Chapter Text
There is something so utterly obscene about wealth, Park Sunghoon has always thought, though he has never said so aloud and likely never will, because the thought itself constitutes a kind of ingratitude that his mother would find frankly inexcusable and his father would find infuriating. But Sunghoon thinks it. He thinks it now, standing on the first-class promenade deck of the RMS Titanic on what is a crisp and indecently beautiful April morning. The sky is that shade of blue that exists only in the first hours after a night that has scrubbed itself clean.
Park Sunghoon is watching the line of third-class passengers below him make their slow and effortful way up the gangway. They have children, several of them, and they are loud because they are permitted to be loud, their faces giving way to this unguarded joy that Sunghoon, who was never a particularly loud nor expressful child, finds at once foreign and a little devastating. A small girl in a red coat is spinning in circles near the foot of the gangway while her mother attempts to manage two bags and a sleeping infant. And the small girl spins regardless, arms out and face up because the ship is enormous and the morning is cold and she is perhaps four or five, and she does not yet understand how to be still.
They are happy, he thinks. They are carrying their own bags, and I reckon their coats are rather thin, and they do not have a steward to take their belongings. But they are nevertheless, unambiguously, happy.
“Cousin! You look mere seconds away from flinging yourself into the bloody Atlantic.”
Sunghoon straightens. He does not quite manage to look bothered but he manages to look collected, which is the next best thing. He turns to find Lee Heeseung dropping into the deck chair beside him with the same ease he brings everywhere else. He is wearing his good grey coat and has his hat on at an angle that Sunghoon knows their mothers would not approve of, which is almost certainly the point, and he has a cigarette already burning between two fingers. His cousin is twenty-three years old and has the face of someone who finds everything mildly amusing, including and perhaps especially his own existence.
“I was merely admiring the view. Watching the—”
“Yes, yes, the third-class passengers, I know. I watched you watching them for approximately ten minutes and I will say, cousin, for a man of your remarkable self-possession, you had something very peculiar on your face just now.” Heeseung draws on his cigarette and exhales in the direction of the sea, which is polite of him actually, and tips his head to look at Sunghoon. “What was it you were thinking about so very intently?”
“Nothing.”
“Mm.” Heeseung makes a sound that communicates very clearly that he does not believe this but has decided not to press it, for now. This is indeed one of his finer qualities and Sunghoon appreciates it with the whole of his chest. “Your mother is looking for you, incidentally. She wants you presentable by eleven. Something about the Cho family.”
Sunghoon feels his jaw do the thing it does, the thing where it sets just slightly tighter than usual. “I am aware.”
“Christine Cho is supposedly quite stunning. Plays the pianoforte—”
“She plays the violin.”
“Does she now.” Heeseung is grinning. “And you know this because you’ve been memorizing the details, which means you’ve been listening more carefully to your mother than you pretend to.”
“I know because my mother has mentioned the girl eleven times since we left London. Eleven, Heeseung. I am going absolutely mad.”
“Right. See, I’d have stopped counting at three and started fabricating a mistress to get out of the mess.”
“You do have a mistress.”
“Two, cousin. I’ve two.” He holds up two of his fingers. “Neither of them is Christine Cho, though I'm sure she is perfectly lovely.” He exhales. “You should meet her, Hoon. At dinner. See if she makes anything happen.”
See if she makes anything happen.
The phrasing is careful and Sunghoon understands the care in it, which is why he loves his cousin, because he has very few people he can afford to love. Heeseung never says it directly, he never has.
“I will sit across from her,” Sunghoon says. “That will be sufficient.”
“Sure.” Heeseung takes another drag. “And when she laughs at something your father says and you feel nothing—”
“Heeseung.”
“Nothing. Not even a bloody flicker. When she exists in your immediate vicinity and your body registers this with the same enthusiasm it would register the presence of a particularly unremarkable chair—”
“Heeseung.”
“I am merely saying.” He holds up both hands, his cigarette trailing smoke. “Christine Cho may as well be the loveliest girl in Southampton, and it would not matter, would it.”
No, he thinks. No, it would not.
˖ ࣪⊹
The Titanic is, by every description available to him, the most magnificent thing he has ever stood inside. And Park Sunghoon has stood inside a great many magnificent things. Cathedrals in Rome. Opera houses in Vienna. Drawing rooms in London where the wallpaper alone cost more than most men earn in a decade. His mother collects these spaces the way other women collect brooches or calling cards, accumulating grandeur as evidence of a life worth envying. Sunghoon has been dragged through all of them in pressed suits with his hair combed flat and his posture corrected by a firm hand between his shoulder blades, and his smile arranged into something appropriate, something that is supposed to communicate gratitude for the privilege of existing in rooms that were built to make ordinary people feel small.
What no one tells you about the RMS Titanic is that she is not a ship in the ordinary sense that most people think. She is a building. She is a city. She is a world folded into the shape of a hull and set afloat on the ocean, and walking through her corridors on their first afternoon, trailing a steward to the first-class suites, Sunghoon finds himself re-assessing his understanding of what a ship is supposed to be.
His suite is vast. That is the only word for it. There are three rooms. He has three rooms to himself— a sitting room with an actual settee, a bedroom, and then his own attached bathroom.
He sits on the edge of the bed and he looks at his hands. He thinks about Christine Cho, who plays the violin and is eighteen years old and apparently very respectable, which means she is exactly the kind of person he is supposed to want and he feels— pressing his palms flat against his thighs, trying to generate something, anything— he feels nothing. The familiar nothing. The specific flavour of his own inadequacy, smooth and cool as a stone.
His cross sits against his sternum, warmed by his body heat and he presses his palm against it through his shirt.
Make me different. I have asked before, haven't I. So here I am asking again. Always asking again, again, again. Make me the version that is good.
There is no answer. Because there is never an answer. There is only the engine thrumming somewhere deep in the belly of the ship and the faint sound of his mother's voice through the wall, and the knowledge that in a few hours they will sit down to dinner. And his mother will conspire to seat him within eyeline of the Cho family and he will sit very straight in his seat and put on the act of appearing interested. No one will know that the carefully curated version of Park Sunghoon is built on a foundation that does not mean what everyone thinks it does.
˖ ࣪⊹
The first-class dining saloon is white and gold and so laughably large that it produces in Sunghoon, against his better judgement, something that is almost purely aesthetic wonder, the kind he tries to keep very controlled and very private. The thing is, expressions of wonder tend to make one look young, and Sunghoon at twenty years old is already trying very hard not to look young. The ceiling arches up and up and up. The windows are enormous. The flowers on every table are fresh and white and the tablecloths are the kind of starched cream that communicates silently and very effectively that someone else washes them, has always washed them, will always wash them, and that you will never need to think about this. The silver is arranged just so. There are more glasses per setting than there are hours in most of Sunghoon’s days that could reasonably be described as interesting.
His mother is wearing dark blue at dinner tonight and she is magnificent in it, and he loves her in the way that is almost impossible to hold at the same time as the several other things he feels. She is a woman who believes wholeheartedly in the version of Park Sunghoon that she has constructed, who has poured many years of her life into making him into a thing she can be proud of, and she is not wrong to be proud. He is impeccably dressed, he has excellent manners, he is educated, he is dutiful, he is kind to servants and respectful to elders and he has never once given her reason to look at him the way she would look at him if she knew— if she knew what kept him awake at night, on his knees praying it all away.
He takes a breath.
His father is two seats over on his left, his mother on his right. His aunt and uncle are directly across, and Heeseung— God bless him, God genuinely bless him— has appeared and is taking the seat beside Sunghoon like a tactically placed guardian, already leaning back in his chair without apology.
The Cho family are two tables away. Christine is wearing a green dress and Sunghoon looks at her for exactly three seconds before averting his gaze, not because she is displeasing— she is not, she is by any reasonable measure quite beautiful— but because looking does nothing and three seconds is already more than he owed.
“She keeps looking this way,” Heeseung murmurs, leaning in close, barely moving his mouth. It should not be easy for a man his size to be this conspiratorial. “The Cho girl. She’s looked over three times since we sat down.”
“Don’t.”
“I am simply reporting the facts. Scientific observation, really.” Heeseung examines his menu. “She’s got exceptional posture.”
“Please stop talking.”
“I’m just saying— ”
“You are convincing yourself that narrating my suffering constitutes concern.”
“I am genuinely concerned, cousin. That is precisely why I’m doing this.” He puts his menu down.
The soup arrives and Sunghoon picks up the correct spoon and drinks it and it is good, because it is always good in places like this, and the goodness of everything in places like this is something he has stopped registering as a pleasantry because it has always simply been the standard for him.
“Sunghoon.” His mother's voice is light and conversational, the timbre she uses when she has been waiting patiently for the appropriate moment to pester her son. “Have you noticed the Cho family are aboard?”
“Mmm.”
“I thought perhaps after dinner—”
“Mother.”
“A brief introduction only, nothing formal. Your father and Mr. Cho have an existing acquaintance from the—”
“I am aware.” He takes another spoonful of the soup. “I would rather not, this evening. It was a long day of travelling.”
“It was a pleasant day of travelling,” his mother corrects. “We were perfectly comfortable throughout.”
“The motion of the tender was somewhat unsettling.” He is not lying, exactly. He is selecting his truths strategically, which is a skill so deeply embedded in his daily life that he no longer notices the effort of it. “My stomach has not entirely settled.”
From across the table, his uncle raises an eyebrow. Heeseung’s father is a quieter man than Sunghoon’s own, less given to proclamation, more given to observation, and the observation he directs at Sunghoon is not unkind. “Perhaps some dry bread,” he suggests blandly.
“Indeed,” Sunghoon murmurs. “Thank you.”
His mother looks at him for a moment— it is the look that sees through the surface and has always seen through the surface but has also always chosen not to follow what it sees— and then resumes her soup. “Tomorrow evening then,” she says, which is not a question nor is it something he can argue with.
The fish course arrives, and then the lamb, then a cheese. Then something involving meringue that Sunghoon eats without tasting because by the time it reaches him, his mother has inevitably circled back.
“She is a very accomplished young woman,” she is saying, and the she does not require identification because there has only been one she on the conversational agenda since Southampton. “She speaks three languages, Sunghoon. She reads— your father mentioned that she has an interest in literature—”
“Mother.”
“—which I thought might be of interest given your own reading—”
“Mother.”
“I am simply noting—”
“Yes, and you have been noting for months now.” He hears himself, hears the frustration in his voice, and he has to smooth it back down. He does not snap. He cannot snap. He is not someone who snaps. So he picks up his wine glass, turns it by the stem and looks at a candle refracted through it. “I appreciate your consideration of the matter. I will speak with Miss Cho before the voyage is out. I am simply asking for this evening, Mother, that is all.”
Beside him, Heeseung is doing absolutely nothing helpful, which is to say he is eating his lamb with alarming contentment. His father says nothing. His father has never, in Sunghoon’s recollection, said anything directly about Christine Cho or any of the other names his mother has floated over his head during the last several years. His father has never asked him what he wants or what he feels or what happens, physiologically and emotionally, when he sits across a dinner saloon from a respectable young woman and wills himself to want her and the willing produces nothing. His father communicates this subject entirely through silence, which in Sunghoon’s family is a very loud thing.
He drinks his wine. He thinks: I am twenty years old and I am sitting on the grandest ship in the world and I feel like I am slowly being pressed between two very flat surfaces and one day there will not be enough of me left to press.
He thinks: That is dramatic and self-indulgent and I should stop.
He thinks: I have been on this bloody ship for six hours and already I am regretting stepping foot inside it.
The meringue dissolves on his tongue.
“Forgive me,” he says, settling down his napkin. He puts one hand to the front of his jacket, the gesture of a man whose body is clearly misbehaving. “I find I need some air. The— the rocking of the ship is quite bothersome. I shouldn't be very long.”
His mother’s eyes narrow immediately. “Sunghoon—”
“Sea sickness,” Heeseung supplies instantly, already reaching across to pat Sunghoon's arm with breezy concern. “Poor Sunghoon has always had a sensitive constitution on the water, hasn’t he.” He looks across the table at his own parents. “Do you remember the crossing to France in ’07? He was green the entire way there.” He is, Sunghoon knows, lying completely, because Sunghoon has an iron constitution on water and has never in his life experienced sea sickness. The point is not the content. The point is the intervention.
“The fresh air will do him good,” Heeseung’s father agrees. But Sunghoon’s mother is still looking at him and for a moment he thinks she is going to say something that will strip the entire pretense bare, because she has always been able to, has always had the capacity to see him— not all of him, not the parts that matter most, but enough— and sometimes he thinks the reason she does not say those things is because she has made a calculation about what seeing them fully would cost.
“Don’t be too long,” she says. “The air is cold. You mustn’t catch something.”
“I know,” he says. “I won’t be.”
He is. He is very long.
The truth is that the moment he is through the door and into the corridor, something loosens in his chest. Just fractionally, just enough. And he finds that his feet are moving without any particular destination, which is not normally something Park Sunghoon permits himself; directionless movement, going nowhere on purpose. He is a man who walks from one place to another place with the spaces between accounted for. He is not a wanderer. He has never been a wanderer.
Tonight, apparently, he is a wanderer.
The first-class promenade is quiet, the cold having driven most passengers inside, and he walks it once, twice, hands clasped behind his back as he watches the black water that is barely visible past the rail. The stars are extraordinary— he registers this with the part of his brain that handles astronomy, which is a hobby he has had since he was thirteen and which he has never fully told anyone about. It seems like something that ought to produce embarrassment, the stars being a topic that most people do not want to discuss and he is perfectly content to have it entirely to himself. He can name every constellation visible from the Northern Hemisphere. He knows the mythology attached to most of them, the Greek, the Roman, the older stories underneath those. The way that people have been looking up and making meaning from the dark since before meaning was even a concept they had the right words for.
He tilts his head back.
Orion’s belt, he thinks, locating it at once. Sirius below and east. Betelgeuse in the right shoulder, which is— statistically and scientifically— already dead, already gone, a star we are watching some hundreds of years after its extinction because light takes so very long to cross the distances involved, and there is something about that, something he has turned over many times, something about looking at light that no longer has a source.
He stops this line of thinking.
He is cold. The night is cold. He should head back.
But he continues to walk. And the ship changes as he moves through it. This is something he does not fully expect, the way the shifts increase in small ways. Like the carpet that goes from deep and soft to thin. And the lighting changes from warm to just functional. The ceiling from high to navigable. He is not paying attention to this, not on purpose at least, he is simply walking, and when he finally stops and looks around properly, he understands with slow, settling surprise that he has indeed walked very far.
The deck he is now standing on is not the first-class promenade.
He looks around. The lifeboats are still above, identifiable in silhouette. But the rail here is different, the boards beneath his feet are unvarnished, and somewhere below he can hear music but it is not the carefully curated string quartet that has been providing the dining saloon with its appropriate backdrop. This is something with more velocity to it, a fiddle, and voices, and what sounds like someone drumming on something that was not meant to be drummed on.
Sunghoon has walked, apparently, to the other end of the ship. He is standing on the stern. The third-class stern deck.
He is about to turn around— he should turn around, this is not a place for someone like him— and then he sees a boy.
There is someone leaning over the railing and he is slouched against it from the inside, forearms resting on top of the rail, his weight forward and his body easy in the posture of someone who has made himself at home against this particular piece of iron for some time now. He’s got a cigarette between two fingers and he is humming something, or attempting to hum something— Sunghoon cannot identify the tune because the boy is not quite on pitch and seems entirely undisturbed by this fact. The wind catches his hair, which is longer than men usually keep it, a specific shade of brown that the moonlight is turning something closer to amber.
Sunghoon stops. He does not mean to stop. His feet are simply making the decision without consulting him first.
He is— he is quite pretty.
The boy turns and the thought Sunghoon was having dissolves before it can be finished, which is fortunate, because it was going somewhere that would require him to stand here on the stern deck of the Titanic and contemplate, at length, the physical details of a stranger. And he is not going to do that, no.
The boy looks at him.
He is, Sunghoon registers in the half-second before he can redirect his attention, roughly his own age. Perhaps a year or two more. He's got a face that is boyish in the specific way of someone who has not quite outgrown their own prettiness. High cheekbones, a jawline that is still delicate, a mouth that seems structurally inclined toward some variety of expression even at rest. There are charcoal smudges on his right hand, his fingers, darkening the skin near the knuckle. His jacket does not fit perfectly and his collar is open.
“Well, mate," says the boy, before taking a slow pull from the cigarette. He is somewhat drunk, there is a quality to him, a looseness in his posture, easiness that goes beyond simply being comfortable. This is the kind of ease that usually requires alcoholic assistance, Sunghoon knows this much. And his eyes are very bright. “You lost?”
Sunghoon straightens— he is already straight, he is always straight, I will give you six years of consistent excellent posture for the price of one lost self, what a deal, Mother— and opens his mouth to say something appropriate, something along the lines of I apologize for the intrusion, I was simply taking the air, I will be on my way, and what comes out instead is:
“Not particularly, no.”
The boy looks at him for a moment, head tilted, the cigarette trailing smoke from between his fingers. “Quite a ways away from the good china, aren’t you?” He speaks. “You look like you've never set foot on this end of the ship in your life. You look, in fact,”— and here he squints, very slightly, a squint that is assessing rather than hostile, really— “like you've got a rod up your— well. You know. No offence meant.”
Sunghoon blinks.
“None taken,” he says and then immediately corrects himself. “That is. I-I do not. Habitually. Have a rod up my—”
“Sure, sure.” The boy waves this away with the hand that holds the stick. “So. Not lost, just dropped by for the view then?”
And the thing is— the thing that Sunghoon cannot quite account for— is that this is delivered without malice. There is no contempt in it. There is, if anything, a kind of open interest, as if this boy has encountered something unexpected and is deciding to find it entertaining rather than an inconvenience. Sunghoon's mouth does something at one corner, not quite a smile but the beginnings of one.
“I was walking,” Sunghoon says.
“Aye, and you walked a fair way, didn’t you.” He looks Sunghoon up and down, not— it is not— it is not the kind of look that means something, surely, or perhaps it is the kind of looks that means something but Sunghoon is not going to think about that. Not standing on the stern deck in the cold with his cross pendant warm against his breastbone. “You’re a first-class lad, then.”
“I—” He stops. “Yes.”
“Thought so.” Another drag. “The coat.”
“What about my coat?”
“S’very nice. Very.” He tilts his head again and there it is, that funny little gesture. “Italian wool?”
“Yes, actually.”
“You can always tell.” He reaches up with his free hand and touches the lapel of his own jacket, which is— it is perfectly serviceable, it is a perfectly good jacket, it is simply not Italian wool. “This here is from a pawnshop in Leeds, since we’re sharing. I got it for fourpence from a fella who I’m fairly certain stole it from someone’s washing line. But it fits alright and it keeps the wind off, more or less.”
Sunghoon stares at him. He cannot tell, precisely, whether this is intended to be funny because the boy’s face remains completely sincere. Completely open. There is no performance of either pride or humility in it, just the flat recitation of a fact.
“I see,” Sunghoon says.
“Sim Jaeyun,” the boy says, and holds out his hand easily as if he’d never once been uncertain about whether or not to introduce himself. “Jay’s inside with the rest of them. Best you don’t go in there, actually, they’re three songs deep into something I cannot identify and someone’s started on the whiskey so it’ll get creative.”
“Park Sunghoon,” he responds, shakes the hand. The skin is rough under his fingers, he can feel it. Only slightly. It is the texture of work, of handling things, and the hand is warm despite the cold and Sunghoon releases it approximately two seconds after he should have.
“Park Sunghoon,” Jaeyun echoes, and he seems to be trying the name, tasting each syllable in his mouth. “Right. And are you going to stand over there the whole time or are you going to come lean on this railing like a person?”
Sunghoon moves without thinking, leans on the railing. He is not sure why he does this. He is sure, subsequently, that he should not have done this, that the appropriate course of action was to apologize for interrupting, to state that he was returning to his own deck. He is certain of this in the same way he is certain of many things that his body then does not cooperate with.
The rail is cold underneath his hands and the sea stretches out beyond the ship, dark and enormous and flecked with white where the wake catches the moonlight. And ahead of them there is only open ocean and it is, Sunghoon will admit to himself very quietly, extraordinary.
“Excellent, isn’t she,” Jaeyun hums, not looking at him. He is looking at the water.
“Indeed,” Sunghoon responds honestly.
“S’why I’m out here instead of in there.” Jaeyun gestures with the cigarette toward the third-class interior. “Easier to breathe. No offence to Jay and the lads, they’re tremendous, but there is only so many times you can hear the same three songs on a fiddle before you need a bit of air.” He takes another drag and exhales into the wind. “Where’re you from, then? Originally.”
“Korea,” Sunghoon says. “My father’s business is in London. We’ve been there—” He considers the number. “—twelve years.”
“Twelve years.” Jaeyun nods slowly. “And you've still got that accent.”
“My accent is fine.”
“Didn’t say it wasn't. Just saying it’s there.” The boy glances sideways and there is something in that glance that is quick and curious and gone before Sunghoon can fully make sense of it. “It’s nice. Sounds like there’s something careful happening back behind the words.”
Sunghoon does not know how to respond to this. “And you?" he asks, because a counter-question seems safer than anything else.
“Ah, this Jaeyun.” He laughs a little. “Yorkshire, originally. Mum’s side. Dad’s Korean, met her when he was working the textile mills. Not the most romantic origin story but here we all are.” He flicks a bit of ash off the end of the stick. “Jay’s from London. Proper London. Grew up right in it, knows all the streets. He’s the one who got us the tickets, actually.”
“How?”
Jaeyun grins and it is— it is a nice grin, Sunghoon notes, purely as an observation. Purely as someone noticing information about the world. It is a grin that takes over his whole face and is complete without restraining and it makes him look like a puppy, Sunghoon thinks, and immediately despises himself for the comparison and also for the way this comparison seems to make his chest do something entirely without his permission.
“Poker,” Jaeyun answers.
“Poker.”
“Day-of game, down at the docks. Fella was trying to sell the tickets, couldn't go himself for some reason or another, so he put them up on a hand. And Jay, the clever bastard, he won.” He shrugs. “That’s how we ended up on the finest ship in the world with fourpence between us." He looks back out at the water and his grin softens into something quieter. “Funny, isn’t it. The way things turn out.”
Sunghoon looks out at the water as well.
I am standing on the stern deck of the Titanic talking to a man I have known for approximately twenty minutes about the concept of how things turn out, he thinks, and I am cold and I should go back to dinner and I am not going to go back to dinner, at least not yet, at least—
“You smoke?” Jaeyun is holding the cigarette toward him. His cigarette. The one that has been in his mouth this entire time.
Sunghoon looks at it. He looks at the charcoal-stained fingers holding it out, the slight glistening damp of the tip where his mouth has been, and Sunghoon is a Catholic and a good one at that, he is twenty years old and he has spent six years being very careful and very controlled, and very precisely the thing he is supposed to be. He looks at the offered cigarette and thinks— for one single unguarded moment before the control reasserts itself— I would like very much to put my mouth there. But then the control is back, snapping right into place and the thought is gone. But it is not truly gone. Thoughts like that are never gone, they are simply reclassified, hidden away in the part of Sunghoon’s mind that he does not access in the company of other people.
He takes the cigarette and puts it to his lip, breathes in.
The smoke hits the back of his throat and it is harsh, entirely foreign to him, and his lungs say absolutely not, you bloody fool, and he coughs. It is not graceful, nor is it the polite suppressed clearing of a throat. He is coughing properly, eyes watering and all, hand coming up to his mouth.
Jaeyun laughs. The boy sounds delighted and oh, he finds this funny, doesn’t he. He is laughing at him. “First time?”
“No,” Sunghoon croaks, which is a lie.
“Sure.” Jaeyun chirps but his expression suggests he is not remotely fooled. He is grinning still and holds out his hand for Sunghoon to pass him the stick back. Their fingers touch very briefly during this exchange. “You’re not meant to just breathe it in like that, actually,” he explains while demonstrating a slow and easy pull, held for a moment and then exhaled. “You sort of— you let it sit. Doesn’t go all the way down.” He looks at Sunghoon then. “You alright?”
“Perfectly,” Sunghoon answers because he is. He is perfectly alright, he is— he is standing on a deck he has no business being on watching the moonlight on the Atlantic, and his chest feels loosened from something. But he is perfectly alright. He always is. He swallows. He can still taste it, the smoke on his tongue and underneath that, something else, something—
Stop. Stop that. Stop it right now.
“Come here,” Jaeyun says. He has turned from the rail and is looking at Sunghoon with an expression that is straightforward. It is the only word for it. He nods toward the empty space beside him, eying the distance between their bodies. “Come here, Park. It's bloody cold out tonight but you're standing all the way there like you're waiting for a trolley." He wraps his own coat around himself a little more firmly as if making a point. “Come and see it properly, will you.”
So Sunghoon moves to see it properly.
Properly turns out to mean standing closer, much closer, the two of them looking out at the water and the sky overhead and Sunghoon is closer than he would normally stand to someone he met not even an hour ago. Close enough to be aware of the other person’s body warmth, which is not nothing when it is cold, not nothing at all. Close enough to see the corner of Jaeyun’s jaw when he turns his head, the line of his throat, close enough that if Sunghoon shifted his weight by not very much, not very much at all... He averts his gaze immediately back to the ocean because the ocean is safe, the ocean does not have charcoal-stained hands, the ocean does not have a mouth he wants to press his—
“There,” Jaeyun says, pointing upward. “That one. D’you know it?”
Sunghoon looks where he is pointing. It is a star, very bright, very steady, at this time of year visible just so. “Sirius,” he answers confidently. “Alpha Canis Majoris. It is the brightest star in the night sky.” He pauses, stops to consider. “In the Northern Hemisphere. Technically.”
Jaeyun turns his head to look up at him.
“What?” Sunghoon asks.
“Nothing.” He looks back at the star. Something in his face has changed, it has become interested in the way faces do when they are entirely intrigued by something. “Go on.”
"I beg your pardon?”
“You know more, don’t you. I can tell. You’ve got that face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You’ve got it, Park. Like you’re trying to decide if sharing something you know is going to embarrass you.” Jaeyun glances at him again, the corner of his mouth. “Does it usually?”
Sunghoon considers. “Often,” he says, which is more honest than he intended.
“Why?”
He does not have an adequate enough answer to this. Because knowledge has always seemed, in my specific life, like something that belongs to me and I am not always sure what I am supposed to do with things that belong to me, because the idea of being seen wanting something, even something as harmless as astronomy, carries with it the risk of someone understanding that there are things I want, that I am a person who has wants, and that is a territory that feels unsafe. He does not say this. “I simply don’t often find the opportunity to discuss astronomy.”
“Well, you've got one now,” Jaeyun clicks his tongue. “I'm brilliant at shutting up and listening.” He pauses. “Occasionally.”
Sunghoon looks at Sirius. He is— he is aware of his shoulders, aware that they are up, that they have been up since he left the dining room, since dinner, since London probably, and he makes an effort to bring them down just fractionally. “Sirius is approximately eight point six light years away,” he speaks. “Which means the light we are seeing left its surface eight point six years ago. What you’re looking at is not the star as it is now. It is the star as it was almost nine years ago. The light is older than the current moment.”
Jaeyun is quiet.
“That’s,” he starts, stops, and starts again. “That’s mad, actually, isn’t it.”
“It is.”
“So everything up there—” He tilts his head back and Sunghoon, despite himself, looks at him instead of the sky for a long moment, looks at his neck above the open collar, the angle of his jaw against the stars. “Everything’s a postcard from the past. You’re never looking at now.”
“No. You never are.”
"Blimey.” Jaeyun exhales and it isn’t the cigarette this time because he’s put it out. It’s just breath, his naked breath, visible in the cold. “Do you know all of them?”
“Not all, no.”
“But most?”
“Many.” He finds himself looking up properly now, shoulders settling further, the weight in his chest beginning to shift to something that is not quite lightness but it is definitely in the direction of it. He points. “That cluster— just there, to the north— is Pleiades. Seven Sisters, they’re called. Though only six are visible with the naked eye and the mythology around the missing seventh is...” He stops himself. “You don’t want to hear the mythology.”
"I do, actually.” Jaeyun is looking at the cluster now, genuinely, leaning forward slightly on the rail. “Tell me, Park. Which one’s missing?”
“Merope. Depending on which tradition you follow, she either hid herself from shame for having loved a mortal, or she simply grew dimmer with time, and either story—” He stops again, because the story he was about to tell— the one about shame and about hiding, about the star that made itself invisible for the wrong kind of love— is pressing against the inside of his chest in a way he did not anticipate, and he is not going to say it, he is not going to say it.
“Either story what?” Jaeyun is looking at him again, turned from the sky, looking at the side of Sunghoon’s face.
“Either story is interesting,” Sunghoon breathes, “in its own way.” He looks at Pleiades. “That is all.”
Jaeyun watches him for moment and he does not press. He turns back to the sky. “Merope,” he tests the name. “Poor lass.” He goes quiet again, and then: “You read? Or write? You look like someone who reads.”
“I read,” Sunghoon answers. “Yes.”
“What?”
“Poetry, mostly. Some philosophy. I’ve recently—” He cuts himself off. He does not share the poetry. He does not tell people about the poetry. The poetry is— it is off-limits to everyone but himself. “I read widely.”
“Sure.” Jaeyun seems content with this. “I draw,” he offers, completely unprompted, filling the space as if it is the natural thing to do. “Been doing it since I was a kid, couldn’t stop if I tried. Hands— I do a lot of hand studies, the way the tendons move and all that, it's more interesting than it sounds, I swear. And the ocean. I’ve done a fair few of the ocean since we boarded actually, this afternoon I was up on deck for two hours with the sketchbook and Jay had to come drag me back inside before I got properly hypothermic.” He says this all with the ease of someone who has never once in his life worried about oversharing, who opens his mouth and simply says the thing, all of it, without filtering for what will make him seem more or less palatable. And there is something about this that Sunghoon cannot locate a word for, something that is simultaneously bewildering and— and something else. Something else.
“And people,” Jaeyun is continuing. “I draw people. Faces. Hands. Bodies." He glances over and it is briefly pointed. “All kinds.”
“All kinds,” Sunghoon says quietly.
“It’s good practice. Life drawing, they call it. You’ve got to— when you draw the figure, you’ve got to understand how it works, how it moves. The architecture of it.” He looks back at the water. “Nudes, mostly.”
Sunghoon remains silent.
He draws nudes. He has said this the way one may mention the weather. He draws nudes and he has said it standing here in the cold while Sunghoon is trying very hard not to turn his head and study the magnificent line of his throat or the way his fingers curl around the railing.
“Does that shock you?” Jaeyun asks and he is not looking at him but his voice has a quality of attention to it.
“No,” Sunghoon manages. “I am not— no.”
“Good.” He grins and Sunghoon can hear it even though he is not looking. “S’just drawing. The body is just a body. Extraordinary thing, really, when you look at it properly. People are embarrassed about it and I’ve never understood why. You’ve got all these remarkable bits and you’ve covered them all up and decided not to look. What a bloody waste.”
Park Sunghoon, who has spent twenty years not looking at the remarkable bits and telling himself this is virtue, says absolutely nothing.
Then: “You draw people you don’t know?”
“Constantly. You see a face and you think—” He does something with his hands, a sketching motion, instinctive. “You want to know what it looks like on paper. What the particular weight of a person looks like when you try to put them down.” He glances at Sunghoon. “I thought about it right when you walked up, y’know.”
The information that Jaeyun has been thinking about drawing him— about what he looks like on paper— brings within his chest a warmth he didn't know was quite possible despite the cold air settling everywhere around them.
“And?” He says, because apparently he is a person who asks questions to strangers now.
“And you’ve got a good face,” Jaeyun says without embarrassment, like it is a completely factual statement to make. “The kind that doesn’t know it. Which is always more interesting. And your hands, too, if we’re being honest.”
His hands.
My hands. He likes my hands.
He looks at the stars.
They stand there for a long time. Sunghoon cannot account for this either, the time, the way it moves differently out here than it does in the dining room, than it does anywhere in his life where he is expected to be someone specific. Jaeyun talks, when he talks, in long rambling chains that go from one subject to the next without any concern for transitions. And Sunghoon listens with a focus that surprises him, because he is not usually someone who listens this way: entirely, without part of himself standing off to the side.
He talks more about Jay— his best friend, his fella, he says, the word warm and fond, the way you say a word for someone you have trusted for a very long time. Jay, who won tickets on a single hand of poker and came running to find Jaeyun in the basement of a pub in Whitechapel to say pack something, we’re going to New York! Jay, who currently is inside apparently attempting to teach someone the words to a song. Jay, who is supposedly the best card player and the sorest loser and has a laugh that carries three streets.
He talks about drawing, circling back to it. He talks about the way the light hits a face differently depending on the direction and time of the day, and how he has been trying for two years to capture the particular quality of light on water and keeps failing. He has sketchbooks— plenty, he says, stuffed with drawings, studies, pages of just hands, pages of just mouths.
Just mouths.
He talks about where they are headed. New York, a friend of Jay’s who has a studio in the city, the plan to find work, to find something. He says this last part with a cheerfulness that is not ignorant of the uncertainty but has decided to treat the uncertainty as part of the adventure, and Sunghoon— who has never in his life existed in relationship to his future as anything other than a plan, a methodically mapped set of expectations laid out in order— does not know what to do with this. So he just watches Jaeyun’s face when he talks about New York and there is something alive in it, a kind of unguarded anticipation, and it is—
It is remarkable, he thinks, to want something in that way, without apology.
At some point Jaeyun has produced a second cigarette from somewhere and is smoking it, and the smoke curls between them before dispersing into the Atlantic wind and Sunghoon watches it go and thinks— for one brief and horrible and beautiful moment— I put my mouth where his was.
“Can I ask you something?” Jaeyun breaks the silence.
“You may.”
“Why did you leave?”
Sunghoon looks at him.
“Dinner,” Jaeyun clarifies, and there is something there, a semblance of curiosity that he displays so openly for Sunghoon to see. “You’re clearly the sort who knows which fork is which and all that, so you weren’t out here by accident. Why’d you leave?”
Sunghoon looks back at the water and he thinks about his mother and Christine Cho and the Cho family, and the specific feeling of being looked at by people who see a version of you that isn’t you. He thinks about the exhaustion of it, the way it has made every dinner for the last two years feel like a negotiation with terms he cannot agree to. He thinks about the dining room, the light, the meringue dissolving in his mouth, the nothing he felt looking across two tables at a girl who is perfectly lovely, who is everything, technically, that he should want and yet. And yet.
“I needed air.” He says.
Jaeyun considers this, blows the smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Right.” He says. “And you just so happened to walk all the way to this end of the ship for it.”
“The ship is very large.”
“Uh-huh.” He exhales and Sunghoon notices that he is not pushing. He will not push. Sunghoon senses this already. Jaeyun is someone who asks and then accepts whatever is given, which is— which should not feel as significant as it does. “It is.” The boy looks up. “Merope,” he says, finding the dim place in the Pleiades. “Hidden.”
Or gone, he thinks. Depending on who you believe.
“I used to go up on the roof,” Jaeyun says, as if he is physically incapable of letting the silence drag on for too long. “The building we lived in, it had this flat bit at the top, not meant to be accessed but you could get up if you knew where to step on the fire escape. I used to go up there when I needed to not be inside.” He looks at the stars with an almost wistful expression. “Works for the same purpose as this, I think.”
“Did you draw up there?”
“Sometimes. But mostly I just—” He gestures at the air. “Breathed. Just breathed without having to mean anything for a bit.”
Without having to mean anything.
“Yes,” Sunghoon says quietly and it comes out simple, a tad more honest. “Indeed. Exactly that.”
This time when Jaeyun looks at him the look stays, it holds, and Sunghoon— he looks back, and this is— he should not. He should not look back for this long, this is the specific kind of looking that has gotten him into trouble before, that has made him stand in front of his bathroom mirror at two in the morning asking questions he cannot answer. And so he looks away and he clears his throat.
“It is getting rather late,” he breathes, though he has lost track of exactly how late, exactly how long he has been standing here with the cold working into his collar and the stars overhead and Sim Jaeyun talking about rooftops in a city Sunghoon has never lived in. “I should make my way back.”
“Right, yeah.” Jaeyun straightens from the rail, stubs out his cigarette on the iron. “Go warm up. Don’t want you catching something.” He stretches his arms above his head and his jacket rides up, and Sunghoon studies the middle distance with absolute dedication. “Had to’ve been at least two hours, you know. You’ve been out here—”
“That long?”
“Give or take.” He drops his arms and he is doing the thing again, he is grinning, the one that does something to Sunghoon's chest. “You’re good company, Park Sunghoon. Better than I was expecting, honestly.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Someone who’d take one look at me and conclude I was a bit of dirt that'd come up from below. And then tell me very politely to get back where I belong.” He says this with absolutely no bitterness, just the recitation of past experience and the ease with which he says it suggests it happens enough that it no longer inconveniences him. “It happens.”
Something tightens in Sunghoon's chest that is not— that is not something he is familiar with. It feels strange, this tightening, but it is not entirely unwelcome. “That is—” He pauses. “That is unforgivably rude.”
Jaeyun looks at him, surprised, and then his face does something that is softer than the grin, less immediate. “Yeah,” he admits. “It is, a bit.”
A pause. The Atlantic. The stars. Merope, hidden.
“Can I expect to see you on the wrong side of the ship again tomorrow night?” Jaeyun asks. He has put his hands in his pockets and his head is slightly tilted and there is no performance in the question, no coyness or calculation.
Sunghoon looks at him.
Say no, he thinks. Say you'll be attending the first-class smoking room, that you have obligations, that it is simply not— that this has been pleasant but it would not be appropriate to continue this way.
“Perhaps.”
“Excellent.” Jaeyun nods, clearly and visibly satisfied, and raises a hand in a loose wave, already turning.
“Goodnight, Sim Jaeyun,” Sunghoon says to the boy's back and then he is turning himself, beginning his walk back toward the first-class promenade.
“GOODNIGHT, PARK!”
Loud. Wildly, entirely loud, thrown into the night without any concern for the hour or the surrounding deck or the passengers who might be sleeping below. Sunghoon does not turn around. His mouth does something he does not sanction, some involuntary movement at the corner of his lips that would, if witnessed, require an explanation.
He walks back toward the first-class deck. And he does not smile.
He is absolutely not smiling.