#onkey fic

When Kibum was growing up, he was told his mark meant something. It meant he would have someone who loved him, who he loved back, so undeniable that it was stamped upon his own body at birth.

The kids who are growing up now should have it different than him. They deserve to know their options. Because up until a few years ago, there was no sanctioned way to get out of a soulmate bond.

As a teenager, fumbling his way into understanding what he wanted, even he could see that permanence was not infallible. The ways to obscure it were plentiful, his first introduction to it, idle drawings in homeroom, used to play cruel tricks. Things never change, even as he’s passing 30. Adults obscure, deceive, to the same degree. Their methods are just more stylized with age - sometimes.

The “fake soulmate” scam wanders regularly through the news. Any town big enough to have strangers is worth the scammer’s time, and it’s common enough it makes the list of tips for any person newly moving.

Skepticism is a regular practice for Kibum through school, and through his first years of freedom. Slowly, irrevocably, it becomes entrenched as a tenet. Soulmates, if they are real, aren’t mandated at birth. The inability of people to even be open to this possibility will result in those same news stories running, year after year, only the names switched out.  

He’s thankful he doesn’t have this romanticism, this naivete, anymore. His soulmate mark means nothing. The problem is convincing everyone else the same.

Soulmates are a blackboard, free for everyone to draw their expectations on it, and society to have a helpful slot of categorization, even control. The marks that they supposedly share have meant whatever is most helpful to the current zeitgeist, tortured out so that the people in charge can use it as they want.

So, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that it doesn’t mean anything at all, if it can be used to justify anything.

Kibum does count himself lucky: by the time he’s found his own place as an adult, tattoos are no longer the undeniable mark of a criminal. It will be years, if ever, before they are accepted in an office, but for now it’s sufficient that they are dubiously affiliated with the artists, the rootless spirits who go outside the bounds of conventionality.

It was within Kibum’s lifetime that you could be charged for getting a tattoo deemed too close to the soul mark. He would have gladly taken that risk, if there hadn’t been a breakthrough.

Removal, free and clear. A soul mark could be lasered away - in a single treatment, if the mark wasn’t too large or ornate, and the bearer didn’t mind the time or pain.

Not an alteration, used to play games with others; not a concealment, clothing, jewelry, accessories chosen for style and caution.

Permanent removal, that had been tested patiently and carefully with soulmate pairs that had been interviewed and profiled and analyzed, before they were allowed to proceed.

It was a miracle, to have it authorized in even its small capacity. Removalists were scrutinized by officials and laypeople alike, gossiped and targeted by conservative groups. Many didn’t last long, and Kibum had never heard of any that stayed in one place for too long. Public opinion was rarely openly welcoming, and enough places were actively hostile. It was in those places where people like Kibum needed a removalist the most - even if it were only for a week.

At the news of the limited sanctions, Kibum had cried, and lied about why when his classmate asked.

There were testimonies, less-than-official transcripts from the first ex-soulmates in history. Kibum had devoured them as soon as they were made available.

The freedom to be free, one had said, and Kibum swallowed this phrase and carried it around with him.

He wears his soul mark at the shallow slope of his left trapezius. The edges of it - the bare limbs of an ugly, dead tree, crawling over the top of his shoulder - are visible only if he twists his head as far as it will go.

He had thought, even with authorization, he’d have to wait years for his opportunity. He doesn’t have the wealth to travel last minute, to catch a removalist before they pack up shop.

Luck, would seem just as fairytale as soulmates. But he can believe in luck, because, one day, his phone buzzes with a text. He cracks his neck and looks away from his current assignment.

In a universe so stupid as to have soul marks, he’ll weather the potential hypocrisy of attributing this to luck:

minho-oh: look

minho-oh: [image file, a building with a sign posted in the window]

minho-oh: [image file, zoomed in of the sign]

“opening soon - tattoo, piercing

removal-certified”

It’s only in the second image that the second line of text is legible. The first line was large enough to be read from the street, through the window of the car Minho must be in.

Minho sends him another message, a phone number. Then, the link to a website.

fraekey: see anyone inside?

minho-oh: firstly youre welcome

minho-oh: no

minho-oh: might be open want me to go in

fraekey: no

fraekey: thx

He has a project to complete, he sternly tells himself. As much as he longs to, he can’t fly across town and put himself at the mercy of a stranger. In the back of his mind, he’ll tick off all the boxes of what to take care of before he can move forward with this. In the meantime, he pulls open the site Minho sent on his battered laptop, and saves the tab for later.

--------------

He figures out the route to the shop the next morning, and sets aside time in the afternoon to travel. The plastered paper Minho had photographed is already looking damaged along the bottom.

After the website didn’t raise any obvious red flags, he had this as his next to-do.

If soul marks could be exploited for gain, then so could removals. That racket had a far more lucrative, and documented, history than a still newly-legitimate procedure.

Kibum could have been lucky twice over, if there were someone from the business just outside to observe, but that wouldn’t be the case. He’ll judge the book by its cover, and modestly considers himself pretty good at that.

The storefront is plain enough, the areas where a more permanent sign could be installed obvious. It’s not clear to Kibum if the owner would even bother: if they put up even a small public notice that they were certified, they’re sure not to last long once the local traditionalists catch wind of him. They will pull up roots, out of their own best interest.

The business may be open, as the lights are on inside, but Kibum still hasn’t spotted anyone - customer or employee. The money to make this their space has been deliberately spent on good lighting for the chairs, the mirrors to examine tattoos in-progress. Photos framed on the walls are soothing, natural landscapes that seem better suited to a therapist’s office.

Closer to the front row of windows is a waiting area, a newer-looking couch, and a table laden with design books.

All in all, it looks exceedingly normal. Kibum’s been inside a few tattoo parlors. He’s held the hand of a friend, picking out a design that would obscure the true shape of his soul mark. This looks no different at all, and he tries to visualize himself being in one of those chairs, staring at those landscape photos of mountains, of forests. There was the faintest buzz of music when Kibum first walked up that’s since tapered off. He wonders what they’ll play as he puts his future in their hands.

Like most of his shirts, this one hides the mark, so he resists the nervous, excited urge to touch it. There’s no need to draw the attention of the few strangers on the street, and risk his tenuous luck any further.

--------------

He does enjoy a good hosting opportunity, to mark the occasion, even if the company is ingracious.

“So?” Minho demands over dinner, apparently unwilling to wait any longer. “Did you make an appointment?”

Kibum himself is busy eating his food, but gives him a response in the form of a small headshake. Frustrated, Minho elbows Jonghyun, who after chattering happily about the progress of his latest project for the first hour, has succumbed to his creative sleeplessness and is dozing off in his chair.

The third and final guest, Taemin, is swallowed up on his phone, not even bothering to glance up at Minho’s groan.

Kibum forces himself to swallow before admitting, “Not yet.”

He had arrived home, intent on submitting the mandatory form, but even as the page stays open, his information filled out, he had busied himself inviting his friends over. It had lingered at the back of his mind all throughout preparation, but something else had lingered too: the memory of his grandmother weeping over the anniversary of her husband’s death, the paper-thin soil of the dark palm of her hand as it caught tears.

There’s a very small part of him who has a fondness for fairy tales. It’s picked a hell of a time to start acting up, taking advantage of Kibum’s busy excitement, creating a handy excuse, small as it may be.

“But he will,” Jonghyun murmurs, intruding and startling Kibum from his thoughts. Minho wrinkles up his face as Kibum latches onto the reminder. He nods in firm agreement, making a stabbing motion towards Minho in affirmation.

“If he’s not even saying it - “

“I’m saying it,” Kibum snaps, sipping his drink as he resists surrendering to Minho’s inquisitive face. He can only muster so much guilt on this point, for his friends who have listened to him time and time again, eagerly excoriating the institutional failings of soulmate bonds, and now they see him pondering the last leap. He can understand that, but he hasn’t changed his mind, and he won’t. He’s having a moment of perspective, shaded briefly with melancholy. It will pass.

“I’m going to make an appointment. I had to go by and see it for myself. Make sure I wasn’t endangering myself, Minho. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

“So tonight, then - we pack up and leave and you open up that laptop, and you set it up. Right?” Minho is dogged when he’s on the trail of something, and he stares at Kibum like he’s going to leap out the window any moment.

“Absolutely,” Kibum says. Taemin flicks his eyes up at him, just long enough to communicate judgment.

He kicks from beneath the table, and Minho jumps up, swearing.

“Taemin, that was rude,” Kibum says as he takes a sip.

--------------

It’s a small shop, Jinki can admit. But he looks around it with satisfaction, at the conclusion of his second day open. He had a couple of walk-ins, inquiring after potential work, and his hand is itching to draw out each as soon as he’s settled.

The shop will never be big, nor will it last long. It was overly optimistic enough to arrange a six-month lease. His savings will take a hit, likely carrying him through the last two months.

With all that in mind - he’s pleased. This town may be just like any other, in that his certified status will raise eyebrows, and a few vocal objecters. The latter will grab some appeal the longer than he stays, the more it’s seen he has customers. It won’t matter that it’s simply one service he provides. He spends far more time creating art, than removing marks.

Yet it’s started already - he had to replace his poster once outright, and tape it up a couple more times than that. A normal day, with nothing he hasn’t already accepted as part of his chosen occupation.

He checks his work email one last time, and deletes the few obvious bogus requests. He bookmarks one or two for later review. Just as he’s going to close up, a new one comes in.

The mandatory fields, he reads through without a second glance, saving the contact information:

Name: Kim Kibum

Age: 31

Gender: Male

Soulmate Status: Not Met

Inclusion of Soulmate: N/A

Gender of Soulmate: N/A

Duration of Contact with Soulmate: N/A

For Jinki to work on a client, he requests even more information, a habit justified more strongly with each passing year:

Privacy: Only contact through text.

Emergency contact: Kim Jonghyun, [phone number]

Timeframe: ASAP

Additional Information: just take it off as soon as you can, you’ll be my hero

The request behind the last line is nothing unusual in spirit. Even so, he smiles at the wording and looks for the next available window towards the end of the day. It’s a grown-in habit, a way to ensure privacy.

He finds a window that works in just two days, and sends back his response.

--------------

He gets a response before he even finishes brushing his teeth, the noise of the notification summoning him.

Accepted. Accepted.

Kibum can hardly believe in luck onceover, much again twice. He immediately puts down his laptop and goes back to the bathroom. Hurriedly, he spits and rinses out his mouth, before stripping off his top. His hair is getting longer, the motion pushes some of it in front of his eyes.

He likes the way he looks. He takes care of himself, tends to the health of his skin, his hair, everything that builds up to his image. Everything is within his control - if he doesn’t want to go to the gym, he won’t. If he wants to drink sugary coffee, he will. And if he wants to do anything else that affects his body, his anatomy, he will.

Every inch of his body is his - except for five inches long, three inches wide, inked into his skin, marking him for someone else. Before he could even recognize himself in the mirror, part of him was never within his say, or even his parents’.

Permanence is terrifyingly inflexible, and that is what a soulmate bond purports to be. People can call it destiny if they want. Every aspect of it is like static to Kibum, sparking out painful, abrupt reminders that it’s there. That it’s waiting for him to walk into its grasp.

Watching himself in the mirror, he remembers, suddenly, with vicious accuracy, a story he heard as a child. A woman, who had been caught in a house fire, was terribly burned. She was found after the fire was extinguished. Burnt beyond all recognition, until her family asked not to see her face, her clothes, her jewelry, but rather her belly. The unscarred expanse of inked flesh, soft to the touch. And touch it they did, their clumsy hands jostling the ashes that were the rest of her skin. The collapsed cavern of her chest, flaking into nothingness, above it.  

The lesson Kibum was expected to learn: your soulmate cannot be taken away from you.

The lesson Kibum learned: not even death will let you escape.

Removal is a goddamn miracle. A miracle he has no intention of letting pass by him.

“Your days are numbered,” he says, pinching the very thickest part, until it’s tight and barely visible between his fingers. He flips the lights of the bathroom off before he releases, unwilling to see it stretch out to its full length again.

--------------

When Jinki goes to open on the day of the removal appointment, there’s a letter slid beneath the sliding gate. He already knows in his heart what it is, but he has to check. The first line proves his theory right, and he throws it in the trash.

It’s empty besides the single missive. He takes it out regardless, unwilling to have it stay within his space, reminding him of its presence.

He’s sure, if he had the disposition, he could make a good guess at the contents. They’re all along the same lines, blustering noise, railing on about an affront against nature.

He has one appointment scheduled, a touch-up, and nothing else until the removal at the end of the day with Kim Kibum. Still, he’ll keep himself available for walk-ins, for calls, to be there for anyone who needs him.

His sketchbook is on one of the back shelves. Grabbing it, he sets it on his lap and flips open a fresh page to keep his hands warm up.

He begins to sketch what he knows best: the mark that crawls up his back, that sits at the brink of his shoulder like a bug.

--------------

It feels like a month since Minho first alerted him to this space, a week since he’s seen it with his own two eyes, but in truth it’s been three days. Kibum looks up, finds the address, and double-checks it against his email. The gate is drawn down, the setting sun lining across its canopy.

For a terrifying moment, he suspects that his opportunity has passed, that the removalist has already been driven out of town. A breath struggles out weakly, before he forces himself to take another, more measured. He glances at his phone again. He is a few minutes early. Quickly tipping his head forward, sunglasses fall down over his eyes and land at the bridge of his nose. He settles against a nearby wall and projects his best ‘fuck off’ energy in the direction of any passersby. The gate of the store is to his right; there’s an alley to his left.

The effort at projection falls apart in a prompt half-second; there’s the sound that could be a metal gate being handled, in preparation to be lifted.

The once is enough to irritate Kibum, but it happens again, then twice. He pushes himself off the wall and turns to fully face the line of the storefront, so he can confirm if any motion is accompanying the sound. Like it was waiting for his attention, it remains silent.  

When there is a noise, it’s not a metallic shaking, but the digital almost-silence of an incoming text. As soon as he pulls it open and sees the message - the hello, is this kibum? Please come in through the back in solid letters - he becomes aware of a presence standing a respectful few feet away, between him and the street.

He looks up, twists to the left, and feels a rush of satisfaction. He’s motivated by more than physical entanglements, but he can permit himself the moment.

“Sorry about that,” the man says. He gestures towards the gate. “Put it down for some lunch and someone’s having fun. Are you ready to come back?”

“Absolutely,” Kibum says, but pauses. He looks, follows the line of his arm, and sees a lock clamped, keeping the gate locked down.

When he turns back, the man looks patient, but motions him to follow.

Kibum gladly follows, away from the reminder,. He can feel his eagerness sparking dangerously high, leaping after the few minutes of uncertainty in waiting. There is already warmth working his way through him, the potent combination of new attraction and general giddiness.

Here’s an objectively attractive individual, and equally objective is Kibum’s imminent freedom. Kibum gets to meet this person, and have no such perceptions of what he’s supposed to be.

If he’s the removalist, Kibum can’t help but wonder how long his own mark has been gone.

The man pulls open the side door to the building, and Kibum realizes as he walks in that they’re the only two in the building.

“Hi, I’m Lee Jinki,” the man says simply as he turns. “Could you confirm what you’re here for, Kibum?”

“Removal,” he says. At Jinki’s raised eyebrows, he elaborates, holding back from rolling his eyes because he doesn’t want to antagonize this man. “Soul mark removal.”

Jinki smiles a little bit, and Kibum’s barest wisp of an eyeroll freezes, because that’s a disarming look. He could take down some armies with that, but Kibum tries not to let it show on his face the borderline flustering it invokes in him.

“Forgive me, but even if I didn’t have to, I might have anyway. Kim Kibum isn’t an uncommon name.”

He gestures for Kibum silently to sit down, and he goes to, retorting: “Maybe I’ll get that changed next.”

The tiniest hint of an amused snort comes from Jinki’s back, which Kibum watches appreciatively, the muscles of his shoulders moving as he rummages through a cupboard. Happily, he’s left something towards the back of one of the higher shelves, stretching his arms out. He enjoys the sight, politely looking away before it becomes creepy.

The time Jinki takes collecting the items is unhurried, but he turns his head halfway to continue engaging with Kibum.

“I do have to go over a few things first, as a mark removal. Some of them you have already answered, but I am required to administer the rest in-person.” He steps back, a small stack of items in his arms, at the top a clipboard filled with papers. At some point he tucked a pen behind his ear that wobbles dangerously as he leans forward to lay his deposit on the nearest table. “If at any point you have questions for me, feel free to ask. We can take a break whenever you’d like as well - by law, there have to be at least two appointments: this initial one where all your information is confirmed, and the second for the actual removal. Depending on the size, the removal could take multiple sessions.”

Kibum had started nodding along just in the first sentence, but stopped as Jinki continued. He knew generally that the process could be prolonged, but he was certain his wouldn’t take more than one session, not if he had any say.

“Easy ones first,” Jinki settles into a seat, popping his left leg over his right. Kibum follows his motion, settles at the edge of a chair. “Please confirm your name for me.”

“Kim Kibum,” he easily responds, but can’t help but slip. “I just said that.”

Jinki doesn’t take any offense to that, simply marking something on the clipboard.

“ID, please?”

After Kibum has provided it, Jinki copies some information and hands it back.

“Age?”

“31.”

“Gender.”

Kibum knows better than to let the question unsettle him visibly, but familiar frustration curdles up. Jinki catches what is unsaid, looking up at Kibum with cautious interest.

“If you need me to change it, the only requirement is consistency between the request and the documentation afterwards. We can revise the request at any time.”

“I’m guessing there’s not much room for flexibility.”

“There’s not,” Jinki acknowledges. He doesn’t look away or show any other signs of disturbance. “But if you’d like me to use something else while we work together, please let me know.”

“‘He’ works today. Thank you,” Kibum says, a little taken aback by the ease of his acknowledgement.  

And simple as that, Jinki moves on, which Kibum would be grateful for except -

“Have you met your soulmate? Yes or no,” as he asks, he pages forward, giving Kibum a glimpse of the progress of his notation

“What happens if I say ‘yes’?” Kibum asks. He has a morbid curiosity to satisfy, but hastens to add, to clarify: “It is a no, like I said.”

“Well,” Jinki carefully looks at him, settles his clipboard so it balances across the side of his knee. “I would have to ask if they are aware of your initiation of the removal process - and if they consent.”

“Not fucking applicable,” Kibum exclaims. Nausea batters at the sides of his stomach.

There’s the soft noises of Jinki’s shifting, and Kibum is familiar with the feeling of anger, the prickled sensation of offense, but this is an overwhelming fury, more than he thinks he’s ever felt.

In his field of vision, like a knife thrust forward, there’s a bottle of water, held out. He blinks, swimming back to the surface of his own awareness.

Kibum takes it without comment, twisting the cap open and forcing himself to take a few sips.

“People must lie about that,” he can’t help but comment. He expects nothing in response, but Jinki colorlessly confirms:

“Yes,”

Kibum sharply looks at Jinki, examines the meticulous neutrality in his face.

“There’s a dead end,” he says. Jinki doesn’t squirm - Kibum suspects he’s far too solicitous of Kibum’s well-being to let himself slip in such a way - but there’s a rigidity to his jaw that’s almost painful for Kibum to imagine. “Can I see?

“It’s not a full dead end,” Jinki admits. “You can still go through with it - after some additional statements were read. I also have to keep a record of it with your signature.”

“Let me guess,” Kibum says, voice thick with disgust. He can remember every single side comment made when removals were in the news.

“‘Questionable impact on mental health’, ‘emotional instability’, ‘underresearched long-term impact.’”

“In so many words,” Jinki allows, leaning back. He takes a long, measured look at Kibum before organizing his papers neatly, clipping them tight. He then holds it out for Kibum to take; he waits for him to begin flipping through, his eyes rapidly skimming.

Like a speared fish, certain phrases snag at his gaze, holding him tight.

“Pen,” he demands.

“I can’t. I have to file this paperwork with the government.”

Kibum stands up in a huff, turning away from Jinki. The papers have spilled to the floor, creating a wake for his upset.

He’s angry at this, yes - but he is also angry at himself. He had read up on the process before, and had considered himself prepared. His feet scuff against the floor - how many others have walked this path. How many times has Jinki had to go through motions he hates, giving as light a touch as he could.

He didn’t want to give any ground for surprise, for emotional reactions, so he couldn’t give any ground to be refused. There is gratitude, that his assessment of Jinki leads him to feel fairly safe - that he will not be refused. Yet he’s exasperated, the edges of himself grated just by this short series of questions. It’s efficient - he’ll give the government that much. People must walk away.

He won’t.

“I’m fine,” he says, brittle. He sits down again. “No, I haven’t met my soulmate.”

“OK,” Jinki says evenly. He had already marked it off, and doesn’t move, just continues to look Kibum in the eyes. The papers are back in his hands; he had silently gathered them as Kibum lost himself. “In that case, all I am required to notify you is that you may be contacted by acquaintances, friends, or even distant family about their own mark disappearing. You do not have any obligation, legal or otherwise, to notify them of your own removal.”

“That’s part of it?” Kibum asks.

Jinki shakes his head.

“No. Still true.”

Kibum smiles a little.

“Thank you. Is there anything else?”

“Well, I do need to see your mark,” Jinki says wryly. “That way I can give you an estimate on how big of a job it will be.”

“And how much it’ll cost.”

“Flat rate,” Jinki corrects and stands. Kibum looks up at him, put off until Jinki lifts an eyebrow, gesturing his hand out in a question.

“May I see it?”

“Oh - of course,” Kibum says, resisting the faint flush he can feel at the tips of his ears. “It’s high on my back. Over the - “ he pushes the ball of his left shoulder forward, concaving at the collarbone. “ - goes to the front a bit.”

“Collarbone, I see. Fair warning: the skin there is quite thin. There’ll be some sensitivity, and, though it isn’t as consistent as tattooing, removals can cause some pain. If that is the case for you, it’ll be heightened here. I can administer anesthetics as necessary, though we will have to go through your options.”

“Doesn’t that figure,” Kibum says. He finishes the motion he had started to expose the mark, having paused as Jinki spoke; he pulls the shoulder of his shirt away from his body and bends his back forward so the removalist can get a full look. There’s a mirror behind Jinki, and Kibum is looking away from him, trying to spy a glance and assess if he needs to take off his shirt entirely.

Out of the corner of his eye, the tattoo reminds him of nothing so much as insect legs.

It seems fully visible, and glances back up at Jinki. His neck cracks in the crunched space between the top of his spinal column, and the base of his skull.

There’s a strange look on his face, made stranger from the unnatural angle. His warm brown eyes are newly heated, in a way surpassing his near-clinical, gently evaluative demeanor. It’s so divorced from what had come before that Kibum shrinks back, reverting back to the familiar anxiety of a stranger seeing his soul mark. A hint of motion pulls his gaze down to Jinki’s gloved hands.

“I’m sorry,” Jinki says, as Kibum watches how his hands withdraw back to his sides. He steps back, polite apology writ large in his eyes. His manner is reserved once more, but he pulls up his hand, his thumb lingering just above Kibum’s clavicle. He moves it, deliberately unresolved in the action, and Kibum understands instantly, flushing with embarrassment.

“It was an accident.”

“Oh?” Jinki asks. Kibum tilts his neck back, silently giving Jinki permission to approach again, to press his fingers clinically against the mark. He traces the edges of the lines with short, neat fingernails Kibum is hypersensitive to. No one has touched his soul mark like this - those he’s hooked up with had no fixation on it, out of design. Jinki continues, oblivious - Kibum hopes - to his thoughts. “If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be the first. The first for me, maybe. But not the first, ever.”

“I know,” Kibum says. He’s done his research. “Me and a friend were curious, and stupid. His hand slipped.”

It truly was an accident that led to the erratic, thin line, only interrupted by the outer edges of the tattoo. It’s a perfect shadow without interruption.

Cutting it out doesn’t work. Light scars disappear, swallowed beneath the mark.

All the ways a soul mark could be altered are well-documented, everywhere from research journals to personal anecdotes. Those who’ve lost a limb have had the ‘comfort’ of finding their soul mark migrated elsewhere on their body.

Which is why places like this, so new, are so important. Kibum doesn’t follow the science too closely. It suffices him to know that it works , that it’s worked its way up from rumor, to distasteful hypothesis, to confirmed process, and finally to reluctantly sanctioned. He can excise himself from the universe’s plan. It doesn’t matter if it hurts.

“I don’t think this’ll take long at all. We can certainly do it in a single session, if that’s your preference.” Jinki remarks, breaking Kibum’s train of thought. He leans back and falls into the chair. The wheels squeak against the tile. “Do you want to make a follow-up appointment? At minimum, it will be four days from now.”

Kibum submerges his thoughts. They are easily drowned beneath the feral, hungry urge for freedom.

“Absolutely.”

--------------

When he’s alone again, Jinki locks up. He picks up his things and gathers them into his backpack. The only sound, the only feeling in his body, is his breath.

There is a cascade of tattoos across his upper arm, trailing down the scapula. The bare branch that’s been with him since birth is obscured among the crowd, though never misrepresented.

He examines it all quietly in the bathroom, his shirt stripped off. He tries to imagine it as a bare patch of skin, watches with an odd detachment, the way his body cringes in on itself from expected hurt.

A soulmate. It was bound to happen at some point.

It would be delusional to see himself as an exception to Kibum’s outlook. And yet - he finds himself being affected by what he’s only heard of before.

When you first meet your soulmate, you won’t be able to imagine life without them.

How lucky he is, to have that axiom fulfilled in his lifetime.

He is just as lucky as all of his clients, all of those who weren’t able to say “not applicable”.

They were people who needed to have their soulmate detached from them. People who needed, not as theory, not as principle, but, as basic survival, to get away. The stories come out, as blunt, angry words, or silent agreement at his gentle suggestions.

Kibum may not have needed it in the same way, but he deserved it just as much. Jinki didn’t have someone available to pass it off to, certainly not in this short of timespan. He’d just have to do it.  

For better, or for worse, soulmates were. Jinki saw many occasions of “worse”; the taste of a “better” never seemed possible. And now it’s an intoxicant, seeping into his good sense, drawing poisonous decisions in the air. An unreasonable, unethical fantasy where he somehow stays soulmates with Kibum, inserts himself into his life.

He shakes his head, sharp. He couldn’t behave like this - he couldn’t pursue Kibum.

Kibum’s first visit, being the last of the day, makes it easy for him to distract himself with errands. He calls in an order to a restaurant; he takes long, unhurried steps to calm his mind as much as possible.

Soulmates are everywhere, he knows that, so it’s not bad luck to find himself waiting in line behind a couple with joined hands. Simple probability, it is, to watch them lean against each other. Statistical likelihood, that soft kiss she pressed to her partner’s cheek, the innocent pleasure the kissed emanates in response.

As happy as they are, just as much are the ones who’ve had their marks removed. So it would be for Kibum.

He shouldn’t tell him, is his unhappy conclusion. To bring it up to him now would reek of selfishness and desperation. Neither of them made the decision to link them together. Neither of them owed their love to the other.

What bothered him, though - what lurked on his ceiling as he laid in bed hours later - were the testimonials of those who had been removed. To them, the thought of their former soulmate invoked nothing. There was no grief, no passion, no anger. They were once again the strangers they were meant to be at the outset of life. That was what gave them peace.

He wonders if he could stand it. To not only hold the laser to Kibum’s skin, but to let his eyes flicker upwards, and watch the absolute dissolution of himself in Kibum’s lovely eyes.

Jinki doesn’t know what kind of person he’d be, if he had to watch his soulmate lose all feeling for you, in real-time.

What kind of person he will be, because he must go through with it.

His last, fitful notion is a question if Kibum will know in the moment after, what has happened. And if his first feeling for the new stranger Jinki will be, is hatred for not telling him.

He sleeps, barely, distressed by dreams he does not remember.

--------------

made an appointment, Kibum texts, triumphant, while he’s still on his way home.  

minho-oh: at the new one?

minho-oh: you ow me dinner

fraekey: pass

jjjjjong: name

jjjjong: cant believe you didn’t do this already?? don’t they have a list??

Kibum pulls up the list of certified removalists reluctantly. Jonghyun is right - there is a list, maintained by the government. He has never bothered to watch it closely; according to all the reports from those interested in removals, is that “new” persons are out of date almost instantly, their address vacant, at best case. Most common is that they’ve stopped practicing entirely, the list serving the opposing groups more than the supporters.

To his surprise, Lee Jinki is listed, though the address is for Goyang. Last renewed in December of 2020, and certified since 2016. He’s one of only a fistful that have been active for more than 3 years, and who knows if the others are still an option.

He shares the link to the group chat without comment, settling into his thoughts.

There has to be the exact mixture of laziness and dislike for the government oversight to operate how it is: it’s a dogged, bureaucratic nightmare to become properly licensed, much less stay licensed. It’s much, much easier to advertise yourself as certified and count on the lack of upkeep as an excuse for not being listed. Little wonder there’s support groups for victims of botched removals - or faked removals entirely. It’s a nasty operation, on par with those who fake soul marks, and easy to pull over if the soul mark isn’t in an easily accessible place. The right mixture of ink tone, embarrassment, and placement, and people are doubly punished for the crime of wanting something else.

jjjjjong: did he treat you alright??

jjjjjong: i know you dont have many options but if hes an asshole

jjjjjong: …..

Kibum loves Jonghyun, but he’s been with his soulmate for five years. He had never actively looked for his soulmate, but there was Taemin one day, added into their group. Kibum came to love Taemin too, but the idea of anyone with a soulmate, voicing small objections, is enough to rankle.

fraekey: good

fraekey: maybe better than good

fraekey: i deserve a celebration after

taemin: do u need some water

He doesn’t dignify it with a response, just lets Minho and Jonghyun’s responses remove it from his screen. If Taemin wants attention, he can get it from Jonghyun tonight. Kibum doesn’t feel like playing that part.

There’s a light inside of him, glowing stronger and stronger with each remembrance that soon he’ll go back. Just four days, and he won’t have anything but himself making his decisions.

jjjjjong: text me back when youre awake

jjjjjong: ill come with you if you want

jjjjjong: we can celebrate after w everyone

He lets himself lie back, fully relaxing into that satisfying buzz. His thoughts wander freely, dancing among what he’ll wear on his first day, something that freely and carelessly draws the eye to his shoulders - to what he’ll have for lunch tomorrow - to indulgent fantasy of challenging some faceless lover to find his soul mark - go on, find it, I bet you can’t….

He falls asleep with a smile on his face, dozing headfirst into a warm, aimless pleasure.

--------------

Three days. Jinki has three days to stick through his decision about his soulmate.

He won’t tell Kibum, but the weight of it, or the anecdotal feeling of the bond pairing deepening, makes him constantly uncertain. He finds himself arguing about it, silently furious inside his own brain at the premise. He is familiar enough with injustice, but this is a new twist of it, one that burns, and gouges within.

He passes the morning of this first day after, with self-imposed torture, refreshing himself on old clients, writing out to his acquaintances with words that only poke around what he really wants to know. It’s ironic, that what responses he will get from other removalists are also anecdotal.

Every removalist he’s known has kept their soul mark; he was not an aberration. All of them, for one reason or another, made the choice to meet their imposition. Some would call it keeping faith.

He knows better. The world is a much more complex place than that.

The shop has a couple more bookings later in the morning and afternoon, a fact he is thankful for. He is equally thankful, in a way that feels perverse to him, that there are no removal requests besides Kibum’s. He’s been asked before, a couple times: and what about you? The question always belies some anxiety, some quest from the asker to check themselves against him as a metric.

Perhaps it would’ve been best to lean into it more decisively, to avail himself of those services to find your soulmate faster. They’re a feature of all the dating apps, a way to disclose in shorthand what you’re looking for.

If you are searching for your soulmate, you can put your mark front and center in the photo, and request verification of any photos sent in claiming to be your match.

If you have a mark, but not looking for your soulmate, it’s best to steel yourself appropriately when striking up a conversation - or, worse yet, a relationship. No matter what they say, don’t get hung up on them, in case you are pushed to the side without warning. Jinki would fall into this category; Jinki could pretend.

Or he could spare himself the lie, simply put himself down in the chair, and use the laser on himself without any further dramatics. He could have done this years ago, as soon as he completed his course.

He didn’t.

When he’s on his late lunch, he pulls open his texts and emails, to see if any other removalist has gotten back to him.

No one has, except one. To his bland inquiries about immediate reactions - moments, seconds, after the last bit of ink is taken off - there is little artifice.

Honestly, Jinki, I feel for them but there’s nothing consistent. Some say it feels like nothing at all, others swear it’s like a weight off their neck. It depends on the person, the situation they’re coming from.

As long as they aren’t in a dangerous situation, I don’t think they’ll notice.

He stares at the last phrase, lets the feeling of melancholy splash gently within. Kibum won’t even notice he’s gone.

Fuck. He needs to get his mind off things, and looks for something else to do, some place to walk through and find his sense of calm again.

--------------

fraekey: come out w me already

fraekey: literally outside your place

Minho complains while still mid-hug, which is so him Kibum feels very affectionate after a long day of slogging through new client inquiries. He lets himself be led inside because his friend doesn’t even have proper pants on, and that’s something he’s pretty insistent about when it comes to dressing for the occasion.

“I have great legs,” Minho rebuts at one of his remarks. “And I would have been ready if you gave me more than 90 seconds notice.”

“Did I not say I wanted to celebrate earlier?” Kibum asks, innocence bursting apart at the strain of his playacting. The look on Minho’s face is priceless, and he can only take it in for a moment before the other man closes the bathroom door. He considers Minho’s wardrobe. “Wear your black shirt! The one that makes you look fun.”

The door pops open wide enough for Minho to thrust his hand through, finger raised up and a “fuck you, I am fun” drifting out. He sounds very affronted, which satisfies Kibum even more than the slight buzz of a pre-game.

Minho interrupts him a few minutes later, not by being dressed up for a night out (as Kibum very specifically requested in the text he sent after telling him he was outside), but by asking - yelling from beyond the door:

“When’s your appointment?”

“Three days.”

“Do you want company?” Minho yells back, but pops open the door, half-dressed with his shirt not yet buttoned. Kibum gives him a moment of silent appraisal that Minho already is anticipating, starting a slow circle so he can see what’s been put together so far.

“Acceptable,” Kibum declares, in full knowledge Minho is going to get hit on all night. “And, no, I don’t.”

It’s the same response he’d give Jonghyun, but where Jonghyun has found - and is, against all odds, pleased with Taemin as a soulmate - Minho is just as alone as Kibum. The difference softens his tone, and Minho seizes on it without mercy.

He does, at least, have the decency to wait until they’re a drink or two in, secure in their spot at the small table.

“Kibum - Kibum - please just - just promise you’ll tell me if you change your mind. About anything. Ever. I’m there,” he says intently. Minho does everything intently. It’s one of the many things that is embarrassingly sincere about him.

Kibum tries to wave him off, but Minho repeats the sentiment, with bonus obscenities to make a person (a person who’s not Kibum) blush.

His mind is wandering freely, encouraged softly with the drink and company. Minho’s fingers are suddenly at his shirt collar, adjusting it in such a deliberate way Kibum knows his mark was in danger of showing.

“You’re going to lose your excuse to touch me this week,” he proclaims suddenly. His voice is a little louder than he intended, but he leans into it, smirking at Minho’s distressed look. “No more protective lurking - “

“You can’t take that away from me,” Minho says, offended. “Fuck you.”

“If you want, honey,” he tosses back, taking a sip of his drink delicately.

Minho, furiously polite, orders another beer.

--------------

Jinki finds where his feet have taken him, and basks beneath the gentle, bluish-green glow of the large saltwater exhibit at the aquarium. He stations himself at one of the benches and leans back, his palms supporting his weight, fingers drumming against the surface. Unfocusing, the track of one large fish looks like nothing more than a mote across the surface of his eye.

His phone buzzes. There are other visitors near him, so he gets up and re-positions against the nearest wall. Clutching the phone close to his body, he opens the messages that are sent to his work number.

Ah - ah.

hi i just wanted to say thanks again for yesterday i really appreciate what you do

He pulls up the phone number and adds it as a contact under “Kim.Kibum”.

He pauses a moment, and then revises it to “Kim.KibumCLIENT”. He contemplates the tank, now sharply following the sinuous line of an eel, for a long moment before opening up to respond.

lee.art: you’re welcome. glad to help how i can

Kim.KibumCLIENT: seriously you’re doing me a favor look who you’re freeing me from

Kim.KibumCLIENT: [image file]

It’s a picture taken of another man, handsome, tall, smiling fondly and crookedly at the camera. Jinki’s heart skips in fear, before his mind catches up. He has to resist the urge to touch his hand to his mark, pull his shirt to the side and confirm it’s still there in the half-reflection of the glass of the tank.

Another image comes over while he’s still lost in thought: the same man, blurred in a motion forward, the vaguest outline of a hand pushing against his shoulder.

Kim.KibumCLIENT: he’s terrible see? you are a charity

He can’t relent, when the line is tossed straight towards him. He closes around the bait, knowing the hook will pierce him through.

lee-art: i’m not a charity

lee-art: i take card cash and arcade tokens

Kim.KibumCLIENT: where do you even get arcade tokens?

Kim.KibumCLIENT: has someone paid you in arcade tokens?

lee-art: not yet but i would accept it

Kim.KibumCLIENT: cute

Jinki closes his phone and shoves it into his pocket. He can’t do this - he can’t. He couldn’t even in normal circumstances, recognizing as any reasonable person that he’s the recipient of a drunk text. Or, at best, a buzzed text.

He makes the adult decision to turn his notifications to silent and shove it back into his pocket. He needs to maintain the emotional support he can find, surrounded by hundreds of fish.

When he pulls out his phone later to look at the photos he’s taken, struck in renewed admiration for the sights, he can’t help but open the message history back up as well. Even the smallest doubt is too much, if it turns out to be accurate.

lee-art: everything alright?

--------------

Several hours later, Kibum is crumpled up on Minho’s couch, his feet on his friend’s lap. It’s too warm, and somehow too cold at the same time, and he shoves his body around in an effort to avoid the aches of a morning that is coming too quickly.

Something is digging into his hip. He’s still wearing his jacket on one arm - it’s all too difficult to extract it. Fumbling, his phone ends up in his hand, and he traces out the unlock pattern.

There’s a dozen photos he took idly throughout the night, and a few unread messages, one from a phone number he hasn’t saved yet. He pulls down the menu to read it.

everything alright?

Someone cares about him. He presses the phone against his chest, warm against bared skin and curls in on himself again. Someone wants him to be safe.

The sweetness of the thought carries him back into sleep.

--------------

When they wake up seven hours later, their hand is stiff and cramped, and Minho is pulling at their shoulder.

“Look, you can stay if you want, but I haven’t shopped yet this week so you’re on your own while I’m at work,” he says, and Kibum waves him off.

Theoretically, they could just take the day off, being in business for themselves as a freelancer. On the other hand, they have rent to pay. The night before they had pulled up to Minho’s place with an overnight bag including their laptop, and they drag it out to set up shop after putting on some coffee.

They do have more than laziness to justify making Minho’s apartment their own for the day - their own place is across town, and Minho has a better internet connection.

Plus, Kibum still has some clothes here that Minho throws in his own laundry whenever they have a sleepover night. It never made sense to make things less convenient, and extract every sign of Kibum’s presence, for some awkward politesse.

They pass the day without much notice, until they crack their jaw in a yawn and realize their stomach has been growling for more than an hour. Food - they blink. Minho had mentioned he didn’t have food. He could eat grass off the lawn if he wanted too.

Leaning back, they fiddle around on their phone and swipe up to see some messages from clients, their mom, Jonghyun, and messages they only vaguely remember, ending with someone asking if everything was alright.

Shortly after that, there’s a photo of coral.

They scroll up and realize, with increasing horror, that they had texted Jinki’s business number.

fraekey: hey, this is kibum….obviously…..i’ve just looked and i’m so sorry about this

fraekey: honestly i’m embarrassed. but because you were nice enough to ask

fraekey: that’s just my friend, i’m sure he was just being annoying. he’d never hurt me seriously

When a response pings just a few minutes later, when Kibum’s still preoccupied with trying to remember all the details of last night, they jump to read it quickly, like it might disappear.

jinki: it’s okay. i’m glad it’s just your friend

jinki: if you don’t mind me asking what were you drinking?

fraekey: too much

jinki: that’s fair

Before Kibum can consider what to do next, another photo comes over. It’s taken from the ground level of a large tank, long strands of seaweed stretching from the floor to the surface, fish streaming from side to side. A shark - they think - looms large at the edges. There’s the smallest reflection of the taker’s hand at the corner.

jinki: looks like we had different nights. did you see the coral?

fraekey: yeah is that here?

Kibum didn’t grow up in this town, and they’re not the type to frequent museums or aquariums. Jinki is new, and his priorities were clearly different. They’re curious, and unafraid to admit it.

jinki: yes

jinki: you haven’t been there?

fraekey: no

jinki: oh ok

Kibum bites his lip, and considers ending it at the natural pause, thanking Jinki and telling him they’ll see him at their appointment. But they had enjoyed Jinki’s company, and part of them is glad they already broke the ice in a fairly harmless way. They have a good feeling, a pleasant instinct brimming beneath their skin.

jinki: sorry i shouldn’t have assumed

fraekey: no its ok

fraekey: anyway…. sorry again. my appt is at 5 right? ill make it up to you with some takeout if thats ok. i noticed there’s nothing good by your shop anyway.

fraekey: just tell me what you like and i’ll bring you something

jinki: it’s almost noon. if it works for you i’m about to take lunch instead?

Kibum huffs out a startled laugh at the invitation, warmth curling within his chest as they smile. They close down their laptop and head to the bathroom to clean up, all too aware of the stiffness in their legs from sitting the entire morning.

fraekey: let me pick since you’re new

fraekey: assuming no seafood

jinki: very tactful

--------------

Jinki fidgets quietly, unobtrusively beneath the table of the cafe. He had ordered a sandwich and drink upon arrival after he received a text from Kibum encouraging him to pick out what he’d like. He replied back simply ok ive ordered, just as the other circled around.

“Hey,” the devil themselves says, sitting down with their own food across from Jinki with a smile.

“Hi,” Jinki says back. The excitement of seeing Kibum again had overridden his determination from yesterday so easily, just over text. Now that Kibum is in front of him, he can feel it cracking apart even more. “How’d you get your food first?”

Kibum laughs, and shows their phone to him, a text showing his order had been received over five minutes ago. His eyes are sparkling with amusement.

“So you ordered already? This saves me from lines.”

“Cool,” he says. He likes placing orders when he gets somewhere, even if that’s a more efficient option. Maybe it’s the feeling of human interaction, or maybe he is as old as he feels sometimes. The look on Kibum’s face is amiable, lightly amused after something Jinki can’t put his finger on. When Jinki’s name is called, he excuses himself to pick it up, distracted with the minute beauty of Kibum’s expressive face.

When he comes back, Kibum is eating with meticulous care.

“You know, it kind of defeats the purpose of me treating you if you go and pay for yourself,” Kibum says suddenly, providing the explanation Jinki was seeking. Jinki flushes. “But that’s OK, I can tell you’re going through some stuff.”

“Really?” Jinki says, willing his voice to remain steady. Kibum’s tone is so genuinely light that they can’t possibly be aware of their bond. Jinki was overly careful when getting dressed for this occasion, seeing transparency and looseness in shirts he had worn for years without concern. “What am I going through?”

“New town,” Kibum says blithely. “Setting up your business, going to an aquarium by yourself means you don’t have local friends yet. If you had some, but the schedules didn’t line up, you probably would’ve just waited.”

“There’s nothing wrong with going to an aquarium by yourself,” Jinki says. He pushes forward, because Kibum’s face is quirking in a way that makes him want to keep talking, keep them present for as long as Jinki can maintain this tenuously casual facade “You can take as much time as you want. No one’s rushing you, or telling you what you want to see is silly. You can read all the displays like they were meant to be read, and just - enjoy it. At your own pace.”

Kibum sits back in their chair. Instead of amusement, there’s a discernible ah of realization written in their eyes.

“I think I can get that appeal,” they say wryly, and with just the barest hint of motion, indicates their soul mark.

Jinki nods, unable to speak so close to the matter. He clears his throat, and moves to take his first bite. He chews around it without looking further at Kibum, uncertain of what to do next.

“It doesn’t sound like you would ever like one,” Kibum says. They haven’t adjusted their volume at all, and Jinki is halfway towards making some gesture, when they continue, with a small, wry smile. “Company at the aquarium, so to speak.”

“I’m not - against it,” Jinki allows. Even those words come out slow, thoughtful. He hopes he can stay on top of the analogy, his own confused feelings, and Kibum’s needs. It’s a demanding balancing act, held underneath Kibum’s watchful eye. “It’s going to work for some people, but not for others. I see people having fun at the aquarium all the time. It’s not like I want to go around breaking them up.”

Kibum snorts, raises their mug to their lips. They flick their eyes up to Jinki as he continues, almost stumbling against his own thoughts.

“People think you’re lonely, when you’re by yourself. And maybe you are sometimes, but you need to find your - your company by yourself.”

“You don’t need one assigned ,” Kibum interrupts. They tap their fingernails against their mug, the thickness of it dulling out the noise. “Exactly. God, it’s so stupid, isn’t it? Presumptuous as hell.”

“It is.”

“And flawed, I swear, my best friend has this soulmate who’s going to land them in jail one day - “

The look on Kibum’s face makes Jinki himself laugh, swallowing down his half-eaten bite too early so as to avoid choking. There’s affection and annoyance and sincerity and commiseration, and he wonders at having it pointed at him: when Kibum peers towards him and opens their eyes just a tad wider, as though imploring Jinki to take their side against these people he’s never met, like backing them in this argument is all they could ever ask for.

It's a hot, undeniable pleasure to have his soulmate look at him like that, and as soon as he ties Kibum to soulmate, he can feel the grin fall off his face.

Kibum isn’t asking him anything, but Jinki can see how Kibum’s own expression changes as he takes in Jinki’s. He clears his throat and wonders when he got through his food so quickly, moves to take a drink to cover the moment.

“I was wondering something,” Kibum asks. They don’t even acknowledge Jinki’s faltering, and he thinks how many people see that for the kindness it clearly is meant as. “I saw that you were listed online and you’ve been active for a few years. That’s pretty rare, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“So what makes you different?” they press, completely unashamed. Jinki lets out a startled chuckle at their bluntness.

“Well,” Jinki starts. He considers Kibum, and he’s not sure if it’s the sense he has of the other’s character, or this alien recklessness that’s lived in him since he first saw Kibum’s mark. “It helps to know how the bureaucracy works, and where it doesn’t.”

Jinki ducks his head to drink, his eyeline sliding somewhere behind Kibum’s shoulder. He may have been able to lay the groundwork, but he can wait to see what Kibum picks out.

“That sounds very vague. Let me guess,” Kibum leans forward. Their eyes are narrowed, and the way they tilt their head in evaluation makes Jinki think of butterflies, pinned to a board beneath glass for observation. “You don’t pay for recertification.”

“I pay. You can go to jail for not.”

“You don’t file in triplicate.”

“Oh, I file in quadruplicate,” Jinki says, stone-faced.

“Are you going to tell me, or are you going to make me guess all day? What if I have better things to do?” Kibum is flirting with Jinki, but beneath the twinkling brightness of this energy, there’s genuine curiosity, and a little bit of anxiety.

“People really underestimate just how...banal, everything can be. The worst kind of people are still human, still make mistakes. They don’t double-check on things. They don’t cover all technicalities. And I’m - really good at technicalities.”

He presses forward, before he can lose the nerve. The prospect of some intimacy with Kibum, even if it’s just the disclosure of a secret he’s kept for years, it’s intoxicating and freeing and Jinki has already made up his mind.

“And if you pay enough, no one asks how you got certified in the first place. They just assume if they can’t find your file, it must be somewhere. Because there’s always somewhere else, where the person before them, or the person before the person before them, messed something up. And people love believing the people they replaced messed things up for them.”

“I saw you on the registration site.”

“Yeah, I passed my last evaluation with flying colors.”

What he doesn’t say, Kibum seems to pick up on. There’s a heavy moment where all this bravery, this impetuous compulsion, drains out of Jinki. He wonders, dully, how quickly he’ll have to leave. It’s almost a good thing he’s made so little of a life here. He’ll miss the aquarium, at least.

“So what else is it?” Kibum asks. “That can’t be it. No one wants to get on the list that hard without something else going on.”

“Like I said. People are flawed. I make mistakes. Typos, wrong phone numbers, bad forwarding addresses.”

“No, instead of yes.”

Jinki looks them in the eyes, forces himself not to touch his soul mark.

“There was a woman, once, who told me her soulmate worked for the government. Imagine that,” for a brief moment, he can taste the imagined terror. “I could have been sending him instructions. And any good I could have done her would instantly be punishment.”

Kibum’s drink is empty. They seem to remember only after reaching for it.

“Why did you tell me this?” they ask. It’s a reasonable question. Jinki can hardly conceive of telling anyone this. And yet he has shown his heart, laid it out in front of a stranger.

He could give them the truth, right now. It’s the perfect reasoning; the explanation is begging to be spoken.

“Arcade tokens,” he says. “Now that I’ve confided all my secrets to you, I think I deserve those arcade tokens.”

Kibum doesn’t quite reward him with a laugh, but the tension has softly, unmistakably broken.

“I - “ Jinki makes a start of it. “I had a judgment of you, when we met. How you acted - about removals, and how you spoke to me last night and today. I thought the judgment was right. You seem like a good person, and not the type to run to endear yourself to the government.”

“Plus I’d get rid of my own removal, pretty neatly,” Kibum says acerbically. Jinki can feel his lips twitch, even as he twists away from the shame of this intimacy.

“You could have waited until I was done, “ Jinki presses. He can’t quite look away, nor truly return Kibum’s gaze. He’s stuck himself in a torturous midway point. “You still could, as soon as you walk out my door.”

“I won’t.”

“I know,” he confesses, breathing through the raw catch in his throat.

--------------

Kibum holds the secret that Jinki shared with them close to his heart, wondering about its purpose - at why the removalist had trusted them to share such a thing. It occupies their thoughts all the way through the night, and into the next day.

It cannot occupy their evening, however, as Jonghyun is being sad in their living room. He’s more specifically, being sad in Kibum’s lap.

They had a fight, he and Taemin. Kibum has tact, and good sense, and does not make any comment on this as proof that soulmates aren’t a guarantee of happiness. However, they are marking it down silently, certain this will come to mind whenever they face this argument in the future.

They have twenty-five texts from Jonghyun, from during the fight, to right before Kibum opened their front door. The last text read someone comfort me and it was sent to them and Minho and four other people, only two of whom Kibum knows personally.

Jonghyun had talked, and Kibum had listened, because they were his friend, but it has been past that moment for a while now. As it stands, Jonghyun is sad in Kibum’s lap, but also on the brink of softly snoring. Kibum shifts as delicately as they can to grab their phone. Taemin has texted them too, just one or two asking if Jonghyun is with them, and if he’s okay.

fraekey: hes here hes safe

fraekey: now until hes ready to talk to you

fraekey: congenially, fuck off

The second message is sent because they know the fight will end peaceably, and the two will reconcile. The third message is sent out of principle, knowing it needs to be said because someone has to be the sensible person, and it was not going to be Jonghyun, and would never be Taemin.

If it were a break-up, Kibum would have handled things very differently, but Kibum knows it’s not. Not because they’re soulmates, but because he has known Jonghyun for more than a decade, and knows this isn’t how his breakups go.

They relax as much as they can without disrupting the now-fully snoring body braced against him. Jonghyun clenches around their waist and cuddles harder.

minho-oh: hows he doing

fraekey: emotionally exhausted

minho-oh: want to hand off?

fraekey: no

fraekey: sleeping on me

minho-oh: i can come over

fraekey: u need a hobby besides this

minho-oh: emotional support is my hobby

They exchange a few more texts, with Minho finally winning the concession that Kibum will let him know when Jonghyun wakes up. Minho can pick him up and take him home, and Kibum will sleep, or perhaps work late. They’re not nearly the night owl Jonghyun is, but occasionally the urge to stay active takes them by surprise, carries them through odd hours.

Jonghyun shifts to his side, his shirt riding up. The dark lines of his soulmate mark catch Kibum’s eyes. Soft and lovingly written, they always seemed, and they still seem that way even in this light. When Jonghyun wakes up, when he stretches in front of some reflective surface, he’ll be glad it’s still there. He’ll find it a comfort, a reminder of what he has.

Suddenly irritated, he flips on the TV, lowering the volume before Jonghyun can wake up and ask Kibum to take him to the home he shares with Taemin.

--------------

Kim.KibumCLIENT: hey

Kim.KibumCLIENT: i promise i’m not drunk

lee-art: its 5pm on a wednesday i hope not

Kim.KibumCLIENT: can we reschedule? for sooner? like tonight?

lee-art: legally there is a 4-day waiting period, so we can’t schedule any sooner than tomorrow.

Kim.KibumCLIENT: can we do it earlier in the day?

lee-art: yes

lee-art: my walk-in times start at 11, if you can get there at 9 we can complete it before then so you still have some privacy

Kim.KibumCLIENT: that would be great, thank you

Kim.KibumCLIENT: i didn’t meet my soulmate

Kim.KibumCLIENT: btw

Kim.KibumCLIENT: i know how this sounds

Kim.KibumCLIENT: but one of my friends with a soulmate just spent the last three hours crying after a fight with their soulmate

Kim.KibumCLIENT: and it just made me think of how much i dont want it. you know?

lee-art: i understand

lee-art: text me when you are here and i’ll let you in

lee-art: front gate will be locked

Kim.KibumCLIENT: thanks i owe you

Jinki drops the phone onto his lap. His decision to not tell Kibum - to give one secret away, and hold tight this one instead - screams, and screams in protest.

His head lurching towards a migraine, he stands up from the couch and presses the heel of his palm against his eye. Kaleidoscoping pain bursts from beneath this contact, and he only barely stops himself from sobbing out.

--------------

fraekey: i’m outside

lee-art: be right there

“Lurking outside your business first thing in the morning makes me feel like I’m stalking you,” Kibum complains lightly when Jinki comes out.

“Guilt?” Jinki asks. “Unresolved guilt or reluctance, is my professional opinion.”

“Wow, you’re fun first thing in the morning.”

“I am,” Jinki says, smiling lightly. He pulls from behind his back a small bag and opens it to show a selection from the local conbini and what seems to be a street vendor. “Breakfast, if you haven’t had a chance?”

Kibum’s stomach growls.

“Absolutely,” he says, picking out a chapssal doughnut. “Shouldn’t I have done this for you?”

“Oh, probably,” Jinki says. “Come on back.”

Jinki leads him into the store and putters around like he’s nervous, or waiting for Kibum to finish eating. Kibum is still chewing, savoring the remaining crunchiness.

All this turns to sand in his mouth when Jinki pulls aside his shirt collar and shows him a mirror of what’s been Kibum’s bane for the last twenty years.

“Fuck me,” Kibum says. Jinki just nods.

“I thought about what it would mean, to not tell you,” Jinki starts. His voice, nervous, jumps higher as he continues. “It seemed like the right thing, but it’s possible you’d be able to tell when I was doing the removal itself. And I didn’t want you to find out that way, or to feel like I made a decision for you, without you. And telling you now - I don’t know, really. I can feel - that doesn’t matter, except to say that if I feel….that there are things that have happened already, then maybe you have too.”

“Maybe this situation is too messed up for there to be a good answer. But if either option doesn’t feel right, then the best choice has to be the one where you know exactly as much as I do.”

Now, Kibum’s mind is racing, and, now, it all goes together: the odds and ends of how Jinki has behaved around him. His catches, his pauses, the sudden changes in his mood, it all locks together in a swirl he suddenly finds himself trapped in.

“Do you love me?” Kibum says, in a rush. It’s a bit of horrified fascination, to be this close to something he’s been terrified of his entire life. He’s been around soulmates, people who are seeking theirs out, people who never want to see them again, but no one’s ever been able to explain it in a way he can understand, the feeling, the inevitability  that - this person, this stranger, now holds the ultimate power over them.  

His heart is thumping, and honestly he can’t say if it’s terror or not-terror, standing stark straight and frigid and sharp. It’s like casting a new light source in a room he’s spent years in, pulling shadows out that are unfamiliar, disquieting.

Jinki looks carefully at him, his eyes weighty with something that may be grief. Kibum wonders where this clarity is coming from. Some insight worming inside of him, without his seeking it out.

“I think it’s more like - I’ve always had this inside me,” as though without thinking, Jinki reaches up and touches the edges of his fingers to the mark. “This...reservoir in me. And I knew it was there, but not how - how big. How much it could flood the rest of me. And you’re - you’re someone I would - or, I could - do that for.” He staggers for a moment, processing his own disclosure. “I could.”

Jinki seems to lose all willpower with that answer, swaying forward, his whole body moving sharply there, then back, like a metronome switched abruptly off.

“But I could just as much...not. Does that make sense?” he asks, suddenly, desperately, and Kibum has the oddest sensation of hating the pity rising up in him.

“I understand,” Kibum says, while he really, truly doesn’t. There’s a looming pause teetering between the two of them.

“Did you ask me here just to tell me this?”

“I can - I can remove it,” if you want is what Kibum is hearing, prowling just behind his words.

“Not - not now,” Kibum says, lurching out of his mouth. “Let’s just - tonight. I can’t do it tonight. Tomorrow. Um - 5. Please. We’ll - I’ll be back then.”

Jinki doesn’t say anything, agreement or disagreement, as Kibum backs himself out towards the side door. His fingers land on the door frame as he goes to leave, some force making him want to take a glance back.

Jinki isn’t looking at him, sitting on the couch, head in his hands. His mark is half-hidden in shadow.

Kibum runs - he runs to his car, he slams the door. He doesn’t remember driving home.

--------------

They’re not sure what exact words they’ve used - shots done back-to-back will do that - but from the look Minho gives them at the end of the night, it’s maudlin as hell.

“Hyung,” Minho says. “Let’s - let’s go home. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Home,” Kibum groans. They’ve let their head drop to the tabletop a few too many times; they can feel grains of food pressed into his skin. It’s disgusting. They’re disgusting. “I don’t want to go home, stupid. Take me somewhere else.”

“Kibum - “ Minho starts. He sounds overly sympathetic. Kibum kind of hates him, except Minho doesn’t have a soul mate, and Kibum is lucid enough to recognize it’s annoying to be dragged out twice in one week, not even respecting their friend’s work obligations in light of their own emotional emergency.

They just can’t afford to lose Minho. They think if they have to explain this to Jonghyun or Taemin, they will literally shrivel into paper.

Paper, on the other hand, burns really quick. That’d be nice.

Minho’s still talking: something about sleeping.

“Noooo,” they whine. They’d prefer to be lost in this haze of slightly fuzzy guilt. The clarity of sobriety sounds like torture.

“Yeah, c’mon,” Minho says, and Kibum hates that they snuffle into his shoulder and start talking even more, all the way as they’re being dragged into the back of a cab.

“I have never hated anything more than the very concept of fate. What an asshole,” Kibum declares to both Minho and the driver. “And I want to hate him too, you know.”

“Who, Jinki?” Minho asks the very obvious question, and Kibum throws him what they want to be a withering look, but it feels more pathetic than anything.

“He shouldn’t have told me, but he had to tell me and I fucking respect him for that but it would be so much harder if he was a jerk.”

“There’s only room for one jerk in a soulmate bond,” Minho says, with a smile, and Kibum sniffs, too sensitive to take the joke with his normal grace.

“Sorry, Bummie,” he says placidly, kissing the top of their head. Minho is the worst, but also warm, and present, and Kibum gives him a hundred thousand mental credits for letting them wipe their snotty nose without another comment, just a largely stifled groan.

“I can’t not do it, you know?” they say suddenly. “If I didn’t - then I’m surrendering, right, and conceding to the universe that I was wrong all along. And I’m not - I’m not wrong, I’m right, it’s outdated, it’s flawed, it’s - it’s exploitative. Right?”

Kibum doesn’t mean to sound so lost when they ask: they really don’t.

Minho doesn’t answer, just lets Kibum tug his arm around themselves tighter.

The clock reads 1:45. It’s already tomorrow.

“Have you thought about, just, not even acknowledging it?”

“That’s stupid,” Kibum says.

“No, listen to me,” Minho is warm, and loud, and Kibum just wants to let it overlap them. “You are someone who’s never taken any direction. No one tells you what to do, Kim Kibum. Not one fucking person has ever managed to tell you what to do. What makes the universe any different, huh? Who says that you have to do what they say? Who says you don’t?”

--------------

Jinki starts every time his phone rings, or buzzes, or is present in his field of vision. He keeps hoping to see some resolution, before the appointment time comes, but that’s an optimism he wishes would go away.  

Every once in a while, he has managed to convince himself that it would be for the best if Kibum walked away, but the lie breaks apart easily.

He wants Kibum. He wants Kibum to want him back. But that’s an untenable hope, burning him from the inside out, his thoughts an almost useless extinguisher.

The day has to pass on, and on, as he’s locked in this rigor. Before he can really process it, the clock tells him he’ll have an answer shortly.

He has to breathe in, out, in, in, in , trying hard to control the expanding circle within his chest, to force it to obey his commands. The normal functioning of his body is misfiring, jerky motions of anxiety trembling at the ends of his fingers, tension grafted tight around his joints.

The doorbell rings, and it’s only in that explosive moment, that Jinki realizes oh, he’s left Kibum outside, waiting, the gate drawn down on a typically closed day. He must already think that’s an answer. But that presumes Kibum was asking , that he wanted to hear Jinki’s thoughts on the matter.

Jinki’s thoughts do not matter, not on this point.

He opens up the door with an almost noiseless gesture, and reads Kibum’s face like a jumbled puzzle. The barest impression of what could be, the suggestion of some great potential.

It hurts, like the acid burn of swallowed vomit.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course. You have an appointment,” Jinki says. The end of his voice lifts, the indication of uncertainty, the request for resolution.

Kibum will give him an answer, he knows. Some parts of his face click together, and Jinki knows it in the instant before he opens his mouth. Kibum would never have run from this, left Jinki a victim bleeding out, open and wounded.

“I do still want to get it removed,” Kibum confesses. He forces himself to look Jinki in the eye, a trace of a plea in his voice. Like he’s asking Jinki to lend him some understanding, some forgiveness.

“Kibum…” Jinki says, and he wants him to understand everything in that word, because he doesn’t think he has any more to give. He settles for something that will never be enough, will never capture the roiling turbulence of fear-respect-sympathy-loss-nausea-relief.

“It would be my honor.”

Kibum stares at him for a moment, his face once again unreadable. He blurts out:  “Can I use your bathroom for a minute?”

--------------

It’s longer than a minute that he’s in there. He spent the entire morning distracted, thinking of how he can best do this. Of how he can avoid hurting Jinki, obsessing over what he could do when he saw Kibum again. Fear for himself - the existential disquiet that’s settled in the center of him, sinking down like an ever-increasing weight.

He can imagine the sickening blend of it all, imagine it all emerging from the mark, reverberating out until he’s swarmed and swallowed up.

He’s never thought about this option before - the premise of a soulmate was absurd, but the actual presence of one? Who’s kind and supportive? What would Kibum be throwing away?

He’s not throwing away anything, is the stubborn reply in the responding breath. He’s freeing himself. He always knew it would have a price, he just never knew what the price would be.

He can do this. He can dive off this board and into the darkness of water.

When he comes out, he finds Jinki first, allows himself a moment to look at him, uninterrupted.  

“Ready,” he says, and Jinki meets his gaze without flinching. He waves him over, the device of his removal close at hand.

He hasn’t made any motion, even after Kibum sits down, and he realizes, a dart of pain glancing across his heart, he’s waiting for Kibum’s permission to touch.

Starting to move his shirt aside, Kibum holds it away long enough for Jinki to take control, to pull the fabric away and secure it down.

Jinki picks up the tool and says, achingly polite. “I’ll be starting where the mark is darkest. If there’s any pain at all, please let me know.”

“Does it hurt?” he can’t help but ask.

Jinki doesn’t look up at him at first, but Kibum catches how he breathes in. When he looks up, Kibum memorizes the look in his eyes, unwilling to let shelter.

“I won’t let that happen.”

He sounds so sure of himself, so resolute, that Kibum struggles not to flush at his respectful touch.

--------------

He puts the tool to Kibum’s skin, and he pulls the trigger.

Fire flares beneath his skin, and it takes all his control to not pass it along to Kibum, to not let it show in his face. He ducks his head down, closer than he has to be, so all that consumes his vision is the slow eradication of Kibum’s mark.

“Feeling okay?” he means to ask, but Kibum is already asking him the same.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he lies, and continues on.

--------------

Kibum can’t help but watch him, until he’s overwhelmed with shame for doing so. He wouldn’t appreciate being watched so closely if he were in his shoes.

If he were in Jinki’s shoes, though, he’s not sure he could even do this.

He forces himself to look anywhere else, and distantly processes that, true to Jinki’s word, there’s no pain. But every once in a while there’s a bare, acrid noise, and if Jinki doesn’t want to acknowledge it, he won’t either.

He expected more to it - that knowing it was Jinki, knowing the context - would change the sensation. But there’s almost no sensation at all, just the buzzing whine of the tool against his skin.

He chances another glance at Jinki, the way he’s focused singularly on the task at hand, as though nothing in the world could intrude on him at this moment.

--------------

The more he works on it, the more of the dark ink he removes, the more certain Jinki is that, for him, it is love.

Jinki has tried to tell himself it’s not, that he couldn’t love someone he’s never met, no matter what his parents have told him. But with every flaring ignition of light, he can feel the pain curdling within his chest.

But what isn’t love, if not the willingness to sacrifice? So he’ll sacrifice his own bond, for Kibum’s happiness.

He has lightened the main branch well enough, but Kibum’s skin is showing signs of redness, so he moves to the thin tendrils. In the moment he moves his hand away, he thinks of the ex-soulmate of one of his customers, looking for them - looking for the one who didn’t want him anymore, and looking for him: Jinki, as the person who severed their bond, who hadn’t finished his lease yet. He had stood and received his anger in their place.

It feels gross, a slimy growth on his heart, to have some connection with that man who threw a chair, swelled over with rage.

Belatedly, he can understand the smallest commonality between them, what it could have been like for him to wake up and realize that the person you always trusted would be there - didn’t want you.

What helps allay the distaste, is that this is their only shared feature. He won’t mistreat Kibum. He won’t lie to him, or manipulate him. He’ll do what he asks, gladly.

Silently, he continues on in his work. He knows Kibum keeps taking glances at him, but he keeps himself from looking up, focused on giving him what he wants. That’s the better expression of respect - to give him the room he wants.

--------------

The time it takes passes in a mishmash of overly fast, and slow-motion.

“There,” Jinki says. He leans back, and Kibum catches the aborted motion of his left hand, the way it jerks.

“Can I see it?”

“Of course.”

Jinki reaches for a small handheld mirror, going to stand, but Kibum stops him, lifting his own hand and stopping just before it reaches, improper, for the curve of Jinki’s hip.

“I mean - yours,” Kibum says, the ugly presumption of it tripping clumsily. He knows exactly which part of him is creating this wildness: the one that had split off, denying to the very end that Jinki’s mark was an exact match to his. If it’s still there, it insists, then this was all a mistake, the similarity leading them to unnecessary panic. He’s not sure if that’s what he wants. Yet he needs to know, all the same.

Jinki pauses and sits back down, slowly. He rolls his shoulder forward, pulls his shirt collar away. It is just enough for Kibum to recognize the newly bare skin he had memorized in a lightning moment of shock.

Kibum spins around, spies the mirror on his own, and goes to grab it. There’s a pang of pain with the motion, but not enough to stop his fingers from closing around it.

“Here,” he says, brusk, shoving it at Jinki. “I can look at mine later.”

Jinki accepts the mirror without protestation, but he makes no motion to use it, instead looking at Kibum, silent and prolonged enough that a pang of regret distends within.

“This seems like it’s more for you, than for me,” he finally says. The placidity of his tone is unnerving, like the portent of some storm on an endless sea. “I’d rather not. Here -”

He flips the mirror around, and stops looking at Kibum, a cessation that hurts Kibum more than he thought it would.

Mechanically, he accepts it and uses it to angle. His skin looks red, and he has been burnt clean of his mark. Not a millimeter of it remains, and he is both grateful and overwhelmed at the sight. The mirror shakes in his grip, almost slipping loose.

“Kibum,” Jinki says quietly. Kibum stills, not quite able to look at him yet, pulling down the mirror just enough to settle his gaze at Jinki’s neck. His apple bobs up and down; his teeth chew at his bottom lip.

--------------

The small “huh” that falls from Kibum’s lips, finally seems to indicate his acceptance. Released from his pulling grip, his shirt skids back to half-cover where his mark once was. The skin there is still red and sensitive, and Jinki is holding himself tight, to keep himself from making any reckless motion, the reflex of his own pain still throbbing. It’s the urge to offer some comfort or support to this person he’s known for a week, and been connected to his whole life.

Kibum lets the mirror drop, and drags his eyes up to meet Jinki’s at last. He can feel his smile, feel how anemic it is, and hopes it looks better than it feels.

“Thank you,” Kibum says. Despite the awkwardness, the removal, Jinki can still feel it, like the ragged wisps of a tissue, the sincere feeling underneath his words.

He wonders how long it will take for Kibum to forget him.

“Have dinner with me,” Kibum says in a rush, looking directly at Jinki’s eyes, a sharp turn from how he had avoided meeting his eyes for the last few minutes. Jinki is so consumed by his own thoughts he hardly understands. He still doesn’t, even as the words register.

“Sorry?” he responds. “I - “

“I was thinking,” Kibum bursts out, swinging his legs so that he’s sitting upright. “Ever since you told me, I’ve been thinking about what I felt about you. Love would be a lot to say, right now. But whatever I did feel, and how much I liked you, and how much of that was me, or was this,” he moves his shoulder up, the redness of his skin glowing,  “But either way I still felt something.”

“When we were talking about how stupid it all is, I meant that. And I still think it’s fucked to feel like you have to follow something from universe to decide who you can be with, but I’d just be following another arbitrary thing to hear that - to see your mark - and have that tell me who I can’t be with. So - have dinner with me. Go out with me, because - I want to do what I want to do. Be with who I want to be with, because that’s what I want. I can’t just throw away that I like you, Jinki, that I like who you are, that I want to spend time with you, on some rigid idea that you absolutely could never be who I want.”

At Jinki’s stunned silence, he seems to lose a bit of his bravado.

“I don’t want to impose on you, and it’s not a commitment. But, god, you get it, you really do, otherwise you wouldn’t make all this effort to do this for people. You’re every day letting people say fuck the universe, and I just wanted to keep doing what we have been doing: getting to know you, talking to you, just...being around you.”

“If you don’t want to eat something, then I don’t know. Take a walk with me instead,” he tests a smile, the lightest baring of teeth. “Watch the sun set. Or if you just want to take something home, it’ll be my treat. Anything, I guess - I just want to thank you, if nothing else, for not just this, but being someone I could talk to.”

Jinki wrestles his face into some acceptable expression, unsure how to parse Kibum’s invitation. A part of him wonders if he didn’t do the process right, if somehow, after so many, he missed a critical step and that’s what’s informing Kibum’s decision. That would be a betrayal of what Kibum asked for.

But if it’s not - that’s the sensible call, Jinki is well-skilled at this by now, and he can feel the absence of it on his skin still, even if he rejected looking at it directly. He took away the soul mark. Kibum is asking of his own will.

He wants to say yes - he wants to paper over the hurt before he can ever really process the damage - but it’s so much. And he is buckling beneath the weight.

“No,” he says. It surprises Kibum too, by the brief flash of hurt on his face. “No, thank you.”

“Oh,” Kibum stutters, and Jinki knows, very suddenly, that he’s broken his heart, but he hides it in an instant, puts it away into some back pocket. It will go away - Jinki knows it will. This isn’t a soulmate. The pain will pass.

And just as he’s thinking it, it seems to happen. Kibum’s face closes off into a beautiful veneer, the barest flicker of loss in his eyes before it disappears, flattened out.

“I understand,” he says, warm in an utterly reasonable and polite way. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Jinki says, and he can tell he’s nowhere near as controlled as Kibum is, but it’s passable enough, enough to carry Kibum out the door, to leave Jinki alone in his store, scrubbed raw of emotion.

--------------

He throws himself into this work.

They both throw themselves into their work.

Kibum picks up more freelance work than they can do in a reasonable day, preoccupying themselves as best they can. On the days where they don’t, where their friends break through, they throw themselves into that, noisily showing they’re fine. They have only ever been fine.

There are only so many removals in a given city. It takes time for people to trust, and Jinki intends to see himself through his six months, and then move on. Regular tattoo requests are booked. Regular removals are booked. He responds to his colleagues and makes small talk with customers, filling up all his social needs. When he can, he becomes a regular visitor at the aquarium. The docents learn his name, share with him the minutiae of the animals they care for. He learns the shark’s names, recites them beneath his breath as he watches them loop the tanks.

--------------

It’s been three weeks, and his skin has lost the redness, when Kibum notices a small dash of ink on his wrist. He rubs at it, at first idly, then more seriously, when what he takes as a pen mark doesn’t rub off.

He puts it to the back of his mind; he showers. He scrubs at his skin until it’s red, red, red, burnt and ragged and the mark is still there.

And when he wakes the next morning, it has grown, a twining, pretzeling pair of lines that have thickened the next day.

He throws up, hyperventilating against his knees, for a half a day. His phone fills up with unresponded-to texts.

Is this what has happened? Is this something the universe has deemed for him, some secondary replacement for Jinki? When he denied the best option, when he was determined to go down this path, who has been tied to him now?

His fingers shake over his phone screen, over the phone number he saved for Jinki.

What is there even to say? Why would his first instinct be to talk to him?

After a day when Kibum takes a photo of the new soul mark, near fully illustrated, only the latest in a four-day progression of images, Jonghyun lets himself in in the middle of the night. He finds Kibum lying half-asleep, half-awake on his couch, his TV blindly playing on from the program he had put on hours ago.

He had told them all about Jinki, after the celebration he had promised to have. His heart couldn’t help but spill out to Jonghyun the next morning, once the night had served its purpose.

“Kibum, what’s wrong?”

With a half-huff, half-miserable groan, he tilts his arm wrist-up and shoves his sleeve up. He twists his arms around so that there can be no mistake. Shock writes itself large across Jonghyun’s expressive face.

“Oh, fuck.”

“Yeah,” Kibum agrees.

“What do you want to do?” Jonghyun asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Jonghyun says. He settles down next to Kibum and tugs him until he falls against his slighter frame. “We’ll just wait then. Minho’ll bring some food in a bit.”

“How do you know that?” he grouses.

“C’mon, Kibum,” he presses a kiss against the crown of Kibum’s head. “I’ll call him in five minutes and he’ll be here in one. Probably with enough food for the next two weeks. He’ll haul his whole fridge over.”

He can’t really argue with that.

And, as foretold, his apartment is invaded the next day. Minho does come over, Taemin towed in his wake. Jonghyun has enough decorum to make a conscious effort to avoid fluttering against Taemin’s side, but Kibum still catches glances of their intimacy over the weekend, the easy touch of hand to hip, the brush of a kiss against a cheek.

In the dead of that night, when Jonghyun is curled up on the couch, pen in hand, notebook lamplit in the shadows, Kibum goes to him, and poses the question:

“If you woke up tomorrow with a new mark, what would you do?”

Jonghyun inhales, and seems to stop his initial response. Instead, he folds his head down, rolling it back and forth until Kibum hears it crack.

“I don’t know. I want to say that I wouldn’t change anything - I’d still love Taemin, he’d still love me. What’s on my body - or what’s not on it - doesn’t change anything.”

“You believe in soulmates,” Kibum says, irritated. “You’ve been the poster boy for years.”

“I believe in Taemin,” Jonghyun says.

Kibum scoffs.

“You were literally crying in my lap about him last month.”

Jonghyun shrugs.

“The people you love aren’t flawless. Taemin is a mess, sometimes. So am I. The point of being together isn’t to pretend that we’re not. Our messes - they sync up. Imperfect instruments on the same key.”

Jonghyun and his damn poetry, Kibum thinks in the middle of his sniffle.

“What do you want?”

Kibum squeezes his fingers into a fist, watches the knuckles tighten beneath whitened skin. What does he want? He wants to scream. He wants to cry. He wants to throw up and rip off his skin and burn. He wants to be at peace. He wants love that doesn’t insist on itself.

Jinki. He wants Jinki.

“I can’t,” he says. There’s a numbness at the ends of his toes. He makes them flex, feels the pinpricks of blood flow. “I can’t have who I want.”

“I didn’t ask who you wanted, Kibum,” Jonghyun corrects him. “I asked what you wanted. You can’t figure that out if you’re still mixing up the two.”

He is right, and Kibum can recognize it. The only way to move is forward, and it’s only going to hurt more the longer he stays where he is.

A fresh round of tears starts to rip through him, and Jonghyun shifts them both up, bracing Kibum’s weight against his, pulling his chin against his chest, his hair shifted beneath his jaw. The sound of his humming is felt more than heard, the tune drawling across Kibum’s skin, raising the soft hairs of his arms.

--------------

Jinki, too, is watching something new bloom across his skin. And from the first moment, he knows it’s not the mark he shared with Kibum.

He knows he will not be what this new person wants. He knows he will not be what this new person deserves. He has broken, irreparably, in the doing, and he is already thinking of who can remove this for him. His hands are shaking, now. He cannot trust himself to do what needs to be done.

It is this maelstrom of thoughts that keeps him moving forward. When he looks at himself in the mirror, when he joins a client to examine the new art on their body, he knows the calm on his face is an outright lie.

And then one day -

Kim.KibumCLIENT: i’m outside. if we could talk for a minute.

Kim.KibumCLIENT: i’m not asking you out again

Kim.KibumCLIENT: but i need to talk to you

It’s an echo, a discordant memory, that leads him outside, that has him seeing Kibum as though they were still strangers. A twinge: they were still strangers. He had made that happen, confirmed it when Kibum tried to have it both ways, as painful as it was.

He ushers them back; he takes the time to draw some of the shutters down, to dim the lights so that this moment is as private as it can be. He is cognizant that this could give the wrong idea, but he tries to make it obvious that Kibum can leave at any moment they choose, of their own free will.

The sideways glance of free will rakes across his emotions, bursting them to sharp life before he tamps down on them, brutal, efficient.

Kibum’s wearing long sleeves, on a rather warm day, Jinki notes - bracelets, too, silvery and sleek and new.

They’ve started talking, with a slow cadence that feels like the rumble at the top of a snowy mountain. And Jinki can only watch, marking the path that leads down to him, helpless before it.

“Firstly, I’m sorry about asking you to look at your removal. You were right. I was asking for myself, and not for you, and I was only thinking about myself. I can be selfish, you know? But I didn’t mean to - I didn’t want to hurt you. I got caught up in all the bullshit of it. On top of that I asked you out when you had just done this - this huge, unbelievable thing for me, this selfless act, and I didn’t give you time to deal with it. And I should have. So - I’m sorry.”

“And I’m pushing my luck coming to see you again, when you probably would rather never see me again,” they press on, a blink of agony rippling across their face that, perversely, makes Jinki’s heart sing, “But this thing happened, and you’re the only person who - who knows - who could give me the help that I need - “

They cut themselves off, sharpening the end of need like a knife - and struggle with their bracelets. Long, skillful fingers have turned to trembling.

For Jinki, all the knowledge he thought was ripening, unwanted, turns suddenly into something else entirely. It wasn’t what he thought at all, and he has to fight to keep himself upright as they succeed in taking off their bracelets.

“I need you to take it off,” Kibum is saying. “I don’t want to find the other person who has this. They’re not - they’re not you.”

“And I know you’ve already - you’ve already said no. But I can’t pretend like it’s not still hurting me, to not - be that person for you, but I just can’t be that person for someone else, even if I wanted to. I can’t ask you - god, I can’t ask you again to remove this for me, but I don’t know anyone else who does this. Who can help me try to move forward.”

“Kibum,” Jinki says. His mouth is dry, and all he can say again is hoarse, and plain: “Kibum.”

“See?” Kibum says. They roll out their wrist; the shirt has long sleeves, but a loose, wide collar. Their shoulder is as naked as when Jinki last saw it.

But now there are delicate lines on their wrist, a single petal in bloom, a burst of veins crackled together.  

Jinki reaches out to examine it, his own hand palm-down, and he says,

“I like it,” he admits. He lets the smile he has been holding back swim to the surface, burst out in all its need to express his joy. His relief, as he turns over his own wrist.

A striking similarity, at first glance. At the base of his, he had noticed the gentle shadowing, the suggestion of continuation. And, here, in Kibum, he finds it. Not a match - not a soulmate, not as it has always been known.

No longer an always, he thinks, giddy, anchorless and floating where his joy takes him.

--------------

“Holy fuck.”

“Yeah,” Jinki says. He stills wears a smile Kibum didn’t think he’d be so lucky to see again. He ducks down, but Kibum can still see the edge of it, the very suggestion of its overpowering happiness.

It feels like electricity crawling on their skin, holding their wrists in such close proximity. It must be their imagination, but in a week of impossibilities, Kibum is willing to flex. Jinki is examining their marks closely, an expert’s eye for details.

“They’re not identical,” he finally says. Kibum’s heart drops, but Jinki’s hand closes around their wrist. He no longer wears a wide, dizzying smile, but a softer one - one that asks for Kibum’s patience, promises him kindness.

“Look,” he says gently, and he moves so that their wrists are touching, their palms facing away in a mirror. They’re not matching, no, but the lines feed into each other perfectly, the base of one petal unfolding on Jinki’s skin, the edge of it on Kibum’s.

Kibum falls into silence, their mind whirling with suppositions and theories and fear. Hesitatingly, eager, wanting:

“What does it mean?” they say.

Jinki’s touch is reverent. He speaks with consideration:

“The ones we’re born with, the ones that have matches. I’ve known for a long time that people aren’t supposed to spend their lives together, just because they have them. You know that, too. But they do mean something, like they’re - like they’re signs. But not all signs are meant to bring you together. Sometimes signs are cautions, or informative. There’s something that reverberates between people. It - it resonates and people want to think that this person will be everything they ever dreamed of. But it just means that this person means more to them than most. It’s just a beginning. But people want it to be the end.”

“They want finality. But - look at us,” he continues, somehow even gentler, like he has an infinite capacity for enduring trials, and Kibum - Kibum is his antithesis, an absolute impossible person to ask to wait, the need bursting out of them, and that makes sense, rushing around Kibum like a reassuring whisper. What better to build something together, than a balance and counterbalance.

“What we had was one type of sign. And this is another, to show, maybe - “ he takes a breath, and Kibum thinks it’s the bravest thing he’s done, in several weeks of unbelievable courage - “This is the real sign to not be alone.”

“Jinki,” Kibum starts, and perhaps they finish too. There’s nothing else to say, no one else to be.

“Kibum,” Jinki returns, a little wry humor scratching at the catch in his voice. He’s crying, Kibum realizes, and maybe Kibum is too.

They could be doing much better things, they decide in a rush, throwing themselves headlong into this, because - because, fuck, they tried so hard to prove the universe wrong, they’re going to give it a chance to prove itself right.

They surge towards Jinki, holds his head between their hands, his chin against their palms like a tealight, and it’s another rush of movement, the tide scattering joyously against rocks, Jinki moving against them now. The distance between them vanishes in a moment, their lips meeting.

Jinki vocalizes something in his throat, some knotted-up ball of hope and fear and expectations bursting apart into separate threads. The fear rushes away, the hope lays out, no longer contained and compressed away. Expectations, surpassed, dwarfed.

Kibum kisses him. There’s nothing else to be said. They kiss him, and Jinki kisses them back. One of them walks their embrace to the couch for waiting clients (it’s Kibum - it must be, because Jinki can’t feel the floor beneath him), a clumsy series of motions to sit. Kibum has their hand on Jinki’s waist, their other hand still poised beneath Jinki’s jawline, keeping time with all the smallest motions of pleasure.

It’s only because Kibum moves, their lips dotting up his cheek until they are a breath away from Jinki’s ear, that they hear him at all.

“Go out with me,” Jinki asks softly. “And break up with me whenever you want, OK?”

He has fallen backwards, supine fully, bracketed by Kibum’s arms, looking up at their face, the both of them wondering at the strange whims of the universe. The goddamn drama of it all.

“OK,” Kibum agrees. The sweetness of Jinki’s request disarms them, leaves them defenseless and vulnerable. “To both. But stay with me first. Stay.”

Jinki nods, sealing their agreement in silence.

With this, they relent simultaneously, their bodies bowing and arching, into a resumed series of kisses that Kibum hastens to plant against Jinki’s electrified skin.

--------------

(The story makes Jonghyun cry; Kibum can see it already, and when it comes true, Jinki hardly knows him and goes to comfort, confusion not enough to override his nature.

Taemin is there and is Taemin; Kibum wouldn't ask for anything else.

Kibum is swept up into Minho’s arms and he squeezes him back, relenting, relenting, because it’s been a hell of a month and he’s been a hell of a burden, perhaps, but he made it through. Jinki held his hand all the way up from the car, and Kibum only dropped it when he had to. He knows it will still be there at the end of the night.

“Hmmm,” his eyes aren’t leaving the page opened before him.

“This is what you’ve called networking. You need to keep up with today’s trend to be able staying at the top of society.”

He finally lifted his head to meet Taemin’s eyes, “Drink your coffee. I think you’re not getting over your last night hangover.”

“Ha. Neat,” he put his phone aside, “You’re coming tomorrow, right?”

“You mean your party?”

“What else?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. There would be lots of important people coming over.”

“I should have been insulted with your statement that makes me and my achievement less important but I guess you’re right, I still have the headache from last night I refused to have any quarrel with anyone.”

“Honey, you can stick with your phone and all those youngster hype, but this is what I called networking. Don’t be too sad, I still love you.”

“Whatever. Dress up nicely.”

“You seriously doubt my wardrobe taste?”

“There’s someone I want you to meet. He might looks like a careless person, but when he stepped on any party, he’s not a joke.”

Kibum raised his torn eyebrow when the words finally hit him, “He?”

Taemin chuckles across the table, “Well, after your recent divorce, I don’t think you want to hang around someone who has more than one X chromosome in their DNA. So?”

“So what?”

“Are you interested?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s not like Kibum wanted to solitude himself from all the females as resentment of the separation with his ex-wife. Since he knew what love is back in the first year of high school, he’s open to anyone for he believes gender determined what kind of good heart people has for him. He just needs the time for himself in general, after five years he spent together with her seemed like vanished in vain because both of them cannot handle each other ego during their three years of marriage.

“It’s about time to open your heart again, no?”

“After only six months? Are you being sober now?”

“Easy there, Tiger. I’m just thinking you blamed yourself enough for something that’s already broken more than one year ago. No offense. And don’t give me that look,” Kibum pulls the best effort not to roll his eyes, “I’m not telling you to get married again, Kim Kibum. You just need to start living.”

“Am I dead already for you or what?”

“Yes. You might be here and there trying to put on the pretty mask but you’re just so dead inside. How long we’ve known each other, really? That doesn’t work for me.”

“Lecturing me doesn’t get us anywhere. Moving on it’s not that easy.”

“I know. But moving forward is doable and that’s what you should do right now.”

Kibum leaned closer to recheck whether he’s been talking with the same Lee Taemin he knew since college, “You really are still drunk, aren’t you? Since when you had those fancy words came out your filthy mouth?”

“Internet does crazy stuff on you, you don’t know that?”

Kibum scoffed and grabbed his book back though his mind is not here to continue the story line anymore.

***

Lee Jinki is not a fan of a crowd actually, unless with some alcohol involved and the plan of fooling around entailed. Still, crowd gives him freedom, to mind his own business, to decide what’s to care about and what’s not.

Since a week ago, Taemin had been pestering him to stop by his party for the opening of his new studio. Being a famous photographer, he had the needs to make the night unforgettable. Besides, the younger man had been talking about how cool and perfect his new place is.

In the ocean of stranger like this, he regrets arrived there sober.   

“Lee Jinki!!”

A bright lean man screamed from near what supposed to be the main stage. Jinki waved his hand toward him but isn’t planning to greet him yet, instead he walked closer to the buffet table near the entrance and snatched a glass of prosecco. He nods to the choice of the liquor.

“Look at you! Who said he’s not coming but dressed up like one of my model?”

“This?” he assessed himself right away, black silk shirt under the same color leather jacket matched with pair of maroon pants and white Reebok classic on both his feet, “This is nothing.”

“Bullshit. You definitely rushed home, took shower, and picked your wardrobe carefully.”

“Well, aren’t you glad I finally made it?”

“Apart of I’m quite happy about it, I was pretty sure you’re coming. Lee Jinki refusing party invitation? That only happened two years ago.”

“Shut up!” he put the empty glass back and grabbed two more, one he handed to Taemin’s hand, “Congratulation, Mr. Photographer. New studio, new adventures ahead!”

The clink sounds of the two glass meeting on the air submerged by the loud longue music from the DJ at the right corner of the stage. As usual, Jinki finished his drink in one shot, leaving Taemin shaking his head to the habit.

“In this rate, you’ll get drunk before I did my speech.”

Jinki shrugged and took another glass, “Had a rough day at the restaurant. A couple kept sending back the food to the kitchen with some ridiculous reason. I needed to drag my butt out of the back house to greet them personally.”

“Is that the reason you left early?”

“You can say that. Or more like I don’t like the thought of me missing free flow in the middle of the boring week,” he winked and Taemin only snickered, “So, what did I miss?”

“Nothing, besides the mini tour I gave to the potential important client. And simple exhibition of my previous works.”

“Knowing that I won’t be your client in any future soon and I visited one of your exhibitions before, then I can continue wandering around looking for some goodies,” Jinki raised his fourth glass now already.

“Ah, speaking about the goodies. I need to introduce you to someone.”

“Your new boyfriend?”

“I don’t date anymore, Honey.”

“Ah, I forgot you’re now the exclusive mistress of that famous dancer Kim Jongin.”

“Stop saying some gibberish, this one is a present for you because you actually made an effort to give your time to me.”

“I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

“You always said that whenever I have a lover candidate for you.”

“Because it always ended up in a mess!”

“Did not!”

Jinki gulped down his sixth glass, “Did not? The last one you brought to me, four out of five times had cried whenever I led him to the bedroom. The one before that guy, already became someone’s else wife. Which one of them that wasn’t a disaster for you?”

“Okay.. okay, I made some mistakes. Who am I to lie to you? I haven’t figured it out how to find a right man for my own.”

“Then why don’t you take this one?”

“He’s a close friend of mine! Besides, he got your favorite!”

“My favorite?”

“Yeah. Perfect pair of bow lips.”

“Prettier than that one?” Jinki put down his seventh glass while pointing across the room with his chin.

Following the direction, Taemin spun quickly just to find Kibum talking to a group of women which he presumed as new acquaintances he acquired tonight judged from the way Kibum’s standing. One and other time, he glances to the place where Taemin and Jinki are standing as if their presence is a huge distraction to the conversation he engaged with the new friends he made.

Taemin returned back to Jinki which his eyes now pass through his skull to have a better look on the guy with the cashmere turtle neck with the twinkling feline eyes. A smirk appeared immediately on Taemin’s face.

***

Kibum found it hard to continue engaged on the conversation he’s in since the sight of a man who looks like Apollo descendant intruded his vision. That guy looks so out of place but at the same time, giving the vibe that he’s born for the event like this. He doesn’t look threatening, however, those eyes, once struck with Kibum’s and he choked on the wine he’s been nursing since half an hour ago, making him spilled some of the liquid to his chest.

He thanked the universe he left the house with the black top instead any other color.

Though he’s definitely not one of the models Taemin has worked with before, the quality of this man’s look can easily passed for one. There’s something about him that hooked Kibum since the very beginning, forgetting what he convinced himself earlier to make tonight only for business purpose and stay around that circle. His initial plan ruined easily when he caught himself glancing more than three times in the span of ten minutes.

“Ah, really? That would be great. Here’s my name card. Contact me whenever you want,” he took out some card from his wallet, “Now if you excuse me, I need to go to the restroom.”

And with that, Kibum retreated himself from the crowd to calm himself. Once he reached the sink, he splashed some water to his face. Kibum slapped his cheeks several times, this is not happening.

He’s not seventeen anymore. But the drum rolled banging inside his chest is telling him the contrary. Having stupid crush is not his type of playground anymore. After some serious relationships ended up in not so nice break ups back in college and one failed marriage, he thought he would be more cautious and even became numb to this kind of feeling. Maybe it’s just the lust. And the neediness started build up in him after one year absence of attention. Yeah, maybe that’s the reason. Get a grip, Kim Kibum.

After spending what have been like forever in the bathroom stall, Kibum thought it would be safe for him to get out and mingle again. He’s searching for Taemin right away, secretly hoping the man with the maroon slack still tagging around. Nevertheless, Taemin seems unlikely to be found within the crowd. He kept looking to his muse, because there’s usually he would stand and explain some of his works, but those models are scattered here and there and no one has Taemin on their arms.

“Where the heck is this ungrateful kid?”

“You like what you saw?”

A deep soothing voice from his side startled him to after life if it’s not to death. He cocked his head to the source of force driven him crazy only by the sound, Kibum stepped back instinctively once he realized their distance is closer than he calculated back in his hazy mind.

“Earlier. Don’t tell me you’re not looking to my direction.”

“Wow. Such amount of confident,” Kibum snickered whilst inside he’s flipped upside down.

“Well, to begin with, I wouldn’t be this confident if I didn’t catch a beautiful human being like you giving me those intrigued glances every two minutes.”

“Oh, how smooth. How many glasses did you take to be this gallant?”

“So you did look at me.”

Jinki chuckles and when he caught Kibum just an inch before flustered as if someone found out his biggest secret.

“It’s a best friend instinct. When a very threatening man with this all manipulative vibe hanging around your best friend, you cannot just stand still and act as if nothing happened. I don’t want something bad happened with Taemin.”

Jinki closed their distance a little bit, aiming his mouth dangerously to Kibum’s ear, puffing hot breathe that turning Kibum’s whole body into stupid giddy sensation.

“Oh really? What about you, then? Want something bad happened to you?”

Usually, Kibum is not in favor of including himself in any conversation buttered all over with innuendo. But this man, changed every single thing he believed in less than five minutes. Especially when he can still feel him huffing on his neck though it’s wrapped completely under the fabric of his knitwear.

“I guess you took more than five. This one is so much better than your first defense.”

“Seven to be exact.”

“You better take care of yourself, Dear Stranger, the party just started and knowing Taemin for years, this is nothing but a teaser.”

Jinki doesn’t wait any clue to press his hip to Kibum’s side, “Why don’t you help me to take care myself? Or do I interrupt you?”

Kibum observed the face of the man next to him, he looks so beautiful even under the poor light, “You must have taken a time-management class very diligently.”

He poked Jinki’s nose quickly, both cannot deny the spark in such limited touch.

“Just being efficient, I don’t see the point to waste limited time for unimportant business.”

“What’s exactly unimportant business here?”

“Working on my uncooperative brain at the moment to arrange some words together trying to get into your pants while I’m pretty much sure it’s going to happen anyway without such futile effort.”

Jinki ducked his head to fix his hair. Little did Kibum know, he tried to hide his eyes while observing the latter’s reaction.

Kibum just beamed into wide smile, still doesn’t believe on what he just heard, “Aren’t you one of a kind with fancy mouth?”

“How about you can tell yourself once you get a taste on that?”

“Interesting.”

“You think so?”

Jinki kept staring intensely to Kibum. After the cute little dimples adorned the corner of his mouth a while ago, Jinki found it so hard to stay away from his flawless face.

“Sort of. Never in my life had I heard this kind of lame pick-up lines,” Kibum scoffed to control his grogginess.

“Well, someone gotta take the chance to try that out. Up until now, the success rate is still 50-50.”

“You tried this before?” Kibum’s almost shrieked toward the fact, “Who’s this poor soul that had to endure this kind of torture?”

“In front of you,” Kibum’s face turned into a mixture of disbelief and amusement, “This guy was such a talker and he got me under his skin in no time.”

“Wow. Tell me who talked about exes during their first encounter.”

“No one. But you’re beyond what people around me would describe as a perfect human being.”

“Looks like you picked up a lot from him.”

Jinki laughed, pinching his eyes into a perfect crescent, Kibum needs to brush off the urge to cup his face right away, “Let’s just say I’m a fast learner.”

“That’s actually good to put in your curriculum vitae.”

“I didn’t know this require such an application.”

“Oh, I usually don’t,” Kibum’s head fell to the back a little bit while he massaged his neck, “I did that only for the strong candidates.”

“Interesting.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“I don’t have opinion about that since I only saw you,” Jinki wriggling his wrist to check the time, “For about an hour so far.”

“Then we need to get to know each other more.”

The smirks curved on Kibum’s bow lips sent chills down Jinki’s spine. He slipped his hand on the other waist and rested it there after Kibum doesn’t make any protective gesture.

“So, here’s the thing. Who am I talking with this past fifteen minutes?”

“You may call him Kibum.”

“Ah, Kibum,” his voice ghosting above his cheek, “I like the way I rolled that name. But I can do more with my tongue, just so you know.”

“Is that an invitation Sir…”

“Jinki. I go by Jinki.”

Kibum arched his back slightly, purposely stretched his neck too much just so his milky skin peeked behind the cashmere, “Is that an invitation Sir Jinki?”

“If you said so, Dear..”

“Then I know somewhere perfect to get to know each other better.”

“Do you even know this place?”

For Jinki, Taemin’s new studio just looked like an old barn with stone, woods, and glasses for the aesthetic purpose. He has no idea actually, it’s the first time he hang out to such place besides his house, his kitchen, and bars.

“Oh, please. I sold this place to Taemin two months ago.”

***

Kibum didn’t know for sure what brought him here. Maybe the lust, maybe the lack of affection he experienced since his separation, or the needs of attention he craved during his sabbatical period. But since he closed the door of that main hall to the small green house at the back of the building, he couldn’t keep his hand for himself.

The other man of course didn’t help at all since what he’d been doing is basically groping Kibum’s pert globes or nuzzling to his side or mapping the hidden surface along his spine.

Anyway, like Kibum minds at all.

Once they sat at the wooden bench placed against the cold stone wall – Kibum basically thanked himself for suggesting Taemin’s interior designer to put some cushion on it – Jinki attacked those inviting cupid lips without further ado. Kibum’s giggles suppressed back to the down of his throat, he’s unable to laugh at his pathetic desire for Jinki’s velvety mouth melted his entire defense mechanism. He just naturally opened his mouth slightly wider when Jinki surprisingly carefully prodded its surface with his tongue.

“Hmmphh,” Kibum hissed in between heated domination battle, “You indeed have particular skill with your tongue.”

Jinki pulled back a little bit just to give him some space to nip at Kibum’s lower lips, “This is not even 50% of my capability, Sweetheart.”

Kibum yelped inaudibly when strong arms brought him settled on Jinki’s lap. The moonlight fell right on Jinki’s face from the glass roof, giving it mesmerizing picturesque shades. Kibum cupped his cheeks and devour what he left before. Jinki’s hand traveling haphazardly on Kibum’s back, and ended up grabbing handful of his ass leaving him squealing.

Again, like Kibum minds at all.

“Shit,” Jinki cussed when Kibum started going south and nibble on his exposed neck. The man lapping here and there, occasionally stopped a little bit longer to suck at his Adam’s apple, sending his soul ascending to heaven.

“Ah!” a perfect mixture of groan and moan slipped out Kibum’s mouth when Jinki rolled his hips against him. The sounds excited Jinki to move more erratically to satisfy both restrained needs. As if they’re dancing partner for years already, Kibum acknowledge the pace and started grinding back.

“Ugh, Kibum..”

The said man just arched his back and brought Jinki’s to his chest. Jinki secured both his hands to Kibum’s slender waist and inhales deeply of the other man’s scent. They were like pieces of puzzles finally clicked to each other, after wait for too long in such desperation.

Kibum detached themselves for a moment to look at Jinki’s eyes, pretty eyes that reflects his own craving, pretty eyes that drown him since the very second he drop his gaze on it. Jinki never found himself fascinated this much among his one night stands life. He realized Kibum is something when he doesn’t only want to suck every single inch of skin beneath the clothes but also handling it with care as if he’s the most precious and fragile ancient Egypt treasure.

Jinki about to lean further to capture Kibum’s lips but the hands on both sides of his cheeks restrain him to do so.

“I cannot do this.”

“Why?” even if he doesn’t have a mirror before him, Jinki can definitely see the frown fell upon his own face, “You don’t want this as much as I do?”

Kibum shakes his head again before rested his forehead to Jinki, “No, no, you’re beautiful, Jinki. So beautiful I couldn’t believe myself that this is real. But I’m not supposed to do this to you. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” Jinki asked again, suddenly terrified by the reality he’s about to face, “You have a boyfriend already? Girlfriend?”

Kibum pecked his nose slowly before flashing his hand above his eyes. Something cracked inside his chest when Jinki saw the silver band on his ring finger.

“You’re married.”

“It’s been only six months after a horrible divorce.”

“So? What’s holding you up?”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

Jinki rolled his eyes before stating the matter of fact here, “I’m single and you’re a widow. Whom are we going to hurt here?”

“You, Jinki. You. As much as I want you to continue what you’re doing down there,” both of them looking to the point where their crotch glued to each other, “Yes, the way your little prince been nudging my ass frantically had been driving me crazy I wanted to ruin your expensive silk shirt and suck your collar bones for the rest of the night, believe me. I just don’t want this to only because I’m sexually deprived.”

“So what do you want?”

Jinki is not the type who compromised during heated hour like this. But strangely, for Kibum, he’s willing to do it at least for once.

“I want you when I want you. Not when I need a release.”

Kibum removed himself from Jinki’s laps, he couldn’t help to chuckle when he notice the obvious bulge on the other’s southern region. He fixed his hair and adjusted the belt that slightly uneven after some battles of friction. Jinki looks disappointed at some point, but Kibum somehow know he’s not mad with the decision.

“A correction. The prince is not that little, if you know what I mean.”

Kibum let out wholeheartedly laughter and kissed Jinki slow and warm on the cheek, inhaling Jinki as much as possible.

“Of course I know what you mean. Or should I say, I felt?”

It’s Jinki turn to laugh this time, the way it sounds sent Kibum’s hand directly to his bangs and ruffles it messy.

“Now if you allow me, I need to go home and call my kid. It’s around the time she finished her school.”

Wow, a man with a baggage, Jinki sudden thought. But at least he admit Kibum’s a man of courage to go this far, unlike this ex-boyfriend he had that just a lump full of cowardliness. That makes Kibum more than his other flings. He might be too soon to fall, but he doesn’t care because Kibum seemed worth to fight for.

“When will I see you again?”

Kibum stopped by the threshold of the green house’s door. He turned his head and sincerely smiled to the stunned Jinki who sit alone by the bench.

“Spring. I’ll see you again on spring.”

Jinki smile to himself and scratch the back of his head that is not itchy at all.

“Spring is good.”

***

Gwiboon’s sulking on her own, stomping her feet while moving and trying so hard avoiding Jinki’s eyes. Most people would get boring easily if the opposite person they talked to is ignoring them. But Jinki, Jinki’s definitely not most people. He enjoyed his time there looking at working hard Gwiboon. She loved whatever she’s doing and that sends him lots of strange feeling. A good strange feeling.

He pulled out the little sketch book he always had on his pocket, snatching a pencil from Gwiboon’s desk and starts copying her side view on it. Every single hair strands, neckline, her jaw, all are drawn perfectly in such limited time. While he enjoying the sight before him to complete his quick doodles, his phone’s buzzing madly, ruining the tranquil air wrapped them.

“Yes, Jinki’s speaking! Oh, Mr. Kim! What can I help this time?”

Gwiboon tried so hard not to eavesdropping but the struggle is real when the only sounds ringing in the room is his clear voice.

“Really? That’s great! Really really great! Thanks for calling me in advance! I’m already at the university don’t worry, I’m heading to your office now.”

He’ll be gone soon. Why does this feel not right?

“No, it’s okay. I’ll see you in a moment. Thank you very much once again!”

When the conversation seemed finished, Gwiboon can hear Jinki’s huffing to the atmosphere and she sense disappointment out of him. Through the small mirror steady on her desk, she can see he shuffled on his seat and ready to leave.

“Gwiboon.”

“Hmm.”

“I need to go right now. But I’ll definitely back aft–– “

“This design needs to be delivered to the board at lunch.”

“Whatever. I’ll see you later! Good luck with the mannequin! I love the lace color.”

“It’s not lace. It’s embroidery.”

But Jinki’s already dashed outside the room when Gwiboon finished her words. And the room feels emptier than ever when not even his trace of perfume stayed there. She shrugged her shoulder and moved to the end of her desk to measure some ribbon. That’s about the time she found a paper alone near the corner.

‘You know what this girl needs? A smile on her face. Because the Kim Gwiboon I know is way much prettier when she smiles. Mind to let me know how the design goes? :)’

Under her flawless portrait on the paper, Jinki wrote his number. Seeing that, her soul had been taken away in between excitement and sorrow.

***

“They love it! Two of them are presented earlier on the next board meeting and they assigned me to fill the first walk and also the last.”

“Who is this?”

“You said you want to know how the design goes!”

He put down the cigarette and kept it back inside its box while his face turned into a blossoming rose, “Gwiboon?”

“Who do you expect?!”

“I just surprised, I thought you won’t calling me.”

“Me too.”

Long pause fill up the awkwardness between them, until Jinki tried to break it, “So it means you’ll stay in the studio until midnight again?”

“Guess so. I can only go to the studio on Wednesday and Friday. And Saturday morning. But lots of detail needs to be finished.”

“Why don’t you go there every day? Working two or three hours after the class won’t hold you to go back early, well, at least not until midnight,” Jinki being his original himself, trying to make everything more bearable with a better schedule.

“The other day I got a bis – never mind.”

“What?”

“It’s not only me on the studio! I don’t want people take a look at my design! It’s not finished yet! It looks like people caught me naked.”

“I’ve visited you yesterday, so that meant I saw you naked?”

“You pervert head hog!”

Long haul of laughter spread through the line, not only to Gwiboon’s ear, but also to her heart. It feels great. It feels like home.

“You are the one who said that. I just emphasize the possibility. No, I just made a confirmation. Not my fault.”

“Cut it off.”

“As you wish.”

“What are you doing?”

“Me? Smoking.”

“And cut that off too! It’s bad for you!”

“I’m not even had a chance to light it up! Your call was kind of interrupting.”

“That’s good. I’ll make sure to call you every two or three days to check on you. Just so you know, the nicotine stays in your lips.”

“How do you know? You’re not even smoking!”

“I can taste it the other time.”

Warmth fills up his hollow chest. He spent the entire week to work on his final project and help Taemin writing some lyrics to his performance. To sum it up, he’s exhausted as hell. But listening to the words leaving Gwiboon’s lips, he felt like he could climb another mountain right now.

“Oh are you sure? Want to double check it again?”

Jinki is not even next to her, but still, she got blushed all over her cheeks, “You and your pervert brain can spend entire years in hell!”

He cracks right away, “I’ll stop by every Wednesday and Friday then.”

“Nah, you got your own thing to finish. I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, you’ll be fine and I won’t. You’ll never know how it feels to be a man coming home before dinner and knowing the woman he cares about still out there doing things for a living.”

Her throat strangled by invisible rope. Silence cut everything Gwiboon’s trying to say.

“So yeah, see you next Friday?”

“Oh,” she finally got her mind back in the system, “Well, whatever. Just don’t back up right away after you found it boring. I won’t entertain you at all, busy stuff.”

“How can I get bored with you, seriously?”

And since that weekend, after his studio’s finished, he brought his laptop and sketch book, dragged his feet to the farthest building at the university. He just sat there and continued clicking here and there, sometimes peeking over Gwiboon and just looking at her when his eyes got tired staring at the screen nonstop.

Sometimes Gwiboon already waiting with a packed dinner for him. Sometimes Jinki pushed the studio’s door a little bit late, with her favorite coffee set in hand.

Sometimes Jinki is too lazy to make a presentation layout and just enjoying Gwiboon’s side view. Sometimes Gwiboon not touching her works at all and just peeking on his screen or capturing his serious face with her Polaroid.

***

And with that, people start talking again. They talk when Gwiboon stopped by to architect’s department studio design both hand carried packed lunch. When she dropped one on Jinki’s desk and the other to his brother’s. They talk when Jinki’s board shoulders appeared so often in the fashion design department. When he casually ruffled Gwiboon’s hair after the class and they went together to Jinki’s basement.

Nobody needs another radio announcement or neon box advertising to notice they are seeing each other. Minho and Taemin don’t even bother to confirm, as well. But they are not Jonghyun.

“You doing well, lately?”

“Hmmm.”

It’s dinner time in their house and the second week of the month, Gwiboon’s home and Jonghyun found his chance to ask her about all those rumor he had been buzzed off.

“Your project is okay?”

“It’s great,” she shoved another pile of beef salad in her mouth, eyes keep staring to her phone.

“I’ve been heard some gossips.”

“It’s gossip. You know you shouldn’t listen to that crap.”

“Well, I won’t listen if that’s not about you.”

“It’s always about me, huh?” she put down her phone, eyes locked with her brother, “Which one do you trust? Those stupid people or me?”

“I trust my friends Gwiboon.”

“So you don’t believe me because I am apparently not one of your friend?”

“Jinki is my friend.”

“So? Did he tell you something?”

“He didn’t. That’s why I asked you.”

“Your logic is not pretty good sometimes.”

“It is pretty good when half of your classmate said that your sister and your friend making out here and there around the campus.”

She shot her head up and what she found makes her writhing silently. Jonghyun’s not angry. Jonghyun looks care.

“Are you going out with him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you dating him?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not the answer I want to hear, Gwiboon.”

“I really don’t know, Jong! We don’t define what is this happened between me and your friend!” Gwiboon finds it hard to just say Jinki’s name like that, “Not everyone smart enough or brave enough to call it something, you know!”

She’s tossing the fork on her hand to the plate, appetite gone in flash. Jonghyun didn’t tilt his head a bit, making Gwiboon more uncomfortable with the atmosphere.

“This is my friend, Gwiboon. You don’t just like people and hanging out with them without checking them whether you’re on the same page and then after you got bored you just left! I’ve told you since the beginning. Jinki’s my friend! He’s a nice guy!”

“And you think I don’t deserve nice guy? You think the best choice that I could have is random guy who treat me like a whore or someone who’s sexist enough to go to jail?! Am I that low in your eyes, Jong?”

When Jonghyun saw her all torn and sincere, he mentally burns himself in hell, “It’s not like that, Gwiboon.”

“It’s always been like that! Being judgmental and hating every single thing I’ve done! I don’t know where exactly my fault is. And I can’t even like a guy whose kind enough to bring me a cup of coffee in the middle of night without asking anything after that?”

“Kim Gwiboon, listen to me.”

“No, you listen to me, brother of mine. I am as afraid as you of losing him if something unwanted happened in the future between me and him. If you care enough all this time, I am not as cold as bitch that you pictured of me in your head. I have no one to run whenever all those gibberish that you called gossip is way too far and ridiculously make no sense to handle. But he’s there. Suddenly he’s there, doesn’t even care about all those craps and still give me the perfect genuine smile even when my own brother doubts me.”

“Gwiboon, it’s no—“

“It’s not like that? Is that what you want to say?”

“I told you to listen to me!” this time Jonghyun started to lose his temper and raised his voice, shut Gwiboon down right away, “Jinki is my friend. You know that. He is a person that I care a lot, as much as I care about you.”

Gwiboon looks she’s not ready with everything that he had in mind.

“Yes, Kim Gwiboon. All this feud and everything we had doesn’t stop me to care of you. Never in a million way, and because of that reason alone, have I known that this time is different than before. Different than all those bastard trying to hook up with you. And that’s the reason why I have no heart to let you ruin yourself.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“Jinki is going to graduate soon. And who the hell knows what would he did after that, he might go to the end of the world to do another volunteer work or being busy in his new office. He’s going to leave eventually. And I don’t want you to feel to be left behind again. Not after what I did to you.”

So Jonghyun has no idea about me leaving the university?

Gwiboon bite her lips, contemplating whether he should tell Jonghyun the truth or not.

“Jong,” the latter is surprised, it’s been so long since Gwiboon called him that way, “I don’t care he might leave next month, or next year, or maybe tomorrow. At this point I don’t even care if what’s going on between me and him right now is real. This is new for me, as you said before, yes, I admit that this is different than before.”

“Gwiboon, how many times should I tell you, I don’t care about you might hurt him, it’s the opposite that I am worried now. The fact that he might hurt you when he left.”

“If that what is your concern, I’ll make sure I’m the one who left him and not the other way.”

“Kim Gwiboon, this is not a game.”

No, it’s not, Jong. I am the one who’s going to leave him and might break his heart. I am the criminal.

“You know I don’t play game. Thank you for your concern, but I think I’m old enough to play safe and handle my feeling.”

Gwiboon wiped her mouth quickly and retreated to her room before Jonghyun stopped her for another argument. Before her tears spilled out the brim of her eyes.

I’m sorry, Jong. I didn’t mean to make you lose him when I did.

***

“Can you move a little bit?”

Jinki shifted closer to Gwiboon instead further away, forcing the latter gritted her teeth. He broke into huge laughter before peck her cheek and gave her the space she needed.

“What the heck?”

“I’m sorry, but your upset expression is my new Achilles heels now. I just can’t help myself about that.”

“You need to do something about that. I am begging you. Before all these girls broke into my locker and burn everything inside, ruined the whole project that I’m working on.”

“And you need to stop imagining something. It’s not gonna happened and it’s not healthy.”

She cocked her head to the side, Jinki grins like a five year old with sugar rush.

“Let me tell you something. I’ve been received dead animals on my studio’s desk. I got calls from unknown number threating to kill me every once in a week because apparently I am a bitch and they are fucking coward without balls and guts. But now, I have some important business to take care before the beginning of the next month. So. Can you not?”

“Not what?”

“Not doing exactly what could wake up their inner hyena to do all those stupid stuffs I just mentioned!”

“Like this?”

He closed the distance once again and rested his lips on her cupid bow ones, pushed back every argument hanging on the tip of her tongue.

“Love birds!! Get a room!!”

They parted and turned to the source of annoying voice just to fins Taemin beaming into wide smirk across the hall.

“Mind your own business, kiddo!”

Jinki shouted to his brother who rolled his eyes before he continued walking to the direction of the library.

“I am so done with you!”

“Really? That fast?”

He darted his eyes to down south and Gwiboon’s cheeks cannot hide the blushed anymore.

“Creepy old pervert! I’m leaving!”

Jinki cracks on the spot but not losing his chance to grab her wrist, stopping her for going somewhere else.

“Can you stay for another 15 minutes?”

“I have an appointment with my supplier and you said you need to fix the structure calculation before this weekend. And also..”

“Also?”

She sighs while slipped the straps of the bag on her shoulder, “Jonghyun might be here anytime. Just like Taemin.”

“So what?”

“He is your best friend!”

“And he’s your brother.”

“Who doesn’t even care that I’m exist.”

“Kim Gwiboon.”

“Lee Jinki.”

“Are you keep it secret from Jonghyun?”

“No, he already knew.”

“So?”

“I just don’t want to make everything more complicated. And awkward. I’m doing you a favor here.”

“Gwiboon, I don’t need your help. I’m okay.”

“But I’m not.”

Both of them are sinking into silence. And without asking, Gwiboon understands how disappointed Jinki at this second.

“Jinki, all my life has been a cold war. I know this is hard and too much to ask, but I hope you have a big heart on it. For once in my life, I want to forget everything and believe only on the reality that I want to acknowledge.”

“I understand. But if you just want to care about what you believe, why you bother to care about other’s opinion?”

“Because I care about you.”

He couldn’t believe what he just heard. When he shot his head up, the girl in front of him looks so vulnerable.

“I’ll see you on Friday. Good luck with the structure stuff.”

And she just walked away, not giving him a chance to hug her or even bid goodbye.

***

Two people lying on a dark indigo fluffy carpet while their head on the bed, or more like thick mattress, with their mind wander in their own track. Above them, a simple handmade pendant lamp is hanging on the open wooden structure ceiling. Sun’s seeping through the small window, making a great shadow on the wall beside which occupied by tall wooden cabinet where books and zombies figurines march neatly.  

What makes Gwiboon loves to spend her time here is not only because of the slanted eyes boy is laying next to her, busy reading a quite thick book. The atmosphere inside this sanctuary soothing her mind, high ceiling released her stressed feeling inside her chest.

“You should put something green on that cabinet.”

“Hmmm.”

“Small succulent in colorful pot won’t hurt.”

“I have no time taking care of any plant.”

“Cactus only need water every one or two weeks, idiot.”

When her elbows stick onto his ribs, he could only flinch, but not planning to stop reading or whatsoever.

“Tell me three things I don’t know about you.”

This time, she got his attention. He put down the book on his stomach and turned his head to his right just to find Gwiboon staring right to the ceiling, fingers intertwined resting on her chest.

He chuckled then, discarded the book and rolled himself, supporting his head with one arm, the free one decided to play with Giwboon’s fringe, “What kind of thing?”

“Anything. Something secret. Something special that only you and your family know. Or even something you kept for yourself.”

“Hmmm. Let’s see,” Gwiboon leaned to her side so she’s currently facing Jinki, tint pink smudged on her cheek, “But in exchange you need to tell me three things about you.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

She smirked then lifted her head a bit so her pouty lips can land perfectly on Jinki’s full ones, “Promise.”

As if hypnotized by her action, he opened his secret drawer right away, “I’ve dyed my hair pink.”

For Gwiboon, even though Jinki’s well known in their circle, she still presume the latter is someone with reserve personality and far for her wild imagination.

“You would never pull it off. No way.”

“Yes way. But it only last for maybe around four months? Or five? I don’t remember,” he picked his phone and roamed to his gallery, “It’s about the same time when Taemin decided to turn his hair purple.”

“I bet you looked so sexy back then,” Gwiboon stretched her hand to brush Jinki’s hair which then the latter stopped her hand with his mischievous grin.

“Nothing beat you when it comes to being sexy.”

She rolled her eyes but failed to hide her blush, “Stop being cheesy! Now facts number two!’

Jinki could only laugh and messed up her front bangs again, a new habit he developed lately whenever the latter around, “When I was in Brazil, I wasn’t exactly live there for three months.”

“What do you mean?”

“I stayed in Argentina for a month and two other weeks in Chile.”

“Wow.”

“You do fascinated by that?”

“No, not even slightly. But the fact all of your fans out there assumed you’re volunteering slash surviving in the heart of Amazon forest for three whole months is indeed really fascinating.”

“Which fans? I’m not even famous in my department.”                

“I’m actually at the point feeling confused whether you are too naïve or too cocky. Then can you explain why people were extremely happy when the rumor about you ditched me broke out?”

Gwiboon’s heart almost dropped to the ground when Jinki’s eyes torn a bit before kissed her nose in flash, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s their right to hate me. I am not that kind either to them,” she tried so hard to shrug his concern, “Now the last one.”

“This is embarrassing.”

“As long as it’s not you telling you’ve been stay behind the bars, I’m okay with that!”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I am not that wild. It’s happened when I’m on 5th grade. I once cried when I got 2nd place in the class.”

And when the girl next to him burst into one massive laugh, he could only blast sheepish smile as his cheeks felt a lot warmer than it supposed to be.

“Now’s your turn.”

“Lee Jinki, the best model student ever, everyone!”

“Enough with me,” Jinki’s sulking and leaned back again to the carpet, hands folded in front of him like a five year old, “I told you that’s embarrassing. Taemin has been mocking me my whole life. You better not join force with him.”

“But that is so cute. I can imagine you, cheeks puffing, eyes almost gone, bawling secretly on your bed, face drenched with tears.”

“I wish I hadn’t told you that!”

“That means you’re human, baby,” she placed both her hands to his cheeks and turned his face to make those eyes level with hers, “I was a nerd, too. I have no friend besides Jonghyun and my books until middle school.”

“There’s no such thing in the world.”

“You can check it out. Ask Jonghyun. But probably he would say nothing and telling you that you’re wasting your time.”

“Let’s say it’s true, what else?”

“I’m closer to my grandmother than to my parents,” her throat suddenly felt a lot drier.

“I guess that happened to Jonghyun, too.”

“How do you know that?”

Jinki’s smile looks so sincere plastered on his glowing face, “Both of you are alike more than you realize. And choosing to stay in the dorm rather in your own house? That should at least speak something.”

“Seriously, you don’t stalk him behind my back, do you?”

“Don’t be jealous, baby,” he winked and got his forehead flicked by Gwiboon, “Is your life that boring? I need to hear something ridiculous.”

“I’m not a superstar like you. My life is full of hate and judgment.”

“Not stupid things like wet your pants? Stealing your parent’s money to buy new Barbie? Or got into fight with some other bitches?”

“I’m leaving soon, Jinki. And there’s no way whatever happened between us gonna last.”

Those words are already hanging at the tip of her tongue. However, when she’s looking at Jinki, those warm coffee color orbs shut her down, threaten her with the most horrible moment when finally their times together ruined.

“Fine. But promise me you won’t laugh at me?”

This time, Jinki’s the one who pecked her lips, “Promise.”

“I took my dog as my high school prom date.”

“Well, the story about an ugly duckling turned into swan is not a joke.”

She slapped his arm hard, “You promise not to laugh!”

“Am I looked like I’m laughing now?!” Gwiboon is pouting but she’s struggling not to laugh at the moment, “Is there no one to ask back then?”

“Minho and I broke up two weeks before prom. He got a new girl and I had no one. So I made a tuxedo for my dog and bring him to the party.”

“And that’s what we called secret. I always thought you are this popular chick everybody adores since you were young.”

“I told you I was a nerd, an outcast who suddenly decided to become a spoiler brat and selfish bitch. I think Minho is the only friend I keep until now.”

“You can keep me, though.”

“How can I keep everyone’s favorite just for myself?” Gwiboon turns her head ahead, staring back to the ceiling, “I’m done being selfish. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Being selfish is okay sometimes. You said we’re human, right?”

She closed her eyes when she caught by the corner of her eyes, Jinki fixed his eyes on her, “We are like a group of dysfunctional people,” she blurted out once he’s back to Jinki.

“I don’t think so,” he played with her hair again, leaned a bit and tuck it behind her ear and making Gwiboon’s almost choked with his sweet scent in such distance, “I’m about to finish my final project then started my master degree soon. And just so you know, this ding dong here is working rather fine lately.”

Jinki looked down and bashfully grinned making Gwiboon slapped him once again, “It’s not what I mean, pervert!!”

It’s hard not to be flustered by such a comment. Especially when she realized her heart beat faster whenever Jinki made that face, the ridiculously adorable dork, literally Jinki’s being himself.

“Most people get to know each other first. Then when they feel like it, they kissed. And probably make out. But we’re having it backwards. We kissed. Some unintentionally, some planned, well, we kiss a lot just to sum up. Then later on, here we are, peeling out ourselves layer by layer.”

“Well, we aren’t common people at the first place, just in case you forgot.”

She really could just sigh, “What are we, really?”

Jinki shifted uncomfortable before convinced himself this is what both of them wanted at this moment, “Two people enjoying each other presence and silently hoping time would just stop like this.”

Gwiboon sighed, maybe too loud, making Jinki frowns again, mind battling whether he said the wrong thing or not.

“You’re right. Maybe I just want to stay like this forever.”

“Staring at the ceiling?”

“Of course not, stupid,” She turned and caressed his cheek in a slow motion, “Feeling you breathing next to me just to make sure I am not alone.”

His hand wrapped hers and dragged it right onto his chest, “You will never be alone again as long as you let me be around you.”

Two or three months ago, Gwiboon might be bet all of her possession to hear Jinki said such things like this. But when he’s finally here, not only looking to her direction, but also give her the best smile she ever seen and hold her hand so tight, she actually wanted to mop her heart and curse the universe for playing with her feeling and time.

Mostly to the time for being such a tease.

“Promises are made to be broken.”

“Wanna bet?”

Before Gwiboon could retail some words in her mind, Jinki’s lips already pressed to hers. Slow and careful, delicate like a ballerina, they’re dancing with her soft flesh, step by step tickling her heart. She gave up under his touch and returned the favor, kissing him back. This time inside her head, fireworks do appear. But they explode together with dynamite, one to another.

They parted away when both of them lack of air, but apparently Jinki doesn’t give her time to rest her heart by sneaking his hand under her back, scooping her a little so their chests pressed tighter than before and his full lips back to claim her pouty ones.

“Jinx, what if this is just a dream?”

“Then I refused to wake up.”

“I mean it. What if, suddenly we were apart?”

“I’ve been there and it tortures every possible part of me. I won’t cross that path again, Gwiboon.”

“That’s not answering my question.”

“Are you seeing another man right now?”

“What? No!”

“Your parents set you into some arranged marriage?”

“Of course not!”

“Are you dying?”

“Jinki, you are nuts! I’m not sick!”

“Then everything can wait. But not this.”

His face is completely hovering hers now. And Gwiboon barely sane to compose anything in her mind.

***

The pain stings her head disturbed her sleep, force her to flex opened the feline eyes and move her damned limb. However, the view that greets her is way far from familiar. Outlining the sun ray seeped into the cold room with her barely functional eyes, she realized she’s not in her dorm. Or in her home.

“…”

The lump covered by the grey blanket on her left moving up and down in a sluggishly pace. She unwrapped herself extra carefully not to make sound more than 10 decibel. But the room is too poor lit when she left the mattress to find her blouse. So after 10 minutes of groping on the dark, she gave up and head to the wardrobe – the only thing she remembered where’s it located – and grabbed pair of boxer and random t-shirt.

Thank God her jeans are still visible enough to be discovered. Tiptoeing, she snatched her shoes, phone, and purse in one go before reaching the door, slowly pulled it and slipped herself in less than 30 cm opening, closed it really slowly in an attempt to not produce any noise that might wake up the owner of the house.

“Good morning, Princess,” her heart dropped to the ground and Taemin just raised his mug to salute her, successfully making her failed miserably to avoid the walk of shame parade, “Going somewhere?”

“Can you lower your voice?”

“Why do I need to tone down my voice in my own house? Do I look like a thief?”

“Ssstt! You might wake up everyone, you idiot!”

“The only one that hasn’t woken up is my brother behind that door. I already feed Eve and my mom already went to the market and back.”

“Your Mom’s home?!”

“Why wouldn’t she?” he laughs since he knew why she screamed and more because Gwiboon’s terrorized face is too funny, triggers him to mess with her even further, “I wonder what happened last night that makes both of you woke up so late. My brother didn’t throw a party inside his room, did he?”

“Lee Taemin..”

“Maybe horse riding? You know when someone sit on the top and move up and down, back and forth… “

Her face is now more crimson than ripe tomato.

“…on the track. But we don’t have horse so it’s impossible. Or midnight work out? Yeah, I guess so, my brother works out like crazy lately.”

The smile plastered on his face knocked her down without Taemin even tried so hard.

“Can you be adult for once and stop shouting?”

“Is this what you called shouting?”

“Cut it off before your Mom heard anything!”

“She’s busy cooking, she won’t hear shit even you’re moaning.”

He sent her a wink, built a nausea feeling on her tummy, “Thanks for the notes! I’m leaving!”

“Please, you know that the kitchen in our house is next to the front door right?”

Gwiboon stopped right away after only three steps.

“So when you’re on your way, don’t forget to say hi to my Mom.”

“Fuck.”

He finished his coffee and chuckles at her, “Why don’t you join us for brunch?”

What kind of idea is that? Sharing the dining table on Saturday morning with someone’s Mom that has no idea what happened behind her son’s door last night? And without taking shower? Make up?! Oh, hell no!

“No one’s care you already take a shower or not, this is Saturday morning, for God’s sake. But if you refuse to walk with me to the dining table, you can just go back to my brother’s room,” now he leaned on the wall, arms folded with his empty mug hangs at his finger, “And wait until my Mom kick that door to ask him for brunch and maybe you as well since you’re inside. How about that?”

“There’s no way your mother found me inside your brother’s room!”

“Why not? She knows you’re here anyway.”

“What?!”

“Taemin! Wake your brother and his girlfriend up! Get in here three of you before this chicken get cold! it’s not my style to serve frozen food to a guest in my house!”

Gwiboon looks like a stray puppy who waits for her death sentence when Taemin raised his brows as if he’s saying ‘I told you’.

“What should I do?!”

“Go back to that filthy room, drag my brother’s ass out, and have a really nice brunch with us. As easy as that. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

“Besides, my brother wouldn’t be pleased knowing you wandering around the city.. you know.., senza underwear.”

She covered her chest with her purse in instant and ran to the door at the end of hallway while cursing inside her head.

“I’ll see you both soon!”

She slammed the door behind her doesn’t even care whether it’s polite enough to do in other’s property.

“Why so loud in the morning?” lazy voice came from the far right of the room, Jinki sat on the mattress without anything covering his torso, bed hair all jolted here and there, try to collect all his soul, eyes squinted to Gwiboon’s direction, “Is that my t-shirt?”

***

Part 7.

it's probably a parade float, is the second thought. some idiot drunkenly taking it for a joyride down an alley. look, there's an opening, light beaming out before it's blocked out by one body, then another. two figures that are probably human, beneath their bobbled helmets, their thick, stuffy jumpsuits.

this neighborhood gets all sorts of characters. it's why kibum chose it a little over a year ago, taking a chance on the already crowded area, the unfriendly lease agreement, the questionable landlord. these are just two more characters, talking in a garbled tongue that kibum just isn't hearing right.

it's 4am, anyway, and kibum doesn't have time for this. so he throws on his headphones, viciously tugs off taemin's socks in a pique of spiteful vengeance, and heads to his bed to mull over ways to make his bank account stretch even thinner.

--------------------------------------

'hey kibum, there's someone banging on the door. hey. hey, kibum.'

kibum is sleeping, he would be horrified to recognize, halfway on his laptop, lodging a canyon of a line across his cheek. when he scrambles up, his joints aching from the unnatural position he had dozed off in, he finds the time on his phone - 7:17 am.

'do you mind? i'm trying to sleep.' taemin says, nonchalant.

'god you are just the worst,' kibum says. he is looking down at his phone, checking his email when the reminder comes up - bank visit 730.

FUCK. SHIT. goddamn it. the bank, his loans for the space, seeing if he's using the space as intended and isn't secretly - something? insolvent? incompetent? kibum is certainly something, something sharp and biting and near-poisonous in proximity, as he throws on his clothes and tries to arrange his hair into something presentable. taemin holds up his bar of deodorant as he passes and kibum grabs it and pauses to apply it, unwilling even in his panic to let the stink of body odor be his signature scent.

he hurtles downstairs, his shoes sliding off at the heel as he careens down the stairs. in the salon he can see the banker (? is that even the term - auditor? realtor? pain in the ass, really) standing outside the door. whoever it is, is an actual asshole, because it's only 7:27 and he's been at the door for 10 minutes, chomping at the bit to rob kibum of his pride and joy. what a miserable bastard.

he is flipping on the lights, and taking one last duck into the bathroom when he spies them. the aliens. the parade floaters. whoever. they're just standing there, one of them a good 4 inches than the other, helmets still on like they're robbing him. one of them has a device in his hand that looks halfway between a smartphone and a gun.

holy fuck he's being robbed. he has literally negative to give, and he's being robbed.

or

or

he's desperate, is his excuse. he puts his hands together, and extends them out.

'look. i will give you anything you need, if you can just let me pretend you are customers for 15 minutes. just to get his asshole off my back? alright? just - ' he nods, looking between the two of them. the shorter one on the left, clad all in yellow, makes a jerky motion that might be a nod? he'll take it, especially when he moves to put away his gun phone. kibum makes a reckless motion to grab his hand and lead him out. the other one in blue is following when kibum glances over the top of the yellow-tinged helmet. the one whose being tugged along, his grip is loose, almost skittish, but kim kibum is not a quitter. he maneuvers both of them into chairs and holds out his hands again.

'just - stay there. and play along. please.'

before they can respond, or decide kibum's meager wealth is worth the charade, he turns away and schools his features as he strides to the door, popping it open with a cool, professional 'good morning'.

'mr. kim,' the bank asshole says, like he's the one being inconvenienced in every aspect of his life. 'am i interrupting?'

'actually, you are,' kibum replies, opening the door wider. 'i had some urgent client requests to handle this morning, so we'll have some company. i hope that helps you make an informed determination on our operations.'

he's impressing even himself with his handling. the asshole is looking at the two, weird as they are, like they aren't random intruders. which, no, of course not. of course. kibum moves forward to make the case more persuasive.

'i think we're ready to take that off now, sir,' he says to the one in yellow, whose gripping the ends of the chair like he's terrified. still, he doesn't make any motions when kibum moves towards the - neck latch? of the helmet - where it clicks into his get-up. when kibum fumbles with it, he gently moves his hands aside to do it himself, releasing the catches and lifting it up off his head in a smooth, practiced motion.

and, well. shit. kibum doesn't really have time to dwell on how gorgeous one of his assailants is, with sweet, expressive brown eyes. there's a discoloration to his cheeks, a yellow blush brought out by the vibrant tones of his clothes. his nose is thick, straight, and sharp cheekbones and jawline that together are really affecting his ability to make this whole thing believable. he clears his throat and meets those eyes with his own eyes wide, encouraging and asking for forgiveness as he moves to run his fingers through his hair.

his purple hair. it's one of the nicest dye jobs he's seen in a while, perfectly and naturally applied like it had grown out of his scalp like that. if his robber is from one of his competitors, coming in here and scaring the hell out of him, he's going to be monumentally pissed, but at that point he'll have to concede he's outskilled. it's not even fried out, it's almost inhumanely soft. perfect styling, too, framing his face - jesus, that face - like art.

he plays with it for a moment - a half-second - too long, but hides it with a murmur of consideration.

'excellent, i think this is about what you were expecting?' he turns the chair around to face the mirror and the man growls, like he's surprised, or scared, by the motion - like he's never been in a spinning chair? goddamn everyone loves these chairs, it's weird. but it tapers off when kibum steadies it at the stop, his black-painted fingernails resting at his shoulders.

(he can feel them shift slightly beneath his touch, and he's keyed up on panic, chalking his noting of that up to panic)

the man is just staring, silent now, at his reflection, and the asshole is still watching them. his (gorgeous, awkward) robber must have stage fright, so kibum smiles wide in the mirror, meeting his eyes. after a moment he follows the silent instruction, crinkling his eyes, breaking his face into an all new level to kibum's panic, with a wide, warm smile that feels like sunshine. he looks like sunshine, all in yellow, like a lavender flower blooming.

'great!' he says, chirpy in a way that sounds unbelievable to his own ears, but he's moving onto the other one, who is already moving to take his helmet off.

well, fuck, they're both good-looking. this one is a hell of lot less tolerant of kibum's performance, spinning himself around, moving away from his hands as he goes to check out his hair (black, surprisingly close to standard, especially in comparison). it's short in the nape of the neck and when he makes a motion to get up, kibum pinches, hard, giving himself a moment of surprise to push down, his hands full-weighted against his trapezius muscles.

at that point, he goes with the program; his smiling motion is a little quicker, but kibum has already picked his favorite and it's too little, too late, robber asshole.

'we can settle up after we're done, okay, guys? thanks again!' he hates his customer service voice - he doesn't even use this voice for real clients - but bank asshole seems like the type of guy who says 'the customer is always right' so he rubs it in extra sweet. he takes his time settling in, setting his shoulders down and back, lifting his chin high as he plays the part.

'these were just two of the clients we have booked today. actually - they were multi-day appointments, follow-up to ensure all their services were to their exact requests. performers, you know?' he knows he doesn't know. and he knows that bank asshole knows he doesn't know, that he has no idea what's trendy, or stylish, or experimental. helmets for protecting hair? why the fuck not. he'll sell that line all day long if he has to.

he doesn't have to. bank asshole is taking photos - without even asking! - and making notes on his phone. he made the case that he could make, and it was better to have someone here than not. even if they were a little difficult and a little criminal.

'well, thank you for your time,' bank asshole says suddenly. he moves to stand and shakes kibum's hand. when he turns, the two - instead of waiting in their chairs - are standing shoulder to shoulder, their helmets at their hips, expressionless, like a low-rent daft punk. he squares his shoulders like everything's normal here, and sees the asshole out with a cool nod.

as soon as he leaves -

he exhales, letting his shoulders and his head drop, releasing a moan to start, and then turning it into a yawn as the adrenaline starts to settle. the lack of sleep, the push to herd his brain into performative professionalism, on top of negotiating his own robbery.

oh. right. he's being robbed.

giving less than a fuck (but not zero fucks), he turns and resigns himself.

'thank you,' he says firstly, pointing it towards the one in yellow. 'ironically you probably saved my ass.'

the one in blue rumbles, like a whiny drunk, before it turns into a questioning 'ass?' the one in yellow turns to him, sharp, an obvious look of dismay on his face. he gestures, hurky, at his gun-phone - kibum tries to take a look at it, but suddenly takes several steps back as the one in yellow - not blue, it would have been easier if it were blue - raises it and aims it at him.

'whoa whoa, just - wait, i can get you - i can get you whatever money, i just have to go upstairs - ' and he squeezes his eyes shut as the one in yellow squeezes his hand, and it fires -

nothing happens. well, not nothing - there's some odd, light noise, like chimes, like the rounding noise of a balloon being blown up, and kibum dares to open its eyes and there are bubbles, iridescent in a way that doesn't quite look right, black and purple and green and red, stringing from one color to the next in a rhythm that's shifting, like it's looking for the perfect hue to settle on, shrinking and expanding out with little explorative tones that feel, inexplicably, like sticking your tongue out to taste the air, except with sound.

it doesn't look real, so jury's out if he's now suffering visual hallucinations, but he glances at the other two and finds the one in yellow is looking at him, with increasing levels of horror.

he opens his mouth and shrieks, incomprehensible syllables that make kibum want to cringe in on himself, but he's also still looking at him long enough to see his eyes shift, from the human brown to an alien orange.

alien.

spaceship.

he's not proud of it, but he passes out. at least in unconsciousness, he doesn't have to worry about dignity.

--------------------------------------

when he comes to, he's propped up in one of the salon chairs. across from him, taemin is sitting on the counter, playing with a pair of scissors. honestly, it's one of the most disconcerting things he can think of, and that's before the blue alien walks into view. taemin beams at him, and gets a smile in return, more tentative than earlier, more genuine.

'taemin,' he says, urgent and undecided about whether or not he needs to risk his life for his worst friend. 'what are you doing?'

'waiting for you to wake up. eating cereal.'

he doesn't have cereal. he ignores this discrepancy and slowly starts to get up. the one in blue doesn't stop him from steering taemin away so they can have this conversation slightly more privately. he still doesn't know where the one in yellow is.

'this is going to sound crazy. but these guys - they're not human - i don't think so, anyway.'

taemin puts his finger on his lips to shush him - to actually shush him, like he's a child and not the most rational, most human individual in the building.

'i know. they showed me their ship outside. it's pretty cool, actually.'

he turns to retrieve a box of cereal from behind the nearest mirror. this would explain kibum's ant problem. his arm goes elbow-deep as he takes a handful and starts eating it dry, talking around it.

'their names are jinki and minho. minho's the one in blue. jinki's out back trying to fix the ship. they crashed.'

'you talked to them.'

'no, they're telepathic. just - beamed it. right into my head,' taemin says, his eyes sparkling with mockery. 'yeah of course. i even introduced you too.'

'kibum,' says a new voice behind him. taemin keeps munching his cereal. kibum turns.

jinki looks infinitely more composed from earlier, which is impressive considering he looks like he's been actively rooting around in an engine, dark smears across his forehead, his gloves covered in something undeniably gooey. unfortunately nothing has really changed the actual look of him, and kibum - who will need therapy - chokes around his first 'hi' like an idiot.

the second one comes out a little smoother. it's hard to hear himself over taemin's chewing.

'kibum,' jinki says again.

'what?' he asks.

'that's all we've managed so far,' taemin says from behind him. when kibum turns to look, he shrugs and puts the box down, licking his fingers clean. 'but it's impressive, right? i'm probably going to be in history books.'

'lucky us,' he hisses. 'you don't even know they're peaceful.'

'um, you've been passed out for at least 30 minutes. and they left you alone and put you in that chair. i was up for leaving you on the floor. they're better than me.'

'low. fucking. bar.'

minho has moved to their side, looking between them like he's unsure whether to intervene or not. kibum turns away in a huff. so now he gets to handle aliens. he can't just leave them to taemin.

with a start, he realizes how much brighter it is outside, and, checking his phone, realizes he's near to the opening hours. he can't afford to leave the little he has, to take up recreational alien-babysitting. he also has, like, an obligation as a member of the human race to not have their ambassador be taemin.

he takes what he thinks is a discreet glance at the other three, and finds jinki looking back at him, patiently waiting. he flashes a nervous smile and looks back down to his phone.

ok.

plan.

small kernel of a plan. jinki is working on their ship. he can keep an eye on him from the salon, with the back door popped open. and he'd rather keep both aliens handy, but if he has them both down here, then taemin will undoubtedly lurk around too. so.

'go back upstairs,' he orders the pair of them. minho doesn't understand him, but he jabs his finger up to communicate the general spirit of it. taemin shrugs, but grabs minho's hand all the same.

his human-looking hand. he must have taken off his gloves at some point, which means that jinki's hands are probably similar.

it's traitorous or selfish or maybe just horny if he wonders what the chances are of the rest of their bodies being human like.

anyway.

jinki turns to follow them, but kibum reaches out to grab him by the sleeve. jinki looks at him, confused, and then takes his own gloves off - and, yes, they are human-like too. he clips them to his belt and grabs for kibum's hand, his grip still as light as earlier. outside of the glove, his hand feels terribly small and delicate, easy to dwarf in kibum's.

'your ship,' he starts, then falters. taemin has already disappeared up the stairs. he starts moving back towards the alley, prattling about taemin's ability to preoccupy people, for lack of anything else; jinki keeps pace beside him, his eyes kept trained on kibum's face, dipping down to watch his lips move. kibum tries valiantly to ignore what that does to him.

he pushes out into the alley, where the ship is opened up, a couple pigeons perched on its antennae.

'you can work on it,' he says, semi-helplessly gesturing towards the ship with their still-joined hands. 'and i'll be inside - ' he puts his free hand to his chest and then nods his head towards the path they just took. ' - if you need anything.' he lets go of jinki's hand and tries to reiterate with slightly more smooth motions.

jinki seems to get the gist of it, at first, but he grabs kibum's hand again and brings it up between them. bizarrely, kibum thinks he's about to kiss the back of it, he just has a gentle, warm look in his eyes that doesn't belong at all - but he doesn't. instead he meticulously opens his fingers, one by one, and then puts his gun-phone against his palm, and wraps his hand around to close it again. he maneuvers kibum's fingers into a series of motions, clicking a switch here, and there, until one of the screens lights up, with a series of lines running seamlessly from left to right.

jinki meets his eyes seriously and brings the device to his mouth. he speaks, clear and decisive: 'jinki'.

then, he moves it back to kibum and nods encouragingly.

'um, okay,' he says. he leans in, and clears his throat. 'kibum.'

jinki nods again and releases his hold. he clutches his hands together in mimicry of kibum's own posture, and mouths silently.

'you want me to talk into this,' he holds it closer to his mouth again, and, in doing so, notices the lines from earlier spiking with each syllable. oh. okay. translation device. or recording device. or... communicator? either way, it's not like it can do any harm. probably, anyway. his life is suddenly full of probabilities, when he had felt dead set on the certainty of failure.

'okay,' he says, deliberately slow, into the device, and is granted with a wide, happy smile from jinki.

he starts backing away from jinki, out of his own preservation instincts and the need to get the salon opened on time. he keeps his eye on the alien, on the off chance he has misunderstood, but jinki is also turning away, casting one last glance back at kibum, and nodding encouragingly when kibum clicks the button and says 'goodbye' into it. if it sounds a little sappy, well, there's no one here to call him out on it.

when he steps back into the building, he takes a few deep breaths and buoys himself up to start the day. everything else before this moment won't count for a good 10 hours.

--------------------------------------

he can't hold it the entire time, it's just not possible. but he does keep it on whenever he has one hand free, from greeting customers and employees as they arrive to clock in. he puts it aside when he's intent on a cut, or a wash, conscious at all times of when he's left it alone, peeking more often down the back way. occasionally he catches a glimpse of yellow, and once he saw jinki staring upwards towards the sky, lost in thought.

it twangs something in his chest, that he has to push aside.

he manages to get through the majority of his day like this, when his stomach suddenly and angrily growls. one of his stylists is nearby, and quirks an eyebrow at him.

'don't even start,' he says, and she sticks her tongue out, making him laugh. why not, he has to take a break at some time. he'll run upstairs and make sure minho and taemin are fine, and drag jinki along with him, and make sure he has something to eat to.

the question of what aliens eat is a good one, and kibum doesn't know, but he can at least ask. they're aliens, they can probably figure out if something will kill them.

'jinki,' he calls as he heads outside. there's a great clatter from the spaceship and jinki pops up, his lips parted and he lets out a pleased bark. kibum, fighting his own smile, motions for him to come down and simultaneously says 'let's eat some lunch, okay?' into the device.

'okay,' jinki repeats amiably, and kibum is positive he doesn't know what he's saying, but he isn't about to object to his sweet agreeability. especially considering they're going upstairs.

he waits semi-patiently for jinki to come down and then sneaks them both inside after looking, shooing jinki up the stairs.

'taemin, minho, have you guys eaten anything yet?' kibum calls out as he turns the key - there's no click, taemin didn't even bother locking - and enters. he waves jinki inside and takes a quick scan to make sure everything is in order. it looks like there's plates in the sink, the TV is loud from around the wall, but neither taemin or minho are anywhere to be seen. but, if they ate, then that speaks positively towards jinki being able to eat something. he clicks the button and starts talking.

'i'm going to give you some water. food...normally i'd just run out to GS25 and grab something, but i should have some packets here...taemin! what did you eat, i'm trying to feed for four here....'  he trails off as he realizes he hasn't heard much of anything since coming in except the TV. he abruptly turns and jinki senses the sudden change in his mood, setting his shoulders back and walking with more caution into the underlit apartment.

it's a small place, with a hole of a bedroom and a bathroom split off from the hybrid kitchen/sitting area. there's only so many places for people to lurk. kibum throws open the door to the bedroom, half-expected taemin to have taken over his bed, and minho resigned to the small desk in the corner, his helmet a pillow. but no such find waits for him there. which means they've either left, and they're altogether fucked, or -

jinki, following kibum's example, apparently is already turning the handle on the bathroom, and when he opens it he jumps back with a noise kibum can't even properly describe - it's like a gasp, gurgled through a mixer of soju and rock salt. when kibum takes the three steps necessary to arrive at his vantage point, minho is turned away, shoulders hunched in, his right arm in an all-too-human motion, and taemin is wiping his mouth and looking exceedingly - exceedingly - unapologetic.

'tell me you did not just suck an extraterrestrial dick, taemin, jesus!'

jinki makes some more noises that kibum trusts has the same energy.

kibum has always known about taemin's hobgoblin-esque exploratory promiscuity. he only asks that his friend be safe, perfectly unbothered that his metaphorical line in the sand is the human race.

he, understandably, never expected to have that sanguine understanding stress-tested.

while he's been busy engaging in a one-sided staring contest, jinki has pulled minho out into the hallway, and is having a furious conversation that sounds halfway between static and muzak. kibum has to consciously tune them out, has to do something to communicate that this cannot happen again, and also - how the fuck did this happen?

'how the fuck did this happen?' he yells. 'i left you alone for a morning, and you put him in your mouth? you don't know where he's been!'

'space,' taemin says. 'and this apartment.'

'you don't even speak the same language, you - you asshole - how can you even call that consensual?'

'hey,' taemin looks genuinely offended. 'i gave him some porn first and showed him how to turn it off and turn it back on. he found a blowjob one and had a boner. i asked and made sure he was good with it. c'mon, hyung, i'm not that guy.'

'fine. you are still the guy who just sucked a dick without having any idea of what it could look like, or what - what it was like when he came - or if the - if it was okay for you to swallow.'

'i didn't swallow,' taemin looks incredibly pleased with himself for his foresight, and holds his hands up in the universal sign for obviously. 'it's fine.'

'it is no way fine,' kibum hisses. 'you are such a dumbass.'

as he lets out the invective he turns and faces the other pair, who have stopped their own discussion and are now looking at him with expressions of apology and confusion - jinki - and...resolve? consternation? whatever. minho doesn't look nearly apologetic enough for kibum's mood.

'you're a dumbass too,' he hisses, stabbing a finger at minho.

'dumbass?' he parrots tentatively, pointing at himself, and then taemin. kibum rubs his temples.

'yes, exactly. both of you. glad we're all on the same page.'

'dumbass?' jinki asks, quieter, and pointing at himself.

'....no,' kibum responds, shaking his head. he can't even be bothered to try to explain, he just heads back to the kitchen. 'c'mon let's eat something. taemin, you are gargling and brushing your teeth first.'

'ok, but that means i have to use your toothbrush.'

the only respite kibum can take is that jinki helps him as best he can in the kitchen, monitoring the water he sets to boil and handing out the chopsticks when the convenience store ramyeon is done cooking.

--------------------------------------

he doesn't have much of a choice except to leave minho and taemin again. jinki seems much more opposed to it, pausing in at the bottom of the stairwell. he gestures towards kibum's pocket, where the edge of his device is poking out. at the motion, kibum pulls it out.

'sorry, i forgot to use it upstairs. don't think you'd want to remember much of it, to be honest.'

jinki shakes his head, and silently holds his hand out. kibum passes it over, watching as he holds it up to the side of his head, and presses a smaller button. the device says 'jinki', then 'kibum', and the rest of all the little pieces of conversation kibum has had throughout the day, speeding up until it's completely unintelligible, spitting noise into jinki's waiting ear. when it finishes, jinki nods, a small smile.

'thank you,' he says, clearly, carefully watching kibum's face.

'oh,' he replies faintly. 'you're learning? that helps you speak?'

jinki narrows his eyes in effort, and kibum realizes it's limited just to what has been recorded. has he talked about learning today, with the elderly mrs. park, or the chatty server from down the street? probably not. 'thank you' is thrown around so much in customer service, no wonder it's the first thing he picked up.

'you're welcome,' he says back, and jinki's smile is a quickly blooming thing that smacks kibum right across the face. he takes a step closer and presses it back into kibum's hand.

'use it more,' he asks softly. 'please.'

--------------------------------------

it's stupid, but he does. he memorizes the feel of pressing it just enough so it activates, and what it's like when his finger slips. he finds a little clip and fashions an attachment to his apron, so it's sitting on his collarbone. when there's an odd question about it, he says he's taking better notes of his day for record-keeping, and that seems to work well enough, though one or two stylists keep giving him odd looks. he doesn't acknowledge them.

at the back of his mind, he knows he's doing this for more than just improved communication, that he likes the way jinki smiles at him, the cadence of his voice when he says his name - the proud look in his eyes when they managed to exchange just a few words. he likes his steady, reserved presence. he has a sweet temperament that smooths down kibum's rough edges, just by being.

it's a crush. kibum brooks no self-deception. it hasn't been a week since he's broken up with his last boyfriend, and jinki is an alien, an actual alien, preparing to leave the planet, that he's known for all of nine hours. and he has a crush on him.

maybe when they lift off, he'll get burned up in the rocket fumes. frankly it's the only satisfiable outcome kibum can see from this.

he has one last appointment for the day, an older lady of the neighborhood who likes to talk, even when kibum doesn't. for once, this anticipated division doesn't bother him much, because it can be put to good use. he makes sure the button is pressed down and secure and leads mrs. choi to the chair, nodding along as she starts laying out her day, her impending anniversary, her entrenched drama with the other salon down the street (the cause for her patronage of kibum's location). it's all much formless noise to him, to be certain. luckily for him she doesn't need a partner to have a conversation, and he's lost in the focus of trimming when there's an unmistakable 'kibum?' from his right.

both he and mrs. choi turn to find jinki standing there, lavender hair a stringy mess, coated through with goop. kibum almost swears in dismay, stopping himself only in the nick of time. he looks down at mrs. choi and, before he can say anything, she swats up at him like they're friends. important to note that they are not friends, but kibum needs the money, and also needs jinki to stay undiscovered.

'jinki,' he says cautiously. 'what's wrong?'

visibly uncertain on how to proceed, jinki raises his shoulders, and lets them drop.

'it's a mess,' he says, and, yes, kibum did call a few things a mess today. 'i need to clean up. upstairs. okay?'

'oh honey,' mrs. choi says, feigning an unwarranted level of camaraderie. 'you really do. are you kibum's boyfriend?'

'friend,' kibum hastily corrects. he doesn't need to get himself into a fake-boyfriend scenario for further emotional torture. he looks square at jinki and nods. 'okay. take my key and go upstairs. wash.'

jinki nods, and kibum is grateful, glad that he managed to phrase it in a way he could understand. he excuses himself to go to the desk and pulls out the key ring, wiggling out his apartment key. jinki saw him use his key earlier, right? he should be able to figure it out. he takes a moment to send a text to taemin too to warn him.

'thank you,' jinki says again, and kibum dips his head back, oddly formal, and familiarly warm with pleasure when jinki turns with a small smile.

mrs. choi should go back to her old stylist, he'll lose her business gladly, because she greets him with a loud 'how handsome your friend is! you must be close, to let him use your shower.'

she says the last part with a relish to her voice, and god, kibum could kill her so easily. he laughs, hollowly, and she continues on.

'he's very polite too. have you known him long?'

'no.'

'mmmm, well. if you don't mind me saying, you shouldn't let him get away. and he seems to like you too!'

'well it doesn't matter who we like. can't really help that he's leaving town soon,' he says tightly.

she lets out a hiss of disappointment. he could give her a terrible asymmetrical cut in return.

'well, that's too bad. he seems to like you well enough, and well enough could be, well, enough to get him to stay!' she laughs gaily.

'ha ha,' he says.

--------------------------------------

'hey, it's me,' he calls through the door. knocking on his own door is just the way to end this day, tired and more emotional than he ever cares to disclose. 'let me in already.'

he hopes taemin hasn't gotten so far as to fuck minho. or let minho fuck him. or let minho suck his dick. if there's any chance they're incompatible, then spitting could hardly have been the apex of protection. taemin could be rotting from the mouth in, or minho from the dick out.

a small, tiny part of him thinks they'd deserve it. a larger part says if that happened, his crush on jinki would have the shit topper of misfortune it deserves. just to round it out perfectly.

he knows jinki must still be up there - because he checked out back before locking up, and the ship was half-dissembled, with jinki nowhere to be seen even when kibum called out - but he did not expect it to be jinki opening the door. he also did not expect jinki to be wearing some of his clothes, an oversized sweatshirt that makes him look like a college student.

'hi kibum,' he says, and he beams when he says, 'welcome back.'

it's so cute, is the thing, so exceedingly domestic and homely that kibum may not survive its cruelty, knowing it won't last.

'i washed,' he continues as kibum sets down his things blindly. 'taemin gave me clothes.'

'good,' he croaks. he fishes out the device before he can forget, hands it over to jinki's obvious pleasure. he holds it up to his ear, and kibum just watches his face, his eyes closed, as he learns. it's not fair, is it? life's not fair, is what they always say, but they're talking about things like losing your job, being left behind by the people you thought were you friends. not being teased with happiness, with love, and having it literally leave for the stars.

well, maybe there's an astronaut or something who can relate. whatever. kibum isn't about to argue technicalities with his own feelings.

'where's taemin and minho?' he asks, instead, when jinki has finished and is setting the device back down in the table. kibum presses the button before he asks, leaning back against the couch. he might as well keep giving his words, it's all he can do.

'they went out,' jinki says. 'for food.'

'okay,' kibum says. he's tired, but jinki looks like he's on the precipice of a question, and kibum knows he's going to have to say goodbye, so he doesn't wave it off.

'earlier,' he starts. 'taemin and minho. what are they doing?'

trust him to ask the hard question.

'sex,' he says. he hasn't said it at all today, it's not something you talk about with your customers. he's open, but he's not that open. he casts his mind back to some of the idle chatter from the afternoon. 'they kissed. taemin was making him happy.'

'oh,' jinki says. he sounds unfinished. he brings his fingers to his lips, and asks in confirmation. 'kissed?'

kibum nods.

'okay,' jinki says, then repeats it to himself. 'kibum?'

'yes?'

'does kissing make you happy?'

he snorts.

'sometimes.'

jinki tilts his head, his brows gone quizzical. there isn't enough vocabulary between them to explain it, but something in his eyes feels compassionate, and - kibum is just sunk. there's no way he's getting out of this without some damage.

'you're good,' he says, plain and honest. kibum flushes and turns away, but jinki continues speaking. 'you're good to us and to others. you should be happy.'

'i want to be,' kibum confesses to his hands. 'i want to be happy.'

jinki moves to his side, the couch arm between them.

'"sometimes"', he says back to him. he touches his lips, and then reaches out, stopping short of touching kibum, but pointing towards him all the same. 'tonight?'

kibum looks at him, and considers a thousand things that don't matter, because he's already saying 'yes', already watching jinki go down on one knee, then the other, folds his arms across the couch until his hands are resting on kibum's upper arms. he smells like his soap, but in this light his brown eyes spark orange once more, and there's a buzzing beneath his touch that hasn't been there before, and then he can see every star in his eyes, can see countless worlds in every freckle, and he surrenders at the first brush of jinki's lips against his.

it's only a momentary touch, but it lives past its occurrence. isn't that a thing? like the light shining down well after the sun had exploded, kibum can still feel his lips after he moves away.

jinki asks.

'are you happy?'

the light is blinking out.

kibum shakes his head, manages to smile a little.

'not tonight.'

--------------------------------------

he closes the salon the next morning, contacting the few appointments by phone call to make sure they get the notice. minho and taemin both slept on the couch overnight, wrapped up in each other, while jinki slept on the floor. the blanket kibum had lent him wrapped tightly around his form. it turned out his bathroom was hosting their suits, the helmets on the floor of the shower, so kibum just washed up the best he could with the sink, brushing his teeth with his finger on the recollection of taemin's earlier use.

apparently minho had also lent his device to taemin for a similar purpose, so the morning was filled with a lot more korean than he was used to, most of it full of minho's innocently profane conversations.

'you had to corrupt him,' he had wearily warned taemin after minho had given an enthusiastic definition of a rimjob to jinki.

'it was educational,' taemin retorted, and in a way, it was. it was certainly more straightforward than anything kibum had given jinki. but still, jinki had cast him his own looks, alternating between amusement and confusion. kibum shrugged helplessly and tapped their shared device reassuringly.

for now, it was much of the same as yesterday, minho and taemin keeping each other company while jinki worked on the ship. kibum was stewing over his business, trying to think past today, or tomorrow, to the return to his regular life.

it was much easier when jinki wasn't calling him out, excitement laced through his voice.

'kibum! come here!'

he gets up and heads out to the back. the ship looks great, with jinki perched atop the cockpit, half his body hidden inside.

'good news?' he asks, careful to have the button clicked.

'yes! very good!' he yells joyfully back. 'come here!'

'how?' he asks, because he doesn't feel like possibly cracking his back from falling onto the pavement. jinki laughs, the slightly alien rhythm of it, and extracts himself, climbing down with no problem at all. when he meets kibum, he turns to present his back and leans forward slightly.

'get on,' he says.

'it's called a piggyback ride,' kibum says uncertainly. he reaches out to touch the broad expanse of his back, before retracting. 'are you sure?'

'yes!' jinki says.

well, when it's said like that, kibum does his best, hopping awkwardly up and wrapping his legs around his hips. jinki grabs at his ankles and starts up, so that kibum is sitting further up on his back. he still smells like kibum's soap, even back as he is in his suit, and it's making the whole experience that much more surreal as jinki clambers easily back up to where he was.

'um, jinki, it's a little small,' because the entry is. looking into it, he's not sure how jinki expects both of them to fit, when he must have just had enough room to squeeze his lower half into the porthole-sized space. jinki shakes his head.

'it's not small,' he explains, without explaining. 'watch.'

he starts squeezing himself in, getting to his earlier position of being cut off at the waist. when he moves to slide down further, his upper half disappears in a blink, leaving the gap empty.

'what the fuck - jinki!' he yells, looking down and also watching his own step, now paranoid about being transported god knows where.

'it's okay!' comes his voice from - inside? kibum peers closer and can't see him at all. anxiously, he dips one toe into the space, but nothing happens. as though entering a cold pool, he starts to clamber in, toe, foot, knee, then the other. all of the sudden he can feel a grip around his ankle and shrieks in fear, starting to kick out before jinki's voice calls out again.

'it's me, i'm here.'

'okay,' he says, chanting it to himself, once, twice - on the third time he bends his knees to go lower, and just as the metal siding brushes his belly button he can feel something wrap around him, like a squeezing flash of warmth, and then he really is being squeezed, by jinki's solid arms, the alien smiling at him reassuredly.

'not small,' he says, and releases him so kibum can see he's now inside a spaceship a good three times bigger than it was on the outside.

'yep. you're right,' he concedes. 'not small.'

'i want to show you something,' jinki says, and he takes him to the front. out of the window he can see the entry into his salon, and beneath it is an expanse of controls. on the far left, there's a screen with another alien, his helmet off, pink hair almost cartoonishly bright.

'jonghyun,' jinki says, with clear affection in his voice. 'kibum.'

'hi,' kibum says, waving. jonghyun waves back, but doesn't speak, clearly turning to look at jinki to translate.

he's gotten so used to jinki talking in korean that it's disorienting to hear him let out those indiscernible noises again, and to hear jonghyun respond back in kind, but he doesn't want to interrupt the clearly happy reunion. jinki is smiling wide, and jonghyun's a bit softer, but obviously genuine.

they're talking about his coming home. kibum wraps his arms around his torso and waits, because what else can he do? this was an accident, after all, and accidents get fixed.

they are talking for a while, it seems, their tones shifting into something more serious - as best kibum can tell - so he takes a step back and begins looking around. the ship is bigger than outside, but clearly was only ever meant for two - two seats, two beds towards the back. there has to be some food for their journeys, kept somewhere, or maybe they were fed nutrients, like in the matrix, until it was time to wake up. it's a big universe, and jinki is meant to be somewhere else in it. not here. not with kibum.

'done,' jinki says, cutting through kibum's thoughts. when he turns back, jinki is looking at him, so he comes forward. from the screen, jonghyun looks pleased to have jinki (and minho, but - you know - fuck him, he goes in the same bucket as taemin) coming back soon.

'done?' he asks and jinki nods, pleasure evident on his face. he performs a complex little signal with his hands that jonghyun reciprocates, and then reaches out to turn it off.

'can we go outside?' kibum asks, because he doesn't think he can stand to be in this ship anymore, with its two seats, two beds, and engine ready to leave. he moves aimlessly back towards where jinki caught him, and jinki lets out that alien laugh, richer for having talked to jonghyun, high off of his happiness.

'there,' he guides kibum to one of the circles decorating the floor, hand gently clutching at his elbow. 'wait.'

that bright, warm flash and kibum is on top of the ship, with taemin and minho looking up at him from the blacktop. before he can make an excuse for his expression - because he can feel it - he can feel the pressure of tears at the corner of his eyes, jinki appears as well. he turns and leans forward again, inviting kibum to ride his back once more, and kibum - he's not proud of this at all - he clutches jinki in a hug from behind, before jumping up into the piggyback.

they climb down together, kibum burying his face in jinki's neck. he's sure he can feel a snotty tear or two, and wipes it across his yellow suit before sliding off.

'ready?' minho asks, anticipation evident in his voice.

'ready,' jinki says. in unison they make that hand signal jinki just shared with jonghyun, and kibum clears his throat.

'thanks for - thanks for crashing into our planet,' he offers, with a respectable command of his voice.

'it was our pleasure,' jinki says.

'literally,' taemin interrupts, elbowing at minho, and the taller alien blushes with a greenish tint. he steps forward to be side by side with jinki, and they each bow forward to taemin and kibum, from their waist, in perfect form.

then, jinki turns to minho:

'i've spoken to jonghyun about the return, and he is prepared,' and he turns to taemin, who - kibum is now noticing - has a bag over his shoulder. 'i have marked all foods that can be eaten. do not stare at the stars too long; you will burn your eyes out.'

'what,' says kibum.

'i brought sunglasses,' taemin argues.

'that's not enough,' minho says, and jinki is handing him his helmet, and minho is moving to place it over taemin's head, and jinki is taking off his suit, revealing one of kibum's old t-shirts, and some sweatpants, and -

'what,' says kibum.

'i want to stay,' jinki says. as he steps out of his suit, he stumbles, and minho catches him with long practice. he moves forward and kibum instinctively turns away from minho and taemin's gazes, trying to find some privacy, to find some equilibrium, because jinki is talking like -

'i like you,' he says.

'you don't know what that means,' kibum says, but jinki smiles.

'yes, i do,' he says, gentle, always gentle. 'i'm not leaving town.'

mrs. choi, and kibum's fingers on the button, keeping it on. jinki pressing the device against his ear, listening carefully and telling kibum he should be happy.

'it's not fair to you,' kibum says again, because he is selfish, he has always wanted more for himself, and in his experience what he wants, doesn't agree to be had. 'your planet - '

'my planet doesn't have you.'

jinki closes his hands over his.

'kibum,' he says. 'will kissing make you happy today?'

'yes,' he whispers, and jinki smiles. there are stars in his eyes.

the space between them closes, their lips pressed together, the world is shaking, rumbling like it never has before and jinki is holding him close as the ship lifts off, taemin pressed against the window like a bug. behind him, minho waves, the light bouncing off his helmet.

jinki is pressing another kiss to kibum's hair as he watches the ship become smaller and smaller, until it's little more than another dot of white among the clouds.

and kibum -

Kibum can still feel the dampness of the tissues they’d used to clean up, the water swished around his mouth after Jinki came. And, yes, he remembers glancing up to see Jinki’s face, hopeful to see brimming pleasure within his eyes, and satisfied to see them squeezed shut instead. His assumption was a stupid, self-serving one, and he bristles internally in anger. On the outside, he plays with the long sleeve of Jinki’s shirt, rubbing the material between his fingers.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he says. Jinki snuffles into Kibum’s collar and nods. The pace of his breathing evens out. He sleeps, and Kibum stews in the background noise of that. The electrical wires draped just outside the apartment window hum unevenly.

It’s hard not to take it as a rejection of Kibum himself, the sting of it ripe, but there’s no sense there, no cohesion with everything that’s comprised their relationship so far. Jinki had wandered into his life, and resolutely refuses to wander out, even after seeing the havoc that periodically rips through Kibum’s life. He’s kind, and with that Kibum realizes why it’s taken so long for Jinki to admit it, because he was precisely afraid of this kind of reaction, wary of giving Kibum any sort of distress.

A part of him sniffs defensively at the thought, but lying in bed at three am leaves little room for pretense.

Jinki is self-conscious, embarrassed to be seen, even by Kibum, and the fact that he wouldn’t lie to Kibum and pretend he was an exception, that’s a level of trust he won’t mismanage.

He lies in bed, his thoughts eliding into dreams as the sun comes up.

-------------------------------------

It takes a few days. They don’t live together, but it’s become normal for Kibum to sleep over on weekends, for them to meet after work on Fridays for shopping. They head back to his place with bags full of ingredients, as well as snacks and drinks in case a lazy Saturday morning turns into a lazy Saturday night. Kibum is growing more fond of those lately, a hazard of his late twenties that Jinki surrendered to much earlier.

Kibum unpacks his bathroom bag while Jinki sings in the kitchen. The dishes from dinner clatter as he moves them from the sink to the drying rack.

He looks at himself in the mirror, and tries to picture what Jinki feels when his eyes find him, when they trail over his body. His hands had fluttered to the bottom of his shirt when it started to ride up, Kibum remembers. Even as Kibum had swallowed him down, his reticence to be seen, to be bared, was paramount.

In the mirror, his eyes are dark, sharp - exactly as he had always known them. They were always something to highlight or enhance. He takes a deep breath, and changes his perspective.

When they tumble into the bedroom a few hours later - when Jinki is pressing kisses against his neck, his hand warm and solid against the small of his back - Kibum sits himself at the edge of the bed and holds Jinki at bay when he moves to join him. His eyes go wide and questioning.

“Do you remember what you told me the other night, about me looking at you?” he asks without preamble.

The immediate discomfort in Jinki’s face, the way his eyeline slides away from Kibum’s, tells him enough, has him squeezing his hands quickly before he releases. He turns away as Jinki starts to talk.

“I’m sorry, Kibum, I didn’t mean anything - “

He stops talking when Kibum turns back, when he pulls the length of a pretty, dark blue scarf taut. The last view he takes in of Jinki, the startle evident in his eyes, the slight parting of his lips, has no trace of rejection or confusion. He doesn’t give hesitation the room to take root; instead, he loops the scarf around, ties the knot quick at the back of his head. He finds Jinki’s hands again in the darkness.

“You meant something by it, baby. I’m glad you told me,” he stresses. Jinki’s palms feel clammy and nervous. He tries again. “If you’re not comfortable, then we should find a way to help you feel comfortable. So - let’s try.”

The tempting rush of nerves, he expels ruthlessly. He wills himself to be patient, even as it’s not in his nature to simply wait for a response. Jinki doesn’t say anything, but there’s the nervous sounds of motion, like he’s shifting from foot to foot. He’s likely biting his lip, as he mulls over what to say.

“Is it comfortable?” Jinki asks, and Kibum squeezes his hand and nods, intent to let Jinki ask any questions that he sees fit. The fact that he asked after Kibum’s feelings validates those first hours’ conclusion, that the confession was butting up against his desire to avoid hurting Kibum’s feelings, even inadvertently.

The subtle sounds of his shifting, when no further questions come up, is only amplified in the dark blue chasm now composing Kibum’s world. He starts to feel a little off-put, like he calculated wrong otherwise, that there was something else in Jinki’s admission he couldn’t decipher.

“We don’t need to do anything,” he says in a rush, pulling his hand back and moving to release the knot, but Jinki’s hand tumbles after him. It misses him properly but lands on Kibum’s arm instead. He pauses and waits, his patience growing thin under the stress of confirming he’s navigating this right. He doesn’t want to mess this up, to make Jinki only regret telling him.  

“I love you, you know? It has nothing to do with you. I want to be with you,” Jinki says. “It’s hard for me to - to be seen like that.”

“I know,” Kibum says in a rush. In his relief he pulls Jinki forward, forgetting his clumsiness, and they land in a tumble on the bed. Jinki curses beneath his breath, his stomach catching the sharp angle of Kibum’s elbow. Kibum moves to pull the blindfold off and make sure he’s okay, but Jinki catches him at his wrist. His lips meet Kibum’s unexpectedly, if a little awkwardly as Kibum had no sense of the motion.

“You stay stop, I stop,” Kibum says for the i love you in return. He waits for Jinki to nod back, to feel the movement beneath his hands. The slide of his brow against the scarf is unfamiliar, but their kisses meander in an easy duet.

When Jinki moves his hand to cup Kibum’s cheek, he starts in surprise. He had always kissed with his eyes closed, but there was nothing from stopping him to see, to check how he and Jinki had moved their bodies against each other. Being blindfolded had left him with his strong intuition, but he hadn’t realized how much of that was supplemented with the little peeks here and there. He settles beneath Jinki’s touch as best he can, keenly and abruptly aware of the startled nerve endings pulled tight beneath his skin.

“You’re so beautiful,” Jinki breathes out in a gasp. His lips are brushing at the hollow space created where the scarf pulls across his nose. It’s a subtle sign of change, for him to voice such sentiments. Jinki loses himself to sensation so easily, and here is what Kibum wasn’t able to anticipate: that letting Jinki operate unseen would let him feel more free to voice as well.

“God, just everything about you,” he continues, even before Kibum can think of what to say next. He lets his lips move down, gentle and reverent in every point of contact between him and Kibum. He moves his neck to give Jinki access there, indulgent to shiver as Jinki sucks a bit of skin between his teeth, sure to be purpled over in the morning. “I can’t believe I get to touch you.”

Kibum gropes blindly as he finds his way up to Jinki’s shoulder, then to his back. He digs his fingers in encouragingly as his boyfriend nuzzles against his skin, muttering insensible flatteries. When he moves down further, his hands brushing at Kibum’s sides, the grip Kibum has on Jinki’s shirt pulls it up with him and he stutters to a stop. He breathes, wet and hard, against Kibum’s stomach.

The material is bunched up, awkward and tight in Kibum’s half-fist, before he carefully begins to release it, flattening it against Jinki’s back.

There’s a sudden dip of pressure on the bed, a change of position - Jinki pulls away, leaning back and away from Kibum. The change of air hints at something, but Kibum is baffled as to what until Jinki leans in close again, his lips once again finding Kibum’s. He puts his hand over Kibum’s and guides it forward until it finds Jinki’s skin, the soft layer stretched across his middle. He moves up cautiously, Jinki’s hand still over his, exploring the space between his pectorals, the shallow dip of collarbone, the hollow of his throat.  

Kibum tries his best to keep his touches light, eager to commit to memory these first moments Jinki has permit himself to be known like this, yet wary of scaring him off. He traces his fingernails in lazy paths as Jinki braces over him; his tongue darts out between his lips to taste Kibum’s throat. As Jinki makes his way to move downward again, he disturbs the soft trails that will lead to Kibum’s navel, and scrapes his chest on Kibum’s nails. The change in direction injects another twist, another discovery. Kibum’s nail tweaks against the hard bud of Jinki’s nipple, and he chokes, sputtering a sloppy curse.

If there was a moment Kibum regretted the blindfold, it was this: the unclear impression of Jinki twitching helpless and hungry; the messy affections of the tongue spilling out of his mouth, wettening the dark curls that spring above Kibum’s cock.

“Come back up,” he pleads, because if Jinki takes him in his mouth he won’t be able to. He moves blindly until he finds hair, tugs gently at it until Jinki acquiesces. His other hand searches again, lands on his chest, and softly moves over his nipple once more. He can hear the moan Jinki bites back. Kibum licks at his lips and slowly pulls Jinki into his orbit, straining to hear for any request to stop, to feel for any reluctance.

But nothing comes. He replaces his fingers with his mouth, and begins to suckle gently at Jinki’s nipple. The thumb of his free hand moves to brush delicately over the other, and Jinki trembles in his hold.

A soft noise is shattering in Jinki’s mouth, muffled against Kibum’s head, as he ministrates. Jinki is a heavy weight that could collapse at any moment, but this new discovery strips away Kibum’s caution. Jinki mewls at every pull, every pulse that Kibum applies ruthlessly. Kibum’s tongue pulses against his nipple, his other hand tweaks and plays in between the wet breaths he catches against Jinki’s chest. The blindfold is being caught and knocked askew as they continue; Jinki presses in on him, eager for more in a way Kibum has never seen from him. His cock is a wet, leaking thing he pulls out in a clumsy, one-handed motion and drags across Kibum’s torso. His body is trembling with the effort of keeping upright, and Kibum lets his teeth capture the very tip of the bud.

“Kibum - Kibum, I,” Jinki sputters and Kibum slips his lips over his nipple once more. The teeth scrape against the bumpy surface and Jinki is cursing into his hair. His cock is wet and spent, pulsing uneven against his side, onto the sheets, before Jinki collapses beside him. The mattress dips down and Kibum rolls towards him. It’s a mess beneath his hip.

Fingers pull shyly at the blindfold, pushing it back into his hair and Kibum blinks to adjust to even the low level of light in the bedroom. It feels like a different space entire than what he entered just an hour ago.

Jinki looks at him, and Kibum lets him - lets him roam over his lips, his cheeks, his throat. He looks beyond him in return, just skirting over the top of his head, the loose strands of hair sticking out. Jinki’s touch, when it comes, is a hesitant, but happy thing as it reaches over to land once again on Kibum's jaw. His pinky slides against his throat.

He scoots, awkward and ungainly until their foreheads can press together. Kibum closes his eyes and breathes out in an effort to steady, to call upon the shallow reservoirs of patience. His own need is drumming steadily away, eager to be recognize, but he can wait. He can wait.

“Kibum,” Jinki whispers against his lips. His hand presses against Kibum’s stomach, his thumb grazing exploringly at the thatch of hair surrounding his cock.

The photo is abstract in close-up, a constellation of blurry moles and freckles across a pale swatch.

If Jinki lays it across the top of his naked thigh, it’s almost a perfect match.

1 reads the ink on the back, if he chose to look. Its edges are soft over the years, just over a decade since Kibum clicked the button. A sweet memento of their relationship: the only one of its genre Jinki gets to keep.

The rest of them are wherever Kibum sees fit. One morning he woke to find them laid out in neat rows and columns on the kitchen table. A chronological review showed the gradual dissolution of Jinki’s state of mind. All thoughts discarded from him at that moment, the plan executed as perfect as Kibum’s smile.

He’s made jokes about putting all his photos into flipbooks, something he can tuck into his back pocket beside his wallet and phone. A bland, generic cover to them, so he can review Jinki’s spread form in meetings and on lunch breaks. No one will know what’s behind his smile is his husband of ten years, deep in subspace, eyes glassy with arousal.

Jinki only gets to keep this one, this innocuous close-up. Beyond the edges is the hem of pale pink shorts pushed into a wrinkled mess. The story that preceded it: Kibum’s large hand sliding possessively up from his knee, his other hand clutching the camera and pressing the click . It doesn’t include Jinki’s pleading erection, highlighted by the bunched-up, thin material. It doesn’t include his furious sobs when Kibum finally lets him release.

Jinki clears his throat and puts the photo to the side. Kibum will be home soon enough from his latest trip, peppered throughout with texts and the more typical photos of the well-heeled traveler, sustained on long phone calls in which he complained loudly and often about the assholes he was forced to do business with, to start, and ending with quiet i love you ’s and the even sound of sleeping Jinki has to hang up on. Welcoming him home is enough of a pleasure on its own, regardless of the shade. They’ve toasted his return with soft nights in, cuddling in bed; going out to Kibum’s favorite restaurant and Jinki’s favorite bar, pleasant tipsiness and goofy flirtations like they’re near-strangers again, only imagining falling into bed together.

They could celebrate along the lines of the photo, which Jinki would prefer tonight. Kibum had sent him a photo of his own earlier, himself seated in the airplane. His eyes were sharp and intelligent above the mask. After the airplane would be the taxi that took him home to Jinki, and he had received a quick text assuring him he had landed safely over an hour ago.

Lost in his thoughts, he’s only brought out of it by the sound of a key turning in the door. The stiffness of his movements belie how long he had been adrift in his own wonderings; he sputters along in his mind trying to bring it back to the here and now. He slips on his socked feet, victim of the wood flooring Kibum praised when they first saw the place. The hallway is lined with picture frames of their life together, incredible artwork Kibum picks with care, and the odd plant. At the end of it he sees a dark head bent forward, no doubt setting his bags on the floor. Jinki’s heart patters that furious, familiar rhythm of relief and pleasure from seeing Kibum.

“Hey you,” Kibum says as soon as he sees him. He wears a small smile that Jinki meets with a bigger one that only disappears when their kiss takes its place. It reappears as soon as Kibum pulls away slightly, immediate need to touch satisfied. The bag still on Kibum’s shoulder is starting to fall down to his elbow. Jinki goes to save it and put it on the counter.

“Was your trip good?” he asks. “You want to go take a shower? I can start putting your things away.”

From behind him, Kibum makes a noncommittal noise that Jinki turns to decipher.

Kibum holds one of his photos in his palm, careful only to touch the edges. Otherwise it would grease up the image: a slightly younger Jinki, his lips bitten red, a tear formed at the corner of his eye.

“Oh,” he says. Kibum was never inclined to slow plays or insinuations, and his lack of patience is only amplified after weeks apart. He should have seen this coming, but Jinki always makes room for him to feel otherwise. Sometimes it makes him a little slow.  

Kibum carefully reaches around him to put the photo on the counter. He lays a kiss at the side of Jinki’s neck, nosing away the soft collar of his sweater.

“Do you want to?” he asks. His breath skirts across Jinki’s skin teasingly. Jinki nods and Kibum closes the distance to press a chaste, sweet kiss once more before he pulls back and they begin.

“I was looking at that on the way home. I had to lie to the driver about what it was, when he asked. You know what I told him?”

Jinki shakes his head, and Kibum tuts.

“I told him I was looking at my husband - my accomplished, intelligent husband who I didn’t deserve at all. Not a dumb, pathetic boy who can’t keep a thought in his head.”

The blood rushes to Jinki’s cheeks as he feels the familiar, overwhelming burn of embarrassment and insult. His whole world is turning soft and pink and malleable with him.

“Can you do something if I ask you to?” Kibum says. Jinki’s tongue is dry, so he nods quickly, eyes to the floor. “I need to set something up and not have it spoiled by clumsy hands. Go get dressed for me the way I like. You can remember that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” he says. Kibum starts at his response, and Jinki can sense the doubting, incredulous curve of his smile, the burning edges of it.

“If you can manage that, then you can wait until I say so. You can come when you’re called.”

“Yes,” Jinki says again, and when Kibum kisses him in dismissal it’s hard, demanding. He hasn’t said a thing about if Jinki can touch himself, but Jinki is dumb but trained well, not about to take the liberty without Kibum’s explicit word.

Jinki fights the urge to ask for one more kiss, one more soft caress, because he’s missed Kibum so much, but the play has already started, and his options are limited. This is what he wanted, and there will be time for that after. There always is.

-------------------

His mind was already lodged in the past, so he digs out the pink shorts. The hem brushes the edges of his palm when he has his arms at his side. They leave his legs bare and shyly exposed, and what is covered is thin and wispy. He pulls his socks off next, flexing his toes cautiously against the cold floor. Last to adjust is his sweater and shirt, gone in a single swoop and deposited in a pile on the chair in the corner. He’s hungry for the embarrassment, the vulnerability and pathetic sight of his arms crossed protectively across his chest, the involuntary disclosure of his belly muscles jumping at Kibum’s knowing touch.

They both would like that.

The change only takes a few moments; it makes sense Kibum hasn’t called yet, but it doesn’t make his hunger any less. He leans his forehead against the wall, creating a strain that prevents him from wondering too expansively about what Kibum has in mind. It could be anything. Kibum is creative, and smart, even after the years they’ve spent together. This dynamic is reliable, trustworthy in how it plays on each of their needs - Kibum likes to tease, to push. Jinki likes to be diminished, naturally sensitive and retiring. Even so, Kibum tries to find new things that inject the sense of discovery once again.

It’s okay. They trust each other. They know their boundaries. And even if Kibum will put him off-balance, he will always pull Jinki back. It’s non-negotiable.

His palms are sweating, he realizes. He rubs them against his side and shivers at the cool brush of air conditioning against his wet skin. It wasn’t on earlier; Kibum must have turned it on. It has the effect he suspects Kibum was seeking - his nipples have stiffened and would brush, sensitive, against any shirt he dared to put on.

Maybe Kibum was trying to keep him from putting a shirt on, but Jinki latches onto this new idea, the awareness of how they would stand out apparent beneath thin, white material. He throws the shirt over his head and takes a moment to look at himself in the mirror, the bashful pale skin exposed on his legs, the dark suggestions dotted on his chest, begging to be tweaked.

He’s a dumb boy, but even a dumb boy can figure out the math that will get him fucked.

There’s a knock on the door, followed by Kibum’s voice.

“Come out for me.”

Jinki follows his summons, opening the door. Kibum’s hand closes around his and guides him out with determination. At first nothing seems different at all, focused as he is on Kibum, the freshly showered smell of him, the dusting of water around the shell of his ear. But then he pauses, beside their wedding photo.

Another photo has taken over its corner, Jinki, eyes closed, mouth open to accommodate Kibum’s slender cock. The tip of it rests on his fat bottom lip. The camera flush has illuminated the wetness of saliva on Jinki’s waiting tongue.

“Something wrong?” Kibum asks, as if he’s stupid for pausing at such a sight. Jinki hasn’t seen that one, but the memory of it comes in a rush. Kibum had been lounging casually on the couch, and Jinki bracketed by his knees, lazily nudging at Kibum’s zipper until he had feigned impatience and relented. The TV had buzzed with meaningless chatter behind him, reflecting off of Kibum’s glasses. The small sounds of the camera on the phone being turned on, the fake shutter sound and flash stuttering his eyes open for a moment. Stars into his vision, fading out into a red and pink miasma as Jinki sunk down the length of Kibum’s cock and swallowed.

The photo obscures most of Jinki’s body in the original image, replacing his public politesse, neat and purposeful in its placement.

“A good day,” Kibum says. His voice is so beige he could be talking about either scenario.

Jinki agrees mutely with a nod, and continues to be towed along, helpless in its Kibum’ wake. He’s given a similar treatment to the other hallway decor, and pauses occasionally to let Jinki stare. It reminds Jinki of a dog owner pausing to let the dog sniff at something utterly ordinary to the owner. So Jinki lingers at this image: of himself, supine, smearing at the corners of his mouth; his legs stretched out, his cock peeking out of his boxers. The last one is one Jinki hasn’t seen before: it’s mostly of Kibum, unlike the rest of them, his face in profile. It’s taken over Jinki’s shoulder, the line of it along the bottom of the frame. He must be seated in Kibum’s lap. He can barely see how his mouth is hanging open, a fringe of hair disarrayed and obscuring even that. Kibum in the photo looks up at him, tenderness in the lines of his face..

It’s the edge of Jinki’s climax, it must be - the moment before Kibum lets the interplay’s premise fall apart, the hands that catch Jinki’s descent gentle and tender.

Kibum took him from their bedroom centuries ago, it seems. The last photo is meant as an out, but Jinki doesn’t want it. Everything else has been steadily building up sturdy walls of self-consciousness in Jinki, like he can hardly bear to be in a body so faithfully and intimately documented.

They reach the living room, where Kibum’s bags have been replaced by more photos, placed with care among their daily items: another on the fridge, another leant against the television. There’s a small, polite display of them on the couch. When Jinki starts towards them silently, he sees the category of them: the dildo by itself, his own fingers spreading his cheeks apart, the slow, methodical entry of it. Jinki remembers the broken sounds that tumbled out of his mouth.

Kibum prompts him, asking if he likes it. By his tone it’s obvious he’s repeating himself.

“Yes,” he answers, looking at Kibum properly. The other man looks briefly pleased, and just as swiftly replaces it with an airy sense of dismissal.

“I can do a lot when you’re not here distracting me with your begging,” he says. Jinki flushes again, and Kibum looks at him more critically. His gaze sweeps up and down. He suddenly reaches out to pluck at Jinki’s nipple.

“I like this. You managed to keep blood flowing to what you call a brain long enough.”

Jinki squirms, uncomfortable with the compliment.

“Oh, you think you’re cute. Don’t you?” Kibum asks dangerously.

Jinki gives a shy shrug, blush crawling down his chest.

“And do you think being cute and dumb is reason enough to fuck you?” Kibum presses on. He pushes the heels of his hands against Jinki’s hips until he falls to the floor. He scoots clumsily backwards, the rug pulling at the elastic of his shorts, pulling them down and exposing a dark tumble of hair. Kibum only pauses once Jinki’s back is against the couch. He reaches down and out, like he’s going to run long fingers through Jinki’s hair. Instead, he skirts past the contact, an insubstantial phantom suggestion of soothing. One of the photos is plucked between his fingers when he pulls back. He flutters it in front of Jinki’s eyes too fast for him to tell what it is.

He’s already gasping from excitement, already crumbling into a pink haze.

“I spent my entire trip thinking about this. This - “ he pauses and lets Jinki’s eyes adjust to understand the photo, the half-moon circles left by Kibum’s hands into the thick flesh of his ass. “- pathetic, slutty boy who could barely speak to ask me to fill him up. I asked him what he wanted, and all he could say was yes, yes . Pathetic. How he manages to make believe he can function is fucking beyond me.”

A bizarre giddiness sweeps over Jinki. It’s circular, a perfect circular route that takes one moment of humiliation and builds on it. As soon as they knew their limits, and that first photo was taken, printed, pressed into Jinki’s hands by a curiously hopeful Kibum, they would be able to perpetuate. All the divots and grooves of pleasure are well known now, committed in ink that can be pulled out at any time, and send Jinki careening down again. Kibum loves to take the photos, a meticulous record Jinki delights in, knowing they are secure and safely entrusted to Kibum alone. It’s for the two of them, a constancy that shows with every shade their trust and love.  

It roils within him, the eroticism of now, the warm memory of pleasures past, and the steadfast trust Jinki has in Kibum. The tight pressure points of Kibum’s finger against his scalp; the line of his arm as he braces forward; the glint of his eyes - they are all parts of what they’ve built together. And here is Jinki’s role: a pleasurable surrender to sensation, a yielding up of his body, a confession of inadequacy. It’s all Kibum’s to trigger; all Kibum’s to tease out.

In this space, it’s just Kibum and the disparate pieces that may reform into Jinki afterwards. Kibum uses the hand holding the photo to tilt Jinki’s chin back until it’s lying flat on the couch cushion. Distantly, he can hear the sounds of Kibum brushing away the other photos. His eyes focus as he begins to loom over Jinki. There’s a bulge in his pants. Jinki’s mouth starts to water.

His mouth is already open obediently, but Kibum squeezes, pressing his thumb and fingers on either side to force Jinki’s tongue out, pink and wet. With his other hand, he undoes his belt, button, and zipper. Jinki looks up at him.

“Too much coordination to ask of you,” Kibum says, and Jinki nods - of course. He can’t be counted on. He pushes his tongue out further.

Kibum releases the grip on his face and moves up to sweep Jinki’s eyelids down, gentle in his touch. His body relaxed, his mouth open and waiting, the first press of Kibum’s cock against his tongue is bliss.

His length is moved in gradual, deliberate motions; he raises to kneel partly on the couch and push his cock further in, to the back of Jinki’s throat. The change in position blankets Jinki’s sense - the smell and taste of his cock, the fresh smell of the shower and soap on his skin; his arm to the one side, balancing, and his leg to the other. Above Jinki is Kibum’s chest, his shoulders, his neck, his lovely face.

It’s what he wanted, when he was waiting, and he could always trust Kibum to know and to bring him to this place. He was more generous than he deserved, to not only press him into the headspace of comfortable dumbness and submission, but to do so in his own artful way that made the descent an easy, inevitable slide. His cock is a hard length in Jinki’s mouth, the weight of his presence intoxicating and smothering. Jinki doesn’t deserve the gift of it.  

He lies there, embarrassed and humiliated just to be in Kibum’s impeccable orbit, even as he yearns to be used in some way, to have his face fucked, to be a cute, dumb afterthought for Kibum to indulge in. As frivolous and empty as could be asked for, that’s what he will be. The humiliation of it all, the unflinching documentation of how long Jinki has sought this out, how long Kibum has tolerated it: it’s warmth, it’s pleasure.

It’s what he needs, and he opens his mouth wider. He lays slack and free for Kibum to bury his cock in.

“There he is,” Kibum says roughly. He rewards Jinki with a sweet touch to his cheek. “There’s that sad, slutty boy of mine. You never can hide it, can you, Jinki?”

Jinki shakes his head. He can feel a tear bud to life at the corner of his eyes. Kibum’s thumb lurches out its path so it can streak his skin, another mark to his vulnerability in this moment.

“I missed you,” Kibum continues on. His voice remains tinged with roughness. Jinki fights not to gag, eager for more. “I missed you so, so much.”

Jinki breathes in through his nose, sharp and keenly aware of his own hardness, the dark streaks betraying his leaking cock. The lights surrounding Kibum’s head make it difficult to see the features of his face, and sting when Jinki tries to see.

He shouldn’t even be trying to see. He knows it’s Kibum there; he knows the weight of him, the smell of him, better than he knows himself. If Kibum’s here, if Kibum’s is deigning to use him, he has no right to ask for anything else.

He knows well the sound of Kibum approaching the finish, the near erraticism it brings about in his rhythm. There’s no denying it, and he hopes that this’ll be another photo, another memory to cherish and hide away for their future. Jinki’s head is full of fuzzy anticipation for the stagger-shot moment, when Kibum will gasp and fold over, press a kiss to the back of Jinki’s head, guide his cock out of Jinki’s mouth, ask him to swallow like a good boy. And then he can start thinking about his own relief, jerking himself off as Kibum watches, criticism lurking at the tip of his tongue.

It changes in a moment, though. Kibum pulls out of his mouth and kneels over Jinki’s bare legs. He roughly pulls at Jinki’s shorts, making him cry out in a startle as his own cock is revealed. Kibum smiles, breathless, wolfish.

“Let’s compare,” he says, and Jinki doesn’t understand, not until Kibum presses his own cock against Jinki’s and wraps his hand around it, pumping them both off at the same time. Jinki moans helplessly at the sight, at Kibum’s insistent placement of the two of them together. His cock next to Kibum’s is fat and purpled with pathetic need, and Kibum’s is slender and slick and primed to finish. He could have just let him come after, in the afterthought of Kibum’s usage, a scrap of his own pleasure, but Kibum is continuing to chase after Jinki’s orgasm, refusing to let him go until he collapses.

What can he do but accede, as humiliating as it is, his own issue pulsing out and coating his dusky hair right alongside Kibum’s. Kibum has his left hand wrapped possessively around the back of Jinki’s neck in a familiar motion even as he shudders through it. A few moments to breathe squeeze their way into this space. The fuzz in Jinki’s head is like steel wool, sharp in its conflicting feelings.

Kibum pulls his hand back and digs into his pocket. The disruption of it pulls Jinki into a sleepy, blinking awareness.

His other hand, the one sticky with their cum, is held out expectantly. Kibum is his steady ground, his rock. He puts Jinki back together again, when Jinki breaks apart in his hands.

Gravity is what it is. The shutter of the camera goes off as Jinki’s tongue flickers out to clean up the mess.

the stars are different.

this is always kibum’s first thought, as inane as it gets every time the lander settles on the surface. when he looks up at the sky, periwinkle or obsidian or orange, different stars look back to greet him. he needs to take this moment, because it serves as the final reminder. he is somewhere new. he is, fundamentally, an intruder, an alien entity with no rights or stakes to the place he’s landed for only a little while.

the stars from where he stands, on this wet, lonely moon, are against a greenish-purple skyscape. the nearest planet is dipping beneath the horizon, its rings broken against the massive sea.

his lander, his home, is settled on a low-lying island, sheltered from the broader deep by ridges that leave only two entrances out. one is visible to kibum through the glass of his helmet; the other, according to the mapping is a half-kilometer southeast. there were no settlements nearby, perfect for his purposes.

he sets up the meters for seismography efficiently, beneath these unknown stars, and goes back to the lander to arrange for the ping, what will allow the services back home from determining what type of role this lonely moon should play for future navigation.

the success of this is indicated by a quiet, pleasant hum, and kibum settles himself back into his bunk. his suit is locked into a cabinet; his helmet, secured to the wall.

he falls asleep, unimpaired by the awareness that he is alone. this is, by now, an accepted reality.

-------------

a planetquake is always a possibility, a probability. kibum awakens to the frantic warning beeps of the seismograph sensors. the lander is equipped for this, bracers and cushioning and structural choices that will leave kibum unharmed no matter what rages on beneath the surface.

he throws himself into the seat to monitor the activity, to see it’s sourced deep underwater, and not nearly far away enough for him to ride it out. the lander will be thrashed to its very limits, but he’s been trained. he latches himself in, and watches through one of the displays as the ground opens up, the sea rushes in, and the lander tumbles into its inky, churning depths.

-------------

he blacks out, because the lander may adjust the pressure to keep him safe, but there’s only so much one can do against the feeling of being thrown, the sensation of turning over and over in a seemingly endless vortex.

-------------

he awakens, because there is a tap-tap-tap against the synthetic covering the lander.

the display shows he is, quite simply, lost beneath the ocean’s surface. the ping is no longer humming actively, but when kibum checks, he is assured by the fact he received a response while he slept, and any craft in orbit should be able to find him with a reasonable scan for activity.

none of this accounts for the tapping.

he has things to take care of first. his suit is crumpled but intact, and his helmet has no cracks or damage that would make it inoperable underwater. his food and water supply can be rationed out for weeks, and he separates it out into the necessary portions immediately, while his stomach is full and his thinking clear.

the lander itself has held together as advertised, though the water pressure may change that if he’s here for too long. but, as he calculates out worst scenarios, the first thing that could take him out is thirst, then hunger, then isolation sickness. all of that comes into consideration first.

kibum breathes out, because he’s used to isolation, but he’s used to isolation in the context of motion. there is no loneliness as long as there is the travel, the change from system to system, from stars to stars. loneliness is only a threat with stillness.

he is no longer on the mapped and confirmed desolate island, is the last consideration, the one that acknowledges the tapping objectively. he is beneath the waves, in a vast and alien ocean, and there could be a myriad of dangers beneath the depths.

it’s such a light, careful tapping.

kibum shakes his head, because the native population of this moon stay on the land. their crafts are rudimentary and stay along the coast. they do not have the capability of diving hundreds of meters and finding kibum and his lander, and tapping politely for acknowledgement.

the surface is durable enough to keep the ocean out, but kibum is a curious soul, and a pragmatic one. his heart threatening to enter his throat, he turns on one of the displays.

the depths of the ocean are dark, this is a fact, but there’s something out there, phosphorescent and glowing, a luring, lovely blue. its tail is thick, strong, and it moves swiftly out of visibility.

swallowing back his excitement, and turning a blind eye to his fear, kibum activates all the displays, creating a 360-degree image that circles around the entire inside of the lander.

kibum moves his eyes quickly around, searching for the creature, but there’s a baffling nothing, except a tap-tap-tap that reverberates from beneath his feet.

it’s intelligent, kibum reasons around his rising heartbeat. with a sharp, hard structure that allows for the continuing tap-tap-tap , and a recognition that there’s something inside the lander.

there are only two places with a physical aperture to view out of. and one is below the primary area kibum sleeps in, meant for secure observation of a surface that the displays couldn’t accurately penetrate.

he slips down beneath, pursuing the tap-tap-tap as it rings louder, harder. the viewing seat is compact as he bangs his knees in his haste to climb in.

“come on,” he whispers. the tapping is just above him and to the right. the seat is within its own bubble, rendering him unable to look up. the luminescent blue is barely visible at the corner of the transparent window. “let me see you.”

the tail lashes out from below, the sudden visibility of it, and the urgency of its motion startling kibum. blue dances in his field of vision as he blinks his way through the change of light.

when it clears, there is a person - a creature, kibum self-corrects, because there is a sharpness to their teeth, a scaliness to their skin, an inhuman glow crackling around them. he floats in front of kibum and his compact viewing station, his tail sweeping back and forth beneath him. kibum cannot even see where it ends, so boxed in by the limits of the bubble.

the creature clearly recognizes kibum as the occupant of the lander, and closes the gap. he reaches out and taps the tip of his finger against the window.

not quite a finger, now that kibum can see it up close. the extremities are nearly see-through, and kibum watches with fascination the way his joints move as he goes again to tap-tap-tap .

“what are you doing?” he whispers, and the creature sharply looks at him through blackish eyes, that change into a pale, milky white after he blinks. he gazes at kibum, his head curiously tilted. his hand pulls back and he puts it to his mouth. kibum can see nothing else as he opens it, but he knows the teeth within are sharp, jagged.

there should be no way for kibum to hear anything that originates outside the lander, but when the creature sings, kibum hears it. he hears it in the confines of his lonely soul, where it searches and finds all his curiosity, all his melancholy, all his too-human worries and fears. it takes all of these within its path, and only uses it to heighten its power. it sings, and it sings, and kibum presses his hand against the window in the sudden terror of being known.

in it, he can hear the hum of the ping, lost in the quake, lost to the sea.

it keeps singing, beauty escaping between teeth belonging to a predator, around hands that don’t quite have fingers, and kibum is alone beneath the waves. there is no craft coming to his rescue at this exact moment, endangered and entrapped within his perfectly safe lander.

that crackling blue glow around his tail is deepening, illuminating kibum’s hand as it stays against the window. the creature comes closer, and reaches out its other hand to meet kibum’s.

quite suddenly, it stops singing, and kibum is left gasping for breath, on the edge of drowning.

he sits back in his observation chair. the creature blinks, and its eyes are once again black. it makes no move to leave.

kibum scrubs his hand through his hair.

“fuck.”

-------------

he scrambles upstairs and detaches one of the small consoles to take down with. the creature is waiting patiently as he navigates the screen, trying to retain his composure as he pulls up the close-range bio-scanner.

it beeps as he brings it to its starting posture, and he quickly glances up, aware of how sensitive the creature appeared to be to noise.

the creature blinks at him, his tail swishing in an even tempo. taking a deep breath, kibum begins the scan. it should only take thirty, twenty, ten - at five seconds, the creature opens his mouth wide, revealing double rows of teeth, and lets out a broken bark of warning.

kibum drops the scanner. from where it lands, an impossible conclusion: human.

“is not,” he says stupidly. he pulls up the detailed report as soon as he finagles the scanner back into his lap. he thinks perhaps he hasn’t run it right, and runs it again, ignoring the second bark of objection. human. he thinks, maybe, the tight quarters of the bubble are affecting its identification process, and it’s reading kibum instead.

maybe, maybe, but there was no way to confirm it. he looks at the creature, and wonders why he hasn’t wandered off.

predators can wait for hours, he remembers, and he gulps, throat tight, at the way those black eyes follow him.

his own stomach growls, and he climbs back up to the primary deck. before he closes the passageway, he sees the blue luminescence brighten momentarily, and then fade away.

slowly, purposefully, he eats his first ration. he enters his data for the day, and pulls an extra blanket around him when he lays down to sleep.

-------------

tap-tap-tap wakes him up again.

this time, kibum climbs to the other aperture, a narrow oval on its side, located above one of the storage containers. its inclusion was a simple concession that humans craved natural light, even when there was no scientific justification. kibum had slept in it before, when he had a particular hunger. his whole body had savored the warmth of foreign suns.

he squeezes his whole body into the space now. before long at all, there is a flickering blue and the creature swims up. he goes to his side, mimicking kibum’s positioning. the fin at the end of his tail beats up and down, and kibum curls his toes parallel to it.

“hi again,” kibum whispers. the creature flicks his eyes over kibum’s form. “you don’t look very human.”

he hums, and again, it sounds like the ping, like kibum trying to send a message back home.

but it turns into a song again, and kibum lies there, his head pillowed on his arm, and listens.

there’s nothing else to do.

he is bared and bare, shedding the layers of himself with each note.

there’s no one else to be.

he is a human beneath the sea, waiting to be consumed.

-------------

the fourth time kibum wakes up, it’s to the absence of tapping.

he checks the bubble, and the storage aperture. he runs scans and finds no one but himself. the 360 display is darkness, darkness, except for one small corner.

this corner is by the access. there is the translucent end of a not-quite-a-finger, scratching at the seam of the airlock. if kibum holds his breath, and doesn’t move, he can hear it.

what has changed? the creature sings him to sleep, and taps him into wakefulness. he watches kibum’s movements and only leaves when kibum goes to. when kibum touches the window, he accepts it and reciprocates it. he has a tail that glows blue and comforting, black eyes that film over white, and double rows of teeth that can never quite be hidden.

kibum eats his ration, and goes to put on his suit. his helmet locks into the neck guard, and he checks his supply of air.

not looking away from the 360 display, kibum enables audio. he could hear him if he whispered, but kibum wants to say it out loud, a plea to summon bravery.

“i’m coming out.”

he holds his breath. he doesn’t move. the scratching stops.

-------------

the air lock of a standard lander is wide enough for a crew of three. kibum can spread his arms wide and just barely graze his fingertips against each opposing wall.

the door to the outside is thick, as is the door going into the lander properly. he checks the seals on the inner door methodically before setting down. his breath steams up the interior of the helmet before the air re-distributes, clearing it up with admirable efficiency.

tap-tap-tap  

kibum never did do well holding still.

he enters the necessary commands, and the passage begins to fill with water. the suit is meant to withstand any danger. it adjusts as the water gets higher, re-grounding Kibum when he begins to float.

through hungry, excited eyes, kibum watches the translucent, cartilaginous edges of fingers curl around. black eyes, double rows of teeth.

between the scales forming the curve of shoulders, at the edges of a tail that stretches out lengthy and sinuous behind him, the luminescence that entices kibum to lift a foot, to step forward.

the creature comes inside first, and meets him before he can do even this. his body is sleek, a mixture of skin and scaling down the proud line of his back, the wings of his ribs. the tail, starting at his waistline, makes him dwarf kibum. he floats a half-head higher than him, and his tail, trying to fit within the airlock, curls around the two of them. it brushes against the heel of kibum’s boot, teasing a possessive squeeze.

silently, the creature reaches out and takes kibum by the arms, and draws him outside. with the suit, kibum is over 200 kilograms on dry land. but here, in the alien sea, he is weightless, pulled heedlessly in a knowing wake.

the lander is impossible to see when their path turns, and his head turns to find it. the grip holds kibum on as he blinks back tears, uncertain if they come from grief or joy.

“where…” he starts to say, but falls silent. there are swimming forests before them suddenly. when they enter, their tendrils draw over kibum, reluctant to release him as the creature turns into a dive, towing kibum down, further and further.

the only thing kibum can see, when they stop, are the luminescent strands across the creature’s body. the lines of it in his tail come towards kibum. they find his legs and push them together, wrapping around him. his hands rest at the last length of it, where it wraps around his waist.

the creature releases his grip on his arms. kibum’s body finds them next against the sides of his helmet, exploring at the catches and releases encircling it.

“please - “ kibum starts. his breath catches before he can continue. the luminescence is bouncing off his helmet, and bringing the creature’s face in stark relief. the flatness of his eyes still somehow show intelligence, a waiting curiosity for kibum’s thoughts. “please don’t.”

the creature pulls his hand up, away from the latches, and back to his own face. instead of covering his mouth, he puts the palm against his cheek. he closes his eyes, and tilts against it, his face relaxing into peace. and then he takes the same hand. he presses it against the glass of kibum’s helmet, the barrier keeping him from holding kibum’s face in that same way.

he begins his song, and kibum listens. he is lashed open at each dark seam of his heart, his character written bold, and his body held naked, all to be consumed.

the creature is the ocean, and the ocean squeezes him tighter and tighter, its cold and its teeth and its beauty and its wonder and terror, folding kibum into the embrace he was seeking when he stepped into the airlock. when he looked outside. when he listened to the tapping, when he set the lander down and when he looked up at stars he did not know.

the helmet is clicked off, and kibum swallows the ocean, and the ocean swallows him.

-------------

there is a small, wet, moon at the edge of the system. the native population keeps close account of their boats, because the ocean does not give easily. but it takes, and it takes.

on the far south stretches of the ocean, there was an island where many islands used to be. the islands come into being with violence, and they are destroyed with violence. no one goes there. it is beyond even where avarice will take the natives.

but those who do not know. those who travel to the outreaches at the behest of others who do not know, and those who do not hear the stories, who do not heed the warnings. they find the islands and they are destroyed with it.

the ocean consumes, and it births. what is consumed is never erased, but made new.

a man swallows the ocean, and the ocean swallows him. it permeates his skin, his teeth, his bones; it glows within him. a creature, formerly a man, now hunts the deep.

it recognizes another man, for once it was that man.

-------------

and he sings to him. and he destroys him, to be made new.

kibum awakens to a tap-tap-tap .

his helmet lies on the floor of the sea, his suit beside it. the creature is floating on its back, his fingers tapping against the glass.

there is a blue glow, and there is a green glow. a tail thrashes beneath him, new muscles working just beneath his waist. careful, knowing before knowing, he moves his tongue to find a double row of teeth.

the creature swims up to him. the blackness of his eyes washes away into brown. he reaches out for kibum’s hand, and he gives it willingly.

the ocean beckons beneath them, around them, above them.