the dark side of the moon
kai/kyungsoo | pg-13 | fantasy, soulmates!au | 8.6k
In which God is a woman, and time has a needle that mends butterfly stitches on wounds that otherwise would never heal. Sometimes those stitches break open like dams.
Planes devoid of color slope into low hills as far as Kyungsoo can see. He trails his eyes over the way the gentle curves of a frozen lake sit juxtaposed against a splash of green leaves hanging over it, the limp branches swaying with the breeze that flits across the land. Snow dots his vision, flakes falling across the sky like shooting stars that hold all the hope in the world, but at the same time everything is lost in a state of stagnancy.
He lays back against the ground, plush with snow and conforming to the contours of his body until his pasty skin bleeds into the same color as the flakes. The atmosphere buzzes around him. And everything stills.
The snow stops falling, the wind stops pushing against his face, and the Weeping Willow is trapped back into the confines of gravity again. Kyungsoo smiles and closes his eyes, cutting off the perpetual white that surrounds him with a blanket of black that doesn’t do much to block out the brightness of the day.
He’s been alone on this plateau since he can remember waking up here, but the equanimity that cradles his mind and mends his bones together outweighs the sporadic hands of loneliness that seize his heart on nights when the stars don’t shine down on him.
Kyungsoo is an aggregate formed from the elements of this world; he is one with the air and the ground and the wind and the cold. The lake is his body, ebbing and flowing with a sea of emotions but on the top of it all, it is hard and unrelenting. The Weeping Willow is his arms that reach out for the unattainable from a permanent spot carved out in the ground. And the scattered clouds are his thoughts: drifting, dissipating, never in the same shape twice.
Letting the blissful smile slip from his face, the snow falls again, the wind dances with the leaves of the Willow, and the white once again consumes his vision.
This is what Kyungsoo’s day consists of, throughout every hour, every minute, every second until it turns dark enough that he can’t see his hand an inch in front of his face. Pitch black nights are the only way to see the stars, though, and every night Kyungsoo happily lays beneath the teardrops of the universe with his hands laced behind his head and his bare feet digging into the snow.
At dawn, hues of orange and yellow and red mist across the horizon and rays of warmth wash over his skin like a tidal wave of good feelings, but it never melts the snow. Nothing is powerful enough to destroy the crystals of fragility built all around him- not even the sun.
❅ ❄ ❆
The moon has just risen to her throne in the center of the sky, and Kyungsoo has his hands planted firmly on the ground to lean back and watch the stars undress themselves when something moves from the corner of his eye.
At first he thinks that maybe he’s just imagining things, that he was hoping a little too hard for a shooting star tonight. He watches the same spot and doesn’t expect anything more to happen. But then he sees it again, and this time his eyes are trained on the ball of snow flying past him. He doesn’t let the panic seep over his body. Instead, he sits in the same spot, breathes just as slowly as before, and stares at the ball now broken asunder onto the ground like shattered pieces of glass.
Kyungsoo has never met anyone else in the long expanse of time that he’s been here. Nothing has ever moved without his permission, cast a shadow he didn’t know about, or let the permafrost beneath their feet crunch without his knowledge. So it’s a surprise when he does see something move, a warped shadow cast on the ground and the pinch of snow under foreign feet.
Fingers make their way into his field of vision first. They’re loose, dangling, tan like the shroud of night, and grow into a large arm mapped out with long veins standing blue on a beige canvas.
When Kyungsoo finally looks up and sees the face of the boy with hair as dark as the snow is white, the back of his brain tears away from his skull and curls into itself, crumbling into the top of his spine. An airy pain burns into the space between the synapse of his brain, branching out to the top of his neck, burning hot against the cool wind.
The seconds draw out into long hours colored with molasses. He’s suspended on the strings of time playing a tune that falls on deaf ears, and all he can do is jump from one chord to another.
“Hi,” the boy speaks, and there’s an inhibited blush spreading over his high cheekbones. “I’m Jongin.”
Jongin is very pretty, Kyungsoo thinks, eyes widening. He walks with the elegance of a falling snowflake and holds an entire galaxy of stars in his eyes, blooming constellations that Kyungsoo knows he could lose himself in learning about.
Despite the way Kyungsoo’s lungs are still and how there’s a ball of breath caught in his throat- painfully so- he replies, “Hi. I’m Kyungsoo.” He’s not even completely sure how to talk to another person, and he questions whether he should even talk to the only other person he’s seen in ages. In the end, he does talk to the stranger, with his words clouding a foot in front of him and his eyes still trained on the boy who calls himself Jongin.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Jongin asks, fidgeting as he takes miniscule steps towards him, and Kyungsoo thinks his voice sounds like the thrum of a leaf riding the wind, dancing over the fresh snow, and drawing lines of harmony that fall apart too quickly.
“No.” He emits a gracious smile. Sometimes it gets lonely here, considering the stars don’t make much for conversation. “Sit down.” Small hands pat the spot right beside him.
When Jongin sits down next to him their knee brush up against each other’s, both of them crossing their legs, and Kyungsoo’s hand stops midway from reaching to adjust his shirt when they touch. His muscles freeze in midair along with Jongin’s, but they don’t turn to look at each other in case it was just loneliness pigmenting in their imaginations. There’s a distinct spark in the way it pioneers his body so freely and grabs hold of his nerves until they’re grated raw with sensitivity to the way they brush up against each other. It churns up an odd feeling in the bile sitting at the pit of his stomach, equal halves of anxiety and nostalgia.
Kyungsoo’s lips stay sealed shut as well as Jongin’s. They bask in the silence of the night and of their company, breathing in the fresh air and exhaling smoke that goes unnoticed by eyes that are too busy sifting through the galaxy. For Kyungsoo, it’s enough. This is enough. This will always be enough for him- just sitting here with someone, being hyper aware of their movements, and trying not to notice the stray tendrils of hair that fly away from their head.
The thick coat of silence is only broken when Jongin speaks up again. “Do you see that star there?” he asks, with a finger on top of the brightest star in the sky.
This time it’s the side of Kyungsoo’s brain that curls up and dies, the echo of it resonating in his ear.
“Yeah.” He nods, even though Jongin isn’t looking and there’s a dull throb seeping from the base of his skull. “Why?”
“That’s Polaris,” Jongin grins, and if Kyungsoo could compare his smile to anything, it would be the first rays of sunlight that heat his skin in the morning, “the North Star.”
“Oh.”
“It’s the star that never moves,” he continues with his eye trained on the sky above, “and it will always be there to guide you back home.”
“Oh,” Kyungsoo repeats dumbly. This is his first conversation in a long time and his eyes have soaked in so much that it leaves barely enough room for him to sort out his words. “Home.”
Jongin rips his gaze away from the sky after another minute of admiring the stars and shudders, goosebumps breaking out over his bare arms and legs. “Speaking of home, yours is really cold.”
Kyungsoo wants to apologize for making him cold; Jongin isn’t used to the weather like he is. He wants to offer him a coat, a warm place to rest, some hot chocolate- all the things that the Willow told him about, even words that could offer solace, but he has none of those. The string of sentences he could say get cut off when they jumble up in his mouth and jump off his lips in a long breath because he realizes just how long he’s been alone.
“But don’t worry about it!” Jongin reassures him, patting him on his back to try and soothe out the worry on his face. “I’ll just bring a coat when I come back tomorrow.”
Kyungsoo’s jaw falls and his mouth stands agape, pearly teeth reflecting the light of the moon. “Tomorrow?” He isn’t any better at conversation than the leaves hanging from the Weeping Willow.
“Tomorrow.” Jongin smiles, and it almost sounds like a promise.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo watches the North Star for the rest of the night, eyes hooded but never blinking. The beams of light pouring from the sky are enough to pry his eyelids open each time he thinks they’ll fall. Jongin’s words burn further into the back of his mind with each second he spends thinking about the star that never moves.
Somewhere along the way he loses himself in roping bleary images of a boy on a mountain, the pixels piecing together in a hazy mirage of dreams. It isn’t until the sun is about to rise and the sky lightens to an electric navy blue that he blinks away the film of dust over his vision to see the silhouette of a man between the stars.
It’s rare that he ever spots a Star Hopper.
They are the ones that could never settle down, that can’t stay in one place for too long because they go crazy or because they’re looking for something. They step across the universe, from star to star, from life to life. Sometimes they invade territories that are occupied, like Meissa or Bellatrix of the Orion, and some trace the lines of constellations with perpetual footsteps that fade away before they’re ever seen or heard of.
The Hopper now, he’s stepping off the tip of Eridanus, taking long strides towards a star further west. His shadow is darker than the rest of the night, but not by much, and at any passing glance, nobody would see a thing. That’s why they’re almost impossible to detect, but every once in a while their eyes catch stray light and they show themselves to whoever is looking.
Sometimes the Weeping Willow will whisper rumors of legends in Kyungsoo’s ear. She once told him of a Hopper that jumped too far, overshot his trajectory to try and get onto Betelgeuse. She whispers that he landed on the stony surface of the moon and couldn’t figure out how to get off.
Hoppers are given the ability to jump off stars, not asteroids.
The Weeping Willow never finishes telling him the story, though. She always starts crying right before the end. Kyungsoo never asked about the man on the moon again.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo doesn’t really know how long it’s been since Jongin came to his world. Each time the sun rises it brings forth a longer day and in turn cuts the night shorter. For each hour he wastes beneath the sun, only a minute is spared under the moon, and there’s a piece of him that craves to be hidden from the universe under an opaque blanket.
Time has become an endless vortex of movements and colors that he can’t keep up with. But then again, he doesn’t really need the concept of time, anyway.
His eyes dart over the horizon, over thin lines curving behind the white landscape. He breathes out a sigh of relief when he realizes that night is about to come again. Kyungsoo leans to the left, taking the pressure off his right hand, and his arm brushes against something soft with a flash of black in his peripheral.
He doesn’t have to turn his head to the side to know who’s beside him, but he looks over anyway. Jongin is concentrating on the same spot he was looking at just a second ago, the scenery reflecting in the dark pools of his pupils. Kyungsoo thinks he could swim through them for the rest of his life, and the thought folds itself, jumping from his mind to ribbon through his ribs before taking a nose-dive into his heart.
“What were you looking at just a second ago?” Jongin squints, searching and searching for something he’ll never find.
“I was just watching the sunset,” Kyungsoo answers. He smiles childishly when he sees the corners of the other’s lips turn down.
“Don’t you ever get tired of looking at the same thing each day?”
“No,” Kyungsoo says, examining the swell of Jongin’s cheeks under long lashes and large eyes, “not with something so beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t be able to do that.” He shakes his head pitifully. “Beauty tires out so quickly. It’s ephemeral. Never eternal.”
“But they both start with the same letter.”
Jongin turns to glance at Kyungsoo then and sees him biting his lip, almost coyly, like there’s a secret hidden behind the red of his lips. He frowns harder, cutting his eyes towards the tree and watching the branches sway with the night’s breeze.
“Say,” Kyungsoo calls when Jongin doesn’t reply, his feet drawing patterns in the snow, toes curling nervously, “how long has it been since you first came here?”
“About eighteen hours,” he says after thinking, calculating, counting up the hours he’s been gone, off doing what he always does. “Why?”
Kyungsoo hides a blush and a shy grin with the back of his hand. “Just wondering. Will you be back at the same time each day?”
“Depends,” Jongin shrugs. “Is that what you want?”
The throb in Kyungsoo’s head starts again, dull and muggy across the veins in his forehead.
He ignores it. “Yes. I would like that very much.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.” Jongin smiles sincerely, with all the kindness in the world bottled up in his cheeks.
Kyungsoo’s temple pulses.
It takes only a couple seconds for the pain to subside, and he doesn’t think anything of it again; it’s simply phantom pain he’s imagining. When he looks back over to Jongin, the latter is no longer sitting beside him, but laying a few feet away in the snow.
“What are you doing?” He furrows his brows, wondering if he has the right to inquire. This is only their second meeting, but this is also Kyungsoo’s land, and the way Jongin is moving his arms and legs through the snow is piquing his curiosity.
“I’m making a snow angel,” he explains, moving his arms and legs faster.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
Jongin plays coy when he stops his movements and turns to face Kyungsoo. “From an angel.”
Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, and after several long minutes of contemplation, he stands up and walks a couple feet to the side, further away from Jongin.
“Hey, where’re you going?” Jongin’s voice bounces through the air.
Kyungsoo doesn’t reply and instead lays on the ground the same way Jongin did. He spreads his legs out wide, arms copying the odd movements, the snow pushing into large piles around his limbs. It’s too easy to slip into the moment, to close his eyes and forget that there is only ice around him that’s as cold as the void growing somewhere deep in his chest, waiting to be filled with another’s warmth.
The moonlight wraps delicate fingers around him, the wind pushes onto his skin like a constant stream, and an hourglass is constructed to the curves of his body, the sand falling to the beat of his heart.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?”
He locks up at the sound of Jongin’s voice breaking through the sands of time building a fortress around him. Kyungsoo tears himself away from the repetitive movements and, with difficulty, opens his eyes to a face full of stars. Jongin is standing just a foot away, already looking down at him with his hands stuffed in his pockets.
Standing up delicately, careful not to disturb the fragile balance of his snow angel, Kyungsoo moves to stand beside Jongin. “It is,” he finally says, staring down at his creation.
Jongin’s gaze is heavy on Kyungsoo’s cheek, and when he finally turns to meet eyes with the boy. The soft smile on his face makes one of Kyungsoo’s own bloom across his face as well.
Tonight, the Weeping Willow watches as the pieces of formality separating them melt to the ground, and she flicks a branch in the air in happiness.
❅ ❄ ❆
“How long has it been?”
Kyungsoo can’t remember the number of times Jongin has come to visit. This could be his third time here, it could his fifth, or it could be his forty-fifth time. No matter how many times he tries to keep count, to mark it in the dunes of his memory, the numbers all eventually fade away. It eats away at the back of his mind- the need to know- and Jongin always seems to have the answers.
“Ten hours,” Jongin answers, and he’s sitting close enough that Kyungsoo can feel the heat radiating from his skin.
“I see,” Kyungsoo croons. They sit another minute in silence, just watching the way the night bends around the horizon.
He feels like they’ve been doing this forever- sitting here, watching the sky, with the Weeping Willow in the negative space of their minds. Kyungsoo hums at the thought, and from the corner of his eye he watches as Jongin’s mouth grows into a spontaneously wide smile of excitement.
“Let’s go down to the lake.”
“What?”
“Come on.” Jongin tugs childishly at Kyungsoo’s sleeve, already standing up from his seat on the ground. His demeanor holds a new spark as he looks out over the frozen lake: a gleam of new prospect and opportunity and fun. “Come on, Kyungsoo! I’ve never been down there.”
Kyungsoo crumbles under resignation from the delight held in Jongin’s voice and follows him down to the almost non-existent bank, watching the boy with a keen eye. “What’s the point in coming over here?” he whines, the snow crunching under their feet. The only light they have is from the moon reflecting off the white ground, and it's just enough not to trip over one of the rocks littered across the snow and fall face-first to the permafrost.
“Because,” Jongin tentatively digs the toe of his shoe into the ice that covers the water of the lake. He kicks a few times for good measure, just to make sure he won't fall through when he really does step on. “I want to ice skate.”
“That’s absurd,” Kyungsoo half-snorts and crosses his arms over his chest. Jongin doesn’t pay him any heed, slowly walking out onto the ice with determination glinting in his eyes, even though he almost slips once or twice. “When you bust your ass, don’t come crawling to me.”
But he doesn’t slip. He wobbles and slows his pace then speeds up again until he’s drawing his own name into the lake with the sole of his foot. Jongin makes a show out of it, too. He smiles and laughs and twirls around until Kyungsoo is giggling, crouching down to rest while trying not to let his emotions flee from their cage in the bottom of his chest.
Jongin skates a circle around the perimeter of the ice, giving a breathless chuckle and opening his arms out wide and invitingly. “Join me.” His voice echoes off the barren plains and open sky.
“No way.” Kyungsoo is quick to deny him, because he knows that if he doesn’t control his tongue he’ll end up saying something he regrets- like actually agreeing to go out on the ice with Jongin.
"Why not?" He raises an eyebrow and stops at the edge of the ice in front of Kyungsoo.
"I've never skated before..." Kyungsoo pouts. The mountain of mercurial resignation pushes down on his shoulders again as Jongin sticks out his hand, eyes beseeching and hair tossing in the wind. The imploring roundness of his eyes has Kyungsoo gently placing his hand in Jongin’s, cold flesh against surprisingly warm skin.
“It’s easy to learn,” he mutters in reply, yanking Kyungsoo up gently and gliding out into the middle of the lake.
It’s facile to slide on his bare feet. The ice under his naked heels is nothing to fret, but he lets Jongin teach him to kick off and keep up his momentum so that he doesn’t trip nonetheless. Truth be told, in the long time he’s been here, he’s never once skated over the lake. The only reason he comes even remotely close to the lake is to sit by the Weeping Willow. He listens to her long-winded stories that speak of volumes of knowledge that Kyungsoo could not even fathom containing.
But the way the cool wind tosses his hair and glosses over his bare skin makes him regret not doing it sooner.
Jongin eventually slots his fingers through the spaces between Kyungsoo’s and drags him along over the lake. They draw pictures, trace characters of all the words they can come up with, and pick up snow from the shallow bank to tease each other with. They laugh, and they look at each other like they know for a fact that this type of excitement is only held expertly between the palms of each other’s hand. It’s soft and delicate and fragile, the mirth in their eyes.
The Weeping Willow watches and hums contentedly.
❅ ❄ ❆
It’s high noon the next time Kyungsoo remembers seeing Jongin.
There’s almost an incandescent glow that encapsulates Jongin’s features under the brightness of the sun, a halo traced around the top of his head and the image of the lake casted perfectly in the dark of his eyes. The rays of the sun slip over black strands of hair, fall onto the bend of his nose, and pool over the pink swell of his lips until Jongin is a clash of night and sunset concealed under long lashes and thin spreads of pink.
It’s odd seeing him like this, with the sky lit up behind him instead of a dark veil, but Kyungsoo likes the change.
He can’t tear his eyes away from the boy beside him.
“How long?”
“Two hours.”
And slowly, the time between them dwindles.
❅ ❄ ❆
It’s the same day when Jongin returns, Kyungsoo thinks, but he can’t be too sure, so he asks anyway. “How long?” He doesn’t bother turning to face him, instead watching the glaring sun set behind the horizon.
Jongin drags his knees to his chest before he answers, locking his arms around his legs and prolonging the seconds until they drag out across the ground in front of him. “About an hour,” he answers shortly, turning his head a few degrees to watch the sun soak into his features and unspoken words linger on Kyungsoo’s lips. “Why do you always ask me that?”
Kyungsoo unconsciously pouts his lips at the question teetering above his head. “I don’t really know,” he replies after another few moments of silence. “It’s just important to me.”
“Why?”
The Weeping Willow sways to the rhythm of the wind, her long branches carving into fresh snow and eternal life branding their view of the horizon. Jongin seems to hold an ethereal beauty over the Willow tree; there’s something in his eyes that gleams with more depth than the leaves hanging from her branches, and for a brief moment Kyungsoo wants to explore the caverns of his mind and heart to find out what it is.
“I don’t remember why.”
❅ ❄ ❆
“Come to my world with me.”
Jongin has been here a few days and he hasn't left once. Every second of every hour he’s either sitting by Kyungsoo or by the Weeping Willow, just watching her in her spot in the ground with the snow surrounding her stump, occasionally whispering things under his breath.
Kyungsoo is laying down, making snow angels when Jongin voices his request, and he sits up so fast that the wet hairs on the back of his head fling onto his face all at once. His response isn’t immediate, though; he spends a long minute with his head cocked and a scrutinizing eye watching the way Jongin nervously looks to the ground and picks at the dirt beneath the snow.
“You don’t have a world, do you?”
Every muscle in Jongin’s body tenses and Kyungsoo knows he’s guessed right.
“You’re a Hopper.”
Jongin lazily plops his hands in his lap, a smile spreading across his lips and his hair tossing in the breeze. “Who told you? The Willow?”
Kyungsoo takes in a sharp, silent breath, and lets it pour from his lungs slowly before answering. “Nobody stays away from their world for this long.”
Jongin moves to stand, brushing the debris from the ground off his pants, and Kyungsoo thinks he’s about to leave. Most Hoppers aren’t welcome on others’ planets. People see them as intruders; at least, that’s what the Willow told him. His heart ceases at the thought; Jongin can’t leave thinking that he hates him- not now, not ever.
“W-Wait,” he panically calls out, standing up and stumbling to where Jongin is frozen in his place, “where were you planning to take me, anyway?” A few seconds pass without an answer, only Jongin staring holes into his face. “If I had said yes, I mean.”
“I’m not sure.” He drops his head, eyes flitting over their footprints in the snow. “Maybe to Nihal, I guess. No one is there, anyway.”
Kyungsoo watches the way Jongin’s irises split open into vulnerability, the way his mouth curls shyly around his words and how his fingers are clenched in the material of his pants. He makes a split-second decision, one that makes his heart unfurl with uncertainty despite his stomach jumping with joy.
“Take me there, then.”
Jongin promptly raises his head, eyes round like the first time they skated over the lake, a wide smiles pulling at his thick lips. He doesn’t ask if Kyungsoo is sure- he can see by the strong hold of his gaze and the way his mouth is set in determination.
He just grabs Kyungsoo’s hand, intertwines their fingers, and leaps.
❅ ❄ ❆
Stargazing and star-hopping are two very different thing, albeit the fact that they have the same first word. Kyungsoo never imagined tracing Orion with the tip of his finger through squinted eyes could be so different from tracing it with his feet, his and Jongin’s shadows following close behind them, coloring in the lines of the constellation.
And before Kyungsoo knows it, he has Centauri cupped in the palm of his hand.
It’s when they’re on Altair that Kyungsoo notices the subtle buzz of the skin on his hand, the one that Jongin is still latched onto. Even with the adrenaline pumping through his blood, there is still a tingle thriving right under the surface of his flesh, like when he leaves his arm in the same position for too long and, in the wake of his movement, there is a warm numbness.
He had asked the Willow about the phantom pains in his head after they became chronic, but only during Jongin’s visits. She hadn’t known anything- and if she did, she did a fine job at playing ignorant. Even though this feels nothing like the crack of his skull or the throb in his temples, something in his gut tells them they’re related.
“Is something wrong?” Jongin asks some time after they pass Nekkar, a dip in his brow as he watches the light of the star sink into the curves of Kyungsoo’s face. They can’t go very far here, since someone already occupies it, so they stay close together, rounding the empty spaces they find.
“Nothing,” Kyungsoo answers. He pulls his hand out of Jongin’s just long enough to wipe the sweat from his palm before threading their fingers back together. “So,” he changes the subject, clearing his throat discreetly, “who lives here?”
Jongin watches him for a few seconds more, and Kyungsoo can see the suspicion churning in dark irises. “A chubby old man,” he eventually says, looking away from Kyungsoo to watch the light that swallows their feet. “This is his world.”
Kyungsoo glances around- white star, hot floor, black, star-dotted roof. “This is it?”
“Yeah. This is it.”
“But the Willow told me that only the unoccupied are like this…”
Jongin chuckles, but it sounds sardonic on his lips. “Most people’s are. But some people get stuck with this.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know why you trust that Willow so much anyway, Kyungsoo. It’s just a tree.”
“That’s because you don’t listen to what she says!” Kyungsoo pouts, knocking his shoulder into Jongin’s. “She’s actually very smart!”
“And how would you know?” Jongin pushes back, and there are specks of mischief glinting over his tongue. “Have you ever been able to confirm what she says? Or do you just take her word for it?”
Kyungsoo pouts harder at that. Jongin has never trusted the Weeping Willow, and Kyungsoo wants to point out that it’s because he’s never had his own. But that would just make Jongin feel guilty; he doesn’t like being a Hopper, doesn’t like not having a home.
He doesn’t like always feeling like he has to find something.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo can’t hop with Jongin for very long before he has to return to his world, his bones dry and thoughts muddled. But that doesn’t stop him from heading straight to the Willow every time he returns, his mouth filled with a new plethora of questions.
“People that aren’t Hoppers weren’t made to be beyond their world,” the Willow tells him when he asks about his creaking bones, the bark of her lips twisting up in annoyance. “Why are you asking me so many questions these days anyway?”
“It’s just that Jongin…” Kyungsoo trails off nervously, because then the Willow is looking at him like she already knows and his heart is pounding in his chest, heat building in his cheeks despite the cold weather.
The Willow’s face is engulfed back into the trunk soon after that, the wrinkles that round her features dispersing into crooked lines of bark. Kyungsoo’s blush doesn’t die down even without her knowing stare, because his hand is tingling at just the thought of Jongin’s fingers laced in his again.
“Hey.” Jongin’s voice scares him out of the silence of the land, and suddenly a sharp stab presses into his knee, like all of his ligaments are twisted into knots and holding anvils over his ankles. Kyungsoo ignores it though, holding in a whimper when the pain feathers up to mid-thigh. Maybe he should be more concerned over his indifferent countenance dealing with the now-familiar pain. “What are you doing down here?”
“Talking to the Willow,” Kyungsoo answers softly, pressing the heel of his palm into his kneecap. However, the pain suddenly disappears, just as Jongin stands up.
“Ah, this old thing?” He walks to the base of the tree, not even a third of her height, and runs his fingers over the rough bark. “I don’t see what’s so special about it-” He cuts off suddenly, and Kyungsoo laughs as one of the long stalks of branches slaps Jongin in the back of the head, the leaves wrapping around to fling water onto his face. He looks shocked for a second before turning to Kyungsoo and shouting, “Hey! That’s not funny!”
“It’s hilarious, actually,” Kyungsoo wheezes through his laughs, eyes curved into crescent moons and lips stretched over white teeth.
Jongin huffs with indignation, and even as he stomps towards him, Kyungsoo can’t stop his laughter. Jongin hovers over him, knees slightly bent as he pushes Kyungsoo’s shoulders until his back hits the ground, then climbs on top of him, knees digging into the snow below him.
“Do you think this is funny?” he growls, grabbing Kyungsoo’s wrists and pinning them to the ground, and all the latter can do is nod.
Jongin’s skin is warm over his, the insides of his thighs pressed to Kyungsoo’s hips and his shirt hanging low as he’s poised over the smaller boy, a small frown on his face. Kyungsoo’s laughter rocks him slightly, but he doesn’t let up. Soon the laughs are dying down into giggles, then short bursts of breaths, before Kyungsoo is calm and staring back at him.
The tension is thick enough to cut into their skin.
Kyungsoo thinks Jongin looks beautiful like this: the light flooding the sides of his face and threading through dark strands, turning them a languid shade of gold. For a moment it seems like Jongin is going to swoop down, as if his head is going to drop and he’s going to kiss him, his warm mouth pressed against the smaller boy’s. Kyungsoo’s lips tingle at the thought.
Jongin’s eyes are soft, his irises malleable and lips barely agape as he whispers, “I’ve been looking for you for forever.”
Kyungsoo’s eyebrows dip in confusion, questions skittering across his lips. “What do you mean?”
Jongin opens his mouth to reply, but then he’s pulling back instead, hands no longer pressing Kyungsoo’s wrists to the ground as he stands up and all thoughts of what Jongin said flies from Kyungsoo’s mind.
“Come on,” he breathes out, and Kyungsoo thinks he hears a bit of regret lingering in his sigh. “I have somewhere special to take you today.”
“Really?” All the previous anxiety and disappointment disappear at Jongin’s words, and he quickly jumps up to stand next to him. “Where?”
“It’s a surprise.” Jongin grins.
Kyungsoo wonders how tension can simply vanish like that- like nothing ever happened. He wonders why they’re pretending nothing ever happened, like Jongin wasn’t going to kiss him, like Kyungsoo wasn’t going to lean up to meet his lips there.
Jongin grabs his hand, and Kyungsoo’s heart trembles; at the same time something sharp pricks the bottom of his spine. He ignores the new pain. Jongin looks at him for a few seconds before jumping, eyes concentrated on the slope of Kyungsoo’s nose. He finds himself too nervous to meet Jongin’s gaze. “Let’s go,” he whispers tensely, and Jongin’s hand tightens around his.
They step out into the sky, footprints staining the ocean of blue, and land on Mirach.
But Jongin doesn’t stop there.
They hop from star to star without a break or a word between them. Some are so small that they can walk their circumference in a few steps, and others are so big that their heat burns the bottom of Kyungsoo’s feet until he’s on the verge of blistering.
He loses count of the number of stars they land on, but he knows it’s more than they’ve traveled to in all their previous adventures combined. And each time he thinks they’re going to stop, that this is going to be the special place that Jongin wants to take him to, they simply bypass it without a second glance.
Kyungsoo sighs as his bones start to creak, yet they still continue to tread across the sky in wide leaps that play across the galaxy. “Jongin,” he murmurs, turning to the boy beside him with a pout on his face. “When will we get there? I’m already getting tired-”
“We’re here,” Jongin interrupts him, a smile growing on his face that’s brighter than all the stars bundled in the sky.
It takes a minute for Jongin’s words to sink in and for Kyungsoo to realize that his feet are on solid ground instead of the airy night sky, that his muscles are grounded instead of buoyant. Except this doesn’t feel like a star. His body is heavier, and when he moves his foot he feels grains of dust or sand or something moving between his toes. He’s almost too afraid to look away from Jongin, to see where they are, but Jongin looks so happy and proud of himself that he can’t help but turn to gaze at the scenery.
Bleak is the first word that comes to mind when he looks around. Under him is grey dirt that looks older than the sands of time, the landscape rocky with awkward dips in the land that sink so deep they could hold their own oceans. And the sky. The sky is pitch black, stars so small that they seem light years away, freckled all across the universe in unmapped constellations.
The moon. They’re on the moon. “Jongin,” he calls panically, yanking the other boy towards him, “are you sure we’re allowed to be here? We won’t get… stuck?” His eyes are glued to rocky mounds of dirt, and his heart beats to the words of the Willow’s story about the moon.
“Of course not,” Jongin mutters, wrapping his arm around Kyungsoo’s waist casually. “I know the secret to getting off.”
His skin burns under Jongin’s, shoulders tensed as his flesh pricks with each brush of Jongin’s fingers. He can’t bring himself to pull away despite the pain. They pull away from each other after a few seconds wherein they decide to explore, Jongin rounding a large boulder and Kyungsoo going to inspect the deep craters, his skin still buzzing.
The moon isn’t as grandiose as he’d imagined it to be. It is just the barren palm of the universe that looks pretty spread out across the sky, a dull rock in the midst of diamonds. It isn’t like the picture the Willow painted; there is no charm laced in the moribund sand or an air of anticipation stilling his lungs. The moon is completely lackluster- so why are people so eager to come here?
“Hey,” Kyungsoo hears Jongin yell from a ways off, his tenor voice heavy under the weight of gravity, “did the Willow ever tell you what happened to the man on the moon?”
“She began it,” he responds, not quite sure that Jongin can hear him, and kicks a rock into a large crevasse. “She never finished it, though,” Kyungsoo says again, but lower this time; the atmosphere is sitting heavy on his shoulders and he’s afraid to disturb it.
A few seconds pass wherein Kyungsoo watches the dust swarm the falling rock, more debris following it as it tumbles down and down and down. “Do you know why he got stuck?” Jongin asks, suddenly much closer than before, and Kyungsoo gasps as he whirls around. “Do you know, Soo?” he repeats after the seconds pass in silence, and Kyungsoo can only shake his head no as he clutches at his chest where his heart is beating rapidly under his sternum.
Jongin’s grin is sly and mischievous, lips curled and eyes twinkling with knowledge. He nods his head towards the side, signaling for Kyungsoo to follow him as he walks north, avoiding the craters and large boulders. Kyungsoo follows closely behind him, having to jog to keep up with his long strides and feeling increasingly fatigued with every step. He has never been away from his world for this long before.
They’re only a few meters from where they’re going when it all starts to flood him at once. The crippling pain in the back of his head when Jongin first came to his world, the throb in his temples, the burn of his flesh, all the phantoms of pain that he’s endured since they’ve met. It builds up steadily, slowly, pounding into the marrow of his bones and the folds of his brain with each resounding footfall.
They approach a vat of darkness that falls over the land, the shadows gradually growing thicker until day turns into night and an opaque blanket coats every rock and crevasse in sight. The air around them is looming, syrupy against their skin and injecting a feeling of dysphoria into Kyungsoo’s stomach.
The dark side of the moon.
“What are we doing?” Kyungsoo questions uneasily, pressing himself up against Jongin’s side. His entire body is throbbing with pain, the discomfort more intense now than ever, especially over his hands and jaw.
“This is how we get off,” Jongin tells him softly, and he looks down at Kyungsoo with a smug smile fitted on his face, then something akin to worry brews in his eyes. “Hey, are you okay? You look pale…”
“I’m fine,” Kyungsoo says, but all he really wants right now is to return home and to lie in the snow with the sunlight lapping at his skin and the whispers of the Willow threading through his hair. “Just take me home, please.”
“Whatever you want.” Jongin’s eyebrows are dipping in concern as Kyungsoo wilts beside him, sweat sheening his face and breath becoming labored.
The pain in his head is intense now, Kyungsoo notes as they step into the shadows. His brain is curling in on itself, dousing itself in gasoline and lighting a match, and the fire is spreading down his spine. His vision is starting to curl at the edges, the darkness skirting up to him, encasing his sight. He never thought this kind of pain was possible or that something of this magnitude could ever possess him.
It’s when they first step foot on the full darkness of the moon that it happens: a white-hot pain shoots through his temples, and Kyungsoo crumples in on himself, folding himself against the dusty floor with his eyes clenched shut. His fingers curl into his palms, nails digging out blood from broken vessels and pierced skin, but it’s nothing compared to the straight trail of agony dripping down his back.
Kyungsoo knows he’s screaming, can feel his incoherent words scraping against his throat, but he can’t hear it through the pain. There is only a loud ringing, funneling straight into his mind, scrambling his thoughts until the darkness takes over.
Except it isn’t darkness. It’s white- thousands of white dots that fall from the sky like snow, cascading onto his face, anywhere it can reach, anywhere he isn’t covered up with a thick coat. It’s fear- all his synapses binding into lumps and words that clog his throat. It’s cold- it’s so fucking cold. It’s so fucking cold. It’s so fucking cold, and that’s all he can think, playing over again and again like a mantra for the weak. It’s a voice- a sonorous voice that’s telling him to stay awake, to keep with him, to wait it out. Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear. It’s white- but not snow white. It’s strands of white, of bleached hair, of wet tendrils that smell like defeat and are perforated with fear and a little bit of love.
It’s black- and Kyungsoo doesn’t see any more.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo wakes up feeling numb- but not the cold kind of numb- the fear-induced, splash of realization kind of numb that settles in the lining of his stomach like a parasite. His paralytic nerve endings are grated raw from discomfort, and he doesn’t want to move from the cold ground beneath him. The memories play themselves in his head, the pain ghosting over his skin, and the snow starts falling again, lightly tumbling onto his face.
“Soo?” he hears someone calling out from somewhere above him, and it’s Jongin’s voice that immediately soothes his aching bones. “Soo, are you awake?”
“Yeah,” he croaks out, but his eyes remain closed, sunlight making his vision bleed red. He’s afraid that if he opens them, everything will disappear; Jongin will be gone and he’ll be left with the cold and the white and the fear.
“I was so worried about you,” Jongin sighs softly, and then there’s a pressure on Kyungsoo’s chest and Jongin’s hair is tickling his cheek. “I thought something happened to you again.”
Kyungsoo finally opens his eyes when the weight on his chest disappears, only to see Jongin still leaned over him, staring intently at his face with an assortment of emotions trudging over his features.
The memories of what he saw on the dark side of the moon all flood him at once, like the dam of consciousness breaking all that he tried to hold back. He sees the snow, the white hair, hears the words still echoing around his mind in that familiar voice.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear.
He looks back to the man on top of him. “You knew all this time, didn’t you?” Kyungsoo whispers, but it isn’t accusatory or malicious or angry. It’s relief and love and longing and Jongin.
“Yeah.” Jongin looks past him, and Kyungsoo can see guilt curling at the edges of his lips, forming it into a frown.
Kyungsoo kisses it away- without warning, without asking for permission, he kisses Jongin straight on the mouth with his fingers coming up to thread through soft black strands of hair and Jongin’s hand coming to cup his jaw. Jongin presses back harder, fitting his mouth to Kyungsoo’s, letting their lips slide over each other’s with their chests flush together
The air feels cool against Kyungsoo’s spit-slicked lips when Jongin pulls back, his cheeks a pretty shade of red and lips equally as shiny.
“I’m so glad you found me,” Kyungsoo breathes, leaning up to kiss him again. “I’m so fucking glad.”
“I thought you would be mad,” Jongin says, and he presses his forehead to Kyungsoo’s with his eyes closed and heart elated. “I thought you would hate me because I knew and never told you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me,” he replies, arm hooking around Jongin’s neck. But he can still feel the gaps in his thoughts, the missing pieces of what happened floating over him, teetering out of his grasp. “I need you to take me back- I need to remember everything, Jongin. I need to remember without you telling me.”
“Okay, Soo.” Jongin sits up and nods briefly. Kyungsoo thinks he sees him brush a tear away, but he doesn’t say anything and lets Jongin haul him up to stand. “Are you sure you’re strong enough? You can be away from your world?”
“You’re my world now, Jongin,” Kyungsoo says shyly, and this time it’s Jongin turn to admire the red flush of alabaster skin.
They thread their fingers together and leap- but this time, Kyungsoo doesn’t feel a buzz over his skin, but a skip in the beat of his heart.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo hesitates right before stepping into the darkness, the sand squished between his toes and his free hand twisting in the material of his shirt. His heart is pounding inside his chest, because he’s not sure what’s going to happen once he wakes up again. He doesn’t know anything except that he loves Jongin. And that he will in every life.
“Ready?”
Jongin’s hand tightens around his, palms damp from a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety. Kyungsoo nods to him, his lips pressed thin, then unclasps their hands and steps forward with pseudo-courage pumping through his veins.
He walks to the dark side of the moon.
This time, as the dusk shrouds around him, there is no pain, only a surge of pictures that play themselves like old films in his mind. They storm him all at once, and he curls in on himself, imbued with apprehension and fear and unease.
There is nothing to cloud the memories this time, nothing to blur the sound of a stuttered muffler behind the bulky metal frame of a blue jeep with blown out tires. It is the only color against an abandoned, pigment-devoid background in the middle of nowhere, and the sound of the engine blends in with the hum of the wind and the fat snowflakes that plop against the snowy floor.
It’s so cold. It’s so cold. It’s so fucking cold, and Kyungsoo lays back in the snow, his body plush with a winter jacket wrapped around him and thick pants covering his legs. The sky is so blue. So blue. So fucking blue, with wisps of clouds passing overhead, sweeping frozen raindrops over the land.
The crunch of snow is the only sound that can dominate the sound of the wind, and then someone is crouching down next to him and fingers are pressing against his cheeks and he can hear a voice shattering against the gelid tundra as all the blood he has left in his body travels to his face.
It’s the same man, the same words, the same feeling, the cold sucking the life out of him just like it is Kyungsoo. He repeats the phrase, over and over again, but all Kyungsoo can hear is the slow beat of his own heart, vessels brittle and ready to shatter at a moment’s notice.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear.
It’s Jongin. It’s Jongin, the Star Hopper, his world, the boy who found him and sat by him and made him skate on the frozen lake.
It’s Jongin, who sat in the snow with him as he laid still, Kyungsoo’s black coat stark against the white snow, as his pale hair fluttered in the breeze.
It’s a question: how long have we been stuck out here?
It’s an answer: a day? Two? I don’t know anymore.
It’s that pain again, that pain that makes his brain crumble and scatter into the cord of his spine as Jongin runs his fingers through his hair. It’s the buzz of his hand as Jongin holds it in his own, the throb of his temple as Jongin presses his lips to it, the stab in his waist as Jongin wraps an arm around him.
Star Hoppers search but for one thing; Jongin found his in narrow shoulders and red lips that added the littlest bit of life to the setting of his life.
Kyungsoo smiles when more words echo throughout his memory, and his muscles tense and his heartbeat slows and his lips turn blue as they are recited, resonating through his skull. He remembers laying in the snow with Jongin by his side, trying to hold on, trying to think of the warm bed they would fall into when they got home, but all he could see was a snowy plane devoid of color that slopes into low hills.
He thinks that heaven doesn’t look that bad, and Jongin talks low, lips pressed to his ear, and lungs dried up from defeat. They are the last words he hears, the last words he thinks of, the last words he cared about from a long long time ago that have carried over across the lines of the universe.
“What happens if we lose each other?”
“Then I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.”
In which God is a woman, and time has a needle that mends butterfly stitches on wounds that otherwise would never heal. Sometimes those stitches break open like dams.
Planes devoid of color slope into low hills as far as Kyungsoo can see. He trails his eyes over the way the gentle curves of a frozen lake sit juxtaposed against a splash of green leaves hanging over it, the limp branches swaying with the breeze that flits across the land. Snow dots his vision, flakes falling across the sky like shooting stars that hold all the hope in the world, but at the same time everything is lost in a state of stagnancy.
He lays back against the ground, plush with snow and conforming to the contours of his body until his pasty skin bleeds into the same color as the flakes. The atmosphere buzzes around him. And everything stills.
The snow stops falling, the wind stops pushing against his face, and the Weeping Willow is trapped back into the confines of gravity again. Kyungsoo smiles and closes his eyes, cutting off the perpetual white that surrounds him with a blanket of black that doesn’t do much to block out the brightness of the day.
He’s been alone on this plateau since he can remember waking up here, but the equanimity that cradles his mind and mends his bones together outweighs the sporadic hands of loneliness that seize his heart on nights when the stars don’t shine down on him.
Kyungsoo is an aggregate formed from the elements of this world; he is one with the air and the ground and the wind and the cold. The lake is his body, ebbing and flowing with a sea of emotions but on the top of it all, it is hard and unrelenting. The Weeping Willow is his arms that reach out for the unattainable from a permanent spot carved out in the ground. And the scattered clouds are his thoughts: drifting, dissipating, never in the same shape twice.
Letting the blissful smile slip from his face, the snow falls again, the wind dances with the leaves of the Willow, and the white once again consumes his vision.
This is what Kyungsoo’s day consists of, throughout every hour, every minute, every second until it turns dark enough that he can’t see his hand an inch in front of his face. Pitch black nights are the only way to see the stars, though, and every night Kyungsoo happily lays beneath the teardrops of the universe with his hands laced behind his head and his bare feet digging into the snow.
At dawn, hues of orange and yellow and red mist across the horizon and rays of warmth wash over his skin like a tidal wave of good feelings, but it never melts the snow. Nothing is powerful enough to destroy the crystals of fragility built all around him- not even the sun.
❅ ❄ ❆
The moon has just risen to her throne in the center of the sky, and Kyungsoo has his hands planted firmly on the ground to lean back and watch the stars undress themselves when something moves from the corner of his eye.
At first he thinks that maybe he’s just imagining things, that he was hoping a little too hard for a shooting star tonight. He watches the same spot and doesn’t expect anything more to happen. But then he sees it again, and this time his eyes are trained on the ball of snow flying past him. He doesn’t let the panic seep over his body. Instead, he sits in the same spot, breathes just as slowly as before, and stares at the ball now broken asunder onto the ground like shattered pieces of glass.
Kyungsoo has never met anyone else in the long expanse of time that he’s been here. Nothing has ever moved without his permission, cast a shadow he didn’t know about, or let the permafrost beneath their feet crunch without his knowledge. So it’s a surprise when he does see something move, a warped shadow cast on the ground and the pinch of snow under foreign feet.
Fingers make their way into his field of vision first. They’re loose, dangling, tan like the shroud of night, and grow into a large arm mapped out with long veins standing blue on a beige canvas.
When Kyungsoo finally looks up and sees the face of the boy with hair as dark as the snow is white, the back of his brain tears away from his skull and curls into itself, crumbling into the top of his spine. An airy pain burns into the space between the synapse of his brain, branching out to the top of his neck, burning hot against the cool wind.
The seconds draw out into long hours colored with molasses. He’s suspended on the strings of time playing a tune that falls on deaf ears, and all he can do is jump from one chord to another.
“Hi,” the boy speaks, and there’s an inhibited blush spreading over his high cheekbones. “I’m Jongin.”
Jongin is very pretty, Kyungsoo thinks, eyes widening. He walks with the elegance of a falling snowflake and holds an entire galaxy of stars in his eyes, blooming constellations that Kyungsoo knows he could lose himself in learning about.
Despite the way Kyungsoo’s lungs are still and how there’s a ball of breath caught in his throat- painfully so- he replies, “Hi. I’m Kyungsoo.” He’s not even completely sure how to talk to another person, and he questions whether he should even talk to the only other person he’s seen in ages. In the end, he does talk to the stranger, with his words clouding a foot in front of him and his eyes still trained on the boy who calls himself Jongin.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Jongin asks, fidgeting as he takes miniscule steps towards him, and Kyungsoo thinks his voice sounds like the thrum of a leaf riding the wind, dancing over the fresh snow, and drawing lines of harmony that fall apart too quickly.
“No.” He emits a gracious smile. Sometimes it gets lonely here, considering the stars don’t make much for conversation. “Sit down.” Small hands pat the spot right beside him.
When Jongin sits down next to him their knee brush up against each other’s, both of them crossing their legs, and Kyungsoo’s hand stops midway from reaching to adjust his shirt when they touch. His muscles freeze in midair along with Jongin’s, but they don’t turn to look at each other in case it was just loneliness pigmenting in their imaginations. There’s a distinct spark in the way it pioneers his body so freely and grabs hold of his nerves until they’re grated raw with sensitivity to the way they brush up against each other. It churns up an odd feeling in the bile sitting at the pit of his stomach, equal halves of anxiety and nostalgia.
Kyungsoo’s lips stay sealed shut as well as Jongin’s. They bask in the silence of the night and of their company, breathing in the fresh air and exhaling smoke that goes unnoticed by eyes that are too busy sifting through the galaxy. For Kyungsoo, it’s enough. This is enough. This will always be enough for him- just sitting here with someone, being hyper aware of their movements, and trying not to notice the stray tendrils of hair that fly away from their head.
The thick coat of silence is only broken when Jongin speaks up again. “Do you see that star there?” he asks, with a finger on top of the brightest star in the sky.
This time it’s the side of Kyungsoo’s brain that curls up and dies, the echo of it resonating in his ear.
“Yeah.” He nods, even though Jongin isn’t looking and there’s a dull throb seeping from the base of his skull. “Why?”
“That’s Polaris,” Jongin grins, and if Kyungsoo could compare his smile to anything, it would be the first rays of sunlight that heat his skin in the morning, “the North Star.”
“Oh.”
“It’s the star that never moves,” he continues with his eye trained on the sky above, “and it will always be there to guide you back home.”
“Oh,” Kyungsoo repeats dumbly. This is his first conversation in a long time and his eyes have soaked in so much that it leaves barely enough room for him to sort out his words. “Home.”
Jongin rips his gaze away from the sky after another minute of admiring the stars and shudders, goosebumps breaking out over his bare arms and legs. “Speaking of home, yours is really cold.”
Kyungsoo wants to apologize for making him cold; Jongin isn’t used to the weather like he is. He wants to offer him a coat, a warm place to rest, some hot chocolate- all the things that the Willow told him about, even words that could offer solace, but he has none of those. The string of sentences he could say get cut off when they jumble up in his mouth and jump off his lips in a long breath because he realizes just how long he’s been alone.
“But don’t worry about it!” Jongin reassures him, patting him on his back to try and soothe out the worry on his face. “I’ll just bring a coat when I come back tomorrow.”
Kyungsoo’s jaw falls and his mouth stands agape, pearly teeth reflecting the light of the moon. “Tomorrow?” He isn’t any better at conversation than the leaves hanging from the Weeping Willow.
“Tomorrow.” Jongin smiles, and it almost sounds like a promise.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo watches the North Star for the rest of the night, eyes hooded but never blinking. The beams of light pouring from the sky are enough to pry his eyelids open each time he thinks they’ll fall. Jongin’s words burn further into the back of his mind with each second he spends thinking about the star that never moves.
Somewhere along the way he loses himself in roping bleary images of a boy on a mountain, the pixels piecing together in a hazy mirage of dreams. It isn’t until the sun is about to rise and the sky lightens to an electric navy blue that he blinks away the film of dust over his vision to see the silhouette of a man between the stars.
It’s rare that he ever spots a Star Hopper.
They are the ones that could never settle down, that can’t stay in one place for too long because they go crazy or because they’re looking for something. They step across the universe, from star to star, from life to life. Sometimes they invade territories that are occupied, like Meissa or Bellatrix of the Orion, and some trace the lines of constellations with perpetual footsteps that fade away before they’re ever seen or heard of.
The Hopper now, he’s stepping off the tip of Eridanus, taking long strides towards a star further west. His shadow is darker than the rest of the night, but not by much, and at any passing glance, nobody would see a thing. That’s why they’re almost impossible to detect, but every once in a while their eyes catch stray light and they show themselves to whoever is looking.
Sometimes the Weeping Willow will whisper rumors of legends in Kyungsoo’s ear. She once told him of a Hopper that jumped too far, overshot his trajectory to try and get onto Betelgeuse. She whispers that he landed on the stony surface of the moon and couldn’t figure out how to get off.
Hoppers are given the ability to jump off stars, not asteroids.
The Weeping Willow never finishes telling him the story, though. She always starts crying right before the end. Kyungsoo never asked about the man on the moon again.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo doesn’t really know how long it’s been since Jongin came to his world. Each time the sun rises it brings forth a longer day and in turn cuts the night shorter. For each hour he wastes beneath the sun, only a minute is spared under the moon, and there’s a piece of him that craves to be hidden from the universe under an opaque blanket.
Time has become an endless vortex of movements and colors that he can’t keep up with. But then again, he doesn’t really need the concept of time, anyway.
His eyes dart over the horizon, over thin lines curving behind the white landscape. He breathes out a sigh of relief when he realizes that night is about to come again. Kyungsoo leans to the left, taking the pressure off his right hand, and his arm brushes against something soft with a flash of black in his peripheral.
He doesn’t have to turn his head to the side to know who’s beside him, but he looks over anyway. Jongin is concentrating on the same spot he was looking at just a second ago, the scenery reflecting in the dark pools of his pupils. Kyungsoo thinks he could swim through them for the rest of his life, and the thought folds itself, jumping from his mind to ribbon through his ribs before taking a nose-dive into his heart.
“What were you looking at just a second ago?” Jongin squints, searching and searching for something he’ll never find.
“I was just watching the sunset,” Kyungsoo answers. He smiles childishly when he sees the corners of the other’s lips turn down.
“Don’t you ever get tired of looking at the same thing each day?”
“No,” Kyungsoo says, examining the swell of Jongin’s cheeks under long lashes and large eyes, “not with something so beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t be able to do that.” He shakes his head pitifully. “Beauty tires out so quickly. It’s ephemeral. Never eternal.”
“But they both start with the same letter.”
Jongin turns to glance at Kyungsoo then and sees him biting his lip, almost coyly, like there’s a secret hidden behind the red of his lips. He frowns harder, cutting his eyes towards the tree and watching the branches sway with the night’s breeze.
“Say,” Kyungsoo calls when Jongin doesn’t reply, his feet drawing patterns in the snow, toes curling nervously, “how long has it been since you first came here?”
“About eighteen hours,” he says after thinking, calculating, counting up the hours he’s been gone, off doing what he always does. “Why?”
Kyungsoo hides a blush and a shy grin with the back of his hand. “Just wondering. Will you be back at the same time each day?”
“Depends,” Jongin shrugs. “Is that what you want?”
The throb in Kyungsoo’s head starts again, dull and muggy across the veins in his forehead.
He ignores it. “Yes. I would like that very much.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.” Jongin smiles sincerely, with all the kindness in the world bottled up in his cheeks.
Kyungsoo’s temple pulses.
It takes only a couple seconds for the pain to subside, and he doesn’t think anything of it again; it’s simply phantom pain he’s imagining. When he looks back over to Jongin, the latter is no longer sitting beside him, but laying a few feet away in the snow.
“What are you doing?” He furrows his brows, wondering if he has the right to inquire. This is only their second meeting, but this is also Kyungsoo’s land, and the way Jongin is moving his arms and legs through the snow is piquing his curiosity.
“I’m making a snow angel,” he explains, moving his arms and legs faster.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
Jongin plays coy when he stops his movements and turns to face Kyungsoo. “From an angel.”
Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, and after several long minutes of contemplation, he stands up and walks a couple feet to the side, further away from Jongin.
“Hey, where’re you going?” Jongin’s voice bounces through the air.
Kyungsoo doesn’t reply and instead lays on the ground the same way Jongin did. He spreads his legs out wide, arms copying the odd movements, the snow pushing into large piles around his limbs. It’s too easy to slip into the moment, to close his eyes and forget that there is only ice around him that’s as cold as the void growing somewhere deep in his chest, waiting to be filled with another’s warmth.
The moonlight wraps delicate fingers around him, the wind pushes onto his skin like a constant stream, and an hourglass is constructed to the curves of his body, the sand falling to the beat of his heart.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?”
He locks up at the sound of Jongin’s voice breaking through the sands of time building a fortress around him. Kyungsoo tears himself away from the repetitive movements and, with difficulty, opens his eyes to a face full of stars. Jongin is standing just a foot away, already looking down at him with his hands stuffed in his pockets.
Standing up delicately, careful not to disturb the fragile balance of his snow angel, Kyungsoo moves to stand beside Jongin. “It is,” he finally says, staring down at his creation.
Jongin’s gaze is heavy on Kyungsoo’s cheek, and when he finally turns to meet eyes with the boy. The soft smile on his face makes one of Kyungsoo’s own bloom across his face as well.
Tonight, the Weeping Willow watches as the pieces of formality separating them melt to the ground, and she flicks a branch in the air in happiness.
❅ ❄ ❆
“How long has it been?”
Kyungsoo can’t remember the number of times Jongin has come to visit. This could be his third time here, it could his fifth, or it could be his forty-fifth time. No matter how many times he tries to keep count, to mark it in the dunes of his memory, the numbers all eventually fade away. It eats away at the back of his mind- the need to know- and Jongin always seems to have the answers.
“Ten hours,” Jongin answers, and he’s sitting close enough that Kyungsoo can feel the heat radiating from his skin.
“I see,” Kyungsoo croons. They sit another minute in silence, just watching the way the night bends around the horizon.
He feels like they’ve been doing this forever- sitting here, watching the sky, with the Weeping Willow in the negative space of their minds. Kyungsoo hums at the thought, and from the corner of his eye he watches as Jongin’s mouth grows into a spontaneously wide smile of excitement.
“Let’s go down to the lake.”
“What?”
“Come on.” Jongin tugs childishly at Kyungsoo’s sleeve, already standing up from his seat on the ground. His demeanor holds a new spark as he looks out over the frozen lake: a gleam of new prospect and opportunity and fun. “Come on, Kyungsoo! I’ve never been down there.”
Kyungsoo crumbles under resignation from the delight held in Jongin’s voice and follows him down to the almost non-existent bank, watching the boy with a keen eye. “What’s the point in coming over here?” he whines, the snow crunching under their feet. The only light they have is from the moon reflecting off the white ground, and it's just enough not to trip over one of the rocks littered across the snow and fall face-first to the permafrost.
“Because,” Jongin tentatively digs the toe of his shoe into the ice that covers the water of the lake. He kicks a few times for good measure, just to make sure he won't fall through when he really does step on. “I want to ice skate.”
“That’s absurd,” Kyungsoo half-snorts and crosses his arms over his chest. Jongin doesn’t pay him any heed, slowly walking out onto the ice with determination glinting in his eyes, even though he almost slips once or twice. “When you bust your ass, don’t come crawling to me.”
But he doesn’t slip. He wobbles and slows his pace then speeds up again until he’s drawing his own name into the lake with the sole of his foot. Jongin makes a show out of it, too. He smiles and laughs and twirls around until Kyungsoo is giggling, crouching down to rest while trying not to let his emotions flee from their cage in the bottom of his chest.
Jongin skates a circle around the perimeter of the ice, giving a breathless chuckle and opening his arms out wide and invitingly. “Join me.” His voice echoes off the barren plains and open sky.
“No way.” Kyungsoo is quick to deny him, because he knows that if he doesn’t control his tongue he’ll end up saying something he regrets- like actually agreeing to go out on the ice with Jongin.
"Why not?" He raises an eyebrow and stops at the edge of the ice in front of Kyungsoo.
"I've never skated before..." Kyungsoo pouts. The mountain of mercurial resignation pushes down on his shoulders again as Jongin sticks out his hand, eyes beseeching and hair tossing in the wind. The imploring roundness of his eyes has Kyungsoo gently placing his hand in Jongin’s, cold flesh against surprisingly warm skin.
“It’s easy to learn,” he mutters in reply, yanking Kyungsoo up gently and gliding out into the middle of the lake.
It’s facile to slide on his bare feet. The ice under his naked heels is nothing to fret, but he lets Jongin teach him to kick off and keep up his momentum so that he doesn’t trip nonetheless. Truth be told, in the long time he’s been here, he’s never once skated over the lake. The only reason he comes even remotely close to the lake is to sit by the Weeping Willow. He listens to her long-winded stories that speak of volumes of knowledge that Kyungsoo could not even fathom containing.
But the way the cool wind tosses his hair and glosses over his bare skin makes him regret not doing it sooner.
Jongin eventually slots his fingers through the spaces between Kyungsoo’s and drags him along over the lake. They draw pictures, trace characters of all the words they can come up with, and pick up snow from the shallow bank to tease each other with. They laugh, and they look at each other like they know for a fact that this type of excitement is only held expertly between the palms of each other’s hand. It’s soft and delicate and fragile, the mirth in their eyes.
The Weeping Willow watches and hums contentedly.
❅ ❄ ❆
It’s high noon the next time Kyungsoo remembers seeing Jongin.
There’s almost an incandescent glow that encapsulates Jongin’s features under the brightness of the sun, a halo traced around the top of his head and the image of the lake casted perfectly in the dark of his eyes. The rays of the sun slip over black strands of hair, fall onto the bend of his nose, and pool over the pink swell of his lips until Jongin is a clash of night and sunset concealed under long lashes and thin spreads of pink.
It’s odd seeing him like this, with the sky lit up behind him instead of a dark veil, but Kyungsoo likes the change.
He can’t tear his eyes away from the boy beside him.
“How long?”
“Two hours.”
And slowly, the time between them dwindles.
❅ ❄ ❆
It’s the same day when Jongin returns, Kyungsoo thinks, but he can’t be too sure, so he asks anyway. “How long?” He doesn’t bother turning to face him, instead watching the glaring sun set behind the horizon.
Jongin drags his knees to his chest before he answers, locking his arms around his legs and prolonging the seconds until they drag out across the ground in front of him. “About an hour,” he answers shortly, turning his head a few degrees to watch the sun soak into his features and unspoken words linger on Kyungsoo’s lips. “Why do you always ask me that?”
Kyungsoo unconsciously pouts his lips at the question teetering above his head. “I don’t really know,” he replies after another few moments of silence. “It’s just important to me.”
“Why?”
The Weeping Willow sways to the rhythm of the wind, her long branches carving into fresh snow and eternal life branding their view of the horizon. Jongin seems to hold an ethereal beauty over the Willow tree; there’s something in his eyes that gleams with more depth than the leaves hanging from her branches, and for a brief moment Kyungsoo wants to explore the caverns of his mind and heart to find out what it is.
“I don’t remember why.”
❅ ❄ ❆
“Come to my world with me.”
Jongin has been here a few days and he hasn't left once. Every second of every hour he’s either sitting by Kyungsoo or by the Weeping Willow, just watching her in her spot in the ground with the snow surrounding her stump, occasionally whispering things under his breath.
Kyungsoo is laying down, making snow angels when Jongin voices his request, and he sits up so fast that the wet hairs on the back of his head fling onto his face all at once. His response isn’t immediate, though; he spends a long minute with his head cocked and a scrutinizing eye watching the way Jongin nervously looks to the ground and picks at the dirt beneath the snow.
“You don’t have a world, do you?”
Every muscle in Jongin’s body tenses and Kyungsoo knows he’s guessed right.
“You’re a Hopper.”
Jongin lazily plops his hands in his lap, a smile spreading across his lips and his hair tossing in the breeze. “Who told you? The Willow?”
Kyungsoo takes in a sharp, silent breath, and lets it pour from his lungs slowly before answering. “Nobody stays away from their world for this long.”
Jongin moves to stand, brushing the debris from the ground off his pants, and Kyungsoo thinks he’s about to leave. Most Hoppers aren’t welcome on others’ planets. People see them as intruders; at least, that’s what the Willow told him. His heart ceases at the thought; Jongin can’t leave thinking that he hates him- not now, not ever.
“W-Wait,” he panically calls out, standing up and stumbling to where Jongin is frozen in his place, “where were you planning to take me, anyway?” A few seconds pass without an answer, only Jongin staring holes into his face. “If I had said yes, I mean.”
“I’m not sure.” He drops his head, eyes flitting over their footprints in the snow. “Maybe to Nihal, I guess. No one is there, anyway.”
Kyungsoo watches the way Jongin’s irises split open into vulnerability, the way his mouth curls shyly around his words and how his fingers are clenched in the material of his pants. He makes a split-second decision, one that makes his heart unfurl with uncertainty despite his stomach jumping with joy.
“Take me there, then.”
Jongin promptly raises his head, eyes round like the first time they skated over the lake, a wide smiles pulling at his thick lips. He doesn’t ask if Kyungsoo is sure- he can see by the strong hold of his gaze and the way his mouth is set in determination.
He just grabs Kyungsoo’s hand, intertwines their fingers, and leaps.
❅ ❄ ❆
Stargazing and star-hopping are two very different thing, albeit the fact that they have the same first word. Kyungsoo never imagined tracing Orion with the tip of his finger through squinted eyes could be so different from tracing it with his feet, his and Jongin’s shadows following close behind them, coloring in the lines of the constellation.
And before Kyungsoo knows it, he has Centauri cupped in the palm of his hand.
It’s when they’re on Altair that Kyungsoo notices the subtle buzz of the skin on his hand, the one that Jongin is still latched onto. Even with the adrenaline pumping through his blood, there is still a tingle thriving right under the surface of his flesh, like when he leaves his arm in the same position for too long and, in the wake of his movement, there is a warm numbness.
He had asked the Willow about the phantom pains in his head after they became chronic, but only during Jongin’s visits. She hadn’t known anything- and if she did, she did a fine job at playing ignorant. Even though this feels nothing like the crack of his skull or the throb in his temples, something in his gut tells them they’re related.
“Is something wrong?” Jongin asks some time after they pass Nekkar, a dip in his brow as he watches the light of the star sink into the curves of Kyungsoo’s face. They can’t go very far here, since someone already occupies it, so they stay close together, rounding the empty spaces they find.
“Nothing,” Kyungsoo answers. He pulls his hand out of Jongin’s just long enough to wipe the sweat from his palm before threading their fingers back together. “So,” he changes the subject, clearing his throat discreetly, “who lives here?”
Jongin watches him for a few seconds more, and Kyungsoo can see the suspicion churning in dark irises. “A chubby old man,” he eventually says, looking away from Kyungsoo to watch the light that swallows their feet. “This is his world.”
Kyungsoo glances around- white star, hot floor, black, star-dotted roof. “This is it?”
“Yeah. This is it.”
“But the Willow told me that only the unoccupied are like this…”
Jongin chuckles, but it sounds sardonic on his lips. “Most people’s are. But some people get stuck with this.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know why you trust that Willow so much anyway, Kyungsoo. It’s just a tree.”
“That’s because you don’t listen to what she says!” Kyungsoo pouts, knocking his shoulder into Jongin’s. “She’s actually very smart!”
“And how would you know?” Jongin pushes back, and there are specks of mischief glinting over his tongue. “Have you ever been able to confirm what she says? Or do you just take her word for it?”
Kyungsoo pouts harder at that. Jongin has never trusted the Weeping Willow, and Kyungsoo wants to point out that it’s because he’s never had his own. But that would just make Jongin feel guilty; he doesn’t like being a Hopper, doesn’t like not having a home.
He doesn’t like always feeling like he has to find something.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo can’t hop with Jongin for very long before he has to return to his world, his bones dry and thoughts muddled. But that doesn’t stop him from heading straight to the Willow every time he returns, his mouth filled with a new plethora of questions.
“People that aren’t Hoppers weren’t made to be beyond their world,” the Willow tells him when he asks about his creaking bones, the bark of her lips twisting up in annoyance. “Why are you asking me so many questions these days anyway?”
“It’s just that Jongin…” Kyungsoo trails off nervously, because then the Willow is looking at him like she already knows and his heart is pounding in his chest, heat building in his cheeks despite the cold weather.
The Willow’s face is engulfed back into the trunk soon after that, the wrinkles that round her features dispersing into crooked lines of bark. Kyungsoo’s blush doesn’t die down even without her knowing stare, because his hand is tingling at just the thought of Jongin’s fingers laced in his again.
“Hey.” Jongin’s voice scares him out of the silence of the land, and suddenly a sharp stab presses into his knee, like all of his ligaments are twisted into knots and holding anvils over his ankles. Kyungsoo ignores it though, holding in a whimper when the pain feathers up to mid-thigh. Maybe he should be more concerned over his indifferent countenance dealing with the now-familiar pain. “What are you doing down here?”
“Talking to the Willow,” Kyungsoo answers softly, pressing the heel of his palm into his kneecap. However, the pain suddenly disappears, just as Jongin stands up.
“Ah, this old thing?” He walks to the base of the tree, not even a third of her height, and runs his fingers over the rough bark. “I don’t see what’s so special about it-” He cuts off suddenly, and Kyungsoo laughs as one of the long stalks of branches slaps Jongin in the back of the head, the leaves wrapping around to fling water onto his face. He looks shocked for a second before turning to Kyungsoo and shouting, “Hey! That’s not funny!”
“It’s hilarious, actually,” Kyungsoo wheezes through his laughs, eyes curved into crescent moons and lips stretched over white teeth.
Jongin huffs with indignation, and even as he stomps towards him, Kyungsoo can’t stop his laughter. Jongin hovers over him, knees slightly bent as he pushes Kyungsoo’s shoulders until his back hits the ground, then climbs on top of him, knees digging into the snow below him.
“Do you think this is funny?” he growls, grabbing Kyungsoo’s wrists and pinning them to the ground, and all the latter can do is nod.
Jongin’s skin is warm over his, the insides of his thighs pressed to Kyungsoo’s hips and his shirt hanging low as he’s poised over the smaller boy, a small frown on his face. Kyungsoo’s laughter rocks him slightly, but he doesn’t let up. Soon the laughs are dying down into giggles, then short bursts of breaths, before Kyungsoo is calm and staring back at him.
The tension is thick enough to cut into their skin.
Kyungsoo thinks Jongin looks beautiful like this: the light flooding the sides of his face and threading through dark strands, turning them a languid shade of gold. For a moment it seems like Jongin is going to swoop down, as if his head is going to drop and he’s going to kiss him, his warm mouth pressed against the smaller boy’s. Kyungsoo’s lips tingle at the thought.
Jongin’s eyes are soft, his irises malleable and lips barely agape as he whispers, “I’ve been looking for you for forever.”
Kyungsoo’s eyebrows dip in confusion, questions skittering across his lips. “What do you mean?”
Jongin opens his mouth to reply, but then he’s pulling back instead, hands no longer pressing Kyungsoo’s wrists to the ground as he stands up and all thoughts of what Jongin said flies from Kyungsoo’s mind.
“Come on,” he breathes out, and Kyungsoo thinks he hears a bit of regret lingering in his sigh. “I have somewhere special to take you today.”
“Really?” All the previous anxiety and disappointment disappear at Jongin’s words, and he quickly jumps up to stand next to him. “Where?”
“It’s a surprise.” Jongin grins.
Kyungsoo wonders how tension can simply vanish like that- like nothing ever happened. He wonders why they’re pretending nothing ever happened, like Jongin wasn’t going to kiss him, like Kyungsoo wasn’t going to lean up to meet his lips there.
Jongin grabs his hand, and Kyungsoo’s heart trembles; at the same time something sharp pricks the bottom of his spine. He ignores the new pain. Jongin looks at him for a few seconds before jumping, eyes concentrated on the slope of Kyungsoo’s nose. He finds himself too nervous to meet Jongin’s gaze. “Let’s go,” he whispers tensely, and Jongin’s hand tightens around his.
They step out into the sky, footprints staining the ocean of blue, and land on Mirach.
But Jongin doesn’t stop there.
They hop from star to star without a break or a word between them. Some are so small that they can walk their circumference in a few steps, and others are so big that their heat burns the bottom of Kyungsoo’s feet until he’s on the verge of blistering.
He loses count of the number of stars they land on, but he knows it’s more than they’ve traveled to in all their previous adventures combined. And each time he thinks they’re going to stop, that this is going to be the special place that Jongin wants to take him to, they simply bypass it without a second glance.
Kyungsoo sighs as his bones start to creak, yet they still continue to tread across the sky in wide leaps that play across the galaxy. “Jongin,” he murmurs, turning to the boy beside him with a pout on his face. “When will we get there? I’m already getting tired-”
“We’re here,” Jongin interrupts him, a smile growing on his face that’s brighter than all the stars bundled in the sky.
It takes a minute for Jongin’s words to sink in and for Kyungsoo to realize that his feet are on solid ground instead of the airy night sky, that his muscles are grounded instead of buoyant. Except this doesn’t feel like a star. His body is heavier, and when he moves his foot he feels grains of dust or sand or something moving between his toes. He’s almost too afraid to look away from Jongin, to see where they are, but Jongin looks so happy and proud of himself that he can’t help but turn to gaze at the scenery.
Bleak is the first word that comes to mind when he looks around. Under him is grey dirt that looks older than the sands of time, the landscape rocky with awkward dips in the land that sink so deep they could hold their own oceans. And the sky. The sky is pitch black, stars so small that they seem light years away, freckled all across the universe in unmapped constellations.
The moon. They’re on the moon. “Jongin,” he calls panically, yanking the other boy towards him, “are you sure we’re allowed to be here? We won’t get… stuck?” His eyes are glued to rocky mounds of dirt, and his heart beats to the words of the Willow’s story about the moon.
“Of course not,” Jongin mutters, wrapping his arm around Kyungsoo’s waist casually. “I know the secret to getting off.”
His skin burns under Jongin’s, shoulders tensed as his flesh pricks with each brush of Jongin’s fingers. He can’t bring himself to pull away despite the pain. They pull away from each other after a few seconds wherein they decide to explore, Jongin rounding a large boulder and Kyungsoo going to inspect the deep craters, his skin still buzzing.
The moon isn’t as grandiose as he’d imagined it to be. It is just the barren palm of the universe that looks pretty spread out across the sky, a dull rock in the midst of diamonds. It isn’t like the picture the Willow painted; there is no charm laced in the moribund sand or an air of anticipation stilling his lungs. The moon is completely lackluster- so why are people so eager to come here?
“Hey,” Kyungsoo hears Jongin yell from a ways off, his tenor voice heavy under the weight of gravity, “did the Willow ever tell you what happened to the man on the moon?”
“She began it,” he responds, not quite sure that Jongin can hear him, and kicks a rock into a large crevasse. “She never finished it, though,” Kyungsoo says again, but lower this time; the atmosphere is sitting heavy on his shoulders and he’s afraid to disturb it.
A few seconds pass wherein Kyungsoo watches the dust swarm the falling rock, more debris following it as it tumbles down and down and down. “Do you know why he got stuck?” Jongin asks, suddenly much closer than before, and Kyungsoo gasps as he whirls around. “Do you know, Soo?” he repeats after the seconds pass in silence, and Kyungsoo can only shake his head no as he clutches at his chest where his heart is beating rapidly under his sternum.
Jongin’s grin is sly and mischievous, lips curled and eyes twinkling with knowledge. He nods his head towards the side, signaling for Kyungsoo to follow him as he walks north, avoiding the craters and large boulders. Kyungsoo follows closely behind him, having to jog to keep up with his long strides and feeling increasingly fatigued with every step. He has never been away from his world for this long before.
They’re only a few meters from where they’re going when it all starts to flood him at once. The crippling pain in the back of his head when Jongin first came to his world, the throb in his temples, the burn of his flesh, all the phantoms of pain that he’s endured since they’ve met. It builds up steadily, slowly, pounding into the marrow of his bones and the folds of his brain with each resounding footfall.
They approach a vat of darkness that falls over the land, the shadows gradually growing thicker until day turns into night and an opaque blanket coats every rock and crevasse in sight. The air around them is looming, syrupy against their skin and injecting a feeling of dysphoria into Kyungsoo’s stomach.
The dark side of the moon.
“What are we doing?” Kyungsoo questions uneasily, pressing himself up against Jongin’s side. His entire body is throbbing with pain, the discomfort more intense now than ever, especially over his hands and jaw.
“This is how we get off,” Jongin tells him softly, and he looks down at Kyungsoo with a smug smile fitted on his face, then something akin to worry brews in his eyes. “Hey, are you okay? You look pale…”
“I’m fine,” Kyungsoo says, but all he really wants right now is to return home and to lie in the snow with the sunlight lapping at his skin and the whispers of the Willow threading through his hair. “Just take me home, please.”
“Whatever you want.” Jongin’s eyebrows are dipping in concern as Kyungsoo wilts beside him, sweat sheening his face and breath becoming labored.
The pain in his head is intense now, Kyungsoo notes as they step into the shadows. His brain is curling in on itself, dousing itself in gasoline and lighting a match, and the fire is spreading down his spine. His vision is starting to curl at the edges, the darkness skirting up to him, encasing his sight. He never thought this kind of pain was possible or that something of this magnitude could ever possess him.
It’s when they first step foot on the full darkness of the moon that it happens: a white-hot pain shoots through his temples, and Kyungsoo crumples in on himself, folding himself against the dusty floor with his eyes clenched shut. His fingers curl into his palms, nails digging out blood from broken vessels and pierced skin, but it’s nothing compared to the straight trail of agony dripping down his back.
Kyungsoo knows he’s screaming, can feel his incoherent words scraping against his throat, but he can’t hear it through the pain. There is only a loud ringing, funneling straight into his mind, scrambling his thoughts until the darkness takes over.
Except it isn’t darkness. It’s white- thousands of white dots that fall from the sky like snow, cascading onto his face, anywhere it can reach, anywhere he isn’t covered up with a thick coat. It’s fear- all his synapses binding into lumps and words that clog his throat. It’s cold- it’s so fucking cold. It’s so fucking cold. It’s so fucking cold, and that’s all he can think, playing over again and again like a mantra for the weak. It’s a voice- a sonorous voice that’s telling him to stay awake, to keep with him, to wait it out. Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear. It’s white- but not snow white. It’s strands of white, of bleached hair, of wet tendrils that smell like defeat and are perforated with fear and a little bit of love.
It’s black- and Kyungsoo doesn’t see any more.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo wakes up feeling numb- but not the cold kind of numb- the fear-induced, splash of realization kind of numb that settles in the lining of his stomach like a parasite. His paralytic nerve endings are grated raw from discomfort, and he doesn’t want to move from the cold ground beneath him. The memories play themselves in his head, the pain ghosting over his skin, and the snow starts falling again, lightly tumbling onto his face.
“Soo?” he hears someone calling out from somewhere above him, and it’s Jongin’s voice that immediately soothes his aching bones. “Soo, are you awake?”
“Yeah,” he croaks out, but his eyes remain closed, sunlight making his vision bleed red. He’s afraid that if he opens them, everything will disappear; Jongin will be gone and he’ll be left with the cold and the white and the fear.
“I was so worried about you,” Jongin sighs softly, and then there’s a pressure on Kyungsoo’s chest and Jongin’s hair is tickling his cheek. “I thought something happened to you again.”
Kyungsoo finally opens his eyes when the weight on his chest disappears, only to see Jongin still leaned over him, staring intently at his face with an assortment of emotions trudging over his features.
The memories of what he saw on the dark side of the moon all flood him at once, like the dam of consciousness breaking all that he tried to hold back. He sees the snow, the white hair, hears the words still echoing around his mind in that familiar voice.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear.
He looks back to the man on top of him. “You knew all this time, didn’t you?” Kyungsoo whispers, but it isn’t accusatory or malicious or angry. It’s relief and love and longing and Jongin.
“Yeah.” Jongin looks past him, and Kyungsoo can see guilt curling at the edges of his lips, forming it into a frown.
Kyungsoo kisses it away- without warning, without asking for permission, he kisses Jongin straight on the mouth with his fingers coming up to thread through soft black strands of hair and Jongin’s hand coming to cup his jaw. Jongin presses back harder, fitting his mouth to Kyungsoo’s, letting their lips slide over each other’s with their chests flush together
The air feels cool against Kyungsoo’s spit-slicked lips when Jongin pulls back, his cheeks a pretty shade of red and lips equally as shiny.
“I’m so glad you found me,” Kyungsoo breathes, leaning up to kiss him again. “I’m so fucking glad.”
“I thought you would be mad,” Jongin says, and he presses his forehead to Kyungsoo’s with his eyes closed and heart elated. “I thought you would hate me because I knew and never told you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me,” he replies, arm hooking around Jongin’s neck. But he can still feel the gaps in his thoughts, the missing pieces of what happened floating over him, teetering out of his grasp. “I need you to take me back- I need to remember everything, Jongin. I need to remember without you telling me.”
“Okay, Soo.” Jongin sits up and nods briefly. Kyungsoo thinks he sees him brush a tear away, but he doesn’t say anything and lets Jongin haul him up to stand. “Are you sure you’re strong enough? You can be away from your world?”
“You’re my world now, Jongin,” Kyungsoo says shyly, and this time it’s Jongin turn to admire the red flush of alabaster skin.
They thread their fingers together and leap- but this time, Kyungsoo doesn’t feel a buzz over his skin, but a skip in the beat of his heart.
❅ ❄ ❆
Kyungsoo hesitates right before stepping into the darkness, the sand squished between his toes and his free hand twisting in the material of his shirt. His heart is pounding inside his chest, because he’s not sure what’s going to happen once he wakes up again. He doesn’t know anything except that he loves Jongin. And that he will in every life.
“Ready?”
Jongin’s hand tightens around his, palms damp from a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety. Kyungsoo nods to him, his lips pressed thin, then unclasps their hands and steps forward with pseudo-courage pumping through his veins.
He walks to the dark side of the moon.
This time, as the dusk shrouds around him, there is no pain, only a surge of pictures that play themselves like old films in his mind. They storm him all at once, and he curls in on himself, imbued with apprehension and fear and unease.
There is nothing to cloud the memories this time, nothing to blur the sound of a stuttered muffler behind the bulky metal frame of a blue jeep with blown out tires. It is the only color against an abandoned, pigment-devoid background in the middle of nowhere, and the sound of the engine blends in with the hum of the wind and the fat snowflakes that plop against the snowy floor.
It’s so cold. It’s so cold. It’s so fucking cold, and Kyungsoo lays back in the snow, his body plush with a winter jacket wrapped around him and thick pants covering his legs. The sky is so blue. So blue. So fucking blue, with wisps of clouds passing overhead, sweeping frozen raindrops over the land.
The crunch of snow is the only sound that can dominate the sound of the wind, and then someone is crouching down next to him and fingers are pressing against his cheeks and he can hear a voice shattering against the gelid tundra as all the blood he has left in his body travels to his face.
It’s the same man, the same words, the same feeling, the cold sucking the life out of him just like it is Kyungsoo. He repeats the phrase, over and over again, but all Kyungsoo can hear is the slow beat of his own heart, vessels brittle and ready to shatter at a moment’s notice.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, Soo, someone is coming for us soon I swear.
It’s Jongin. It’s Jongin, the Star Hopper, his world, the boy who found him and sat by him and made him skate on the frozen lake.
It’s Jongin, who sat in the snow with him as he laid still, Kyungsoo’s black coat stark against the white snow, as his pale hair fluttered in the breeze.
It’s a question: how long have we been stuck out here?
It’s an answer: a day? Two? I don’t know anymore.
It’s that pain again, that pain that makes his brain crumble and scatter into the cord of his spine as Jongin runs his fingers through his hair. It’s the buzz of his hand as Jongin holds it in his own, the throb of his temple as Jongin presses his lips to it, the stab in his waist as Jongin wraps an arm around him.
Star Hoppers search but for one thing; Jongin found his in narrow shoulders and red lips that added the littlest bit of life to the setting of his life.
Kyungsoo smiles when more words echo throughout his memory, and his muscles tense and his heartbeat slows and his lips turn blue as they are recited, resonating through his skull. He remembers laying in the snow with Jongin by his side, trying to hold on, trying to think of the warm bed they would fall into when they got home, but all he could see was a snowy plane devoid of color that slopes into low hills.
He thinks that heaven doesn’t look that bad, and Jongin talks low, lips pressed to his ear, and lungs dried up from defeat. They are the last words he hears, the last words he thinks of, the last words he cared about from a long long time ago that have carried over across the lines of the universe.
“What happens if we lose each other?”
“Then I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.”