Chapter Text
For a moment, there is silence in the tent. Jihoon’s emotions hang at the tip of a needle, threatening to tip to one side, or the other, or burst completely.
“You what?” His voice is hoarse and raw, and perhaps too biting, but they didn’t make mistakes like this. Joshua doesn’t make mistakes like this. He is the most meticulous of all of them, always checking and double-checking.
“I know,” Joshua says, half-sobbing. “I know. But I was lost, and they asked my name, and I didn’t even think about it.”
Jihoon sits back on his heels. His head hurts.
“So you’re here…” he trails off.
“Forever,” another voice interrupts. Someone crawls out of the shadows, levering himself into a cross-legged position between Joshua and Jihoon. The someone has dirty blue hair. His clothes are torn to shreds– the bottom of his pants rise above his ankles, and his shirt has a stretch of fabric hanging loosely from the hem. He wears no shoes.
“Captain Kim Hongjoong,” the man says, sticking out a hand. It’s covered in dirt, with criss-crossing scars. Jihoon takes it carefully.
“If he told them his name,” Hongjoong says, “Then he’s here forever. God knows I’ve been.”
Jihoon shuts his eyes against the swell of hopelessness that threatens to overwhelm him. He thinks about Jeonghan, Seokmin, and Seungkwan, stuck on a beach and alone.
“It’s not really been forever,” Joshua says, his voice uncertain. “It must seem like it, but it can’t have been.”
“It’s been three days since you went missing,” Jihoon volunteers quietly. “At least, as far as I knew.”
“Do you know the date?” Hongjoong asks. His voice is even, but something in his tone betrays a frenetic anxiety. Jihoon looks into his eyes and finds a familiar desperation.
“I’m sorry,” Jihoon says as softly as he can. “I don’t.”
Hongjoong’s shoulders slump. With a respectful nod toward Joshua, he slinks back to the corner of the tent.
“There must be people looking for him,” Joshua murmurs, gazing at Hongjoong’s curled back. “He’s been here so long– he’s seen a winter here, at least.”
Jihoon shrugs. “I was looking for you, and I got so lost I ended up here.” It goes unsaid that if anyone is looking for Hongjoong, they have long since given up.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Joshua says, tears hanging onto his eyelashes. “I mean, I’m not, but it’s been so lonely, Jihoon. Is Jeonghan–?”
Jihoon hooks an arm around Joshua’s shoulders. Joshua tucks his head against Jihoon's neck and takes in a shuddering breath.
“Jeonghan is… upset,” Jihoon starts lowly. There’s no point in lying to Joshua. “He didn’t take you getting lost well, and Seungkwan and Seokmin were fighting. But they’ll be okay.”
Joshua shudders. “I can’t stay here though, Jihoon.”
In the darkness, Jihoon presses his lips to his older brother’s hair. “I know. We’ll get you out of here.”
It’s an uneasy sleep, but having one of his brothers so close allows Jihoon to drift. The sun wakes him, shining through the tent flaps and stabbing right into his eyes. When he opens them, squinting against the harsh light, Hongjoong is already up, kneeling on the ground with his hands clasped and head bowed.
Joshua stirs, and Jihoon stretches as his elder brother sits up.
“He still prays to the old gods,” Joshua explains quietly. “Not us, but the Ancients– Dhelnas and Nakbris, Zean and Asmis.”
Jihoon nods. Those are old gods– much older than he and his brothers, and nearly archaic. That kind of piety is rare in humans anymore.
“They’ll come for us soon,” Joshua says. Hongjoong has shifted, facing north with his hands held open. Jihoon recognizes the prayer. It’s a common traveler's prayer, one meant for good weather and calm seas.
Captain, Hongjoong had said. Jihoon puts the pieces together– pirate.
“What do you do?” Jihoon asks. His voice is rough with sleep and thirst.
“I work the fields,” Joshua says. “Planting and harvesting.”
Hongjoong has stood up and is running his fingers through his hair. It doesn’t seem to be helping.
“Remember, Jihoon,” the human sing-songs, making his way across the tent. “Don’t take a single thing they give you. It’s never, ever free.”
Jihoon and Joshua watch him leave in silence.
“I’ll have to go soon,” Joshua says. “Hongjoong is right. Learn everything you can, but be careful.”
Jihoon nods, the tight knot in his chest twisting as Joshua stands up. “I will, I promise. I’ll see if I can find a way to get you out of here, too.”
The silence that Joshua leaves is loud. The tent is dark and close in his absence, and Jihoon breathes through a sharp spike of anxiety. He traces the supports across the tent ceiling and names his brothers with each beat of his heart.
Seungcheol, Jeonghan, Jisoo, Junhui, Soonyoung, Wonwoo–
He’s cycled through them all three times before the tent flap is peeled open and the Fae from before– Lee Hoseok– crouches in the watery light.
“Hello, Jihoon,” the Fae says. “Please, follow me.”
Jihoon eyes him warily. “I will follow where you go for now, as I am a stranger to this land. But I will not follow you forever.”
The Fae regards him with interest. “It’s well reasoned. Alright then, Jihoon.”
The tent flap slides closed, and Jihoon takes one last moment to breathe before stepping out.
Even in the early morning, the area buzzes with activity. In the distance, Jihoon can see rows of people working on a large area of tilled land– the fields, where Joshua said he worked. Others are clustered around tents, setting up large looms or stoking fires.
“It’s nice here,” Jihoon says, even if it burns to admit it. “Beautiful. Wild, in ways things have not been wild for many years.”
Hoseok hums. “Yes, we keep to ourselves. The new technologies being invented aren’t much use to us, we are so accustomed to this way of life.”
“The loom is new technology, to me,” Jihoon laughs softly. “When I was young, we spun clothes out of star-song.”
“Truly?”
“No,” Jihoon says, remembering that Hoseok is a scholar. “We wove on wooden frames. They were not unlike looms, they were just less… refined. There was nothing lovely to create with them– we only had sheets of roughspun cloth.”
Hoseok listens intently, barely pausing as he ducks into another tent, holding the flap open for Jihoon to slip through. The inside of this tent is warm, lit with low-burning amber candles. The walls are held unnaturally far apart by dozens of books– more than one hundred, certainly, all leather-bound and musty-smelling.
“I looked for mentions of you all,” Hoseok says, gesturing to a low table in the center of the room. Jihoon kneels next to it obediently. It’s strewn with books, papers flung every which way across the dark wood surface. “There’s mention of you in books a thousand years back, but nothing more recently.”
Jihoon nods once, shortly. “My eldest brother, Seungcheol, is near thirteen hundred years.”
“Yes,” Hoseok says eagerly. “And really, you don’t know where anyone came from? You weren’t born?”
Jihoon shrugs. “I wasn’t. Joshua wasn’t. Junhui always said he came from the moon. We thought he was lying but we weren’t sure.”
Hoseok is scribbling something frantically in a worn notebook. His handwriting is thin and spidery.
“What do you know of my brothers?” Jihoon asks after a minute of silence. “There’s something, I know.”
Hoseok sighs, reaching behind himself and pulling a thin sheet of paper out from between two red-dyed journals.
“It’s not a lot,” Hoseok warns. “But we received a letter from our trading partners to the south this past winter. It’s mostly updates on weather patterns, predictions for fishing hauls for the summer, territory disputes. There’s one section, though, that you might be interested in.”
Jihoon does not apologize for practically snatching the paper from Hoseok’s hands. He reads the smeary, ink-blotted letter with a desperation usually reserved for the starving.
Most of the letter is, as Hoseok said, dry discussions. It’s the middle of the letter that steals Jihoon’s breath away.
There was a strange occurrence this New Year. We received visitors, although they looked to be more your people than mine.
‘Your people’ Jihoon takes to mean ‘fae’.
Silver was their hair, and thin were their clothes, despite it being the deepest part of winter. They came upon our town and did not tell us their names, nor their business. They were drawn to the fires we had built to usher in the New Year, and they danced.
“They danced,” Jihoon whispers, fingers brushing over the words as if he could make them come to life, create his brothers in stunning color or black and white.
‘Til near midnight, they danced and laughed. They were entrancing, speaking frankly. It was at midnight that I knew something was wrong; between one blink of an eye and the next, they were gone.
Jihoon crushes the paper to his chest, imprinting the words into his skin.
Gone.
But there, once.
“Where is this village?” Jihoon manages to ask through the block in his throat. “Where?”
Hoseok is watching him, and his eyes are sad. “It’s a fortnights worth of travel.”
Jihoon almost snarls. He almost leans across the table to grab Hoseok, to shake him, to ask him Do you know the distance I would go?’
Any distance. To find them again, any distance.
He doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, the ache in his chest swells like the sun, and Jihoon cradles it, holds it.
A fortnight of travel. Just that.
If he weren’t stuck here.
Jihoon, then, does the impossible. He swallows back his hurt, his rage, his grief, and he turns to Hoseok.
“What else do you want to know?”
The time passes quickly after that– Hoseok has a list of questions for Jihoon, and Jihoon answers each one as truthfully as he can. The questions vary from inquiries about farming practices a thousand years ago to religious holidays, and Jihoon finds himself almost respecting the fae in front of him for his curiosity.
Almost, because then a fortnight rings through his head, and he finds himself again lost in a tidal wave of emotion.
The sun is close to the horizon when Hoseok permits him to leave, still scribbling in his worn journal, uncaring of the ink splatters on his sleeves. Jihoon steps out of the tent, squinting at the warm golden light. There’s a slow, lazy energy draped over the camp, different from the harsh patterns of efficiency he had seen earlier.
He does not know where to go, so he goes back to the tent he shared with Joshua and Hongjoong. They are already there, washing in a shallow tub of water.
“How were the fields?” Jihoon asks. Hongjoong cradles the water just a little too long, holding it reverently between his hands before pouring it over his head.
“Tiring,” Joshua says, turning to Jihoon with his gentle smile. “Although planting is familiar. I had missed it, on the beach.”
Jihoon smiles back, but it fades as he remembers. A fortnight.
“I spoke with Hoseok, their scholar,” Jihoon begins. Hongjoong seems to sense the shift in the atmosphere and turns away.
“He has a letter.” Jihoon’s throat is tight. “From a town only a fortnight away. Joshua, I think it was– I think it was our dancers.”
“Chan?” Joshua gasps, his hand flying to his chest and squeezing. “Jun and Minghao– Soonyoung?”
Jihoon presses closer to his older brother, unable to bear the pain of it on his own. “Four were mentioned. But Joshua, they said they disappeared when the sun rose.”
Joshua shudders, his whole body shaking. “A fortnight.”
Jihoon nods. He cannot say it again.
They take dinner– warm bread, cold cheese. Fruits.
They wash. Hongjoong prays.
When night truly falls, Jihoon curls against Joshua, their foreheads pressed together. A wolf calls.
Jihoon whispers into the space between them.
“We must get out.”