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Kyujin was born in April, exactly two weeks after his birthday. Newly six years old Hyunjin had been a bit upset at having his birthday upstaged by something as big as a new addition to their family; after all, birthdays come every year, but a proper day of birth? That's a once in a lifetime kind of event. Still, he had taken a look at that toothless bundle and decided he would have loved and protected her forever. He promised her he would be the best older brother ever, and, although the bundle didn't seem to have much consciousness, he swears she smiled at him.
Right now, as the wonderful twelve-year-old Kyujin grew up to be marches into his room and demands he cover her full body in white body paint for a Halloween costume, he kind of regrets it.
"Can't I just do your face and hands? Everything else is going to be covered by your clothes anyway."
Kyujin plops down on his bed, not looking him straight in the eye. "The tights are see-through," she mumbles, half-heartedly hoping he won't hear her. What's the point of saying it, then?
Hyunjin jumps up from the mattress. The vengeful spirit of his mother looms over him, whispers in his ears about shivers and colds. Their parents decided they would make the Halloween weekend a nice vacation, an occasion to visit their grandparents up north – they were supposed to come with. His sister, however, had burst out crying, asking whether they hated her or something. She's been hosting her friend group's Halloween party since forever, and she takes her role as mayor of Halloweentown very seriously: she couldn't just ditch her friends.
Hyunjin is not sure if the sight of Kyujin's red-rimmed eyes had awakened his brotherly instincts or if it had been a moment of insanity induced by sleep deprivation, but the result had been the same. He had looked at their parents, mentally kissed his grandmother's tteokbokki goodbye, and stated that yes, he was fine with staying home and watching over the girls. No, it wouldn't be a problem. No, he didn't have any other plans for the night. (It was a lie. When he told Felix he was going to miss his party, his friend almost rescheduled so he could come babysitting with him. Hyunjin appreciates the sentiment, but Kyujin and her friends are in that period in their lives in which they only have two reactions to boys their age, which are shameless flirting and relentless bullying. Felix is a kind soul; he doesn't wish on him either of the two. He threatened to fuck up his League of Legends progress if he did reschedule.) It’s not a hassle to him, but the prospect of what will happen to him if something goes wrong has kept him up at night. Therefore, Kyujin will not catch a cold.
"You're not wearing tights, you're wearing leggings," he says, trying to give his words a sense of finality. Kyujin groans, her hands clutching the body paint as if it's the only barrier left keeping her from hitting him. His back has started aching prematurely, that much is true, but he's still too young to die.
"But it looks so awkward," she whines, "everyone is going to make fun of me."
And Hyunjin - he will not budge. He will not give in to the masterful guilt tripping his sister is unleashing on him. He repeats this affirmation in his head when Kyujin's scowl turns into a pout, then into criminal puppy eyes.
"You're already not wearing a coat, which mom is going to kill me for," he reminds her, "you're wearing the leggings and the tights over them. And when all of your friends' teeth clatter so hard they set the rhythm for flamenco, you'll be the one who makes fun of them. It's called strategic thinking."
Kyujin probably knows that, if she pushes just a little harder, Hyunjin is going to let her have it. It's not his fault, he thinks. That's his baby sister, the one who was two apples tall only days ago, the one who would chew on all his art supplies the moment she realised she could bite. He never, ever tells her no - he suspects she has never heard those two letters exit his mouth related to her. It's one of the laws of the universe, along with gravitational pull and something else he didn't bother to learn in science class: if Hwang Kyujin asks for anything and Hwang Hyunjin tells her no, she just has to ask again and he'll give her what she wants. Fortunately for him, his logic sounds reasonable to her ears, this time.
"Fine, face and hands."
She puts her Shrek hairband on, pulling her bangs out of the way, and stands as still as a statue. Since Hyunjin is a perfectionist at heart, he blends a bit of their mom's blush in the paint to give her skin the exact pink hue Draculaura has.
"Isn't Monster High for kids?" he asks. He makes sure none of the paint is too close to her eyes, smudging it with the sponge. Kyujin opens them just to give him an unimpressed look. "I am a kid," she answers, tone blank. Well, that level of self-awareness is new and very mature of her. At her age, Hyunjin would've eaten his own shoes rather than admit he was a child, but Kyujin is nothing like him, too smart for her own good and generally well behaved. He nods.
"Besides, they're cool. Even Katseye did a collab with Monster High."
Hyunjin checks with the back of his hand if the paint has dried. It has not. He goes to the bathroom and rummages through the makeup that their mom left at home.
"Who is Katseye again?" he yells, far enough that Kyujin won't kill him for his ignorance. He can hear her offended gasp from the other room. "The girl group!" she yells back, "From Dream Academy."
The cogs in his brain turn, slow and lazy, until he has a vague image of a weird reality show and girls dancing in red dresses. "Are those the ones mom won't let you listen to?" he asks, just to be a little shit. He comes back bearing bright pink lipstick, eyeliner, and a colorful eyeshadow palette, all stuff his mom probably used to wear before she decided beige was the new black.
“It's not fair,” Kyujin complains. He coats her eyelids in a clumsy attempt at eyeshadow. He doesn't know how to do makeup, but it can't be that different from painting, can it? It doesn't look half bad. “Are girls supposed to be sexy only when other people tell them they are? Can't they decide when to be?”
Winged eyeliner is a no-go: if it gets messed up, he'll have to do it all over again, and he's not too confident in Kyujin not strangling him first. Instead, he outlines her waterline, so her eyes look bigger, like she's actually a cartoon, and hopes it will be enough.
“Of course they can,” he assures her, “if they want to. I think mom just doesn't like the music,” and he doesn't blame her. He listened to that gnarly song once and had to take a few minutes to decompress, too overstimulated by everything going on. Kyujin rolls her eyes. “Whatever,” she sighs, “do the heart.”
“Is the paint dry?”
He tests it again and, when it doesn't leave a white cast on his skin, he picks up the thinnest brush he has. The work would come out better if there were pink body paint, but he has to make do with his mom's blush. “Okay,” he says, lifting the small mirror so she can look at her reflection, “is it fine?”
Kyujin nods, a giddy smile spreading across her face. He turns her cheek with one hand to admire his artwork. It's probably going to be the best look of the evening, he thinks with childish pride.
“Let's do your hair next.”
Kyujin claps her hands in excitement, the thrill of doing something forbidden getting her high for what he hopes is the first time. Their mother had instructed them to buy clip-on hair extensions, while Kyujin was of the opinion that the plastic hair would make the costume look unprofessional. It's a Halloween costume, Hyunjin had said, why would it have to be professional? Kyujin had pouted. Hyunjin had bought her spray hair dye, with the promise of her washing it off the same night.
He picks out strands and sprays them pink, careful not to paint her forehead by accident. Then he leaves her to tie her long hair into pigtails, sticking bat-shaped bobby pins into her hairdo. She looks kind of silly, wearing the upper half of her costume and her Rubik Cube pajama pants underneath.
“Get out of my room,” he commands, “your friends are about to arrive.”
She runs off with a laugh to finish up her look. While listening to the clatter coming from his sister’s room, not daring to wonder why she's making so much noise to put on a skirt and some boots, he basks in his last moments of peace and quiet, scrolling through the reels Felix has sent him. More than half of them feature ferrets in bizarre situations, all noodly and frenzied. The “this is so you” text that captions them is both uncalled for and unappreciated. It does not deserve an answer. Eventually, he gets out of bed and wears his own costume. Kyujin forced him to come up with one, calling him boring and all sorts of age-related names. This one is… fine, he thinks. It's clever, he doesn't look bad, and he has everything he needs inside his closet. He tucks the caricature he drew of himself into his bag.
The doorbell rings, almost as loud as his sister's screech when she hears it. She stomps down the stairs. Hyunjin, reluctant, follows.
Kyujin’s friend group counts four other girls, all her age, all wearing Monster High costumes. She's known them for a long time - they're good kids, although middle school has painted them a new shade of insufferable. Two of them hate him, one turns pale every time she spots him, and one, he's pretty sure, has a vague crush on him. That’s kind of embarrassing for her, but she's eleven, so he can forgive her.
Coincidentally, she's also dressed as Draculaura (her costume is store-bought, and she’s wearing a wig. Talk about unprofessional).
“Your makeup is so much prettier, though,” he overhears her telling Kyujin.
“Hyunjin did it,” she brags, and he can feel four girls turning to stare at him with a newfound sense of respect. His dream come true, for his Monster High makeup skills to be admired and respected by a bunch of preteens. Lucy (Draculaura number two)’s mother greets him politely, thanks him for the hospitality, and gives him her phone number, “Just in case, dear.”
He’s offended by such a blatant dig at his babysitting skills until he realizes he can also use it if something happens to him.
As his world's best brother oath commands, he’s been watching over them for almost a decade, but they have always been sweet, cute children, content with making up gruesome stories with their Barbies and having him act dead when they played funeral. He doesn’t know where the obsession with death comes from; he suspects it’s engraved in little girls’ minds since birth. As a child, he liked to build farms with Legos and had a weird obsession with Noah’s Ark. To each their own, he guesses.
He’s blinked once, and they have entered a much more difficult phase of their lives, one Hyunjin wouldn’t relive if someone promised him a million dollars. His own middle school years were spent between trying to get under Han Jisung’s skin at every possible occasion, frantically taking “Am I Gay?” Buzzfeed quizzes, the two activities having nothing to do with one another, and being a general asshole. He can only hope life is being kinder to these girls. Otherwise, his chances at survival drop to zero.
The girls exchange chatters as Kyujin makes them settle their jackets in the alley, then guides them to the kitchen, where they set trays filled to the brim with snacks and sweets. What’s the point of bringing sweets to a Halloween party when they’ll get so much candy to become sick of sugar for days? Hyunjin does not know, but he does admit the cupcakes are cute, with purple frosting and skull-shaped sprinkles decorating them. “I made them all by myself,” announces Abby. Her voice drips with pride. The girls immediately start to tease her, saying there’s no way she managed to do such a thing on her own when she can’t even cook noodles without burning them. Ouch. If it were him, he would’ve started crying on the spot. Abby just bursts out laughing. “Okay, maybe mom helped a little,” she admits, and the girls laugh with her.
Only when the sound has died down does he dare to insert himself into the conversation. “Do you guys want to go trick or treating now or later?” he asks. Five heads snap towards him, five deers in headlights. They stare at each other for a while, communicating telepathically on what they should do. “Now,” Kyujin decides after a few seconds, “if we go later, everyone will have run out of good candy.”
The others nod, oddly synchronised.
“Alright,” he agrees, “just let me take a picture of you all for mom first.”
Kyujin groans, cheeks turning purple in embarrassment. “It’s so cringe.”
This time, though, he doesn’t budge. Complete unease is the most comical look a preteen can have, and Hyunjin is a weak, weak man. He enjoys the sight of them all huddled together in awkward poses, snaps a photo, and sends it without even checking it. They’re all cute anyway.
His mother answers in an instant: So pretty!
Then, immediately after: But where are their jackets?
He lies that they’ll put them on once they go out and prays she doesn’t want to see a picture of them dressed for the cold. He picks up his own coat - it goes with his costume and he doesn’t want to freeze; he’s not crazy like them anymore.
The air is chilly when they step outside, late afternoon feels more like winter than fall. He pointedly ignores a shiver behind him. Orange and red streaks have already begun to bleed into the sky, lighting the whole street in the same shade as the pumpkins on the porches.
“Can we stop by the Han's first?” Kyujin pleads.
Hyunjin stares ahead, to the pretty house in front of them, dread rising in his stomach. The yard is full of decorations: two carved pumpkins, one rougher and simpler than the other, like a kid has made it, two plastic skeletons sitting on the porch, a garland nailed to the door, a big cauldron filled with candy topped by a sign that asks passers-by to ring the doorbell, as the candy is only in the case no one’s home. There are three kitten plushies next to it, wearing little ghost sheets. Along with the golden leaves scattered by a large tree, it’s a magazine-worthy picture of fall decor, cozy and childlike. To him, it might as well be the door from The Shining. Looking at it, he only feels horror.
“Do we have to?” he asks, mirroring the teary-eyed look his sister gives him. There’s no use to it, he knows there’s no use. Nowhere in the laws of the universe is it written that his sister can’t tell him no.
“You know they give out cookies! Handmade cookies!”
Hyunjin sighs. See, he doesn't have a problem with Mr and Mrs Han. In fact, one could go as far as to say he adores them: they had lived here for a long time before his family moved, and made good friends for his parents, offering a cure to homesickness through their much less accented Korean and meals eaten together at the long table in the backyard. He doesn't have a problem with Younghyun, their eldest son, who was in high school when he still went to kindergarten and moved out by the time Hyunjin was ten years old; he invited them to his wedding, even, so no, he can’t say he holds a grudge of any sort. Who does he have a problem with… Hyunjin doesn’t allow himself to even think of his name, afraid he’ll pop out of nowhere like Bloody Mary or something. The sole problem of the Han house, he attempts to comfort himself, should be out at some party, poisoning the air with his grating voice, like any eighteen-year-old in the world except Hyunjin. Hell, maybe he’s at Felix’s party, since his best friend is a traitor and they’re apparently best friends now. There’s no reason to think he’s anywhere else. It’s safe to ring the doorbell in front of them. Nothing will happen.
“Fine.”
His sister downright squeals. He looks both ways before letting the girls cross the street and run to the door, where Mrs. Han, who must have seen them through the window, is already waiting, a batch of cookies in her hands. Hyunjin makes sure the girls greet her most politely, because she’s as sweet as her youngest is the literal devil. Her eyes scrunch up in little crescents as she compliments their costumes, although she must have no idea who they’re dressed up as. With a last thank you, they skip over to the next house, where he can still see them. He, however, lingers by the door to say hi. The woman all but shoves two cookies in his hand.
“You need energy to keep up with those kids. Stuck with babysitting?” she asks, smile turning wry. Helpless, he nods. He’s met with her loud laugh.
“My Jisungie, too,” Mrs Han says. Hyunjin tries not to wince at the name, and if he fails, she doesn’t seem to notice. The fact that he’s apparently stuck with his same fate is only a marginal relief from the jerk-knee reaction he has whenever Han Jisung is mentioned.
“He’s taking Dylan trick or treating,” she adds.
It’s amazing that she gets starry-eyed talking about him, but Jisung is her son, after all, as much as Hyunjin would like to think he just spawned on the face of the earth one day to make his life impossible. And, to be fair, Dylan is a very cute child: it’s not his fault his uncle is the most infuriating person Hyunjin knows.
“That’s nice,” he answers after one too many beats, mostly because he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to say. Although Mrs. Han is still convinced, by the work of magic, that he and Jisung are friends, she seems to sense his discomfort and sends him off with a smile.
He takes a bite of a cookie, sweet but just enough that it doesn’t nauseate him. At least, he knows Han Jisung is staying at his brother’s, far, far away from him. He hopes Dylan has fun. In fact, he hopes he has so much fun that he decides his uncle should move in with them forever, and Hyunjin gets to never see him again.
The next house doesn’t come with freshly baked goods, nor does it come with the looming threat of the bane of Hyunjin’s existence, a solid seven out of ten. He sneaks the other cookie in his sister’s bag - his tolerance for sweetness is not that high.
The third house has its shutters closed, but it has a basket with some candy still left near the door, a few of which Hyunjin allows the girls to take after checking the wrapping is intact. All in all, things could be worse. The girls’ chatter varies from the latest practice gossip to the books they’re reading to the anime they’re watching, and takes a turn when one of them starts to complain about her costume, making for real entertainment.
“I wanted to be Cleo De Nile,” Claudia argues, shaking her head with such strength her fuzzy ears almost fall off. It’s a played and replayed argument, that much is clear, with how the rest of them roll their eyes or sigh, talking all over each other as they explain why it was fundamental that she had to be Clawdeen.
“Your name is literally Claudia!” Zahra shrieks, bandages flying around as she gestures wildly.
“Yeah, no one forced Abby to be the fucking Yeti, though!”
That, Hyunjin notes, is true. Abby, who perks up as soon as she gets brought into the conversation, is dressed as Frankie Stein, but she’s not as committed to the Monster High lifestyle as Kyujin is: her face is not painted a sick shade of grey-green.
“Because no one likes Abbey Bominable!” She defends herself. He wouldn’t think it was possible to have opinions this heated about a cartoon, but he’s fought Felix too many times about which Haikyuu team deserved to go to Nationals to feign ignorance.
“Besides, I deserved to be Cleo De Nile the most. I’m Egyptian,” Zahra resumes, so satisfied with what she believes will put the argument to rest.
“There could have been two Cleo De Nile, then! We have two Draculaura!”
Zahra stops in her tracks. She seems to have run out of answers, opening and closing her mouth without uttering a sound. Claudia’s already tasting victory: it doesn’t change much; she will be dressed as Clawdeen the whole evening, but at least she’ll have the consolation prize of being right. Kyujin pipes up.
“But Claudia, you have curly hair…”
As the little group descends into chaos again, he suppresses a cackle. They only stop bickering when it’s time to collect candy, and he’s so invested in the outcome he doesn’t notice the ghost of a breath behind him, the tapping of shoes against the concrete, the clearing of a throat.
“Well, Hwang, you’re hurting my feelings here. What happened to hello?”
If the ground opened up under his feet right now and swallowed him whole, Hyunjin would have no other thought but to thank it. And as much as he wishes to go on with his life, to ignore both the hand and the voice attached to it, he can’t.
It’s one of the great laws of the universe: gravitational pull, he’s unable to tell his sister no, and, if Han Jisung provokes, Hwang Hyunjin reacts every single time, without fail.
He turns without enthusiasm, very aware of their audience of gossip-hungry little girls, and when he faces him –
Someone, be that a God, the universe, or the fucking red string of fate, has it out for him. Someone wants him to suffer, for his heart to be filled with anguish, for the desire to crawl up and die to take over his mind as his body is taken over by what can be nothing but hormones.
Jisung was a cute child, with round cheeks and large eyes, who then turned into an awkward looking middle schooler with glasses bigger than his face (not a good look on him, Hyunjin admits, but the only person he’s ever seen look pretty in middle school is himself, and God knows he abused his advantage with the terrifying amount of selfies he used to take), who then turned into a wiry teenager with a bowl cut and his mouth twisted in a permanent sneer, who then turned into whatever he is now. Some might call it a glow up. If you ask Hyunjin, he has merely grown into his features. It’s not like he was ugly before, and his face hasn’t seen a drastic change – he’s still got his huge, bug-like eyes, his puffy cheeks, the expression of someone who might not think he’s smarter than you, but definitely thinks you’re dumber than him. He’s just gone through puberty, which for Hyunjin meant gaining seven inches of height in two weeks and hitting his head everywhere he went because of how it fucked up his depth perception, and for Jisung meant his voice dropped from squeaky dog toy to a warm, audiobook voiceover kind of tone and his shoulders doubled in size.
But it doesn’t matter how big or how hot he’s gotten over the years. It doesn’t even matter that, if he catches a glimpse of him on the weekends, taking out the trash or God forbid mowing the lawn, Hyunjin can see a faint shade of stubble on the line of his jaw, something he himself never quite managed to get and has no business finding as appealing as he does.
It doesn’t matter because Hyunjin is immune to this new hot guy shell. He sees right through it, and he knows what lies in his heart of hearts: pure evil. Or, like, at least three-quarters evil.
However, since someone up there hates him, he turns around and sees Han Jisung in a Spiderman suit. His upper half, anyway, as he’s wearing sweatpants over it, loose and baggy, falling low on his hips. It's a small mercy that, by contrast, only aggravates his sufferings. Blood rushes to his face with unfortunate speed. There's no way Jisung doesn't notice, if the smug smile that creeps on his face is anything to go by. Fuck his life.
The whole situation is idiotic. Hyunjin is not – he is not attracted to Jisung. Sure, he has a soft spot for Spiderman, who hasn’t? He watched the Andrew Garfield movies and cried his eyes out, then went online and searched for one of those Buzzfeed quizzes again. But the nice part about the movies was that Spiderman wasn’t a billionaire with a God complex like most superheroes; he was kind, friendly, a perfect boy-next-door kind of vibe. Han Jisung, though he’s technically the boy next door, is a cocky bastard, the type of guy to overhear a quiet joke and repeat it louder just so he can get all the credit for it. Not to mention the Incident, which no number of accusations of being dramatic can make him forget. His trust was broken once and forever, and that’s why, even if he has the vague impulse to sink his teeth into one of his arms (maybe the one that’s bended to hold the strap of the backpack slung across his shoulders, for no reason at all), Hyunjin is not and will not be attracted to Han Jisung.
He takes a deep breath. He won't allow his carnal desires to win against his wisdom: he will fight them and prevail. Medieval knights have endured much higher levels of sexual frustration and came out the other side. Hyunjin can stand to see Han Jisung in a very tight top for five seconds.
“What are you doing here?” he hisses. Maybe it's not his smartest comeback ever, but he can recover. He just needs to focus on the task at hand. Jisung gives the space around them an exaggerated scan.
“What do you think I’m doing?” he asks, eyes widened in mock stupor. There, a more familiar reaction: the violent urge to slap him.
He looks up to the sky, asking it to give him enough strength to either walk away or strangle him for good. “Aren’t you supposed to be at your brother’s?” Why is he still talking to him?
Jisung’s surprise turns more genuine, then.
“How would you know that?” and, great, he looks like a stalker now, isn’t that just neat. He opens his mouth to explain, but the other spares a glance at the half-eaten cookie he’s holding and connects the dots before he can get a chance to speak. Jisung covers his face with his hands, failing to muffle the whine that comes out of his mouth. “Dude, you have to stop hanging out with my mom,” he says. Hyunjin sputters. It makes it sound like a weird thing, like Hyunjin shows up at his house with pastries and makes his mom keep him informed on all the freshest Han Jisung gossip over tea. Mrs Han has willingly offered information about her son Hyunjin didn’t ask for and didn’t want. He’s just been stupid enough to mention it.
“I’m not hanging out with your mom, I just ran into her because I’m babysitting and it’s Halloween, you idiot.”
The mild discomfort on Jisung’s face after becoming aware of five middle schoolers watching him is so fulfilling, it should be photographed and framed somewhere in Hyunjin’s room. Still, he thinks he can do better: if “mild discomfort” hits this good, he can only wonder what his “utter devastation” feels like.
Mild discomfort doesn’t last long, sadly. Not that it’s very surprising, Hyunjin is convinced Jisung does not possess the area of his brain that would make him capable of feeling self-conscious. He certainly did not have it when he decided to start his underground rapper career with a bang, at the big age of twelve, and uploaded a song made up of every curse word in the book (and not much else).
“Yeah, me too,” Jisung scoffs in annoyance. Hyunjin’s blood boils in his veins, and not fun ones. “Not at Younghyun’s, though, here. Little Peter here’s getting the full five-star hotel treatment. I’m just taking him out on a stroll.”
Hyunjin’s brows furrow. Now, it’s no secret that Jisung is a little bit weird. At this point, everyone is used to it, and there are certain mannerisms that other people would get questioning looks for that can be marked off as typical Jisung bullshit. If Jisung was only referring to himself with his English name, Hyunjin could get behind it, even though nobody but teachers who can't be bothered to learn how to enunciate two syllables uses it anymore. Jisung talking about himself in third person is slightly more concerning, but he does watch tons of shitty anime. Maybe he thinks it sounds cute.
Jisung, however, is not only doing both of those things at once, but also using both third and first person related to himself at the same time, and describing himself as “little Peter”. Now, it could be a euphemism for something else. God, he hopes it's not. Jisung is shameless and unbothered most of the time, but that would be a new low even for him. He will be forced to reach the nearest bathtub and drown him (or himself) if it is.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Hyunjin sums up his stream of consciousness in seven simple words.
“Oh my God,” Jisung whispers, “don’t cuss, there are children here.”
As if he wasn't prancing around talking about little Peters and shit. Just to be sure, Hyunjin looks around - no children are near them. Sure, he sees children, pops of color on the brightly illuminated street, yelling and laughing and shaking their baskets, scattering candy all around them like the careless little punks they are, but none that could hear them and internalize Hyunjin’s foul language. Even the girls have moved on to the next house, fed up with his government-assigned banter with Han Jisung. As long as they stay in his line of sight, he doesn’t blame them. No, he empathizes with them. He wishes he could just walk away from Jisung, stop answering. He is unable to.
“What children?” Hyunjin sneers.
Jisung looks over his shoulder. His face falls, then, no longer carrying his usual shit-eating grin but an intense flash of panic. Hyunjin wonders if it’s just an elaborate ruse to piss him off or if something is seriously wrong.
“Hey, Peter, c’mon,” he raises his voice. It cracks a little at the end. He does seem worried for real, but the fact that he’s going around calling his own name is still hard to wrap his head around. So, Hyunjin does what he does best: he gets on his nerves.
“Jisung, I don’t know if the pathetic excuse of a brain you have has finally quit its job, but you are Peter. If this is you calling yourself a child, however, I praise your sudden moment of self-awareness.”
And the thing is - the thing is Jisung flat out ignores him. He’s too busy scanning the road, the little monsters going from house to house, and the more his eyes squint, the more his expression grows anxious. Is he fucking with him?
That is, until his gaze stops at the door the girls are currently standing in front of. Well, they’re crouching, in a circle, with something Hyunjin can’t make out in the middle. Jisung, apparently, does, and he sprints. Han Jisung, sprinting. He has never, ever seen him run in his entire life, which is telling, as they used to share the same P.E. class in middle school. He didn’t even jog, ever. The most he’s seen him do is pick up his walking pace when he was late for the bus, and that was it. Although that was before he committed to the gym rat lifestyle, so maybe he does run these days. It still doesn’t explain why Jisung is running now. This is definitely not typical Han Jisung bullshit, and for this exact reason, Hyunjin follows him in an awkward jog. He was meant to reach the girls anyway.
Jisung’s object of desire turns out to be in the middle of the girls’ circle.
“Are you lost?” he hears Zahra say, her voice coated in sugar, as Lucy mumbles something along the lines of “Oh my gosh, he’s so cute,” followed by a good amount of cooing. It could be a dog (not a stray, he hopes. Getting rabies is going to be a hell of a problem to explain to five mothers, including his own). Maybe a kitten, that would be cute.
“No, no,” Jisung interrupts, his voice high-pitched and breathy from his little stunt. “He’s with me, he just wandered around.”
The circle opens like the Red Sea, revealing the treasure it concealed: a child. About three years old, he’d say, but he could be older and tiny for his age. Hyunjin bets that’s the case for two simple reasons: along with his puffy cheeks and eyes as round as buttons, it’s a dead giveaway to his bloodline. His hair is a little curly where it sticks out of his red beanie, but he’s sure that, under it, he’s sporting a bowl cut (he thinks it might be genetic at this point). Even if it wasn’t painstakingly obvious, the way Jisung scoops him up and holds him close to his chest, an arm under his legs, breathing heavily against the kid’s hat, pretty much seals the deal.
Great babysitting Han Jisung does, losing children in the very night where everyone is out in the street - anything could happen to a kid left alone, from getting lost to something way worse. He refrains from making a snarky comment about it just because the boy looks about to pass out, trying hard to pull his breaths into something even as he rubs little circles on the child’s back with his free hand.
“Peter, my dude, you scared me,” he pants out, and Hyunjin hates how he thinks it’s sort of endearing that he’s calling a four-year-old “dude”. And now, Mrs. Han has not sent them baby pictures of her grandson for a long time, but he’s pretty sure that’s Dylan. That is, if Younghyun hasn’t decided to rename his son after his brother. He doesn’t put it past Jisung to convince someone to do that, with his God complex and all.
Dylan (Peter?) bends his head to whisper something in his ear. Jisung nods.
“Well, yes, but not on me, my guy. I’m your sidekick, I’m supposed to know where you are.”
Hyunjin has been taught it’s impolite to treat kids as furniture, to pretend they don’t exist, so he gives him an awkward wave. Dylan stays unimpressed, having forgotten about him. It makes sense: he’s only seen him a handful of times, when Younghyun and Jennifer make the trip to visit the family during the holidays. It’s okay that he doesn’t remember him. Hyunjin doesn’t mind.
“Hey, Dylan,” he doubles down on his greeting. It doesn’t elicit the reaction he hoped. Jisung covers Dylan’s ears (one with his free hand, the other pushed against his chest, which Hyunjin does not look at) and gasps, indignation written all over his face.
“Dude,” he says emphatically. He takes the endearing comment back: Jisung should have to pay a fine every time he uses the word. It’s making his head hurt. “This is not Dylan. I mean, of course he is,” he whispers, while making sure his nephew’s hearing is still shut off, “but tonight, he’s Peter.”
Hyunjin blinks. A light giggle escapes one of the girls, who he had totally not forgotten were there.
“Are you brainwashing him into believing he’s you?” he asks, incredulous.
Much to his embarrassment, Jisung bursts out laughing. He can admit it’s a little ridiculous, but what else is he supposed to think? Nothing makes sense. A thought hits him on the outskirts of his mind - Jisung has a nice laugh, deep and sincere, one that makes people want to laugh too. Is what he would think if he weren’t laughing at him.
“It’s his costume,” Kyujin supplies, in Korean so her friends don't grasp the width of his ignorance, because she is his favourite sister for a reason, after all, “from the Into the Spiderverse movie.”
Jisung releases his free hand from his makeshift earmuff role to extend his hand to her in a high five. She does hit her palm against his, after only two seconds of stalling. She’s brave.
“See? Your sister’s cultured. He’s Spider-Ham. I’m Peter Parker, he’s Peter Porker. Check it out.” Jisung levels his nephew to the ground again, and turns him around like he’s a designer showing off his new collection. That explains the pig snout tied over his nose with a soft ribbon, Hyunjin thinks. He’s wearing a red hoodie with the paper cut out of a spider taped to his chest, blue sweatpants, and a red beanie with little paper ears attached. Spiderman’s (or Spider-Ham’s, he supposes) mask is drawn with kohl around his eyes, and he’s holding a little Jack O’ Lantern-shaped basket, except it’s painted red, its features modified so that it looks like Spiderman’s face, complete with the web motif all over it. It’s not as accurate as a store-bought costume would be (probably, as Hyunjin didn’t even know a pig variant of the superhero existed until five seconds ago), but it’s evident someone has put in a lot of effort into making it. That someone, given how stupidly proud he looks, could very well be Jisung. His stomach does a little flip at the thought, before he straightens it by sheer force of will. Han Jisung is an asshole who broke his trust and scarred him forever, not the protagonist of a domestic fantasy straight out of Hyunjin’s daydreams. And he’s not being dramatic about it.
“And what are you supposed to be? Patrick Bateman?” Jisung cocks an eyebrow, condescension dripping from every word. He’s not ashamed of his costume. He’s over that phase of his life where he wants to bury himself three feet into the ground when someone thinks he’s uncool. Still, after all the years he’s made fun of Jisung for being a nerd, he’s slightly self-conscious about it. He shakes his head.
“I’m Dorian Gray,” he mutters, face heating up.
Jisung squints. He can hear the girls chattering and then, out of the corner of his eye, leave for the next house. He really should stop getting carried away with talking to people.
“The singer?”
Hyunjin can’t suppress the groan that leaves his mouth, a knee-jerk reaction. Call him pretentious, but there’s a limit to everything. And it’s more absurd, taking into consideration that Jisung is taking AP Literature, something he’s very qualified to know, since he’s taking it too.
“No,” he grits out, exasperated, “the character.”
Jisung stares at him, none the wiser, eyes wide and empty.
“The dude with the painting in the attic,” he clarifies, cringing at himself for oversimplifying the plot so much, but he does reach his goal: Jisung’s face finally lights up with recognition. Then, he seems to realise this is a shortcoming Hyunjin will definitely tease him for. His face scrunches up in a frown.
“I knew that,” Jisung tries to say, but he’s putting zero effort into sounding convincing. He must know it’s useless.
"Seriously, dude,” and Hyunjin puts a special emphasis on that last word to underline that he’s only using it to piss Jisung off, “how do you pass your classes?”
As usual, he hasn’t taken into consideration just how shameless Han Jisung is. Instead of kneeling at his feet and demanding forgiveness for his crimes against literature, he just grins, hand resting on his hips. Beside him, Dylan looks supremely bored, deciding to play with the pins clipped to his uncle’s backpack. Hyunjin hopes he won’t sting himself.
“I don’t know,” Jisung muses, “must have charmed my way to the top.”
Hyunjin rolls his eyes so hard he fears, for a moment, that they’ll get stuck the wrong way like his mother used to warn him.
“That must be a very satisfying way of doing things.” His words are so deeply coated with sarcasm that he almost sounds like a real asshole for a second. Then again, he only allows himself to make fun of him because he knows Jisung can be crazy smart when he wants. He’s just not that academically inclined – better yet, he pretends not to care about school to fit his misunderstood genius aesthetic. He’s pretty sure he’s never failed a class, except that time in ninth grade he did it on purpose, just to prove a point. What the point was, remains a mystery. Something trivial, knowing how stubborn he is.
Jisung shrugs. For a moment, but that could also be Hyunjin’s reptilian brain seeing things, something flashes in his eyes, something different from his usual fabricated nonchalant attitude, different from the glint he gets whenever their back and forth is particularly entertaining. He takes the light fabric of his scarf, more an aesthetic choice than actual covering, between his fingers and tugs.
“Bold thing to say while you’re dressed as the poster child of getting things because of a pretty face,” Jisung murmurs. His voice is low. It doesn’t sound like he’s mocking him. Hyunjin swallows a gasp of air and wonders what would happen were he to come closer. There is a ninety-nine percent chance of nothing happening. Hyunjin is not thinking with his brain; he doesn’t want anything to happen. Still, the possibility sets a small fire in his stomach that has nothing to do with the burning rage he’s used to feeling.
The spell breaks with the sound of a pin clattering to the ground. He snaps back to reality, shame punching him in the chest as he realises he was about to make a fool out of himself in front of a child. Dylan mumbles an apology, Jisung shrugs it off. He crouches to pick it up and shoves it into his pocket. When he’s back to facing him, any trace of whatever made Hyunjin so restless has disappeared.
“Unless, of course, you’re the portrait and not the guy!” Jisung exclaims cheerfully. Scene, and cut. They’re back to regular business, and Hyunjin wants to hit him, all vaguely horny thoughts erased from his mind.
“You’re so full of…” he starts, but cuts himself off at the speed of light the moment he makes eye contact with Dylan. He won’t be the one responsible for teaching a child his first curse word. He scans Jisung desperately, looking for any loose ends he might grab to make fun of him.
“You’re not even wearing your costume properly!” It comes out as a childish whine. Hyunjin’s usually better at this than today. His retorts have turned Jisung’s eyes teary more than once, although it’s been a long time since he’s actively spoken to cut deep. But today, maybe because he has an audience, maybe because his usually witty thoughts have turned to barely sentient goo that’s only capable of wondering whether Jisung would be able to bench his body weight, he’s out of it. And he doesn’t realise the extent to which he has fucked up until he sees Jisung bat his eyelashes in a mocking, overly flirty expression.
“Aw, babe,” Jisung coos, “you want me to take my pants off?”
He winks obnoxiously to top it all. Hyunjin wants to strangle him. He wants to watch as life abandons his body, leaving him to regret the day he first decided to cross him.
“Shut up,” he says, rubbing his temples, “shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Jisung just laughs. Hyunjin will murder him in cold blood. He will murder him, then he will show up at his funeral and remind everyone of the time he wore platform boots and tried to convince everyone he had always been that tall, only to sprain his ankle because he kept tripping on them. He might even bring up his old Instagram account, the one Jisung has forgotten the password to and so desperately wishes could be deleted not just from existence but from the memories of anyone who’s ever come across it. (It’s not that bad, in Hyunjin’s opinion. It’s filled with tons of bad selfies with edgy captions, sure, but hey, at least in none of them he has his toes out.)
“And look who’s talking! Where’s your evil painting?”
The painting is the caricature he has in his bag, but showing it to Jisung will get him called a nerd for sure. He’d thought it was clever, safe in the walls of his room, back home, but now he’s not that confident. If Jisung laughs at him, Hyunjin thinks he might punch him in the face again or start crying. As if the other boy doesn’t own a fucking Spiderman cosplay, what’s nerdier than that? Looking mouth-watering doesn’t erase the nerdiness.
"In the attic, duh," he answers. Jisung isn't convinced, one eyebrow raised and all.
"Can I go check?"
He takes a deep breath. Then, suddenly, an epiphany:
“You know what? I don’t have to put up with you,” Hyunjin says, voice filled with wonder,“in fact, I’m leaving right now. Goodbye, Jisung. I would say it’s been nice to see you, but it would be a lie.”
Well, not exactly – it has been nice seeing him. Hearing him speak is a whole other story.
“Wow,” Jisung deadpans, “did you take this fire clapback out of a thirteen-year-old’s 2009 Tumblr blog?”
“Goodbye, Jisung,” he repeats, this time louder. He ignores the chuckle the other lets out. “And bye, Peter.”
He feels immensely silly after that, but Dylan beams and waves him goodbye.
He’s halfway down the street when Jisung’s voice reaches him again. “You’ve wished me goodbye three times! Do you like me?”
Hyunjin turns and catches a glimpse of him, hands cupped around his mouth to carry his voice over. God, is he ridiculous. First, he nearly makes a scene about Hyunjin not calling his nephew the same name as his character’s, then makes fun of him for doing it.
He mirrors the gesture. “I hate you!” he yells inside his hands. Jisung’s laugh doesn’t need amplification to reach him.
“Hate is a bad word,” Jisung yells back, “there are children here!”
Hyunjin fights all his urges to flip him off and goes to find his own children.
They've moved fast, he notes, industrious ants, collecting candy like they're getting paid for it. And they are, to think about it, in candy. Are middle schoolers still obsessed with candy like children are? He thought it was more about the experience than the amount of goods they score, but either he was wrong or they have something more interesting to do at home, which is why they’re rushing so much. The sun has set, by now, and children are being ushered home by their parents, no matter how hard they whine or cry. Their disappearance leaves the street emptier. There aren’t a lot of people next to his or his sister’s age in the neighbourhood; it’s a calm place, one you move to because you want to retire somewhere quiet or because you want your children to play freely in the streets, without fear of anything happening to them. Most of the families that move here eventually move out when their kids reach middle or high school age, looking for better opportunities, more stimulating environments.
There had been a lot of friends when Hyunjin was a kid, friends who would knock on his door and ask his mom if “Sammy could come play”. They rarely knocked on Jisung’s, unless Hyunjin’s mom told them to; Jisung was mean and bossy and would start crying for no reason, they said, and Hyunjin was still bitter about the Incident, so he didn’t bother to come up with something in his defense. He’d been annoyed, then, every time someone had assumed they were friends just because their parents were. That had only meant they did a lot of stuff together, like Jisung’s father driving them to school or his mom picking them up from swimming lessons, until Hyunjin quit because he wanted to play soccer like the rest of his friends. Summer after summer, as his middle school years rolled by, his friends had packed their lives into boxes, hauled them into cars and trucks, and left. No tearful goodbye or promise to phone or text each other had survived the pressure of time, until it had been just Jisung and Hyunjin, on opposite sides of the street, neither of them knocking on the other’s door.
He’s glad his sister found a group of friends that aren’t made out of convenience or physical closeness, although that makes it a little harder for them to see each other outside of volleyball practice. However, they build the occasions themselves. (Kyujin forces him to drive her everywhere, all the time, ever since he got his license. She’s lucky he doesn’t have that much of a social life to account for.)
He looks at the doors that used to be his friends’ and finds them deprived of the girls. Are they seriously walking this fast? But some are closed, nothing in sight, so they must have skipped over some. On this side, it's a dead end. Hyunjin frowns. Maybe they went the other way when he wasn't looking?
They can't have gone very far. The street they live on is long, sure, but a group of girls speedwalking will reach a crossroad eventually, and Hyunjin likes to think they're smart enough not to take a direction before telling him which way they're going. He checks his phone just in case Kyujin has texted him anything – hell, for all that he knows, they could be back home stuffing their faces with Abby's cupcakes and watching Nightmare Before Christmas, or whatever it is they wanted to do once they got back. Nothing shows up, just a long string of texts from a presumably drunk Felix. Isn't it a bit too early to be this wasted already? He scoffs, pocketing his phone with a smile as he already imagines his best friend's devastating headache when he sobers up and his consequential decision to quit alcohol forever, something that happens once every few months, with him.
Still, he has to focus: the girls. He walks down the other end of the road and finds nothing. Something cold starts tingling in the pit of his stomach, but it's probably silly. Only closed doors and lit up windows stare back at him when he takes a turn, then another, until he’s mapped all the places humanly reachable without any result.
“Excuse me,” he asks a young woman who's holding the hand of a toddler in a pumpkin costume, “have you seen five girls, around twelve years old, dressed as Monster High characters?”
The woman only gives back a confused look. Maybe she doesn’t know what Monster High is, and he tries his hand at describing the girls’ costumes, but she shakes her head, even after he pulls out his phone to show her the picture he took before leaving the house.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, but he has no time to accept her apology; he nods and goes on to ask the next person he sees. Nothing. But there are fewer and fewer people on the streets right now, and the girls are in a group of five, something easily spotted in a smaller crowd. Yet, the few people still around he manages to stop haven't seen them.
“Fuck,” he hisses under his breath. His pulse starts to quicken, rabbit fast in his chest, his ears, his throat. It feels like his heart's trying to jump out of his mouth. Where have they gone? They don't have superpowers, for fuck's sake, and it's impossible that they all got run over by a car. He speeds through the neighbourhood again, maybe he's missed them, maybe they were sitting on the sidewalk, maybe someone had invited them inside. Oh God, what if someone did invite them inside and not with good intentions? They're twelve, as much as they like to think they're grown and have seen stuff, they haven't, they're naive, and it's such a quiet place, nobody thinks something like that can happen in such places until it does. That's what he's supposed to be there for, to make sure their inexperience doesn't get them in trouble – instead, he got caught up in Han Jisung pissing him off and he lost sight of them like a complete idiot.
Hyunjin walks back to the house he last remembered seeing them at and stares into the space they occupied before. He can’t possibly ring all the doorbells to check if they’re inside, he tells himself, but what other options does he have?
His lungs feel swollen with air he can’t exhale, for some reason, and it takes up so much space it’s choking him at the base of his throat. Taking his phone out gives him no comfort; his sister hasn’t texted him anything. Did she forget to charge her phone before going out? Did she leave it at home altogether? Unlikely, but still, she was with her friends, preoccupied with anything other than making sure he had a way to reach her. Hyunjin has Zahra’s phone number from when Kyujin’s phone died while she was at practice, but he hears nothing from her, either.
He presses the call button, next to the unintelligible string of emojis Kyujin had saved her number in his phone as, and it rings for a few long seconds, seconds in which Hyunjin can only focus on the repeated sound and his ragged breath, before shutting down. He presses it again, then another time, then another. It goes unanswered all four times.
Not trusting his trembling hands to hold it up for one more second, he throws it back into his bag. The streetlights cast their light in sharp lines above him, and he doesn’t know if his vision is blurry because of them or because his eyes are filling up with tears. If the streetlights are on, it must be late, and fuck, it’s cold, too. He feels it through his jacket, the girls certainly feel it with the lack of theirs.
“Shit,” he mumbles to himself as he walks back to their house. It’s his last resort: maybe they got bored and decided to come home, although why they didn’t tell him remains a mystery. He dares to get his hopes up; that’s what it must be. Hyunjin will find them leaving crumbs all over the couch and will give them the scold of a lifetime for almost giving him a premature heart attack, then he’ll spend the rest of the night holed up in his room, listening to the sounds of the girls’ sleepover, and will get Kyujin to bribe him into not speaking about it to their parents. It sounds like a solid plan, Hyunjin tells himself, and he’s so reassured by it that he’s mostly calmed down when he arrives home. None of the windows is lit up: not the kitchen’s, not the living room’s, not the one in Kyujin’s room.
He collapses on the sidewalk with a sob. Dizziness overwhelms him, the road spins around him, white spots dancing in front of him everywhere he looks. They’re not here. They’re not, unless they’re playing the dumbest prank anyone has ever come up with, but Hyunjin doesn’t have the strength to get up and check for himself. He can’t bear the thought of finding the house empty, cloaked in darkness. Five girls can’t vanish off the face of the Earth, rationally, but Hyunjin’s other hypotheses are too scary. He’s supposed to look after them.
If he thought things couldn’t get any worse, someone trips over him. He raises his head from where he’d dropped it, between his crossed arms, and sees Jisung biting his own hand to seemingly muffle the string of curses he must be dying to let out. Great. So not only has his sister disappeared, he can’t even have a breakdown about it in peace. Jisung, of all people, is bothering him right now. If he wasn’t already crying, Hyunjin would start now.
“Holy moly, dude, why are you sitting in the dark like a freak?” Jisung pants. Hyunjin wants to dig a hole in the ground beneath him and hide in it until Jisung’s convinced himself he must have dreamt it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a spade. The boy’s eyes widen as it probably dawns on him what Hyunjin was doing, sitting in the dark like a freak. And, God, this is the worst night of Hyunjin’s life already; he can’t have Han Jisung making shitty remarks about his idiocy, too. He opens his mouth to tell him to fuck off, but the only thing that gets out is a choked sob.
“Jeez,” Jisung says, looking so desperately out of his depth it’s a little funny, “Okay. Hey, what’s going on?”
He sits on his heels so that they’re eye to eye, something Hyunjin hates him for. No, he doesn’t want to look into Han Jisung’s huge eyes and tell him he lost his sister; he doesn’t want to tell Han Jisung anything, but it seems like he’s not intent on moving until Hyunjin spills it.
“It’s fine,” he manages, after a few deep breaths, “Go away.”
And it should be enough, shouldn’t it? He and Jisung are not friends. They don’t hate each other as much as they used to, sure, and now they have more friends in common than separate, but that doesn’t make them care about each other by proxy. And the more he spends shooing Jisung away, the more time he loses. He has to go.
Hyunjin stands up – better yet, he tries to. The abrupt change makes his head go light, and everything is spinning again, his legs weak. Embarrassingly enough, Jisung has to stand up and grab his shoulders to help him from falling; then, he all but manhandles him into sitting down once more. Humiliation adds to the pile of ugly feelings burning in his stomach, and oh, how he hates it. He just wants Jisung to fucking leave so he can resume worrying about things that actually matter.
“Just tell me what’s wrong, dude, you’re so upset you’re fainting over it, you might as well spit it out.” Jisung’s voice is whiny and annoying, it reminds him of when they were children. He just wishes he didn’t have to learn the other’s still as devastatingly stubborn as he was the hard way. Hyunjin might have opened his mouth to tell him to fuck off once again, but the thought of Kyujin never leaves his mind, and what tumbles out instead is:
“I lost my sister.”
Jisung is rendered speechless for a moment, something Hyunjin would very much like to pride himself on were it any other occasion. His eyebrows are raised so high they disappear behind his bangs.
“You lost your sister?” he repeats in disbelief. Hyunjin would have deemed it impossible for Jisung’s eyes to get wider than they already are, but apparently, the boy is a scientific miracle, because they do. He doesn’t miss the way they trail over his nephew, who’s using the momentary distraction to stuff his cheeks with candy. What’s with that family and eating like fucking squirrels?
“I’m sorry, her friends didn’t tell you where she went?”
At that, Hyunjin lets out a little laugh between sobs, hysterical. He really, really shouldn’t be telling Jisung all this, but it’s not like he can get out of this by lying, and the only thing left for him to do is admit the truth and brace himself for Jisung’s mockery.
“I lost them, too.”
“You lo–” Jisung opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. He looks like a fish, it’s so stupid. If they were in a cartoon, imaginary numbers would float in the space over his head as he does the math.
“You lost your sister’s friends?”
“Jesus, Han Jisung, do you have to repeat everything I say? What are you, a fucking parrot?” Hyunjin snaps, and Jisung visibly flinches at the curse word. Right, there’s a child next to him, he’s not supposed to curse, but also, Hyunjin feels like he has a bit of the right to.
Jisung raises five fingers between them.
“Hwang,” he says slowly, “there are five of them. How do you lose five children?”
Hyunjin’s breathing quickens against his best judgment, and the worst part of it is that Jisung is right. It’s something so absurd, it should have been impossible – and the girls are not five-year-olds with no concepts of where they are, they’re twelve and bright and in possession of cellphones, and Hyunjin still lost them in the street half a mile from his house. And that’s because he got too distracted talking with Jisung, of all people, and being stupidly flustered by, what, the fact that he was hot? It’s all so idiotic in hindsight. Hyunjin can’t help but be mad at himself. Jisung has spent the same time talking to him, and his nephew is still by his side, so no, as much as he wishes, he can’t blame it on him. This is Hyunjin’s fault and his only. And just like that, he’s crying again, much, much harder than before, and he can’t take a single breath that doesn’t waste out in a sob, choking on his own tears, ears ringing.
Distantly, he can hear Jisung panicking, but it sounds so far away, so unrelated to him. And yet, the idea of crying with an audience, this audience in particular, fills him with more shame and anger.
“No, hey, I’m sorry,” Jisung whispers. Hyunjin would like to tell him something to make him stop hovering next to him, but he simply can’t stop crying. Time is running by, time he’s wasting by bawling his eyes out on the sidewalk instead of actually doing something to find Kyujin, and it’s not Jisung’s fault, but he’s making everything worse. He loses track of how many apologies he hears from the other boy, but that doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t help, it just makes him feel shittier. He’d thought Jisung making fun of him would be bad, but it’s Jisung being worried about him that’s driving him insane, because, what does he care?
“Hey, Hyune.” Jisung almost shouts, and the combined surprise from the sound and the stupid nickname breaks him out of it. Jisung hasn’t used it in a decade, at least, which means it’s been a decade since he last heard it. When everyone else used to call him Sam, or Sammy, Jisung said Hyune, like it was a secret only the two of them could share, smiling when his other friends were confused by it. Hyunjin shrugged their questions off every time and just called him Peter. A vague thought breaks through his panic-addled mind: back then, he was probably Jisung’s best friend, even if Jisung had never been his.
Now, Hyunjin doesn’t remember the last time Jisung called him by his name, or something other than dude or Hwang. It’s ridiculous. He cries even harder.
“No, no, hey, listen to me,”
Jisung sets his hands on his shoulders and, listen, Hyunjin’s never been a tactile person. He can count on one hand the times he’s let his parents hug him, much less his friends (a fact Felix, the most PDA obsessed person he knows, is always complaining to him about), much less the son of his neighbours, whom he still detests a little. Which makes it surprising that, when Jisung sets his hands on his shoulders, a light, but grounding touch, he all but melts into it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he collapses against him, leaning into Jisung much more than he should, letting his head fall to rest on his shoulder as he keeps sobbing his lungs out. Jisung lets out a soft gasp, like the action surprises him – reasonably, given that the last time two of their body parts interacted with each other it was Hyunjin’s fist against his nose – but he can’t let himself freak out. Hyunjin considers pulling away. It’s embarrassing, or, if it isn’t now, it will be later. However, Jisung brings his hand to the back of his neck and leaves it there, nailing him in place. It’s easier, like this, when he doesn’t have to look at him, but he’s still wasting time. He needs to calm down, he needs to…
“Hey, I need you to listen to me. Try holding your breath for one second, then letting it out for two. Then two, three, three, four until you reach ten. Okay?”
Hyunjin wants to tell him he doesn’t want to do his stupid breathing exercises (where did he even learn them?), but it’s a bit hard, seeing that he’s not able to speak. However, Jisung’s voice has a desperate tinge to it, and the pang of guilt that hits him like lightning is enough to make him pliant. And, for some reason, it kind of works. They have to repeat the count two times, but by the time the second comes to an end, he’s almost coherent.
“There you go,” Jisung encourages, relief so palpable in his voice that Hyunjin could start crying again. He doesn’t, thank God. By sheer force of will, he detaches himself from Jisung’s shoulder, wincing at the wet spot his tears have left on his costume, but he refuses to meet his eye. He must look like utter shit right now, he doesn’t need to try and sustain Jisung’s worried gaze, too.
“Do you want to– Do you want to come inside?” He continues, and it takes Hyunjin a while to understand he means inside his house, where his parents are. He shakes his head so fast something cracks in his neck, forcing himself to look at him to convey just how much he doesn’t want that happening. Jisung’s parents can’t see him like this because if they do, they’ll know, and if they know, Hyunjin’s parents know. Jisung’s doing a poor job at not letting his confusion show on his face, expressive as always, but he nods anyway.
“Okay. Okay, then we stay here.”
Jisung sits next to him, so close their knees brush, their shoulders pressed together. He has to crane his neck just to catch a glimpse of him, this way, and for some reason, the lines of his face soothe him a little. That should be an indicator of how twisted his situation is: Jisung's presence brings him comfort instead of aggravating him. Well, comfort is a strong word. Let's say it keeps him from tearing off his face.
“And hey, I really am sorry for being a jerk about it. I’m helping you find them, okay? Just tell me how I can help, and I’ll do it.”
Hyunjin shrugs. “I… would have done the same thing to you,” he admits with a grimace, “and you were right. It’s absurd.”
It’s Jisung's turn to shake his head with force. His glasses slide down his nose a little. It kind of disturbs him, and he asks himself if Jisung would mind, were he to push them back up. He keeps his hands stuck firmly to his sides.
“No, no. You were upset, and I just made things worse. I shouldn't have.”
Hyunjin finds that this considerate version of Jisung puts him more on edge than everything else, so he nods just to make him stop apologizing.
“So, what exactly happened?”
He takes a deep, shaky breath, staring at where Jisung’s beat-up Converse meet the ground.
“I just… I was talking to you, and when I turned, they weren't there. I thought they’d just kept trick or treating, but I couldn’t find them anywhere, and I mean. They can’t possibly have gone that far, can they? I thought they might have gotten bored and come home early, without telling me, but, as you can see,” he gestures to the empty house in front of them. A sour taste lingers in his mouth.
He takes a glance at Dylan, who’s entertaining himself with some toy firetruck he must have retrieved from Jisung’s backpack, discarded half-open next to them. His basket overflows with candy, a sign of a long time spent exploring the neighbourhood. A little spark of hope lights up in his chest.
“Did you see them after we met?”
Jisung, finally, pushes his glasses back up. He frowns, mouthing something Hyunjin quite can’t make out but looks a lot like the street names. Hyunjin decides he prefers not to let himself get caught trying to read his lips or looking at that area altogether.
“No, I haven't,” Jisung answers, the corners of his mouth pinched down like it’s his own damn sister he’s looking for.
A miserable noise escapes Hyunjin’s mouth. Jisung rubs his hand against his back, comfortingly, in movements similar to the ones he traced on Dylan’s shoulders when he found him again, and it makes him question if he’s doing it to soothe Hyunjin or himself. Still, it’s not bad, this new touch thing. His skin is warm where Jisung’s fingers press. All in all, it makes him feel a little less horrible.
“Have you tried calling her?”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows Jisung isn’t being condescending. As far as he knows, Hyunjin could have forgotten to do something that obvious, in the state of shock he’s in, and he’s just trying to help. He also knows that they’re being civil right now. Better than, in fact, as Jisung’s arm stays wrapped around his shoulders, and he likes that they’re being civil, he wants to keep it that way. Sure, Hyunjin knows that, but Jisung is genetically engineered to get on his nerves, to find his insecurities and gut them wide open with a child’s carelessness. He knows Jisung’s not calling him stupid, but Hyunjin feels like he is. So, he snaps.
“What do you think? Thank you for telling me what to do, otherwise, I would have never, ever come up with it on my own.” Venom seeps in his words out of habit, and he half expects Jisung to think that if he’s lucid enough to fight him, he’s lucid enough to take care of himself and leave him alone. Jisung doesn’t.
He leans back on his hands (Hyunjin mourns the loss of contact, although he recognizes he might deserve it) and rolls his eyes, but stays otherwise unbothered.
“Sheesh, you could have just said you called her and she didn’t answer,” he mutters. There’s no real heat behind it, and Hyunjin doesn’t understand why he’s acting the way he’s doing. It feeds his God complex, Hyunjin decides, staring at his yard. Kyujin did all the decorating on her own, and it shows, cutesy paper garlands cut into pumpkins, ghost-shaped candle holders that he doesn’t know where she found set on the windowsills, their lights snuffed out with the tiniest huff of wind. The next step to inflate his own ego is playing charity with his childhood nemesis turned sobbing mess, and it makes perfect sense; it doesn’t explain why Jisung has chosen warmth and comfort instead of spewing some holier-than-thou bullshit, nor does it explain the way Jisung has shifted his hand so that it brushes with Hyunin’s if one of them moves, but martyrdom could have new standards.
“I’ve tried calling her friend, too, neither of them is answering, and I don’t have the others’ numbers.”
The other says nothing, and the silence is only broken by Dylan making siren noises while he makes his firetruck do a spectacular flip. Hyunjin hopes the imaginary firemen have imaginary health insurance. Jisung kicks a pebble that Hyunjin’s not sure exists out of his way.
“You know,” he tries, after a moment of reflection, “they’re twelve. Maybe they snuck out, or something.”
Hyunjin takes a moment to consider the possibility. Shutting the voice in his head that insists there’s no way his precious baby sister would do such a thing, he supposes it could happen. Remains unchanged the fact that Lucy’s mom had driven them here. Unless they have friends old enough to have a license, which would be worrying enough on its own, it’s not like they have great freedom of movement. And to go where, that’s a mystery, too. But Hyunjin likes this possibility, as it’s the only version of the story where they might be somewhere safe. Kyujin is smart, even if easily swayed, and he wants to believe she’d only break the rules this badly if she had a foolproof plan to make the escape work.
He voices this thought to Jisung, who taps his chin with one finger in a comically stereotypical thinking pose. One of the many things he does, Hyunjin has no business finding cute in the slightest. He shakes his head as if that will erase the flying thought from his brain.
“So, if you were a middle schooler who wants to have an adventure, how would you move?” Hyunjin asks him. He, himself, had always been too eager to please to disobey his parents’ orders, and although Jisung’s father looks frail enough to have a heart attack if his son went missing, the boy seems more likely to have taken the risk.
Jisung scoffs, kicking the ground aimlessly again. At this point, the sole of one of his shoes is about to fall off, this pressure on them is just cruel. The smile he wears is bitter. He’s laughing at a joke with no punchline, because, as it occurs too often not to notice, the punchline is Jisung himself.
“How would I know? I never left my room. My parents would buy Younghyun things so he’d take me out of the house in return. Not much of an adventure guy.”
Hyunjin blinks. Well, that’s not helpful, but it also doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. He vaguely remembers lazy summer afternoons spent eavesdropping on his and Jisung’s parents in the kitchen, talking with hushed voices, worrying about something Hyunjin had been too young to understand then and doesn’t fully understand now. In middle school, Jisung had been closed off and skittish, reacting to everything and everyone with bared teeth and an anger that largely outsized his tiny body. Hyunjin had thought he was being an asshole; now, he realizes Jisung was probably just scared, or caught up in that complicated, heavy tangle of emotion that sometimes still agitates behind his eyes. It’s hard to see that kid in Jisung as he is now, in the relaxed line of his shoulders, in the confident way he’s settled in his own skin, but Hyunjin can make out the edges anyway, if he stares long enough.
(Just like, if he stares long enough, he can catch a glimpse of the child who had cried laughing at having successfully tricked him, a memory that annoys him more than the one time Jisung had made Hyunjin so angry he punched him in the face. That can be attributed to the tangle, while the Incident. The Incident was deliberate.)
He lies back on the sidewalk, the dark sky clear and unforgiving. Dylan yawns. The kid is so quiet he almost forgot he was here – actually, he definitely forgot he was here. Guilt washes over him. He must be tired out from the walk, and Hyunjin is keeping him from resting with his whole business.
“Um, shouldn’t you take him home?” he asks Jisung. The boy shakes his head.
“No, it’s okay. Hey, Peter, listen to me.” Dylan waddles closer to his uncle, little pig ears bobbing with every move. Jisung puts his hands on the small shoulders and lowers his voice to a whisper.
“We have this mission, right? Some girls need help from someone really, really brave. Can we tell them Spider-Pork’s on the case?”
Dylan seems to reflect on the question for a while. Then, he leans in to whisper something in Jisung’s ear, causing his face to twist curiously. He has no answer to why he won’t speak out loud; he hasn’t asked, but he, himself, as a former shy child, remembers the pure torture to stay and be forced to interact with adults he didn’t know and is glad Jisung isn’t forcing it on him since, being the same age as his uncle, Hyunjin classifies as an adult in his eyes. All of a sudden he feels a thousand years old.
“Hey, you’re a hero, you should do these things for free!” Jisung reprimands. He’s doing a bad job of holding his laugh in, and despite the blood thrumming in his ears and the nausea that overcomes him the more they stay without doing anything, he finds himself smiling. It’s because of Dylan, of course. Hyunjin has always liked kids.
Dylan says something again, a small, heart-shaped smile scrunching up his cheeks. If it weren’t for the curly hair and the slight difference in the curve of his nose, Hyunjin would suspect Dylan was cloned from Jisung, who was cloned from Younghyun. That’s how much they look alike.
“Well, I guess they will be grateful for saving them. No, I don’t think they’d mind giving you candy for your troubles, would they?”
He turns to Hyunjin with a wink. A pathetic kick courses through his stomach as he gives the two an awkward thumbs up. If they snuck out for real, the girls won’t be too happy about being retrieved, but Hyunjin couldn't care less. They’ll have to beg him not to snitch to their parents, getting candy out of them won’t be an issue. If they find them, his brain reminds him, and nothing’s funny anymore.
Dylan seems happy with the response and resumes playing with his toys when Jisung tells him they’ll be working on the plan of attack.
“Yeah, yeah, leave the boring stuff to us,” Jisung mutters, which is a silly thing to say to a four-year-old who couldn’t possibly help them in any way. It’s kind of… Hyunjin shuts the thought before it forms.
“So let’s say they have left because they wanted to,” he resumes, digging his nails in the palm of his hands. He can’t help but feel on edge, no matter how much he’s calmed down since he found their spot empty. “How? Where?”
Jisung furrows his brow, deep in thought. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and opens Instagram. Hyunjin frowns. If Jisung’s taking a break from brainstorming to watch reels, Hyunjin’s going to punch him in the face for the second time in his life.
“What are you doing?”
Jisung takes his sweet time answering him, hyper-focused on his screen. Hyunjin nudges their shoulders together to snap him out of it.
“Chill out, I’m checking if your sister posted anything.”
“My sister never posts on Instagram,” he replies. She’s got this mysterious thing where she has no posts, no icon, no highlights, just her name and her team in the bio. He doesn’t see how that could help.
“Are you kidding? She spams, like, every two seconds,” says Jisung, and he’s hit with the realization that, first of all, Kyujin has blocked him, and secondly, she has him blocked but not Han Jisung. And there’s another curious aspect to it.
“Hold on. Why do you follow my sister on Instagram?” Hyunjin squints at him. He’s not even sure if Jisung is following his account. The other shrugs.
“It’s not my personal, it’s the crew’s. We followed her ‘cause she DM’d us one time saying she put her classmates on to our music and it made them think she’s, like, all cool and alternative. Chris thought it was so sweet he almost cried. She gained our respect and our following.”
Hyunjin truly, honestly doesn’t know how to feel about the news. His own sister, a fan of Jisung’s hip-hop crew-project-thing. Who, apparently, likes their music so much she made all of her friends listen to it, and then wrote them to tell them how much everyone liked it. Does their mom know about it? Jisung’s music might have taken a step up from HIP_FUCK_SIN, but if Katseye is inappropriate, God knows how she would react to the devastatingly horny stuff Chris Bahng comes up with.
“So your fanbase is a bunch of middle schoolers? That checks out.”
He can’t help but be mean. It’s shitty because Hyunjin finds it cool that his crew slash project thing is gaining traction, and it’s cool that they’re confident enough to do it in the first place. The music in itself is far from his style, but he’s listened to some tracks and he can understand why people like it. Besides, Felix has been pestering him for ages to actually attend one of their gigs, for the sole reason that Jisung’s friends (slash crewmates slash whatever they are) are college students and Felix thinks they seem interesting. God forbid Felix doesn’t befriend all the interesting people.
Anyways, Kyujin is, apparently, the biggest 3RACHA fan – but in all seriousness, the name is at least a little corny. When he finds her, he’ll have to give her a talk about fraternising with the enemy. (And isn’t it weird? Just by being with Jisung, the “if” has turned into a “when”).
“Every stream’s a good stream,” Jisung refuses to let him get under his skin. Infuriating. On his too-bright screen, Kyujin’s blank icon is surrounded by a red circle.
“Bingo,” Jisung says, like he’s a hacker in some early 2000s heist movie. He scrolls past the insane number of pictures she’s uploaded. Physical confirmation of being blocked stings just the tiniest bit, but even that doesn’t matter when Jisung triumphantly turns the phone to him and shows him Kyujin’s last story, a selfie that shows her, Abby, and a girl he doesn’t know, complete with Katseye’s version of Monster High’s Fright Song. It was posted five minutes ago. The relief is so strong he feels all his blood rush to his head, as the tension in his shoulders disappears and he slumps to his side like a ragdoll (it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact Jisung is right next to him, ready to wrap his arm around his shoulders again).
“She’s fine,” he breathes out, chest ten times lighter, “she’s fine.”
He takes a few seconds to look at the picture. Kyujin’s makeup has smudged, and she doesn’t seem to be particularly thrilled (not as Abby, whose smile is wider than her face), but she’s otherwise unharmed. Good. Because, after he gets over his mind-blowing relief, he’s going to kill her. Something he won’t do is snitch to their parents – they’d find a way to magically twist it into his fault, but everything else is fair game. God, he’s going to blackmail her until she’s at least thirty-five.
“Why is your smile so evil right now?” Jisung asks, his lips quirked up in a more acceptable way. Hyunjin only feels his smile grow.
“Nothing important,” he replies, voice sweet. The other laughs and shakes his head.
“Alright, freak. So what do we do?”
Hyunjin mulls over his options. On one hand, he could let her be; after all, what matters is that she's safe and her phone works, then she can figure out the rest. The idea of going to bed and leaving them stranded wherever they are has a certain appeal to it. On the other, he doesn’t know if she is in a possibly dangerous environment, and his hands are itching with the urge to give her the scolding of a lifetime. Screw all the times his dad told him he shouldn’t act like one of her parents; he’s positive he has earned it, on this specific occasion. And the thought of bursting into some middle schooler’s house and causing drama puts a smile on his face.
“Well,” he says, “we hope she’s got her location on.”
Which, to be honest, is something he should’ve thought of way earlier, but it must’ve slipped his mind in the emotional rollercoaster he just lived through, and Jisung didn’t think of it either. He thanks his mom for forcing him to install Life 360 on Kyujin’s phone without her knowledge. At the time, it felt like a wild invasion of privacy, and it still is. It is, however, one he’s insanely grateful for at this moment. There’s only to hope that she hasn’t figured it out yet.
The stand-in icon for Kyujin signals her location, which he’s quick to screenshot and note down before she has the thought to deactivate it. The address is a fifteen minute drive away from their house, but it’s not walkable unless you’re fucking stupid, which is a hypothesis Hyunjin still keeps at bay.
“I don’t understand. I mean, I was distracted, but I would’ve definitely noticed a car stopping behind us and picking them up.”
“So they didn’t go by car,” Jisung shrugs. He sneaks a hand in Dylan’s Spiderman basket, grabs two chocolate coins, and pops one in his mouth. The other, he hands to Hyunjin, who’s not a big fan of sweet things but feels like refusing it would be a declaration of war, and goes for dropping it into the coat of his pocket.
“I mean, dude, there’s a literal bus stop right there. The one we walk to every morning? To go to school? You know some buses go places other than school, right?”
The urge to smother him burns in the back of his throat, but Hyunjin can’t really argue. He does know that taking the bus is a possibility – it’s just one he didn’t entertain. Public transport wasn’t exactly his thing when he was younger, too unpredictable for his liking, with stops missed and delays longer than the ride itself. But, sure, Kyujin and her friends might have taken the bus. A quick search proves Jisung right: there’s a stop within walking distance from the house Kyujin is at right now, and the ticket prices are affordable for a middle schooler’s pocket.
Jisung stands up, brushing metaphorical dust off his knees.
“Let’s go, then.” He offers Hyunjin a hand up and, just for tonight, he allows himself to take it. It’s warm, fingertips slightly calloused from the strings of his guitar, a silver band tightened around his index. Its hold is solid. Overall, an eight out of ten for its handholding potential, two points deducted for the person it belongs to.
Jisung pulls him up, and Hyunjin seals his mouth shut before he does something as embarrassing as meowing at the easy display of physical strength.
“Wait, we’re taking the bus?” Hyunjin asks, trying not to sound too displeased. Are buses still running at this hour? “You know I can drive, right?”
He hears a scoff from the other boy. “Nothing personal, Hyune, but I’m not letting you drive my mother’s car when you’re this freaked out. So, unless you have a car you’ve been hiding in your pocket the whole time…” Jisung points to the bus stop.
Hyunjin doesn’t have a car, unfortunately, and as much as he would like to argue that he is in perfect condition to drive, his head is still splitting in half from all the crying. Jisung should have a license by now, though. He points that out just to make him frown, and is satisfied with the result.
“Hey, I thought we were having a truce, here,” he whines. To be honest, Jisung’s face is perfect for whining and complaining and being all sulky in general: the big, downturned eyes, his natural pout. He doesn’t know how his parents ever managed the strength to tell him no (given how he is, they probably haven’t). Hyunjin raises an eyebrow.
“Oh, are we? I never remembered agreeing to it.”
Jisung stops in his tracks, his movement so abrupt that Dylan doesn’t have the time to stop walking and ends up crashing against his legs. He blinks, slowly, and there, there he is, the boy he knows, frail and unsure, but it doesn’t feel good, knowing his words have real power to pierce through his confidence; surprisingly, it doesn’t make him want to shatter it. It makes him want to be careful, to be soft and meek and pliant, to train the sharpness out of his teeth, the roughness out of his words.
“I mean,” he backtracks, “maybe snotting all over your suit was a clear indication of it.”
That earns him a laugh. Tinges of nervousness still paint it blue, but it’s a laugh, and Jisung starts walking again, ripped-up shoelaces hitting the ground.
The bus driver gives them a withering glare when they get on, insulted by the idea of someone making use of a functioning service. Hyunjin understands: if he were underpaid and doing an evening shift, his only wish would be to be left alone for all of it, or at least to be exempted from carrying two teenagers and a hyper child. Dylan must have understood the mission has started and he’s thoroughly excited, halting every two seconds on their way to the bus stop to show them cool Spider-Ham poses, until Jisung persuaded him that a piggyback ride was way cooler (“You get it, Peter? It’s a piggyback ride, which means it’s exclusive to super cool pig superheroes. Like the Batmobile”).
Now, Dylan is unable to sit still for the ride and keeps running from one end of the bus to the other. Hyunjin and Jisung are taking turns apologising to the bus driver, who had smiled fondly at the child and told them not to worry about it at first, but now seems to be regretting that statement every time Dylan reaches one end. Thank God, the bus is empty, otherwise they’d have a lot more people to apologise to.
“Pete, if you keep pulling this stuff, I’ll have no choice but to physically restrain you,” Jisung warns, but either Dylan does not know what restraint means or he just doesn’t care; the result is the same. The boy sighs and rests his forehead on the seat in front of them. Perhaps there is a good answer to why they’re sitting next to each other in an empty bus, it’s only escaping Hyunjin at this moment. It’s lucky they don’t have anyone to explain it to, and he can sit close and let himself brush Jisung’s ankle with his.
“I let him have too much sugar,” he groans, “now he’s never going to tire himself out.”
Hyunjin pats his shoulder in mute comfort. He would be more sympathetic if he were the one charged with putting him to bed; instead, he just finds it funny.
“Hey, at least he’s having a blast.”
Jisung nods, not too convinced. He pops three gummy bears in his mouth in one go and drops his head against the seat again. Jisung’s hair has been bleached and dyed indigo over and over uncountable times, yet it still looks soft to the touch. It raises the urge to test the theory, to run exploratory fingers through it, so much that Hyunjin’s hands itch with it, but it’s fine. He’s going to go home and do a ton of self-reflection to understand what’s got into him, what’s got him wanting to touch and touch and touch some more. He’s not going to give in.
“He really likes you,” Hyunjin says, to make conversation and distract himself from how the led lights cast different hues on Jisung’s head, how his silver earring seems to shine twice as bright against the blue. “Dylan,” he clarifies, in front of Jisung’s confused stare.
A smile breaks across the other’s face, and it justifies any warmth Hyunjin might be feeling in his ears.
“Yeah, it’s great. You know, I didn’t think I would like him so much, ‘cause kids are,” he makes a vague gesture with his hands like it explains everything (it doesn’t), then drops them to his knees again, “but look at him.” Dylan sits down only to jump off in the same second, humming his own theme song.
“What’s there not to love? And I’m his favourite uncle, so it’s fair that he’s my favourite nephew, too.”
And Hyunjin, he wants to be nice. He wants to say it’s sweet that Jisung and his nephew have bonded so much, even though he’s not famous for being good with kids, that Dylan has good reasons to be so happy to spend time with him, and that, when he’s older, he’ll look at the memories they’ve made together with love and fondness. The sole thought of voicing all of this, complete with the realisation that, yes, Jisung is surprisingly good with kids and it’s a coincidence that, in Hyunjin’s opinion, it’s one of the most attractive qualities a man can have, makes his stomach try to eat itself in shock, and, before he can collect himself, he blurts out:
“So, are you looking forward to making him eat sand?”
The reaction is immediate, the picture of every single reaction he gets every time he approaches the subject of the Incident. Jisung rolls his eyes, breathes out an exasperated exhale.
“Oh my God,” he groans, “oh my God, I can’t believe you’re still bringing that up.”
And, okay. Hyunjin has talked about the Incident many, many times, namely whenever some poor soul dared to ask why he seemed to dislike Jisung so much, but he has never said a word about it to Jisung himself. And that’s because, despite how he always swears the contrary, he knows it’s silly, immature, dramatic, and all the other things he’s been told it is. Jisung must have heard of his fixation with it from someone else, but directly mentioning it… He slipped up. It’s a mistake, a huge one, and he has nothing left to do but brace himself for the teasing.
The thing is: his parents, although born and raised in the US, had spent a lifetime surrounded by other Korean families, a tight-knit community they had grown up in, side by side until they inevitably fell in love, got married, had him, and all that jazz. Moving from their hometown to the one they live in now had been a disorienting experience, and happening to live just in front of another Korean family, one who had a kid the same age as Hyunjin, had been the closest thing to home for them. It was natural that they gravitated towards Mr. and Mrs. Han, natural that they were excited about Hyunjin and the Han’s kid striking up a lifelong friendship like the ones they had formed in their childhood. Hell, Hyunjin himself was excited, too.
One day, his mom had gone to visit their neighbours, Hyunjin in tow. While the two women were busy talking each other’s ears off, Mrs. Han had suggested that he join her son in the backyard, so they could play in the sandbox. His parents’ stories about the way they met all of their friends resounded in his head. Who could blame him for being excited? He and Jisung had played for a while, and it had been fun until the other had looked at the sand and asked:
“Do you think it tastes nice?”
Hyunjin had not been particularly curious about that one, but it was his friendship of a lifetime on the line, so he had lied and answered that, yeah, it surely was yummy.
“Let’s try it together,” Jisung had said, a heart-shaped smile showing all of his gums, and, well, that was how friendship started, wasn’t it? On the count of three, Hyunjin had picked up a handful of sand and shoved it into his mouth. Jisung had stared at him for two or three seconds, blinking, and had burst out laughing.
“I can’t believe you did it for real!” he had squealed, like Hyunjin trusting him was the funniest thing in the world, and as Hyunjin’s eyes had burned with big, ugly tears, he had learned one, that Jisung was an untrustworthy asshole (and that was before he even knew what that word meant) and two, what true humiliation tasted like, sand and dirt, and sounded like, Jisung’s loud laugh.
It’s been thirteen years, fine, he’s had the time to get over it and it’s becoming ridiculous, at this point, but he’s not making it up for dramatics: he was seriously, deeply hurt by that, and every time Jisung did something nice for him, he waited for him to turn around and make fun of him again. He went to him with nothing but an open heart and childlike naivety, and Jisung had crushed his dreams and expectations under his cackles. That’s why this whole children-hunting situation is confusing, to him: he doesn’t understand if Jisung is being kind because he wants to or because it’s a setup for a cruel pun. And, sure, it’s not nice of him to presume Jisung hasn’t matured past the age of five years; still, his brain moves in the most irrational way sometimes, and again, he and Jisung aren’t friends.
It’s a conversation hitting too close to home to have it on an empty bus with a child playing Spider-Ham two seats away, and their stop is close by, if Hyunjin’s phone isn’t deceiving him, he’s ready to drop the subject until he turns around, face burning red, and sees Jisung staring at him with a small, amused smile.
“It’s not gonna help, but I only played with my brother before, and his idea of having fun was putting me through potentially traumatising and dangerous experiences, like throwing me off trees and stuff. I wanted to have the upper hand for once,” Jisung murmurs, and it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that he’s apologising for something that happened ages ago when they could barely put a thought together because Hyunjin still hasn’t let go of it, but the fact he’s willing to do it is another attack on his poor stomach, which is living the experience of being an astronaut and floating in outer – inner? – space.
It leaves him speechless, mouth slightly agape, that he’s quick to close before he says something stupid again.
“It’s our stop,” he croaks out after he’s sure his heart will not explode out of his lips when he opens them. Jisung drags Dylan off the bus with a last, pitiful look at the bus driver. Hyunjn, too engrossed in his sandbox speculations to be polite, mumbles a good night, one he will definitely have now that he’ll continue without them.
A chill breeze reddens his cheeks for a good reason when they step out. He’s too busy checking his phone to resume the conversation, or he might be paying too much attention to it to avoid doing that. He catches, though, the way Jisung’s hand is close enough to hold, knuckles nudging against his, kicking his lungs empty with every friction. It’s like being shocked, having the boy so close to him, a sweet kind of tingling he doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of. It’s something he needs to have a minor crisis about the moment he gets home, but for now, he’ll let himself feel the cold of Jisung’s ring on his skin.
From the outside, the house his sister’s at is just like every other house in towns like theirs, on two floors, painted cream, cute little flower vases by the windowsills. The windows are lit up in different colours and there’s music high enough to be audible from the street. Oh, it’s so, so much worse than he had imagined.
“They’re at a house party,” he whispers, horrified, staring at the door like it might grow fangs and tear him apart. Jisung fails to suppress a laugh, but shakes his head disapprovingly the moment he turns his gaze to him. They escaped to go to a middle schooler’s house party. He blinks, wondering just what happened to his sister. If she had to force him to an untimely death, she could’ve done so to do something cool, not pretend to get drunk on the cheapest beer and sit on the couch waiting for someone to want to kiss you. Like, anything else. Hyunjin stands in front of the door, pondering the life choices that took him here, and takes out his phone.
“Should we, like, give her a call or should we just barge in?”
“I mean,” Jisung says, scratching his nape, “It would be fun to make a scene. But she will hate you forever if you do that. So it’s your choice, sister or glory.”
Hyunjin considers his options for the long time of two seconds, then chooses sister. Giving her a call is probably useless – she’ll ignore it, just like she ignored the others. He opts for a text, quick, easy, and unavoidable.
To ❤️(*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ*.ﾟ💗 MANBOSS 🔥🎀: heyy we’re outside ur party rn so you come out or we’re coming in
To ❤️(*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ*.ﾟ💗 MANBOSS 🔥🎀: ten minutes max
He sends out the text and, not even a beat after, he sees his sister typing.
From ❤️(*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ*.ﾟ💗 MANBOSS 🔥🎀: omg THANK YOU
Needless to say, Hyunjin is the tiniest bit confused. He turns the screen to Jisung, who takes his time laughing at the way Kyujin’s contact is saved, then mirrors his expression when he reads the text.
“Well, that’s a core memory,” Hyunjin comments, “imagine your favourite underground rapper crashing your party and bringing you home because it’s past your bedtime.”
And a smile blooms on his face; he feels it. It’s going to be the most embarrassing moment of Kyujin’s life, being caught red-handed by an older person she thinks is cool. Jisung being that person shows her lapse in judgment, but makes the moment he’s about to live so much more interesting.
“You’re so evil,” replies Jisung, so admired it makes him want to giggle, or something. Definitely food for thought, that one.
It’s not a long time before the girls exit the house in a beeline, looking like the five stages of grief, unharmed save for some with a slight tipsiness that might be fake. Hyunjin stands with his arms crossed, and if everyone has always told him he resembles his mom, he’s sure they’ve never looked alike more, ready to give out a scolding, except his mom usually isn’t about to start laughing with how much she can’t wait to make them suffer. Hyunjin thinks it’s fair that they go through a minuscule fraction of anything he’s felt tonight.
Jisung stays a little to the side with Dylan, who, for all his excitement about having a mission, seems now pretty uninterested in taking his merits. He’s got the fabric of Jisung’s sweatpants held tight in his chubby fingers, tugging on it while he complains about something. Jisung nods in understanding, then crouches down to have him jump on his back again. He’s tired, Hyunjin thinks, guts churning a bit with guilt.
He snaps out of it as the girls arrive in front of him, pointedly avoiding his gaze, but, before he can even open his mouth, Kyujin launches herself at him, speaking a hurried Korean.
“Jinnie, thank God you’re here,” she says, eyes teary, “I couldn’t wait to leave, but they didn’t want to.”
And – Hyunjin is but a mere part of the cosmos. He works thanks to laws of the universe that move him, one of which is the unwavering priority his sister has over everything.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, trying not to fall straight into panic again.
Kyujin takes a deep breath. She doesn’t look incredibly shaken, but the relief is palpable in everything, from the unusual way she slumps to the twist of her eyebrows.
“So I know we did this really stupid thing, and I was on board with it and it was so shitty of me to be on board with it knowing you would panic, and I’m very very sorry, but they were so excited about this party because Claudia’s crush was going to be there and I couldn’t spoil the fun, right? Then you started calling and I got anxious, but they told me not to answer, and I wanted to go home there and then, I didn’t even like that stupid party to begin with, and I know you probably think I’m saying all this to save my ass, but you have to believe it’s the truth.”
The word vomit, from which his sister’s breath is not even heavy, takes him aback. As he breaks it down into pieces and analyses every word, he tries really hard not to forgive her in that second. Of course, he’s mad they went behind his back and made him lose ten years of his life, not to mention how stupid and dangerous their stunt was. Nothing happened to them, but it was a matter of luck and nothing else. For fuck’s sake, what did they think? They’re kids, Kyujin had told him herself that same evening. And, even if it’s dumb, he’s also a little hurt that she felt like she had to lie to him. Hell, he probably would’ve driven them to that stupid party had she asked and given him enough reassurances that it wasn’t going to end in tragedy.
But, and here is where his resolve crumbles, he remembers being her age well. If your friends ask you to do something, you do it, no questions asked, or you’re boring as hell, and affirmation from her friends is something Kyujin values and needs more than anything else in the world, more than their parents not being mad at her, more than Hyunjin sleeping at night. It’s not her fault. He suppresses the ache between his ribs – he can’t protect her from everything. To grow, she needs to make her own mistakes and hurt people and fuck things up. Hyunjin has had his fill of growing pains; they mostly stand beside him, superhero costume and child half asleep on his back, and fuck if they both aren’t living, breathing depiction of “growing means messing stuff up and hurting people”.
“It’s okay,” he mumbles, “well, it’s not, I’m mad as fuck, and you made me lose my mind with worry. But it will be, eventually. Do you want me to send the girls away or do you want them to stay?”
Kyujin mouths the word stay. It’s the only answer he needs.
“Let’s go home,” he says, in English, so everyone understands. The girls don’t even dare say anything, they just follow him, eyes glued to the cracks on the sidewalk.
“I really am sorry.” Kyujin’s voice is small, and Hyunjin is suddenly very, very tired.
“It’s just… tell me, next time you want to do stupid shit. I’m not mom or dad. I won’t scold you. But I need to know where you are if something happens to you. Someone needs to, and I’m your best bet if you want to pull stuff like this. Tell me you understand.”
His sister gives him a miserable nod and apologises again. He decides to cut it off before he makes her cry.
The ride back is silent, Hyunjin choosing to sit next to Jisung again when Kyujin joins her friends, giving them a watered-down retelling of their talk. They have, at least, the decency to look guilty. They’re close, so close, although Jisung is balancing Dylan asleep in his lap, it feels a little like breathing again. He’d like to say something, anything, but his limbs are heavy and his eyelids are closing, and he dozes off against the boy’s shoulder before he realises.
He wakes to a gentle shake. The led lights in the bus pierce a hole in his eyes the moment he cracks them open: in front of him, he makes out Jisung’s blurry features, amused smile and glint in his gaze that might just be the reflection of light on his glasses.
“Let’s go, baby number two,” the boy says. Baby number one is, of course, Dylan, who seems just about as awake as he is, face buried in the crook of his uncle’s neck. Hyunjin prays he hasn’t drooled all over his shoulder and gets up, mumbling something that should be an apology but sounds unintelligible even to his own ears.
“It’s okay, I watched the girls while you were sleeping, just in case they wanted to make another escape. You needed an emotional support nap,” Jisung states, like it’s the wisest thought he’s ever had. Gratefulness overwhelms him, leaving him so breathless he can’t thank him properly. Not that he feels rested, per se, but he does feel a little less hysterical and just the idea of Jisung doing that for him – it does things to his head.
It’ll probably be fun to recall this story years from now, he thinks, like every event that is just one stroke of luck away from being a tragedy. Right now, he doesn’t feel a lot like laughing. He and Jisung walk side by side again, and Hyunjin doesn’t look forward to the moment they’ll arrive home, he realizes with a pang in his chest. Not only because he’s going to have to rethink a lot of his life decisions and figure out just how much do his hormones control him, but also because it’s so frail, this closeness they’ve built tonight, and it could be Hyunjin clinging to him for comfort and Jisung letting him because he was upset, but it feels nice, and he’s scared of what happens when the door closes behind him. Do they go back to where they were before, nodding hi when Felix stops Jisung in the hallway to talk, otherwise ignoring each other? Are they friends again? Or, now, because Hyunjin doesn’t think he’s let them be friends before.
“I can hear you thinking from here,” Jisung’s voice is soft and slightly teasing, but not sharp enough to cut, and Hyunjin’s throat ties in a knot. He glances over to the other helplessly, finding his warm brown eyes like an anchor, digging into them to find an answer.
“Overthinking is my gig, Hyune. Find yourself a new one, okay?”
It’s a joke, and not the solution to all his problems he was looking for, but he picks up the sweet crumb in the shape of his nickname Jisung’s left on the road, pockets it and waits to see where he’ll drop one next.
They make their way to their houses, where their paths divide; the ground is being ripped away from under his shoes when he stops and looks at Jisung again, heart thrumming in his ears. He doesn’t want him to go, although he has no choice and no valid excuse. They look at each other for what feels like ages.
“I have to drop this guy off,” Jisung says, and it’s stupid that Hyunjin wants to whine about it. He forces himself to be reasonable and nods, but makes no move towards his own house, filled with the need to say something and not finding the words.
“Thank you,” he manages to get out, “you didn’t have to, but you made it all more bearable, so. Thank you.”
It feels like saying something more than the words themselves, like shifting the world a little to the left. Hyunjin might not know how to breathe anymore. Jisung shrugs, and he might be seeing things; it might be the light, but his cheeks flush a shade darker. He brings two fingers to his forehead in a mock salute.
“Hey, I’m just doing what I have to do. You know, friendly neighbourhood Spiderman and all that…” He can see Jisung cringing at himself the second he says it, eyes shutting, and it punches a laugh out of him. He’s so corny. Hyunjin likes him so much.
The thought makes him choke on his spit because, what the hell? And he’s greeting Jisung and hurrying the girls inside as every inch of his body starts to feel like it’s been set on fire. Right now, he sees how inevitable the conclusion is: it’s been looming on him all night, a snowball effect that’s begun with finding him attractive and has gained weight the more they spent the evening together, snow adding to snow when Jisung had held him through his crying, gone out of his way to help him though he had no reason to, and all those times before, all those conflicting feelings kicking in his chest in those years they’ve spent as they were, forming an avalanche that’s only now crashing down on him. It would be dishonest to say Hyunjin’s liked him all this time, he thinks, but he’s never felt as intensely as he has towards anyone but Jisung, all the anger and begrudged admiration and the affection, too, the kind possible only growing up together despite everything.
He knows Jisung like the back of his hand, he realises, and he knows him from watching him all this time, at a careful distance, not close enough to be noticed, not far enough to miss anything; it’s natural that, now, he wants to know him by touch, by taste, by all those details he can get only if he steps close enough to feel his breathing. It’s a bit of a life-changing discovery that he’s having, right there in the middle of the hallway, Kyujin looking at him like he’s grown a second head. He wants to know and to be known, and Jisung, fuck, Jisung’s always been special to him, in all kinds of ways, and now he wants to be special to him, too. Is he? Did Jisung help him because he cares, or because he’s just nice? Nice isn’t a word he’d use to describe him, in the general sense. Jisung’s not nice and he’s not polite, he’s blunt and harsh but he does everything with his whole heart in it, and he might have done it because, arch nemesis or not, he's as kind-hearted as few can be.
“You guys do whatever you want,” he wheezes to the girls, “I’m going outside for a bit.”
Kyujin’s look grows from questioning to borderline worried, but it’s not like he can spill the major crisis he’s having in the living room, so he just shakes his head, turns on his heels and leaves through the door again.
“Fucking weirdo,” he hears her mutter, but he’s so out of it it doesn’t even matter.
He sits on his porch, knees tucked under his chin, and watches the Han’s window drip light in the space between the curtains. His heart is beating so fast, like he’s almost finishing a race and everything in his body is begging him to stop, his legs threatening to give out, his lungs incapable of holding a breath. He hugs his legs and tries to calm down. His teeth clatter in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with the cold.
The door across the street opens and Hyunjin fights not to run away from that sliver of light, from that silhouette he knows is coming for him. It’s fifteen steps from his house to Jisung’s. They feel like miles. Jisung’s steps are slow, measured. Hyunjin thinks he might go insane from anticipation.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Jisung jokes when he’s finally, finally at arm’s reach, and Hyunjin’s mouth dries up. In the span of time Hyunjin spent panicking, he has swapped his costume for a loose hoodie, a washed-off black that is now closer to brown with the red logo of his brother’s high school band. He looks softer, hazy, like dreams often are. The yellow light of the porch paints his tan skin the same color of honey, smooth golden, darker where a faint blush blooms on his cheeks, on the tips of his ears. Hyunjin wants to touch so bad his heart aches with it.
Jisung is hesitant, unsure, only sits down when Hyunjin pats the ground next to him, and he lets himself hope he might be feeling restless for the same reason he does.
“Hey,” he whispers, in fear that speaking out loud will break something still inexistent.
“Hey, yourself,” Jisung answers. He rummages in his pockets for a while, then extracts a handful of candy.
“Payment for our hard work,” he says with a wink, and Hyunjin is just about to tell him he doesn't like sweet things that much, when he looks down and finds that most of it is sour. Has Jisung chosen them to match his taste? The thought leaves his pulse to accelerate. He pops one in his mouth, while Jisung picks one disgustingly sweet, covered in sugar.
Hyunjin inhales, exhales. He doesn't know why Jisung is here, and he hates having false hopes. There's a grain of sugar on the corner of Jisung's lips, and he wants to lick it off so bad it makes his head spin.
“Sorry again for dragging you into that mess,” he mumbles. He'd like to look away from Jisung, because he gets the feeling he might be staring at him too long, but he doesn't know when he'll see him again this close, and he's just discovered he might be down bad for the guy – he's allowed a little peeking. The boy's eyes glitter with something he might be reading too much into, addicting all the same.
Jisung's hand settles on Hyunjin's knee, squeezes lightly. It delivers like a punch to the gut, and he's metaphorically taking four or five steps back because of how hard it hit him; in real life, the air is sucked out of his lungs as he tears his gaze away from the boy's face to the point he's touching.
“It's okay, I mean… I went into it willingly,” he says. His smile is as big as his voice is trembling, and, ironically, that's what calms him down. Jisung is nervous behind his jokes and his attitude, and that simple point of contact has coloured his ears a deep red shade. Jisung blushes on his ears first, then his neck, then his whole face. It's a detail he’s learned in his years of observation and that he finds particularly endearing, although, at this point, he might have to resign himself to liking everything about him.
Hyunjin shifts, so he's sitting in a way that has their body fully turned to each other, just to see more, to feel more. Their knees knock together, and Jisung lets out an awkward little laugh, one he wants to drink up until his lips find the source.
“It was nice, anyway,” Jisung continues, and he's shying away from his stare, looking to his hands instead. His shaking fingers are tying in multiple knots the string of his sweatpants, untying it, tying it again.
“Yeah,” Hyunjin agrees, and despite the electricity he can hear crackling in the air, he chooses to match Jisung’s quiet, gentle way of approaching the matter. It's hell, keeping himself from jumping on him, but patience is a virtue he has learned the value of on many occasions. “I mean, I'm never letting myself babysit again, but.”
To that, Jisung laughs. The sense of accomplishment he feels in his chest is silly and exaggerated, but it's fine. Hyunjin has a crush, he’s allowed to be a little stupid. When it dies down, the other opens his eyes and finds Hyunjin looking at him again, and this time, oh. This time, everything must be showing on his face, Jisung’s expression shifts into seriousness. His hand goes from resting on Hyunjin's knee to his shoulder, a touch that's both more and less intimate. Just like that, Hyunjin feels nothing in his body, wrapped in a thick coat of excitement that leaves only the spot where Jisung's hand is bare.
“Perhaps we could hold our truce for a little longer?” Hyunjin hears himself say, but his voice sounds miles away, ears filled with cotton and the thrumming of his heart.
Jisung's hand trails up to the back of his neck, right where it's supposed to be. It's perfect for pulling him in, and Hyunjin knows, now, a certainty buzzing in his blood, that it won't take much time until Jisung does just that.
“You have to tell me if I'm reading this wrong,” Jisung whispers. And since he knows it's going to happen, well. Hyunjin usually likes dragging out the wait, when he's in control of himself, a position he wouldn't say he’s in right now, but he's lucid enough to have some fun with it.
“Reading what wrong?” He tries to go for a teasing smile, but he must fail, his cheeks ache. The boy in front of him rolls his eyes.
“Christ, you really are insufferable,” Jisung breathes out. Then, he surges forward and kisses him. His stomach’s doing somersaults, the feeling of Jisung’s chapped lips pressed against his numbs all his senses and sets every single nerve of his alight at the same time. It doesn’t last long, just enough for Hyunjin to grow hungrier, then Jisung places both hands on his shoulders and rips them apart. He can’t help the disgruntled noise he lets out.
“Let’s hang out,” Jisung says, and Hyunjin is very, very confused. He’s also kind of pissed off that he’s cut off precious kissing time to ask him to do something they’re already doing (if kissing on Hyunjin’s porch is considered hanging out). “I don’t mean it in a fuckboy way,” he adds, and now he gets what he’s so worried about. Hyunjin thought his smile couldn’t get any bigger, but there he is, giving the boy in front of him the biggest, giddiest smile he’s capable of. “Like, I’m not saying let’s go in an empty parking lot with your dad’s car, though that could be an idea, I’m saying… we could go see one of those museums you like, or, or something. I mean, I probably won’t understand anything but that’s okay, ‘cause you could explain that stuff to me, and you love it when you’re smarter than me. It’s a win-win situation, right? What I mean is-”
Hyunjin is truly, sincerely flattered by how he has him rambling like that, but he has the creeping suspicion that they’ll stay here all night if he doesn’t do something to stop Jisung’s word vomit.
“Are you saying you like me?” he asks, and Jisung’s eyes snap back to him, surprised at being cut off. Then, he glares.
“Dude, that’s hardly news. I thought you knew,” he says accusingly, and Hyunjin’s world stops spinning for a few seconds. He had imagined a similar epiphany had occurred to Jisung the same night, but the idea of Jisung having liked him for longer than that, God knows how long, being supposedly obvious in showing it… It’s kind of earth-shattering.
“Oh, okay,” he lets out, and it’s a mild reaction, but he struggles to speak when he feels his heart has grown four sizes and is obstructing his throat. Jisung takes his glasses off, sets them on the ground next to him. The implication makes his breath catch against his ribs again.
“I mean, me… me too.”
“Yeah,” Jisung draws closer, so close their noses bump together, and everything Hyunjin could see before is swallowed by the never-ending pit of Jisung’s eyes, the flash of his teeth as he smiles, the warmth his skin exudes. “Yeah, I figured.”
There are so many things they have to talk about, so many years of tension, mutual envy, and misunderstandings that can’t be erased in one night, and Hyunjin knows he probably has to figure out stuff on his own. It’s easy to put all the things he feels and has felt related to Jisung in a big box of infatuation, but not all those feelings are good, not all of them come from a place of love, and the sincere admiration he harbors sometimes mixes with the pettiest jealousy, which makes it all the more confusing. And Jisung has his own shit to sort, too, his own personal tangle to unravel, and Hyunjin might be thinking about this too hard, might be too many steps ahead, so he decides he can wait until tomorrow before he starts overcomplicating everything.
“Kiss me again,” he says, and hopes it sounds more like a command and less like a plea. Jisung’s huff of laughter lands on his upper lip; Hyunjin is so ridiculously excited, goosebumps explode on his arms, on his nape where Jisung’s hand cards through his hair and pulls him in.
“Aye, aye,” Jisung answers, lips moving against his, and God, he’s so embarrassing, and Hyunjin likes him in just as embarrassing an amount. But kiss him again, Jisung does, firm and deliberate yet so, so soft. His mouth is sweet when Hyunjin licks into it, and sure, he has never liked candy, but he might get addicted to the flavour lingering on the back of Jisung’s teeth. Their knees get in the way, and he might go insane if he doesn’t get as close to him as possible – he takes the initiative and all but climbs onto his lap, punching a breathy laugh out of the other, one he’s quick to muffle with his own mouth. Hyunjin has kissed people before.
He’s kissed girls when he didn’t want to feel left out, then almost every boy who has wanted him because every occasion missed was one he was afraid he’d never get again; he’s kissed people who were good at it, people who were bad at it, people he didn’t like and people he liked too much, that one senior Felix had said looked just like Kento Yamazaki (Hyunjin doesn’t know who that is) he wasn’t able to stop talking about for two months, although he was too flustered for the experience per se to be enjoyable. None of those kisses even compares to this.
This is Jisung, the boy he’s known ever since he has memories to recall and his mouth is gentle and unforgiving where it presses on every corner of his, like he doesn’t want to miss anything, like he wants to commit everything to memory, and if their teeth clash against each other it doesn’t matter, it just moves him to find a better angle. They couldn’t be closer, yet closer is all that he wants, fighting the nonsensical urge to crawl under Jisung’s skin and make a home for himself there. He wishes he could never run out of air, but when they inevitably have to break apart, he finds out he’s underestimated how good that would feel, too. Jisung leaves hot breaths against his jaw, sending chills through his spine, trails kisses next to his ear, down his neck, every single one of them a mind-numbing shiver. Nimble hands tug Hyunjin’s shirt out of his pants and sneak under, tighten around his waist, not wanting anything else but to feel more of his skin. It tickles a little. Hyunjin gets to drag his fingers through Jisung’s hair and feel they’re as soft as he imagined, head dizzy with satisfaction.
“You’re so fucking pretty,” the boy whispers against skin, then bites down on the column of his throat. Hyunjin doesn’t know if the gasp ripped out of his lips is from the praise or the feeling of a bruise being sucked on his neck. Just to be sure, he pulls him up and kisses him again. At some point, they slow down, his hands letting go of Jisung’s now messed up hair to swipe a thumb across his jaw, then rest on the side of his neck. They stay like that for a while, kissing just to kiss, to stay close to each other, although Jisung complains that he can’t kiss him properly because Hyunjin just can’t stop smiling, no matter how hard he tries. And when the boy under him shivers from the cold, Hyunjin sees a chance and takes it.
“Do you want to come in?” he asks.
Jisung wants to. They eat the girls’ leftovers at the kitchen table, ankles interlocked together, but they don’t talk much, except nonsense that has Hyunjin choking on his food more than once. Sometime later, they move to the couch, Jisung cuddled up on his side like some oversized housecat, exchanging sweet nothings and lazy kisses that don’t lead anywhere, both because they can’t and because they don’t want to, it would be too much, too fast. Jisung dozes off on him three times before Hyunjin gets the courage to tell him to go home. He’d ask him to stay if he didn’t have to deal with the girls still being here and finding him in the morning. Jisung pouts, but eventually goes, eyes half-lidded, after kissing him goodnight three times.
(In the afternoon, when everyone has left, he and Kyujin are both in the bathroom: she is hand washing the pillowcase, stained with the pink hair dye she obviously forgot to rinse off, in the bathtub. He’s using all of his nonexistent makeup skills to try and cover up the purplish bruise Jisung had the courtesy to leave on his neck. He'd like to ask for a more detailed explanation of what happened last night, but he and Jisung have heard loud laughing and talking coming from up the stairs for much longer after they should've gone to bed, and Hyunjin figures that the most important thing is that she had fun. There's always time for the rest, and he doesn't want to taint a nice memory with his nagging.
Kyujin’s eyes are burning holes through his skull. Whenever he turns a questioning gaze at her, she blinks innocently and goes back to her chore, a meek Cinderella clad in shark-shaped slippers. He almost gets away with it. He’s putting the concealer back in his mom’s beauty case, and he thinks he’s getting away with it, when Kyujin gives her pillowcase a final scrunch and asks, tone even except for a teasing lilt,
“So I get we don’t hate Jisung anymore?”
Hyunjin threatens to tell on her and even takes out his phone, pretending to call their mom, until Kyujin begs him not to. It’s all for show anyway. On her way out, she gives him a thumbs-up and whispers something about getting the spot in front of the stage at a gig. Hyunjin tells her he doesn’t speak Korean and shuts the door in her face. He looks at his reflection and bursts out laughing.)