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          the petty boringness of yunhwa was saved only by its beauty, by the sparkling night skies protected from the city lights. the singing of the cicadas and crickets play as accompaniment to the waves rhythmically washing against the sand, and what a better way to listen than with a bottle of soju and a beloved bro. minsoo hated the formality of a cup when the chilled glass fit perfectly in his hand, already on his own second bottle; if there was a single strength min was confident of, it’s his alcohol tolerance. 

          kim dau was also one of the few strengths that saved the korean town, one of the few gems that minsoo held close and regretted leaving behind. a balanced combination: minsoo the devil stoically on your left shoulder while dau smiles away on your right. mornings spent milking cows — accompanied with min’s long complaints — to nights the elder dragged dau through some random scheme. he’d never admit aloud, but those moments were the ones that kept him afloat until he planned his escape, heart split at the thought of leaving it all behind.

          “my sister was mentioning today what things might be like if i never moved away, and i’ve been thinking about that all day.” shaking his head, a quick shot of alcohol went down with a squint. that was part of the reason min preferred beer; kept his mood lightened while keeping his thoughts censored. “i feel like i’d be a fisherman, maybe, or a manual laborer. oh! perhaps a carpenter. carpentry’s pretty sexy, right? i’ve actually been searching for a new hobby.” 

dau had entrusted minsoo with a lot of things in life — mainly, being his rock. though biologically two years separated the two, dau had never found anybody in his life who he felt closer to. yunhwa had never felt like yunhwa without him. dau had become quite attached to the idea of the necessity of needing minsoo in town in order to feel like he could thrive. the two had done everything together, and most importantly, minsoo had even waited for the younger to graduate high school in order to enlist in the military together.

having the older male’s presence and support meant the world to him.

“i can’t see you being a fisherman,” dau says with a chuckle and a swig of his own green bottle, never failing to take his eyes off the beauty of the last sliver of sunlight kissing goodnight over the horizon. out from between his lips comes a satisfied breath of air. “all you’d do is get trashed on the boat and wake up shipwrecked.” leave it to minsoo to actually do something so ridiculous that it would actually happen. the idea of going out fishing together once summer arrives, however, does linger in dau’s mind. he takes a long pause to consider minsoo’s options had the universe really chosen to keep the elder a prisoner in the town — just as it had done to him. maybe you would’ve ended up just like me, he thinks. of course, he’d never actually say it aloud.

·˚                    (   *   & .  Family was a tough pill to swallow, especially when it consisted of big and brave superhero lawyers, or whatever the hell he used to call them when he was a child. If only the younger him could see his alienation now. The television that afternoon had been tuned onto a news channel, against his better judgement. It was none other than his mother on that screen. Another national court case. The details of the case sounded like static to his brain, his only focus being that she defended another murderer. He knew he shouldn’t hold it against them. It was their job. But why? It always felt uncomfortable to him that talented lawyers could help obvious murders get lesser sentences than they deserved or even walking free. Regardless, this nonsense was making his chest heavy and the room was starting to feel stuffy. He needed to leave.

That afternoon Daewon drove the Highlander with several bottles of booze out and wherever he could go to… that being the beach. He sat there reclined in the driver’s seat and drank soju like out of a baby’s bottle, wanting to erase all of what he saw on tv that day. Especially at the part with the interview that included his mother and denying her son’s existence to begin with. *Not that he could blame her*. He was the son that got kicked out of Seoul National University School of Law. All he was, was shameful in their eyes.

Bottles collected at the foot of the passenger’s seat and everything gradually became fuzzy. He honestly didn’t have a plan when he drove out without telling his housemate, without a designated driver cause he sure in hell was in no condition to drive home. Not until he sobered up a bit. Maybe Daesun will be done with work by the time he was ready to leave. In the meantime, a walk on the beach may be able to help him out there. Hopefully.

Fumbling, Daewon kicked the door of his car open and stumbled out, probably dropping his keys in the process somewhere. Hell if he knew. It was hard to tell what was up and what was down at that point. Still, he waddled towards the sand in some sort of a daze. He failed to realize just how cold it was getting as night started to fall from all the alcohol in his system. He’d really feel this in the morning.

Daewon didn’t know how long he walked around, mumbling a bunch of incoherent curses and kicking sand around. A weird weightless feeling was starting to settle in. His mind was foggy and he could barely see out of his eyes. If anything, they were starting to get heavy and he wanted to go home and sleep. It was probably a good idea, considering he had work in the morning. In his head, it’s time to head home even if he couldn’t keep his lids open. The distance probably wasn’t that long anyway.

The drunkard pats around his pockets to try and find his keys, groaning when he isn’t able to find them. “Jesus fucking Christ.” he moans, stumbling to his knees to feel around the sand in case he dropped them somewhere. With the tides getting even higher, he could only hope his keys didn’t get washed away cause in his head, they were around somewhere.

@yhdau

jiseok’s visit earlier, though needed, still left a cloud of anxiety to loom over dau’s head. anything that concerned his parents or sisters always affected dau more than he would ever admit aloud; so instead, he finds more comfort in masking his problems surrounding his family by putting on the world’s best son stunt for everybody else watching. yunhwa residents who didn’t know him or his parents well saw him as just a darling young man; handsome, independent, polite — well, save from the thoughts of lady m, of course — as a general consensus, there weren’t too many bad things to find in kim dau’s life. 

he’d rather keep things private than let too many people know what was going on: word spread like — yes, wildfire — in this town. and as a man who knew almost nothing else about the world outside of this nowhereland, whatever was said about him or his parents by those in yunhwa had to equate to the word of law.

sometimes he wished he could get away from it all, but where could he go? you can’t drive a car to antarctica. 

along his — you guessed it — trip down to the shore, the young man had nearly stepped on a pair of car keys among the sand. there was no evidence to say to whom they’d belonged to, only that the automobile was a toyota. dau narrowed his eyes to try to peer farther along the horizon to find any parked cars up along the roadside. 

it took a little bit of walking, more thinking about his mother — and at times, yongji too — before another figure came into view ahead. there was no sign of a car in sight, but as the silhouette of a younger man came closer into view, dau could see him swaying. he watched the male stop to pat his pockets in a frenzy before dropping to his knees to dig frantically in the sand around him. 

“That should do it.” His smile is visibly contented, complemented by a confirmatory nod as he retracts, stethoscope returned to its nurse bag. “Though as always,” briefly stern, “I want to remind you that if you experience any change in your symptoms or your condition worsens, please contact the clinic immediately. The drive out is never any problem. I mean it.” He’s headed to matron’s chamber door, halfway through its threshold as his head pokes itself back. “I’m going to leave my number here, too, just in case, alright? Okay. Stay safe!” Another nod, smile persisting, his hand ascending to wiggle its fingers in a quiet goodbye. He navigates himself with a courtesy, wooden floorboards of the country home oddly comforting, despite their inevitable creaks heralding his placement beside the younger farmhand.

“She’s okay.” He speaks decisively, simper gentler as he offers a timid wave, seating himself beside him. “I don’t see any significant change between this and her last check-up but the cough admittedly sounds nasty. I can see why you’d be concerned. You were right to call.” His validating is chaste, expression widening with the same warmth in his eyes. “I recommend monitoring it here. Bedrest, at-home remedies, nothing laborious. If it doesn’t improve or you’re worried about anything, call me. I don’t mind. The drive is gorgeous and I think the kids like it, too.” 

There’s a distant scream, as if on cue. A shriek that reverberates over the open hills, enclosing upon the men, broken up by intense panting. “U-Uncle!” Another deep gasp: his niece, nearly keeling, hands atop her knees, trying to recuperate. “There’s …  they have …  chickens! They have chickens! Chickens! Chickens — !” She’s taken off with another scream that tumbles as she runs, arms flailing above her head, very interested in those little birds.

“As I was saying …” He gestures with a pointed knowingness, feigning embarrassment lightheartedly, shifting with his laugh. “Really, though. Thank you for letting me bring her. Hopefully she wasn’t too much of a handful.” There’s a pocketed baggy he tousles out of his coat, unzipped plastic revealing a bounty of cheese crackers he places between them, a humble token of his gratitude.

“Have you been doing okay? I feel like it’s been a while since we last got to talk.”

@yhdau​

dau likes seeing jiseok — he really does. he’s a nice guy. always pleasant to talk to and is professional for being such a young guy (but who was twenty-four year old dau to really comment?), but it was under the circumstances that always made seeing jiseok give him a twisted knot in his stomach each time he had to see his face at his doorstep. 

seeing jiseok meant his mother was having health issues. as the eldest and only son, it took a lot of mental and emotional energy to look jiseok in the eye as the only other man of the house to let their nurse in with a soft smile.

not that it was a situation of life or death for his mother, but the ranch fire had affected the kim family in more ways than just one. the after effects of getting their animals out of the barn after it’d been set ablaze the night of the arson left his mother with symptoms of smoke inhalation that still lingered present day. 

while dau’s father hovered outside him and his wife’s bedroom door, dau sat stoically in the living room reclining chair; he hadn’t noticed that his fists had been in tight balls until jiseok finally made his way back out. he and his father made a direct beeline to jiseok only to both slacken their shoulders in relief at the good news. 

dau’s father insists that jiseok keep the cheese crackers for himself, that it was their gratitude he should be accepting. he promises the young nurse a fresh bottle of milk from one of their cows before excusing himself to check on his wife in the bedroom, leaving the two younger men to their devices.

“yeah, yeah,” dau runs a hand through his tousled, dark hair, a stark contrast against his tanned skin and the slight sunburn that managed to color the tip of his nose a light pink. he never actually really considered himself as part of these equations; it was always about the utter importance of his mother’s health. he could take the brunt — she couldn’t. she didn’t deserve this.

dau no longer enjoys the silence of the road to and from his family’s ranch.

not since after the fire he doesn’t — what used to give him comfort and solitude from the bustle of downtown, away from all the town gossip and pitiful gazes and empty condolences over his family’s losses only made him feel even more isolated. the road was a long one, turning from smooth pavement to uneven gravel as soon as the flatland turned to hills that fostered nothing in sight except for the kim family’s ranch only a few more meters ahead.

from the road and over the wooden fences was a timber structure that once resembled something of a barn. it pained him to look at it for too long now — what once was a place he’d visited so often was now something that was burned to its core and flatlined. the barn hadn’t been the only place the fire spread to, but it clearly was where it began. it was a shame for anybody in town to behold. the only thing dau had to be thankful about was that their ranch was such a ways out of yunhwa that unless somebody came looking for it, nobody could see the destruction unless they’d wanted to.

(and he often wondered just how it’d all happened in the first place.)

the sound of car tires struggling against the dirt road immediately turned dau’s attention southward. apart from other ranchers nearby, who more often than not would simply come on horseback, there wasn’t anybody in the ranch’s vicinity that normally rode automobiles on the backroads. dau’s family’s truck was a tank, built to withstand even driving on the off roads in four wheel drive. tires having this much trouble were certainly the sign of a car — and driver — who definitely weren’t from around here.

dau doesn’t have to take himself on horseback too far down the slope of the road into town to see a female on the side of the dirt road. he could see the outline of large cases of luggage surrounding her on both sides, an all tell sign that she definitely didn’t intend to be left here. 

he approaches her with a smile, the shade from his straw hat shielding himself well from the open sun; she, on the other hand, the poor doll, was left with nothing. “need any help?” he asks, disembarking from the horse’s saddle and eyeing the mighty large suitcases that dau could just tell weighed far more than she did. “those bags of yours lookin’ pretty heavy.”

the beat of the music from the tavern last night had found its way through dau’s veins as the night went on; he couldn’t get it out of his head, nor out of his body. it pulsed through his veins just as fluidly as the alcohol from the night had pushed its way all the way from his shot glasses to the soles of his feet that had found their way to her. 

by the time he’d had his hands around her waist and chin rested on her shoulder, dau was far gone. a concept of next morning regrets never once crossed his mind in the moment, and for awhile, his inebriated state of mind really did rule king of his decisions.

there were only supercuts that lingered in his memory of leaving the tavern with her in hand; how they’d even decided or found their way back to her place in such far gone states of mind was beyond him. 

the highlight reel of the evening ended with those last few recollections. dau had woken up abruptly before the light of day even had the audacity to show itself just yet; he couldn’t blame it for being embarrassed to show its face after such a long night that was far from memorable. he still felt drunk and dizzy as he could’ve sworn he’d felt when they’d first begun taking their clothes off in her bedroom — god, how had his conscience failed him? — and that god forsaken bass that reverberated through every song of the night still pulsed in his memory like a leech on skin. dau was positive the two of them hadn’t bothered to drink much water either, as the onset of an incoming migraine was coming to him even with the absence of light in the room.

jiyeon was still asleep, thankfully, and still so far zooted that even dau’s stumbling and searching in the dark to find his discarded clothes on the floor did nothing to wake her up. the only redeeming factor dau could make of the situation in the moment was his count of one condom in his back pocket — he’d brought two. thank god that part of his brain had still been functioning.

dau vaguely remembered jiyeon from their high school years, though nothing about her when they were growing up ever stuck out to him. she’d always just been one of the countless girls that made up his class — not in a bad way, of course — but there wasn’t much he could recall they’d had in common apart from both being natives of yunhwa. he’d known that jiyeon eventually would grow up to be the town hall’s secretary, a far more prestigious and important job than dau was sure he’d ever hold. her clout in yunhwa was what made this situation suddenly very sticky for dau: what if others found out? he knew there’d been some sort of celebration for somebody’s birthday last night — though he couldn’t remember who exactly, and that was why this situation he’d put himself in now felt incredibly sticky. dau wasn’t the type to even do something like this, ever. he’d let himself become too far gone for his own good, and for all he knew, jiyeon could’ve remembered it all. there were things that may have been said or done that had been erased in his drunken haze, and the looming responsibility of confronting her about it later felt like a looming storm in the distance. 

but for now, he’d let her sleep. once he’d actually made it out of her place and out into some fresh air, dau checked his phone. it was only five in the morning.

—

simultaneously living and working on a ranch doesn’t make it easy to come wandering back home at the peak of dawn after a long night out. it was something dau never did anyways, so the notion of trying to keep himself from either waking or running into his parents at such an early hour (someone would be up once the roosters started calling) left him with an unsettling pit of guilt in his stomach. he’d managed to make his way back in through his house and gaze over the loose wooden floor boards without too much of a ruckus, albeit stopping first at the refrigerator to nourish his dehydrated body with the first signs of water, before settling back into his bed as if he’d been there all along. 

of course, however, his aging father would wake him up only two hours later when the roosters started calling. he’d been instructed to head down to the town hall and pick up a new burn permit. it’d taken all of dau to get himself out of bed, his migraine worse than it’d been before he’d try to go to bed when the light of day was still dim. he drives his father’s pickup slower than usual into town. 

all he wanted was this trip to the town hall to be a quick in and quick out sorta trip. dau had completely forgotten about white day’s existence until stepping through the front doors and being greeted with a lobby adorned with florals and romantic sentiments everywhere. an employee offers him a handful of candy and rose with a joyful smile before dau politely and tiredly declines.

not until he reaches the front counter and sees a very familiar head of black hair does dau pause to breathe. 

    why did grown ups lie? first, it’s the tooth fairy and santa claus. next, it’s the reason why they are leaving town. ahreum knows her mother like the back of her porcelain hands, knows that when she picked up her keys to head out for ‘business’ for a week or so, it was really because the clubs in yunhwa were nowhere near the clubs in busan. they paled in comparison to the ones her mother would frequent in gangnam, but it was enough. this time, her mother would be miles away and ahreum wouldn’t have to deal with taking care of her raging hangover the next morning. maybe moving to yunhwa had some perks. the blonde bombshell is slightly tipsy as her feet pull her to the front of the tavern ( if her mother and father’s love story was anywhere near healthy, she’d find it sweet that her mother’s liquor cabinet code was still his birthday ) and she could feel the extra pep in her step, liquid luck coursing through her veins.

    she opens the doors with a light push of her dainty fingers, now using the extra strength in her feet to push it open to reveal the nearing end of the trivia nights that were held often at the tavern. she doesn’t frequent it often; she doesn’t frequent much often around yunhwa. it’s nearing a year of her permanent move to the seaside sanctuary and still, nothing is that familiar. her long hair sways behind her, almost like a golden shield, as she makes her way towards a familiar figure perched at the end of the bar. ❝ ranchy! ❞ there’s a giggle that falls from her lips, a friendly hand waving. geez, did the alcohol in her system make her twice as outgoing.  ❝ i need a mai tai … do you think you can get me one? ❞ gold lashes bat as she hopes to get her first free drink of the night. 

life’s fortunes told dau that tonight would end on an early and simple note. the male would be approaching his mid twenties next winter; and although it came as something funny for people to joke about, dau really did feel like father of all his friends who felt retiring for the night at eight was enough. his body was already exhausted enough from expending itself to caring for ranch animals all day and could barely handle even two and a half pints of beers without being the first to begin dozing off over his drink at the bar.

tomorrow would be his first day in weeks that dau would have the day off — his youngest sister would be taking his spot helping his parents on the ranch instead. dau had been itching for this saturday to come for weeks; all he’d been anticipating was sleeping through the sound of belting roosters at the crack of dawn and actually give his overworked body time to recover. closing out the week with a mild game of trivia (yes, maybe he was already an old man at heart) and a cold glass of beer was all dau wanted — and expected. 

what he didn’t expect, of course, was to have the world’s biggest party girl barging down the tavern’s doors like the greeks going to war. 

dau hears ahreum’s beck and call from across the entire establishment and squeezes his eyes shut out of reflex. ahreum’s voice, he swore, could travel across the universe and back in the blink of an eye, and it’d also garnered the interest of every male patron in the bar to watch her as she descended toward his crouched figure at the far end of the bar.

“haven’t you already been drinking?” he says to her as he readjusts his posture in his seat to look her fair in the eyes. there was no denying that as usual, ahreum looked good — almost too good. it took a conscious blink to pull his eyes off her and redirect his ‘attention’ back to the bar. 

god, was it hard to tell a pretty lady no.

“just one,” he tells the bartender moments later, succumbing to ahreum’s easy maneuvers to obviously win him over. slipping them a paper bill between two fingers. he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen ahreum, but dau knew that if he tried to get out of leaving the bar soon, his plans would be squashed.

not once, not even in the twenty some odd years of knowing each other, had dau ever told anyone about their spot.

it’d become such a place of solitude and fierce recollections of the past that revealing it’s existence would only ruin it entirely. of course, to the untrained eye for any that so stumbled upon it accidentally would it only appear to be just another part of moonjaedo. this part of the beach, however — it took time and effort to find. it took a lifer of yunhwa, somebody who had it in their stars to remain on these sands forever, to discover. 

it was the prints in the sand from their high school years that had proven the grounds hadn’t been visited in years, except only by themselves.

there was a lot to be said about their secret beach. it took quite a bit of climbing over bluffs and over an array of slippery stones that formed a natural barrier around the concealed, walled off piece of land separate from the rest of the ocean front. all those that chose to stay in the vacation homes during the summer stayed clear of this side of the beach, thankfully, leaving the locals, more specifically himself and yongji, to their own devices away from the commercial fuss.

but dau hadn’t seen her here in years. funny, because she was the only part that mattered to him about even being here. things felt empty without her around. dau almost wished he hadn’t spent so much of his time cleaning up their leftover garbage from the beach in years past now — just as a reminder of how things once were, back when times were so much simpler (and before the notion of growing old really didn’t mean much to either of them).

he’d brought himself an eight pack of beers and a picnic blanket for himself to watch the sunset over moonjaedo in quiet solace. it’d been years since he’d visited the beach with yongji, and although he’d seen her since his return from the military some years ago, their relationship felt fragile and far less flexible than it’d once been years ago. what’d happened to their predecessors was happening to them too before his very eyes. 

it was no surprise the tavern was this empty at 5 o’clock on a friday. dau hadn’t realized just how close the northern hemisphere was to the spring equinox, just only two weeks away, as guided by the last sliver of daylight holding on for dear life outside the tavern’s sheer curtains. tonight, though, reeked especially of cigarettes; as much as the young man tried to grow accustom to it on trivia nights, aka smoker’s paradise, he could never shake the slight nausea that always hit him right when he was beginning to feel his drink. 

the rum and coke in his hand was starting to grow too watery for his tastes. dau didn’t open let himself drink this much, already pushing two cocktails in less than an hour, but it’d been an excruciatingly long day at the ranch — not anything new, of course, but his father had grown seemingly bitter and grumpy in the early afternoon onwards ‘till the last afternoon feeding. dau needed his old man out of his hair, and as soon as he’d made sure the ranch’s fawns were fed, dau had settled for an ice shower and an evening trip down to mokjawon.

he orders one more rum and coke for good measure. it’d be his last one of the night — he always clocked himself out at three, max (there’s absolutely no way to work on a ranch if you’re hungover the next morning, period). two drinks, however, were enough to get dau’s characteristically quiet demeanor to find the words to actually start and hold a conversation. it was something his friends actually doted on him for not drinking enough — since drunk dau meant fun dau — but who could blame a man with responsibilities? 

the cascade of... blonde? silver? the man was practically colorblind at twenty-four, and though he couldn’t put an exact color to this young woman’s hair color sitting across the tavern, it had enough influence over dau’s choices to raise him from his seat and gravitate him across the room. her petite frame was facing away from him as he took one of the many empty seats beside her. frankly, he couldn’t even tell if she was korean or a foreigner at this angle, but his curiosity didn’t stop from prompting him to say something. 

“must’ve taken you a long time to get your hair to look like that,” dau says, his head tilted closer to the bar in an attempt to get a better view of the woman’s face. by now, he’d noticed, the last remaining sunlight outside had retired for the day.