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Sieun has never pulled Suho against him in a haze of sleep, never soothed him after a handful of fitful dreams, never awoken before Suho and simply stared at his sleeping face. But he’s imagined it countless times, so much it’s almost become real, so much that Sieun isn’t entirely sure of reality.
Sieun could cradle a fire in the palms of his hands and it would not match the intensity of Suho’s fervor. His fervor for life—for living, for making something for himself, for his grandmother. It bleeds out in everything he does.
Sieun is drawn to it as in the cliché, as a moth to a flame. Sieun cannot resist, once, from grasping at Suho’s wrist, just to keep him there a moment longer.
“What is it, Sieun-ah?” Suho asks, and Sieun cannot speak. Suho’s flames lick at his palm, rushing up his arm and into his chest, searing and delicate—
flames as in fervor,
as in the life-sustainer, as in renewal,
as in the phoenix that dies infinite deaths after living infinite lives.
ash and smoke.
“See you tomorrow,” is what Sieun finally says.
A breath. Suho gives an enrapturing smile, pulls away, and the flames go with him.
-x-
When Suho takes him to the restaurant after school one day, unaware of how often Sieun has thought of it since the first time, he prepares the barbeque the same way as before, raises it to Sieun’s mouth with his own hands.
“Tastes good, doesn’t it?” he asks.
It does. It practically melts on Sieun’s tongue and he remembers, vividly, the first time he tasted this—the shock of feeling Suho’s fingers on his lips for a fraction of a second. The desire that rolled through him then, rolling through him now.
Sieun swallows.
“The food, or you?” he questions, aiming to see that cocky smile bloom on Suho’s face. Sieun tries to memorize it.
“How would you know what I taste like?” Suho counters. He tilts his head. A little bit closer.
If they let it, this could be the moment things change. Sieun is aware of it, the way Suho looks at him, has been aware of it. The way Suho is looking at him now mirrors how Sieun feels.
But he’s not used to having Suho so close like this, to knowing that the sound of Suho’s breath is real. The gentle brush of his hand against Sieun’s chin when he feeds him, lingering too long to be accidental, is something he’s not sure he’s allowed to have.
Sieun doesn’t let the moment stretch further. He shoves food in his mouth, and Suho regards him with amused, slightly disappointed eyes he pretends not to notice.
-x-
To Sieun, Suho is always a hair away. Right there yet so far. It’s impossible to reach out and touch him without Suho closing the distance himself, but Suho never does.
Sieun is too slow, and Bumseok gets to him first.
It’s July thirteenth when Suho stops breathing, when his heart stops beating. And then he gets up, runs away from the boxing ring as soon as he gets the chance. Sieun learns about this later, in the early hours of the morning, once he finds Suho waiting outside his apartment after hours and hours of searching for him.
Sieun searches for his pulse and cannot find it. Finds a crack in his skull, open, but not bleeding. His body bruised all over, a canvas splattered in blue and purple. It’s the first time Sieun has seen his body, has been allowed to touch, and it twists a sick feeling in his stomach.
Sieun tends to the wounds, cleans them up. Suho doesn’t feel a thing.
Suho is living, but he isn’t alive. A walking corpse. Suho’s hands shake when Sieun tells him as much, waves of emotion crashing down on him, and Sieun wants to hurt. He wants to find Bumseok, Wooyoung, Yeongbin, Jeongchan, Taehoon, all of them. He wants them to fall and never get back up.
Sieun stands. Puts away the first aid kit. Walks to the kitchen. Calmly finds a knife he’s never once held before. Suho watches him from where he sits at the dining room table and makes no move to stop him, not until Sieun actually tries to leave.
A hand, cold to the touch, closes around his wrist.
“Don't,” Suho says, pale lips twisted into a frown. When Sieun tries to jerk away, he adds, “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“Suho, they—they killed you.”
Suho’s fingers tighten. “I know. But I’m right here. I need you more right now.”
“Suho…” Sieun begins to crumble.
“Please. A friend,” Suho whispers, “would put me first in a situation like this.”
—friend as in knowing his favorite foods but never preparing them,
as in knowing his favorite songs but never listening to them,
as in loving him but never saying I love you.
why did he do those things?
Sieun puts the knife down, says, “You do come first. To me, you always have.”
Suho kisses him, then. Inevitable. And Sieun kisses back, desperately hoping to warm Suho’s skin with the heat of his own. He kisses until they fall together in a tangle of limbs, until Suho pulls back with a startled noise, until Sieun realizes Suho is—impossibly—hard, his skin hot to the touch.
He kisses Suho again, praying that the fire will stick.
-x-
Bumseok’s seat is empty on exam day. Jeongchan and Taehoon eye Suho with unnerved, nauseated expressions for the entirety of the morning, and Sieun wants to kill them. He thinks about how easy it would be, especially now, to catch them off guard.
Then he looks at Suho in front of him, more than likely filling in random bubbles on his answer sheet, and Sieun forces himself to focus on getting his own exam out of the way.
Suho isn’t alive, but he’s not gone. Not yet—not ever, if Sieun can help it. He just needs to think. He worries Suho will begin to rot, and he needs a plan for that. He worries about what’ll happen if someone finds out, so he’ll make sure nobody does.
Suho fails almost every section of the exam and isn’t mad about it. Sieun barely scrapes by. He’s never cared less.
-x-
They tell Youngyi only because they have to; Suho doesn’t eat or sleep, and although he stays with Sieun at night now and doesn’t look deathly pale as long as he has sex, Youngyi would figure out eventually that something is off.
Suho has always lived to eat.
don’t you talk about life while living it?
Youngyi stares at them incredulously after they tell her. Sieun’s throat feels tight.
“Is this some joke to get back to me for your birthday? I already told you that wasn't a prank,” she says with an annoyed cross of her arms, turning to Sieun. “I’m surprised you’re going along with this.”
Sieun wishes that was true. “Try to feel his heart. Touch his skin.”
Youngyi rolls her eyes, but complies. Her eyes widen when she presses her hand to Suho’s chest beneath his shirt, feels his unnaturally cold skin, the lack of a rhythmic beating in his chest. Her hand falls to her side, limp.
“Don’t tell anyone. Even my grandma, okay?” Suho asks, and Youngyi bites her lip. Nods once. She doesn’t speak for the rest of the time they’re together, and when her fifteen-minute break is over, she goes back to work with a sick, frightened expression she cannot hide.
She continues living at Suho’s house, continues working at the restaurant, but as far as Sieun knows, they do not speak again.
-x-
Five days after dying, Suho shows no signs of decay despite the time and the heat of July. The blood in his veins has coagulated, and it doesn’t pool in any area of his body, stationary within him. His wounds do not heal. At least the skin around them doesn’t slip whenever Sieun touches them, presses his fingers here and there, hoping that he might eventually do something to cause Suho pain.
After a few nights spent that way, he stitched Suho’s wounds closed, no longer able to bear looking at them the way they were.
Tonight, Sieun feels sick thinking about them.
“You’d be a good doctor,” Suho muses, unaware of Sieun’s turmoil, voice muffled where he lies half-naked on his stomach. Sieun’s hands press into the bruising on his back. “Or maybe a surgeon.”
“I’m not kind enough.”
Suho twists, throws Sieun a look over his shoulder. “I’d rather have a cold, competent doctor than a friendly one who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
Sieun shakes his head, doesn’t reply, but the comment sticks with him.
Suho’s skin begins to warm beneath Sieun’s palms, the way it only seems to when they’re close like this. Fire, renewed. A pyre lit, until it’s not. He slips a hand beneath Suho, into his sweatpants, and Suho lets him.
-x-
Soon, at the beginning of the last week of school before summer break, Jeongchan and Taehoon stop looking at Suho with fear in their eyes. They stop looking at Suho at all. So does everybody else, as if Suho never existed in the first place.
He doesn’t come to school on the last day of the semester, and Sieun spends the entirety of the day looking over his shoulder at Suho’s empty seat, a terror in him unlike anything he’s ever felt before.
Sieun takes the pink pillow from his desk, shoves it in his bag, afraid to leave it behind. Afraid it might be the only thing he has left as proof that Suho existed.
The fear is assuaged only when he spots that familiar bike parked just outside the school gates, the bright blue and white windbreaker drawing Sieun’s eyes right to him. People walk by him like they don’t even know he’s there, and he pretends not to be bothered by it, but Sieun can tell.
Suho puts the helmet on Sieun without speaking, a fondness in his expression that’s at odds with the sad pull at the corners of his lips.
sieun wondered once, why do you always give me the helmet? you’re the driver.
“You didn’t come to school. What about your attendance?” Sieun asks, although he already knows the answer. Suho smiles, always smiling, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“I think you know there’s not going to be an attendance award for me, Sieun-ah,” Suho says, rueful words a punch to Sieun’s gut. “I tried going to work today, and nobody could see me, so I went home. But Halmeoni, she—”
Suho cuts himself off, averts his gaze. Sieun’s heart shatters. He hugs Suho, feels his shoulders shake, hears his shuddering breaths in his ear. Suho cries like he hasn’t done it in a long, long time.
For a brief moment, Sieun wonders what he must look like to everyone around them—a boy, holding onto nothing.
-x-
Suho curls up beside Sieun in bed, and for the first time since he died, Sieun does not ask to inspect his wounds. He knows nothing will be different this time. They lay in silence, instead, simply looking at one another, hands locked in the space between them. Sieun is sweaty, hot after what they’ve done, but the cold is already creeping back into Suho’s own body.
Every time, the heat disappears quicker and quicker. Both of them are aware of it, but they do not break the heavy silence to address it.
The apartment is so quiet they can hear when Sieun’s father comes home, the beeping of the lock, his footsteps towards Sieun’s bedroom a moment later. If the circumstances were any different, Sieun would be thinking of how to explain who Suho is, why he’s in Sieun’s bed, why they’re half naked.
The circumstances are not different. So Sieun doesn’t bother to move when his father opens his bedroom door, though Suho turns over to look at him.
“Son—” his father cuts himself off. He backs out of the room, closes the door softly, and Sieun assumes that he thinks he’s asleep. He wonders how often his father has checked on him when he gets home from work. How often he’s truly been asleep, unaware of the fact his father was there, that he cared enough to look.
How much has Sieun realized too late?
“I wish I could’ve met your parents,” Suho whispers, turning over to hold Sieun’s hand once again. Sieun lets out a shaky breath. Doesn’t say that he wishes Suho could’ve, too. “When I’m gone—”
A jolt.
“Suho.”
“When I'm gone, will you make sure Youngyi and halmeoni are alright on their own?”
Sieun can’t do this. His throat tightens, bites his lip so hard he nearly breaks the skin.
Still, he says, “I will.”
“And you, too. Don’t hold onto me too tightly, hm? You have a life to live,” Suho says, somehow managing to smile as he cups Sieun’s face.
“…It means nothing without you in it,” Sieun admits, voice breaking. He lays his hand over Suho’s, loathes the cold of it, longs to somehow give Suho his own heart if it would bring his body back to life.
Suho looks like he’s trying not to cry. “Don’t say that, Sieun-ah. Promise me you won’t shut everyone out for the rest of your life because of me.”
“Okay,” Sieun just manages to grit out, tears threatening to spill over. He separates their hands. Rolls over and puts his back to Suho. Suho sighs, curls up with an arm around his waist.
Sieun will regret, in the morning, not turning around and kissing Suho one last time.
-x-
In the news, the body of an unidentified teenage boy is found at the gym Suho used to train at. An instructor found him in the morning when he opened, and nobody knows who he is or what the cause of death was. Sieun reads the words with a blankness. Stares numbly at his phone until it goes black. Finds Suho’s pink pillow that fell onto the floor sometime last night.
Suho’s red and black windbreaker is not on the back of Sieun’s chair where he left it the night before.
Sieun registers the sounds of his father making breakfast, the knock on his door when Sieun doesn’t come out of his bedroom by ten, something he’s only ever done when sick. His father pushes open the door, carrying a tray with two plates, and Sieun stares at him, uncomprehending.
His father looks uncomfortable, awkward, standing in the middle of Sieun’s bedroom. Like he’s never done this before. Because he hasn’t.
“Last night,” his father starts, setting the tray down on Sieun’s desk. “that boy. I didn’t hear him leave, so I thought he was still here.”
The words chip away at something within Sieun, the first thing he’s felt since he woke up without Suho by his side.
“You saw Suho,” he says, disbelieving. His heart leaps into his throat, tears welling in his eyes, and Sieun’s father looks panicked.
“I’m not here to tell you to stop seeing him,” he says, hurriedly, and Sieun can’t handle it. It’s too late, too much. He thinks, Suho really could’ve met my father, he could’ve if Sieun just said something sooner, if things had happened slightly differently.
Sieun snaps.
For the first time since Suho died—the first time in years—he cries.
-x-
When Sieun is much older, studying for the medical license test, he takes Suho’s pillow out of the box in the bottom of his closet. He cradles it in his hands, holds it to his chest, something he only allows himself on certain occasions. Suho’s birthday, his death day. Sieun’s birthday, graduation, exams.
The object warms beneath his touch, but never grows hot, and Sieun can no longer bear it. When he finally puts it back in the box, he hopes impossibly that the warmth will linger until next time, knowing it will not.