kpoppin
For: kpoppin
Title: I Kind of Love You
Pairing: Yewook
Category: lab lit!au, fluff, romance
Summary: Yesung wasn't thrilled to be spending his Christmas away from home, training a newly hired analyst near an oil deposit in northern Alaska, but with every cloud came a lining, and this lining was gold.
The last thing Yesung wanted was to go north on the annual Alaskan expedition in late December; after all, he was more of a penguin person than a polar bear person, but after several rather generic gifts and early Christmas cards intended more to further prod than anything else, he finally gave. In all honesty, he didn't know whether he'd rather spend his Christmas at the North Pole alone, or at home, alone.
But after he found out that there was another researcher going with him, a younger one, a rookie, Yesung almost connected his forehead with the desk in front of him and wished that he'd taken the road less traveled by instead. Generally, the lack of incoming researchers was rather evident, and Sungmin had a thing for reminding him. “You should be glad that there's someone willing to take your place on the next couple of expeditions,” he constantly said, but Yesung didn't buy it. Not when said rookie was a small, spindly little being with hands balled into fists at his sides and his eyes glued to his boots, and Yesung, he had to spend his Christmas training this guy. His Christmas.
(But it wasn't like he had anything better to do. He just didn't like to admit it.)
-
Yesung learned that his name was Ryeowook from the badge pinned to his jacket, and he liked to hide because he hid constantly, behind his hood, behind closed doors, or in his room, introverted and reserved. And he didn't speak, this Ryeowook. Yesung sometimes got the feeling that Ryeowook knew that he didn't want to be on the expedition, and so he kept to himself, even when Yesung sought him out from the confines of his own cabin.
“Ryeowook?” Yesung dared to venture one evening at dinner aboard the ship, and Ryeowook flinched. “Hey, I'm not going to eat you.”
“Judging by the glare you're giving me, i-it's kind of hard to believe you,” Ryeowook replied. His tone was gentle, though, and Yesung knew he'd at least gotten somewhere.
“Hey, we're going to be spending the next couple of weeks together, so we should learn to get along,” Yesung quipped, and this time Ryeowook looked up, face almost hidden by layers of underwear and fur.
“I, I wasn't aware that we were fighting.”
“Okay, so maybe we weren't,” Yesung said, and propped his head on his hands at the table, and Ryeowook went back to his awkward staring, played with the hem of his coat and rubbed his hands together. “Am I really that mean?” Yesung murmured, and he was sure Ryeowook had heard him, but showed no signs of receiving the message.
After a couple of minutes, though, Yesung tore off his coat and left the room, rather miffed, but he wasn't quite sure why, if it was because of Ryeowook's lack of response to him, or if it was because of his own deficit in the area of communication. But he was sure that in the coming week, he'd experience the worst Christmas yet.
-
“Here.”
Yesung woke up to a gentle shaking the next morning, and he struggled to open his eyes, struggled to remember where he was. It was his first expedition since the previous year, because he'd been the researcher, nuttier than a fruitcake, who had trained for the winter session in the north. An adventure, he remembered thinking, all too clearly. It would be fun.
And it really had been fun the first couple of times. Yesung recalled his own training, from a warm-hearted Donghae who'd gone on to trudge through the heavy snows of the Antarctic about a year after. Ryeowook must have had been crazy, too, Yesung thought, or delusional. Or naïve, and Yesung settled for the final option, because Ryeowook seemed like the type.
When he orientated himself, he smelled home, and when he closed his eyes, it became stronger, almost like he wasn't on a ship at all, one headed to the dark expanses of winter for the ironically warmest holiday of the year. But when he blinked again, he was disappointed to discover that the stronger smell had just been due to Ryeowook lowering the mug so that the stench of warm, fresh coffee traveled up his nose a little, well, better.
“Here,” Ryeowook urged, still holding the mug, and his arm was shaking, so Yesung took it from him hastily.
“Weak?” Yesung said, and Ryeowook frowned.
“I've been trying to wake you for the past ten minutes while holding this,” he retorted. “Lazy bum.”
Yesung grinned and nudged Ryeowook's stomach, and when Ryeowook barely managed to keep a hold on his own cup of tea, they settled for sitting by each other on Yesung's bed calmly instead.
Maybe he could learn to be the warm-hearted Yesung that Ryeowook would remember years later.
Maybe.
-
Three days later, Yesung and Ryeowook arrived at the port of Wainwright, Alaska, through the Berring Strait and placed dead center of the northern shore of Alaska, protruding out into the Arctic Ocean like a sore thumb. But aside from the lanterns of the ship, it was pitch black at four in the afternoon.
Yesung made his way out onto the deck anyway; it was like a tradition for him, despite whatever harsh winds might have blown him off, despite having to hold on to the railing for dear life occasionally, he did it anyway. As one of the top analysts of his field, no one ever questioned him, or told him to go inside, it's cold, cold, cold! and after a couple of minutes, Ryeowook even went so far as to join him.
“Why are you out here?” Ryeowook mumbled, holding himself with one arm and clutching Yesung's hand with the other, and Yesung found it amusing and smiled through parched lips.
He took it as a rhetorical question and went on, putting his hand over Ryeowook's.
Ryeowook stayed a couple of minutes until Yesung ushered him inside for the fear of him simply being dragged away by the gusts. “Don't pick up this habit,” Yesung whispered to them as they were enveloped in the barely warmer air of inside the waiting cabin. “It's bad for your health.”
“I'm going to be working here,” Ryeowook said. “I'd better get used to it.” And Yesung realized that Ryeowook was probably thicker-skinned than he'd originally assumed, and that Ryeowook was a little more like him that he'd thought, a loner with a rebellious streak.
-
They visited the actual town of Wainwright on their first night, and it was a rather lively night for a population of five-hundred, and without the sun to keep them in check, both Yesung and Ryeowook lost track of time because the sun was always setting, or set; it was always night.
Needless to say, each restaurant had its own little private generator, and sturdy Christmas lights hung from the gutters and roofs of the buildings, bringing joy to the shadowed world.
And they received a hero's welcome, because when people visited during the barren winter months, the entire town knew about it.
Ryeowook received a short introduction to alcohol at the bar, before Yesung dragged him away under the premise that he didn't want him being hung over the next day for their first full session of training, but really, he couldn't lie to himself, he was protecting Ryeowook.
He could be the warm-hearted brother that Ryeowook would remember years later.
Maybe.
-
Ryeowook was already asleep by the time they started making their way back to the research center, and along the icy pathways, Yesung was fighting a losing battle with himself to keep his eyes open, much less on the road, but the road was barely visible either, and after lack of snow for about four days, there were still only two or three tire trails in front of him.
He'd never seen it the way he saw it that night before, Alaska, because despite signing up for the winter months, generally, his company avoided sending winter expeditions as often as possible, and the North Pole had always been the Land of the Midnight Sun for Yesung, but this time, it was more of an eternal darkness.
The radio hummed old, quiet Christmas songs, a little dreamy, and across the barren field and through the fog, he could see faintly the lights of the research center flickering at him. And he could hear faint static as the DJ announced the coming of two of his favorite Christmas songs, and as they played, he instinctively reached a hand over and rubbed Ryeowook's leg. Like a brother.
-
(And he thought that maybe, just maybe, he kind of sort of loved Ryeowook.)
-
Yesung watched carefully as Ryeowook plastered his face to the window of the helicopter the next morning, flying out bright and early several miles to their final destination, to spend the solstice through the twenty-sixth at Point Barrow, just outside the town of Barrow, larger than Wainwright but infinitely colder. But the occasional light below them reminded them that they were still on Earth, and the day was reaching toward the time of twilight, brightest it would ever get in the winter.
They could both hear the fan of the copter's propellers, until Yesung sighed and was about the turn on the radio again, but Ryeowook interrupted him.
“You don't want to be here right now, do you?” he asked through a mouthful of small snacks he'd brought with him.
“That's-”
“Admit it!” Ryeowook slammed his fist down onto the panel beneath him, and Yesung jumped, and his chair legs crawled against the floor as he shifted back, because Ryeowook had never been a talkative one. “You want to be at home, enjoying your cozy Christmas season with your friends, or your wife, or your children, drinking, or making cookies, or hanging up cute little stalkings with cute little tassels and letters to Santa and-”
“-not-”
“Not training me. You're probably wondering what I'm even doing here,” Ryeowook went on. “A small, fragile thing like me. You're waiting for me to break, quit, so that you can join Sungmin and the other kid on their search for Susan the Polar Bear and whether or not she survived the summer months or whether she-”
“Ryeowook,” Yesung growled, taking Ryeowook's wrist. “Listen to me. I'm as open to train you as you are to accept me, so if you want to continue, please. Please do. I'm all ears.”
He saw Ryeowook deflate just a little, his shoulder dropping as quickly as his resolve, and for a moment, he wanted to take it all back. He wanted to let Ryeowook go on, while he listened, or perhaps, perhaps he wanted never to have met Ryeowook at all. For a moment. “You-you probably.”
Ryeowook tugged, but Yesung kept a firm grip on his wrist, fingers digging into bone under thin skin. “Go on.”
And Ryeowook twisted his fingers together for a fleeting moment before trailing them up his forearms until he was huddled into a ball again and, as Yesung perceived, trying to make himself look as small as possible.
“Go on,” Yesung goaded, and he picked up his chair and moved closer, rubbing Ryeowook's back.
“I-”
His lips moved, but the words didn't come out, or maybe Ryeowook didn't want to go on, probably the case, so Yesung settled for comforting him, holding him, lightly tugging on strands of hair as he ran his fingers through it, and murmured, “You don't want to be here, either, do you?”
-
There was a light at the corner of the helicopter landing pad, and it Yesung almost hoped there was an attendant swinging it, but he remembered Sungmin telling him that he'd leave the light on for them, and that they were alone, the two of them, in an unknown world.
“Thrilling,” Ryeowook breathed, and Yesung found himself delighting in the small smile that crept onto Ryeowook's face.
“We'll make it through this together,” Yesung replied, non sequitur, but he needed that little bit of reassurance because the silence was unknown to even him, with the seniority in their small coup; usually there were the dogs howling, but no one was unhinged enough to head to the north during the dead of December.
“No one's brave enough, you mean,” Ryeowook corrected even before Yesung'd realized he'd actually spoken aloud.
And if anything, Yesung thought that they'd drift apart, the two of them, after Ryeowook's initial outburst, but it seemed like Ryeowook was more open now than before.
“We're beastly,” Ryeowook added, and Yesung couldn't help but agree.
-
Somehow, in the passing days, Yesung came to realize that Ryeowook always knew what he was thinking about, and though South Korea seemed generally cold enough for both of them in the wintertime, the presence of Ryeowook made it a little more bearable in Barrow.
“You want to celebrate Christmas, don't you?” Ryeowook mumbled as soon as Yesung walked into his room late at night on the second evening, and Yesung was somewhere between incredulous and grateful that he didn't have to bring it up himself, because he didn't think he could. And when Ryeowook noticed that Yesung was hopeless, he flashed another bright smile. “It's okay. I do, too.”
“You-right,” Yesung finished lamely, smoothing his shirt. “How?”
Ryeowook looked down at his desk for a moment, and lifted up a sheet of paper, and on it was a sketched, pathetic little Santa, but Yesung had the urge to snatch it and make copies and plaster them all over his wall for each upcoming expedition.
“I was just thinking about that myself,” Ryeowook admitted. “Come, we'll brainstorm.”
And so they found themselves on Ryeowook's bed this time, Yesung sitting down politely and Ryeowook falling beside him, cheerful all the while, and began on a tangent, speaking quickly and quietly, and Yesung's heart was decelerating, his eyes drooping, and his arms winding around Ryeowook's slender waist, lulled into a peaceful sleep just as Ryeowook began singing White Christmas, all whispers and beautiful semi-tones and-
-
Yesung woke up in the middle of the night, or it could have been morning already, but they had all the time in the world.
Ryeowook liked the generator turned off at nighttime because they were “going green,” as he called it, and since they were researching the environment of the north, then energy-efficient environment preservation made sense, right?
And so nights were bitter, and the walls weren't thick enough and the windows were never really fully closed because Yesung somehow still felt the wind through the plaster-metal-wood-fresco finish, or perhaps it was the sound of it that made him aware, kept him awake; maybe it was all psychological.
He shivered, and as a reply, arms slung around his neck tightened, soft pads of fingers tickled his skin, and through the black, he saw Ryeowook's sleeping form in front of him, and felt Ryeowook's legs wrap around him. Suddenly, it wasn't cold anymore. Someone had snapped the windows secure and plastered the outside research center with a kind of insulation Yesung liked to call love, and his eyelids fluttered shut, and his hands ran down the lengths of Ryeowook's arms, and he smiled. He smiled, and pressed his lips to Ryeowook's temple, ducked under the comforter, and fell into an uninterrupted slumber.
-
(“You fell asleep on me last night,” Ryeowook half-murmured half-whined the next morning, and Yesung shrugged. “While we were supposed to be brainstorming.”
“I couldn't help it!” He raised his arms in defense, and added, “It was all warm, and nice, and-”
“Warm?!” Ryeowook left muttering something about how it was all Yesung's fault; he must have forgotten to turn on the generator, and Yesung wanted to protest, but his feet were left planted to the floor, and all he could muster was a partial frown.)
-
(And maybe, just maybe, Yesung could turn his worst Christmas on chart into Ryeowook's best Christmas; yes, he'd do that.
He'd do that.
Yesung's grin was lopsided and lovestruck, but Ryeowook wasn't looking, so Yesung pulled a fleece hat and the spare pair of earmuffs left on the nearest shelf by the last scientists and took Ryeowook's hand, and he squeezed.
He'd do that.)
-
“We have to investigate the oil shale deposit today,” Yesung said, flipping through hundreds of pages of clipboard notes in gloved hands as he waited just outside the garage door for the two snowmobiles to warm up. “It's what we came here for, and to be honest, the journey there and back takes a couple of hours, and the task is completable in, like, a day.” He frowned and turned back and forth between two pages. “I don't know why they gave us four.”
“Maybe they didn't want us traveling on Christmas,” Ryeowook suggested. “So that we could spend it, you know, together.”
Yesung laughed and ruffled Ryeowook's mop of dark hair, growing limp in the dry climate. “You're cute,” he said, and missed Ryeowook's crestfallen face, and with a glance at his watch, he announced that the snowmobiles were ready and that Ryeowook should head out first, and he'd meet him in about an hour at the mineral deposit site. “I have a couple errands to run first.”
“You'll meet me, right?” Ryeowook asked, twisting his tense hands in almost anxiety, and Yesung, for the sake of his own conscience, nodded frantically.
“Yes, of course.” And with a shy smile, added, “I promise.”
-
Yesung learned from the locals that day that Ryeowook had a fascination with sunrises and conifers.
“Oh, yeah, he came here earlier with senior analyst Donghae, I think,” the owner of the small drugstore at the southeastern corner of Barrow confessed. “You know Donghae? Of course you do. He should be popular around your area; he's popular around here, too. Anyway, Ryeowook, he didn't want you to hate him too much, so he charted the area before coming here with you. He knew you'd be in a sour mood from the moment you met him, and so forth.”
Yesung's heart cracked a little at that, and wondered if he really had been sour, and he picked at his nails as he remembered all the times he'd snapped at Ryeowook to just go to sleep, we have a long flight in front of us, amateur.
“And he watched the sun climb up the tresses of the sky every morning!” the man went on, waving his hands frantically. “You wouldn't even believe it. He was dedicated, that boy.”
“How dedicated?” Yesung asked to make it seem like he had his undivided attention as he recalled the days he'd left his plate on the dinner table of the ship while Ryeowook cleaned it all, and the nights when he came home to a made bed and a spotless bathroom and never bothered to notice.
The store owner digressed to something about what Ryeowook had told him the other day, how Ryeowook had thought that Yesung was going to be an old guy, literally, whose deepest desire was to spend the holidays with his spoiled wife who would ramble about the first Christmas with her newly born granddaughter, and how grateful he was that Yesung was almost his age, how Yesung might have acted like an old crab occasionally, but Ryeowook cooked and made breakfast for him anyway.
“Oh, you...you wouldn't even believe it.” He winked. “That Ryeowook desperately wants a Christmas tree to celebrate the season. Just, just for future references.”
-
“I completed the audit on the oil shale reservoir, just like you wanted,” Ryeowook said that very evening, aerating his mashed potatoes with his fork, and soon, he had a whole polka-dotted platter going, with steak more tenderized than it should have been as Yesung kept silent and watched him. “Where were you all day?”
Yesung still didn't reply.
“You promised,” Ryeowook mumbled, “that you'd meet me.”
And from the start, Yesung's plan of a Christmas miracle was falling apart under his own eye, in his own fingers. “D-did I?” Yesung asked, tilting his head up to glance at Ryeowook, who gave him a long, rigid look, and put down his fork.
“Maybe, maybe you didn't.”
-
(Maybe, maybe Christmas wouldn't work out after all.
Ryeowook left the room and Yesung, teary-eyed, brushed his hand against the miniature Sitka Spruce, standing proudly in a pot behind him, donned with lights and ornaments and an angel and everything.)
-
“Merry Christmas Eve,” Ryeowook whispered the next morning, holding Yesung's door open and nearly obstructing his entire body from Yesung's view, and Yesung sat up, bare-chested and covers in small piles around him.
“Oh, yeah, that,” he replied, yawning. “Christmas Eve.”
Ryeowook seemed detached, though, and rubbed his hands against his pants. “I'm going to make breakfast.”
“You,” Yesung started, but Ryeowook had already slipped out of the doorway. “Do that.”
-
The only words that Yesung managed to drag out of Ryeowook's mouth that morning were the interrogative, “Do we have anything else to do in Barrow?”
“Not really,” Yesung answered, relieved. “It was just-just the oil shale.”
“Right,” Ryeowook said, and nibbled at his bacon, and soon simply gave up after consuming a good centimeter. “That means, that means I have to spend the whole day here?”
“With me?” Yesung snarled, coming out with more of a bite than he'd originally intended, and he noticed Ryeowook flinch. “Is that so bad?”
Ryeowook dropped his fork again, and froze. “No. I just, no-I don't know.”
-
Yesung discovered that there was telephone service in the research center as soon as he got a call from back in South Korea at nearly eleven at nighttime, and when he answered from his room, five voices wished him a merry Christmas.
“It's not Christmas yet,” Yesung replied with a raise of the eyebrow.
There was a silence for a short while, and then he heard Kyuhyun mutter, “See? I told you we were an hour early. I told you! But would you listen to me? No, of course you wo-”
Yesung hung up then, and Ryeowook popped into his room again.
“Are you done with the phone?” he asked in another withdrawn type of tone, and Yesung nodded slowly, Ryeowook disappearing at the first bob.
And he knew that eavesdropping was wrong, and would probably get him into more trouble, would probably make Ryeowook hate him even more, would probably make their tenuous relationship snap, but when all was silent in the research center save for Ryeowook speaking in the other room, it was rather difficult to avoid it. And to make matters worse, Yesung was a curious being.
So he picked up the phone, held it to his ear, breathed through his nose, and heard Ryeowook whisper, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”
There was no reply, but Ryeowook went on. “Yeah, I'm fine. Merry Christmas.” Another pause. “I miss you, too, you know that.”
Yesung wondered if it was simply something amiss with his ears, wondered if he could only hear Ryeowook, that would've been rather enticing, but a dog barked in the distance, and Yesung sat down on his bed delicately, receiver in one hand and phone in the other.
“Yes, yes, I met Yesung days ago, Mom.”
And again, no reply, and Yesung was beginning to think it was some kind of joke, until Ryeowook spoke again. “Oh, he's nice. Handsome. Scatter-brained at times, just like Dad was.” Ryeowook waited for a moment, and then laughed. “Dad, you know it's true. But,” Ryeowook continued, and Yesung didn't notice that he was pressing the phone to his face rather forcefully until then, and he peeled it away. “He's a little awkward. Gets mad easily. Doesn't keep his promises,” Ryeowook said in a low voice. “Reminds me of you guys. You promised to see me off when I went north for the first time. And where were you when I left?” Ryeowook's tone was accusatory, but mocking. “Up there, somewhere. Not at the port.”
Then, the silence lasted for a while longer, and Ryeowook's short gasps came over the line; he was crying. “Yes,” he finally choked out. “I know, you say you're always watching. I-I hear you.”
And Yesung couldn't believe it had taken him the whole painstaking fifteen minutes to figure it out.
-
A knock at his door brought Yesung back to his senses, and he hadn't hung up since Ryeowook had finished talking, but he told Ryeowook to come in anyway, and so he did, closing the door behind him.
“Thanks for everything, Yesung,” Ryeowook breathed, pulling gloves over his hands. “Really.”
“You seem to think you're going somewhere,” Yesung replied, but didn't turn around.
“I am.” Ryeowook replied, brushing his hair back with his fingers. “I'm leaving early, since our work is done. We don't need another day here. I'd rather spend Christmas in Wainwright, or Fairbanks, or Juneau, the city.”
This time, Yesung jolted around, hair flying, phone flying, hitting the wall with an obvious crack, but neither of them bothered to notice. “You can't leave early!” And it was something anyone would say, but Yesung, Yesung felt that when he said it, it was just a bit more special, a bit more influential, but Ryeowook failed to jump ship.
“I already arranged for a helicopter to pick me up in about an hour,” Ryeowook admitted, though his resolve was firm, and Yesung stood up, made his way toward Ryeowook and took his wrist.
“Then, let's leave together.”
Yesung took Ryeowook's hand and amidst Ryeowook's struggle, took it and squeezed it again, just as he'd done so many times before, laced their fingers together and dragged him out into the living room, turned on the light switch, and the entire room was set aglow with strings of warm bulbs that flickered once, and then remained lit, they smiled, they smiled at him. Ryeowook tensed for a moment, and his shoulders hunched, and he took an unconscious step closer to Yesung.
“I'm not going to-”
“You don't have to ask,” Yesung finished, and he could feel Ryeowook beside him, he could feel the warmth, of love, of Christmas, of Ryeowook, “because I, I kind of, I kind of love you.”
-
(“I,” Ryeowook whispered, dodging Yesung's gaze, “I kind of love you, too.”)
-
And so they had it, while leaving the building hours later, helicopter propellers buffeting snow in drifts against the side of the building, and Ryeowook and Yesung had to hold their hats down against their heads. They laughed together, and Yesung spotted the lights, stars, glowing through the translucent curtains, and he'd leave them on all night, he'd leave them on forever.
He'd left most of his clothes in the drawers because he knew he'd get a generous grant at the end of the year, especially for training Ryeowook and helping with the mineral deposits, not something he usually did.
They held hands through it, and into the day as they made their way down to Fairbanks, Ryeowook glanced out the window at near eleven and prodded Yesung, saying, “The sun's rising.”
“Merry Christmas,” Yesung replied, watching with an arm around Ryeowook's chair the sky turn from a midnight through shades of gray, and the cloud coverage thinned, and Alaska, in the winter, wasn't so bad. And Christmas, Christmas wasn't the worst Christmas ever, and by a long shot, there had been worse Christmases in Yesung's past years.
And suddenly, Ryeowook was shy, Ryeowook was shy, but he leaned in to Yesung's touch anyway, and Yesung pressed light, airy kisses to the side of Ryeowook's face. He turned to meet Yesung's lips with a kind of sweet, tender indolence, and Yesung could taste the honey tea Ryeowook had sipped down that morning.
-
When all good things came in one little package of Ryeowook, Christmas, and Alaska, Yesung wasn't one to complain. Because he'd been the secret Santa, through misunderstandings, that had made Ryeowook's Christmas. Because he had been the Yesung that Ryeowook would remember for years.
Because they were watching the sunrise from a helicopter on Christmas Day, and he kind of loved Ryeowook, and Ryeowook kind of loved him, too.
Title: I Kind of Love You
Pairing: Yewook
Category: lab lit!au, fluff, romance
Summary: Yesung wasn't thrilled to be spending his Christmas away from home, training a newly hired analyst near an oil deposit in northern Alaska, but with every cloud came a lining, and this lining was gold.
The last thing Yesung wanted was to go north on the annual Alaskan expedition in late December; after all, he was more of a penguin person than a polar bear person, but after several rather generic gifts and early Christmas cards intended more to further prod than anything else, he finally gave. In all honesty, he didn't know whether he'd rather spend his Christmas at the North Pole alone, or at home, alone.
But after he found out that there was another researcher going with him, a younger one, a rookie, Yesung almost connected his forehead with the desk in front of him and wished that he'd taken the road less traveled by instead. Generally, the lack of incoming researchers was rather evident, and Sungmin had a thing for reminding him. “You should be glad that there's someone willing to take your place on the next couple of expeditions,” he constantly said, but Yesung didn't buy it. Not when said rookie was a small, spindly little being with hands balled into fists at his sides and his eyes glued to his boots, and Yesung, he had to spend his Christmas training this guy. His Christmas.
(But it wasn't like he had anything better to do. He just didn't like to admit it.)
-
Yesung learned that his name was Ryeowook from the badge pinned to his jacket, and he liked to hide because he hid constantly, behind his hood, behind closed doors, or in his room, introverted and reserved. And he didn't speak, this Ryeowook. Yesung sometimes got the feeling that Ryeowook knew that he didn't want to be on the expedition, and so he kept to himself, even when Yesung sought him out from the confines of his own cabin.
“Ryeowook?” Yesung dared to venture one evening at dinner aboard the ship, and Ryeowook flinched. “Hey, I'm not going to eat you.”
“Judging by the glare you're giving me, i-it's kind of hard to believe you,” Ryeowook replied. His tone was gentle, though, and Yesung knew he'd at least gotten somewhere.
“Hey, we're going to be spending the next couple of weeks together, so we should learn to get along,” Yesung quipped, and this time Ryeowook looked up, face almost hidden by layers of underwear and fur.
“I, I wasn't aware that we were fighting.”
“Okay, so maybe we weren't,” Yesung said, and propped his head on his hands at the table, and Ryeowook went back to his awkward staring, played with the hem of his coat and rubbed his hands together. “Am I really that mean?” Yesung murmured, and he was sure Ryeowook had heard him, but showed no signs of receiving the message.
After a couple of minutes, though, Yesung tore off his coat and left the room, rather miffed, but he wasn't quite sure why, if it was because of Ryeowook's lack of response to him, or if it was because of his own deficit in the area of communication. But he was sure that in the coming week, he'd experience the worst Christmas yet.
-
“Here.”
Yesung woke up to a gentle shaking the next morning, and he struggled to open his eyes, struggled to remember where he was. It was his first expedition since the previous year, because he'd been the researcher, nuttier than a fruitcake, who had trained for the winter session in the north. An adventure, he remembered thinking, all too clearly. It would be fun.
And it really had been fun the first couple of times. Yesung recalled his own training, from a warm-hearted Donghae who'd gone on to trudge through the heavy snows of the Antarctic about a year after. Ryeowook must have had been crazy, too, Yesung thought, or delusional. Or naïve, and Yesung settled for the final option, because Ryeowook seemed like the type.
When he orientated himself, he smelled home, and when he closed his eyes, it became stronger, almost like he wasn't on a ship at all, one headed to the dark expanses of winter for the ironically warmest holiday of the year. But when he blinked again, he was disappointed to discover that the stronger smell had just been due to Ryeowook lowering the mug so that the stench of warm, fresh coffee traveled up his nose a little, well, better.
“Here,” Ryeowook urged, still holding the mug, and his arm was shaking, so Yesung took it from him hastily.
“Weak?” Yesung said, and Ryeowook frowned.
“I've been trying to wake you for the past ten minutes while holding this,” he retorted. “Lazy bum.”
Yesung grinned and nudged Ryeowook's stomach, and when Ryeowook barely managed to keep a hold on his own cup of tea, they settled for sitting by each other on Yesung's bed calmly instead.
Maybe he could learn to be the warm-hearted Yesung that Ryeowook would remember years later.
Maybe.
-
Three days later, Yesung and Ryeowook arrived at the port of Wainwright, Alaska, through the Berring Strait and placed dead center of the northern shore of Alaska, protruding out into the Arctic Ocean like a sore thumb. But aside from the lanterns of the ship, it was pitch black at four in the afternoon.
Yesung made his way out onto the deck anyway; it was like a tradition for him, despite whatever harsh winds might have blown him off, despite having to hold on to the railing for dear life occasionally, he did it anyway. As one of the top analysts of his field, no one ever questioned him, or told him to go inside, it's cold, cold, cold! and after a couple of minutes, Ryeowook even went so far as to join him.
“Why are you out here?” Ryeowook mumbled, holding himself with one arm and clutching Yesung's hand with the other, and Yesung found it amusing and smiled through parched lips.
He took it as a rhetorical question and went on, putting his hand over Ryeowook's.
Ryeowook stayed a couple of minutes until Yesung ushered him inside for the fear of him simply being dragged away by the gusts. “Don't pick up this habit,” Yesung whispered to them as they were enveloped in the barely warmer air of inside the waiting cabin. “It's bad for your health.”
“I'm going to be working here,” Ryeowook said. “I'd better get used to it.” And Yesung realized that Ryeowook was probably thicker-skinned than he'd originally assumed, and that Ryeowook was a little more like him that he'd thought, a loner with a rebellious streak.
-
They visited the actual town of Wainwright on their first night, and it was a rather lively night for a population of five-hundred, and without the sun to keep them in check, both Yesung and Ryeowook lost track of time because the sun was always setting, or set; it was always night.
Needless to say, each restaurant had its own little private generator, and sturdy Christmas lights hung from the gutters and roofs of the buildings, bringing joy to the shadowed world.
And they received a hero's welcome, because when people visited during the barren winter months, the entire town knew about it.
Ryeowook received a short introduction to alcohol at the bar, before Yesung dragged him away under the premise that he didn't want him being hung over the next day for their first full session of training, but really, he couldn't lie to himself, he was protecting Ryeowook.
He could be the warm-hearted brother that Ryeowook would remember years later.
Maybe.
-
Ryeowook was already asleep by the time they started making their way back to the research center, and along the icy pathways, Yesung was fighting a losing battle with himself to keep his eyes open, much less on the road, but the road was barely visible either, and after lack of snow for about four days, there were still only two or three tire trails in front of him.
He'd never seen it the way he saw it that night before, Alaska, because despite signing up for the winter months, generally, his company avoided sending winter expeditions as often as possible, and the North Pole had always been the Land of the Midnight Sun for Yesung, but this time, it was more of an eternal darkness.
The radio hummed old, quiet Christmas songs, a little dreamy, and across the barren field and through the fog, he could see faintly the lights of the research center flickering at him. And he could hear faint static as the DJ announced the coming of two of his favorite Christmas songs, and as they played, he instinctively reached a hand over and rubbed Ryeowook's leg. Like a brother.
-
(And he thought that maybe, just maybe, he kind of sort of loved Ryeowook.)
-
Yesung watched carefully as Ryeowook plastered his face to the window of the helicopter the next morning, flying out bright and early several miles to their final destination, to spend the solstice through the twenty-sixth at Point Barrow, just outside the town of Barrow, larger than Wainwright but infinitely colder. But the occasional light below them reminded them that they were still on Earth, and the day was reaching toward the time of twilight, brightest it would ever get in the winter.
They could both hear the fan of the copter's propellers, until Yesung sighed and was about the turn on the radio again, but Ryeowook interrupted him.
“You don't want to be here right now, do you?” he asked through a mouthful of small snacks he'd brought with him.
“That's-”
“Admit it!” Ryeowook slammed his fist down onto the panel beneath him, and Yesung jumped, and his chair legs crawled against the floor as he shifted back, because Ryeowook had never been a talkative one. “You want to be at home, enjoying your cozy Christmas season with your friends, or your wife, or your children, drinking, or making cookies, or hanging up cute little stalkings with cute little tassels and letters to Santa and-”
“-not-”
“Not training me. You're probably wondering what I'm even doing here,” Ryeowook went on. “A small, fragile thing like me. You're waiting for me to break, quit, so that you can join Sungmin and the other kid on their search for Susan the Polar Bear and whether or not she survived the summer months or whether she-”
“Ryeowook,” Yesung growled, taking Ryeowook's wrist. “Listen to me. I'm as open to train you as you are to accept me, so if you want to continue, please. Please do. I'm all ears.”
He saw Ryeowook deflate just a little, his shoulder dropping as quickly as his resolve, and for a moment, he wanted to take it all back. He wanted to let Ryeowook go on, while he listened, or perhaps, perhaps he wanted never to have met Ryeowook at all. For a moment. “You-you probably.”
Ryeowook tugged, but Yesung kept a firm grip on his wrist, fingers digging into bone under thin skin. “Go on.”
And Ryeowook twisted his fingers together for a fleeting moment before trailing them up his forearms until he was huddled into a ball again and, as Yesung perceived, trying to make himself look as small as possible.
“Go on,” Yesung goaded, and he picked up his chair and moved closer, rubbing Ryeowook's back.
“I-”
His lips moved, but the words didn't come out, or maybe Ryeowook didn't want to go on, probably the case, so Yesung settled for comforting him, holding him, lightly tugging on strands of hair as he ran his fingers through it, and murmured, “You don't want to be here, either, do you?”
-
There was a light at the corner of the helicopter landing pad, and it Yesung almost hoped there was an attendant swinging it, but he remembered Sungmin telling him that he'd leave the light on for them, and that they were alone, the two of them, in an unknown world.
“Thrilling,” Ryeowook breathed, and Yesung found himself delighting in the small smile that crept onto Ryeowook's face.
“We'll make it through this together,” Yesung replied, non sequitur, but he needed that little bit of reassurance because the silence was unknown to even him, with the seniority in their small coup; usually there were the dogs howling, but no one was unhinged enough to head to the north during the dead of December.
“No one's brave enough, you mean,” Ryeowook corrected even before Yesung'd realized he'd actually spoken aloud.
And if anything, Yesung thought that they'd drift apart, the two of them, after Ryeowook's initial outburst, but it seemed like Ryeowook was more open now than before.
“We're beastly,” Ryeowook added, and Yesung couldn't help but agree.
-
Somehow, in the passing days, Yesung came to realize that Ryeowook always knew what he was thinking about, and though South Korea seemed generally cold enough for both of them in the wintertime, the presence of Ryeowook made it a little more bearable in Barrow.
“You want to celebrate Christmas, don't you?” Ryeowook mumbled as soon as Yesung walked into his room late at night on the second evening, and Yesung was somewhere between incredulous and grateful that he didn't have to bring it up himself, because he didn't think he could. And when Ryeowook noticed that Yesung was hopeless, he flashed another bright smile. “It's okay. I do, too.”
“You-right,” Yesung finished lamely, smoothing his shirt. “How?”
Ryeowook looked down at his desk for a moment, and lifted up a sheet of paper, and on it was a sketched, pathetic little Santa, but Yesung had the urge to snatch it and make copies and plaster them all over his wall for each upcoming expedition.
“I was just thinking about that myself,” Ryeowook admitted. “Come, we'll brainstorm.”
And so they found themselves on Ryeowook's bed this time, Yesung sitting down politely and Ryeowook falling beside him, cheerful all the while, and began on a tangent, speaking quickly and quietly, and Yesung's heart was decelerating, his eyes drooping, and his arms winding around Ryeowook's slender waist, lulled into a peaceful sleep just as Ryeowook began singing White Christmas, all whispers and beautiful semi-tones and-
-
Yesung woke up in the middle of the night, or it could have been morning already, but they had all the time in the world.
Ryeowook liked the generator turned off at nighttime because they were “going green,” as he called it, and since they were researching the environment of the north, then energy-efficient environment preservation made sense, right?
And so nights were bitter, and the walls weren't thick enough and the windows were never really fully closed because Yesung somehow still felt the wind through the plaster-metal-wood-fresco finish, or perhaps it was the sound of it that made him aware, kept him awake; maybe it was all psychological.
He shivered, and as a reply, arms slung around his neck tightened, soft pads of fingers tickled his skin, and through the black, he saw Ryeowook's sleeping form in front of him, and felt Ryeowook's legs wrap around him. Suddenly, it wasn't cold anymore. Someone had snapped the windows secure and plastered the outside research center with a kind of insulation Yesung liked to call love, and his eyelids fluttered shut, and his hands ran down the lengths of Ryeowook's arms, and he smiled. He smiled, and pressed his lips to Ryeowook's temple, ducked under the comforter, and fell into an uninterrupted slumber.
-
(“You fell asleep on me last night,” Ryeowook half-murmured half-whined the next morning, and Yesung shrugged. “While we were supposed to be brainstorming.”
“I couldn't help it!” He raised his arms in defense, and added, “It was all warm, and nice, and-”
“Warm?!” Ryeowook left muttering something about how it was all Yesung's fault; he must have forgotten to turn on the generator, and Yesung wanted to protest, but his feet were left planted to the floor, and all he could muster was a partial frown.)
-
(And maybe, just maybe, Yesung could turn his worst Christmas on chart into Ryeowook's best Christmas; yes, he'd do that.
He'd do that.
Yesung's grin was lopsided and lovestruck, but Ryeowook wasn't looking, so Yesung pulled a fleece hat and the spare pair of earmuffs left on the nearest shelf by the last scientists and took Ryeowook's hand, and he squeezed.
He'd do that.)
-
“We have to investigate the oil shale deposit today,” Yesung said, flipping through hundreds of pages of clipboard notes in gloved hands as he waited just outside the garage door for the two snowmobiles to warm up. “It's what we came here for, and to be honest, the journey there and back takes a couple of hours, and the task is completable in, like, a day.” He frowned and turned back and forth between two pages. “I don't know why they gave us four.”
“Maybe they didn't want us traveling on Christmas,” Ryeowook suggested. “So that we could spend it, you know, together.”
Yesung laughed and ruffled Ryeowook's mop of dark hair, growing limp in the dry climate. “You're cute,” he said, and missed Ryeowook's crestfallen face, and with a glance at his watch, he announced that the snowmobiles were ready and that Ryeowook should head out first, and he'd meet him in about an hour at the mineral deposit site. “I have a couple errands to run first.”
“You'll meet me, right?” Ryeowook asked, twisting his tense hands in almost anxiety, and Yesung, for the sake of his own conscience, nodded frantically.
“Yes, of course.” And with a shy smile, added, “I promise.”
-
Yesung learned from the locals that day that Ryeowook had a fascination with sunrises and conifers.
“Oh, yeah, he came here earlier with senior analyst Donghae, I think,” the owner of the small drugstore at the southeastern corner of Barrow confessed. “You know Donghae? Of course you do. He should be popular around your area; he's popular around here, too. Anyway, Ryeowook, he didn't want you to hate him too much, so he charted the area before coming here with you. He knew you'd be in a sour mood from the moment you met him, and so forth.”
Yesung's heart cracked a little at that, and wondered if he really had been sour, and he picked at his nails as he remembered all the times he'd snapped at Ryeowook to just go to sleep, we have a long flight in front of us, amateur.
“And he watched the sun climb up the tresses of the sky every morning!” the man went on, waving his hands frantically. “You wouldn't even believe it. He was dedicated, that boy.”
“How dedicated?” Yesung asked to make it seem like he had his undivided attention as he recalled the days he'd left his plate on the dinner table of the ship while Ryeowook cleaned it all, and the nights when he came home to a made bed and a spotless bathroom and never bothered to notice.
The store owner digressed to something about what Ryeowook had told him the other day, how Ryeowook had thought that Yesung was going to be an old guy, literally, whose deepest desire was to spend the holidays with his spoiled wife who would ramble about the first Christmas with her newly born granddaughter, and how grateful he was that Yesung was almost his age, how Yesung might have acted like an old crab occasionally, but Ryeowook cooked and made breakfast for him anyway.
“Oh, you...you wouldn't even believe it.” He winked. “That Ryeowook desperately wants a Christmas tree to celebrate the season. Just, just for future references.”
-
“I completed the audit on the oil shale reservoir, just like you wanted,” Ryeowook said that very evening, aerating his mashed potatoes with his fork, and soon, he had a whole polka-dotted platter going, with steak more tenderized than it should have been as Yesung kept silent and watched him. “Where were you all day?”
Yesung still didn't reply.
“You promised,” Ryeowook mumbled, “that you'd meet me.”
And from the start, Yesung's plan of a Christmas miracle was falling apart under his own eye, in his own fingers. “D-did I?” Yesung asked, tilting his head up to glance at Ryeowook, who gave him a long, rigid look, and put down his fork.
“Maybe, maybe you didn't.”
-
(Maybe, maybe Christmas wouldn't work out after all.
Ryeowook left the room and Yesung, teary-eyed, brushed his hand against the miniature Sitka Spruce, standing proudly in a pot behind him, donned with lights and ornaments and an angel and everything.)
-
“Merry Christmas Eve,” Ryeowook whispered the next morning, holding Yesung's door open and nearly obstructing his entire body from Yesung's view, and Yesung sat up, bare-chested and covers in small piles around him.
“Oh, yeah, that,” he replied, yawning. “Christmas Eve.”
Ryeowook seemed detached, though, and rubbed his hands against his pants. “I'm going to make breakfast.”
“You,” Yesung started, but Ryeowook had already slipped out of the doorway. “Do that.”
-
The only words that Yesung managed to drag out of Ryeowook's mouth that morning were the interrogative, “Do we have anything else to do in Barrow?”
“Not really,” Yesung answered, relieved. “It was just-just the oil shale.”
“Right,” Ryeowook said, and nibbled at his bacon, and soon simply gave up after consuming a good centimeter. “That means, that means I have to spend the whole day here?”
“With me?” Yesung snarled, coming out with more of a bite than he'd originally intended, and he noticed Ryeowook flinch. “Is that so bad?”
Ryeowook dropped his fork again, and froze. “No. I just, no-I don't know.”
-
Yesung discovered that there was telephone service in the research center as soon as he got a call from back in South Korea at nearly eleven at nighttime, and when he answered from his room, five voices wished him a merry Christmas.
“It's not Christmas yet,” Yesung replied with a raise of the eyebrow.
There was a silence for a short while, and then he heard Kyuhyun mutter, “See? I told you we were an hour early. I told you! But would you listen to me? No, of course you wo-”
Yesung hung up then, and Ryeowook popped into his room again.
“Are you done with the phone?” he asked in another withdrawn type of tone, and Yesung nodded slowly, Ryeowook disappearing at the first bob.
And he knew that eavesdropping was wrong, and would probably get him into more trouble, would probably make Ryeowook hate him even more, would probably make their tenuous relationship snap, but when all was silent in the research center save for Ryeowook speaking in the other room, it was rather difficult to avoid it. And to make matters worse, Yesung was a curious being.
So he picked up the phone, held it to his ear, breathed through his nose, and heard Ryeowook whisper, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”
There was no reply, but Ryeowook went on. “Yeah, I'm fine. Merry Christmas.” Another pause. “I miss you, too, you know that.”
Yesung wondered if it was simply something amiss with his ears, wondered if he could only hear Ryeowook, that would've been rather enticing, but a dog barked in the distance, and Yesung sat down on his bed delicately, receiver in one hand and phone in the other.
“Yes, yes, I met Yesung days ago, Mom.”
And again, no reply, and Yesung was beginning to think it was some kind of joke, until Ryeowook spoke again. “Oh, he's nice. Handsome. Scatter-brained at times, just like Dad was.” Ryeowook waited for a moment, and then laughed. “Dad, you know it's true. But,” Ryeowook continued, and Yesung didn't notice that he was pressing the phone to his face rather forcefully until then, and he peeled it away. “He's a little awkward. Gets mad easily. Doesn't keep his promises,” Ryeowook said in a low voice. “Reminds me of you guys. You promised to see me off when I went north for the first time. And where were you when I left?” Ryeowook's tone was accusatory, but mocking. “Up there, somewhere. Not at the port.”
Then, the silence lasted for a while longer, and Ryeowook's short gasps came over the line; he was crying. “Yes,” he finally choked out. “I know, you say you're always watching. I-I hear you.”
And Yesung couldn't believe it had taken him the whole painstaking fifteen minutes to figure it out.
-
A knock at his door brought Yesung back to his senses, and he hadn't hung up since Ryeowook had finished talking, but he told Ryeowook to come in anyway, and so he did, closing the door behind him.
“Thanks for everything, Yesung,” Ryeowook breathed, pulling gloves over his hands. “Really.”
“You seem to think you're going somewhere,” Yesung replied, but didn't turn around.
“I am.” Ryeowook replied, brushing his hair back with his fingers. “I'm leaving early, since our work is done. We don't need another day here. I'd rather spend Christmas in Wainwright, or Fairbanks, or Juneau, the city.”
This time, Yesung jolted around, hair flying, phone flying, hitting the wall with an obvious crack, but neither of them bothered to notice. “You can't leave early!” And it was something anyone would say, but Yesung, Yesung felt that when he said it, it was just a bit more special, a bit more influential, but Ryeowook failed to jump ship.
“I already arranged for a helicopter to pick me up in about an hour,” Ryeowook admitted, though his resolve was firm, and Yesung stood up, made his way toward Ryeowook and took his wrist.
“Then, let's leave together.”
Yesung took Ryeowook's hand and amidst Ryeowook's struggle, took it and squeezed it again, just as he'd done so many times before, laced their fingers together and dragged him out into the living room, turned on the light switch, and the entire room was set aglow with strings of warm bulbs that flickered once, and then remained lit, they smiled, they smiled at him. Ryeowook tensed for a moment, and his shoulders hunched, and he took an unconscious step closer to Yesung.
“I'm not going to-”
“You don't have to ask,” Yesung finished, and he could feel Ryeowook beside him, he could feel the warmth, of love, of Christmas, of Ryeowook, “because I, I kind of, I kind of love you.”
-
(“I,” Ryeowook whispered, dodging Yesung's gaze, “I kind of love you, too.”)
-
And so they had it, while leaving the building hours later, helicopter propellers buffeting snow in drifts against the side of the building, and Ryeowook and Yesung had to hold their hats down against their heads. They laughed together, and Yesung spotted the lights, stars, glowing through the translucent curtains, and he'd leave them on all night, he'd leave them on forever.
He'd left most of his clothes in the drawers because he knew he'd get a generous grant at the end of the year, especially for training Ryeowook and helping with the mineral deposits, not something he usually did.
They held hands through it, and into the day as they made their way down to Fairbanks, Ryeowook glanced out the window at near eleven and prodded Yesung, saying, “The sun's rising.”
“Merry Christmas,” Yesung replied, watching with an arm around Ryeowook's chair the sky turn from a midnight through shades of gray, and the cloud coverage thinned, and Alaska, in the winter, wasn't so bad. And Christmas, Christmas wasn't the worst Christmas ever, and by a long shot, there had been worse Christmases in Yesung's past years.
And suddenly, Ryeowook was shy, Ryeowook was shy, but he leaned in to Yesung's touch anyway, and Yesung pressed light, airy kisses to the side of Ryeowook's face. He turned to meet Yesung's lips with a kind of sweet, tender indolence, and Yesung could taste the honey tea Ryeowook had sipped down that morning.
-
When all good things came in one little package of Ryeowook, Christmas, and Alaska, Yesung wasn't one to complain. Because he'd been the secret Santa, through misunderstandings, that had made Ryeowook's Christmas. Because he had been the Yesung that Ryeowook would remember for years.
Because they were watching the sunrise from a helicopter on Christmas Day, and he kind of loved Ryeowook, and Ryeowook kind of loved him, too.