the prettiest horse you know

in the summer, when they're eighteen, henry comes to jejudo for two weeks. they go to samyang beach. henry cooks, or tries to, and joon can only watch and make fun of him. sometimes he just watches. that's the point where he figures out that he likes henry, when the evening light strips all the colour away from their skin and repaints them pink and purple like the sky. when henry leaves, joon is biting his nails.

eighteen is when joon and min move to seoul by themselves. joon starts university there. joon starts a lot of things there, like coughing flower petals, which he tells min about, and min looks at him incredulously through a layer of half-sleep and then tells him to stop talking. it's okay though, because then min watches it happen the next day, and then they decide that this is a problem. it's called hanahaki, they learn, and every time joon talks to henry it feels like it's getting a little bit worse. they're not even on the same side of the world but it feels like he's being ripped apart. he gets told that he should have surgery to fix it. joon doesn't want to.

when joon is nineteen, he's in hospital. actually he doesn't remember much of what came before that except that he stopped talking to henry. he finally let min delete all of the apps from his phone, or finally listened every time he was told not to look at one of henry's social medias. a lot of finallys. for example, he finally let them crack into his chest to take out the flowers, because he'd been crying so much recently that it probably reached a new level of pathetic and he didn't want to love henry anymore.

when he wakes up after that, everything looks so brightly white. joon doesn't remember very much of that either. it's like his memory doesn't start again until they send him home the day after, and joon spends a lot of time rewatching reply 1997 and biting his nails while he thinks about how now it just feels like there's something missing inside him. there's an ugly brand of scarring down the middle of his chest. he watches it heal. he feels normal again, he guesses.

at some point he starts talking to henry again. he doesn't tell min. everything is fine. no flower petals. he settles out of caution a few months in, and everything is fine again, just like when he was in high school. even if every time he coughs, he's expecting flower petals. min glances at him every time too. joon casually dates one of the exchange students instead. they break up because joon is so uninvested that aomame can tell, and he should feel bad about it, or something like that, but he's so tired. this scares him. the love, that is, that hanahaki might happen again. he keeps his heart where he can still see it, and clings a little tighter to his friends.

joon used to be the one coughing petals, or Suffering, or crying every day until they took flowers out of his lungs and everything went back to normal. ish. kind of. he thought about how it wasn't really the same, because when he looked at henry then he expected to feel golden flowers springing into his throat but instead there was nothing but something kind of heavy or empty or something more like stone.

and then henry turned out to be in love with him, and joon tasted bitter in the back of his mouth, like he was thinking about how this couldn't have happened so many years ago when it was him choking on flowers and catching tears in the corner of his eyes. he understands what it’s like though. he doesn't know if that's a good thing or not.

joon was.

joon kisses henry like he wants that to make him love henry again. it doesn't. joon ends up looking at clumps of golden petals and wishing that he could. he's never wanted to be in love with henry before but now it chews at him: if he hadn't had surgery, things would've been different. maybe he should wish that they could just go back to being friends instead. where hanahaki never happened, where neither of them had ever been in love with each other at the wrong times, where they could go back to brushing sand out of the corner of their mouths and chasing sunsets but everything slips further and further out of reach, and joon is waiting for it to shatter.

joon is.

joon never intended for henry to find out about his hanahaki. but it gets caught up in his work and he leaves it on the coffee table before he goes to change, and by the time he's come back, henry is holding the page about the procedure. joon ends up sitting on the sofa with his arms wrapped around henry, pretending not to look at the paper or henry, or the anything. 'cause he's never wished that he could love henry before, but now the thought makes him dizzy all over again.

joon was.

in love with henry, that is, but he can't be again.