politely. In his signature he wrote: Aiden Lee (Donghae). For some reason, that second half felt like switching on a light in a room long left dark.
—
At the publishing office near the Han River, the meeting room smelled of new paper, marker ink, and coffee. Shelves lined the walls with the house’s titles—historical novels, new-generation poetry, a second-gen idol’s memoir, an actress’s essay collection. At the far end, a provisional poster for the current book: “Rain Village — Stories by Aiden Lee (Donghae).” Eunhyuk sat to the right of a crouched designer with ash-dyed hair—Kim Jongwoon, known in-house as Yesung. Up front, Leeteuk squared his notes, wearing his usual thin smile.
“We need to lock the cover today,” Leeteuk said. “The author has preferences, but he’s open. He wants something that captures ‘rain as background noise, not the protagonist.’”
“Yes,” Yesung raised a hand, bright. “Two options. First: watercolor—narrow alley, laundry lines, blue plastic chairs; rain shown only by concentric circles in puddles. Second: more abstract—taut threads in muted colors, like a kite whose body’s off-frame.”
“Kites,” Eunhyuk murmured before he could stop himself. Heads turned. He cleared his throat, cheeks warming. “Sorry, just… the kite is a good idea.”
Leeteuk lifted an eyebrow a millimeter. “You often point to small objects when you read, Eunhyuk-ssi. I like that habit. Small things hold worlds.” He paused. “Doesn’t this writer, Aiden, mention a ‘paper fish’ in one story? Two kids trying to anchor sunset with paper?”
Eunhyuk nodded. “Pages 33 to the end. ‘Sunset, he said, is just the sun playing hide-and-seek with paper fish.’” He didn’t add that when he first read it, he’d felt something tug at the back of his shirt. A name no longer used, a promise never said.
Yesung chuckled. “So he’s a poet too.” Leeteuk tapped the table. “Good. We’ll pitch both directions to marketing. Cho Kyuhyun from legal confirmed illustration rights are workable. Shindong in production says watercolor costs a bit more but still fits margins. Oh—and Siwon in marketing wants to leverage our celebrity network for the launch. Maybe some SM artists who write lyrics or photo books—Girls’ Generation, SHINee, Red Velvet. Also… this is funny… Heechul offered to MC if his schedule fits.”
Everyone laughed. In their minds, Heechul would turn any launch into a mini-variety show. Eunhyuk jotted a few points, but his pen veered off; along the margin, lines turned into thread, a paper fish, and a small boy calling from the alley’s end. “Hyukjae-ya!”
That name again. He closed the notebook and looked out at the river’s dull shine. The rain lay like porridge, softening the edge of everything. Inside, something wondered: how many people change their names in order to survive? How many Hyukjaes borrow the mask of “Eunhyuk” to manage clients, compose neutral sentences, and negotiate memory into something presentable? And how many Donghaes become Aidens—filing down accents, simplifying childhood chatter, packaging the East Sea’s salt into sentences palatable at literary festivals?
—
Before America, Donghae was a boy who knew every seam in his alley. A tiny shop sold red-bean ice pops; a bike repair played H.O.T. through a tinny speaker—“Candy” bounced down the morning like marbles. The ward library was cold because an old air conditioner wrestled the weather. At the window table, Donghae and Hyukjae did homework, books face-to-face, robot pencils marching across pages.
“What will you be when you grow up?” Hyukjae asked one afternoon, left hand propping his cheek, right hand doodling fish along the margin.
“Writer,” Donghae declared. “Or fisherman.” He added quickly, knowing the two answers were like particles reconciled only by his name.
Hyukjae squinted, then laughed. “A fisherman who writes about fish?” Donghae considered that, looking into Hyukjae’s laughing eyes, then yawned because the AC mimicked winter in comics. “You?” he asked back.
Hyukjae studied the ceiling like answers were written there. “A dancer,” he said. “Or someone who guards books.” More serious now: “If I guard the books and you write them, we’ll still be in the same place. We can keep… bothering each other.”
“Promise?” Donghae hooked out his pinky. Hyukjae linked his. “Promise.”
Outside that window, ginkgo leaves fell again and again like confetti that had missed its cue. Sometimes BoA drifted from the librarian’s radio, “No.1” turning slowly. They couldn’t know those two names—BoA and H.O.T.—would still be shouted on big stages years later, while they would meet on a stage neither had planned: a book launch with a clip-on mic, audience laughter, and camera flashes. Childhood never knows its own trajectory.
—
The meeting ended and people dispersed. Yesung lingered to pitch one more illustrator: a college friend, Kim Kibum, who mostly shot photos now but sometimes painted. “He sees the overlooked,” Yesung said. “Things most people walk past.”
“Overlooked things hold worlds,” Eunhyuk repeated Leeteuk’s line. He messaged Kibum with proper formality: intro, project frame, expectations, deadline. Kibum replied fast, half teasing: “Want me to drag Taemin to shoot alleys? He’s currently obsessed with photographing rain from under an umbrella.”
“Taemin?” Eunhyuk typed. “As in SHINee’s Taemin?”
Kibum added a winking emoji. “Yep. Studio neighbor. If we’re lucky we get rain and free coffee.”
Eunhyuk stared at the screen, smiling. The city’s creative net was always tighter than he imagined—someone always knew someone. He checked the time—still a sliver before heading home. He decided to walk by the Han, though the rain hadn’t fully quit. He liked how it blurred the city’s margins, leaving just enough linework to guess at.
On the pedestrian bridge he stopped. The river moved like pages turned by wind. Above, a cluster of kids ran and laughed, their tiny umbrellas candy-bright. One boy called to another, “Hae-ya, hurry!” Eunhyuk turned. It felt like a hand on his shoulder. He shut his eyes and waited for his breath to smooth.
Little Donghae called to little Hyukjae on the day the moving news arrived. “Dad got a job overseas,” Donghae said, mouth twitching between grin and pout. “They say it’s far. There’s snow like sugar.”
“So… you’re going?” Hyukjae’s voice snagged like a kite string in wind. Donghae nodded, eyes glassing.
They went to the library. The guard who knew them let them sit longer. They didn’t read. They just traded useless small gifts: a paperclip bent into a fish; an eraser carved into H and D; a scrap of oiled paper folded into a boat. “If this boat sails, it’ll come back,” Hyukjae said. Donghae agreed, though he knew paper boats in gutters never returned, slipping into dark drains that led wherever adults went.
At the alley gate on the last day, they dared not cry in front of anyone. They looked down and hooked pinkies one more time. “Promise,” Donghae said loudly, as if to convince the grown-ups that children’s vows followed the same rules as company contracts. “When we meet again, we keep… bothering each other.”
“Bothering,” Hyukjae echoed, eyes hot. “You’ll be the writer. I’ll guard the books.”
“Will you dance sometimes?” Donghae blurted, afraid of misplacing a shard of a dream. Hyukjae lifted his chin. “If H.O.T. plays, I’ll dance. You sing if it’s BoA.”
Donghae laughed, then fell into a brief awkward hug that stuck to shoulders like leftover rain. After that, a car waited. After that, a door shut. After that, flip-flops—slap-slap—thinned to an echo and disappeared.
—
Aiden finished a story that night—about a tiny library with an overzealous AC—then walked home along wet streets reflecting the shop lights. In his apartment he opened a clear plastic box of Korea-things: a knotted roll of kite string; two tarnished 100-won coins; a tiny photo of two boys in front of bookcases, snapped on the sly by the librarian with an instant camera. He stared at it a long time. No filter, no curated saturation. Just two kids—one grinning, one pretending to scowl. Behind them, a hand-painted banner: “Welcome, Spring.”
He flipped the photo and wrote: “Small things hold worlds.” Then, an arrow, and: “Hyukjae, are you guarding the books?”
He laughed—not at his wit, but at the silliness of mailing the past a letter. Still, writing the line loosened his chest. He tucked the picture back, turned off the lights, and left the little kitchen lamp on. Rain kept tapping. Sirens twirled down the avenue. He slept with the odd certainty that somewhere in another city beneath the same wet sky, someone was opening to the same page.
—
The next morning, Eunhyuk began the routine that hadn’t much changed since he took the job two years ago. Coffee bun from the kiosk; an Americano, no sugar, from the office machine; inbox; meeting memos. A new email—from an unfamiliar address with a familiar domain: “Lee Publishing Asia.” Sender: Choi Siwon, marketing lead. Subject: “Author Confirmation: Aiden Lee (Donghae) – Korea Itinerary.” The body was official, but paragraph three held a sentence that made Eunhyuk smile without thinking: “Author stresses he wants to meet the small editorial team, not just management, because those who ‘touch his sentences first’ deserve coffee.” Below it, a note: “If possible he wants to see an ordinary Seoul alley with a childhood feel—not a tourist lane but an everyday one. Any recs?”
Yesung replied fast, cc’ing Eunhyuk and a few others. “I know some. An alley in Mangwon still has blue plastic chairs, ward notices, a stubborn cassette shop. Kibum and Taemin can help shoot.”
Leeteuk added, “Eunhyuk-ssi, will you be PIC for this micro-tour? You have a good eye for small objects that catch ‘rain as background.’”
Eunhyuk typed back: “With pleasure.” His heart beat twice as fast as it should—whether from new responsibility or from something that, for so long, had spoken softly inside. The name arriving soon—Aiden—might be the same boy, might not. Life sands names into easier sounds. Still, under the neat envelope he hoped to find a sliver of oiled paper cut like a fish.
He closed the laptop and looked out. Sunlight angled between towers. The streets hadn’t dried; the after-rain shone like underlines beneath key sentences. Eunhyuk lifted his cup, blew across the dark surface, and murmured—to whoever, he didn’t know—“Do you still call me Hyukjae?”
—
Aiden checked his ticket to Seoul, then traced an imaginary line from Incheon to the city center, down to the Han’s banks, through alleys that might now be only remnants. He jotted a list he’d show no one: “Things I want to see in Seoul: blue plastic chairs outside a corner shop; towels pegged with wooden clips; kids running without umbrellas; a crookedly taped ward poster; a tiny library with an AC too cold.” And at the end: “Someone calling the old name.”
He laughed again—bitter this time. Cities don’t keep names; people do, and people change. But writing the list calmed him, like tying a paper boat to a nail at the rim of a gutter. He closed his phone, opened the laptop, and typed the opening of the next story:
“I once lived in an alley where rain wasn’t an event but a language. People greeted each other by shutting a door just hard enough for the neighbor to know the wind had risen. Children measured distance not in steps but in how far they could let a string go without losing the kite. In that alley I had a friend whose name meant ‘sea,’ while mine meant ‘tone.’ We grew inside an orchestration we didn’t recognize as music until, because of adult jobs, one of us had to play on another stage.”
He stopped, looking at what he’d made. Then added: “We never said ‘love,’ but we were quiet together often, and I think that’s the plainest shape a promise can take.”
—
In a hallway in Seoul, Eunhyuk ran into Heechul, visiting to record a promo podcast. “So you’re the Eunhyuk?” Heechul tilted his head. “I know a few Eunhyuks, but they usually dance and eat naengmyeon too fast.”
Eunhyuk laughed. “I only guard books, hyung.”
“Guarding books is harder than guarding people,” Heechul intoned in counterfeit wisdom. “Books have longer memories. Don’t lose to them.” He winked and moonwalked two steps before pivoting into the studio.
The words hung: longer memories. Eunhyuk knew a good book doesn’t merely preserve, it calls. In spaces between, in paragraph breaks, a voice invites the reader to walk backward while looking at the present. Maybe that’s why he’d stayed in this work—to sometimes hear his own name called by a page he didn’t write.
He returned to his desk and opened the Aiden project folder. The short bio read: “Aiden Lee, born in Mokpo, raised in Goyang until the end of elementary school, then moved to the United States for family work. Writes in English, sees in Korean: alleys, seasons, food, neighbor talk, living-room televisions. He believes small things hold worlds.” Eunhyuk stopped at “Goyang.” He let the cursor blink. Goyang. A tiny library. An AC too cold. Oiled paper.
He pulled up a map and typed his childhood address—for no reason he’d admit: to see if the ginkgo at the corner still stood. The map showed the same road, but now: a new café, a big pharmacy, a dance studio that he had no idea when it appeared. Its name made him grin—“Shindong Dance Lab”—the same as their production head, but clearly a different Shindong. The world liked its jokes.
He booked a Sunday bus out that way. No official reason, no one waiting. He just wanted to see if blue plastic chairs still sat out after rain. To hear if kids still called to each other from the alley’s end. To test whether, when he closed his eyes at that crossroads, he’d hear someone run in flip-flops, parting a drizzle and calling, “Hyukjae-ya!”
—
Aiden shut the file and opened the window. Brooklyn’s rain had stopped. The street reflected a pale sky. He brewed green tea from a Queens shop. While the water heated, he tuned an online radio station that happened to be playing early-2000s Korean hits. “No.1” came on. He chuckled. Did the universe play little tricks when someone was writing? He lifted the cup and tasted the rim. Right temperature. Familiar scent. On the table his passport lay open, showing his name—two names, two crossed paths. Aiden Lee (Donghae). Tomorrow he’d record a short intro video for the Korea team—PR’s request—friendly and brief, a greeting in two languages. He smiled at the thought. In that video he wanted to say a line that mattered to no one but him: “I was born in Mokpo, raised in Goyang. I love tiny libraries, blue plastic chairs, and rain that makes no demands.”
He knew that across the sea, someone might watch it professionally—note the diction, check the runtime. But perhaps—just perhaps—one person would pause at “Goyang” longer than the rest.
—
At a time neither could name yet, two names—Eunhyuk and Aiden—were edging toward the same sentence. Unseen, small objects were conspiring as silent couriers: a blue chair left wet outside a shop; a creaking library shelf; a kite string snagged on an antenna; a formal email smuggling a wish to see an ordinary alley; a paper-fish scrap kept in a plastic box; a marketer’s note—“Use SM artist network for launch”; a designer’s message mentioning “Kibum and Taemin”; a maybe-true MC plan by Heechul; the mental index cards in Leeteuk’s tidy brain; and somewhere, a certain Kim Ryeowook quietly trimming overwrought lines into the right kind of lyric.
In one city the rain resumed in a fine pelt; in the other it dried, leaving silver seams on the road. Above both stretched the same sky like a sheet of cloth—catching unwritten promises, holding words not yet spoken. Between them sat two children in a cold library, pinkies linked, sending—through channels only they understood—a simple sentence they’d rediscover later amid meetings, maps, and boarding passes: “We’ll bother each other again.”
They didn’t know their first meeting in Korea would feel like stepping into a photo the librarian once snapped: rows of books, a slightly crooked banner, and someone, hesitantly, calling the old name. For now—to close a wet day and open a new one—it was enough to live in two cities, two languages, two names, and one feeling with no label but this: a memory that refuses to dry.