Work Text:
i.
There are no clocks in the village.
Jaehyun thumbs his wrist, stained with ink the colour of his saddest dreams, and counts to ten beats. He breathes in time with his throbbing pulse, unable to believe at this age, that light floods his body and he draws life from the ground.
Legend speaks of a bronze sculpture positioned in the middle of the town plaza. He would tell you the time if you tickled his chin. He doesn't exist anymore—only the tolling church bells do, every count of which must be noted at every sunrise—but his legacy remains in the blood of all townsfolk. His croaking travels down lineages and into the chests of scribes. They beat. And these beats, these hearts, master fates etched into stone because they are time itself. Even the stars can't strike the pulse of a master.
No one can defeat time. Not Jaehyun with his wicked fingers and silken hair, not the children rolling leather strings into make-believe scabbards, and definitely, not the grids of numbers left for him to calculate.
A rolled-up parchment whacks his head.
"What are you lazing around for," his father barks, twirling the roll with his right hand and rapping his left knuckles on Jaehyun's oak desk. Jaehyun sucks in a sharp breath. It makes his hair stand on end, like a frightened animal the size of a newborn rabbit.
"I'm sorry," he mutters, pretending to drink the task on hand like honeyed mead.
There is profit today, there was loss yesterday—and there will be loss tomorrow.
The expenses of running an inn have finally overtaken their income. They can scam all the travellers they want; they can offer mineral baths and delicacies unique to their village, but there is no cure to a cold that doesn't involve bitter herbs shoved down one's throat. This isn't a cold—this is the onset of a plague that will haunt them for decades to come.
Winter is upon them, and it is harsher than it has ever been. No traveller would make the journey this far north.
He doesn't tell his father. Jaehyun dips his feather and writes the undeniable demise of his family's inn. The numbers fall short and he scratches hollow lines where there should be the promises of gold coins showering from the skies.
The heavens are not merciful enough. They shouldn't be.
It is a miracle, the ladies at the meat shop whisper, how fine of a man Jaehyun has turned out to be when all his family has proven to be is the hellhole that ripped open the underbelly of their town's riches. They lunged and stole until everything was theirs. They wear spun fabric from those merchants with shops in the city, and jewels—so many jewels. His mother is a deity of opulence. Strings of pearls break at her fingertips without hesitance. Jaehyun, though, wears the same cotton every church boy wears on his days off. The feel of hemp burnished in the stitch from an old woman's fragile hands.
"Ever since we have left the accounting to you, we have only suffered loss after loss."
Jaehyun's jaw tightens.
"I only do the needful, I don't have anything to do with earni—"
"You scoundrel!" The rolled parchment falls on Jaehyun's hand as if it were a pillar of marble, and instead of blood, ink splatters onto the sheets. It draws a constellation. Something to do with finding a way. There is no way. There is only the burn on the back of his hand.
The wind howls through the gaps in the window shutters. The paper untucks swiftly and billows like a rigid curtain.
Jaehyun shivers and his nose, his tongue, the back of his throat, everything turns to ice.
This is where he chooses to lock his heart, in a cage, after it slipped through rusty iron bars for the hundredth time. He will forge a lock and he will swallow the key to let it sit at the pit of his stomach with the barrage of stones he has been eating over the years. It will settle, as all things must. If he dies here, he will be the one to dig his grave.
"From tomorrow morning, you will cater to our guests. Be on time, and dress well. Your brother will handle accounting. Maybe then we will see a fortune."
Jaehyun wishes the wheels would stop spinning.
ii.
Kim Doyoung steps into the inn with grand pretence—and a silver clock dangling from a pocket in his waistcoat.
Time begins to tick in the village as the residents stir awake from their centuries-long slumber. A visitor is here.
He has the eyes of a graceful doe and a cold smile, befitting the chilled breeze that has begun to freeze the swaying wheat. His travelling cloak is longer than his body. It sweeps the floor after his footsteps, erasing proof of his existence. His skin glistens with moisture. Truly, the city folks are different.
"I am here on official business," he says to the landlord, and his voice melts, melts, melts. It is gentle and stern. It could dissolve moss-covered bridges and turn them into fens.
Jaehyun stands at a doorway and can't help but stare.
"It is our pleasure to have you, Official."
Pleasantries are never like this. An empty spot in the stable; a crowded gate; the chatter of maids hiding as they fold bedsheets; the pleasant hum of insincerity in his mother's throat; vices marked by demons pooling beneath the seam that holds Jaehyun's abdomen closed.
"You shouldn't have," Official Kim says, with a curt bend to his neck and a sweet lilt that burnishes pink onto the mother's cheeks.
"We want you to have the most comfortable stay." She places her fingers on his arm delicately, a touch just perfect enough to be kind, too light to be vulgar, yet Jaehyun knows to swallow the ugly rearing of a feeling that says 'I should die before I see this'. Said feeling has grown wings and they sweep the back of his throat with the intent to bruise. This woman is no mother—at least, she hasn't birthed him—and she parades with the title to fill her endless desires for approval. It blinds him with unjust fury.
Jaehyun hates her as he hates himself.
"My son will wait on you—personally," like a servant who will beg at your feet. She doesn't say the words she had thrown across the dinner table last night.
He wishes he could dig a fire lamp into the ground and set the world ablaze.
Official Kim meets his eyes—and oh, they are colder than ever. Urgency is the hill he has chosen to die on and it reflects in the downwards curl of his mouth, in the shameful dip between his eyebrows. He doesn't want Jaehyun. But Jaehyun wants to have the chance to please him, even if just to steal his mother's newest pawn from under her nose.
He walks where he is wanted—strings hooked to his skin and his joints broken and replaced with wooden balls like a child's first marionette—and he bows. He holds one arm behind his back, and one arm in front, pressing the mass of his body—the weight of his existence—between them. If he could grow fangs, he would. Official Kim insists he doesn't need someone to look after him in the politest words he can. Jaehyun stays bent over the precipice of his right to become human.
"I will only stay here for two nights," he presses, like a finger to a bruise.
Two nights paid by the central city—and the cathedral that stands in the middle of it—is equivalent to buying a star and managing to pull it down to earth with ropes knit of withering rose stems. Money has flooded into the bag. His brother's smirk and father's grimace have rendered Jaehyun an imbecile. The god of chances is a cruel, cruel being who hates him.
"Please don't dismiss the tradition of an establishment as old as ours," the mother pleads. She is a snake. Her exhortations will eventually force the Official and his travelling partners to tumble over dry grass, unbreathing in its demise.
And so it breathes.
Jaehyun's shadow on the wooden floors precedes him as he leads Official Kim to his room. They come to a standstill when they meet eyes again and the two other travellers bemoan their fatigue. They have attendants of their own: Jaehyun's sister, with the same blood as their vulture of a mother in her veins, and his other brother, one whose real name is a mystery lost to the heavens. They linger with frigid toes and the cloth of their slippers cutting into their feet.
"We will meet here tomorrow—" he flips open his clock and Jaehyun is forced to move his gaze from nimble hands to what can only be termed a miracle birthed by humanity, "—at seven o'clock."
Foreign words from a foreign mouth. What would it feel like to devour it?
A circle. A disk, with black dots and lines and two metallic needles moving fast enough to hex a bind. It is mesmerizing. Jaehyun has read of these, he has seen washed out illustrations in smuggled books, but this is his first time looking at the contraption. Humans have conquered time. Or so it seems.
"How long does it take to reach the Northern Pass?" A friend of the Official asks.
The question is directed at Jaehyun, and he wets his lower lip with the tip of his hot tongue before he can answer: "Two hours." Well rehearsed, and flowing, just as the script said. Or his father, to be precise.
"Then we must get ready early and be on our way."
They bid goodnight and Official Kim turns to Jaehyun again, waiting to be led.
"Do you carry only one clock?"
"I beg your pardon?"
Jaehyun shakes his head and smiles. He can see the effect his heartthrob dimples have instantaneously. His opponent's face simmers from a boil of consternation to stewing confusion. What a lovely expression.
"Your room is this way. The bath is down the hall and I will bring tea and dinner at the twenty-first chime—"
What did he say again, o'clock?
At twenty-one o'clock.
iii.
The morning sees Jaehyun shuffling about the bath, heating water at the individual wash stalls. He hasn't done this in ages, not since he was fifteen with blistered fingers, and he wouldn't do it now if it weren't for an acidic remark sinking to the depth of his rotting bones.
His guest, Official Kim, sinks under the crystal-like cover of hot water to hide from Jaehyun's eyes.
"Would you like me to wash your back?" Jaehyun asks with a hand on his mouth.
"...Please."
Kim sits with his back straight against the wall of the stone tub, skin red from the dip of his tailbone to the scattered hair at the top of his nape. He looks like a charm, like one of those dolls Jaehyun's sister would tear the clothes, hair, limbs, stuffing—everything—from. Perhaps it is finally his turn to have a go at bathing a doll he doesn't deserve to see, much less have.
Jaehyun dips a small, wooden bucket into a large tub with steaming water in spite of the blurring numbness in his fingers. The water comes from a cistern outside the inn, covered with layers of hay and what they call a 'filter' of mud and rock. Jaehyun understands the need for freshwater in the indoor bathroom, he truly does. Sometimes though, he doesn't understand why his father would allow the sparkling, mineral-rich spring water to be dirtied by the scrubbed grime of travelling men every day. That water glistens unlike any other as it gathers into droplets on his nails and drops back onto earth. One bath should be enough—this one, where he and the other workers burn their fingers fanning the flames in water heaters.
Shaking the thoughts aside, because he shouldn't think—his existence is that of broken stoneware, but he will never see gold dust; he is meant to be thrown aside, not fixed—and empties the bucket into the bath.
"Is the heat all right?" he asks, keeping the bucket aside.
"It is."
"Do you have a preferred oil?" Jaehyun unrolls his sleeves, only to roll them again. They will remain soaked regardless.
"Just wood ash will do."
Official Kim doesn't look at Jaehyun even once. It's a pity, really. He is a pretty man, both of them are pretty men, and they should look at each other, naked or not, to see the cracks in each others' masks.
Jaehyun settles on a stool and leans so that his knees don't knock against the tub's stone. He scoops out a handful of wood ash and oil from a nearby container and rubs it all over his hands. When he requests Kim to take a dip in the water to wet his skin, he listens and does so without a sound.
Such a shiny back. Milky, spotted with the heat of the sun and tiny black stars along a section of his spine. Kim probably doesn't know they exist, such is their size. Jaehyun rubs his palms together again—slick, thick, heavy—and finds if he were made of wax, he wouldn't dislike the feeling. Does wax feel? Do candles know how easily they burn, how many homes they light? Jaehyun can't even light his own room.
As expected, Kim's skin is softer than it looks. Hard, corded muscle stretches under his skin where sinew ends and begins. If he were any paler, Jaehyun imagines he would be able to look at his innards. Are they as pink as the meat they eat? It should be.
He runs his fingers in large circles and kneads the base of his palm into the triangular edges beneath his shoulders.
Jaehyun has never seen such a defined back before.
Kim isn't a quarter as hard as the men-at-arms in town. He lacks the rounded bulk on his arms and he lacks the protruding vessels on his neck. But he is sharp and clean.
Jaehyun can't help it when he slows down as he rubs down the neck. He takes his sweet time moving past every knob of bone.
Kim sighs and relaxes. He loosens into a smudged streak of charcoal from the taut line of ink he was supposed to be.
"Ack!" He twitches when Jaehyun rubs his sides.
"Did it hurt?"
"No...I didn't expect it."
"I will keep my hands to your back then. My apologies."
There is the sound of a choked voice—say what you want to say, tell me I'm overstepping boundaries—but words never come. Kim bows his head, short hair snipped into a neat line coming into clear view, and Jaehyun allows the silence to fill the ever-growing gap between his heart and mouth. Everything he says is cursed.
Kim's voice, on the other hand, reminds him of the sap that flows from the bark of trees bent over by the wind.
Jaehyun's pants tighten at the crotch, threatening to chaff his dick where it rests heavily against his thigh. He colours with shame as the touch of Kim's skin sends embers jumping through his body. He hardens. There is no place to hide. The doors jeer at him with a segue of degrading comments ready to shoot him when he walks through. One day. All he needs is one day of being a regular man tasked with the most mundane of tasks. If only he were born to a farmer or woodcutter.
"You must be getting cold," he says and moves close, so close, his breath ghosts Kim's skin menacingly, then lowers his hands into the hot water.
When he pulls them out, he is careful enough to trace the lightest of touches along Kim's pelvis. Before the man can open his mouth to say something to shove Jaehyun back in his place, under the soles of his leather boots, Jaehyun digs his fingers into the tense line of his shoulders.
He wonders if the sighs and moans leaving Kim's mouth are more than signs of relaxation. Jaehyun is struck by the want to face him. He wants to take his dick into his hands and lick it till all chubbiness is lost to the ether. He wants and wants and this isn't good—
"What are you doing?" Kim asks, without a snap, but with a quivering glance and a momentary turn of his head.
Jaehyun's hands have strayed past the delicate canvas they were handed. The front of his shirt is wet and grey.
"You do realise what they meant when they offered personal attendants., Jaehyun says in response. He has nothing better to say. Ugliness and pebbled desperation is waiting at the back of his tongue.
"I was under the impression this is an inn, not a brothel."
"Do you take me to be a prostitute?" He whispers into a reddened ear. His own ears must be as red as a polished apple.
"Then why are you offering to pleasure me?"
"I am attracted to you. As a man, to another man. Is it that difficult to glean?" His index finger twirls a coarse hair. Kim shudders but doesn't move away. Desire, a sin, is paramount.
"No, I figured that much...why would the landlady offer her children?"
"You ask too many questions, sir," Jaehyun pulls away, the ache in his pants dimmed, "I believe you will know if you think a bit more."
"She needs a favour," Kim concludes.
"She needs many favours, but this is one easy way to get at least one of her wishes fulfilled. Our inn was running low on funds before one of the landlady's sons...he...he learnt that one of the maids had an affair with a landowner."
"Did he use it against them?"
"No, he used it to gain an advantage. It didn't take long before some others learnt that other services were provided for the rich if they only asked. Which is false. Your lot is the first to be offered anything of a sexual nature."
Jaehyun kneels onto the floor and washes his hands at a spot away from skin. He still needs to rid Kim's back of the dark suds and oil he massaged into it. He continues speaking when Kim voices concern, "Before this, we only bathed them or offered entertainment services in groups of three in their rooms, we made sure they were drunk and passed out before leaving for the night."
"What use do officials from the central city have for your mother? This place is as far as a place can get."
"She wants to sleep with you."
Kim turns to stone.
"Forgive me but, does she have no shame?"
"None at all. Once she does, she may bear a child, and she may show up at your door with a request. Who knows what devious ideas she comes up with." Jaehyun scoffs then and returns to wash his back. He fills up the wooden bucket again and pours water from a height. It splatters loudly. Just like rumours would if Jaehyun had the courage to pack up and run far away.
"Is that what she did with your father? I apologize, however she looks much too young compared to him."
Jaehyun bristles at the blunt question. But there is no point in lying now, is there? The world has decided where it wants to rest for eternity and even if a common man pleads her to keep moving, to keep up with the river of time that bites his ankles, she will not listen. She has cut off her ears and closed her eyes.
"...Yes. It is as you said, she used to pleasure him when my mother was dying."
"I simply need to refuse her advances then."
"That's the most logical thing to do."
All the dirt is gone. Jaehyun pushes himself to stand up, to fetch a cloth to dry Kim when a gentle hand circles his wrist. Kim's eyes—beautiful and deep—stare at him.
"Why did you offer to sleep with me then?"
"I said it before. I am attracted to you, one man to another, and you can refuse me. I am duty-bound to provide the best possible service. I would be glad to, even if that weren't the case."
"And if I accept your offer?"
"You wouldn't have to ask as many questions as you are asking right now. Please don't go along with it to please me. I'm a stranger."
The church bells toll the beginning of a new time, one where everything is threadbare and laid on the ground like a century-old carpet.
"I shall meet you at night."
iv.
If Jaehyun can figure in a day that Kim Doyoung is an honourable man, then to what extent does the knowledge of this honour extend if you have the privilege to spend a decade with the man?
He envies, with the intensity of a cherry red feist, the two joking travellers who ride alongside Kim.
They seem to know him well. If the bashful ignorance Kim serves them whenever they grin at Jaehyun is to be believed, they have picked up on the sparking tension tying them together.
Jaehyun cleans Kim's room, dusts the windows, sweeps the floor, and pours tea over the clay teapot he is responsible for drying and curating. The gods must be smiling on him today, even if he doesn't believe they have a mouth or any lips to smile with. He doesn't cross any of the scathing bodies with scissor-like tongues that love to read him apart whenever he so much as breathes.
The sky turns lilac and brings with it a veil of hidden stars. Jaehyun loves the moon. The moon smiles at him.
"Jaehyun!" A fellow maiden calls him from a window as he toils away with laundry in the backyard. "The officials have come back from work. The boss says you need to be in the kitchen before the bells ring!"
The maiden vanishes then with a curtain of long, dark hair fluttering behind her. He recognises then, she is the girl tending to the third traveller. Ashes of her past are smeared on her neck, on her calves, on her cheeks. They will never clean. Not like the ashes they spend nights mixing into oil and storing in the bath. These ashes will finally scatter when she becomes one with the ground. Another youth wasted in the grandiose schemes of one wretched adult and the children who call her mother.
Jaehyun looks up at the sky.
He wishes he had a clock right about now.
Preparing dinner is easy. Flay a fish. Slice a fish. Sear a fish over smoke from coals. Serve the fish on a spotless plate. Jaehyun catches his reflection on the ceramic as he lowers it to the table.
Kim thanks him then prays.
Who does he pray to? Jaehyun prays to the river when he eats, to the sun when he chews the first bite, then to the ground when he swallows. Someday, he will stop. When he knows what time it is, he will lie on his back and count the grains of light behind his eyelids.
"How does it taste?" A question to elicit a response that will swirl into the sweetest gratification.
"It tastes delicious."
Gratification earned.
Jaehyun smiles, bows, and heads back to the kitchen where he washes rice for himself and the other workers. Little hands steal a bite and he ignores it with a dimple poked into his cheek. It cooks. It takes all the time in the world to soften. If Jaehyun were to be reborn, he would love to be born as rice on a fertile paddy. He loves the scent of it.
Before huddling behind the stoves and eating, he must clean the main hall. An unbreakable rule.
The hall is empty save for, just as expected, Kim, the other travellers, the girls attending to them, and—he loathes to think of it—the mother.
"—show you something special," The mother is saying something with batting eyelashes and painted lips. Her dress parts at her cleavage as she sidles up to Official Kim. Her atrociously overwhelming scent, that of flowers from a valley a moon away, makes Jaehyun gag, and she sighs into a cup of warm mead. Her skin is flushed and lustrous—is this what his father saw when he took her and replaced Jaehyun's birth mother without a second thought?
"No thank you," ever so polite, "my back hurts after a long day."
"All the women of this family are skilled masseuses. Would you like someone to set the pain right? Perhaps, I should offer to do that myself?" She giggles. Her age—not far from the oldest child of this family's—bleeds into the freshness of her voice. Kim's face twists into discomfort and she leans away with a malevolent leer. She will slither into the crevices of his abdomen and suck him dry by the end of the night.
It would take the mountains to crumble for Jaehyun to feel any sympathy for her. Yet, the mountains are chipping away under their weight.
"I believe," Jaehyun voices, small but steady, thump, thump, thump, "it will be comfortable if I do it. I washed the sir's back earlier today, so a follow up from me would be best suited, don't you agree, mother?"
She doesn't agree.
It is etched in the marble-like planes that crash together to make her otherwise pretty face. Prettiness wasted on a heart as pumped with demonic whispers as hers.
"I'm grateful," Kim says, falling into an uncharacteristic slouch.
"Whatever pleases you," she says. Venom. It is venom that she spews at Jaehyun. She inflicts him with hate so strong it steeps into him and reminds him that all he is and can ever be is a used rag too old to be cleaned. His place, in his own eyes just as in hers, is at the bottom. The bottom of where, nobody knows. Just bottom. He will take it if it means gaining the agility to outrun her pointed teeth.
She rushed to put her dress together to cover more skin when Kim leaves after addressing his friends. As a final act of filial piety, Jaehyun collects the dishes Kim has left behind and murmurs to her.
"I won't go if you don't want me to." The proposition is golden.
"When has anything I've said ever stopped you, you fool." She breathes out a long, controlled sigh, eyes fixed on the other men who have finished their meals and are ready to thank her for shelter then fall asleep. None of them ranks as high as Official Kim does—the record keeper on a secret task handed to him by the cathedral. Pawns to be knocked off their feet when the ground decides to split open a chasm.
"Sleep well." A farewell. A dance of victory.
She doesn't acknowledge it and straightens her sleeves before downing the rest of her mead.
Jaehyun blinks her disappointed face away and follows in the socked footsteps of the man he wants to devour. Official Kim's feet are so light on the floor he could be the remainder of a loyal spirit. Jaehyun's heart sways. A man with a sense of justice. Jaehyun doesn't have it. Justice is lost on those who have never learnt to feel right apart from wrong.
An image, a sound, a breath of the wind, all to be written into his memory.
Let this temporary happiness tickle his insides.
v.
The night sky descends slowly—slow enough to tie Jaehyun's tongue with its teeth and to steal his breath.
Official Kim—Doyoung, call me Doyoung when you scream, he whispers against Jaehyun's lips—leaves his earlier hesitation torn asunder—like a fowl with rickety legs learns to jump across brooks—when Jaehyun's fingers skirt over the hem of his shirt.
Jaehyun's ears thunder with the speed of his racing heart. He flushes down to his toes, a cherry red on his cheeks and blush pink on his knees. Doyoung's tongue works past his lips carefully. If he were a treasure, if Jaehyun were a treasure, he would like to be handled this delicately.
Fingers rub Jaehyun's nape; a thumb presses into a flush lip; Doyoung gasps and there it is, the stretch of his neck. Pristine. Unmarked. Ready to be devoured as a ceremonial meal served to starving men. Jaehyun's thumb, wet with spit—hot and gross—drags roughly down Doyoung's chin and lands where his head meets the rest of his body. It glimmers grey and blue, with the shadow of a window sash cutting across. Right above the line of shadow, bone juts out. Jaehyun leans down and bites. The concept of nibbling is foreign.
When Doyoung chokes a startled cry and moans, Jaehyun jumps off the precipice.
Jaehyun holds him close and presses their lips together, chastely.
All their clothes fall away, waiting to be stepped on when both of them reach bliss. Jaehyun's heart rings like a sharp bell. He pulls away to kiss down Doyoung's cheek and behind his ear, at a soft spot with thin skin and then down the side of his neck. He is a bloodthirsty vampire. He is the manifestation of an undead fugue. Doyoung moans again, a short, rotund sound that stems from his belly and Jaehyun smiles against the wound he leaves above Doyoung's shoulder.
Water gushes in the distance—the girls must be bathing. It throws them back to the morning. Eyes heated. Chests heated. Thighs heated and craving. The heat swells and bursts.
The church bell rings to mark the start of a new hour.
Doyoung's hands roam over the expanse of Jaehyun's back like the hands of vivid danger. His thighs fall open with shame and a mumbled request: please don't look there.
"Will you tie my hands?" Jaehyun asks.
"What? Are you asking for…"
"You have a chain," at the end of the chain is a clock, he doesn't say, "I want to know what it feels like. Right here…on my wrists."
"It is very thin. It might cut into your skin."
"Then tie them loose." As long as I can feel the cool metal. As long as I can check whether it beats the same cursed rhythm as the one in my body.
For a man whose smile is so, so frighteningly cold, his voice insists that he is a warm, warm, horribly warm lover with insides made of molten glass, ready to be shaped in a furnace and then eaten by men like Jaehyun who have grown up cleaning shards of broken windows all their lives.
So this is what the sublime touch of a dishonest man can do.
Not once does either of them stop.
And Jaehyun comes, then comes again, and once more before the sparrows chirp on low-hanging branches outside the room. He doesn't let go of the timepiece in his hands the entire time.
Sunlight greets a sleeping Doyoung and a withering Jaehyun.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
One stick moves faster than the other two—he hadn't even seen the third stick when he caught a glimpse yesterday—and their silver sheen becomes indistinguishable from the glass covering it. He can't even touch the sticks. He can't touch the white base.
Once again, Jaehyun is overcome by momentary rage.
The sound does not match the thumping in his neck or his wrist. For a while, it does, then it doesn't.
With damning realization, he concludes the impossible.
It is his body that is fluctuating with incongruity. It is his heart that is wrong. Shadows falter in their crawl to comfort a shattering soul. The clock sounds continuous, without stop, and he doesn't need to ask twice to know that it is fuelled by magic. His body isn't. Time evades his callous grasp.
"This is a pocket watch. I would leave it with you," Doyoung's husky voice startles him. Jaehyun can hear the rejection in his tone. Doyoung—no, Official Kim—sounds like everyone Jaehyun has ever met. Therein lies the rejection. The jagged edges of Jaehyun's existence are harder to climb than spelunking at the cave.
"But it's a memento. Someone precious gifted it to me. My apologies…"
"I'm just fascinated. We have no clocks in this village. I don't mean to keep this."
Doyoung hums, a merry sound for a throat as abused as his, then opens his mouth and shatters dreams he didn't know existed, "For some reason, all timepieces are on the list of banned items for merchants to sell."
"I see."
So, there will never be any clocks in this village if Doyoung leaves.
No one here sees the need to learn what happens when and why there are hows and whats. Sacred papers turned to ash decades ago and no one bothered to wonder what they said. Only the church bells will continue to toll. Little children will learn to run past the fences and into the long grass, all the way to the forest, where the bell chime doesn't reach. Someday, one of them will fall victim to the icy gale of the northern caves.
Time will tear into their bones and run.
And Jaehyun…he will have to stay within the limits of his body, waiting to shrivel up and be sold with raisins. A memory will be imprinted on the back of Jaehyun's eyelids—silver like a shy glance; ticking down to earthly demise; gentle with searing heat; the taste of lips Jaehyun will never have again.
Freedom is now a lost treasure sinking to the depths of…the depths of what?
Jaehyun would strangle himself if needed to shove down the gurgling cry in his throat, brutally so with bloody imprints left in the wake of his violence, and blinks away a single tear.
For him, time will stop.
"...Thank you, for last night," Doyoung says in a hushed whisper, sensing that their conversation hangs in the air with one clipped wing and a lopped-off head.
Jaehyun stands up and gathers his clothes.
"It is part of my duty to make sure you are well-rested. Other than my interest, of course, which was unseemly. We shall never cross paths again, after all. I hope you find it in you to forgive my slight. Even if you enjoyed it."
vi.
The horses are ready. The guests are ready to leave. Official Kim is the last man to gather his things and step past the threshold Jaehyun can never cross.
"Do you think you can visit again?" Jaehyun asks in the smallest voice possible. Will you come back? Will you come back to me and hold me again and take away my heart even if only to rip it to shreds.
Official Kim is caught by surprise.
The coattails of his expensive travelling cloak billow in the cold wind. Jaehyun's toes freeze in his thin, cloth slippers.
His eyes widen and he resembles a deer caught dancing to the tunes of an antelope. Don't wait for me, he seems to be saying. Kim licks his lower lip and takes in a shuddering breath. Hair stands at the back of his neck where the upturned collar doesn't reach. He fiddles with the fingertips of his glove.
Jaehyun heaves out a sigh, part-real, part-feigned, and presents his final greeting at Kim's doorstep.
"Thank you for your patronage," he says, tongue cold against lying teeth.
It is done and sealed, ready to be thrown into the midst of river currents and pedagogical storms. Jaehyun bows his head—the package is tied, twine knotted and one side ripped open with a rusty pocket knife—then steps away, behind the line of maids. The mother appraises him with shrewd eyes.
This is a stolen victory.
Her eyes hold contempt and Jaehyun's immediate future holds a backhanded slap to his dignity.
It doesn't feel like a victory.
Not when Official Kim doesn't stop him from turning away.
Could it be a tie greater than lust when their bodies danced to the crippling notes of desperation for a single night. Why does it hurt? Jaehyun wants the stretching fissure in his body to switch places with the scratches on his bedroom floor. Perhaps if he was swallowed by the underworld asleep, he would never have to wake up to another morning without the warmth of a person next to him.
How unfortunate of a man he is.
Jaehyun the dreamer, Jaehyun the lost, Jaehyun the boy who must let all his tears run through the gaps between his lungs, and only those gaps. There is no place for sadness on his pristine face.
"Thank you, dear," the mother croons, and he refuses to look.
"The pleasure was ours. We completed our duty and...we had a comfortable stay. Thank you."
Are those words for the cruel mother whose face splits into two halves with the length of her grin, or are they for Jaehyun's trembling resolve?
There is no way to know.
It takes less than eighty heartbeats—fake, all fake, who knows how long it actually took—for a horse to neigh and stamp a good against the stone ground. It takes another thirty beats to exchange farewells. This is the frenzy of knowledge, to count and berate, as well as the power to say goodbye. Jaehyun tells himself waiting for a downpour—which is seasons away—would benefit him more than waiting under a roof meant to fall and crush him when he least expects it.
Would Kim look back?
Horses. Patter, clamp, a whinny, another patter.
How would Jaehyun know; he never looks up.
The kitchen is a safe place to be. He needs to help collect firewood, to sew buttons on a little girl's shirt, heat bathwater, to sweep the floor. To clean the room he had mercilessly thrashed on just a few hours ago. He buries a figment of hope under his feet as he walks away.
The wind is icier than the mountains.
vii.
"Doyoung," Jaehyun whispers in the ringing solitude of his little bedroom.
He wishes, with his eyes closed and back rigid on the tough mattress he calls his home, that the glamour of yesterday would last forever.
But forever is not a word meant for men as feeble as Jaehyun. He will tumble into ditches and grass-covered traps like a directionless cloud wandering on earth with no way back to the heavens.
Official Kim never spoke his name, Jaehyun thinks.
Does he even know it? If he does, will he remember it when he leaves? Will he, at least, send me a clock in gratitude? It should work since he isn't a merchant.
He seems to be a man of blessed pride. He must understand there is a well within the man he slept with, and this well, with decades of parched history and crackling walls, is now overflowing.
His hand wanders to his chest. It moves up. It moves down. He holds in a breath—his bones make space for the air he sucks in—and lies still. No thudding. No hammering. Just silence and the thrum of a beat that would leave his body willingly, if it were allowed because living within Jaehyun is living without magic and time. No one wants to be him.
Downstairs, the mother gathers herself once again. Chances have been lost. A boy has been afflicted with the sickness of losing someone he was never destined to have. A pain. Necks should snap and relieve the living than to keep them tethered to the banks of a lake that pretends to be the sea.
The church bells toll heavily. It is noon. The chattering of the maids reaches his bedroom as they rush to buy lunch in the city plaza. If the time-telling bronze bust still existed, Jaehyun could have been its friend.
Alas, the bust would be a clock. And because there can be no clocks—
There are no clocks in the village.