Work Text:
"Woonhak." Dongmin's hand found Woonhak's shoulder in the dark, shaking gently.
Nothing. He tried again with both hands this time. "Woonhak, wake up."
One eye opened, then the other. He blinked slowly, gaze unfocused, surfacing from somewhere deep and not yet sure what he was surfacing into.
"Dongmin? Is it you?"
"Yes," Dongmin whispered, and pulled his hands back. "It's me."
Woonhak pushed himself up on his elbow, hair dishevelled, face soft and creased from the pillow. He looked younger somehow, his face was puffier. Dongmin had the sudden and completely unreasonable urge to press his thumb into his cheek just to see what would happen.
"You can't sleep?"
"No, it's not that." Dongmin fidgeted with the edge of Woonhak's blanket, not quite meeting his eyes. "I want to show you something."
"What?"
"A surprise."
Woonhak's expression shifted into something more cautious.
"We're not allowed to leave our rooms at night." He said it quietly but seriously, the way he said most things, as if every rule was worth the weight it had been given. "We're supposed to be sleeping."
Dongmin huffed through his nose. "Please, Woonhak. I promise we won't get caught."
Woonhak considered this with the gravity it probably didn't deserve.
Dongmin watched him think it through with expecting eyes, watched him weigh it, and said nothing more, knowing somehow that pressing harder would only push him back. It had to be Woonhak's own decision.
In the end, curiosity won out over caution. He nodded once, small and a little reluctant.
The night outside was cooler than expected, the sky a deep and total dark between the trees. Their footsteps were careful on the grass, landing soft, trying not to exist too loudly.
Dongmin stopped at the foot of a large oak and looked up.
Woonhak stopped beside him, looked up too, and saw nothing particularly remarkable.
"What are you looking at? Did you see a squirrel?"
"There's a treehouse." Dongmin tilted his chin toward the canopy. "I spotted it earlier but I haven't figured out how to get up there yet."
Woonhak squinted. "A treehouse," he repeated, as if verifying.
Dongmin was already moving, hands finding bark, testing branches.
He went up with an ease that suggested he'd done things this way before: quietly, at night, without permission.
Woonhak watched from below with both hands in his pockets, something between admiration and mild alarm settling over his face.
A moment passed. Then the rope ladder came tumbling down, swaying gently against the bark.
"What are you waiting for?" Dongmin's voice floated down, hushed and pleased with itself. "Climb up."
Woonhak climbed carefully, hand over hand, testing each rung before committing his weight to it. The opposite of how Dongmin had gone up.
The treehouse was small. Smaller than it had looked from the ground and there was barely enough room to sit without their knees touching, their shoulders finding each other in the cramped dark.
Woonhak didn't try to move away. There wasn't anywhere to move to anyway.
"Is it your first time here?" he asked.
"In this treehouse? Yeah." Dongmin settled back against the wall, entirely unbothered by the fact that they were breaking at least two rules and possibly three.
"I saw it when we were walking around earlier. I kept thinking about it."
Woonhak nodded slowly. There wasn't any light, no bulb overhead or torch wedged into a corner but his eyes were adjusting, and in the faint silver that filtered through the gaps in the wood he could make out the walls and the words carved into them.
He leaned forward slightly, tracing the shapes with his gaze before he could read them properly.
Bible verses worn into the wood by someone's patient hand, letters soft at the edges from years of weather and touch.
He didn't need full light to recognise them. Some of them he already knew by heart.
Something settled in his chest, quiet and familiar. The feeling he got in the church back home when the morning light came through the high windows at a certain angle and landed on the same spot on the floor it always did. He sat back.
Beside him Dongmin looked different out here or maybe it was just the dark, the way it softened things, made the familiar strange.
Usually Dongmin moved through the days here with something restless in him. A hunger for elsewhere that he didn't bother to hide, the kind of wanderlust that had a way of making everyone around him feel slightly stationary.
His mother had made him come, everyone knew that by now. He'd said so himself, plainly, on the first day, without embarrassment.
But up here he looked almost content or proud, maybe. The expression of someone who had found a thing before anyone else could and was quietly glad about it.
Woonhak looked at the carved verses again, at Dongmin's profile in the dark, at the small square of sky visible through the treehouse roof, dense with stars.
He was so scared of getting caught that his pulse had been unsteady since they'd slipped out the door and he didn't want to think about what the punishment might look like if someone noticed they were gone.
"Relax." Dongmin's shoulder bumped gently against his. "I promised you we wouldn't get caught, didn't I?"
Woonhak exhaled. "You did."
"So relax."
Woonhak unfolded his hands from his lap and set them flat on his knees instead, which didn't help much but was something to do.
Outside the treehouse the night was very still, only the occasional shift of branches from time to time.
"Have you done this before?" Woonhak asked. "Sneaking out."
"Many times."
"Here?"
"No, back home." Dongmin's voice was easy. "This is a new location."
Woonhak glanced at him again. In the dark Dongmin looked unbothered in the way that suggested it was constitutional, built into him somewhere deep, the kind of calm that didn't come from the absence of risk but from simply not minding it.
Woonhak found it difficult to understand and difficult to look away from.
"What else have you done?" he asked. "That you're not allowed to."
Dongmin looked at him then, a sideways look, assessing, as if he was deciding something.
"Booze," he said. "Mostly."
Woonhak was quiet for a moment, turning the word over. "What's that?"
Dongmin glanced at him again. Something shifted in his expression, not condescension but rather reassessment. Right, this was Woonhak who he was talking to.
"Alcohol," he said.
"Oh." Woonhak nodded slowly. "Does it taste good?"
"No." Dongmin almost smiled. "Not really."
"Then why do you drink it?"
Dongmin was quiet for a moment and Woonhak had the sense he was asking something nobody had bothered to ask before, or at least not genuinely, not without already having an opinion about the answer.
"It's the feeling," Dongmin said finally. "When you're drunk everything gets quieter and lighter. It's like for a little while nothing is pressing down on you. My mother would say that's exactly why it's forbidden. That you're supposed to sit with the weight, not drink it away."
"Is she right?"
Dongmin considered this with more seriousness than Woonhak had expected. "Probably," he admitted. "Doesn't stop me."
Woonhak nodded. He received it the way he seemed to receive most things: carefully, without rushing to a verdict.
Dongmin could feel it, the quality of Woonhak's attention, and it was strange because usually when he talked about this kind of thing there was an undercurrent he had to manage, the other person's discomfort or their judgment or their poorly concealed interest in the details.
There was none of that here. Woonhak was present, listening, and it made Dongmin feel oddly exposed in a way that had nothing to do with what he'd actually said.
"Do you like it?" Woonhak asked. "The feeling."
"Sometimes." He paused. "But sometimes it just makes everything louder instead. It depends on the night."
"What makes it louder?"
Dongmin looked at him. Woonhak was watching him with that expression he had, open and leisurely, genuinely wanting to know.
"When there's something I can't get out of my head," Dongmin said. "The alcohol kind of amplifies it instead of quieting it down."
Woonhak nodded slowly. "So it doesn't always work."
"No," Dongmin said. "It doesn't always work."
Woonhak seemed to sit with that for a moment. Then he asked quietly: "What do you do then? When it doesn't work."
Dongmin had not been expecting the question, or maybe he had not been expecting to not have an answer ready for it.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I haven't figured that out yet."
Woonhak nodded again and didn't push and didn't offer a solution. He let the answer be what it was. In Dongmin's experience people rarely did that.
The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable. It settled between them and stayed there and neither of them moved to fill it, which felt like its own kind of thing, its own small accomplishment.
Dongmin looked at the carved verses on the wall without reading them. Woonhak looked at his own hands in his lap.
"I've never broken a rule before," Woonhak said eventually. "Not really."
"I know."
"Is that strange to you?"
Dongmin thought about it. "A little," he said. "Not in a bad way. Just-" he paused, searching for the right word. "You seem very sure of things. Of what's right and what isn't. I don't have that."
Woonhak looked at him. "You could."
"Could what?"
"Be sure of things." He said it without pressure. "I don't think you're as far from it as you think."
Dongmin looked back at him. In the low light Woonhak's face was open and entirely serious, no trace of acting in it.
He meant it simply because it was what he thought and he saw no reason not to say it.
Dongmin felt something move in his chest, low and quiet, and looked away.
"You don't know me very well yet," he said.
"No," Woonhak agreed. "But I'd like to."
Dongmin had kept his promise. They hadn't gotten caught.
It was a small thing, maybe, but Woonhak turned it over on the walk back and found that it mattered to him more than he'd expected.
Dongmin had said I promise and then made it true, quietly and without flamboyance, and Woonhak didn't take that lightly. A promise kept was a promise kept.
He didn't question what had moved Dongmin to wake him up specifically. Out of everyone in their room, out of everyone in the camp, it had been Woonhak's shoulder his hand had found in the dark.
Woonhak chose to receive that simply, as a good thing, because it was. Dongmin had wanted to show him something and had thought of him and that was enough.
What stayed with him more was the conversation.
The easy way Dongmin had talked, the things he'd admitted without shame, like he was just telling the truth because it was the truth and there was no particular reason to dress it up.
Woonhak had sat with all of it carefully, each thing Dongmin offered, and found that none of it made him want to pull away.
If anything it had the opposite effect, filling in the shape of someone he was still learning, adding weight and dimension to a person who had until now been interesting in a way Woonhak couldn't quite account for.
He didn't think Dongmin was bad. He thought Dongmin was searching, which was different.
His father had told him once that the people furthest from faith are often the ones who need someone to simply sit beside them without trying to change them.
Woonhak had sat beside Dongmin and asked honest questions and listened to honest answers and he thought, quietly, that this was something he could do.
For Dongmin it was simpler and more complicated at the same time.
He had not planned to say half of what he'd said. He'd brought Woonhak up there on an impulse.
The treehouse had been sitting in the back of his mind all day, a small discovery that felt too good to keep to himself and the talking had happened the way talking sometimes did in the dark. Loosening without permission, finding its own level.
He had waited for the moment Woonhak's expression would shift, the small tightening around the eyes that meant judgment was being quietly formed. It hadn't come.
Woonhak had just looked at him and listened and asked the next question and Dongmin had answered that too, and somewhere in the middle of it he had stopped waiting.
That was new.
He wasn't sure what to do with it yet. He filed it away somewhere without a label and told himself he'd figure it out later, and walked back through the dark beside Woonhak, and didn't figure it out at all.
------
After that first night in the treehouse, something shifted.
It happened the way these things sometimes do: one day they were two boys assigned to the same room and then suddenly they were something else entirely, something that didn't have a clean name, but everyone around them seemed to notice anyway. They weren't strangers, weren't solely roommates, and friends seemed like too much given the few days they'd been spending their time together, and at the same time too little given how much they'd learned about each other already.
They often fell into step with each other without deciding to.
Breakfast became a given. Dongmin always filled Woonhak's cup before his own, and Woonhak always saved him a seat without being asked. Free hours found them at the treehouse, or under the elm trees at the far edge of the field, or simply side by side somewhere, not always talking. Woonhak would read and Dongmin would exist next to him, which was apparently enough for both of them.
The nights were theirs in a different way. After lights out, when the room settled into the slow breathing of sleep, one of them would nudge the other awake and they'd slip out without a word, crossing the dark grass to the oak tree like it was something they'd always done. They sat with their shoulders touching in the small space and talked about things that felt easier to say in the dark.
Donghyun, who slept in the bunk across from theirs, had taken to watching them with the quietly entertained expression of someone witnessing something they fully expected to become a story they'd tell later. He never said anything directly. He really didn't need to, because his eyebrows communicated plenty on their own.
It was the kind of closeness that made no logical sense given the time. Five days were nothing. It wasn't enough to know someone, not really, and yet Dongmin had stopped feeling like a stranger to Woonhak somewhere around day three, and by now that felt like a fact as plain as the weather. Some people just fit together a certain way. That was all.
It was their group's turn to cook for the camp.
The kitchen was chaos. Bodies squeezing past each other, steam fogging the windows, someone at the back shouting about missing pepper or salt. Dongmin and Woonhak ended up side by side at the prep station without having planned it. They just kept ending up in the same places.
They were still figuring each other out.
Five days in, which was both enough and not nearly enough. Enough to know the rhythm of each other's mornings, to have inside references neither of them had named yet, to have been to the treehouse three nights in a row now. Not enough to have stopped noticing things. Dongmin still caught himself watching the way Woonhak listened, the quality of attention he gave everything, like nothing was too small to take seriously.
Woonhak handed him a knife without being asked and Dongmin took it without comment.
They worked in silence for a moment, companionable and easy.
"You're dicing those too big," Woonhak said.
Dongmin looked at his pile and then at Woonhak's. "What do you mean? They're the same size."
"They're not."
"They're nearly the same size."
"Nearly isn't the same."
"For a stew it is."
Woonhak considered this with more seriousness than it deserved. "No," he concluded. "It isn't."
Dongmin laughed under his breath and kept chopping. "Have you cooked a lot back home?"
"My mother lets me help sometimes. Even though she mostly corrects what I do, she does let me help."
"So you learned criticism firsthand."
Woonhak glanced at him, catching the implication. "I'm not criticising, I'm just observing."
"You're doing that from a critical standpoint."
"From a precise standpoint." But the corner of his mouth was doing something. "You can make them smaller. That's all I'm asking for."
"You said the sauce won't cook evenly."
"It won't."
"But five minutes ago you said they were fine?"
"I said they were probably fine, that's different."
Dongmin pointed his knife at him. "You are impossible to cook with."
"You've cooked with me for four minutes."
"Four awfully long minutes." Dongmin faux sighed.
Woonhak laughed, sudden and bright, the kind that seemed to surprise him slightly each time it came out. Dongmin had already catalogued it as one of his favourite sounds without making a conscious decision to do so.
"Can opener," Dongmin said, reaching past him. "I'll do the tomatoes, then. Something I can't get wrong."
Woonhak glanced over. "Don't say things like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you've already decided how it goes." He said it simply, without superstition in it, just the quiet practicality of someone who'd been taught that confidence without care was its own kind of carelessness. "Pay attention and you won't get it wrong."
Dongmin looked at him for a second. "That's very wise for a Thursday afternoon."
"It's Friday."
"Wise for a Friday," he corrected himself.
Woonhak shook his head, already turning back to his cutting board. Dongmin watched him for just a moment longer than necessary, then looked down at the can opener.
He paid attention. It didn't help.
The lid gave way with a sharp metallic pop, and Dongmin reached to peel it back the rest of the way.
That's when it happened.
The edge caught his index finger, just a slip, just a careless second, and for a moment he felt nothing at all. The cold shock of the metal, a strange, distant awareness that something had gone wrong.
Then the blood came.
It welled up in perfect crimson beads along a thin, precise line, trembling and then spilling over, running in a hot, ticklish trail down his finger and into his palm.
Dongmin hissed, dropping the lid, making it clatter against the counter.
"Dongmin?" Woonhak was at his side immediately, knife abandoned. "What happened? Are you bleeding? Let me see."
"It's just a cut-"
But Woonhak had already taken his hand, both of his hands, cradling Dongmin's like it was something fragile. His face went pale at the sight of the blood, at the way it kept coming, insistent and bright.
"Oh," he breathed. "Oh, that's- there's a lot. Dongmin, that's a lot of blood."
"Woonhak, it's-"
And then, before Dongmin could finish, Woonhak lifted his hand and put Dongmin's finger in his mouth.
Dongmin's brain went completely blank.
Woonhak's lips closed around the cut, gentle and instinctive, and the warmth of his mouth was shocking: soft and wet and impossibly intimate. The bleeding stopped against his tongue. Dongmin could feel the faint pressure, the slight suction as Woonhak held him there, and he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but stare.
The kitchen noise faded to a dull roar. The steam, the shouting, the clatter of pans, all of it muffled, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the world. There was only this: Woonhak's mouth on his skin, Woonhak's brow furrowed in concentration like this was the most normal thing in the world.
A few seconds. That was all. Then Woonhak pulled back, a thin string of pink-tinged saliva breaking between his lip and Dongmin's fingertip. There was a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth; he wiped it away with the back of his hand, unthinking.
"Sorry," he said, not a trace of embarrassment anywhere on his face. There was only concern, plain and uncomplicated. "My mother always does that for the bleeding. It stops it faster, I think."
Dongmin stared at him.
Woonhak had already found a dish towel and was pressing it to Dongmin's palm, brisk and focused. "We should clean it properly. There's a first-aid kit somewhere in the bathroom, probably. Come on."
And then Dongmin was being pulled out of the kitchen, Woonhak's hand around his wrist, moving with the purpose of someone who had decided what needed to happen and was simply making it happen. It didn't seem to cross his mind that he'd just done something that would short-circuit most people. That the intimacy of it might register differently outside of wherever Woonhak existed inside his head.
Dongmin looked back once. Donghyun was watching them go from across the kitchen, eyebrows raised so high they'd nearly left his face entirely.
The bathhouse door swung shut behind them.
Dongmin's finger was still warm, still tingling.
His mother does that, he told himself. It's just something his mother does.
The bathroom was empty. Sunlight came through the high windows in long pale columns, catching on the taps, casting shadows across the white tile floor. Every sound echoed in there: the squeak of their shoes, the hollow clatter of Woonhak yanking open cabinet drawers.
"Sit," Woonhak said, gesturing to the edge of the bathtub.
Dongmin sat. His legs felt slightly unsteady, which was embarrassing. His mind was still back in the kitchen, replaying the moment in a loop it showed no sign of breaking.
Woonhak found the first-aid kit and knelt in front of him, popping open the red plastic box. His hands had stopped trembling now that there was a task to focus on. He laid out antiseptic wipes, a small tube of ointment, and a roll of gauze, each with careful precision.
"Show me," Woonhak said.
Dongmin held out his hand. The bleeding had slowed to a lazy ooze, the dish towel blotched with red. Beneath it, the cut was small and clean: a thin line across his fingertip, still glistening.
Woonhak looked at it closely, acting as if he were doing a vital job. "Does it hurt?"
"Barely."
"I doubt it." He tore open an antiseptic wipe. "This might sting, I'm sorry."
The cold wipe touched the cut and Dongmin hissed through his teeth, more surprise than pain. Woonhak flinched in sympathy, his grip on Dongmin's wrist tightening briefly.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'll be quick."
"Woonhak, I'm not dying."
"You were bleeding."
"A little. That's what fingers do when you cut them."
"You're supposed to be careful." His voice had gone quiet, almost defensive, like the carelessness itself was the injury.
Dongmin looked down at him, at his furrowed brows and caught lip and the blood still smeared across his thumb, and felt something splinter and soften all at once.
You're so gentle, he thought. The world has kept you so safe, and now you think a paper cut is a tragedy. What's going to happen when something really hurts you? Who's going to be there? I want to be there.
This was how Woonhak had been raised. Held carefully, kept close, the family's singular hope and pride. Every scraped knee had probably been a crisis, every fever a vigil. He'd learned, without ever being taught in so many words, that when someone you loved was hurt, you dropped everything and fixed it without thinking about it first.
And apparently you put their bleeding finger in your mouth without a second thought, like it was nothing, like it was the same as handing them a plaster. A cut wasn't just a cut to Woonhak. It was a failure of protection. Dongmin understood that more than he'd expected to.
"Thank you for all of this."
Woonhak glanced up, surprised. "You don't have to thank me. You're my-"
"Dearest friend," Dongmin finished, quietly.
He said it so Woonhak wouldn't have to, so the words wouldn't land somewhere they couldn't recover from.
Woonhak smiled, something settling in him, and turned back to the cut. He applied the ointment with careful fingers, his touch almost weightless. Then he unrolled the gauze and wrapped it around Dongmin's fingertip with the same slow precision he used for everything that mattered to him.
When he was done, he pressed his thumb to the centre of the bandage, light as a benediction, lingering just a moment.
Then he closed his eyes.
His lips moved without sound; his hand still cradled Dongmin's, the bandaged finger resting against his palm.
He was praying.
Dongmin couldn't move, couldn't look away.
The afternoon light caught the cross at Woonhak's throat, caught the smear of blood at the corner of his mouth, caught the fan of his lashes against his cheeks. He looked like something carved from devotion, like a figure in a stained-glass window, kneeling in the light, asking something of a God he had never once doubted.
He's praying for my finger, Dongmin thought. He put my finger in his mouth and now he's praying for it. He's asking God to heal a cut the size of a grain of rice.
It should have been funny, and it should have been absurd, but Woonhak meant it. He meant all of it. The panic, the kneeling, the prayer, the word dearest. He poured his whole heart into everything without measuring what he was pouring, and Dongmin was standing at the edge of it, trying to hold some of it without spilling.
Don't, he thought. Don't pray for me. Don't waste your faith on this. Don't put your mouth on my skin like I'm something worth healing.
But he said nothing. His throat wouldn't allow it.
Woonhak opened his eyes.
"All done," he said, and smiled.
Dongmin held himself together by a thread, and then he let the thread loosen into something easier, something Woonhak wouldn't have to worry about.
"So," he said. "Did you put in a good word for me? Full recovery? Maybe a small miracle?"
Woonhak blinked. "What?"
"The prayer. Am I losing the finger, or?"
Woonhak's cheeks went pink. "I wasn't- I was just-"
"You were praying over a paper cut."
"It's not a paper cut. It's a laceration."
"A laceration." Dongmin bit back a grin. "Right, life-threatening. First the dramatic rescue, and now this. I'm lucky you got to me in time."
"You're making fun of me."
"I'm not."
He was, a little, but the fondness underneath it was real, and he let that show too, let it soften the teasing into something gentler.
"I'm just saying, if I'd known all it took was a can lid, I would've arranged this on the first day."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
Woonhak tried to glare at him, but the blush undermined the effect considerably.
"You're impossible."
"And yet you still knelt on a bathroom floor for me, bandaged my finger, called me your dearest friend." Dongmin tilted his head, the teasing gone now. "I think that says more about you than it does about me."
Woonhak didn't seem to know what to do with that. He looked down at his hands, still loosely holding Dongmin's, and seemed to register all at once how long he'd been kneeling there.
He let go, stood, and brushed off his knees with the brisk efficiency of someone moving on before they could be asked to stay.
"We should get back," he said, voice slightly higher than usual. "The tomatoes."
"Right, the tomatoes."
Woonhak turned toward the door, and Dongmin slid off the edge of the bathtub and fell into step behind him, cradling his bandaged finger against his chest like a wounded soldier returning from somewhere far away.
"Woonhak."
Woonhak looked back.
"Thank you, really."
The smile Woonhak gave him was small and genuine and slightly flustered still.
"You're welcome, really."
They walked back to the kitchen side by side, shoulders brushing in the afternoon light, and Dongmin's heart put itself back together quietly, piece by piece, knowing with a kind of tired certainty that it would only come apart again.
That was the thing about Woonhak. He made you want to be worthy of his worry even when all you'd done was cut your finger, even when all he'd done was try to stop the bleeding.
------
That same night Dongmin stirred from his sleep before he fully understood why.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling, and listened. Quiet sniffling was coming from the bed below his. It was Woonhak.
"Woonhak," he whispered, still looking at the ceiling.
Woonhak went quiet immediately, catching on that he had woken someone up.
"Is something wrong?"
"I'm fine," he muttered, voice wavering, trying his best to even out his breathing.
Dongmin sat up. The room was dark and everyone else was asleep. He climbed down from his bunk bed and crouched in front of Woonhak's.
Woonhak, abashed at Dongmin's sudden presence, hid under his blanket, trying his best not to be seen.
"What's wrong?" Dongmin asked gently, tugging at Woonhak's blanket.
"I'm fine," came muffled from under the blanket.
"What made you cry?" Dongmin tried again.
"Nothing."
"You can tell me. I won't tell anyone."
Woonhak seemed to consider this, going quiet for some time before he finally lifted the blanket from his face. Dongmin, after all, always kept his promises.
Something lurched in Dongmin's chest at the sight. Woonhak's tear-streaked cheeks, his hair sticking to his forehead, his red-rimmed eyes. Everything made Dongmin freeze for a second.
"Woonhak." Dongmin's voice went a little quieter, more careful, and before he could think about it his hand went to brush Woonhak's bangs from his forehead.
"I'm homesick," Woonhak whispered, looking down at his own fingers twisting in his lap, his voice still shaky.
Dongmin's heart swelled. Woonhak was so unbelievably pure, innocent and guileless. It was no surprise he was homesick.
Always sheltered by his family, barely ever away from home, held carefully inside the world his parents had built around him.
The only time he was away was during summer holidays when he attended these youth programs, and even then he carried his home everywhere, in the cross around his neck and the way he folded his hands before meals.
Woonhak loved his parents unconditionally, so homesickness was something that never quite passed.
"You poor thing." Dongmin's knuckles wiped gently over Woonhak's cheeks. "Is there any way I can help?"
"Whenever I'm sad, I pet my cat."
Dongmin looked at him with amusement, giggling quietly.
Woonhak was a bit confused. He had meant it wholeheartedly, with no ill intent behind it. "Why are you laughing?"
"You want to pet me like your cat, Woonhak-ah?"
Woonhak didn't seem to catch whatever Dongmin was trying to imply. "You do look like my cat a little bit," he said instead.
His parents had let him name the cat, one of the few choices that had been entirely his. He had chosen Eden without much contemplation. Something whole, innocent and unspoiled, a place where everything was still good.
"His name is Eden. He's a Bombay."
"You think I look like a Bombay?" Dongmin was amused and at the same time a little confused.
Woonhak nodded.
"How?"
"Maybe your hair or your eyes," Woonhak said. Then his expression shifted, something dimming in it. "I miss him," he sighed, eyes going glassy again.
"I'll be your Eden then." Dongmin said it quickly, before the tears could return, lowering his head and waiting expectantly.
Woonhak's hand found his jet black hair hesitantly at first, fingers threading through slowly like he wasn't sure he was allowed. Then after some time it settled, moving gently.
Dongmin didn't say anything. His heart was in his throat and every breath felt like too much.
He had never thought he'd encounter a boy as sinless and saintly as Woonhak.
A heart so free from malice and deceit that Dongmin felt guilt root itself somewhere deep and permanent inside him. Just for having crossed paths with him, for being here, for wanting to stay.
Their hearts were so different, on opposite ends of a line. If Woonhak's heart was white like fresh snow, untouched and pristine, then Dongmin's was grey, tainted by dirt, marked by footsteps and car tires turning it all to mush.
He stayed crouched by the bed, head bowed, and waited for Woonhak's breathing to even out into something deep and untroubled.
The sniffling stopped. Woonhak's hand grew heavier and slower until it stilled completely against Dongmin's hair.
Dongmin waited a moment longer before carefully lifting Woonhak's hand and setting it down on the blanket.
He stood and looked at him for a second in the dark. Woonhak's pendant caught the moonlight flowing in from outside. A small silver gleam against his collarbone like an ugly reminder.
A reminder to Dongmin that whatever he was feeling toward this boy wasn't allowed.
------
The room was warm.
Summer had settled heavy over the camp, the kind of heat that didn't fully release even after dark, just softened into something close and still. Someone had left both windows open and the curtains moved in slow intervals, whatever faint breeze came through lifting them and letting them fall. The other boys slept undisturbed. On the wall by the door a small wooden cross hung from a nail, slightly crooked.
Dongmin was almost asleep when the mattress dipped.
He felt the careful weight of someone climbing up and then a hand on his shoulder, gentle and shaking him awake.
He opened his eyes.
Woonhak's face was close to his in the dark, expression soft and a little uncertain. The question that followed was so quiet it was barely sound at all.
"Can I stay? I'm feeling lonely."
Dongmin nodded and moved before he'd finished deciding to: shifted toward the wall, lifted the blanket, made room.
Woonhak climbed in and settled without any apparent awareness that it might require thought. His arm went over Dongmin's chest, hand coming to rest just below his shoulder. He shifted once, twice, and then went still with a small exhale that landed directly on Dongmin's neck.
Dongmin stopped breathing.
He stared at the ceiling and kept very still, trying to think of something that wasn't about the exact temperature of Woonhak's breath against his skin, the weight of his arm, the way his fingers had curled loosely in the fabric of Dongmin's collar without seeming to know they'd done it.
Woonhak's voice when he murmured something small was hushed, barely carrying, his breath fanning against Dongmin's neck each time he spoke. He was trying not to wake the room, trying to be so quiet about it.
Dongmin wondered, and then immediately hated that he wondered, whether Woonhak would try this hard to stay quiet under different circumstances, whether that same careful hush would hold under something else entirely, whether those small sounds he made were the worst of it, or whether there was something underneath them that hadn't been found yet.
He'd thought about it before. More than once or twice actually, in the unguarded minutes before sleep when he didn't have enough left in him to keep the door closed. He thought of what Woonhak might look like with the composure gone out of him and whether the innocence would stay in his face or change into something else, something Dongmin would be the only one to have seen. What sounds he might make if Dongmin pressed his mouth to his throat right where the pulse was, whether he would even understand what was happening to him or whether he would just feel it, the way he seemed to feel everything: completely, without armour.
He wanted to be the one. That was the shameful truth of it. He wanted to be the first thing Woonhak ever lost his composure over, wanted to be the reason those careful quiet hands stopped being careful.
He killed the thought.
It came back nonetheless.
He killed it again and it came back again and this was how it had been going, nightly, for longer than he wanted to count. Because the other side of it was always there waiting: Woonhak's face, open and unguarded, trusting him the way he trusted everything, without checking first and Dongmin knew exactly what he was, knew the grey of himself, the scuffed and handled quality of it, knew that Woonhak deserved none of it touching him.
So he made the promise. The same one, every night.
It was significantly harder to keep when Woonhak's breath was warm against his neck and his fingers had drifted to his collarbone, tracing the line of it through the fabric slowly, following it one way and then back, and Dongmin was being taken apart by increments in the dark while Woonhak talked softly about his village and didn't notice anything at all.
"What's your village like?" Dongmin heard himself ask, needing somewhere else to put this.
"I like it. It's quiet. Everyone knows everyone and we have a really pretty church."
"Do you?"
"Yes, I spend most of my time there. It's quiet in a different way than quiet usually is." His fingers kept moving, that slow absent tracing. "I help with the flowers mostly and Sunday school sometimes. My father says it's good preparation."
"Preparation? For what?"
"He wants me to be a priest." There was a note of mild surprise in Woonhak's voice, like he'd assumed Dongmin already knew. "Did I not tell you yet? I think it's a good idea. I'll surely be good at it."
He said it without arrogance, just simple and honest the way Woonhak said everything.
Dongmin stared at the ceiling.
I'll surely be good at it.
Of course he would. Of course this boy with his whole untouched heart, with the cross at his throat, with the way he arranged flowers for church altars and sat in the purposeful quiet and helped small children memorise verses they didn't yet understand. Of course he would be good at standing in front of people and telling them something worth believing in. His whole life had been pointing in one direction and it had never crossed his mind to look another way. Not because he hadn't been allowed to, but because he hadn't wanted to.
And Dongmin was lying here thinking about him in the dark like something that needed to be kept from him.
Something settled in his chest with the weight of something that had been suspended for a while and finally dropped.
He pressed his eyes shut. Woonhak's words kept arriving at his neck, each one warm, each one landing somewhere they shouldn't, low and hot in his stomach, and his fingers kept tracing those slow patterns across his collarbone and Dongmin was so tired of holding this still, so tired of lying here being careful, and the heat of it rose in him and he couldn't-
He couldn't-
In one swift movement he hovered over Woonhak, hands pressing into the mattress on either side of his head.
Woonhak's hand dropped, the tracing stopped.
Woonhak looked up at him, confused, blinking slowly in the dark. His open unguarded face tipped up toward Dongmin, waiting for an explanation.
"What's wrong?" he whispered. "Is there not enough space?"
He started to lean forward, to move, probably to leave, and Dongmin put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him gently back down against the mattress, leaning closer.
"You're very warm," he said.
Woonhak looked at him and said nothing, waiting.
Dongmin's thumb found the edge of his mouth and traced it slowly. Woonhak's breath caught, small and quiet, not pulling away, not understanding.
"Your lips," Dongmin said quietly. "Your hands, your body." His thumb stilled at the corner of his mouth. "You're too warm, Woonhak."
"I'm sorry," Woonhak whispered. "I can leave if you want."
Dongmin almost smiled. "No." He leaned closer, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough to see the cross at his throat catch the thin moonlight. "I don't want that. I want you close to me. As much as possible."
Woonhak's eyes were wide and dark and searching his face, confused.
"How?" he whispered.
Dongmin looked at him for a moment, at the open expression, the real confusion in it, the way Woonhak was looking up at him and waiting for an answer the way he always waited for everything. Always patiently, like he trusted Dongmin to make sense of whatever this was.
He should have stopped there.
He didn't stop there.
He lowered himself slowly, one arm beside Woonhak's head, and pressed his mouth to his cheek softly. Woonhak went very still beneath him, no movement or sound coming out of him,
as if he was waiting to understand what was happening, as if he'd decided to let it continue until he did.
Dongmin moved to the other cheek, then to his temple. Woonhak's breathing had already changed, shallower, his hands flat against the mattress at his sides like he didn't know what to do with them.
Dongmin's mouth found the hinge of his jaw and then lower, the soft skin just beneath it.
"Dongmin," Woonhak whispered, uncertain, like navigating through somewhere he hadn't been before and didn't have a map for.
Dongmin didn't answer. Instead, he moved lower, to the curve where his jaw met his neck, and stayed there and felt Woonhak's breath stutter.
"I don't-" Woonhak started. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Dongmin murmured against his skin, the lie came out soft and easy. "Just stay still."
A small silence and then Woonhak's hand came up and found Dongmin's shoulder. He needed something to hold while he figured out what this was and his body was figuring it out faster than he was, his pulse quick beneath Dongmin's mouth, his head tilting back slightly, not meaning to.
Dongmin pressed his lips to the side of his throat and felt him swallow.
Woonhak made a tiny, involuntary sound and tried to muffle it immediately, pressing his lips together, and it was that, exactly that, the instinct to contain something he didn't even understand yet, that did something irreversible to Dongmin's chest.
Because he was trying to be quiet, he was trying so hard to be quiet and he didn't even know why his body was making sounds in the first place, didn't know what was producing them or what they meant, and that unknowing, that complete and total innocence of it, was the most devastating thing Dongmin had ever been close to in his life.
He wanted to be the one who taught him.
The thought arrived fully formed and shameful and he didn't push it away this time. He let it stay and let himself feel the full weight of it: the wanting to be first, to be the only, to be the one who took that careful contained sound and coaxed it into something Woonhak had never heard come out of himself before, to see his face when it happened, to watch the innocence not disappear but transform, to be the one holding it when it did.
He pressed closer.
His free hand found the hem of Woonhak's shirt.
"Dongmin-" It was barely a sound.
"I know," Dongmin said, his voice low and unrecognisable even to himself. "It's alright."
His fingers slipped beneath the fabric, just the edges of them, feeling the warmth of his waist, the soft give of skin, and Woonhak made that sound again, slightly less contained this time, his grip on Dongmin's shoulder tightening, his whole body gone taut and uncertain and present in a way it had never been before. He was feeling something he had no category for and his body was responding to it before his mind could intervene and every bit of that was written plainly on his face for Dongmin to see.
Woonhak couldn't hide it. He didn't know how to, didn't know there was anything to hide, didn't know that most people learned early to put something between themselves and what they felt before letting anyone see it. He had never learned that and everything showed, everything had always shown and now this was showing too, this new and unnamed thing, playing out across his face in real time with nowhere to go, and Dongmin could see all of it and the seeing was making him want more of it, was making him want to be the reason for all of it, every version of it, every sound and every expression and every moment of not-knowing that would eventually, in his hands, become knowing.
"I don't know what this is," Woonhak breathed. His voice was so small, so lost, without any attempt to seem like less than he was.
That was it.
That was what cracked it open completely.
It wasn't the warmth of him or the sounds or the grip on his shoulder but purely the honesty of it, the plain and total trust of admitting confusion to the exact person causing it, the way Woonhak had looked at him and simply said the true thing because it was true and he had never learned any other way to be.
Dongmin kissed his jaw, then lower, then the curve of his shoulder, pushing the fabric aside, and Woonhak's breath broke apart on the exhale, his head pressing back into the pillow, his hand releasing Dongmin's shoulder to cover his mouth with the back of it instead and made a small muffled sound.
"Shh, it's alright."
The cross caught the moonlight at the edge of Dongmin's vision. The small silver of it against Woonhak's collarbone, shifted to the side, resting against his skin the way it always did, the way it had every single day, the way it would long after any of this was over.
He'd seen it a hundred times and he'd always looked away.
He looked at it now and couldn't look and something in him went very quiet, very suddenly, the way a room goes quiet when something is dropped and breaks.
Woonhak's face was tipped back, his eyes pressed shut, expression somewhere between confusion and something he had no name for, something Dongmin had put there, had drawn out of him without warning, without permission, without giving him any possible way to prepare. He had never been anything other than open. He didn't know how to be. He had handed Dongmin his trust the same way he handed everyone his trust, completely, without keeping anything back for himself, and Dongmin had taken it and taken it and was still taking it and-
He pulled back.
His hand came out from beneath the fabric and he sat back and looked at Woonhak and Woonhak looked back at him, breathing unsteady, eyes dark and searching.
Neither of them spoke.
Woonhak's face was still open, still trying to understand. Still, even now, even after all of that, looking at Dongmin with something that was neither accusation nor anger. There was just this searching look, an honest confusion as if he trusted that an explanation would come and was willing to wait for it.
Woonhak trusted him, even now.
Especially now.
Dongmin could not look at his face and so he looked at the cross.
He reached out and straightened it with one finger gently, setting it back to where it always rested, centred against his collarbone, the way it was every morning when Woonhak tucked it beneath his collar before facing the day.
Woonhak looked down at his hand and then back up.
"Dongmin" he said softly. He was still waiting, still giving him everything. "What are you-"
Dongmin opened his eyes.
The ceiling met his gaze. The curtains moved in the warm dark.
He lay completely still and stared at it and breathed.
Woonhak was beside him. Actually beside him with his arm over his chest, fingers loosely curled at his collarbone, breathing slow and even and deep against his neck. Asleep. He had been asleep for a while, probably. He hadn't moved.
Nothing had happened.
Dongmin closed his eyes and opened them again. The ceiling was still there, the cross on the wall still hung slightly crooked.
He could feel exactly where Woonhak's hand rested against him, could feel the warmth of him along his whole side, could feel the slow even breath arriving at his neck in intervals, real and present and unconscious, and it was so much worse than the dream because in the dream he hadn't had to hold anything back and now the holding back was the only thing left.
He exhaled very carefully.
Woonhak slept on, entirely at peace, utterly oblivious to the conflict raging a mere few inches from his face.
Dongmin looked at the ceiling for a long time.
The curtains lifted then fell, lifted then fell.
He did not sleep again.
------
They were in their treehouse again, talking about anything and everything the way they always did, when it started raining.
It was light at first.
"It sounds nice," Woonhak murmured, closing his eyes and tilting his head back slightly.
Dongmin glanced at him and hummed in agreement.
It was peaceful in its own way, the rain on the leaves below them, the smell of it rising through the wood.
Then the hail started. Small pieces of ice rattling against the roof in sharp irregular bursts, loud and insistent, filling the small space with noise.
Woonhak ignored it because he'd been turning something over for a while, Dongmin could tell. Woonhak always got a particular look when he was working toward a question, a slight inward quality to his expression, and now he said it.
"Do you think God puts people in your path for a specific reason?"
Dongmin looked at him. "What kind of reason?"
Woonhak thought about it. "To make you better, maybe or happier?"
"Maybe," Dongmin said. "If you pray hard enough."
"I don't think it's about praying hard, exactly. I think-" Woonhak stopped.
The sky cracked open.
Lightning, white and total, and then the thunder came right behind it, enormous and rolling, shaking the walls of the treehouse, and Woonhak's hands found Dongmin's arm immediately, wrapping around it and gripping hard.
Dongmin barely noticed because something else had registered.
They were in a tree, in a thunderstorm.
"Woonhak," he said. "We need to get down."
"Are you joking? I'm not going down that ladder."
"Woonhak-"
"It's slippery, it's dark, do you want me to fall and-"
"Woonhak."
Woonhak stopped.
Dongmin looked at him directly. "Obviously I don't want that but staying up here is more dangerous, don't you understand? We're in a tree in a lightning storm."
Woonhak was quiet so Dongmin continued.
"I'll go first," he said. "I'll be below you the whole way down. You won't fall."
"What if-"
"You won't fall."
Woonhak looked at him for a long moment, thunder rolling again somewhere overhead. Then he nodded small and deeply unhappy about it, but decided.
Dongmin went through the trapdoor first, found the rope ladder with his feet and started down. The wood was slick immediately, the rain in his eyes, the wind at his clothes, but he kept moving until he was halfway and then looked up.
Woonhak's face appeared at the trapdoor, pale in the dark, peering down with an expression that was doing its best not to be frightened.
"Come down," Dongmin said, loud enough to carry over the rain. "I'm right here, I'm not moving."
Woonhak got onto the ladder.
He came slowly, each rung considered carefully, his knuckles white on the rope. The wind moved through the oak and the whole ladder swayed and Woonhak made a tight miserable sound and stopped completely.
"Don't look down," Dongmin said. "Look at the bark infront of you."
"It's so slippery-"
"I know, just look at the bark."
"My hands are completely wet-"
"Woonhak, I'm right here."
A very long pause in which the rain came down harder and the wind moved through again and Dongmin held the ladder steady from below and waited.
Then Woonhak's foot found the next rung.
"There," Dongmin said. "Keep going."
He came down rung by rung, slow and vocal about every single one, and Dongmin stayed below him and kept talking, kept his voice level and present and there, until Woonhak's feet finally found solid ground.
Dongmin's hand found his in the dark immediately.
Woonhak held on.
"You're alright," Dongmin said. "Let's go."
They ran hand in hand through the dark and the rain, across the slick grass, the sky lighting up white behind them, thunder rolling overhead. The rain was everywhere, soaking through their clothes and hair in seconds. Dongmin pulled Woonhak along and Woonhak ran beside him and neither of them let go until they were through the door of the building and standing in the corridor, breathless and dripping.
The door swung shut behind them and the rain was muffled now, a sound against the windows rather than a thing happening to them.
They stood there catching their breath, water running from their hair, their clothes dark and heavy with it. Woonhak's hand was still in his. Dongmin became aware of this at the same moment Woonhak did. He felt the slight shift as Woonhak registered it too and then neither of them moved and neither of them said anything about it.
Woonhak let out a long unsteady breath that ended almost as a laugh.
Dongmin looked at him. Hair plastered completely flat to his forehead, water dripping from his chin, cheeks still flushed from running.
"What are you laughing at," Dongmin said. "You were about to cry ten seconds ago."
"I wasn't-" Woonhak started, indignant, and then seemed to decide this wasn't a battle worth having. He pressed his lips together instead, the laugh still sitting in his eyes.
Something in Dongmin's chest loosened that had been tight since the first crack of thunder.
"Come on," he said. "Before you freeze."
He led him to their room.
The room was dark, the other boys sleeping undisturbed. Dongmin moved carefully and found his towel and turned back to Woonhak, who was standing in the middle of the room with his arms wrapped around himself, shivering slightly.
"Sit," Dongmin said, nodding toward the bunk.
Woonhak sat without a word.
Dongmin draped the towel over his head and began drying his hair, and Woonhak went still beneath his hands and let him completely. The rain against the windows filled the quiet, softer now.
After a while he pulled the towel back.
Woonhak's hair was going in several directions at once. Dongmin didn't mention it. Instead, he smoothed it down once, twice, his palms moving slowly over the top of his head, and when he looked down Woonhak was already looking up at him.
Really looking, his expression steady and open, face tipped up toward Dongmin with the rain-damp still on his cheeks, his eyes very quiet and very present.
Dongmin's hands stilled in his hair.
"What?" he asked softly.
Woonhak held his gaze. "You care about me," he said.
It wasn't really a question. It was something he'd noticed and was saying out loud because it was true and he saw no reason to keep it to himself.
Something moved across Dongmin's face that he almost didn't catch in time. Then he found the easier version of himself, the one that knew how to navigate this, and smiled, crooked and deflecting and almost convincing.
"Of course I do," he said. "Someone has to."
Woonhak didn't smile back. He just kept looking, steady and unhurried, and his hands which had been resting in his lap came up slowly and found Dongmin's wrists, curling around them loosely.
"Earlier," Woonhak said quietly. "In the treehouse, before the thunder." He paused, seeming to find the words he'd had before and lost. "I was trying to say something."
Dongmin looked at him.
"I prayed for someone like you," Woonhak said. Soft and plain, like he was finishing a sentence that had only been interrupted. "Someone who would care about me the way you do." His eyes stayed on Dongmin's face, giving him everything. "I prayed for it for a long time, Dongmin."
The room was very quiet.
Dongmin stood there with Woonhak's hands loose around his wrists and Woonhak's face tipped up toward his and felt something move through his chest so slowly it was almost gentle.
He reached out and pinched Woonhak's cheek.
Woonhak blinked, startled back into the room, his brow pulling together.
"Go to sleep," Dongmin said softly. "You're still shivering."
Woonhak's hand came up to his own cheek, touching where Dongmin had, his expression somewhere between confused and something softer that he hadn't finished feeling yet. Then he nodded, small, and climbed into his bunk and pulled the blanket up around himself.
Dongmin hung the towel over the bedpost and climbed up to his own bunk and lay on his back in the dark.
I prayed for someone like you.
Woonhak with his damp hair and his hands around Dongmin's wrists and his face tipped up with that expression, the one that meant he was saying the exact true thing and knew it and said it anyway, without strategy, without protection. The way he'd looked at Dongmin the whole time, like he was something worth praying for, like he was someone specific enough to ask God about by description.
Dongmin who hadn't prayed in longer than he could honestly remember, who had stopped believing anything was listening somewhere along the way and made his peace with that, or thought he had, who moved through the world with the quiet private understanding that whatever was up there had no particular interest in him and the feeling was mutual.
Woonhak had prayed for him.
Had knelt somewhere, probably in that old church with the deep blue windows, probably with his eyes closed the way he closed them for everything, and had asked for this. Had described it as someone who would care and had waited, and kept believing one would come, and had then settled into a bunk below a boy he'd never met and decided with simple certainty that here, finally, was his answer.
Dongmin pressed his eyes shut.
Below him Woonhak's breathing had already evened out, slow and deep and entirely at peace, the way it always was.
Dongmin lay in the dark and listened to it and felt the full impossible weight of being someone's answered prayer.
He didn't sleep for a long time.
The rain went on and on against the windows, steady and unhurried, and he lay there in the sound of it and thought about a boy who had asked God for him specifically, and waited, and never stopped believing he would come.
He didn't know what to do with that.
He was sure he never would.
------
The treehouse had become a confessional.
Not the kind Dongmin had grown up vaguely aware of: a dark wooden booth, sliding partition, a voice on the other side that was supposed to represent something larger than itself.
This was different.
This was a cramped square of wood wedged in the branches of an oak tree, no light, no partition, nothing between them at all and instead of a priest there was Woonhak, sitting close with his hands folded in his lap and his cross catching the moonlight, which was worse than any priest Dongmin could imagine because priests didn't look at you like that.
Like you were worth listening to, like whatever you said next would be received carefully and without verdict.
In a real confessional you named your sins and were given something to do about them. A number of prayers, a specific penance, a clean slate if you truly meant it.
Here there was no penance. Here there was just Woonhak, which amounted to the same thing and nothing like it at the same time.
Every visit Dongmin climbed up that rope ladder and sat down next to him and added something new to the ledger.
The warmth of him, the way he smelled like soap and something else underneath it, something that had no name, the specific quality of his attention, the way it settled on you like something solid and stayed there, the cross at his throat that Dongmin kept not looking at and kept looking at anyway.
He came back every night.
He told himself it was because there was nothing else to do at this hour. He told himself it was because Woonhak was interesting in the way that unusual things were interesting: worth studying, worth figuring out.
He told himself a lot of things on the climb up and believed fewer of them each time.
The ledger kept growing.
He was starting to think he'd never be able to pay it back. He was starting to think that was the point.
"My father says everyone deserves a chance at faith," Woonhak said. "That it finds people in its own time and not the other way around."
They'd been talking for a while by then, the conversation moving the way it did up here: unhurried, finding its own level, going places it probably wouldn't have gone in daylight.
Dongmin had said "I don't know, I only pray when it all goes down." when Woonhak asked if he believed in God, and Woonhak had received it the way he received most things: in a careful manner without rushing to fill it with something else.
"Your father says a lot of things," Dongmin said.
Woonhak glanced at him, mild. "He's wise."
"Is he?" Dongmin tilted his head. "And you always listen to what your father says?"
"Most of the time."
"Most of the time," Dongmin repeated, like he was turning the words over. "What happens the other times?"
Woonhak considered this genuinely. "I think about it first and then usually I agree with him anyway. He hasn't been wrong yet."
Dongmin looked at him. "That must be a comfortable way to live."
Woonhak looked back, unbothered. "What does your father say?"
The question landed simply, harmless, portraying Woonhak's honest curiosity. Dongmin looked away.
"Nothing I've kept," he said.
Woonhak didn't push. He never pushed. He just let the answer sit and moved on when Dongmin was ready.
"What else does your father say?" Dongmin asked after a moment. His voice had the lightness he put on when he wanted something to sound like nothing. "About faith, I mean."
"That it's something you carry," Woonhak said. "Not something that carries you." He paused. "I think I understand that more now than I used to."
Dongmin watched him. "And you just have it? All the time? You never doubt it?"
"Sometimes," Woonhak admitted. "But it comes back."
"Where does it go?"
Woonhak seemed genuinely stumped by this, thinking it through with that small furrow between his brows.
"I'm not sure. It just gets quiet sometimes and then something happens and it's loud again." He looked at Dongmin with that open expression. "Don't you have anything like that? Something that gets loud sometimes."
Dongmin held his gaze for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "I do."
He looked away.
Woonhak hesitated for a second before letting the proposal slip out, unsure of its reception: "If you want, I could share some of mine in the meantime. While you're still figuring it out."
Dongmin looked back at him.
Woonhak's expression was open and slightly uncertain, tilted toward him in the dark.
One person had too much; another had too little. The transaction was effortless: Take this. It doesn’t empty my cup, but it might fill yours.
The warmth that moved through Dongmin's chest then was slow and full and somewhat unbearable.
"What does your father say about that?" he asked lightly, keeping his voice at a safe distance from what he was actually feeling. "Sharing faith with someone like me."
Woonhak smiled faintly. "He says everyone deserves a chance at it."
"Even troublemakers?"
"Especially troublemakers." He said it without hesitation, like it was something he'd already decided. "I think you'd be surprised what you're capable of believing, if someone sat with you in it."
Dongmin stared at him.
The angel said: "Take it. Let him give you this. It's the kindest thing anyone has offered you in a long time."
The devil said nothing yet and just waited.
"Thank you," Dongmin said quietly.
Woonhak smiled, small and satisfied, and looked back at the wall like it was settled, like he'd just solved something simple.
Dongmin looked at the cross at his throat and then very deliberately looked somewhere else.
They talked for a while after that, or Woonhak talked and Dongmin half listened and half watched, which had become its own kind of habit up here.
Woonhak was telling him something about the boys back home, the ones his age, how different they seemed sometimes, like they were operating on a frequency Woonhak couldn't quite tune into.
"They talk about things," Woonhak said, vague but earnest. "I don't always follow."
"What kind of things?"
Woonhak made a small gesture, vague and slightly helpless. "Girls, mostly. Or just- I don't know. Things I haven't really thought about."
Dongmin looked at him. "You haven't thought about it?"
"Not really." He said it plainly, without embarrassment.
It simply hadn't occurred to him the way it occurred to other boys his age, apparently, and he'd filed that under the long list of ways he was different from them and moved on.
"My father says those things are a distraction."
"From what?"
"From what matters."
Dongmin was quiet for a moment. Something between amusement and something darker turned over in his chest. "And what matters?"
Woonhak looked at him like the answer was obvious. "Faith. Family. Being good."
"Being good," Dongmin repeated.
"Yes."
Dongmin looked at him for a long moment, at the cross at his throat again, the earnest expression, the complete and total absence of any awareness of what sitting in a dark treehouse at midnight with someone like Dongmin might mean, might look like, might be doing to the air between them.
The angel said: "Leave it alone."
"Have you ever tempted someone?" Dongmin asked anyway.
Woonhak frowned slightly. "What?"
"Tempted. Made someone want something they probably shouldn't."
Woonhak considered this seriously. "No, I don't think so. Have you?"
Dongmin almost smiled. "Once or twice."
"What does it feel like?" Woonhak asked genuinely. As if he was asking what a foreign country was like, somewhere he'd never been and never planned to go.
"It feels like-" Dongmin stopped and started again more carefully. "You make someone aware of something they were trying not to think about. You offer it to them without saying it outright. You just make the wanting louder until they can't ignore it anymore."
Woonhak was quiet, absorbing this.
"That sounds unkind."
"It can be."
"Do you feel bad about it?"
Dongmin held his gaze. "Sometimes," he said. "Not always."
Woonhak nodded slowly, accepting this, not judging it. He shifted slightly where he sat, adjusting his position, and his knee pressed briefly against Dongmin's thigh before he settled.
He didn't notice he'd done it.
He looked back at the wall and said, thoughtfully and with complete innocence, his voice soft and genuine and meaning every word of it in exactly the way he thought he meant it: "I think I'd be easy to tempt. I don't really know how to resist things I've never encountered before."
He turned to look at Dongmin as he said it, tilting his face up slightly in the dark, honest and open and entirely unaware.
Dongmin felt it, both things at once, arriving together the way they always did around Woonhak and refusing to separate.
Something in his chest that was soft and aching and wanted to keep this boy exactly as he was forever, untouched by anything Dongmin carried.
And something lower, something that had no softness in it at all, that stirred precisely because of that, because of the obedience, the openness, the complete and guileless trust turned toward him like a plant toward light, with no idea what kind of light it was turning toward.
The angel didn't even get a word in.
Something shifted in the quality of Dongmin's stillness.
It was small. Something behind his eyes going quiet and something else coming forward in its place. He didn't move yet. He just looked at Woonhak, at the upturned face and the honest eyes and the cross at his throat, and let the thing that had been sitting low in his stomach all evening rise a little higher, stop apologising for itself.
Then he moved.
He turned toward Woonhak, closing the small distance between them with a patience that had nothing gentle in it, and reached up.
His fingers found the chain of the necklace and hooked underneath it, light as anything, and tugged.
Woonhak came forward with it, slightly.
Dongmin held the chain loosely and looked at him from up close. His eyes moved across Woonhak's face the way he'd been stopping himself from doing all evening, unhurried now, taking inventory.
The slight part of his lips, the way his breath had gone shallow and uneven without him seeming to notice, the small confused crease between his brows as he tried to locate the shape of what was happening and came up empty.
Dongmin let the silence go exactly as long as he wanted it to.
"You'd be easy to tempt," he said, voice low, almost agreeable. The corner of his mouth pulled. "You're right about that."
Woonhak's hand went to the cross instinctively, fingers closing around it. Dongmin felt the movement through the chain.
He didn't let go.
"You know what your problem is?" he continued, quiet and unhurried. His eyes dropped briefly to the hollow of Woonhak's throat and back up. "You trust too easily. You just let people in. You don't even check first."
"Should I?" Woonhak asked. His voice came out smaller than usual.
"Probably." Dongmin's thumb moved slightly against the chain, just once. "But you won't."
Woonhak was very still. His free hand had found the fabric of his shorts at some point, fingers curling into it, knuckles pressed white against his thigh.
He wasn't pulling away, wasn't moving toward Dongmin either. He was just paralysed, his body having received some signal his mind hadn't decoded yet, simply freezing in the gap between the two.
Dongmin watched him do it.
He watched the confusion move across his face, the way Woonhak's eyes searched for some framework to hang this on, some category to put it in, and found nothing.
He watched the slight movement of his throat as he swallowed, the cross still gripped in one hand, the shorts gripped in the other, holding onto both like they were the fixed points in something that had started moving without his permission.
He had no idea what this was and Dongmin could see that clearly.
And some part of Dongmin, the part the angel had been trying to reason with all evening, knew that was exactly why he should stop.
He didn't stop.
"Of course you don't know what to do with this," he said softly, almost fondly, almost condescending. The distinction barely mattered anymore. His eyes moved across Woonhak's face one more time, slow and deliberate, and he felt rather than saw the way Woonhak's breath caught at being looked at like that. "You're such a good boy, aren't you."
It wasn't really a question.
Something moved through Woonhak's expression that he immediately tried to smooth over and didn't quite manage. His fingers tightened in his shorts.
He didn't answer. He didn't have an answer. He just looked at Dongmin with those wide dark eyes and that expression that had no name and stayed exactly where he was, which was already closer than he'd started, because Dongmin was still holding the chain.
He held it one moment longer.
Then he let go.
Dongmin leaned back on his palms, putting a little distance between them, easy and unhurried as if nothing had happened, the smirk fading into something more neutral.
Woonhak didn't move for a moment. Then slowly, carefully, like someone testing whether the ground would hold, he sat back too. His hand released the fabric of his shorts. His other hand released the cross and let it fall back to his throat.
He was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't know what you were doing," he said finally, his voice very careful. "But I could tell you were good at it."
Dongmin looked at him.
Woonhak was looking at the wall, not at him, his expression still carrying the faint unresolved quality of someone who had felt something move through them and had no place to put it. His cheeks were faintly coloured, his hands were still in his lap.
"It felt like-" he started and then stopped abruptly. "In the stories my father tells. About the sailors. The ones who heard something in the water and couldn't stop themselves going toward it even when they knew-" He stopped again and shook his head slightly, as if he'd surprised himself. "Nevermind."
Dongmin watched him from the corner of his eye and felt the satisfaction and the guilt arrive at the same time, the way they always did, jostling for the same space in his chest.
"You don't even know what I just did," he said, a confirmed observation.
Woonhak looked up. "No," he admitted.
"Doesn't that bother you?"
Woonhak considered this honestly. "A little," he said. "I don't like not understanding things."
Dongmin looked at him. The devil, still warm from its recent victory, said something quiet and suggesting in the back of his mind.
"Go on then," Dongmin said.
Woonhak frowned slightly. "What?"
"Try it." He tilted his head, easy, like it was nothing. "If you don't understand it, figure it out. Go on."
Woonhak looked at him for a long moment. That small furrow appeared between his brows: the one that meant he was taking something seriously, turning it over, deciding whether to engage with it fully or let it go.
He decided to engage.
He was quiet for a moment, thinking it through the way he thought everything through, with his whole attention.
Then he shifted, turning toward Dongmin more fully, and Dongmin felt it, the change in orientation, the small closing of distance, and kept his expression neutral.
Woonhak looked at him, really looked. The way he did when he was trying to understand something, careful and unhurried, moving across Dongmin's face like he was reading something he wanted to get right.
Dongmin held still under it, held his expression, waiting for whatever earnest and harmless thing Woonhak was about to produce.
Then Woonhak's hand came up.
Fingers light against his jaw, just the tips of them, turning Dongmin's face toward him slightly, guiding, the way you'd turn something you were handling carefully. Making sure he was looking.
His touch was gentle and warm and completely without guile and it lasted only a second before his hand dropped away.
Dongmin did not move.
Woonhak looked at him from close, and said, quietly and with total sincerity, like he'd been thinking it for a while and had simply decided now was the moment to say it:
"You have beautiful eyes."
Dongmin stared at him.
"I noticed them early on," Woonhak continued, earnest and unhurried. "They're sharp but not unkind." He tilted his head slightly, considering. "I think they give you away sometimes though. When you're trying not to show something."
His hand found Dongmin's knee then, settling there lightly, naturally, the way you'd rest a hand on a table. Already moving on, already thinking about the next thing he wanted to say, completely unaware that he'd just placed it there.
"Was that right?" he asked, looking at Dongmin with that open expression. "Is that how it works?"
Dongmin said nothing.
He was aware of several things simultaneously:
The hand on his knee, warm and light, sitting there with complete innocence.
The face close to his, still waiting for an answer with that earnest crease between the brows.
The eyes that had just looked at him like that, like he was something worth looking at carefully, worth noticing, worth saying true things about out loud.
He had spent the entire evening being the one who watched, the one who read, the one who knew what was happening while Woonhak did not.
He had not prepared for this.
The angel said nothing. It didn't need to. It just waited, quiet and knowing, while Dongmin sat very still and felt something move through his chest that had no darkness in it at all, just warmth, unbearable and full, the kind that was worse than the other thing because at least the other thing he knew how to manage.
He looked at Woonhak's hand on his knee.
"Yeah," he said finally. His voice came out lower than intended, rougher at the edges. "Something like that."
Woonhak nodded, satisfied, and removed his hand from Dongmin's knee to fold it back in his lap.
Just like that it was done and filed away under things he'd learned tonight and moved on from, the way he moved on from everything: cleanly, without residue, already looking at the wall again with that calm expression.
Dongmin looked at his own knee where the warmth of Woonhak's hand was already fading.
He thought about beautiful eyes, about being given away, about the hand on his jaw turning his face like something that needed to be handled carefully.
He thought about the entire evening, everything he'd done, the chain and the silence and the deliberate patience of it, the angel losing and the devil winning and the satisfaction of it that had felt so clean at the time.
He looked at Woonhak's profile in the dark.
He was calm, already half somewhere else, already thinking about something else entirely, the last fifteen minutes sitting lightly on him the way everything sat lightly on him because he didn't know the weight of it.
Woonhak had undone him completely by accident, in about thirty seconds, with two touches and a true thing said plainly.
Dongmin said nothing. The thing the angel had been warning him about all evening was here now, sitting quietly in his chest alongside the guilt, and they were both just going to have to live there together for a while.
He looked away.
The devil had won like it usually did but it never felt like winning afterward, not with Woonhak, not up here.
It just felt like something added to the ledger. Another thing Dongmin would carry back down the rope ladder and across the dark grass and into the room where everyone else was sleeping, and add to the pile of things he was accumulating about this boy that he had no right to and no use for and couldn't seem to stop collecting.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Your father's stories," he said eventually, quiet. "The sailors."
"Yes."
"Did they make it?"
Woonhak considered this. "Some of them," he said. "The ones who had something to hold onto."
Dongmin looked at the cross at his throat.
"Right," he said. "Good."
Outside the branches shifted, the night pressed close and easy around the treehouse walls and neither of them moved to break it, just sat in it together, the charged thing slowly settling, leaving something gentler behind in its place. The particular quiet of two people who have reached the end of something and are in no hurry to climb back down.
Woonhak yawned, small and helpless, and covered his mouth with his hand.
Dongmin almost smiled.
"Tired?" he asked.
"A little." Woonhak blinked slowly, the tension of the last hour softening out of his face, replaced by something drowsier and younger. He looked like he had on that first night Dongmin had woken him up: unfinished and soft at the edges. "Are we going back soon?"
"Yeah," Dongmin said. "In a minute."
Woonhak nodded and leaned back against the wall, eyes half closed, content to wait.
Dongmin looked at him for a moment in the dark.
Then he looked away, and let the minute stretch out a little longer, and said nothing, and that was enough.
------
They had decided to pay their treehouse a last visit at night.
They sat close, knees touching, and Dongmin noticed how quiet Woonhak was. Usually by now he'd be talking about something. A memory from home, a detail he'd forgotten to mention before, something small he'd noticed during the day but he said nothing, and after a moment Dongmin heard it. A small sniffle. Woonhak's face turned away.
"What's wrong?"
Woonhak didn't answer immediately, his shoulders were drawn in slightly, the way they got when he was trying to hold something together.
"I'm not homesick," he mumbled, before Dongmin could assume. "It's not that."
"Then what is it?"
Woonhak swallowed hard. When he spoke his voice was unsteady, thin at the edges. "I'm just sad that this is the last day. That tomorrow we'll go back to our lives. That we'll probably never see each other again."
Dongmin's chest lurched.
"I just wish you'd stay by my side." Woonhak's voice dropped quieter. "Forever, maybe, or just somewhere nearby. I like spending time with you, I like talking to you, I like the way you listen." He stopped, searching, and when the words came they came slowly. "It's like I waited for a friend like you my whole life. I'm going to be so lonely in that small, quiet village."
His cheeks were tear-streaked now, his voice shaking with the helplessness of someone who has finally said a thing out loud and cannot take it back.
"Dongmin, you're so important to me. I don't know why I feel this way. I just don't want to live a life without you by my side."
And Dongmin knew exactly why Woonhak felt this way. He understood it with a clarity that settled over him cold and certain, the way you understand something you've been trying not to think about. It was love, romantic love. A confession made without any awareness of what was being confessed.
He didn't want to be the one to tell Woonhak that. He thought about what the knowledge would do to him. The guilt it would plant, the way it would follow him home and sit with him in that quiet village and in that church where he arranged the flowers and stood at the front and believed in something completely. Woonhak was innocent of this. If he didn't know the name for what he was feeling he couldn't grieve it, couldn't turn it over until it became something shameful. Dongmin couldn't take that from him. Wouldn't.
So instead he leaned forward, shifting onto his knees, palms pressing into the hard wooden floor on either side of Woonhak's thighs. He moved slowly, deliberately, and didn't break eye contact once.
Woonhak stilled, his breath went shallow, pulse jumping visibly at his throat. He didn't know what this meant, he didn't move away.
Dongmin looked at him, at the tear-streaked cheeks, the glassy widened eyes and something pooled low in his stomach, hot and complicated, and he looked away from it, looked only at Woonhak.
He dipped his head slowly, giving Woonhak every last second, and heard the way his breath changed when Dongmin's face dropped level with his jaw.
Then his lips found the line of it.
He was careful, nipping gently at the curve of Woonhak's jaw and felt him go absolutely still, like something inside him had stopped mid-motion and didn't know how to start again. Dongmin moved slowly along the line of it, and Woonhak made a small sound, barely anything, the sound of someone who has just noticed something happening to them that they have no category for.
Dongmin paused at the hinge of his jaw. He could feel Woonhak's pulse from here, fast and unsteady, betraying everything his stillness was trying to hide.
Then he felt it.
Woonhak's hand found his forearm. Dongmin didn't think Woonhak even knew he'd done it.
He stayed very still.
He moved to the spot below Woonhak's ear, nipped softly there, and felt Woonhak's grip tighten, just slightly. A small involuntary thing, a reflex, his fingers pressing into Dongmin's arm the way they might press into anything. May it be a door frame, a railing, the edge of a pew. Something to hold while something else moved through him that he had no name for and no place to put.
Dongmin closed his eyes for a moment.
He lifted his head and faced Woonhak again. Woonhak was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on him before. He wasn't frightened, wasn't confused exactly, it was something between the two that had no clean name. His lips were parted slightly, his eyes were very dark in the low light, still moving carefully across Dongmin's face, still searching.
His hand was still on Dongmin's arm.
Woonhak didn't seem to notice or if he noticed he didn't understand why it was there, and so he left it, the way you leave a hand on a wall after the dizziness has passed because some part of you isn't sure yet that it's really over.
Dongmin leaned in one last time and kissed his cheek soft and unhurried. He caught the last of a tear, tasted the salt on his lips and stayed there one moment longer than he should have before pulling back.
"You told me Eden does that," he whispered, voice coming out lower than intended. "Nips at your face when you're sad."
He pulled back and looked at Woonhak, putting some distance between them now.
That was what he said. A small constructed thing to cover what was actually happening inside him. The guilt had been there the whole time, low and nauseating, and it didn't leave. His knees ached from pressing into the wooden floor. The last time he'd been on his knees on a hard floor it had been to repent. This was the opposite of repenting.
Woonhak stared at him. He didn't seem to know what had happened exactly, only that something had, and that it had moved through him strangely but he smiled, small and bewildered and real.
"He does," Woonhak said. "But you're strange."
Dongmin smiled back, faint. "Don't cry, Woonhak."
Woonhak looked down at his hands. The tears had stopped.
"Whenever you miss me," Dongmin said, "hug Eden and remember me, yeah?"
Woonhak nodded, a small smile escaping despite himself.
Then, quieter: "Will you miss me?"
Dongmin went still.
Of course he would. He would miss everything. The presence of him, the specific warmth of sitting beside him, the sound of his voice telling a story he loved, the way he spoke about his family like they were always right there with him. He'd miss the Woonhak who sat beside him at breakfast and let Dongmin fill his cup without making anything of it, the Woonhak who climbed into his bed at night when he felt lonely, settling in without apology, trusting completely, the Woonhak who read under the elm trees with the same focused quiet he brought to everything. He'd miss the boy who cried easily and laughed easily and asked questions about everything and noticed things no one else thought to notice. He would miss all of it, in a way that had no clean edges, no end point he could locate.
"Of course I will," he said.
Woonhak couldn't contain his smile.
"So whenever you miss me," Woonhak started, "gaze at the sunset."
"Why the sunset?"
"Because I'll be there every evening no matter where you are."
"What if I can't see the sunset?"
Woonhak pondered this seriously. "I'm still there, am I not?"
"Yes, but-"
Dongmin stopped. He wasn't sure what he wanted to say, only that the sunset wasn't quite enough. Something in him wanted something physical, something that existed outside of sky and light and the hope of a clear evening, something he could press into his palm in the dark of his own room, miles away, and hold.
Woonhak was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, he uncurled his right hand from where it had been pressed into a tight fist against his thigh.
Dongmin hadn't noticed it before. He'd been too focused on tear-streaked cheeks, on the salt still on his lips but now he saw it. Woonhak's fingers had been clenched the whole time through all of it. Even when Dongmin had leaned over him, even when he'd nipped along his jaw and kissed his cheek. Woonhak had been holding something the entire time.
His fingers opened.
In the centre of his palm lay a small smooth pebble. Grey, with a single vein of white quartz running through it that caught the moonlight like a thread of silver. It was warm, Dongmin could tell even without touching it, from the faint flush of Woonhak's skin where it had pressed.
"When did you-"
"The first night we came here." Woonhak's voice was quiet, almost shy. "I picked it up from the ground before we climbed up. I don't even know why. I just wanted something to remember this place by so I kept it in my pocket every time we came back."
He'd been carrying it for days. Through every conversation in the dark, every shared silence, every night they'd spent up here while the rest of the camp slept below. The pebble had been there the whole time, a secret weight against his thigh, and Dongmin had never known.
"Tonight I took it out before we climbed up," Woonhak continued. "I was going to leave it here as a memory of us but then-" He trailed off, his cheeks coloured faintly.
Then Dongmin had kissed his face and Woonhak had held the pebble tighter, fingers closing around it like it was the only fixed point in something that had shifted without warning and refused to right itself.
"I held it," Woonhak said simply. "And it got warm."
He held it out, the same way he offered everything: without guile, without condition, without any real awareness of what he was giving away.
"This is for you."
Dongmin couldn't speak.
"It's not much," Woonhak added, uncertainty creeping in. "But it's from here. From this treehouse. So even if you can't see the sunset, you'll have this. Something from our place."
Our place.
Dongmin reached out and took it. Warm and smooth, worn down long before Woonhak had ever picked it up, and warm now from Woonhak's grip. From the hold he'd kept through something that had confused and moved him in equal measure, something he still didn't have words for.
Dongmin closed his fingers around it.
"Thank you," he said. His voice came out rough.
"I know it's just a rock," Woonhak said, suddenly self-conscious. "You don't have to keep it if you don't-"
"I'll keep it." The words came out with more weight than he intended. "I'll keep it forever."
Woonhak's expression shifted. Something in it eased. He smiled, small and satisfied, and looked back at the wall. "Now I'll always be with you," he said. "Even if you can't see the sunset."
Dongmin looked down at the pebble in his closed fist. It was still warm, still holding the shape of Woonhak's grip.
He thought about the small sound Woonhak had made when his lips touched his jaw, the way his fingers had tightened around this small unremarkable stone through a moment he didn't understand and couldn't name, the way he had stayed still and not pulled away and trusted Dongmin with that too, the way he trusted Dongmin with everything, completely and without suspicion, because it had never occurred to him not to.
He didn't know if that made it better or worse.
He pressed the pebble tighter into his palm.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "That's what I'm counting on."
He didn't say the rest. Didn't say that he already knew, with a certainty that sat cold and motionless in his chest, how this would go: that there would be nights, years from now, in a different life entirely, when the sunset wouldn't be enough, when nothing would be enough. Nights when some song would drift through the static of a radio or the hum of a passing car and he'd hear it like a verdict:
Your serotonin's gone, the kerosene's gone, the sunset is gone. Yeah, it's all gone, all gone, all gone.
And the world would feel stripped clean of whatever kept a person upright, and he'd be left with nothing but the quiet and the dark and the memory of a boy in a treehouse who'd promised to be there every evening, no matter what.
And on those nights he would reach into his pocket, or into the drawer where he kept the things that mattered, and find this pebble, still smooth, still grey and still threaded through with that single vein of white.
And he would hold it and it would still be warm.
Woonhak would be there, even then.
Woonhak, who would be a priest one day. Woonhak, who would stand at the front of that pretty village church and tell people about grace and never once suspect that he had been the closest thing to it Dongmin had ever touched.
Even if I can't see the sunset, Dongmin thought. Even then.
The pebble pressed into his palm, its warmth already fading toward memory. Outside the treehouse, the first pale suggestion of dawn was beginning to show at the edge of the sky.
The last night was nearly over.
Dongmin closed his fist tighter and didn't let go.