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Ten thinks that anybody’d have to be certifiably insane to step outside voluntarily in this weather. His hands are stuffed into his pockets, his jacket not doing much to keep the cold out, the wind tearing through the streets and stinging at his cheeks. The perpetual grey of the sky doesn’t do much to improve his mood, only reminding him that winter is long and cold and relentless and cares not for people like Ten, people who have to walk a great deal of the city in order to get to the bus stop.
The winter of December and the winter of January and February are two different beasts. The first is gentler, more forgiving, even enjoyable, but the second is harsher, brutal and cruel. December is soft flurries, it’s warm get-togethers with friends and family and the promise of time off from classes; when the calendar turns, some new entity takes over, Ten is nearly convinced of it. The weather becomes angrier, the skies become darker, and long gone is the happiness of the holidays, replaced with biting winds and devastating blizzards.
There is simply nothing to be loved about winter.
These thoughts and more are what course through his head while he cuts through the park, stopping by the coffee cart beneath the old oak tree, gnarled and bare.
The steam of the rising from his cup brings warmth that feels welcome against his cold skin. He revels in the relief for a moment while he glances around in a fleeting manner, not really caring about what he sees, until he lands on something new.
There is a single man sitting at the bench, and the first word that Ten’s mind assigns him is peculiar. Ten has always been an observer, an evaluator, and his mind processes people and places in colors and details, lines and shapes, like he can commit them all to memory and put them to paper later.
He looks to be in his early twenties- he could be a university student- though he has no bags or books with him, and the only thing he seems to be carrying is a leather-bound notebook which he holds in his lap with one hand. His posture is almost unnervingly straight and still, his outfit almost conspicuously put-together, his jacket and turtleneck varying shades of neutral greys and browns. However, the most interesting thing about him, and the reason Ten had laid eyes on him at all, is the pair of binoculars looped around his neck.
He seems to catch Ten looking at him, and shifts slightly so that he makes eye contact with him; Ten looks away quickly, but his curiosity does not wane.
He has never claimed to be a particularly shy person, and his morning waits for the bus are always so boring that he finds himself sitting on the bench next to the man.
“What are those for?” He asks, gesturing to the binoculars. The man blinks, as if he hadn’t expected Ten to address him. Up close, Ten notices he has soft features, a gentle nose and gentler lips that quirk up in obvious passion when Ten asks.
“That’s an odd way to say hello,” the man points out (his voice, Ten finds, is the gentlest thing about him of all), though he places a hand over the binoculars anyways and fiddles with the strap while he explains them. “These are for birdwatching,” he tells Ten.
Ten glances around, looking for birds to watch. His coffee is still warm in his hands, the steam wafting up between them lazily. There’s a significant lack of birds in sight. He informs the man of this, and he laughs once, dimples making split-second appearances on his cheeks.
“That’s what these are useful for, you see.” He taps the binoculars once, and then he pulls them up and over his neck, offering them to Ten. “Have a look in that tree over there.” He points to an oak with sprawling, bare branches across the path.
Ten puts the lenses to his eyes and does exactly that, and finds two little grey birds leaping between branches.
“They aren’t very interesting,” Ten admits.
“Oh, sure they are,” the man says, seemingly amused by Ten’s impatience, “they’re looking for a place to nest. They mate for life, did you know that?” Ten shakes his head. “I think it’s plenty fascinating, that such a little thing can still understand something like loyalty, lifelong partnership.”
“Well, when you put it that way. . .”
“Everything’s more interesting when you put it in a certain frame.” The man’s dimpled grin returns. It reminds Ten of art, in a way. Everything is beautiful so long as it is captured at just the right angle.
Ten’s bus pulls up on the curb.
“I have to go.” Ten is reluctant to pull away.
The man merely shrugs, takes the binoculars back from Ten, and raises them to his eyes. Ten can see his own reflection in the lenses. “Okay.”
From the bus window, Ten can see him still. He is completely unbothered by the woman walking her rowdy pomeranian a few paces away from him, the cars rushing by across the street, as though they’re trivial things compared to the birds he seeks. Birds are odd things, Ten thinks. You don’t really think about them unless you look for them.
***
“Good morning.” Ten sits down next to the man, steaming coffees in both hands.
“Good morning?” Wary eyes peer at him from behind binocular lenses. “Did you buy me coffee?”
“Maybe.” Ten shrugs. “Maybe they’re both for me. Maybe it’s for a friend.”
“It’s a good thing, then.” The man grins mischievously. “I don’t even like coffee.”
“Well, in that case, this is definitely for somebody else.” Ten peers at the little notebook in his lap. “What’s in there?”
“Awfully curious, aren’t you?” A soft laugh lets Ten know that he isn’t really annoyed. “I write down what I see, or sometimes draw it, that’s all.”
Ten peers at his face again, trying to commit it to memory. All Ten can think is pleasant, easy to look at, sort of soft but sort of not, mouth curved into a faint grin. Eyes that observe Ten with a distant curiosity, perhaps like he would one of the birds he seems to love so much. “What’s your name?”
“Kun.” Ten thinks it’s fitting. He likes the way Kun’s gentle voice wraps around the sound of his name, melodically in a sense, the single syllable somehow soft around the edges.
“I’m Ten.”
“I haven’t really seen you around here before. I don’t really know anybody by name, but I usually see the same people, you know? Not that anybody has tried talking to me before,” he adds with a laugh. “You’re the first.”
“Well, you’re interesting,” Ten admits, “and I figured out that if I take the bus from here, it takes me to where I need to be faster. Anything to get out of this weather.” He shivers. If there’s anything two people in the northeast can bond over, it’s complaining about the weather. But Kun gives him a surprised look.
“You don’t like it?”
“ No. ” Ten pulls his coat tighter around himself. “It’s cold, and wet, and drab. I prefer the sun.”
Kun nods slowly, like he’s absorbing this, processing it. “I don’t mind it.”
“Well,” Ten shivers, “I do.” Kun busies himself with his binoculars and hums complacently. It’s a very nice tenor sort of sound, even though Ten doesn’t know much about music. “What are you watching today?”
Kun sighs. “Not very much. There’s a storm coming in tonight, and I think all of the birds have taken cover.”
The clouds are darker than usual, the winds strong enough that they toss Ten’s hair about and sting his cheeks. He sees the bus arriving out of the corner of his eye.
“They probably know what’s best.” Ten suggests. “Don’t you get yourself caught in a blizzard, okay? It’d be a shame if I came by tomorrow and you were stuck in a snow bank or something.”
“I promise I won’t, then.”
Ten leans his head against the bus window and watches his breath make frosty clouds on the glass. He wipes the condensation away with his sleeve, and barely makes out the blurry shape of Kun in the distance.
***
“Why always this bench?”
“Because I like it.” Kun shrugs; his eyes sparkle with something like mirth. “It’s comfier than the other benches.”
“They’re all the exact same bench, though.” Ten sits down and offers Kun a foam cup, warm to the touch.
“It’s just comfier, no rhyme or reason to it.” Kun regards the cup in Ten’s hand with skepticism. “I told you I didn’t like coffee, remember?”
“This isn’t coffee, it’s tea.” He’d taken another wild guess.
Kun laughs softly and takes the cup from Ten. “Thanks, then. You’re ridiculous- and stubborn.”
“Am I?”
“A little,” Kun admits, “it’s nice.”
“At least you didn’t get swept away by that blizzard.” Ten wonders exactly what he’s doing, how he got here. How he started to look forward to this in the mornings instead of dreading facing the cold, every little feathered thing that crosses his path reminds him of Kun. He doesn’t entirely know what’s happening, what occurs between the two of them on these soft winter mornings, but he strangely doesn’t want it to end.
Still, sometimes his old ways prevail. He shivers, stuffing his hands into his pockets, hunching in on himself. Maybe he’s just not built for this kind of weather, bone-chilling cold, endless winds.
“Are you cold?”
Ten glares at Kun. “Are you not? ”
“Not really,” Kun replies, unaffected by Ten’s glare, “I rather like it, really.”
“But why ?” Ten asks, disbelieving.
“Well, I see how you might hate it, the cold and all, I mean. But I think there’s something to say for the snow.” Kun points to a patch of snow across the path. “The cardinals, for instance, don’t look nearly as bright in the summertime. See how red he looks against the snow?” Ten catches sight of the little red bird hopping about on the ground, and sees. He nods. “I could argue then, that the drabness of the wintertime makes everything else look prettier in comparison.” He glances at Ten, and Ten, well- he doesn’t really know how to argue against that, because he’s right, in a way.
“I guess you’re kind of right,” Ten replies, grinning at Kun, “I never really thought of it that way.”
“Lots of people don’t.” Kun shrugs. “I agree with you in some aspects,” he adds, pulling his coat tighter around himself, “it is cold.” The very tip of his nose is soft red to match his cheeks, a result of the wind, for sure.
The notebook lies open in Kun’s lap, half obstructed by the scarf that hangs loosely around his neck, the pages gently ruffled by the wind. His sketches are crude but recognizable, more rushed pencil strokes than precise lines, and little notes in Kun’s slanted handwriting in the margins. Ten doesn’t realize how long he’s been looking until a light touch pulls him from his thoughts.
“Your bus,” Kun explains, squeezing his arm so lightly that he cannot feel it through all of his layers of clothing. Ten lingers on the bench for a moment, an imperceptible second, just to look back at Kun. Kun looks back, his breath appearing in delicate clouds before fading away, his eyes awfully warm. In the dead of winter, Kun still manages to look warm , not in the literal sense, but in the sense that although he is merely a passing stranger present only in fleeting minutes of Ten’s days, he still feels undeniably safe .
“Bye,” Ten says, and then pulls away and off of the bench to board the bus. When he slips his cold fingers back into his pockets, he cannot help but view the dull of winter in a slightly different light. Ten is an artist; he understands contrast. So perhaps it’s odd that the man who watches birds on the bench in the park was the one to point it out to him, that maybe winter’s so dark because it allows for new, previously unnoticeable things to become apparent against its backdrop, that it makes ordinary things seem more beautiful.
***
February comes with a fury so icy and so cold that Ten considers staying in, skipping everything for a day, wrapping himself up with his cat and his blanket and a book and pretending the outside world doesn’t exist. He’s almost positive that as soon as he steps outside, he’s going to slip on a patch of ice, maybe face plant into a snowbank.
But his feet, and perhaps his heart, betray him. Though the windows of his apartment are coated with frost, and he has to pull on an extra layer of just about everything just to stave off the chill, he finds himself fully dressed and with his hand on the doorknob with time to spare. His cat stares at him curiously. Maybe Louis is just impressed with Ten’s ability to motivate himself to go out in such terrible weather.
He’d hate to break it to Louis, but he thinks it has more to do with the prospect of meeting Kun in the park than anything else.
He locks the door behind him and before he knows it, he’s all but slammed with a wall of icy, dry air. God, he hates winter. Everywhere he steps, there are patches of black ice, barely visible until he steps on them. The tall buildings surrounding him loom upwards like grim sentries, the cars that creep by, jammed in traffic, seem tired and lethargic. He really should’ve stayed inside.
And, yet.
“Fine morning isn’t it?” Even Kun’s soft voice is dripping with sarcasm.
“Oh yeah, fucking great,” Ten grumbles, taking his seat. “I think my fingers are going to fall off. Or my ears. Maybe my toes. Maybe everything.” His teeth chatter, he kind of shakes. No matter how many layers he puts on, it’s just never enough. This is the kind of cold that’s so cold that it burns. “How cold is it?”
“The weather this morning said eight degrees, but with the wind chill it’s like, ten below zero.” He laughs. “Ten,” he repeats, “like you.”
“ Very funny.”
Kun seems to hesitate, taking in a sharp breath, before scooting closer, closing the gap between them. He stays like that, tense, waiting for a response. His side is awfully warm; their knees bump together.
“Any better?” He murmurs, glancing away shyly.
“How are you- how are you so warm? Yeah, that’s better, you human radiator.” Ten is astonished, offended by how the universe has blessed Kun with warmth, and Ten with none.
When Kun laughs, Ten can feel it. He knows he probably shouldn’t, but his instincts seem to want him to press closer, to huddle into Kun’s side, because it feels safe and warm and overwhelmingly right.
“What are we watching this morning?” He asks, out of habit.
“Bluebirds,” Kun says, except the funny thing is that he isn’t looking out at the park at all. He’s looking right at Ten, something unidentifiable in his eyes. “I was watching a pair of bluebirds, but. . . I think they flew away.”
“Got distracted?” Ten supplies.
The unidentifiable thing in Kun’s eyes grows. It’s a soft thing, but its meaning evades Ten entirely. “Something like that.”
***
There is a span of days when Kun is not at the park.
Just shy of two weeks. That’s how long it is.Ten doesn’t realize how well he had slipped into his daily routine until he has vanished.
The bench is empty, but the birds remain, and somehow Ten finds this wrong, as he walks his usual route to the bus stop. He quietly names them as he passes them by, and each one sounds more like Kun’s gentle voice than himself. A blue jay announcing itself loudly on the lamppost, a flock of starlings in the snow, a pair of sparrows fighting over a piece of bread on the sidewalk.
Each day he does this in Kun’s absence. He won’t say that it leaves a great big gaping hole in his heart; he won’t say that these days are miserable for him; but they are just that small fraction lonelier, just a little bit off kilter, unbalanced. Ten can survive without Kun, absolutely, but the truth is that he’d rather him here. This he grapples with on the first days, on the first walks, and eventually comes to accept.
He forgets, every day, to be angry at the cold weather.
Kun returns exactly fifteen days later, and perhaps Ten should be ashamed of the soft sigh of relief that leaves his lips, but he can’t find it in himself to care. He is just as put together as usual, his leather notebook in hand, but there’s something very subtly different in the air around him. Ten notices this while he’s purchasing his coffee like he does every morning, as he hands the money over to the friendly old vendor with the flat cap, gloved fingers fumbling with the change. Kun has patches of dark beneath his eyes, and his lips do not hold quite the same thoughtful tilt that they usually do, instead downturned in a soft frown. His notebook isn’t open, held very firmly shut in his lap.
“Hello,” Ten says, sitting down next to Kun, a polite distance between them. Kun turns to Ten and there is sorrow in his eyes.
“Hi,” Kun replies, and smiles a smile that only serves to amplify the sadness in his gaze.
“You weren’t here for a while,” Ten continues, and decides not to add that I missed you. “It was strange to see you gone.”
“Well, I’m back now.”
They sit in comfortable silence, but it’s laced with something heavier. Kun doesn’t open his notebook at all, doesn’t once look at Ten. The bus is taking far too long to come this morning.
“Did you know,” Kun speaks up after a while, so quietly Ten almost doesn’t hear him, “that lots of people believe a red cardinal to be a sign that their lost loved ones are watching over them?” Ten doesn’t have to look far to see the red bird, flitting between the bare branches of the oaks that line the pathways. Kun has a wistful smile on his face, an odd shining quality to his eyes. Ten understands.
“Oh,” he says softly in acknowledgement, “oh, Kun.”
Kun shrugs, a minute movement. “My grandfather taught me about all of this. The birds. They meant a lot to him,” he tells Ten. “He liked the finches best. How they get all dull in the winter, but turn bright in the spring.” He sighs, his voice never wavering. Kun is always so composed. “Maybe I see it, now,” he adds, frowning, “why you think winter is so drab.”
Ten doesn’t know what to say at all. He brings his eye back to the cardinal in the tree, red plumage stark against the wintry greys and whites. It whistles once, trilling and, if Ten listens closely enough, mournful, before taking flight, disappearing in the blink of an eye. Kun’s hand’s are folded in his lap. The bus arrives before Ten can utter another word.
His dreams are haunted that night, with abstract images of dull grey and brown, of jagged, branched shapes and fleeting dashes of intermittent red, and through it all a steady feeling of muffled warmth, though it grows dimmer with each passing second. He hopes, when he wakes up in the dark, sheets tangled around his shivering body, that Kun doesn’t leave again, at least for a little while.
***
Ten watches Kun recover through a lens that is both close and distant at the same time. It’s over a period of several months that the weight slowly lifts from his shoulders, and it’s only in March, when the snow is melting and patches of green begin to show through the grey, that Ten sees the light in his eyes truly return. He doesn’t realize how weighed down he had been until he looks back on the beginning.
“Why do you still come by every morning?” Kun asks him once, on a day when it is warm enough for him to lay his jacket over his lap instead of wearing it over his shoulders. He peers at Ten through his perfect hair and his round glasses and waits very patiently for an answer.
“I don’t really know,” Ten admits. “I just do.”
“Lots of things just are.” Kun nods thoughtfully. “Until they aren’t. Will you ever stop?” He asks, tilting his head curiously.
“Do you want me to?”
“No.” Kun says it with certainty. He turns to look fully at Ten, elbow coming to rest on the back of the bench. “But things tend to come and go,” he adds, softer. “You’ll have to leave sometime. ”
“The world is much larger than this park,” Ten replies, “just because I leave it doesn’t mean I leave you, too.”
“Our world is only this big,” Kun mumbles. He puts an emphasis on our, when he waves a sweater-pawed hand at the bench, at the park. This is the only place where their paths cross, where their separate spheres of life intersect for fleeting, frost-bitten moments bathed in gentle morning sun. This is all they have together. “Would you want it to be bigger?”
“If I’m being honest,” Ten says, and tentatively reaches over to lay his hand over Kun’s, “I’d like my entire world to be yours, and yours mine.”
Kun softly exhales an oh, bashfully glancing away from Ten, not withdrawing his hand. The red flush of his cheeks nearly matches the red of the cardinals he loves so much.
“I’d like that too.” His eyes are round and wide and so honest that it makes Ten’s stomach flip. He laces Kun’s fingers between his own and stands, pulling him up with him. “Where are we going?” Kun asks, holding his coat and his notebook to his chest with his free hand, the other warm and perfectly fitted in Ten’s. Ten merely grins at him.
“To make the world ours,” Ten says, and it earns him such a brilliant smile from Kun that he doubts there is anything brighter in the world, in that moment.
***
They make the world theirs, very slowly, in a patient dance of sorts that doesn’t bore Ten in the least bit. Ten finds solace in the places where Kun’s and his hands fit together in such perfect union that he can’t imagine he’d ever fit as snugly with anybody else. He finds warmth in where the distance between them on the bench slowly closes, until they are shoulder to shoulder most days, until Ten can feel the subtle rise and fall of Kun’s shoulders as he breathes.
He finds that there is an odd sort of vibrancy in the greys of the snow and the sky that he hadn’t noticed before, he finds that he doesn’t mind the cold as much as he once did. Every time the perpetual dimness of the season threatens to bring him down, he looks to the sky and, more often than not, finds a bird on the wing and is reminded that life goes on.
To fall in love in the wintertime, Ten decides, is to fall in love with stillness. Time slows during the colder months, turns into something lazier, the hands of the clock ambling along their paths rather than rushing, calm in their steady, onward march. To fall in love in winter, he thinks, is to fall in love patiently, with each passing day, in a way that feels less like falling and more like a warm embrace.
Ten has never been patient, but somehow Kun allows him to be. Or maybe he learns it from Kun, learns it from the birds that he watches, that there’s no reason to rush from here to there with no real reason for rushing. Why not pause, listen to the two-note call of the chickadee calling for a mate, or the lonely call of a hawk in the sky? Why not lean his head on Kun’s shoulder and watch him sketch the wildlife before them, lazily watching each stroke of graphite become the rough, but loving, likeness of a lark?
Kun is like the winter sun. Fierce but gentle in his ferocity, in his passion, warm but not overwhelmingly so. When Ten steps into his light he is instantly warmed from the inside out. Kun becomes his respite from the cold.
Life goes on, but Kun does not, in the sense that he remains even when the snow melts and stays that way. The world churns and speeds around them, but Kun remains constant; during times apart, Ten is reassured by the fact that he always, always comes home, as does Ten.
On a day when the snow has melted and thinned until patches of green show through, when the park is in that ugly state in between winter and spring, all mucky slush and puddles of mud, the bench is theirs as usual. Kun’s head is tipped back a little, eyes closed to the peace of early spring, coat falling from his shoulders. His eyelashes are dark against his skin, casting shadows like threads onto the tops of his cheeks.
“Remember when I said,” Kun starts, opening his eyes, “that things just are, until they aren’t?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I think I was wrong.” He tilts his head down to look at Ten. His eyes are warm like springtime. “Some things really just are. And they’ll always be.”
“ Always? ” Ten prompts him, smiling.
“Yeah.” Kun nods, “Like the changing seasons. The turning of the earth. Night and day.” One of his hands rises to cup Ten’s cheek, lightly, tenderly. “You and I.” He kisses Ten with so much care, so much love, gentle and almost shy but not quite. Ten smiles against his lips, wraps a lazy arm around his neck to play with his hair, and feels like he’s releasing some kind of long-awaited exhale, some gentle pressure that had been built up in his chest disappearing with the press of Kun’s mouth against his.
The distant screech of the bus brakes is the only thing that forces Ten to pull away, feeling lighter, warmer, than the sun ever could have made him. He fixes Kun’s hair for him, moving the stray strands back into place so that they’re so very neatly swept across his forehead in that very Kun way.
“You’re such a romantic,” he snorts.
“Only for you, really.” Kun smiles and pecks Ten’s lips again. “And I mean every word of it.”
“I know you do.” Ten rises from the bench and dances a few steps backwards, the warm breeze invigorating. “I’ll see you later.”
“I’ll be here,” Kun says, softly, and toys with the binoculars around his neck.
“I know.”