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Jeongin first sees Hyunjin when he starts volunteering for the pediactric’s unit.

The air is acidic and sweet with sterilisation, tickling at his nose hairs and crowding into the crevice between his skull and his brain, pressuring down on the increasingly tender organ. Through the halls, there’s the electronic white noise of pagers beeping, doctors being called, heart monitors and other medical devices making loud trilling noises that fall easily into the unique colour of a background noise that belongs exclusively to the floors of a hospital. 

Within these walls, Jeongin feels like a visitor to a distant realm: some people are getting the worst news of their lives, some people are breathing their last pitiful breath, some people are kissing their mother’s heads goodbye for the last time. 

Jeongin settles into the chair, the children excitedly scuffling over as fit as they are able to take their positions on the jigsaw-patterned softfoam.

Jeongin wasn’t nervous about volunteering here, nor was he especially worried about getting along with the children. Jeongin loves kids. Something about performing in front of children strips away the usual thin veil of shyness he carries with him. He becomes confident, mischievous, and sometimes a little silly when he’s in these positions. When his friend Felix mentioned a space in the volunteering group, Jeongin had jumped at the opportunity to fatten his college application. That’s what gap years were for, no? 

Joengin’s parents hadn’t been wholly convinced of his decision to take a year-long break from education before cementing himself fully in teaching college. Jeongin had seen first-hand how stressed Felix, who was a year older than him, had gotten during exam season. Jeongin wanted to have a year of newfound adulthood to himself to shape into an ideal poster of youth for him to look back upon fondly in his old age. 

Some of the children are more sickly than others, but all of them growl when Jeongin points to the monster on the book, all of them gasp dramatically at the crux of the story, and when Jeongin falls out of his chair in pantomimed fear when they shout ‘Look out!’ when the monster is creeping up on the protagonist, they are in fits of giggles. 

“Mr. Jeongin! Read another, read another!” One of the kids shouts out when he tucks the book back into his tote bag. 

“I only brought two books with me,” He explains to a chorus of outrage and complaints, “But! If you all want, I can bring an extra book next week?” 

The children nod and jump, a particularly vocal little boy clung to his leg, not at all perturbed by the stranger. Jeongin pokes him gently in the soft of the armpits, making him squeal and roll on the softfoam away from the attack. 

“Hm… it doesn’t sound like you guys are excited enough… I guess I’ll only bring two next week,” He gets pulled and yanked with a horde of tiny sickly fists grabbing the tail of his coat as he leaves the ward. One-by-one he carefully dislodges the tender hands, so small and fat compared to his own, and tells them he’ll be back at the same time next week and maybe the children should try and guess what type of books he’ll bring.

He goes to the nurse’s station and hands the little volunteering card for the head nurse to sign as evidence of his time. He finds her with a little difficulty. She’s sitting down, almost completely hidden behind stacks of files and bunches of flowers and a collection of toys ranging from plush animals to strange building-block creatures. 

“You’re good with them,” She says kindly. Jeongin thanks her, bowing at the compliment. This amuses her somewhat. “Have you worked with children before? Any younger siblings?”

“I have a younger brother... but I want to be an elementary teacher.” He takes the card back and slips it into his phone cover. Felix tells him that he shouldn’t put important things there - but in Jeongin’s mind he’s much less likely to lose his phone than a wallet. 

“And you thought this would look good on college applications, right? We’ve had plenty of your kind, and we’re always happy to have them, especially when they’re so good with the kids.” Jeongin feels his face glow and he tactfully shifts behind a vaseful of daisies. 

“But I have to warn you that you will move between the wards. You can come here again next week, since you’ve gotten their hopes up - but after that we’ll move you around. The kids get attached easily, especially if they don’t often get visitors.” 

Jeongin feels his face fall a little, but he understands the reasoning. He wishes he could see the horde of energetic kids in this particular wing of the hospital every Sunday, but he’ll have to leave eventually. It’s only after he waves his departure to the nurse and walks past where the arrow had pointed him towards the Oncology Ward that he realises there’s a good chance the rotation is to stop the volunteers getting attached too. 

He doesn’t have much space to think about it. A noise grows quickly in his direction, and Jeongin barely steps out of the way of a wheeled desk chair spinning out of control, almost bouncing against the garishly chipper cartoon-painted walls. A young man almost gets thrown from the chair.

The nurse on dinner duty stops the chair just in time, pulling the man up from the scuff of the loose-fitted cardigan. When he had flown past, it billowed like a cape and made him look much younger than what Jeongin now sees him to be. The boy is pulled to his feet to show hospital-standard bedclothes and slippers that long-term patients often wear.

“How many times have I told you that this is a hospital, not your personal racetrack?” 

“It can’t be a race if there’s no one to race against,” The boy replies. He yelps loudly when she pulls at his ear and starts walking him down the hall, right towards Jeongin. For some reason, Jeongin stopped in his tracks. 

“And there won’t be anyone to race against. You remember that these are children? Sick children.” 

They’re passing him now, and the boy, bent almost in half by the ear, pulls a face in Jeongin’s direction to show his contempt for the scolding he’s getting. Jeongin's face provides in response an awkward half-smile half-laugh. He begins walking again, embarrassed. 

Over his shoulder, he hears the conversation fading down the hall, namely the boy’s loud voice which bounces off the walls with the same wildness as the chair, which is still spinning in place even as the boy disappears. 

“I’m a sick children too, you know.”

“You’re a grown-up now.” 

The boy says something else, and it’s followed by a loud squeal. Jeongin imagines the nurse had pulled sharply on his ear to scold him for whatever his reply was, but he thinks nothing more of it. The door to the ward clicks shut behind him with a light buzz to indicate that it’s locked. With the door shut, everything within the ward is closed off from the outside world. When he navigates his way to the main entrance and then out into the cool February breeze, he tugs his coat closer to his body and takes the scarf from his tote bag, almost dislodging the books in the process. 

Jeongin goes about the rest of his week on a separate planet from the inner workings of the hospital. Airports exist on a different realm, as do schools during late evenings, or cinemas during the morning - hospitals are this way too. When Jeongin steps out and the doors shut, all thoughts of the hospital stay there, as though the place only flickers into existence whenever Jeongin steps inside it, otherwise running on a machine not in touch with Jeongin’s reality, and he is happy to leave it at that. 

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The second time Jeongin sees Hyunjin, he is waiting for the bus with Felix. 

Both of them had finished their volunteering sessions and were waiting for the 34 bus. It stops in the center of town, where Jeongin and Felix will penguin-march into their favourite cafe whose windows are steamed from the temperature imbalance of the February chill and the head radiating from the baker’s ovens. They’d draw little faces on the window and Jeongin would talk about nothing, and Felix would talk about nothing too and they would have a good time. Then, Felix would get on the 24 bus, and Jeongin the 117B, and they would part ways: Felix back to campus, and Jeongin to his family home. 

The winter has been a bitter one, the snowfall having carried through the bulk of December and January, and even though the skies remained fat and heavy with snow, none had fallen today. Even still, the bitter cold seems to radiate from the ground below, yesterday’s snow sharing its bite with Jeongin as he takes the heat packs from his pocket and shoves them under his butt before sitting on the bench. He holds his tote bag on his lap, not able to hold it between his feet in the dirty slush.

“What ward were you in today?” Felix asks, pulling his own scarf close. 

“Oncology. I’ll be moved somewhere else next week. I liked the kids there, they were excitable,” he says. 

“Most of the kids are that way, though. They’re just happy to see some unfamiliar faces that aren’t poking and prodding at them with needles. Actually, that’s a little sad isn’t it? When you think about it.” 

Jeongin does think about it. Then he thinks about how the wind is slicing through every gap of fibre in his coat and he curls into himself. 

“It is a little sad,” He agrees. The cold is biting at his lips. He keeps looking out for the bus, hoping to see its illuminated screen with their number, the sound of the brakes, the squealing sound of the doors opening with a pull of warmth. But it doesn’t come. 

“It must be delayed,” Felix says. Jeongin hums, not willing to bring his face out of his scarf to talk in this cold. The clouds loom heavy, threatening to empty in what will likely be a snowfall heavy enough to be a blizzard. Jeongin desperately wished for summer, for the familiar comfort of the sun and its warmth, heating his core from the inside out. Summer will come; Jeongin knows that he will see it eventually.

When the figure passes him, Jeongin does a double take. He’s almost gone as fast as he’d flashed by Jeongin’s vision. 

It takes him a moment to recall why the stranger is familiar until he sees the familiar grey-blue pants and billowing cardigan. The same tall, thin figure from the hospital. The boy is running, blonde hair catching Jeongin’s eye. His arms are full of candy, foregoing any sort of bag. His arms are awkwardly bobbing as he runs, feet almost sliding right through the slides he’s wearing.

Something falls from his arms, and the stranger’s gait doesn’t hitch, face pulled back in a smile of blissful ignorance. 

It’s a handsome face. The type of handsome that is natural enough to make Jeongin’s eyes linger, but not performative or purposeful enough for him to think much else about. A beauty different from how Felix will wink at him playfully in the mornings, face carefully lined with makeup. No, this boy has a youthful glow of effortless beauty to him. 

The boy’s cardigan billows behind him as he sprints up the pathway leading to the hospital doors. 

His heatpacks fall to the ground when Jeongin gets up to pick up the dropped candy. The cardboard is dampening at the edges from the slush on the ground, growing wrinkly and some of the lettering on the back starting to warp. Pepero. Jeongin snorts. Hopeless romantics exist everywhere, and he’s almost reluctant to show the box to Felix for the exact reason of Felix’s response.

“Oh! He must have been giving it to someone for Valentine’s Day!” Felix looks back up the path, then along the street searching for any sign of the bus. “We should see if we can catch up to him.”

Jeongin considers it too, but the timetables printed on dog-eared laminated paper stuck to the inside of the bus shelter catch his attention. If they missed this bus, they’d be waiting a further thirty-five minutes. 

Jeongin wipes the worst of the snow and slush off on his coat and drops the pepero into his bag. He realises a second too late that he should’ve been a little more gentle with the delicate snacks, but their initial fall onto the pavement would’ve caused damage already and he feels a little less bad about it. 

“Some of the nurses know him, I’ll ask them to give it to him next week,” Jeongin says. 

Felix looks back up the path, but before he can try again to suggest finding him, the bus catches their eye as it rolls up the lonely street and pulls up beside them.

“That’s a shame,” Felix says. He pulls his travel card from his wallet, prepared for the bus to open its doors. “He’s gonna miss Valentine’s Day.” He sounds genuinely put out about it. The doors open and pull the two as they step onto the bus, shoulder to shoulder. Felix taps his card easily and Jeongin pulls his glove off with his teeth and fumbles with his phone case to pull out his travel card. After an awkward moment, he presses it to the sensor and it beeps. 

Jeongin takes the window seat and begins to draw on the glass. He draws little animals inspired by the picture book he had brought today: Freddie Frog Grows Up! . The lifecycle of a frog had never been as engaging as when the children began a competition to see who could jump highest as a frog, which resulted in some bruised knees and Jeongin having to bribe them to settle down with the packet of candy he’d brought with him for his lunch. 

The frog on the glass is eating an ice cream cone. That isn’t right - it’s freezing outside. Jeongin tries again. A coffee would be better.

“Do you think he’s a patient?” Felix interrupts his artistic muse and the eyes of the frog end up more lizard-like than frog-like.

“Who?” Jeongin tries for a third time. 

“The guy who ran past us.” 

“Yeah. I saw him in the ward last week, I’m pretty sure he’s a patient, he’s wearing those ugly pajamas. I wonder what’s wrong with him.” 

His frog legs go careening half-way across the window when Felix shoulders him. “You can’t just ask that!” He scolds. 

Jeongin gives up on the frogs. With the sleeve of the coat pulled over his palm, he wipes the window down, erasing the frogs altogether, like they hadn’t even been there in the first place. The window clears, but leaves behind a hint of fog that won’t go away no matter how he rubs. The outside world looks a little desaturated. Jeongin turns his gaze away from it to face Felix.

“You started it!” 

Felix sighs and dramatically flops against Jeongin, looping their arms together. “I hope his Valentine’s isn’t ruined. What do you want to get out of the cafe? I’ve been craving a chocolate croissant all morning-” 

Felix and Jeongin continue talking about their menus, growing more and more ridiculous as the bus journey goes on. The pair of boys excitedly think of complex and tooth-rotting hot chocolate drinks.

By the time the bus pulls a familiar corner and Felix presses his thumb into the buzzer, the pepero that shifts in Jeongin’s bag as he hoists it over his shoulder is long forgotten. It tucks itself into the dark corner of the tote, where it will sit there, forgotten but not gone. It waits for an opportunity to call for it. It will wait a long time. 

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The first time Jeongin meets Hyunjin is an unremarkable affair. 

Jeongin is preparing to leave, walking down the smaller, more hushed corner of the Respiratory Ward when he runs into the familiar long figure and its cardigan, pooling off of the shoulders and hanging around the elbows like some sort of widowed prairie wife. The slip of arm Jeongin can see between the sleeve of the grey-blue tee and the cardigan is thin and wiry but muscles still flex when the boy tries to shake the vending machine.

Jeongin is caught by surprise: with the ward being on the other side of the hospital he hadn’t expected to run into the boy again here. Not that he’d been waiting for it, but things tend to happen whether Jeongin had been anticipating them or not. 

Jeongin is fully prepared to walk past him but the pathetic whining catches his attention. In the reflection of the glass amongst a colourful mosaic of mineral waters and juices and sodas, the boy’s handsome face is pulled into a pout, eyebrows furrowed. The boy catches Joengin’s eyes in the glass, and now Jeongin can’t walk away without seeming rude. 

He wouldn’t walk away though, not when he sees the simple problem.

“You need to get the Pepsi on the far left. It will fall and dislodge your mineral water,” He says, pointing to the number written below the row of the soda. 

Jeongin should have expected this to not be the end of the conversation, but he still reels back when the other spins, bright-eyed and frustrated. He fixes his cardigan before speaking.

“But I can’t drink Pepsi, and I don’t have enough money to get it anyway,” He says. Jeongin’s eyes fall to the patient ID wristband on his wrist. It fits with a little wriggle room, sliding up and down an inch when the boy grabs the vending machine and starts aggressively shaking it. 

The thing begins to topple. 

Jeongin surges forward and easily pushes the machine back on all fours. He regards the boy with wide eyes. Clearly a patient, but hardly sickly looking at all. Rather, he’s all healthy freshly-bleached blonde hair and bright eyes. The energy from the boy seems to ooze into the hall. Suddenly, the contents of the machine settle and Jeongin hears a series of bottles falling into the trap below. 

The other boy hoots and squats down, close enough to Jeongin’s crotch that he jumps out of the way. The boy smiles so big it might split his face and showcases his water.

“You almost died for a bottle of mineral water?” Jeongin takes the offered soda, which had also fallen during the avalanche. He ducks his head in a polite bow. 

“I need the minerals.” Jeongin’s eyes drift down again to the bracelet. The colour of it matches that of the obnoxiously painted Squidward in this particular corridor. The paintings are juvenile and cute, Jeongin likes them a lot even if they are pretty terrible. 

“You’re not a child,” He says. 

The boy, thankfully, takes it with the same humour that Jeongin had meant it. He chuckles, lips making way for a row of short, perfect teeth. 

“Maybe puberty just hit me really hard. I could be fifteen.” 

Jeongin doesn’t believe it, and his raised eyebrow indicates that, but the other laughs in response. If Jeongin grabbed his arm and looked at the information on the bracelet he’d learn his age - but he doesn’t. 

Meeting people in hospitals is a strange meet-cute. Hospitals, in their weird way, are taboo for healthy people. No one goes there willingly, no one wants to be there. Those who are stuck here form deep-rooted bonds which are less to do with compatibility and more to do with being forced into the same space, just to make the days a little less lonely. 

Jeongin is an anomaly in these walls. A visitor. He doesn’t have a place in the delicate social frame of the hospital. Yet, he knows his kids by name. He greets familiar nurses and they greet him back. He runs into this strange long-limbed boy who is too old to be in the children’s ward.  

Something in his stomach tells him that he’ll be seeing more of this boy, if the 100% encounter rate so far is any indication, so he does what any polite twenty-year-old would do. He stands in the corridor of the Pediatric Respiratory Ward with his tote bag and engages in polite small-talk with the stranger, who responds tenfold with enthusiasm. 

They exchange names, and Jeongin tells him he has a friend waiting for him. The boy stares longingly down the hall, eyes glued to the doors there, but he shakes it off as cheery as before and waves goodbye before walking away. His gait is slow; the boy is in no rush, like he has nowhere in particular to be. Like he has all the time in the world. 

Lucky. Jeongin wishes he could take as much time as he wanted.

Unfortunately, Jeongin has a bus to catch. He sprints down the hall, exploding through the doors and bounding towards the bus stop. His bag bounces violently against his thigh. The door clicks behind him, but he’s already gone - the hospital existing in its own realm once again, all of those in it nothing more than ghosts: half in the present, half in a dreamscape on the edges of reality. 

Jeongin and Felix fall into easy conversation about a movie being released next year. They plan to see it when it comes out, already talking about whether or not it will get a sequel down the line. Jeongin and Felix get on the bus, and the hospital falls out of existence for another week. 

Jeongin doesn’t get a reason for the boy being in the hospital.

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This week, Jeongin brings the same books he had the first week - the stories will be new to these children. He’s directed down the winding halls by a nurse to the Resuscitation ward. New ward means new children. Jeongin tries his best to remember all of the new faces, but when met with so many children in such a short period of time, it proves too much for his brain to process. 

The nurse tells him that it’s for the best. 

Maybe she’s right. The thought sits oddly heavy in his stomach. 

When he’s directed to where he needs to be, it’s difficult to remember that these are sick children. The chatter is loud, even from the children who are still in their bed. On the softfoam there’s a scattering of building blocks and an impromptu race track built from short blocks. A car bumps against his foot. 

“Oh, sorry.” 

It’s Hyunjin, sitting cross-legged on the jigsawed softfoam. His arms are weighed down by a pair of squirming children with tubes taped to their cheeks and into their noses. They’re clambering over him like a pair of cats. 

Despite being the same age, if not a little older than Jeongin, he doesn’t look out of place. He fits easily with the giggling children. His cheeks are fat with a smile - a smile which is directed at Jeongin. He’s dressed as he always is: hospital standard clothes and that loose cardigan, toes peeking out of slides. One of the children makes grabby hands at the car at Jeongin’s feet.

He kicks it over. It rolls into Hyunjin’s leg. The child picks it up and starts chewing on the wheels. 

“Hi again, Jeongin,” Hyunjin says. 

“Hello,” Jeongin says softly, matching the tone. He greets him like a secret, but the children are well accustomed to the trill of hospital background noise, and quickly zone into the unfamiliar voice. Within seconds, Jeongin is swarmed, being pulled to the beanbag by his pant legs. He is careful not to step on any delicate toes. 

He didn’t have any expectations for Hyunjin, but he didn’t expect him to grab a cushion and sit down in front of him, an idol figure in the middle of a wall of children. He’s tall - directly in Jeongin’s eyeline. He’s nervous to open the book and read with someone his own age here. With the kids and a nurse who usually uses their chaperoning time as an excuse to catch some much-needed sleep on a firm-backed plastic chair he feels no pressure. He can be as fun as he wants. Hyunjin sitting here sets him for a  loop.

But the eyes on him are kind. The gaze isn’t judgemental, amused, or even expectant of Jeongin’s reading abilities. They’re nothing but playful, encouraging even. It reminds Jeongin of being back in class and having to give a presentation, and how his friends’ eyes would sparkle in such a way that Jeongin knew they’d be pulling faces from the back of the class to make him laugh. They always did. He was never great at holding back his giggles. 

 Hyunjin listens with just as much interest and entertainment as the kids. He laughs at all the right places, cheers when Jeongin’s hands wave for a reaction, and boos with his hands cupped around his mouth when Jeongin makes an exaggerated thumbs down at the rude characters in the story. During the ‘scary’ parts, the children shuffle behind Hyunjin, and he takes one of them onto his lap, wrapping his arms around them and providing the comfort of a big brother. The little chirps of ‘ hyung’ like songbirds in the springtime.

The frost licks the window. Jeongin is still wearing his coat. He waits impatiently for the Spring that he wishes would hurry up already. 

He finds himself not embarrassed in the slightest as he grows accustomed to Hyunjin’s presence. He finds that the boy laughs just as heartedly as the children do at his silly voices, a beaming smile breaking between his cheeks. He laughs with his entire body, almost colliding with some of the children to his side - but they shift easily out of the way. They must be used to it, Jeongin thinks. The movement dislodges his hair, and Hyunjin has to take a break from laughing to pull the hair tie from his hair, putting it between his teeth while he brings the locks back into a ponytail. 

Jeongin is getting to the part of the story where the elk shouts in excitement - a loud and grating sound. Jeongin loves doing his elk voice. Hyunjin’s nose scrunches up and he laughs around the tie in his mouth.

Jeongin finds that he enjoys reading with Hyunjin’s presence more than without it. 

When he finishes the stories, he reaches into his bag with wide eyes and pulls out a bag of candy, like it was a grizzly secret. The children follow the multi-coloured bag with wide eyes and increasingly loud squawks of delight. Grasping in the air with soon-to-be sticky hands, mouths pulled into grins which will soon be painted with artificial colours. He hands it over to the nurse, who will know more than he does about which child can and can’t eat what. The last thing Jeongin needs is to send a child into hyperglycemia.  

Hyunjin walks over immediately to the nurse, gracefully stepping around the army twenty feet below him with a begging pout on his lips. His hand gets slapped away by the nurse with a scold. Hyunjin sticks his tongue out. Jeongin sees the child with the car in his mouth subtly slide Hyunjin a pair of gummy bears with a double-eyed wink, which Hyunjin returns.

Jeongin catches the cut of mischief when their eyes meet. Jeongin presses his finger to his lips and says nothing more. 

He uses the distraction of candy to slip out of the ward to get his card signed at the nurse’s station. She signs it in black ink. He slips it into the back of his phone case. His tote bag is weighty and Jeongin prepares to face the miserable winter once again. 

Suddenly, Hyunjin emerges from behind the vase of daisies. Jeongin has a suspicion that he should grow accustomed to the boy randomly popping up in his visits, and his words only confirm his thoughts.

“Your stories are fun,” Hyunjin leans against the low part of the desk. He then bears his weight and hops up, swinging his legs. He ignores the nurse’s half-hearted scolding. “Most people come in here and drone on and on. But you do the voices.”

“Some people don’t even do the voices?” Jeongin can’t imagine a story without them. 

“Mhm. Or they half-ass it. You go all in.” 

“You liked the elk?” 

“I loved the elk,” Hyunjin laughs. “Will the elk return next week?” 

Jeongin knows it’s time to go. He doesn’t want to miss his bus. Hyunjin is dropping himself gracefully to his toes, elongated and feline. His delicate hands fix his cardigan when it slips down his shoulder. There’s something different here - and maybe it’s just the acknowledgement that woah, people in hospital are real people and not just walking statistics that make mothers frown and pause their crocheting to say ‘aw, that’s sad, isn’t it?’ then focus back on the stitch they missed. Hyunjin is just as human as Joengin is, bright eyed and quick-tongued. If a hospital is a universe that exists independent of the outside world, then Jeongin has a suspicion that Hyunjin is the rickety wooden bridge between the two - the sole connection between these two entirely separate worlds.

When Jeongin was younger he and his brother would explore the woods near their house, and there was a river there. And the river had a rocked shore that they would skip stones across. And the river had frogspawn in the stagnant parts at the edges that they would watch grow into tadpoles, and so goes the life cycle of mother nature. And the river had a rickety old wooden bridge probably built by hands which have long grown wrinkled and leathery from age. Jeongin didn’t want to cross it. You never know what’s going to be on the other side of that bridge. 

“I’m not sure about the elk - he’s busy, you know.” Hyunjin nods in understanding. “But I’ll be here every week.”

Hyunjin’s face blooms into a smile. When he smiles, he does so with his entire face, eyes crinkling and nose scrunching. “Same time?”

“Yes.” 

“Okay.” 

True to Hyunjin’s gentle inquisitive enthusiasm, he’s there the next week. And the week after. And Jeongin now instinctively seeks out the blonde whenever he arrives, and he’s always met with a cheery smile and wave when Hyunjin finally notices his presence. 

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Navigating the fantasy lands tucked away in ridiculous children’s books becomes more fun with Hyunjin around. 

Jeongin had never been one to grow fond of people easily. It isn’t to say that he doesn’t care or that he’s not a warm person: he thinks he’s perfectly normal and ordinary in those regards. But Jeongin sees how Felix seems to gather friends and acquaintances like a squirrel gathers nuts, hoarding them and locking them in a delicate place in his heart which he’ll check up on religiously and claim as his emotional territory - until he doesn’t. These intense friendships and loves fade and the nuts are almost forgotten. The nuts are still there, and Felix will find them buried deep in the earth or snuggled in a seclusive crook of a tree and they’ll keep him satiated for the winter when the time comes. 

Jeongin isn’t like that. 

Jeongin is happy to enjoy his solitude. The people he spends time with in school or the neighbourhood kids he would play with in the summertime were important to him. He may never know how the sun stains the skin on another’s back or how one’s face grows pink from exertion from an active summer’s day than that of his childhood friends. 

But, taking that train of thought,  he’ll never know what his childhood friends look like in their office suits, ties askew from a long day’s work. Nor will he know their alcohol of choice, or the names of their new pets.

The people who come into his life wean in and out like the changing of the seasons, only lasting as long as they’re necessary, and when they fall out of orbit, whenever their summer connection cools into a lethargic long-term hibernation or whenever the wintertime connections warm and melt into the lazy lozenge of spring, then that’s just the way it is. There’s no tragedy, no reason to mourn. 

All this being said, he’s warming up to Hyunjin tremendously. 

Hyunjin’s reliable visits during his volunteering time are a welcoming constant in the ever-changing collective of faces for him to read to. Jeongin begins gearing instinctively towards him whenever he enters the ward. Without knowing where Hyunjin will be, somehow his eyes instinctively find him, like there’s something in his biology that has been activated, a dormant gene only brought out of hibernation by the creature on the floor, currently braiding a girl’s hair; the slip of a thing fits easily on his lap, like she’d been there hundreds of times before. And maybe she has - Jeongin wouldn’t know. 

Jeongin is a little hesitant to pull the books from his bags. He’ll take out the colourful, waxy covers from the impregnable mess of his bag. He manages to pull out a trail of receipts from various coffee shops and midnight fast food indulgences. A receipt flutters with the delicate wingspan of a butterfly right onto Hyunjin’s leg. Jeongin’s face flushes when Hyunjin picks up the receipt for an exorbitant amount of candy from the convenience store. He takes the paper back like a whippet - creasing it in his grip where Hyunjin had presented it delicately between his fingers like a bluffer about to show his royal flush. Jeongin only recently got his braces off - he has almost two years worth of candy to make up for - so sue him. 

With the offending papertrail of his transgressions hidden back in the black hole, he lays the spread of books on the softfoam, letting the kids practise their democracy by picking the triage of books he’ll read today. They’ve circled around them like they’re the most interesting things in the world - but Hyunjin is looking right at him. There’s a pout on his face and a downward pull to his eyebrows. 

“You’ve read all of these already.” The genuine disappointment skimming over the typically crystalline sparkle in his eyes is more endearing than it should be in someone his age. More than anything, Jeongin finds it ridiculous.

“These kids haven’t heard them before.” 

“But I have!” 

“No one is forcing you to sit here and listen!” Jeongin bites back with playfulness cantering in his eyes. Hyunjin pulls a face and huffs in response, but when Jeongin leans over to pick up the carefully selected trilogy of books, he catches the crease of an upturned lip. 

Hyunjin listens to the story, but he leans in less than normal, parrots the squeals of the kids and the pantomime phrases with less genuine enthusiasm. All the same, he listens. He starts braiding the hair of a girl’s hair beside him, shushing her when she turns around to start dishing out complicated requests and tells her to ‘stay polite for Mr. Jeongin-oppa.’

At the end of the storytime when the children are all successfully distracted with a bag of chocolate buttons being doled out by a nurse like a sergeant dishing out military rations, Hyunjin suddenly perches his butt on the counter once again. He offers Jeongin a stolen button from the palm of his hand, shrugging at Jeongin’s polite refusal.  Jeongin likes chocolate just as much as the next guy - but he bought the cheap stuff. Hyunjin realises it too when he pops once into his mouth and almost hacks it back up in disgust. 

“Why does it taste so bad?” He asks, trying to cleanse his palate by sticking his tongue out of his mouth. He drastically searches for somewhere to spit the horrible thing. His noises of distress alert the head nurse who grumbles and passes the waste basket over the counter. Jeongin averts his eyes while Hyunjin spits the chocolate out and makes retching sounds while doing it.

“Watch your ribs,” The nurse warns.

“Watch my ribs? This kid almost poisoned me in broad daylight and you’re worried about my ribs? Seriously, what if he was a hitman? You’d let me die so quickly?” Hyunjin says around a mouthful of spit. 

She shoots him an unamused look and takes the wastebin from him but not before poking it harshly into his arm. Hyunjin almost falls off the counter - she definitely didn’t poke him that hard. 

“You’re funny.” She deadpans. Hyunjin returns it as any mature twenty-one year old would, by sticking his tongue out. 

There’s an ease to their relationship. In the wrinkles of her face, Hyunjin seems to have settled perfectly into her weary times. They have the precision of banter that only years of existing habitually can build. Like mother and son, aunt and nephew, brother and sister. Something like that. 

“I almost knocked over your daisies, noona. Maybe that would be karma.” 

“You hate those damn things anyway.” 

Hyunjin glares at the flowers like they’d personally offended him. Hyunjin was always emotive, even to flowers. The faces of disgust at the kids who still picked their nose, the smile that terraforms the sculpt of his face whenever Jeongin’s particularly silly voices come out, the blank look of confusion when he tried to tie one of the kid’s shoes. “It’s difficult doing it backwards!” He shouted to no one in particular. 

“I hate daisies.” He turns to Jeongin and says this like it’s important. He tugs a petal off and holds it between his fingers. “They’re so plain. You could have any flower - lilies, roses, carnations… et cetera-” 

“Did you say et cetera because you ran out of flowers to list?” 

“There are millions,” He continues, ignoring the question. “I have better things to spend my time on than botany. But the people who bring these monstrosities should know better. Out of all the beautiful colours to pick for the inside of a bleached-white hospital, why would you pick white? ” 

“Did you never make daisy chains when you were little? In the springtime I’d sit on the grass and make daisy bracelets and crowns with my friends.” 

“And if there were lilies nearby I’d bet you’d have rather used them - right? I’m right.” 

Jeongin smiles. “Whatever you say!” 

The nurse signs Jeongin’s card, tells him what ward he’ll be on next week, and tells him to wrap up warm because it is snowing pretty heavily outside. Jeongin thanks her, and bows respectfully in parting as he always does.

Hyunjin blows a gasket at the action. 

He pounces towards him like a cat hunting in the tallgrass and ruffles his neatly combed hair, calling him horrible names: cute, sweet, baby boy, cutest dongsaeng - Jeongin responds by threatening to punch him. 

Hyunjin laughs and skips away down a hall, off to some other ward. His hospital band slides up his arm as he waves goodbye. 

On his way out of the hospital, the lingering heat in Jeongin’s ears tethers him to the bridge between the two worlds for a little longer than usual. Even as the bus approaches, all else of the hospital locked away behind perspex-glass doors, Jeongin has his hands cupped over his ears to try and draw out the heat - something about thermosomething equilibrium. Felix doesn’t know the Korean word for it, nor does Jeongin know the English word he used as substitute. 

Oddly, he finds himself suddenly remembering Hyunjin the day before his volunteer slot. This is odd in the sense that Jeongin hadn’t once considered the boy outside of the hospital. The thought strikes him with all the grace of falling into a cool pond, pulling yourself up by the slippery, weather-worn rocks and gasping for air from the sudden shock of cold. The sun doesn’t peek through enough of the canopies in the woods, only little slices of light battling its way through the gaps in the dense foliage. The water never gets heated up. Even in the summertime, the pond water is as cold as the snow that fell from the ugly winter clouds. 

Nothing in particular triggered the memory, which perhaps is odd too. 

Jeongin doesn’t have the spare cash to buy more books - he’s already pillaged the dusty loft, for once grateful that his mother had a vehement objection to throwing out anything from their childhood, adamant that the books would be passed from generation to generation or something of the kind. Next week he’ll make a point of digging around his room for some spare change and he’ll take himself into the city and hunt through the second-hand stores for more books. Hyunjin is doing a favour by sitting in on his readings, Jeongin is a little worried that the staleness of repeating books will drive him off. 

Typically, Jeongin wouldn’t pay much mind to that fact. People can come and go out of his line of attention as they please, but he won’t lie and say he wouldn’t miss his company, even if he wouldn’t be lonely in the loud room without it. 

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The realisation that Hyunjin was a patient, and therefore sick, should have hit him sooner than it did.

“Excuse me, is Hyunjin around?” Jeongin asks the head nurse. He learns her name, but refers to her respectfully as Nurse Kim. The ink clots on his card where she pauses mid-stroke. She slides the card over to him. Jeongin doesn’t put it away. He waits for the ink to dry a little more so it doesn’t smudge on his phone. 

“The kids enjoyed the jewellery making today. It was a nice change for them.” 

The beads and other various decorations make an unmistakable noise when Jeongin shifts the huge container to adjust the weight pulling on his arm. It was a surprisingly bulking thing, considering the light cost and shipping fees he paid for it. 

“I needed time to brainstorm more voices. I’ve gotten complaints from some kids.” 

“Ah,” She says knowingly, “Some of the bigger children? They can be hard to please, considering these books are maybe thirteen years below their reading age.” 

She’s remarkably amiable and easy to talk to. Jeongin wonders how someone could cope so well with such a stressful job. Even as she’s bantering with Jeongin, she’s tapping away at the computer at a monstrous pace. At least the flowers are nearby - if her fingers go on fire at least she can pull the daisies out and douse the flames with their water. Maybe that’s the entire point. 

“I think he’s jealous. His voices all sound the same.” Jeongin taps the card as he slides it towards himself. He doesn't put it into his phone and quickly bow his goodbyes like he normally would, hoping that his still frame is enough to nudge Nurse Kim into answering his question. It’s a simple one. Maybe it's a patient confidentiality issue - but any answer is better than no answer. The beat of Jeongin’s sure posture grabs her attention. 

Her short, bitten nails rest on the keyboard and she smiles pityingly at Jeongin like she knows something he doesn’t. “Maybe next week, honey. He’s feeling a little tired today.” 

“Oh.” 

It’s all Jeongin can think to say.

The realisation is slow and clunky, like his brain struggles to fit the simplest of puzzle pieces together, despite it being so obviously within his grasp like a toddler playing with shapes. Tortuous and awkward. Even when the piece is fumbled into place, the thought feels misplaced in the inner mechanisms of his brain. The new gear that by all means makes sense, but it doesn’t look right.  Jeongin hadn’t realised the gear had been missing in the first place. 

Hyunjin is a patient. Patients are sick. 

The concept bounces around in the caverns of his skull and isrejected by every neuron in his brain. Hyunjin being a patient might be a fact, but it’s a ridiculous one. He can easily apply the word to every other patient he’s seen in the ward, there’s no issue applying it to even the bright-eyed and fat-cheeked children who have little more than a runny nose but when applying it to Hyunjin it feels like he’s wandered into a locked pandora’s box. Unlike Pandora: Jeongin had no desire to open it. The monsters don’t fly out, but rather sit in the box staring back at him, as if saying: now what? What will you do with us? 

Jeongin does nothing. He slips the card back into his phone case. “I guess I’ll see you next week, Nurse Kim.” 

The box smacks painfully against his thigh with every heavy foot to the bus. Felix is waving him frantically, holding the doors of the bus open and apologising profusely to the bus driver, who seems like he couldn’t care less about pulling up two minutes late to the next stop. In winter, the buses are always delayed anyway, but even Jeongin knows he was pushing his luck when he decided to take a long cut through the hospital. He peeked his eyes briefly into as many wards and rooms as he could manage without invading people’s privacy or abusing the visitor lanyard around his neck. He only needed a moment. He was confident that Hyunjin’s presence would pull his eyes to him. 

Felix rounds on him the moment he collapses into the seat. 

“What took you so long? I was worried you were gonna miss the bus. I know how much you hate the cold-” His eyes fall quickly to the huge clear case, the colours of the beads sinking through the semi-opaque plastic like the smudged reflections of the brake lights of the cars through the fogged bus window. “Oh? What’s this?” 

Jeongin tells him. Felix might be one of those people who are a little bit in love with the world.

“That’s amazing,” He says genuinely. “Did they have fun? Whenever I want to change it up for the kids I just read in English, they find it really intriguing for some reason.”

“They don’t even know what you’re saying.” 

“Yeah,” Felix’s sigh is marinated in fondness. “Sometimes I just list the English names of Pokemon like I’m telling a story. It’s not like they can tell the difference. Do you want me to buy you a chocolate croissant?” 

“Yes please, hyung.”

Felix makes doting noises and noses his neck. Jeongin lets him. Jeongin lets him pull him off the bus. Jeongin lets him slide his hands into the crook of his elbow when they order. Jeongin lets him take a bite out of his croissant before he stuffs the entire thing into his mouth in one go. Jeongin lets him, with a face of mischief and a strange laugh, slide the jewellery case out from under the table and make himself some bracelets. 

Jeongin has to help him, because the things keep breaking and scattering over the cafe floor and Jeongin’s short nails are having great difficulty picking the tiny glitter beads out from the cracks of the tiles. 

Felix wants to make some more, so Jeongin gives in and makes himself one too. He’d spent the majority of the day tying the strings for the kids who can't tie knots, or carefully threading beads onto strings which required a more mature level of dexterity which Jeongin really should’ve thought about before impulse purchasing the thing. At the end of the day he didn’t get to actually partake in the activity much. 

He makes his with simple grey and yellow beads. Felix, who had an assortment of rainbows, glitter beads, and pink and purple matching sets, calls him boring. Jeongin takes a colossal bite out of Felix’s brownie in retaliation. 

“You can eat the rest of it. The texture is too dense for me. They overwhisked it.” Jeongin doesn’t ask what that means and happily enjoys his brownie. Felix toes his feet under the table and sorts through the multi-layered case. Something about the other boy that Jeongin admires: he completes every task like the opportunity to do it is a privilege and a joy. He hums a gentle tune and picks little beads out, carefully laying them on the table. After his scurrage, he rolls them with cupped hands towards Jeongin. 

“Here, make another. I picked out colours that will match,” He points to the yellow mess edging threateningly towards the edge of the table. There’s a few glittered yellow beads, some little yellow cartoon faces, even a pair of little sunflowers. None appeal to him any more than the plain grey-yellow beads he’d chosen. 

“Hey - what’s that?” His attention is drawn, inexplicably and without cause, to Felix dropping a bead back into the case. Felix retrieves it and holds it up for Jeongin to see.

“I thought it would match, but there’s so little yellow, I felt like the white would wash out the colour… do you want it?” Felix pushes it towards him. Jeongin is staring at it a little stupidly, like it was something more than a stupid bead for cheap, poorly-made jewelary.  

The little circular daisy smiles back at him much like how the fields of wild daisies in the places he would scrimmage during his summers would. They would grab the sun and reflect it tenfold, making spots of white bleach across his vision, calling to him to take them, take the weeds and push through their stalks with the sharp edge of his nail, entwine the necks of their kin together and make something beautiful. 

There’s something sick in ripping flowers out of the ground to turn them into beautiful dead things which will be a novelty for a couple of hours at most before being tossed to the ground to restart the life cycle all over again. 

“Give it to me, hyung.” 

Felix puts it on the table and flicks it across to Jeongin. By sheer stroke of luck, because god knows Jeongin’s coordination is severely lacking, he manages to catch it. 

Half-way through the bracelet he accepts that he has no intention of wearing it himself. Hyunjin hates daisies. It’s a kind enough gesture to give Hyunjin a taste of what he’d been too sick to take part in whilst still being a gentle ‘fuck you’ for having been absent in the first place. 

Hyunjin’s wrists are smaller than his own so he carefully measures the elastic string to fit more snugly than on himself. The elastic, over time, loosens but Jeongin doesn’t worry about that. People never wear these kinds of things long enough to have to worry about the complicated logistics of their longevity. The cycle goes like this: you wear these bracelets out of a sort of novel obligation, then take it off to sleep or shower or dress up for a fancy event, then weeks or months later you find it, wear it for a few days, take it off and so on and so forth until it falls behind a desk or into a bag and is found years later and regarded with only the most cashmere slip of nostalgia and tossed into the trash with little morose. 

People grow and change - as inconsistent and unreliable as the uneasy weather which metronomes violently between sweltering heat that paints you with a heavy sheen of sweat and the raging typhoons which cause the seaside towns to barricade their homes to prevent them getting washed out into the tide. The things which we collect even with the biggest swell of love and nostalgia will become engulfed and washed out with the changing tides of the development of growing up. 

Nothing is permanent and everything in one’s life is a gentle breath away from changing. Maybe this is root for anxiety for some people, but for Jeongin it sounds a lot like a sigh of relief. 

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As if to make up for the lost time, Hyunjin is especially talkative today. 

“Jeongin Jeongin Jeongin Jeongin Jeongin-” 

“I’m standing right beside you.” 

More than that, Hyunjin was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him. Jeongin can feel the pills of his cardigan, itchy and difficult against his hands. The cardigan from far away appeared stylishly ill-fitting in the way that seems to be the trend nowadays, but up close Jeongin sees now that the thing is threadbare and stretched beyond any consideration of form. It definitely doesn’t make the hospital clothes look any worse - although Jeongin suspects that Hyunjin just has the air of someone who wears clothes with the innate ability to breathe new life into them.

“Then why did you take so long to answer, hm?” Hyunjin leans into him when he asks. Jeongin knocks back and nudges Hyunjin back into his own business. 

“I’m not encouraging this behaviour.” 

Nurse Kim slides him his signed volunteer card. “This is why you're my favourite. No one else puts him in his place. He seems to think that he’s been crowned Prom King of the hospital.” 

“I’m a scholar,” Hyunjin says with a flair of the wrist. “I’d prefer ‘Elected President of the Hospital’, thank you very much, noona.” 

“Well, Mr. President, you have some tests this evening so please try and make room in your incredibly tight schedule for us civilians.” 

“Civilians,” Hyunjin snorts. One of the nurses - the one that pulled him by the ear that one time - collects the chairs they’d laid out for story time, managing five in each arm and only held back by the lack of arm length. She kicks the double door open and it ricochets off the wall with enough force for the reverberations to knock some of the lego figures off the desk. “More like grand marshals if you ask me.” 

“No one asked you, darling,” Nurse Kim says kindly. 

Hyunjin makes a show of being hurt by the harsh words, and flops against Jeongin. It comes as a surprise when he drapes an arm around his shoulder. 

Jeongin increasingly finds that Hyunjin is easy to read. The emotions linger shallow in his eyes, hovering just below the surface through the slices of fluorescent lighting. It’s a childlike honesty reflected in those eyes, unkempt of his true longing, so quick to ask Jeongin exactly what he wants and tell him exactly what’s on his mind at a moment's notice. 

There’s a softness to Hyunjin, he realises as he gets pestered into accompanying him to the vending machine three corridors that way, just over here, you won’t miss your bus, I promise! Jeongin knows he’s watching Hyunjin like he’s some strange creature curated for speciation, but he can’t help it. He bounces on the heels of his feet and sucks on his teeth while he decides what to buy. Despite the heavy rings under his eyes, he’s smiling brightly. 

“I’ll buy you something too.” 

“What? Don’t do that,” Jeongin says. There’s something illicit about taking gifts from a patient, like he’s abusing his volunteering slot. Hyunjin pulls a sneaky face and slowly edges his finger towards the button. “I said don’t.” He keeps going.

Jeongin bumbles over and blocks the keypad with his hand. Hyunjin, naturally, starts nipping at the flesh of his hand with his fingers. It’s sharp. Jeongin yells out in exaggerated pain to deter him, but all it does is make him laugh and scrunch his face up and abuse him even further. Hyunjin manages to push Jeongin’s hand out of the way for a brief enough moment to punch in the number for the Pepsi. 

“I’m older, you should let me take care of you!” The boy argues. 

With a huff, Jeongin accepts the Pepsi. The thing is - Jeongin doesn’t even like sugary drinks.

Hyunjin gets himself a mineral water - sparkling this time - and hands it to Jeongin to open. Jeongin does, and the smile he gets in return is blinding, although with the fat of the cheeks pushing up towards his eyes with it, the dark beneath his eyes are revealed as bags rather than a trick of the light like Jeongin had originally thought.

“You look tired,” Jeongin says.

Hyunjin scrunches his nose at him. “Didn’t anyone teach you that you’re not meant to point out when people look tired? It’s impolite.”

“They did.” 

Hyunjin pinches him lightly in the arm. It doesn’t hurt. “Well for your information, I haven’t gotten much sleep recently, so obviously I’m a little tired.”

Ah. Jeongin is oddly relieved. Lack of sleep? Perfectly normal reason to look tired.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Were you expecting something more tragic? Oh, Jeongin - I’ve been up all night with ghastly news that my leg needs amputated! How will I ever join BTS now?” 

Jeongin smiles. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re too ugly to join BTS in the first place!” 

Hyunjin asks Jeongin to walk him to his room, all consideration of Jeongin’s bus timetable out the window. Jeongin should say no - because he has to go home and Felix will be disappointed without his post-volunteering cafe buddy, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he finds himself shooting Felix a quick message to not wait up, and following Hyunjin down the winding corridors of the hospital. 

Taking a turn past a sign reading Respiratory Sleep Unit → , Hyunjin waves at some nurses on duty and greets them by name, then effortlessly pushes open a door and nods Jeongin inside.

It’s a private room. Naturally, as private rooms tend to be, it’s small. There’s a bed, a window, a little bedside cabinet, a visitor's chair and a tv hiked up on the wall. Jeongin tries not to let his eyes linger on the number of machines attached to the bed, and oddly enough, a series of wires with suction-cup looking things on the ends of them. Hyunjin flops himself onto the bed, unceremoniously shoving the pile of wires onto the floor and toeing off his hospital slippers. 

“Make yourself at home,” Hyunjin says, as if hospital rooms aren’t the farthest place from homely comfort. Jeongin is hit with a wave of regret for his initial thoughts, because for all Jeongin knows - this probably is the closest thing Hyunjin has to a home at the minute. He has no idea how long Hyunjin has been at this place, but the decorated state of his room doesn’t paint a picture of hope.

Along the politely boring blue walls, there’s countless drawings and pictures taped to the wall - some attached with band-aids, some with what looks like bandage tape, some with plain sticky tape, and some with rather cute stickers. The drawings range from childish finger painting signed with illegible scribbles to more grown-up and professional pieces: careful pencil art of a range of things, anime characters, animals, scenery, flora - it’s impressive. A particular, more juvenile piece catches Jeongin’s eye:  a drawing of four vaguely human-looking things, the colours faded and paper yellowing at the corners from age. 

“Did you draw these?” Jeongin can’t help but ask. 

Hyunjin’s face pinkens a little and he avoids looking at the art Jeongin’s pointing at. “Most of the stuff, yeah. Some of the kids paint me pictures too.” 

“Ah - is that who drew Naruto then?” 

Hyunjin picks up the limp pillow and hides his face in it. “Stop looking at them! Why did I invite you in here again?” 

Jeongin titters, but moves away from the pictures that Hyunjin has clearly drawn. In the back of his mind, he considers bringing in some colouring pencils and paint for one of his next volunteering slots, but maybe considering how shy Hyunjin seems to be about the work, this is more of a private activity for him. 

“What about this one? It looks old -” He points to the faded painting he’d noticed. The wall behind it, through the wrinkled gaps of the painting where it has naturally bent over time, is a few shades darker than the rest of the wall, indicating that the sun is the cause of the colour bleaching of the painting. It must’ve been stuck on here for a while. The four characters are… peculiar. One towers ridiculously over the others, one has a red slash through its stick-body, one has no hair (although that could simply be a design choice) and one is sitting down in a wheelchair(?). They’re definitely hitting all types of diversity quotas in this piece. 

Hyunjin looks from behind the pillow, squints really hard then frustratingly looks for his glasses, “Wait - one moment- why do I always put them at the back of the drawer-” The glasses suit him, but they only serve to magnify the heavy blinks of tired eyes. “Oh! That!” He smiles brightly. At that moment, the sun shifts in the sky and the room brightens. Jeongin shifts out of the way of the blinding light and decides to sit on the chair, carefully slipping his bag underneath it. 

“Me and my friends drew that together ages ago - it’s really good, right?” He laughs. There’s tremendous nostalgia behind it. “Guess which one I am.” 

Jeongin pretends to think really hard. “The one in the chair? You seem like you’d be too lazy to walk sometimes.”

“No!”

“The bald one?”

“Jeongin! Stop it!” He laughs. “Obviously I’m the tall one.” Hyunjin gestures to his long, lithe body laid out on the bed, and kicks the limp pillow in Jeongin’s direction when he snorts. 

“Oh yeah, I can really see the likeness. I actually thought it was a photograph when I first saw it.” 

Hyunjin takes the pillow back from Jeongin’s outstretched hand and puts it behind his head, lying down with a sigh. His eyes flutter shut for a moment and he slips his glasses off, rubbing hard at his eyes. When he blinks back over to Jeongin - he’s as bright and cheery as ever, despite the obvious growing lethargic nipping at him. 

“We drew that right before Minho-hyung was discharged. I think it was… ten years ago now?” He blinks, like he’d never had to do the math before. “Woah… ten years sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? A whole decade.” 

This painting is older than half of the kids in the entire ward. Jeongin fights the goosebumps - for some reason, this unsettles him. Thankfully, Hyunjin doesn’t ruminate on it any longer, the topic made Jeongin’s stomach jump a little with discomfort. 

“Is it weird that I come to your story tellings?” He asks without a hint of humour. He sucks his bottom into his mouth. It bounces back with a glittering reflection of the mid-afternoon sun. 

“Yes,” Jeongin says. “Can you stop? Your presence is off putting, especially when you read along with the stories from the otherside of the room.” 

“Well, maybe if you didn’t recycle the same six books on repeat,” Hyunjin mocks. He pulls a face when he does it. Jeongin thinks briefly that Hyunjin would be very good at reading stories, his faces are so expressive - but his voices are lackluster - you can’t have it all, he supposes. 

“Would you care to donate some books to the cause then? Since it bothers you so much? In fact,” Jeongin grabs his bulging bag by the straps and hands it towards Hyunjin. The weight of it swings like a pendulum. “Here, go for it. You can take over.” 

Hyjun pushes the bag away with a grimace, “Why is the bottom of it so dirty? Gross. Get that away from me.” 

“No no no, I insist.”

“No!” Hyunjin whines, childishly turning himself away. “Your voices are so good! Even if some of them do kind of sound the same. Plus it’s way more entertaining than the shitty TV they have here. I’m not even allowed to watch it because of the harsh blue light and the electromagnetic interference .” He groans.

“Oh? That sounds like a bummer,” Jeongin says. “No TV? I don’t know what I would do.” He takes his phone out and pulls up Netflix. “You must be really bored.” The opening tune plays loudly, and Hyunjin covers his ears and whines. He begins kicking at Jeongin’s phone. “Seriously, it’s such a shame.” 

Jeongin scoots the chair right up against the wall, only leading to Hyunjin dramatically dropping himself over the edge of the bed, looking miserably up at Jeongin. Some strands of his hair fall out of his loose ponytail and hover only a ghost away from the floor. “You’re needlessly cruel, has anyone ever told you that?” 

“Mhm,” Jeongin hums. “You’re very dramatic, has anyone ever told you that?” 

Hyunjin blinks up at him. His smile, despite being small and upside down, trills something serious inside Jeongin. It’s been a long time since Jeongin has spent time with someone besides Felix. Not that he’s desperate for more friends - Jeongin is content with what he has now, but spending time with Hyunjin, even in such an unusual setting - it’s refreshing. There’s something oddly easy with Hyunjin, maybe it’s his personality, or maybe it’s because the other boy is surrounded by either middle-aged hospital staff and children all day that he’s magnetically drawn to Jeongin - either way, it’s definitely a pleasant part of Jeongin’s week that he’s found himself looking forward to.

Eventually, sometime later - which in reality is much later as Jeongin lost track of time with Hyunjin - his eyes catch the hospital band around Hyunjin’s wrist. A little loose and it sits over the bony part of his wrist, the edges digging into his hand on which he is leaning, stretched out lazily in conversation with Jeongin.

The flash of wrist reminds him of the gift he brought today, and he tries to find an appropriate part of the conversation to bring it up without looking like a weirdo or seeming unnaturally friendly. In reality, he didn’t go out of his way to make it for Hyunjin, but just giving it to him would probably procure images of Jeongin sitting on his bed arduously tolling away at making a bracelet for poor sickly Hyunjin. But - he can’t clarify the actual, more seamless trail of events that lead to him making it without seeming defensive. It’s a lose-lose situation. Eventually, Jeongin just decides to bite the bullet. He doesn’t care if Hyunjin thinks it’s a little weird - Hyunjin is a little weird. 

“We made jewellery the other week, but you weren’t there,” He says. 

Hyunjin pauses his conversation about some video game he saw one of the kids playing and how selfish the brat was for not letting him have a turn. “Huh? Oh. Yeah I was busy,” He says quickly. “Anyway, the kids were so eager to show me all their beautiful bracelets.” 

“You’re jealous?”

“Of course I’m jealous! They look so cute!” He argues. Good. Good. This is working out well. 

“Because you weren’t there, I uh-” Saying the words out loud is embarrassing, so he instead reaches into his pocket and pulls the bracelet out. Simple white and yellow beads with the daisy in the middle. Nothing flashy, nothing obnoxious, except the gentle Fuck You in the middle. He throws it in Hyunjin’s general direction. He misses it and it clacks against the wall and falls into the padding of the bed. “There,” Jeongin says. 

Hyunjin, with humorously colossal confusion, examines the beads carefully, taking the bracelet into his hands with a level of care to suggest that it’s made of diamonds. He gently thumbs over each bead, rolls them up and down over his hand, testing the elasticity of the string to make sure that it won’t break. Jeongin immediately sees when Hyunjin notices the daisy. He snorts, curling his body inwards on itself to hold in his laughter. Then, with eyes glittering in a smile that only exists in the curvature of his cheeks, he slips the bracelet on and beams at Jeongin. The bracelet sits snugly on his wrist, the patient band falls over it without issue. 

Jeongin tries to go back to the original conversation, but Hyunjin is a nuisance and a pain and makes an embarrassingly big deal of the small gesture the entire remainder of the visit. When Jeongin finally escapes,  having to almost bolt through the hospital to avoid missing the bus, he just manages to duck under Hyunjin’s attempt of a hug, paired with a kissy face. In his retreat, he hears Hyunjin loudly shouting his thanks accompanied by a slew of other embarrassing things in his wake. 

Even the blush aggressively mudding his cheeks can’t fight its way atop the dumb grin Jeongin wears for the rest of the way home. 

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“How come you’ve never asked why I’m in the children’s hospital?” 

Jeongin almost chokes on his spoonful of jello. Hyunjin bounces out of nowhere, as perky and glowing as ever, even if it is ass o’clock in the morning. He brushes his hair behind his ears and drops himself gracefully into the seat opposite Jeongin, as lithe as a cat. 

Jeongin swallows the jello, almost responds, then the taste of the food fills his mouth faster than his words can. He grimaces at the green-yellow monstrosity and stabs his spoon into it. He doesn’t hide his disgust on his face, and quickly downs half of his bottle of water. When he flops into his arms, exhausted at the start from Hyunjin, he notices Hyunjin practically salivating at the sight of the nasty stuff.

Jeongin flicks it towards him and Hyunjin needs no further prompting. 

“That’s so gross - how are you eating that?” 

Hyunijn eats the jello with a roll of his wrist to indicate to Jeongin that he’s not going to answer with food in his mouth. After a sickly swallow, Hyunjin points accusingly at Jeongin with the plastic spoon. “You try eating bland seaweed stew three days a week. This is basically the King of hospital food.” 

Jeongin falls back into his arms, exhausted. “If that’s the King of hospital food, and you’re the President, doesn’t that mean you’re outranked by a dessert?”

“I never said I was the President of hospital food , now did I, Innie? I’m not very edible, am I? Actually no - don’t answer that.”

Affronted, Jeongin sits up straight. “What answer do you think I’ll give? Yes?!”

“Well… A lot of the nurses would agree with you on that,” He winks. Then immediately falls back into his chair, cringing. “Ew - I can’t believe I just did that. I feel like a creepy old man on a train.” 

Jeongin rubs his eyes. It’s far too early for this. 

Normally, Jeongin takes the early afternoon slot, but another volunteer - Jisung -  was in a bind and asked Jeongin to take his morning slot. He agreed on instinct before he checked the bus timetable, and lo and behold, the only bus he could get was the 7am,  which meant he had an entire hour to kill at the hospital before he was technically allowed to start. He did what any other teenage boy would do in a hospital canteen: ranking all the desserts. Jeongin likes to think of himself as a forward-thinker, so he’d planned to go up one-by-one. Needless to say, after that toxic sludge he’ll be redacting his experiment. 

“Why are you so energetic at this time of the morning?” Jeongin yawns, pulling his hoodie sleeves over his hands and using his forearms as a pillow. Hyunjin coos obnoxiously above him. 

“Aww… is baby sleepy?” Jeongin kicks him under the table. “Ouch! Hey! I could have brittle-bone disease and you could’ve just shattered my leg!”

“But you don’t and I didn’t.” 

Jeongin feels Hyunjin gently lifting his head, and he blinks his eyes open. Hyunjin’s folded cardigan slips under his head. Hyunjin gently lowers his head back down and pulls his hood over his hair, smoothing out his bangs. Jeongin grumbles, but lets Hyunjin maneuver him. The hood is a nice touch because without it Jeongin is sure Hyunjin would be poking fun at his glowing ears right now. Jeongin hates being babied - but he has a face that people seem to be drawn to for these types of things. He must have the image of someone who needs taken care of. 

The bracelet on Hyunjin’s wrist almost glows with how strongly it calls Jeongin’s attention when he fixes his bangs. Jeongin hides his face in the cardigan out of embarrassment of his glowing cheeks. People don’t usually wear things like this - especially not a whole week after being given it. Hyunjin had no way of knowing that Jeongin took the earlier volunteering slot today, so it isn’t like he did the typical appeasement of wearing a gift purposefully in front of the gift-giver to make them feel like they’d chosen well. He’d worn it just… just because. Because why? Ugh, Jeongin isn’t even going to entertain any thoughts on the matter. 

“I’m a light sleeper. The light woke me up,” Hyunjin passes off easily. 

Jeongin blinks and looks out at the windows, licked with frost and sparkling the reflection of the lights of the canteen. “It’s still dark outside.” 

“The lights of my machines. Normally I put tape over them, but that sergeant major nurse was on duty and tore them off when I was getting my nightly checks.” 

Jeongin sucks his tongue. “She seems like a hardass.”

“Right!” Hyunjin smacks the table, “That’s what I said!” He cradles his hand in agony. Stupid, Jeongin thinks affectionately, before double-backing. 

The thought surprises him. It isn’t like Jeongin to be soft , especially around people he’s only known for a handful of weeks. It’s disorienting. It’s a little worrisome because typically, in his experience, fast friendships fall apart the hardest, and they hurt the most. There’s a reason why the best relationships are forged over years and years. There’s time to get to know each other in a natural, organic way, but his isn’t one of those relationships. 

Hyunjin is there, though, sitting with his legs crossed in the chair, eating the worst excuse for food that Jeongin has ever had the misfortune of tasting like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing and grinning dumbly into the container. 

“The nightly checks… are they like… those sticky things that were on your bed?” 

Hyunjin hums. “Something like that. You never answered my question, by the way.” 

Jeongin smacks the spoon out of his face and pulls himself back into a seating position. He feels fibres from the cardigan stuck to his hair, but he does nothing more than pull his hood down and shake his hair in an effort to clear them. 

“Oh, sorry Hyun-jin.” He drawls in a dopey voice. “Why are you so curious?” 

Hyunjin shrugs in response and slurps jello off the spoon - almost inhaling it. Stupid. 

“Maybe I just don’t care enough to ask.” 

“Woah-” Hyunjin holds his chest, eyes wide. “You’re so scary. How could you be so cold? You’re like a gangster. But I know you’re secretly all soft and squishy inside, right? Like a darling baguette!” Hyunjin reaches over and tugs on his cheek. Jeongin chases it with his teeth, breaking into his chuckling laughter. “Ah, my little baby bread~, there’s no gangster in you at all, not a single gram! Cute!” 

Jeongin stands up, pulling what’s remaining of his Busan dialect from the dusty attic of his lexicon, “Hey! Who’re you calling baby bread? Do you want to be hit?” Jeonging rolls his fist.

Much to Jeongin’s disappointment, Hyunjin is pulled away not much later by said Nurse Sergeant Major. She’s chiding him before she even gets within normal speaking distance, shouting his name the second she walks through the canteen doors. Hyunjin looks around with wide eyes at the call of his name, then looks back to Jeongin, as if to say, What the hell is her problem?

“Hwang Hyunjin! What on Earth do you think you’re doing?” 

Hyunjin not-so-subtely pushes the jello pot in Jeongin’s direction, and then some, and it accidentally flies off the table and falls, rolling in loudly in the silence of the canteen. 

“Um… nothing?” He tries. She has none of it. 

“First of all, you should be resting, second of all, you were absent for your morning tests, third of all, you should not be walking around this week without your drip - how many times am I going to have to repeat myself?” She motions for Hyunjin to come with her, and to be honest, if Hyunjin said no Jeongin has a sneaking suspicion that the nurse would lift him from his seat and drag him away herself. Hyunjin, avoiding that horrible display, gets up and sinks away but not without some sort of fight. 

“The IV makes me look poorly!” Hyunjin complains. The nurse tuts and pulls him along.

“Hyunjin, you are poorly. Come on now, I can’t keep babysitting you like this, you know how important it is that you’re resting-” Jeongin fails to listen to anything else she has to say, because over his shoulder, Hyunjin is pulling faces right until he’s out of sight. 

Jeongin shakes his head. Hyunjin really is a different breed. Felix has an innocent youthfulness to him, a constant embering love for the world, but Hyunjin is different - he seems to want to play more than anything else, like the world is nothing but a place for him to have fun and find joy.

He doesn’t have time for anything that doesn’t interest him. It’s a pretty good approach to life, Jeongin wonders briefly how that will play out in the long run. Jeongin can’t imagine adopting that policy in his middle-age. Forgoing the mortgage to buy some new sports car, or an expensive watch. But then again, that’s what youth is for isn’t it? Living everyday like it’s your last - the future will come eventually, it can wait. 

Hm - maybe Hyunjin has a point. It’s a good outlook. 

Maybe that type of dangerous thinking had activated a dormant part of Jeongin’s mind because he finds himself goofing off and involving himself in Hyunjin’s antics more. Although he tried not to do it in front of the children, he still found time after his slot was over. Granted, Jeongin makes a point not to stay as late as he did the first time Hyunjin invited him back to his room.

Jeongin has shown Hyunijn how to play Among Us, Mario Kart, and a plethora of other mobile games. He’s brought his laptop for a sneaky episode or two of a show that Hyunjin had mentioned sounds interesting. He’s even snuck into the hospital kitchen and stolen some high-value pudding cups from the walk-in fridge under Hyunjin’s professional dictation.  

But it doesn’t really matter what activity they end up wasting time doing, it’s always fun and more often than not, Jeongin is walking out with cheeks sore from laughing and Hyunjin shooing him out of his room with a hand pressed onto his stomach in pain from his own endless fits.  

“Jeongin - you’re going way too slow!” Hyunjin complains. “Let me show you how the professionals do it.” Hyunjin pushes the rolling chair down the hall, then with a calculated leap, jumps onto it and his additional weight balances just right for the chair to maintain its velocity. He goes flying past Jeongin, his bangs lifting off his grinning face. 

Hyunjin comes to a stop after bouncing between a store cupboard and the wall, back and forth like a ping pong ball until the wheels stop turning and Hyunjin is holding onto the back of the seat, gathering up his energy after the stint. 

“Was it fast? I couldn’t tell,” Hyunjin says, sounding drained. 

“You're out of breath from that? Think how the poor chair must feel, having to carry your fat ass.” Jeongin goes to Hyunjin and starts wheeling him back to the starting line. Hyunjin laughs at the comment and allows himself to be pushed. He rests his cheek on the back of the chair, closing his eyes for the duration of the smooth ride. The plush of his cheek pushes up into his eyes, and the permanent dark circles that lie there are pronounced with the action.

He wonders if Hyunjin is getting enough rest. 

Hyunjin blinks back into the land of the living with weirdly perfect timing: right when the first wheel of the chair comes to a lazy stop. He blinks slowly, looking around, like he isn’t quite sure where he is for a moment, and he even regards Jeongin with a scrutinizing look, cocking his head to one side.

For a horrifying, gut-clenching second, Jeongin thinks that Hyunjin has forgotten him. His stomach turns to ice, the horrible jagged-kind that takes its form from snow, painful and strong and impossible to battle with body heat alone to melt. Hyunjin blinks once more and something shifts into place, and he’s looking up at Jeongin with a tired but eager smile.

“Let’s do it again. Will you push me this time?” He spins himself around with a surprising amount of effort, and looks over his shoulder at Jeongin expectantly. A strand of his hair falls loose from his ponytail. His roots are growing in. Jeongin thinks they’re growing especially slowly, now that he’s noticed them. Felix has touched up his roots twice already in the space of Jeongin meeting Hyunjin - but Hyunjin’s are only just beginning to show. 

Jeongin meeting Hyunjin. When did that become a point of interest of which Jeongin uses to measure time from? A petulant sound from Hyunjin pulls Jeongin from his ruminations. He won’t have time to think about it until later: sitting alone on the bus, staring out through the window and trying to draw images on the fog. He can think about it then. He can think about it obsessively until he steps off the bus and boxes away the visage of Hyunjin in his brain until the next week. 

“For a President, you act awfully like a child.” 

“I’m in touch with the youth.” 

“In touch with being spoilt more like.”

“Shut up and play with me!” 

Jeongin does, and Hyunjin in his chair goes down the hall in a straight line, going farther than Hyunjin’s turn, but with less speed, less bumping, and therefore less excitement. Hyjunjin comes to a stop when he bumps into a set of doors. He shuffles the chair around to look point-blank at Jeongin from down the hall. He tells Jeongin that his push sucked - but Jeongin isn’t paying that much attention. The overhead lighting sucks the life out of Hyunjin, rendering his skin pale and sickly, shadowing the bags under his eyes with black and desaturising the light in his usually warm and bright eyes. The shot, for some reason, makes Jeongin’s mouth go dry. 

Although Hyunjin is speaking to him and spinning himself in slow half-circles with his foot, under the overhead fluorescents and at the end of a clear hallway, Hyunjin looks like a ghost. 

Hyunjin and Jeongin got reprimanded, of course. The first time it happened, Jeongin was upset - he was worried that his immaturity would be reported and he’d have his slot taken away, or at least - that’s what the Sergeant Major had implied. Hyunjin had cooed at him obnoxiously and pinched his cheek.

“Noona! Isn’t he so cute!” Hyunijn pulled Jeongin to the head nurse, “He’s almost crying! Innie! Don’t cry - I’ll make sure that sour old frog won’t lay a finger on you.” Hyunjin promised, taking Jeongin’s head into his chest. Jeongin pushed him away and made a deal of the display of affection and tried to scrub the embarrassment from his cheeks. 

Now Jeongin is getting his card signed on his own. Hyunjin had been whisked away for tests and mandated resting time with much sterner of a tone than last time. Hyunjin had even complied with little fight - but to be honest, it didn’t look like he had that much in him.

“The kids enjoyed the story today. I heard them talking about it when I was doing the rounds. They’re awfully fond of you, you know?” The nurse tells him. Jeongin takes a moment to gather his senses to reply. He hadn’t even realised he’d been staring out at the pair of doors where Hyunjin had been led away with an arm around his waist. 

“Oh - thank you,” He says genuinely and bows his head politely. 

“You’re so darling,” She peaks over to where Jeongin keeps looking and smiles at him like she knows something he doesn’t. Jeongin takes his card and slips it into his case - or he would if his fingers wouldn’t keep slipping over the corners. “You’re a good influence on him.”

“Who?” 

“Hyunjin,” She smiles. Jeoning almost snaps his phone when he finally opens the case up and slides the card in. “I haven’t seen him as energetic in a long, long time. It’s nice to see him so cheerful again. You don’t see him outside of volunteering, right? You seem so close.” 

“No, ma’am. Once a week.” 

“Ah,” She nods. Her eyes catch the daisies beside Jeongin and her face falls into a frown and she lets out an irritated sigh. “These daisies - I guess they’re finally on their way out. You would not believe how long these things have lasted. So many of the nurses think that they’re plastic but no - they just keep hanging on.” She digs into her desk and pulls out a sachet of plant food, ripping the pack open and pouring it in. The food drifts into the water and settles at the bottom. She picks the wilting petals off and winks at Jeongin, a quick and effortless operation. “And just like that - you’d have no idea that they’re struggling to hold on, would you?” 

“I guess not,” He says. The daisies stare at him in judgement. He looks away.

“Anyway - what was I saying? Oh!” She gives Jeongin a welcoming and open smile. “If you ever want to visit, just come on in. Don’t worry about visiting hours or anything - I’ll let you in, and I practically live here so I’ll always give you the all clear, but in the rare, tragic event that the hospital actually gives me a day off, then everyone here knows you by face and name anyway.” She reaches up, and for a split second Jeongin almost flinches, thinking that she’s moving to him but instead she rotates the vase, checking the health of her daisies. She picks off another wilted petal. “If anyone questions you, just tell them you’re here to see Hyunjin, okay? Even if it’s the middle of the night - none of us nurses will stop Hyunjin getting a visit from a close friend.” 

For some reason, this offer weighs heavy on his mind. Hyunjin is obviously a peculiar case in the children’s hospital, but something about the offer sits sourly in Jeongin’s stomach. 

When he’s riding the bus home, he draws his pictures in an absent mind. He pulls his sleeve over his hand and rubs away the field of daisies staring back at him and rests his head against the washed away field, the cold seeping through the window and preventing Jeongin from slipping into a restless nap, keeping him hanging in the balance between consciousness. 

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Jeongin can’t say that the lack of Hyunjin’s face at his next volunteering slot didn’t worry him a little. He doesn’t know why it’s so embarrassing to admit that he cares for his friend - but he does. He had a room full of doting, energetic children on the edge of their seat with every single word of the story, but even Jeongin had to admit that he wasn’t working to his usual standard. His voices lacked gumption. His mind was somewhere else entirely which is why Jeongin left two weeks worth of candy with the nurse to pass out as some sort of redemption for his lackluster performance. 

He didn’t even stop to get his card signed as he walked past the nurse’s station. He makes a beeline for Hyunjin’s room - the complicated back-hallways and shortcuts memorised in his brain by now. He’s convinced that some of these places are staff-only but he can’t bring himself to care much. Those who recognise him as Hyunjin’s friend just cast him a wave, those who don’t recognise him are convinced enough by his confident stride to not make a comment. 

When he opens the door to Hyunjin’s room, he doesn’t expect a pair of faces staring back at him in surprise. 

“Geez, take the door off the hinges while you’re at it, Jeongin,” Hyunjin says, clearly having received a start from Jeongin bursting through the door. His wide eyes fade into his easy warm smile. “What are you doing here? Are you here to visit too?” 

Jeongin looks at the stranger sitting on the bed, his eyes sharp and cat-like as he looks Jeongin up and down. Jeongin nods his head in his direction. “Sorry for interrupting - I didn’t expect you to have-”

“You didn’t think I had friends?” Hyunjin cries, waving to the picture stuck to the wall, “Did you think they were imaginary?!” 

“I - oh. No. You know what I meant,” Jeongin manages. “It’s Sunday.” Hyunjin’s eyes grow comically wide, then he grips the other visitor's hand tightly and shakes it. 

“You never told me it was Sunday! You’re useless!” The visitor lets his arm hand loose in Hyunjin’s grasp. He does little more than shoot Hyunjin with a flat gaze and it has Hyunjin folding himself into the other edge of the bed, apologising in rapids. 

“At least I’m not useless and ugly.” Then he turns to Jeongin, a pleasant enough look on his face. “I’m Minho. I’m the one with the charming slash of red through my abdomen in the picture by the way. Contrary to the image: I’m not actually a murder victim.” 

“That’s what your scar looked like back then!” Hyunjin argues. “You had your appendix taken out - how else was I going to draw that?” Hyunjin huffs. 

Jeongin shakes Minho’s hand. “Hi, Minho-ssi it’s nice to meet you.”

“You can call me hyung.”

“Oh-” Jeongin faults. Then instantly feels a wave of calm wash over him. Minho holds a comforting posture in the room. Jeongin isn’t sure how to explain it, but he feels like Minho feels almost as much at home here as Hyunjin, at least to a degree. This soothes the anxiety Jeongin had rushed into the room with, and he relaxes a little, tote bag slipping down awkwardly from his shoulder to the crook of his elbow. “It’s nice to meet you, hyung.” 

“You don’t call me hyung!” Hyunjin cries from his bed.

“If you wanted to be called ‘hyung’ then you should’ve gone to a real hospital!” Jeongin bites playfully - the term of endearment was a topic of great begrudgement from Jeongin and great longing from Hyunjin. It’s kind of funny to keep Hyunijn on the ropes like this, especially when he plops dramatically back into the pillows. 

“Minho-hyung, are you hearing the disrespect? Kids these days have no manners.” 

Minho smiles, leaning over to the bed and gripping Hyunjin’s thigh from atop the blanket. Even through the layers, Minho’s hand wraps easily around the thin limb. It hits Jeongin then, now that he has a moment of breathing room, just how small Hyunjin looks, laid up in bed, hair hanging untoned and limp around his face, skin no longer bright and glowing, IV drip connected to the catheter in his hand and held in place with heavy, ugly stickers. On his forehead, Jeongin can see some irritated patches of skin - he suspects the electromagnetic stickers from the bundle of wires currently cast aside on the chair are to blame. 

“Don’t think you’re going to distract me so easily, Hwang Hyunjin,” Minho says. “Nurse 

Kim told me that you’re skipping your tests and your mandated resting times-”

“That bitch-”

“And I don’t think you need me to tell you how reckless and stupid that is, Hyunjin. I’m serious. No more sneaking out to the store, no more sneaking coffee and energy drinks from the cafeteria, no more sugar, just do what the doctors tell you to do from now on, okay? Just until your body gets a little better.”

“I’m still going to get my roots done,” Hyunjin says, pretending that he isn’t upset by the words, purposefully ignoring them. Hyunjin is very good at selective hearing. 

Whatever Jeongin reads in Hyunjin’s body language, Minho must read too. The other settles back, grabbing his coat which had been tossed carelessly over the end of the bed. “It won’t make you any less ugly, don’t waste your time. No more being an uncooperative little brat, you hear me? Don’t make me get Chan in here.”  Minho points to the bald kid in the drawing, eyes full of threat.

Hyunjin only rolls his eyes, fixing the sheets where Minho had been sitting. “Chan moved back to Australia the second he went into remission.” 

“And if I called him and told him that you were being a dumbass you don’t think he would get the first plane out and knock you six ways from Sunday?” 

“No, he wouldn’t-” Hyunjin coughs pathetically into his fist, “I’m poorly. ” 

“You’re a poor excuse for a person, that’s right. I’d have my own way with you then he’d give your crumpled body a stern talking to after cleaning the blood from your ears.” 

With that, Minho gives Hyunjin a quick hug and Jeongin a friendly pat on the shoulder as he departs without any more preamble. 

“I’m sorry if I intruded - I can come back-” 

“No, no,” Minho insists, “I’ve been here all day, I’m on my way out - really. You’re giving me a good excuse to escape.” Hyunjin pulls a face at that, but waves cheerily to Minho as he shuts the door behind him, not before reiterating the no-more-stealing-candy point he’d made earlier. 

Jeongin pushes the pack of gummy bears further into his pocket and zips it. He didn’t even know Hyunjin had his diet planned - and here he was enabling his bad habits.

Although he had been smiling when Minho left, like a tyre, Hyunjin’s mood seemed to deflate slowly,  until he’s little more than a lump of rubber, lying morosely propped up in his bed. It’s not a look that Jeongin likes on Hyunjin. The boy was more of a springtime sunlight than a miserable winter, lying cold and still. 

He brushes the limp hair back from his face, tugging a hair tie from his wrist and tying it. The bracelet that Jeongin had made perfectly snug to his wrist now jostled up and down the inches of his wrist. His hospital band too seemed to fall further down his forearm than before - which tells Jeongin that it isn’t simply the elastic in the bracelet failing. 

Hyunjin is sick, Jeongin has to remind himself. It shouldn’t come as much of a shock to him everytime he remembers it - but it does. It continues to swipe his legs out from under him and Jeongin has to grapple for sudden stability without looking too much of a fool. He tries not to stare at Hyunjin, pale and exhausted, the harsh lighting doing nothing beneficial for the other’s skin. 

“How am I meant to stay here and rest if there’s nothing fun to do?” Hyunjin asks into the air. “I complained last week and you know what they gave me? Let me show you, Jeongin.”  Hyunjin reaches over to his bedside locker - and where Jeongin knows they are normally locked, Hyunjin’s opens right up, key dangling from the keyhole. There, he pulls out a book and tosses it into Jeongin’s lap.

“Sudoku?” Jeongin tries to fight a laugh. 

“Sudoku! Jeongin - because I’ve been here so long they’ve trusted me enough to remove the locks on the windows - then they give me this? I think they want me to jump out!” 

“Or maybe they’re trying to bore you to sleep so you’ll stop bothering the nurses,” Jeongin says. 

Hyunjin takes the book back and looks at it thoughtfully. “You might be onto something there…”

“Well.. do you want me to show you how to do them? Sudoku, that is?” 

“Absolutely not.” Hyunjin shoves the book back into the stuffed cupboard. Some papers fall out in its place but Hyunjin just pulls a leg over and kicks it under the bed, like it’s his very own bedroom - which, Jeongin stops himself, it is. “I didn’t realise it was Sunday. I lost track of time.” 

Hyunjin looks genuinely upset about his error. Jeongin’s heart tightens. “It’s ok,” He says. “I’ll be back next week. I was thinking of bringing some crafts for the kids to make sock puppets.” 

Hyunjin brightens at this, then looks down at his hospital-grade grippy socks. “Can you bring the socks too?”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” 

Hyunjin sighs dramatically back into the pillow, but as though the stage had been swiped from under him, his muscles weep into true lethargy. “I’m bored, Jeongin.” He says this as if it’s the worst thing someone could be. “There are so many things to do, but I can’t do any of them.” 

Jeongin’s heart clenches. When Jeongin is bored, he plays some video games or goes into the city or even just walks along the stream he used to play at. Those walks are healing, they cure his cabin fever whenever he’s been cooped up too long, but they’re not exciting - they’re calming. Trekking into somewhere largely untouched by humanity is relieving in a meditative way. It’s only really navigable in the spring and summer; Jeongin wouldn’t dare go out in the harsh winter. There he sees squirrels running up trees, foxes creeping in the tallgrass, and frogs hopping out of the stream. The frogs down by that stream had more jumping power than any frog he’d ever seen before. He and his brother used to joke that the drunk men walking home from the bar would piss in the stream and get the frogs drunk and loose-limbed. 

The thought gives Jeongin an idea. 

He rummages around in his bag of wonders, and pulls out some construction paper. He moves Hyunjin’s legs out of the way with more care today than he normally would and sets the paper out on the flat surface.

“Have you ever made origami before?” Jeongin asks. 

“Uh - I made those little stars? My therapist when I was little told me to write all my worries on them then throw them away.” Hyunjin makes the motion of folding up the paper, then ripping it up and throwing the confetti over them both. “What a waste of time.”

“And paper.”

“And paper. So what are you doing?” Hyunjin preens. He tries to add another pillow behind his back to put himself upright, but it proves too mighty of a feat and he quickly maneuvers the pillow to his chest, trying to hide his failure.

“Just press the button,” Jeongin points to the bed’s readjustments. “It’s not broken, right?” He adds.

Hyunjin stops him before he does something foolish and outlandish like report it to a nurse. “No no - ugh. I hate using it. I’m not that sick - I can sit up fine by myself.” 

“I know,” Jeongin says, although he recognises the sinking suspicion that he doesn’t know , not really. “The reason you can’t sit up is because your core muscles are so weak.” 

Hyunjin grumbles and presses the button, rising himself up slowly into a more upright position. “Show me this paper folding before I get really mad and beat you up.” 

“Beat me up? If I handed you a whisk and a bowl you couldn’t beat an egg.” Jeongin shrugs off his coat and flexes his bicep, snorting at himself, “See this?” 

“Oh! So cute!” Hyunjin pokes the muscle. Jeongin accidentally drops his (rather heavy) bag on his foot in retaliation. 

Jeongin sets about making the origami after a full minute of blank-staring at the page trying to stir up these long-forgotten memories. Somewhere deep in his brain, the cobwebs lift and he starts going to work. It’s a fairly complicated piece, and Jeongin remembers having the thing dotted with blood from the amount of papercuts he sustained trying to commit the movements to muscle memory when he was little. 

The entire time, Hyunjin keeps trying to guess what it is - and every single time, Jeongin threatens to stuff the paper up his nose. Eventually, with a careful flipping of the folds to perforate the body, the frog is born.

“It’s more impressive with coloured paper,” He tells Hyunjin, putting the thing in his palm. “And look-” He presses a careful finger onto the slightly protruding tail of the frog. It does a perfect backflip on his palm. 

Hyunjin squeals in delight, actually having to stop himself from wriggling around too much in excitement at the action. He’s staring at the frog in a mix of awe and endearment, like the little 3-minute construction in his palm was the best thing he’d seen all week. 

“This is amazing,” He says. He flips the frog again, this time it goes high in the air, at level with Hyunjin’s face. When it falls back down, the glittering streams of Hyunjin’s playful gaze promise its return. Again and again the frog flips, and Hyunijn’s demeanor only grows cheerier, despite his exhaustion. 

Jeongin spends a long time showing Hyunjin how to make the frog, even going as far as to write out the instructions on a piece of paper at Hyunjin’s request and draw guidelines on half a dozen pages so he can practise. Hyunjin doesn’t quite get the hang of it, and pretends to bite the paper he’d folded and refolded dozens of times.

“I’m just going to steal yours and claim it as my own and everyone will be really impressed,” He says.

Jeongin makes quick work of grabbing a marker from his bag and scribbling his name on its underbelly, much to Hyunjin’s chagrin. “No way - you can’t fraud a masterpiece like this. Do you have no principle?” 

Hyunjin tries to scrub the signature away, laughing at Jeongin’s reaction when he sucks his thumb into his mouth and starts wiping at the ink. His laugh echoes around the room, and in Jeongin’s head too, for the entire way home. Through the night, and then some. His brain’s telling him to commit it to memory, and Jeongin sees fit to try his best. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚

Jeongin should have known that it would get worse before it gets better. The next time he sees Hyunjin, he’s parked at the back of the room in a wheelchair. He seems to be just as uncomfortable with this development as Jeongin is. Although the root of Hyunjin’s discomfort seems to lie in embarrassment, he quickly gets over it once Jeongin packs up and beelines towards him. 

“You were almost pissing yourself trying to not stare at me the entire time. It was really obvious,” Hyunjin says lightly. 

Jeongin can’t respond with anything meaningful. It’s not the wheelchair that’s brewing an icy feeling in the pits of his guts - rather - it’s the lack of the animated glint in Hyunjin’s eyes, the sunken cheeks and the swollen eyes. Jeongin wants to take Hyunjin and roll him into the sun to see if she can help breathe some life into him. He can’t do that though. All he can do is follow Hyunjin as he wheels himself to his room and settles himself up on his bed. 

The littering of unsuccessful frog origami covering every reasonable surface of the room should be enough to cheer Jeongin up - but it isn’t. He accidentally stands on one on his way to sitting on the edge of Hyunjin’s bed. He feels like crying.

Hyunjin is smiling at him dopily and unfocused. He’s hardly present. It takes Jeongin clearing his throat for his eyes to focus on him, but the gaze is slow, struggling to focus in between heavy blinks. Jeongin searches for something to say. He searches in the deepest parts of himself. Hyunjin reaching towards his IV drip and screwing it into his catheter triggers the question. It comes out of his mouth with the force of a brick wall behind his teeth.

“So you’re actually sick?” Is what Jeongin says. 

He doesn’t know why his voice cracks, or why there’s a heavy shadow of doom circling his guts. The sun outside hides behind the clouds, as if signalling the question as time for her to leave. 

Hyunjin’s laugh is tired but true. Although to Jeongin, it’s nothing but sour. The sound of it makes his stomach flip horribly inside itself, as if trying to recoil into a foetus position to rock itself free of nausea. 

“I am,” He says, as though it’s the easiest thing in the world.

“Are you - is it - I mean will -” Jeongin blubbers uselessy. There are no words floating around in his brain to call upon. All of the coherent thoughts he may have had are weighed down somewhere in the churning floor of his guts, trying to burrow away to safety. His mouth hangs there, open like a fool. The question looming over his mind is too awful to put into words - but maybe Hyunjin can read Jeongin as easy as Jeongin can read him.

“Are you gonna ask if I’ll get better?” Hyunjin helps. Jeongin can’t even nod his head. Hyunjin continues anyway, although Jeongin is sure that he doesn’t want to know the answer. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.” 

Hyunjin has the gall to apologise for something like that. It makes Jeongin’s insides sink further into the stagnant, ice capped pool. It isn’t fair - this thought is screaming on repeat. It isn’t fair.

“Why?” Jeongin’s voice comes out rough and tight.

“I have chronic exhaustion. No matter how much I sleep, my brain hardly rests at all. They used to put me in a medically induced coma three times a year, but they found that it wasn’t actually helping any, so now we just wait.” 

Wait.

“Oh.” Jeongin blinks at his shoes. His laces marble behind the growing liquid in his eyes. He fights to blink them back. “Is that medicine then?” He points to the IV drip.

Hyunjin responds by pulling it out of the catheter and hooking it back up, giving it the stink eye. “No. It’s just vitamins and saline. Apparently it’s to keep me as healthy as possible but I think they just like having me tied down to my bed.” 

“And the tests?” 

“They’re monitoring my brain waves to - I’m not going to go into detail, it’ll go way over your head. They’re just keeping track of my energy levels and cognitive function. I go through periods where my brain is ready to give up - but then I bounce back. I always bounce back - even when the doctors don’t expect it.” He laughs and looks around the room. “You know, I’ve been here since I was seven. Around my eighteenth birthday they were moving me to the adult hospital when I took a very severe dip in health and they didn’t expect me to pull through. The doctors reckoned that the stress and change in environment influenced it, so they agreed to keep me here - granted, I don’t think they expected me to be holed up here for so long after that. They’re practically itching for my bed to become free.” 

Hyunij laughs like it’s a joke. But Jeongin isn’t laughing.

Once again, Jeongin’s brain works at a snail’s pace to unpack the information, and truly, he doesn’t even think he manages to do it, because despite the initial eye watering, Jeongin mostly just regarded the news with a sense of detachment, as though that Hyunjin was some fantasy Hyunjin of no relevance to Jeongin at all. 

He kind of wants to yell at Hyunjin for laughing, or for breaking the news to him so lightly, or for even befriending him at all. He isn’t sure why he’s so angry all of a sudden. 

He refuses to act on it. He has no right to have judgement over Hyunjin’s sickness - it’s none of his business - or at least not enough to warrant him throwing a fit over it, or wailing into Hyunjin’s arms like a heartbroken widow.

Instead, Jeongin pretends he hadn’t just heard one of the most unjust pieces of news he’s ever heard in his life and kicks Hyunjin’s ass at Uno. He can’t be sad or upset about it, because Hyunjin is dealing with his own impending doom and Jeongin has no right to be selfish and emotional about it. 

Hyunjin falls into a restless sleep three rounds in, suddenly and without warning. He blinks awake when Jeongin’s departure is announced through the creak of the door.

“-can’t end on a draw four!” 

Jeongin stills. “Sorry?” 

Hyunjin blinks up at him in confusion. Looking at the space that Jeongin had occupied a few minutes ago, before Hyunjin fell asleep and Jeongin took that as sign to leave. “Oh, did I fall asleep?” He asks. When Jeongin nods, his brows tighten and he nods. “Oh, sorry. Are you leaving?” His eyes… once they would be asking Jeongin that with a playful tickle as he’d goad for one more round, but now they’re tired, impermeable wall of exhaustion. 

“Yes. You look like you need rest. I’ll be back next week.” 

Hyunjin smiles, tired and small but still as honest as it was the first time he’d seen it. “Okay, baby~,” He drawls, “I’ll see you next week.” 

The tingling feeling in his stomach at the nickname feels less like butterflies and more like maggots, a horrible warning that tells Jeongin to be careful: maggots do not linger around good places.

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚

As though by some change in the chemical makeup of Jeongin’s brain, every moment of his time spent with Hyunjin is tinged with a deep indescribable melancholy. Even as he sits shoulder-to-shoulder with Hyunjin watching silly videos on his phone, Hyunijn laugh echoes in the chambers of his insides and in its wake leaves a shadow of anguish. 

The sun is shining, the hospital has its quiet buzz and although Hyunjin is fiercely tired and on occasion falls into his micro-naps, he’s cheery and pleasant. Sometimes Hyunjin’s dedication to having his mood not be dictated by his health status is astonishing.

It hits him in moments like these, when Hyunjin laughs and jolts into Jeongin, the smell of his coconut shampoo wafting into his senses, the press of a body warm and frail against his own; his jackhammering heart develops a murmur. He realises that this one day, that this too will be in the past, and he will mourn it. He will mourn the memories. 

Slowly bleeding to death from the wounds in his cognation, Hyunjin grows more and more fatigued with increasing bouts of confusion as the weeks slip by relentlessly and without preamble. The more Jeongin learns of the inner workings of Hyunjin’s mind, the more he can see the future drawing its bow, back and back and back and aiming at him right between the eyes. 

“Your friend - Felix - he’s foreign, right?” Hyunjin asks him later that day. He’d grown tired of the videos, claiming they were hurting his eyes, so Jeongin stayed with him while he rested. Jeongin shifts at the breaking of the languid silence - he’d thought Hyunjin had slipped into a resting state. Not quite sleep, but something like it.

“Australian.” 

“I saw him reading an English book to the kids last week,” Hyunjin blinks up at him, like he’d known exactly where to find Jeongin’s gaze. “Do you think he would let me borrow it? I want to learn English some day, and the book sounded really nice.” 

Jeongin is by no means someone who gets angry easily, which is exactly why the flush of fury that races through his body takes him by surprise. He can do little more than look at Hyunjin and try to control the anger trembling beneath his skin, and the worst of it is this: Hyunjin is waiting for his response. Hyunjin knows his health status, and he’s come to terms with it enough to crack jokes - but still, in a pitiful show of humanity, he’s clinging onto that tiny morsel of hope, whether it’s intentional or not. People say that hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning and kicks you out the door, but Jeongin thinks that’s bullshit. Hope seems like a type of haemophilia: Hyunjin is bleeding to death and not acknowledging he needs so much as a band aid. 

Hyunjin knows the number of hours he has is numbered, yet every so often, he will lapse into ridiculous thoughts like these - planning for the future. It makes Jeongin see red. So little time left on earth, and Hyunjin is wasting it by looking into the future?

When his eyes lay on it - his anger dissipates suddenly enough that Jeongin falls back onto the pillow, making Hyunjin get jostled a little in the air. On the windowsill, turned around as if gazing out the window,  is a perfect little frog. It’s decorated with delicate colourings from Hyunjin’s hands. 

He isn’t going to cry, but the image before him feels like he should. Like he’s in a gallery in front of a world-famous painting that everyone seems so up in arms about, but Jeongin just doesn’t get it. Still, it simmers him down.

“If you want,” he says.

Hyunjin smiles at him and his stomach tightens. Maybe he could cry. 

“Thank you,” Hyunjin says. “Did you learn much English at school?” 

“Only a little,” Jeongin says in rusty English, “ But I’m not very good.” 

“If I had a foreign friend, I would become fluent in no time. If you utilized him more, you could be fluent too!” 

“Utilize him? Felix isn’t a machine - he’s my friend.” 

“You don’t utilize your friends? I utilize you all the time.” 

“I don’t know where you got the impression that we’re friends. Looking after you is part of my volunteering hours.” 

Hyunjin wails and threds his arm into the crux of Jeongin’s elbow. He hoists himself up to lean on Jeongin’s shoulder. “You’re breaking my heart, baby.” 

“You’ll manage. Your hair looks dry,” he adds.

Hyunjin jumps from his brief lean-to and cups a hand over his scalp. “Stop looking at it. If you’re going to point out my weak, frail body, then at least be a good dongsaeng and go and get me some candy from the vending machine to energise me.” 

“Or,” Jeongin pushes him with little force, holding him at arms length even as he pouts and makes embarrassing grabby hands. “You could stop being such a lazy hyung.”

“I could fall down the stairs and die! What would you do then?”

“You’re in a hospital. I’m sure a doctor will stumble across you eventually. Legally, I’m not liable if I avoid doing anything.” 

Hyunjin squints his eyes. “That doesn’t sound right… but I don’t know enough about medicinal law to say anymore.” 

“Lazy stupid…” Jeongin sighs with a fond look in his eyes. Hyunjin snorts and his face battles with a smile. It fills Jeongin with the same sense of blue-tinged happiness. He tries not to notice how the corners of Hyunjin’s mouth struggle to lift it into his characteristic splitting grin. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

It happens quicker than either Jeongin or Hyunjin expected, in hindsight. 

Hyunjin was mostly fine one minute, Jeongin wheeling him out into the sun, teaching him how to play Uno, then suddenly Jeongin comes into a room that feels unbearably stale. Like the atmosphere had made a point to reflect the state of its occupant.

A grey, dreary Hyunjin. 

Jeongin almost thinks he has the wrong room - or maybe that’s wishful thinking. The trill of the hospital fades into the background as the door closes with a soft puff of air behind him. Through the dreary snowy day, there is little but a white-ish glow from the window, casting the room in a sickly hue. Hyunjin’s skin blends in with it too much.

He’s lying, tucked up to his armpits, as motionless as the frog on the sill, only with less grandeur. 

The ice shoots from Jeongin’s toes the entire way to the roots of his hair, freezing him in a state of paralysis. The seconds tick by weighty and sluggish. If Jeongin concentrated, he might have seen each second slowly pass by in corporeal time, huge gobs of the stuff slinking their way through him. Jeongin couldn’t even concentrate on his breathing. 

His bag falls to the ground with a quiet thunk. Jeongin doesn’t register. All he has eyes for is a still, grey-faced Hyunjin in bed. There are no nurses, no aggressive buzzing of the machines. The entire ordeal is incredibly anti-climactic. Jeongin looks around, voice trying and failing to call for help. A part of him doesn’t want the help. 

“Hyunjin?” He whispers. It’s punched from his gut. The attempt at speech triggered his lungs to finally work again, and when they do they do so on doubletime, having Jeongin wheeze and stutter silently. “Hyunjin?” He tries again.

He walks to the bedside. It takes him hours to will his arms to move. He shakes Hyunjin carefully, terrified to dislodge him, or hurt him. He kind of wants to grab him and smack him into consciousness when he doesn’t respond. 

Hyunjin’s cracked pale lips blur into a dusty rose haze behind the growing well of water in his eyes. He tries one more time, the sound coming out ugly and desperate. “Hyung?” 

Outside, the wind howls. The snow is being swept against the window with enough force to sound like hail. Outside the door, a pair of nurses are talking about the latest episode of a popular drama. The books and trash inside Jeongin’s discarded bag settle. 

But still, the room is silent. An echo chamber of nothing. 

“‘M not dead.” 

Jeongin presses his palms into his eyes. His tears are falling freely from his eyes. The relief washes over him in aggressive waves, the sudden change in emotion has his stomach churning and he has to focus on not throwing his guts up on Hyunjin’s floor.

“Can’t get rid of me that easy.” 

When Jeongin looks at Hyunjin, now awake and slowly sitting up, he can’t believe how ill he looks. Lips cracked, skin blemished and pale, cheeks hallow, eyes dark and pigmented, hair thin and dry. If Jeongin looks into his eyes and searches for the shimmering pondwater there that reminds him of that summery boy he’d met in the corridor - the comparison is haunting.

“You scared me,” Jeongin says. It’s childish, it’s a vehement understatement, but it’s all he can manage to say. His vocabulary has been reduced to that of a child with the pain of what he’d thought had just happened. 

Hyunjin, although not his place, comforts Jeongin. “It’s alright,” He says. “Don’t worry. I go through periods like this all the time and I always bounce back. It’s just god’s way of making sure I don’t get too arrogant, I guess.” When he says it, his voice crackles and wavers.

 Jeongin tries a smile, but it shifts into something ugly and he hides his head in his hands again. Hyunjin’s lip wobbles, but he pinches it between his teeth and tries again. This one comes out a little more healthy, albeit still not convincing. He shuffles over on the bed with great difficulty and pats the space beside him.

 “Do you have any music on your phone?” he asks when Jeongin immediately climbs onto the bed. “We can listen to some songs. A few won’t kill me, right?” It doesn’t sound like a joke.

Jeongin pulls the headphones from his bag - a cheap pair of wired ones he bought to replace the airpods he lost (again). He hands Hyunjin a bud and passes his phone over to the other boy, who picks a fitting indie song. The gentle melody and easy piano backing makes Jeongin’s brain slow down in likeness, settling him into a half-restless state of lethargy. Maybe it was selfish, to see how ill Hyunjin was right now and take half of his bed so willingly, but a niggling incessant part of his brain was telling him that he might never get this opportunity again. Hyunjin seeks out his hand and Jeongin offers it.

One song turned into one more, then one more, then the sun has gone and a deep, lonely blue fills the sky and Jeongin realises that he’d fallen asleep. 

He wonders what has woken him up so suddenly, his sleep having been disturbed rather than a natural awakening. He isn’t surprised to feel Hyunjin curled up into him - somehow, it feels natural, like it was a natural progression. That doesn’t stop the flush on his cheeks. 

Hyunjin’s head is buried into his chest, his only view of the older being that of his growing roots. He almost runs a hand through the hair until suddenly he feels it. A short jolting against his chest. Hyunjin is crying. 

When Jeongin puts a hand on Hyunjin’s shoulder, the other starts a little. Then, as though no longer having to worry about rousing Jeongin from his slumber - the floodgates open and the hushed gurning turns into loud sobs, the type of sobs that are punched from the very back of the throat, the ones that hurt on the way out. Jeongin - frozen in shock - awkwardly pats Hyunjin’s back until the worst of it is over.

He’s still crying, but somewhat coherent, and Jeongin realises that the sounds being buried in his chest were words and he desperately regrets not trying to pay more attention to them.

“-I haven’t even left Korea. I wanted to go to America, or Europe, or even Japan and I can’t do any of it. I never will. I can look at pictures but it isn’t the same. My entire life is contained inside this hospital and that’s hardly a life at all!” 

No, it isn’t.

“And-and I wanted to be a musician! Or an artist! Or fuck - even a dancer. But I can’t. Anything I want to be is nothing more than a daydream at best and it’s so - how do I even - I haven’t done anything yet! I never got a chance to do anything!”

No, you didn’t.

“I had friends. I had real, genuine friends. Seungmin from school - he’s in college now - and he messages but it hurts so much to see his messages because I know he’s checking up to see if I’m still alive. Chan’s cancer is gone and he’s in Australia. Changbin learned to walk all over again in a month and now it’s like it never happened like he was never even here at all and he’s a new person and Minho - fuck - I thought he’d be here forever. He had so many complications I thought - hoped - that he’d stay. How fucked up is that? How fucked up am I? It’s just gonna hurt them - I shouldn’t have-”

No, don’t say things like that.

“Will I know? Or will I just be here then poof gone?! Jeongin - Jeongin, I am so scared. I’m so, so scared.”

I know. I know.

He knows because no amount of smiles and joking can hide the psychological fear of confronting one’s own death, especially so undeserved, so prolonged, and so unfairly young. 

Jeongin can’t help. Hyunjin is weeping and he can’t offer even a morsel of help. He does all he can think to do. He gathers the weak, unsettlingly thin body into his arms and lets Hyunjin weep into the crux of his neck. He hadn’t even realised he started crying too until Hyunjin pulls away and cups his face in his hands.

“Oh, Jeongin.” 

The overhead lights are off. The only illumination in the room is from the lights of Hyunjin’s machines, his own heartbeat pulsating a gentle glow onto his face. Even on the edge of the world, with puffy eyes and tears running down his face, Hyunjin looks beautiful. Jeongin commits this moment to memory, every single gory detail. Jeongin files this image down into his core memories. There will not be a day on this earth where he’ll forget Hwang Hyunjin. 

“Why are you crying, little Jeongin?” Hyunjin asks with a croak. “You’re crying over me?” He smiles when he says it, laden with guilt. 

“I-” Jeongin wants to lie, wants to make a joke that he knows Hyunjin so desperately wants. “I am. I am.” 

Hyunjin’s face crumples once again, only to hide his face this time, he brings his forehead into Jeongin’s. Jeongin steadies him by his waist and hips, and neither of them make comment about how ugly the other looks when crying. Hyunjin’s stuck on a loop of apologising, which only makes Jeongin’s heart fall further into his stomach because it isn’t Hyunjin’s fault.

It isn’t Hyunjin’s fault that he’s dying.

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

Jeongin continues his duty of visiting Hyunjin on his volunteering days, but increasingly his visits are scattered sporadically throughout the week until they pile up similar to the increasingly thick sheets of snow and he’s taking the bus in the midst of these storms every day to visit Hyunjin. He’ll spend all day with him, getting the first bus in the morning and taking the last bus home. A part of him tells himself it’s simply because he enjoys his company, but the reality is that he wants to cram every limited moment with Hyunjin into his schedule. It’ll make it harder - but he doesn’t let that stop him.

Hyunjin deteriorates even further. It depresses Hyunjin in equal volume as Jeongin when he tries to pick up the bottle of water Jeongin brings him and accidentally tips it all down his front. His arms are too weak to hold a full bottle. 

Jeongin tries to cheer Hyunjin as much as he’s able despite his own tumultuous stomach. He might not cheer him to the degree of seeing that familiar smile and hearing the laugh that rings out like springtime songbirds - in fact, he hasn’t heard that in a while - but Hyunjin looks marginally less miserable when Jeongin walks through the door, and Jeongin can see how his eyes smile, even if his muscles are too tired to pull his cheeks up. 

Jeongin takes the offered sandwich from Nurse Kim, who had just finished completing Hyunjin’s checks with lines growing deeper in her forehead. Unlike the other times, there’s no bantering here. Instead, she writes some things on the chart tucked at the foot of his bed and pushes his hair out of his face, placing a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll be back in the evening,” She says. Jeongin tries to pretend that it doesn’t sound like the ringing omen of the bell who doth toll.

Hyunjin nods and lifts his hands in a pathetic attempt of a wave. Jeongin, despite it being against the rules, offers half of his sandwich. Jeongin loses his appetite entirely when Hyunjin declines. Declining food, nonetheless illegal food is something so out of character from Hyunjin that it sends his brain careening sideways. He wraps the sandwich up and discards it on the table. 

“You’re quiet today,” He says. “Have you finally ran out of words?”

“I’m fine,” Hyunjin says, the same way he always does: “I’m just a little tired.” 

Hyunjin used to be loud. Jeongin has to remind himself of this. These days, he’s straining his ears to try and hear the raspy voice. Alongside Hyunjin’s low energy, he’s been sour all day. Jeongin hopes to change that. Today is a special day, and he tells Hyunjin this, who regards him with a raised eyebrow as he hunts in his bag. 

“It’s White Day today, you know?” He says. Out of his bag, deep in the crevices of the battered thing, he pulls out something he had tucked away months ago, forgetting about it completely until now. He couldn’t be sure what spurred the memory - maybe it was the familiar cold bite of the breeze that rattled through the slip of the ajar window, maybe it was the inability to recognise these two iterations of Hyunjin as one and the same. Or maybe a part of Jeongin’s brain was telling him he needs to pay his debts sooner rather than later. “You gave me this Pepero on Valentine’s Day - I’m returning the favour.” 

“No I didn’t.”

“Oh, but you did.” He holds the pack up. The edges have stained in colour and warped from the water of the slush from way back then. “You were running past the bus stop and you dropped this-”

“So you stole from me. You’re a thief. You stole from a terminally ill person, you sick bastard.” 

“Do you want to get hit?” Jeongin warns, playful glint in his eye. Hyunjin manages a smile with tremendous effort, and takes the box. His eyes shimmer dangerously when he asks Jeongin if he wants to play. 

But they don’t. Hyunjin holds the box in his hand as though it’s something precious while Jeongin tells him about a strange experience he had on the bus that morning. He looks from the box to Jeongin in the same way  - Jeongin avoids eye contact.

“Oh, I have something for you.” Hyunjin says. He gestures for Jeongin to go into his bedside locker. Jeongin pulls out a notebook as instructed, only for Hyunjin to flip it open and rip a page from it, handing it to Jeongin with sunken shoulders and severe regressions. 

On the paper, in sloppy writing, is a list of numbers and names. Jeongin tilts his head, confused.

“Do you want me to call them?”

“No. Not yet.” Hyunjin reaches over and puts his hand on Jeongin’s knee and says nothing, and Jeongin knows what he means. He puts his hand over Hyunjin’s and squeezes his understanding. He doesn’t - no, can’t - think about it any longer. He can think about it when the time comes - there’s no need to ruin a good day. He finds himself chasing after these excuses with the desperation of a man starved for water.

So instead, Jeongin fixes Hyunjin’s hair and pulls it into a ponytail - he doesn’t wait for Hyunjin’s complaining before pulling two bits out to frame his face. Hyunjin smiles at that. His roots are violent - and a horrific thought breaches Jeongin’s mind without any grandeur that freezes him in his tracks: will they dye it for his funeral?

Jeongin could cry - why are thoughts like these coming into his head? Hyunjin isn’t going anywhere right now - and right now is all that he should be worrying about.

As if sensing his distress, Hyunjin pulls Jeongin into a hug. Jeongin squeezes his eyes tight into the crook of his shoulder, willing these awful thoughts out of his head - which is much easier said than done. 

He relishes the contact for once, and allows Hyunjin to hold onto him as long as he is able. It’s growing late, and Jeongin has to leave. Hyunjin waves him back at the door. 

“Can you do me a favour?” He asks. His voice is struggling. Jeongin worries that he may lose it altogether. “Can you bring me coffee tomorrow? No - please. Jeongin,” He stops Jeongin’s refusal in its tracks, “ please. ” Something about the desperate look in Hyunjin’s eyes has Jeongin swallowing thick and nodding. 

Rather than leaving, Jeongin lingers a little longer. His bus is coming, he may miss it, but he can’t bring himself to leave. He pats down his pockets, double and triple-checking that he hadn’t forgotten anything (he hadn’t). He wraps and rewraps his scarf, paranoid that it isn’t covering his neck properly (it is). He checks the soles of his shoes for dirt (there is none). All the while continuing to chat to Hyunjin. 

The long day grows on Hyunjin, and in his lingering, Hyunjin’s eyes grow so heavy that they can hardly focus. This happens often. Too often. Jeongin fixes his pillows so he’s a little more comfortable, fluffing them in the obnoxious way he knows Hyunjin likes. He untucks the bottom of the blanket - another Hyunjin trait, and refills his cup of water, rinsing out his metal straw as he does so. 

Hyunjin murmurs something. Jeongin freezes. Surely he misheard.

“What did you just say?” 

Hyunjin takes a long pause. “I said thank you.” 

Oh - right. Jeongin misheard him the first time. Jeongin wrestles the emotions inside him, settling on gathering the last of his things. He’s talking more about the pillows. Jeongin doesn’t quite have the scope of honest communication to reply with his whole heart, so he settles pathetically.

“It’s okay. I’m going to miss my bus if I pamper you anymore, though.” He squeezes Hyunjin’s arm and lingers once more in the doorway, looking back at his friend. “I’ll see you later, Hyung.” 

He waves goodbye to Nurse Kim on his way out. She’s too distracted with dumping her shrivelled, dead daisies into the trash with a morose sigh. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

In the morning, there is a reprieve in the snowfall. The sky is open all the way, bright against the world of white beneath it. It renders Jeongin blind. In the line in front of him, of which Jeongin is impatiently waiting, workers and victims of the world alike queue up at the coffee kiosk for some weak-beaned escapism.

The birds in the trees twitter and sing as though they can hardly believe their luck to be gifted such a pleasant day. Their voices glitter in the air and Jeongin is reminded briefly of a babbling brook whose skimwater is lit, fragrant with the golden mist of a late evening sun. The frogs croak their evening hymns, the crickets converse under the falling hues. For a briefly wonderful moment, Jeongin is sixteen and sunkissed again. He lets the rare claws of nostalgia sink into his flesh for a while - just a little while won’t hurt. Too often the things that get one out of bed in the morning fall and sink into the lake of the past, almost forgotten, sinking deeper and deeper until the visibility from the surface is little more than a dream. 

Jeongin lets the rarely welcomed ghosts of his past riot in his mind for a few minutes more before the bad news comes. 

The coffee in his hands falls victim to the harsh winter. In a different time, the same coffee within the sleeveless cup would burn Jeongin’s delicate fingers and he would blow them and curse the coffee for being too hot for his delicate sensibilities. But that’s in a different time. Winter has an ability to snuff out the flames of summer and render it obsolete. You forget summer ever existed at all. In this time, the heat from the coffee is incurred into lukewarm - thermowhatever with the heat of his palms.

There’s nothing he can do. Hyunjin will have to make do with the disappointingly lukewarm coffee.

He imagines how the disappointment would paint Hyunjin’s face. His mind’s eye supplies him not with the poorly Hyunjin he had been forced to accept. That Hyunjin is too weak to lift his spoon to his mouth, growing winded from talking too much, eyebrows that tighten with effort when his facial expressions become too much for his muscles to cope with. 

No, his brain gives him the image of that Hyunjin he had met months ago. The image of that smiling face, eyes crescent beneath the oppressively wide smile on his face, pearly short teeth biting down on a stick of Pepero as he goads Jeongin into playing with him. The image sends butterflies into his stomach, but as is most things related to Hyunjin these days, it carves an ugly place in his chest. In that bloody cravity lies a mound of the butterflies of which had lived inside him once. Aged beyond their time - too vulnerable to the rapid changing of Hyunjin’s condition, they lay dead. Rotting mosaics of colours fill up the aching wound where his heart is. 

Every pleasant thought of Hyunjin brings another dig into the hole, carving out more and more space. Soon, Jeongin fears it may tear into his heart. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when that time comes. But Jeongin, as though influenced by Hyunjin’s blase approach to the future (the difference being of course, Hyunjin has no need to look beyond the present, but Jeongin doesn’t want to think about that), pushes that thought somewhere else, out of his grasp. 

Jeongin doesn’t unwrap his scarf as he walks through the main doors. Despite the break in the clouds and the lack of snowfall, the cold from the ambience wraps itself around Jeongin, as though to engulf him. It clings to his entire body and soddens his clothes as the pondwater would. It sinks through and stains his skin with goosebumps. The cold is unlike anything he had felt before. It’s as if his body refused to even fight it - like there’s no heat inside of him to thaw away the frost.

The interior corridors did nothing to aid the feeling for they, too, were cold. Not cold like the icicles Jeongin would lick as a child, and not cold like the feeling of snow being shoved down his back, melting from the heat of his back and trickling into his underpants. No. The cold here was something impersonal and without any fond staining of nostalgia. Cold as the framework of a car sitting in a scrap yard. Cold ceramic tiles in the changing rooms of a public pool. Cold as something which had never felt a glimpse of love, tenderness, or laughter. A coldness that can only be achieved from the sheer absolute absence of anything that may give warmth. 

The familiar door which Jeongin had spent the better part of his months behind - and with increasing wariness, he thinks of the better part with deliberate meaning. Behind it, the bed is empty. 

Unable to stop the natural process of his step, Jeongin approaches the bed and puts the coffee on the table. For once, it’s clean. For once, the bed is made. For once, the bundle of wires which Hyunjin must sleep linked up to are gone.

The hinges of the cupboard grunt when Jeongin tries to fling it open. It’s locked.

Jeongin stumbles out the door, nothing reaching his brain synapses on anything more than a fundamental level. The trills of the hospital sound like an orchestra. Its sweeping chorus pulls Jeongin into a stupor and cradles him lifelessly in the threshold of the door. His brain can’t think. He can’t think about it - it can’t - 

Uselessly, his brain freezes. There’s nothing to help kickstart it. He’s focused on the bespeckled floor when a nurse approaches him. He almost feels half-human. Half-ghost. She regards him slowly, gentle hands on his shoulders like the tender touch for a lost animal.

He blinks uselessly at the floor. “Huh?” 

Her words come out hushed and distant She’s speaking from somewhere faraway - a different part of reality which coexists outside of Jeongin. He’d never belonged here anyway, he was merely a visitor into this strange, timeless realm. When the worlds collide in an ugly spectacle, Jeongin is the lone survivor, floating uselessly trapped on the bridge between the two planes of existence. 

“I’m sorry hun. He passed away peacefully in his sleep in the middle of the night.” 

The carefully nailed boards beneath his feet don’t dramatically crack and split under his weight, nor do they rot and crumble away. Rather, they blink out of existence unremarkably. Somehow, this is more upsetting with the lack of emotion it flushes through him. He’s been flushed clean of humanity with a saline drip and he’s left lifelessly in the corridors of a foreign place to bring himself back to life. 

So - Hyunjin is dead. 

It doesn’t wind him. It fills him with no floods of tears, no heart wrenching weeping as many wailing mothers he had seen. The cold inside him falls silent, falling into somewhere in the parameters of lukewarm. 

He’ll never see Hyunjin again. The thought arrives to him slow and clumsy. Somewhere in the distance, a doctor’s pager trills through the endless beeping and buzzing. The orchestra continues on, leaving Jeongin a frozen state in the midst of the riptide. He’s being pulled between the drift of indifference and slow, hazy acceptance - or acceptance’s ugly, unexceptional twin. 

He’s standing there, a blink in the eye of the storm, wrapping his brain around losing someone he had grown to love so dearly - and the thought that comes next has him laughing with the ridiculousness of it: the paint of the doorframe where the door clicks closed is peeling. 

He takes a stripe of the peeling blue and peels it down with his finger. 

Rather than being a catalyst for more paint to follow in a delicate snowfall, it peels off in its entirety and nothing follows it. How sad. To be pulled from its home and not cause even the briefest gasp of a ripple effect. No one will notice the strip missing. 

Except Jeongin. Jeongin will remember the moment where he peeled it off and flicked it to the floor. Someone will remember, Jeongin has engraved the memory into the palms of his hands. No amount of repainting will paint over it there. He can keep it safe, tucked away from harm. Or at least, that’s what he can tell himself.

Because nothing can escape being a victim of harm, can it? 

A foreigner in this place, he returns to the only place he can feel safe. Jeongin closes the door behind him and sits on Hyunjin’s bed. Except it’s not Hyunjin’s bed anymore and it never really was. He wonders where his stuff is. Hyunjin had a lot of stuff. The thoughts come with a guilty lack of pain. 

He wasn’t indifferent. He is sad - in theory. He knows he should be sad. He knows he will be sad. His insides lost all colour. An echoing silence bounces around in his brain and he finds himself thinking of nothing but the fact that he’s thinking of nothing. The sun lacks its vibrancy. The paint on the walls appears more anaemic than he had seen them more. His own skin slumbers in a desaturated hue. 

The world, Jeongin realises without catharsis, has lost its colour. Like last season’s algae riding the coast onto the riverbed and sinking into the grass: dry, grey, at the world’s mercy. 

If Jeongin had known yesterday was going to be his last day with Hyunjin, he would have done it differently. Or would he? He might think it - but what else could Hyunjin do in such a state other than lie in bed and wait for his exhaustion to overpower the tremendous efforts his body went through to keep him breathing. Maybe he would’ve opened the Pepero and prompted him more to eat it - Hyunjin usually enjoyed things he claims he’s not in the mood to do after a little push.

For the first time, a clenching feeling takes hold of Jeongin’s body. It’s a sudden reminder that Jeongin is alive and hasn’t drifted along the breeze as a ghost to roam the interiors of these walls. The thought hurts. Not a lot - but enough for Jeongin to take a conscious breath, startling his body into wakefulness. 

If he had known… he would’ve made his last words to Hyunjin more meaningful. Maybe he would’ve cracked a joke to see that smile one last time. But no. 

See you tomorrow, hyung.

How fucking anti-climactic. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

One by one, Jeongin calls the names on the list that he still had tucked into his pocket. He doesn’t put it off. Maybe he should. Maybe he should be too distraught and tender-hearted to tell Hyunjin’s small circle of close friends that the other is dead. 

He does it with the same approach to checking off a chore list. He has nothing else to do - so he will do this. There’s a callousness to the way Jeongin’s brain is controlling him - but as though through an act of self-preservation - Jeongin lets himself be manipulated as a marionette as his body dials the numbers with the disconnect that he’s talking to actual, real people. 

Kim Seungmin (childhood friend - used to sit together in english class!!) replies with a long stretch of silence. The ‘thank you. Take care,’ is quiet and achingly genuine. He wonders if Seungmin’s emotions had blinked away at that moment too. 

Bang Chan (aussie hospital hyung ^ ^) doesn’t pick up the phone at all. What time is it in Australia? Jeongin doesn’t check nor does he leave a message. 

Seo Changbin (hospital fun-sized hyung) reacts in a way that makes Jeongin envious. He shouts down the phone as though Jeongin was personally responsible. He tackles Jeongin with a bombardment of questions that he doesn’t have the answers to. The line clicks to a close loudly. 

Minho-hyung (you know him already, silly!!)  

Minho is silent. Then, hours later his gentle heather voice reaches into Jeongin’s throat and pulls the stone lodged there. “Are you okay?” He asks.

How could Jeongin answer a question like that? 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

Minho sits with Jeongin and goes through Hyunjin’s things, sorting them into boxes to be passed around a select few people who need something to replace the Hyunjin-shaped hole in their lives. All of Hyunjin’s presence is packed away neatly into a few boxes, taped up with sticky tape Minho borrowed from Nurse Kim and tore off with his teeth.

The photos are down from the wall, leaving behind grease stains from the tack, lifted paint from the tapes and a select few piercing holes from drawing pins. The walls leave behind the outline of the gallery, darkened where the paint had not been bleached by the sun. Left behind are the shadows of Hyunjin’s presence - his art, something that could only be created by his hand alone. In a few days, the room will be deep-cleaned and repainted and given to a new patient.

Jeongin is useless, in all honesty. He’s been holding onto a hair tie he had picked up from the space between the bed and the locker. He doesn’t play with it around his fingers like Hyunjin would when he was bored. As though any interference with the elasticity of the thing would be one more stain of Hyunjin’s presence wiped away from the world, Jeongin holds it in the palm of his hand with the delicateness of a baby chick. 

Minho asks him if he wants something from the locker. He held it up, but Jeongin couldn’t quite manage to pull his eyes from the palm of his hand. Maybe if he thinks hard enough, he will engrave the other there. As Jeongin ages, Hyunjin will do so right alone with him within the creases of his palm lines. 

“If this is too hard for you, you can go get a drink of water and I’ll bring your stuff out to you when I’m done. There’s a vending machine around the corner.” Minho is trying to be helpful. 

“I know where the vending machines are,” He says. Those things will haunt him, he thinks. Staring into the glass, choosing from a range of horrible sodas that would ruin his teeth, the Pepsi will call out to him, and in the reflection, Hyunjin will wink. Then Jeongin will turn around, and there will be nothing. As quick as a flash - a blink within the timeline of the universe: Hyunjin will blip out of his life as swift as a skipped frame and as detrimental as an avalanche. Jeongin is buried under 30 feet of snow. 

Minho continues his diligent duty of clearing out the cabinet. The key to it is attached to Nurse Kim’s lanyard, which hangs out of his back pocket. Jeongin remembers playing cat and mouse in elementary school. The mice would tuck strips of fabric into the back of their pants and the cats would chase them to pull them out. Once, a kid grabbed it but Jeongin didn’t want the game to be over, he wanted to keep playing. He yanked it back, pulling the fabric tight in his palms and tugged with all of the strength in his body, desperate to play on. Jeongin always felt bad for the other kid, who’d fallen over with the momentum and skinned his knees red raw on the gymnasium floor. Jeongin once thought that the world is cruel to those it pities  - but he thinks the world doesn’t pity anyone and instead is just cruel to whoever it wants.  

Is there a name for the feeling when you win a tug of war? When the weight gives in and the fabric comes into your entire possession; how even though you’ve won and the loser is on the ground with skinned knees, you still end up with aching arms and burns on your palms? Is there a word for it? It doesn’t feel like a victory. 

“Why did you come here? Why are you doing this?” Jeongin asks. The phrasing sounds rude - but Minho knows what he means. Minho is good at things like that. 

“We talked about it. I live the closest, so Hyunjin wanted me to do this. He was worried that his parents would either prevent their grief by throwing everything out, trying to cleanse their life to make it as easy as possible to cope or alternatively, keep every scrap of him - even the junk.” Minho grabs a fistful of candy wrappers tucked away at the back of the cabinet and puts them in the trash. 

Eventually, Minho has cleared the locker and he sits beside Jeongin. There’s a healthy space between their shoulders. 

Jeongin spares Minho a proper glance for the first time, and he’s actually shocked to see the other’s eyes are rimmed red and tears are being held back with slow, purposeful blinks. His voice is without tremors when he speaks. Jeongin hadn’t once thought about how hard this must be for Minho. And yet, he can’t feel guilty. The guilt stares at him from behind a perspex wall, but it’s impregnable - out of touch from Jeongin’s reality.. 

“You talked about it?” Jeongin asks in a whisper. 

“When you know you’re going to die, it’s only normal to plan for when it happens. It’s healthier than pretending it isn’t going to happen.” 

Hyunjin’s dreams of a bespoke future was only an act of escapism rather than disillusionment. 

“He gave you a job too. The numbers, I mean.” Jeongin’s phone burns a hole in his coat pocket. “Thank you for calling,” Minho says genuinely. He then takes a short laugh and blinks up at the roof, trying to will the tears back into his eyes. He apologises for crying. 

The mud has claimed Jeongin. Around him, the pondwater is weeping, the animals are drowning, the weeds are tangling around the wildflora and choking their breath. He sinks further into the vestibule in his mind where anything that might make him human avoids him like the southside of a magnet. He’s sinking further and further. The mud clogs his lungs, but unlike Minho who is coughing away the lump in his throat - Jeongin’s stone is gone and his airways are closed and he wonders what exactly is wrong with him to be so indifferent. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

His parents ask him what’s wrong. Jeongin almost tells them until the bracing fact wedges its place between his brain and his mouth. He’d never actually told his parents, nor anyone, really, about Hyunjin.

Jeongin dipped away to an alternate reality and kept it within himself. When it is done with, he can wash his hands clean and the stone will sink into the pond without causing any ripples. Jeongin is in the middle, the sole survivor amongst the algae and water froth. 

He lies lifelessly on his bed, floating above the blankets with his shoes still on his feet and his scarf still wrapped as tight as a noose. He gets sea sick lying still. The internal conflict between complete apathy and guilt for said apathy wash him to and fro as carelessly as a lifeboat in the gulf of the rapids. Weakly, Jeongin recognises that he might as well try. He could let himself be beaten against the rocks and drown in the despicable ruthless rapids that battle beneath the tepid surface. He might as well make some effort to survive this, for lack of anything else to do. 

So he decides to make his bed. Then he rearranges the books on his shelf. Then he collects some trash from his floor and tosses it into the wastepaper basket. He picks up dirty socks and folds them and puts them in the basket. He takes off his coat and shoes and puts everything away in its place. He empties his tote bag to sort through and does so with his back turned on the cardboard Pandora's box handed to him by a soft-spoken Minho and a wish for Jeongin to take care of himself. 

He knows what’s in the box - he’d watched Minho fill it with a premeditated efficiency. Like he’d been checking off a mental list in his head. The thought of Hyunjin detailing exactly which of his possessions would be passed onto Jeongin - a brief visitor in his closing days - makes the acid tumbling in his empty stomach climb dangerously up his throat. 

In his bag, quite frankly, is a mess. There was always something methodically disorganised about Jeongin’s mind. Maybe in that regard, he and Hyunjin were the same. 

He’s already thinking of Hyunjin in the past tense. So soon? Is he accepting it so quickly? Jeongin simply steps over the stages of grief like nothing more than a puddle on the sidewalk, lest he get his shoes dirty.

He pulls out enough receipts to wallpaper his bedroom. Various books he’d read to the children, some with dog eared corners and warped edges from being stuffed so carelessly in his bag. He should show greater care with delicate things. But it’s too late now; the creases will never fade away. He finds a water bottle, mottled with interior condensation from age. His fingers catch the edge of a hard-backed book - surprising in the fact that none of the books he’d ever read the children are this thick or hefty. He pulls it out, trying again when he accidentally pulls the sleeve from it. 

The English book that Hyunjin had asked from Felix. Jeongin had never actually delivered it.

The sight blinds him with an indescribable rage - an animalistic hunger for anger that Jeongin had never known a sane person to be capable of. In this moment, all thoughts and notions of sanity were lost on him as his vision blacked out behind a vision of red.

The stupid book. The English book that Hyunjin wanted to use to practise his English - a skill that he knew he would never grow old enough to use.

The thing makes a satisfying thump against the wall. Jeongin grabs it by the cover and does it again. And again. And again. He swings it against the wall, against the knobs of his bedframe, the corner of his bookshelf: he batters the stupid waste of ink until the poor thing has shed its pages. With a final backwards arch, he reels it forward and aims for the window. If it shatters, maybe the book will fly out and with it, Jeongin’s ugly emotions. 

The window doesn’t break. The book falls with a useless thud to the floor and Jeongin is standing in the midst of a miserable spring snow of pages.

Silently, feeling more hollow than he had before, Jeongin takes anywhere between seconds and months to realise he’s a human and not some type of NPC waiting for player input. He gathers the pages and stuffs them and the book into the wastebasket. He doesn’t find it in him to care about the consequences of destroying Felix’s book. 

Bonelessly, the anger leaving behind a calm, quiet misery, Jeongin falls to the floor in a pitiful heap and continues sorting through the bag. What else can one do? 

He tries not to think about much - doing so feels like an open invitation for horrible things. He can’t help himself from wondering if Minho is in the same state. He decides that no - Minho was more attached to Hyunjin than Jeongin - a product of cohabiting and time. He’s imagining Minho finally letting the buildup of tears leak from his eyes, mouth contorting into ugly sobs as he sorts through his own box and takes the remaining scraps of his friend to hang up around his bedroom.

Jeongin recognises the ugly feeling in the gaping hole of his chest cavity as envy.

He wishes not only to have some sort of human compassion for Hyunin, but wishes, in an uncharacteristic display of ugliness, that Minho could be in his own position, just so Jeongin will feel less lonely in his apathy.  

If you test the strength of a rickety bridge enough, eventually the plank will snap. Jeongin, in the moment he pulls a spare t-shirt out of his bag, is submerged into ice water. 

With the pull of the t-shirt something comes tumbling from between the creases. Looking back at him, with two cartoonish and uneven eyes, is an origami frog. Jeongin is frozen. The ice water fills his lungs. The frog blinks at him and tells him that it’s okay. It’s all okay. 

Jeongin’s throat cries out before his eyes have the time to water. The sobs are loud and ugly: quiet, retching screams muffled in the t-shirt in his hands. He breathes in the musty cotton and hopes it clogs up the space the sounds are coming from. 

Devastation pulls Jeongin under in that instant. It’s a surreal feeling, one which he couldn’t name or describe if he’d been granted a lifetime to do so. It squeezes him, threatens to crush him from the inside out. The water burn sears his insides, into the depths of his soul, rendering him speechless and dumb to the point where he no longer knows what words are.

Blinded by the sheer extent of his despair, Jeongin reaches out for the frog. He does so with shaking hands - more terrified to crush the delicate thing than he has been of anything else in his short life. He tries to steel his face to not look as hideous as he does in front of the reverend thing - but with one glance, he loses the briefest scrap of composure that he’d managed to collect. 

The time it takes Jeongin to scramble together the pieces of himself that had been ripped apart by the currents is an embarrassingly long one. Perhaps it’s minutes, perhaps it’s hours; perhaps he will be doing it for months or years or the rest of his life. 

The frog is coloured a sensible green, the waxy sheen from the crayon catching the weak lighting overhead, glowing across its back as if to say I’m here, I’m alive because I am shining. Look at me, Jeongin, I am made with purpose. Its eyes - Jeongin notices - are drawn purposefully crossed. 

With a swell of affection colossal enough to make Hyunjin’s stomach wring itself dry, he puts the frog on the ground and presses a careful finger to the lip of its tail. 

It flips, and in the midst of its somersault, Jeongin sees a flash of black ink. He takes the frog and turns it over. He turns it over. He turns it over.

He doesn’t.

He does -  once he gains the confidence to do so. He knows what he saw, but he can pretend he didn’t. He can pretend it’s wishful - or perhaps hurtful - thinking.

On the belly of the beast: I <3 U. -HJ 

Maybe if Jeongin had said what had been growing in the pit of his heart, the wound wouldn’t be so messy. Maybe if he’d planted his heart closer to the surface it would’ve caused less damage when it is ripped out.

But he didn’t.

He said nothing. And he’s missed his chance.

Hyunjin had too, in his own way. Maybe Hyunjin had assumed Jeongin would see the frog sooner - there’s no telling when Hyunjin slipped this in. Maybe he’d been sitting on bated breath, pulled somewhere between life and death; love and mercy - waiting for Jeongin. 

This is all Jeongin will get of Hyunjin’s heart: a little frog, a scribbled short-hand confession. And devastatingly, it’s an ocean more than Jeongin had ever given Hyunjin and for that, he will shoulder the guilt in his shoulders, his hands, his sleeves, his socks - he will carry the guilt with him everywhere he goes.

What Jeongin really wanted to say in the end, remains unsaid. There’s nought he can do but live with it. The story’s been written. He wishes there was another version of this story. 

˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙˚˙༓࿇༓˙

Jeongin wishes he could say that he was managing well with the death of Hyunjin. Truth be told, he was struggling to find many reasons to roll out of his bed in the morning. A world without Hyunjin was a world without meaning - as ridiculous as it might sound.

It is ridiculous.

Jeongin knows that he’ll recover. Someday the image of Hyunjin’s face won’t wash him with a wave of misery so volatile it causes him to fight back vomit. Someday the chirp of his silver laugh in the memory banks of his ears won’t fill him with terrified dread that some day, it’ll be forgotten entirely.

He obsessively flicked through the few photos of Hyunjin in his gallery, desperate to keep his image burned in the back of his skull so that he’d never forget even the most minute details of his face. Jeongin will keep Hyunjin alive if he has to dedicate hours a day to doing it. 

The thing that keeps Jeongin from falling into some deep, grief-driven depression is the adoption of some of Hyunjin’s key principles: living in the moment, but looking forward to a future whenever the present is too depressing to consider, no matter its truth. So Jeongin continues day by day doing the best he can. He makes breakfast for his brother in the morning. He meets Felix weekly at the same cafe they’d come to love. He buys himself that new game that was just released because he wants to. He goes on by allowing the unbearable days to be unbearable, and allowing them to pass, and he allows pleasure in the other days. He goes on by finding a channel for his love and another for his rage. 

It takes time. 

It takes an endless amount of time. 

When he takes the bus, he doesn’t need a scarf. The days have warmed up, despite doing nothing to wean away the frost in his heart. He accepts the tepid sun on his face. The spring is late this year, and Jeongin can’t bring himself to mourn the winter. 

When he steps off the bus - the first time in months - Jeongin is greeted with a field of daisies springing their way along the pathway to the main entrance of the hospital. He thinks Hyunjin would have grumbled about it - the thought makes him laugh to himself, although it still has a painful twinge to it. Once, he thought back to making daisy chains when he saw the familiar budding of the springtime weeds, but the memory has since been replaced by Hyunjin. If Hyunjin knew that Jeongin thought of him at the sight of daisies, he’d flop over in a fit of dramaticized misery. 

Jeongin reckons that’s what love is: everlasting. Deathless. 

No matter how cold the winter may be, the grass will always come back in a season or two. Unlike the field of beautiful weeds, Hyunjin won’t come back. But he will appear every spring in the greenness of the grass, in the playful chirp of the morning songbirds rising from hibernation, and in the  twinkling light show across the surface of a stream. 

The world’s beauty will persist against the miserable dregs of winter - and Jeongin will too. 

He’s returning his visitor lanyard. He’d stopped volunteering immediately after Hyunjin passed away, without anyone chasing him for his absence. It was about time to hand the visitor slip over - he was no longer a visitor in this place. He was a stranger again. An alien amongst the halls. 

The walls are painted faint pink now. For some reason, the change makes this a little easier. 

The familiar trill of the hospital is not lost on him. Nor are the pleasant squeals of children who, despite facing great hardships, are finding their own fun and joy. 

He waits at the desk. Nurse Kim has lilies in a curved vase. Jeongin looks around, peeking his head into one of the open wards - his favourite one, with the jigsaw softfoam. The sight makes him blink back a sudden and violent wash of tears. 

The children - a new army of them, strange faces to Jeongin - are collected on the softfoam, their little fingers wrapped up with cartoon-patterned bandages. In the middle of the circle - the main performance act: dozens of somersaulting frogs. 

“Jeongin? Is that you?” A familiar voice calls him over. For the first time in a while, Jeongin smiles genuinely. 

“Hi, Nurse Kim,” He says politely. She moves a stack of files out of her way to get a proper look at him over the desk. Her face falls into something between joy and ache. Jeongin understands.

“I missed your face around here. How are you?” She asks. It’s a heavy question. Jeongin answers it easily.

“I’ll be okay.” He will. 

He knows he will. 

He says little else. The bridge between the worlds is gone - they are separate once again, as they should be. Nothing more than polite small talk fills the silence as Jeongin hands over his visitor lanyard once and for all. This will be the last time he steps inside these walls, and although there will always be a twinge of sadness for the fact - nostalgia can make one miss almost anything. Swimming in the waters of the past does no one any good. 

He bows his leave, then from the corner of his eye, he sees a frog on the desk. It’s simple - green, with cross eyed. The corners where the paper is folded is pillowy, starting to heather with age, but it’s just as recognisable as a prototype of Jeongin’s gift. 

With a bittersweet smile and a strange, aching love in his chest, Jeonging catches his fingernail on the lip of its tail. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, hyung,’ He thinks. He presses his finger down on the frog and it flips in a perfect somersault.

It lands perfectly back on its feet, just like most creatures tend to do.