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Chapter Text

Jongdae leans back on his office chair, pushing the backrest as much as he can before it starts squeaking and threatens to snap. He stretches his arms over his head and lets out a sigh as several of his vertebrae make extremely satisfying pops and his skeleton realigns, breaking the impression of having become chair-shaped. 

The clock on the wall above Kyungsoo’s head marks 5 p.m. The lights of the pathetic and very synthetic miniature Christmas tree Yixing had put on his desk reflect on the clock’s hands, which seem to be moving in slow motion.

When the backrest makes a concerning click and gives way, making Jongdae flail to get purchase, Yixing glares at him from in between his two screens, on the desk right in front of him. He throws a crumpled post-it at him, but doesn’t comment. 

On the other hand Baekhyun rolls his chair from behind his own screens, on the desk at Jongdae’s right. “Why are you celebrating? Are you done already?”

Jongdae tests the robustness of the chair for a further second, before he slowly re-emerges from his semi-horizontal position. “I’m not celebrating. I got nothing to celebrate.” He extends his legs and is not surprised when something cracks in his lower back. “I’m just trying not to fossilize. And procrastinating. This writ of summons is absolute hell.”

He arches his back and then, with arms up over his head, he bends right and left. The scar on his back tugs at his skin when he does it, but he ignores it. He’s had it for so long he doesn’t even notice the slight discomfort anymore.

Baekhyun points his wireless mouse at him. “Good. Because I’m going to have to work at least two hours overtime tonight, thanks to this nice business branch lease agreement, and I want your asses to be glued right where they are to keep me company in this misery.”

Jongdae shrugs. “I don’t see myself going anywhere anytime soon. I got assigned another project by the demonic intern. I’ll be lucky if I leave before midnight.”

“Yeah, don’t count on me for keeping you company, though,” Yixing mutters. “I don’t care, whatever it takes, I’m delivering this son of a bitch within the next hour. Tonight I want to go home at a reasonable hour.”

“No, no. You should stay here with us. It’s what you get for choosing to work with the Chinese language. That’s at least as demonic as Jongdae’s least favorite intern.”

Yixing squints. “That is my language, thank you very much. If there’s a demonic language in his room, it’s the one you work with . Doesn’t it have like three alphabets or something?”

“Pretty sure my language pairings are the demonic ones. Have you ever tried to count in French?” Kyungsoo grumbles from behind a pile of paper dictionaries, because he’s old school like that. “Also, at the cost of my own sanity, I am badging out at 6 p.m., too, even if that means having to tell Junmyeon that I don’t give a shit, and his interns shall figure out a way to tell the client I don’t have the time to translate a bunch of hideous power of attorneys—fucking hell,” he grunts, one of his arms shooting out of his crumpled form (Jongdae would recommend some stretching for that) to reach for his phone that started ringing. “Hello, Junmyeon?”

Jongdae chuckles and shakes his head, reaching for his keyboard to pick up his translation where he left off. 

“Of course, Junmyeon. No, no bother at all,” Kyungsoo is saying through gritted teeth on the phone. “I know. May I suggest we contact the translation company—of course,” he basically growls. 

Jongdae has to cover his mouth with both hands so as not to laugh out loud at his friend’s misery. 

“Of course the client wants us to work it out internally, for matters of maximum confidentiality, even though the guys over at the translation company signed a very proper NDA—I understand” Kyungsoo is repeating in a sort of sing-song tone, for the benefit of the other translators overhearing. Baekhyun crosses Jongdae’s gaze and bites his lips, trying not to cackle. “Yes, Junmyeon, absolutely, it will be on your desk by tomorrow morning. Oh, you need it tonight? Nope, no problem at all!” he adds breezily. 

The contrast between his melodic voice and the way his eyebrows are promising murder is very striking.

Yixing flinches when Kyungsoo hangs up with such violence it seems like his purpose was to make the entire phone disappear through the surface of his desk, but he otherwise continues to type furiously on his keyboard.

Baekhyun tries to hide his laughter behind his monitors, in order to spare his face from receiving a slam similar to the one the poor phone just received, but Jongdae decides to spy over the dictionaries to offer Kyungsoo some sympathy.

When Kyungsoo looks at him, he looks only slightly less murderous. He clears his throat. “What should we order for dinner?”

“I thought you said you wanted to go home at 6 tonight,” Jongdae comments casually, because he’s suicidal like that. 

He ducks under the desk when Kyungsoo lifts a couple of dictionaries and threatens to yeet them at his head. He had done that to Baekhyun once, and he missed his target by very little, so Jongdae is not in a hurry to make him try again.

-

At 8 p.m, the four of them are still in their office, all bent over their desks. The only sounds are the continuous rattling of keyboards and the occasional muttering in a foreign language, especially coming from Yixing’s side of the room.

The only relevant difference is that it’s dark outside and that there are empty takeout cartons piled in the trash can in the corner. 

Junmyeon knocks on the door. “Hey, guys!”

Everyone answers with a much less enthusiastic mutter. Kyungsoo politely pretends to bother forming coherent words in response, and it’s probably for the best that he didn’t actually voice his thoughts at the appearance of the lawyer. 

Jongdae has to rub his eyes and take a better look at Junmyeon, the managing partner of the international law firm they work for. It’s not the first time the lawyer has to stay late in the office, but Jongdae still hasn’t found an explanation as to why all lawyers seem to always be able to maintain a tidy appearance even though he’s fairly sure more than once he’s seen Junmyeon and Joohyun hide a pillow under their desks in the morning. How do their shirts not wrinkle? Law firm staff is not required to dress business casual since they have no client contact whatsoever, yet Jongdae’s hoodies still look like he’s been through a war and a whole set of cataclysms by the end of each day, and his shift is only eight hours long when the law firm is not buzzing crazy with year-end closings. 

And the fact that the lawyers don’t seem to mind the unreasonable hours? Sure, they’re driven, passionate, and that job is their vocation, but damn. Jongdae loves his job, too, but he needs sleep every now and then.

He squints at the coffee mug Junmyeon is holding. He’s sure the answer must be in there. Maybe it’s not just coffee. 

“How’s that job coming along?” Junmyeon is asking.

Kyungsoo visibly collects himself with one deep inhale, before swiveling on his chair to face the door. “All good, Junmyeon.”

“Good. Because we have a call with the client in three hours, and I was thinking it’d be good if we already had the documents ready, so that the associates can give them a look before submitting them to the client.”

“You have a call with a client in three hours? At 11 p.m.?” Jongdae can’t help but ask. 

“Yeah, well, different time zones.”

Kyungsoo looks like he wants to point out that he could think of many other moments, the next day, that could be convenient for a meeting, all more favorable for the residents of both time zones involved, and for him especially.

“Junmyeon, have you eaten?” Yixing asks instead. 

Junmyeon glances at his mug, probably about to answer something completely unhealthy about caffeine or whatever substance he put in it, then smiles. “No worries, I’ll get some takeout in a bit.”

Yixing nods, then goes back to his work. 

“Okay, I’m headed downstairs. Anyone need anything?” Junmyeon asks.

“A break,” Kyungsoo mutters.

“A raise,” Baekhyun adds, thoughtful. 

“A beer,” Jongdae groans.

Luckily for them, Yixing’s phone had started ringing and all comments went unheard by the man on the door. 

At 9 p.m. Yixing finally gets up and leaves. 

After a particularly long string of curses, around half hour later, Kyungsoo manages to send his translations to Junmyeon and badge out, basically running in case Junmyeon wanted to call him to ask him something about the documents. Which he totally did, and Jongdae had to answer the phone and tell Junmyeon he was sorry, but he should remind him that Kyungsoo was not even supposed to be there in the first place. 

“Hey guys! Working late?”

It’s one of the interns, one of the less demonic ones. 

To be fair, Jongin is anything but demonic. He’s a sweetheart and he apologizes a thousand times whenever he sends Jongdae a job to get done; the demonic part is that his bosses want everything done in the blink of an eye, so Jongin obviously has to beg Jongdae or else his head would be on the line, and Jongdae complies because he actually cares about Jongin, even though he’s sure that none of the projects they give him are half as urgent as the lawyers make them look like. 

The fact that Jongin is definitely not demonic is once again confirmed when he sits on the corner of Jongdae’s desk and places a substantial amount of candy on it. 

“I love you, Jonginnie,” Jongdae exhales, reaching toward the pile of sweets, surprised when he doesn’t have to scramble to get one. All that stretching had been good for something, at least. 

“Hey! I want some too!” Baekhyun protests, and Jongin throws a chocolate bar at his forehead. It placates him immensely. 

“I hope it’s not stuff for my department that is keeping you here at this time,” Jongin pouts. 

“Nope,” Jongdae mutters from around a mouthful of candy. “It’s actually something Sehun needed help with.”

Sehun. The actual demon.

“It’s for the big medical malpractice case, isn’t it?” Jongin asks, leaning to spy on Jongdae’s monitor. He lets him do it, he’s too busy ingurgitating candy anyway. 

“Why are you still here, Jongin?” Baekhyun asks, chocolate smeared to the middle of his cheek.

Jongin laughs. It sounds quite pained. “When am I not here?”

“Fair enough.”

“And you’re sure this is what you want to do with your life?” Jongdae asks, grimacing as he throws balled up candy wrappers to the nearest trash can and misses spectacularly. 

Jongin smiles. “I am.”

“You still have time to change your mind!” Baekhyun exclaims, but Jongdae barely hears him.

He had gotten up to pick up the candy wrappers from the floor, because he’s civilized like that, and brought another one on the very short journey to the trash can, just in case his blood sugar threatened to fall under a reasonable threshold. 

Standing near the bin, he unwraps it and shoves it in his mouth. The wrapper is yellow and blue, and the drawing on it seems to indicate that it was grapefruit flavored, but there’s something written in between the wrinkles of the plastic, on the inside. 

Jongdae squints and smooths it. Then he throws it away; there was nothing there.

“What? Oh, sure Jonginnie. We should all have lunch together on Friday.” He sits down and smiles at the young lawyer in the making, who claps his hands once. 

“Awesome. I gotta get going, I’m revising an awesome contract for Banking that Yixing will surely be thrilled to translate.”

Baekhyun laughs. “Yixing loves Banking.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely not! Not as much as he despises Litigation, though.”

They all shiver.

Jongin cringes. “Yeah, I hate that shit, too.” He jumps up, and doing so he nearly knocks over the pile of documents that was resting on the corner of Jongdae’s desk.

“Sorry, Jongdae. Here,” he places a few stray sheets of paper in Jongdae’s hands, then walks out. 

Jongdae glances at the pile of documents, a permanent ornament on one corner of his desk the meaning of which he had forgotten entirely, and decides that soon he shall have to remove it, make it join the candy wrappers in the trash. That is not the time, though, so he simply occupies himself with those that Jongin had picked up.

He unhesitatingly throws away the printouts of some old timetables, but hesitates at the ripped envelope. He doesn’t remember receiving any letter, yet there’s his name on it. 

He spies inside, but it’s empty. Could it be something from the administration? Maybe something about the year-end benefits? He remembers printing that out himself, not having it delivered to him in an envelope. But when he looks again, he sees he had misread it, and the name on the envelope was actually the one of one of their clients and he had translated his correspondence for him. 

Scoffing at himself, he makes another trip to the trash can. On the way there, he feels the signs of a light headache springing somewhere above his left ear.

One hour later, two coffees and several stretching sessions later, Jongdae looks up from his right monitor; Baekhyun is twirling a strand of his hair with a sort of maniacal, rhythmical precision as his lips spell out silently the words of a particularly difficult sentence. Jongdae waits for him to be done, hit the full stop button with a snort and an expression that suggests that he had absolutely no clue of what he had just written, then he talks. 

“How are you doing, Baek?”

“Two paragraphs and I’m done for today. Sending it to proofreading tomorrow and hopefully never seeing it again.”

“I’m almost done, too. Wait for me? We could take the subway together.”

“Cool,” Baekhyun answers, glaring at the screen. He says a couple words in Japanese out loud, snorts again, then gets up. “I’m gonna get some more water. You want some?”

“I’m good.”

“You need hydration, Dae.”

“What I really need is sleep.”

Baekhyun groans sympathetically and drags his feet to the end of the hallway to fill his water bottle, and Jongdae sighs, looking back to his monitors. One one side, the English text, on the other, the text he had just translated. 

He focuses, to pick up where he left off. He needs to pay attention, he knows that when he’s tired he tends to make more mistakes, and the conclusions of a writ of summons are definitely not the place to let the distraction take over.

He frowns when he sees, on the line below the last sentence he translated, a word he doesn’t remember typing.

Jongdae.

“Yup, that’s my name,” he chuckles, and shakes his head as he drags the cursor across it and deletes it.

He really needs to sleep. 

He glances at the English text again, his brain already formulating the correct translation, and moves to start typing it.

“Should either of the Parties—hey, what the hell?”

He looks at what he’d been writing:

Should either of the PartiJongdae_

He frowns. He deletes his name. 

Should either of the Parties fail to comply with the Agreement hereof, thJongdae_

“The fuck?”

“You okay?” Baekhyun asks, walking back inside their office.

“There’s the weirdest bug with my keyboard, or my computer, I don’t know? Random words keep appearing.”

“You should call IT,” Baekhyun says, after sipping on his water. “I’m sure they will appreciate a call at this hour. Oh wait, they won’t, because they are smarter than us and badge out as soon as their shift is over and don’t give a shit about the unrealistic requests of their superiors.”

“I’m serious,” Jongdae continues, as he continues typing. “Look, it did it again! Oh, God, and I realized it just now! What if this has been going on for a while and it fucked up the entire doc? I might cry.”

Baekhyun puts down the water and circles his desk. “Okay, lemme see.”

Attached hereto as Annex 34.2 (ApJongdae_

“Look!” Jongdae points at his own name.

Baekhyun squints and reads the last two sentences. Jongdae watches Baekhyun’s face become more confused by the second. “Dae, I don’t see anything wrong with these phrases.”

Jongdae stops staring at him to look back at the document.

Attached hereto as Annex 34.2 (Appeal_

“Oh. It’s gone.”

Baekhyun clasps his shoulders with a chuckle. “Come on, dude. We’re just sleep deprived. Fifteen minutes ago I was sure one of the clauses of this contract was written backwards. Let’s wrap up fast so we can go to sleep.”

Jongdae searches the text but luckily for him, his computer hadn’t slipped his name in any other sentence. 

“Done,” he announces, knowing he will definitely have to proofread it the following day anyway. 

“Me too,” Baekhyun chirps. “Let’s go to sleep. We are seriously understaffed here. If we start having hallucinations we’re fucked.”

-

Jongdae hadn’t exactly dreamed of this when he studied to become a translator. He’d wanted to translate comic books and children books, but it was a difficult industry to conquer with no experience and only a couple of editorial proposals that kept getting rejected.

And with a less than immaculate criminal record like his, it was not like he could be picky about his job.

The law firm had been his first internship, and it should have been temporary, just something to give some relief to his finances and fill his resumé with something related to his field of work, while he worked on projects to present to publishing houses on the side. Over time had slowly abandoned all that and stuck to the world of legal translation. He didn’t actually dislike it, so he accepted the offer and stuck with the law firm. 

He was aware of being extremely lucky.

He knows Baekhyun, too, had a secret wish of becoming a videogame localizer, but just like him, he’d found himself lulled by the comfortable (sometimes not so comfortable) life of the firm. 

They’d met in their first months at the firm, both recently graduated and freshly introduced to the uncertainties of the world of internships, and instantly hit it off. Kyungsoo had been a recent addition to the firm, except that he and Jongdae went way back to the beginning of their college days. When Jongdae overheard Junmyeon complain about how his European clients frowned upon the idea of having to use external translation companies because they feared for their secrecy, he had proposed they set up an interview for Kyungsoo, who immediately wowed them with his French and Spanish.

Yixing had been there longer than all of them combined; as a Chinese native speaker, slightly older than them, he’d been hired when the firm was still expanding. 

They make a pretty tight team, overall, even though all of them look at Jongdae like he’s their worst enemy when, the following morning, he’s the first to deliver his documents for the closing. 

“Done!” Jongdae smiles, getting up from his chair and proceeding to stretch thoroughly. “I think I’m going to the café across the street, does anyone want anything?”

“Same as yesterday: a raise,” Baekhyun grumbles. 

“The usual, thank you, Dae,” Yixing flashes a brief smile at him from over the Christmas tree next to his monitor. “And a cookie, if they still have some.”

“Why would they not have them anymore?”

“I may or may not have eaten something like six batches of them this morning before coming in,” Yixing says noncommittally, his mouse clicking away. 

Jongdae puts on his desk some of the leftover candy Jongin had brought. Just in case there were no cookies left in the world.

“Soo?”

“I recall you suggesting a beer.”

“It’s 11 a.m., Soo.”

“Then I’m good.”

The air is fresh on Jongdae’s face and it does wonders for him, even though he hasn’t slept enough and there’s a dull headache pulsing behind his left eye and threatening to take over the rest of his brain. 

A snowflake gracefully lands on the tip of his nose, and he chuckles to himself. He rubs his hands together and stomps his feet, waiting for the light at the pedestrian crossing to turn green. 

There’s not many people in the café. He places his order, and he’s almost handing his card to the girl behind the counter when he remembers Yixing’s request. “Oh, and my co-worker wanted cookies.”

“We still have some. You can choose from the display over there.”

Jongdae walks over and then stares at the cookies like an idiot for several minutes. 

All the labels in front of the neat rows of cookies bear his name, written with the same elegant handwriting as the rest of the labels and boards in the café.

Jongdae.

Jongdae squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head, and when he opens them the labels are still there, except that now the innocent cookies seem to interrogate him.

Jongdae?

“What even…”

“Do you need help?” The girl comes over and he startles.

“What? Oh! No—I mean, yes, sorry, I’ll take, uh—” he glances back at the cookies and thankfully the labels only bear innocent ingredients. “I’ll have four cookies, one each.”

He pays and walks back to the office in a daze.

He deposits one cookie on each translator’s desk and sits to sip on his coffee. He shakes his head to himself, very much looking forward to that night’s full sleep. 

-

But when sleep comes, he wishes he’d never even closed his eyes in the first place. 

The next day in the office Jongdae brushes off Baekhyun’s comments about his disheveled and exhausted appearance, saying he was just cranky because of all the overtime he was working on top of running around for the Christmas errands everybody hates but everybody has to do. However, Kyungsoo corners him as they badge out at the end of their shift.

“What’s wrong?”

Jongdae flinches and almost drops his backpack. He huffs. “Nothing,” he dismisses, zipping the bag closed and slinging it over one shoulder. “Nothing is wrong.”

“You look like you haven’t slept in days. And even though I know we’ve worked a lot of overtime this week, I assumed you managed to cram in a few hours of sleep here and there,” Kyungsoo says very matter of factly, and the beep of his badge seems to give the sentence more finalty. “What’s wrong, Dae?”

Jongdae swallows nervously, but doesn’t say a word as they cross the hall together to leave the building. 

“I think I’ll need to see my therapist,” he finally admits once they’re in the street. 

Kyungsoo looks at him. He’s silent for a long time as they walk side by side to the subway.

“Is it about Minseok?”

Jongdae barely winces at the mention of Minseok’s name.

There used to be a time when he couldn’t control his reactions at the mention of his name. His full body flinched, he couldn’t stop himself from whimpering, or screaming, and fear and sorrow and confusion and anger would rise within the fragile borders he had tried to put around his sanity. He would uselessy attack whoever brought up the subject, he would snap, then use the last remainders of his self-control to leave the room, go somewhere he could slam doors or maybe smash some things, punch holes into a mattress, a wall, a mirror. 

Time helped him keep his emotions on a leash. Leashed emotions were still emotions, though, and were very much present, and Jongdae can feel them as he and Kyungsoo skip down the steps to the subway station, merging with the rest of the workers leaving their offices. 

Jongdae doesn’t answer until they’re at the platform and the train approaches. 

He looks up, at the front car, at the shiny lights and the glass and the led screen showing the final destination of the train. 

It doesn’t say Suseo, today. It says Jongdae. 

Jongdae looks away, and accidentally crosses Kyungsoo’s gaze. 

He knows Kyungsoo is still waiting. 

He finally nods. “Yes,” he answers, and it’s only partially a lie.

-

Jongdae doesn’t know which is most concerning, the fact that he suddenly seems unable to read, or the fact that for a week straight he has been having nightmares and sleep paralysis.

He thinks the two things might be connected. It would make total sense that not being able to sleep would have meant his lucidity fading, with not being able to read as an understandable consequence, except that he had started not sleeping well after he realized he was reading his own name everywhere.

He had almost gotten used to seeing his own name blinking at him from the door of his own place of work, from restaurant sign boards, newspaper headlines, road signs, license plates, names in his phone contact lists, the odd email at work.

All he had to do was blink really hard, breathe in deeply, try to think about something else for a minute, and it would be gone the next time he looked over.

But then it started getting worse.

On Monday, he got to work late because he missed his subway station. He had been wearing his headphones, so he didn’t focus on where he was and didn’t hear the metallic voice of the announcer, and when he looked up at the subway map every single station on the map had been called “Jongdae.”

He had looked out the windows, and all the signs on the platforms were just useless repetitions of his name. He didn’t dare to ask other passengers for help, so he ended up getting off at a random station and ran outside to breathe fresh air. After a couple minutes crouching on the floor and breathing in and out as calmly as he could, he opened his eyes and the hangul on the subway stop was innocently informing him he was three stations past the one he was supposed to get off at. 

On Tuesday, Yixing brought them to a Chinese restaurant that had recently opened near their place of work. While the dishes on the menu were written in three languages, and while Jongdae was fluent in all three of them, he found rows and rows of his own name in three different alphabets staring at him from all the pages. 

It was awful. The menu didn’t have many pictures he could point at, either. He asked Yixing to recommend something delicious and order for him and sat quietly for the whole lunch battling a stinging headache. 

On Wednesday, he had the foolish idea he should try to pair a healthy diet to the sleep schedule he was definitely not respecting (against his wishes), and took a detour into a different aisle at the grocery shop to pick up some canned goods that seemed organic enough to make him curious to read the ingredient list.

According to the ingredient list, a certain Jongdae had been murdered and minced into dozens of cans distributed across several aisles of the store. 

He stuck with his instant ramen. It bore his name, now, but he was familiar enough with the label and logo to pick it up and be sure it was something he already knew.

It started to become really bad on Thursday, when Jongdae sat at his desk at work, trying to be very silent as he freaked out at the sight of a document he was supposed to translate and deliver within two days, which was basically made of thirty-five pages of his own name in Times New Roman size 11. 

He hid behind his screens, squeezed and rubbed his eyes over and over again, scrolled through the entire thing twice. He started hyperventilating. Baekhyun ended up noticing there were no sounds of keyboard ticking or mouse clicking coming from his side of the room and asked Jongdae whether he was sleeping. Jongdae made sure his face couldn’t be seen before he answered he was “just reading something”. 

It took him two hours, two coffees and two journeys to the restroom to splash his face with cold water before he could look at a screen and see something other than Jongdae.

The fact that it had started to affect his productivity at work did not bode well. 

On Friday afternoon he almost thought it was over, until Kyungsoo asked him about Minseok and Jongdae saw his own name on the windshield of the first car of the subway. 

On Friday evening he called his therapist. 

She could see him on a very short notice.

They had gotten well acquainted with each other over the years, and it was such a relief to be able to tell her everything. 

She is silent for a long time when Jongdae stops talking.

“You haven’t told me what happens in the nightmares you’ve been having recently,” she points out in the end. 

Jongdae shrugs. “More or less the usual. We’re in the forest, we’re fighting, and when I turn around he’s gone, or dead, or about to kill me. Or I dream about waking up in the woods, and he’s not there. Sometimes it’s just that, and then I wake up and I can’t breathe or move, some other times I dream about finding his body, or dying with him.”

She nods slowly. “You are still not able to lucid dream?”

Jongdae shakes his head. “No. I mean… sometimes I can. But only in those stupid dreams where I’m like, going somewhere and I miss the bus and I realise I left the house in my underwear, you know, dumb dreams everybody has.” 

A couple years after it had happened, after he moved to Seoul, the therapist he’d been seeing at the time had proposed that he try to practice lucid dreaming as a way to make the nightmares less awful, to help him cope with his PTSD. He mastered the technique, but only partially. 

He sighs. “For some reason I can’t lucid dream when I really need it, when I have nightmares. Sometimes I realize I am dreaming, but I still cannot take control of the dream. I know I should take his hand, turn around, go back to the others, run, I know what could change the dream to make it less awful, or to help me wake up before it gets to the bad part, but for some reason I can’t.”

“Will you continue to try?”

“Of course. It would be nice to be able not to wake up drenched in sweat and with a sore throat after dreaming of that damn forest.”

She scribbles something on her notepad. “You said you didn’t have that many nightmares, lately. Last time I saw you, two months ago, you told me they had almost completely subsided, and that when you dreamed about him, his presence was not of particular relevance.”

Jongdae clenches his teeth. As if Minseok’s appearance would ever not be relevant. Even while asleep, Jongdae could feel his heart breaking a little.

But what she meant was that Minseok in his regular dreams was just there, one of the many harmless characters that populated his dreams. Say he dreamt about missing the bus in his underwear? Minseok would be one of the bystanders, alongside with, who knows, his middle school teacher and the girl working at the cookies café down the block, one those absurd combinations the human brain sometimes produces while sleeping.

Those were regular dreams. The nightmares always started with the sound of rain in the woods, and the scent of forest and blood.

“Correct. But I woke up screaming like eight nights in a row.”

“I wonder why now all of sudden. Did anything happen? Did anyone from Sangdong call you, aside from your parents? Any unexpected mention of him was made? Did any new speculation come out online, or…”

Jongdae shakes his head. “No. Not at all.”

She hums, taps the pen on her chin, pensive. “Did anything relevant about the accident happen around this time? An anniversary?”

Jongdae shakes his head again.

The incident happened in the second week of April. Minseok’s birthday was in March. Jongdae had been cleared of all charges in late September, after his own birthday. Jongdae was used to being extra wary around those dates, and ever so punctual, the nightmares came every year.

But nothing happened around Christmas.

“And about the issue with reading,” she asks then. “Since it’s something you never experienced before, that is probably more concerning to you, isn’t it?”

“It messes with my head when I’m at work. I can’t read, and I can’t write because I can’t read what I’m typing. I can’t—I can’t work. I can’t go to work like this. And I can’t tell my co-workers or my boss, they’d think I’m insane, which might be true, and they’d fire me for that, if I don’t get fired because of my dramatic drop in productivity.”

“I understand,” she placates him. “But you need to tell me a little more before I send you to an optometrist, or a neurologist. The issue might be—”

“That I am finally going insane?”

“Jongdae.”

Jongdae covers his face with his hands. 

She sighs. “Just how often does it happen?”

“Constantly!”

“What about now?”

Jongdae looks around, a little exasperated. His gaze skips over the plants on the window, the flawless desk, the carpet. Then he finds something on the bookshelves behind her. He rubs his eyes, then snorts. 

“Unless Kim Jongdae is psychiatry’s greatest mind and a very prolific writer and you became a big fan of his and bought all of his books, then yes, I suppose it’s happening even right now.”

She turns to look at her books, too. To her credit, she is able to keep her composure, even though she probably did not expect his answer. 

Jongdae leaves the appointment with a list of medical examinations, a prescription for sleep medication, and a certificate to exonerate him from work for the following two weeks because of “burnout.”

-

“I can’t believe you would go ahead and get an exemption and leave us with double the work to make it up for your absence!” Baekhyun whines over the phone. 

Jongdae puts the phone on speaker on the couch between them. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. 

“Baek, even if I came in to work and sat next to you all day today, I swear I wouldn’t have been able to translate a single page. I am fucked up, I literally cannot even read, let alone translate.”

“We are all burned out here, I need a goddamn certificate too! If all of us worked according to how we felt, none of us would clock in in the morning, I’ll tell you that!”

“Baek.” Kyungsoo takes the phone, puts it off speaker, and puts the phone to his ear. “Leave him alone. You know Jongdae, he’d cut off an arm and give it to you if you ever needed it, so now that he needs something can’t you at least pretend you understand it, instead of making him feel guilty about having to take some time off? I literally just spent the entire dinner trying to make him feel okay about putting his health first, can you please not undermine all my efforts?”

Baekhyun sounds like he tried to reply, but Kyungsoo simply groaned. 

“You’re such an asshole, Baek. Bye.”

Baekhyun’s protest is cut when Kyungsoo ends the call. 

“He’s right, though—” Jongdae tries.

Kyungsoo shuts him up by throwing his phone at him. “You literally just said it. Even if you did try to work, you wouldn’t be able to. So take this time to try to get better instead.”

Jongdae looks down at his hands. 

“I’m not sure—I did go see a neurologist. Did a bunch of exams. I seem to be doing fine, physically.”

“That’s good.”

“Think about it. It is definitely not good. If physically I’m good, it means I’m crazy.”

Kyungsoo shakes his head. “No, you’re not crazy. You’re just traumatized. All that shit has got to have some consequences. You had some bad times before, but then you got better, so now you’re going to get better again.”

Jongdae looks away. The TV is still on, even though Kyungsoo put it on mute when Jongdae’s phone rang. The news channel is airing some news reports about some political scandal. Jongdae unfortunately doesn’t know what it is about, because the titles’ ribbon at the bottom of the screen is just an endless repetition of Jongdae? Jongdae? Jongdae? Jongdae! Jongdae! JongdAE! JONGDAE!

“Jongdae. Hey. You were fucked up when I met you, but you got better after that, right? There’s been a relapse, but you’ll be fine.”

Jongdae nods at Kyungsoo, grateful, even though he’s not sure he can believe him this time. 

When Jongdae met Kyungsoo, the first week of university, he had had exactly zero intentions of ever befriending him, let alone telling him about the shit he had left behind when he moved out of Sangdong.

All he’d wanted was to move on, relatively speaking, and be happy again in a place where no one knew him or Minseok.

And that plan did not include telling anyone about Minseok, ever.

But at the very first college party, Jongdae had picked up a few more drinks than were recommended and passed out on a couch in some friend of a friend of an acquaintance’s flat. He met Kyungsoo the next morning, when they crashed against each other outside of the toilet and nearly started to throw hands over who should throw up first.

Kyungsoo was a menace so he obviously won, so he could comfortably sit on the floor and hug the toilet as he regretted ever picking up a tequila shot. Jongdae had to settle for the sink, and the house owner definitely regretted hosting a party afterwards.

Still, it was a very bonding experience. Their degree programs were very similar, they were both new in town and didn’t have many other acquaintances, so the next weekend they predictably found themselves together in a very similar predicament, Jongdae almost excited to have the liquor wash away once again the lingering haunting thoughts from Sangdong.

Except that Kyungsoo learned from his mistakes and he actually put down his shot glass at some point, so the next morning he remembered most of the previous night and especially remembered all of Jongdae’s incoherent babbling and sobbing about a certain Minseok guy who was probably dead, and asked Jongdae about it the next morning when it was Jongdae’s turn to hug a toilet.

And Jongdae told him everything.

He liked that Kyungsoo was the kind of person who was going to keep his secrets and bring them to the grave with himself. He liked that Kyungsoo didn’t pry. He liked that Kyungsoo never talked about it again, until years later, after they had graduated, when Jongdae felt like he was the one who was going to be able to talk about it more freely.

Kyungsoo had been a lot more hermetic about his own fair share of issues concerning his family, but eventually he’d shared them with Jongdae, the morning after another party, one of the very last they went to once they realized there were much better ways to cope. 

They’d been best friends since. 

Jongdae’s phone rings again.

“Hello.”

“I’m sorry I’m an asshole. It’s just—two weeks, and then there’s winter break. I’m not gonna see you for like a month. I’ll miss you. You make work tolerable.”

Jongdae chuckles. “It’s okay, Baek. Besides, I hope I’ll come back sooner than—”

“If I clock in and see you at your desk I’m going to break your legs so you have to stay at home, okay? Just get better. Your health comes first.”

“I’ll do my best. Thanks, Baek.”

“You’re welcome. And when you get back, break my legs. I don’t take this job seriously enough to get actual burnout, but broken legs should be enough to get exempted for a while, don’t you think?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I sure am. I would never willingly keep this job if I wasn’t one.”

“Doesn’t that make me an idiot, too?”

“Maybe. Have a nice evening, say hello to Kyungsoo from me. Bye, Dae.”

Kyungsoo stares at Jongdae long and hard after Jongdae hangs up. 

“What?”

“Are we going to ever acknowledge that the reason why Baekhyun keeps this job is not because he’s an idiot, but because you also keep this job?”

Jongdae rolls his eyes. “Not with this again, Soo.”

Kyungsoo lifts his hands in surrender. “All right. But you know what I think.”

Jongdae knows. Kyungsoo had given Jongdae extensive speeches on the matter before, seemingly very invested in demonstrating this supposed romantic interest that Baekhyun might be having in Jongdae. Sure, Jongdae and Baekhyun vibe well together, bring out the worst of each other in the best possible way and got really close really fast, but Jongdae honestly doesn’t see it. 

He knows that if he was in an entirely different situation, one that wouldn’t involve his own psychological stability, he would address the matter, if anything to prove Kyungsoo he was just a delusional shipper and make him shut up once and for all. But there’s a lot on his plate right now, and he cannot bring himself to care or to worry about Baekhyun’s or his own non-existent more-than-friends feelings.

“You know what sucks?” he calls over his shoulder after a while, at Kyungsoo who’s rummaging in his fridge. 

“What?”

“I think this year I will have to go back home for Christmas. Pretty sure that if I don’t have actual burnout now, my parents will give it to me.”

Kyungsoo comes back with two beers. They clink their bottles together, then they huddle on the couch.

A little resigned, Jongdae stares at this new brand of beer, which apparently is called Jongdae, before he takes a swig.

“Can’t your family come here like last year? I thought you said your parents were happy, and your brother’s kids had fun.”

“Mom’s hips are getting worse, she’s not comfortable traveling anymore. It’d be cruel to ask them to come here. Looks like I’ll have to visit my hometown a lot more often from now on.” He rubs his forehead. “Which is exactly what I need right now.”

“There is no way you can get out of that?”

“Without my father and brother coming up here and camping in my apartment as long as it takes to make sure I’m doing okay? Nope, no way. Also, they’d instantly find out that I am indeed not doing okay, and them knowing would definitely not help me do okay.”

Kyungsoo sighs, wiggles his feet off the border of the couch cushion as he takes another sip from his beer, pensive. “How long has it been since the last time you went home?”

“I don’t know. There was my brother’s wedding back when we were in uni, remember? Then grandma’s funeral three years ago… and I think they needed me to go down to the police station for something a couple years before that… I never stayed over 12 hours. Never spent the night there, anyway. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Hey,” Kyungsoo smiles. “My parents don’t give a shit about Christmas, or about me, for that matter, and I think they booked themselves a room on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean, so I’ll be free. If you think it might help, I could come visit you a couple days over the holidays. I’m pretty sure somewhere in my contract it’s written that it’s in my right to take days off even without medical certificates, can you believe it?”

“That’d be cool!” Jongdae wishes he didn’t sound as relieved as he actually was. “Soo, that’d be amazing!”

“Right? So your Mom could fret over someone that isn’t you, and you’ll have the excuse of showing me around to escape your family, and we could be not-okay together!”

“I could kiss you right now.”

“Eh, no, thanks, I don’t want Baekhyun to start hating me. He’s been helping me with some of my jobs for White Collar Crime, I don’t want him to stop.”

“Whatever, weirdo.”

-

It’s the next morning that Jongdae actually thinks he’s lost it. He stayed at Kyungsoo’s place after dinner and his nightmares had been merciful, waking him up more than once but not forcing desperation out of his lungs under the form of semi-ultrasound panicked screeching. 

He’s helping his friend take out the trash, picking up their empty beer bottles, when he notices that the brand name has not only been replaced by his own name, but by something else, too.

Jongdae, please

“Oh, shit.”

“Did you say something?” Kyungsoo calls from the other room.

Jongdae turns the bottle in his hands and puts it in the trash bag, confident he can control the way his hand is shaking. But then he picks up the next bottle, and he immediately puts it back down before he can drop it.

“Shit, what the fuck.”

“Jongdae, what?”

When he appears at the kitchen door, Jongdae looks at Kyungsoo, who’s clearly aware that something concerning Jongdae’s latest medical certificate is going on.

“What does it say? What do you see?” Jongdae asks urgently.

Kyungsoo walks up to him, takes the bottle and looks at the half-unglued label. “It’s… Cass Fresh, Korean no. 1 beer? What do you see?”

Jongdae’s hands are shaking so much that he barely manages to gently deposit the bag with the empty bottles on the floor before he drops them and shatters them. 

“I see: Jongdae please help me?”

Kyungsoo’s eyes widen and he looks back at the bottle, then puts it back just as gently, as though it were a poisonous animal that could bite him at any given time if he jostled it too much. “Nope.”

“What even is it? Is it—schizophrenia? Am I—what the fuck—” 

“I thought you said you only saw your name.”

“Yeah, until five seconds ago!”

“Maybe it’s your subconscious that is talking to you.”

Jongdae grips at his own hair at the sides of his head, as an illogical way to try to ease his omnipresent headache. “Well, maybe it should shut the fuck up!” 

Kyungsoo tries to hug him, but Jongdae knows it’s because he’s just as scared. 

Sure, they’ve known each other for a decade and things have gotten pretty wild on more than one occasion. But nothing has ever come even remotely close to this. 

-

Jongdae’s therapist refuses to give him medication other than painkillers for the headache and the sleep medication. He visits her once more, uselessly. She calls him every day, and Kyungsoo does, too, but Jongdae doesn’t even leave his room. He keeps the shutters closed, to keep outside the light that would only reveal devastation. 

He tries getting drunk to get rid of those written hallucinations, or at least to get knocked out and forget about them, but it’s an experience so dreadful he considers turning teetotal. Putting intoxication on top of not being able to properly tell reality and hallucinations apart, and then falling asleep in that state, had made fear and horror thrive in his suffering brain. 

One night, after waking up from a dream he couldn’t remember much about, except that Minseok was dead in it, he got up and tore his room apart. Manic, completely out of his mind, he took anything that would bear legible lettering and hid it, shut it inside a closet, or covered it with the carpet, any object, book, document, envelope, box, poster, decoration, his medication, his clothes. Anything that bore a single word had to be gone from his sight. He hadn’t realized how readable stuff was so deeply ingrained and easily found in everyone’s life.

And for a couple hours after this operation, Jongdae’s mind had been clear and calm. Wherever he looked, the silent calls he had been getting over the past two weeks couldn’t reach him, because there was no vehicle to express them.

And he sat on his bed and cried, but felt like he had provisionally solved his problem. 

His tears were still drying on his skin, leaving salty trails of a fading desperation, when it started happening.

“Kyungsoo.”

“Dae? It’s like 3 a.m. Are you okay?”

Jongdae is petrified, laying on his bed with his phone pressed to his cheek, staring at the ceiling without blinking. “Kyungsoo, there’s something wrong,” he whispers.

“What? What’s wrong?” Kyungsoo is sounding a lot more alert now.

But Jongdae doesn’t really know how to tell him. He doesn’t know how that is even possible. 

“It’s everywhere. I see it everywhere,” he says as quietly as possible. He doesn’t want to anger it.

“What? Where are you? Why are you whispering?” 

Jongdae’s eyes keep mapping the ceiling, the smooth expanse of what used to be uniform white plaster that is now a canvas of uninterrupted neat handwritten lettering, spelling his name over and over again. 

“It’s everywhere. On my ceiling. It’s addressing me.”

“What? Oh! The messages you saw? But that doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing written on your ceiling.”

“Now there is.”

Kyungsoo inhales sharply. There’s a rustle, the sound of his lamp turning on. “Are you sure? What about the rest of your room?”

Jongdae takes his eyes off the light fixture above his head, that he had been staring directly at in hopes that the light would burn his retinas and prevent him from discerning anything of what is surrounding him. 

And surely, as soon as he squints at the wall on his right, he sees that same orderly calligraphy bleeding from the ceiling to the wall, as though his name was raining onto every object in the room. That inexplicable descent contaminates his shelves, his door, it covers his dresser, his chair, and it starts pooling on the floor, getting bulky as the lettering overlaps and conflicts. 

“It’s everywhere,” he croaks, his voice breaking and fading. He goes quiet again, as though the lettering was a living creature that was studying him, approaching him surreptitiously, waiting for the perfect chance, the perfect excuse to attack, the same way the snap of a twig under a prey’s paw could launch the beast to the chase.

He keeps staring at the thick, slow tidal wave of silent inky calls drenching his floor, getting closer to his bed, and he holds his breath, scared it would fill the room and rise to his mattress, and then higher than that, and he would drown in it.

“Jongdae, close your eyes!”

Jongdae obeys. And for a marvelous second, it works. 

Until it starts painting on the inside of his closed eyelids. 

“It’s not going away!”

“Dae, are you sure you’re not dreaming? Like, sleepwalking or something?”

Jongdae swallows and opens his eyes again, uncaring of the light hitting his unblinking eyes. 

Having studied it thoroughly, Jongdae knows it’s one of the fundamental principles of lucid dreaming. “I can’t read in my dreams. Never could. Even lucid ones.”

Kyungsoo swears quietly. “Dae, I don’t know what to do—should I call someone? Tell me what I can do to help you!”

Jongdae ignores him, he can barely hear him. Now there’s sound, there’s the sound of his blood rushing.

He sits up, then he stands, wobbling. He steps over a ribbon of written pleas to his name, and he follows it like a tightrope walker, all the way across the room to the opposite wall, where he places his forehead against the no longer white plaster. 

He closes his eyes, inhales the stuffy air of the room, and it feels denser than usual in his lungs, as though he’d started breathing in all those writings and they were polluting his sanity from within. 

And maybe it sort of helps, to digest those letterings. To process them so closely. To be prey and to feed on the predator.

Because when he opens his eyes again he understands what is scaring him more than the fact that his subconscious is fabricating writings on every surface he lays eyes on. 

It’s the fact that he knows that lettering.

“Jongdae? Are you there?”

“It’s him,” he mutters, vaguely aware of still holding a phone and having someone listening to him, someone who had been trying to get an answer out of him for a while now and who was sounding increasingly worried by his lack of reactions. “I know it’s him.”

“Who?”

“It’s his handwriting,” Jongdae whispers, pressing his palms against the wall, aware, for the first time in a decade, of the tingling of the scar on his back. “It’s Minseok’s handwriting.”

-

When Jongdae was ten years old, one of his teachers was already convinced that none of the kids in his class would win a Nobel Prize in literature. And she was okay with it, she had made peace with the fact that she would never be thanked for her contribution to the development of the next literary genius. However, the writing skills of the kids were really, really poor. And she would not make peace with being responsible for the release of such an illiterate bunch of future adults into society.

Her initial plan of assigning compulsory readings in hopes to awaken some faint involuntary reflex of creative literary conscience in the kids failed miserably. Those who read, did it so grudgingly that any flicker of creativity was quickly smothered by the fact that it was compulsory and it made them hate it with a passion. And the others did not even bother to pick up the book because they were too lazy, or too busy with sports, or too busy trying to get themselves and their best friends killed in some attempt at climbing trees while their homework laid in the comfort of their backpacks, completely forgotten. Jongdae obviously belonged to that last category. 

Around halfway through the school year she decided to stop with the readings, and started with the merciless weekly creative writing exercises. Ever since the very first week, Jongdae gave her a little hope.

The assignment was nothing particularly difficult and did not require a particularly active imagination or linguistic prowess: it was something along the lines of “pretend you moved towns and write a letter to one of your friends talking about your life”. 

Jongdae obviously addressed the letter to Minseok, his best friend. He handed in five pages, front and back, instead of the two that were required. He was surprised when he found out he had so much stuff he wished to say to someone he spent the entire afternoon with literally every single day, and he was even more surprised when the teacher gave him the highest mark in the class and praised him in front of everyone. His grammar was certainly not perfect, but she’d loved the way he expressed himself clearly and spontaneously, and the things he had written did not sound forced. 

When Jongdae told about this unexpected academic success to Minseok, later when they were cycling to the latter’s home to watch cartoons together, Minseok looked surprised, too. And then, when Jongdae got home later that evening, ready to boast his success to his parents, Jongdae couldn’t find the letter in his backpack. 

The next day when he got home from school, though, he found out that his paper had mysteriously snuck its way back inside his backpack, and it was accompanied by a fellow letter, in Minseok’s handwriting. 

It started like this:

Dear Jongdae,

Sorry I stole your letter. I was just curious. Can I answer?

For the following six years, Jongdae and Minseok would find every other day, on alternate days, a letter in their backpack. 

They never spoke about it. It was their secret, their escape, their parallel track away from real life, and they just kept doing it. That game lasted for years, until the week before Minseok disappeared. 

During those years, to Jongdae, Minseok’s handwriting had gotten just as familiar as his round, smiling face.

-

When the time comes to leave for Sangdong, Jongdae is already exhausted. Taking time off work did not help; he hasn’t eaten or slept decently for days, and it shows. He kneels in the middle of the devastation of his room and cries quietly as he packs, scavenging in the chaos to dig up what he might need for a week at his parents’.

A week. Seven days in Sangdong. Given the premises, he might as well open the window and jump.

Jongdae, listen to me! Please! asks the tag inside his sweatpants, right above the materials composing the textile. 

Jongdae, I need your help! is the title of a book that Jongdae puts in his backpack even though he knows he won’t be able to read it to save his life.

Jongdae, I need to reach you! begs the box of medication that he’s been given to take when he has trouble falling asleep, and that he hasn’t taken for a while, because sleeping means seeing Minseok’s dead body, and that’s the last thing he wants to see. 

Jongdae, help me… is the message that fills Jongdae’s mirror when he stands in front of it to shave.

Jongdae, please tell me you can hear me! Is the sender of a text he doesn’t even respond to.

Son, I am so happy you’re coming home. I cannot wait to see you. Love, Mom.

-

If Jongdae could, he would wipe each and every memory of his childhood from his brain. Anything connected with his hometown? He’d gladly trade it for some peace, even just temporary. He wishes he could have been reborn one morning in some stranger’s flat when he was about to throw up on Kyungsoo but Kyungsoo pushed him towards the sink. That should have been his first memory. Not really poetic, but the first memory he deserved. 

In hindsight, maybe it’s a good thing that he remembers something about his birthplace, because he’s insane, and of course the sign on the platform at the train station doesn’t inform him he has arrived in “Sangdong”, but rather in some place that has been named after him. Which, as honored he would be, isn’t of much help.

Jongdae hurries to get off the train when he recognizes the small station, red bricks against the wintery gray backdrop of the bare birch forest that blankets the hills, and does his best to ignore the KIM JONGDAE! glaring at him from the sign above his family’s heads. 

“Jongdae, Son!” his mother circles his neck with her arms, and she has to tiptoe. Jongdae didn’t remember her being so tiny, or so unstable, and when she leans against him he has to support her and he hates that he’s uncomfortable, because she smells like home, not home as in the place where he grew up, but rather as something that should be safe, and he hates himself because he doesn’t feel safe.

There’s his father, and his brother is there too. Jongdeok drives them home, and everyone is chatty and seems genuinely happy about seeing Jongdae, and for the very first few minutes Jongdae has to pretend only a little bit to match their level of excitement as he follows them to the car.

Five minutes after leaving the station’s parking lot he already feels suffocated. When no one sees, he swallows a painkiller dry to cope with his headache. 

He doesn’t need to be able to read to remember the names of the streets, of the bakery, of his school. He tries not to look outside the windows, but it’s all there. All memories that have been patiently waiting for him to be back, ready to be untucked and hurt.

Minseok’s family had moved to Sangdong when Minseok was six years old. They’d been the talk of the town, since not many people moved out of big cities, leaving behind careers and busy lifestyles and countless opportunities to end up in a place like Sangdong. Not willingly at least. It was a bizarre event, a definitive trend reversal. 

Jongdeok drives past the playground’s fence, and Jongdae lets his gaze drift over the now rusty slides that had been his and Minseok’s exclusive reign for many endless afternoons. He notices that the wooden swings that creaked at every push have been replaced with some sets of new colorful, plastic diversions that are already showing signs of wear and discoloration due to the weather. Soon they’re gone from sight.

Jongdae met Minseok for the first time at the playground, barely one week after Minseok’s family moved to Sangdong. By the end of his first summer in Sangdong, Minseok and Jongdae had already been inseparable.

Jongdeok takes a left turn near the ice cream shop where they bought their ice creams every day for an entire summer, when they were nine and seven. They ate so many that they couldn’t even stand to see it, the following year. 

When Jongdae was eight, he fell from the tree in Mrs. Lee’s garden trying to steal the last apple for him and Minseok to eat. The glass of the car window is cold under Jongdae’s forehead; he grimaces when he notices that the tree has been cut down, and Mrs. Lee’s house looks like no one has lived in it for many years. It’s a big, three story house with a huge wooden door, and the fruit trees were so tall they obscured all its windows. Minseok used to say it looked like a haunted castle, when they were kids and to them everything still had the potential to look huge and fascinating.

Minseok and Jongdae crashed against their school gate, when they were twelve and ten. They launched themselves down the downhill road, crossed the intersection where Jongdeok now diligently waits for the street light to turn green, even though there’s no one around. Jongdae’s parents had made the very unreasonable decision of gifting both Jongdae and Minseok skateboards, since they kept stealing Jongdeok’s, anyway, and somehow expected them to behave responsibly. How neither of them broke a limb remains a mystery, though there are still indentations on the metal of the gate as a perpetual memento of how silly they’d been.

Jongdae looks away when the road flanks the border of the birch forest. Minseok’s family had moved to a house with a front porch looking directly into the woods. They said they wanted their kids to connect with nature. Forest or not, Jongdae loved how it was close to his own house; when he turned fourteen, it was so common for Minseok to sneak over during the night that Jongdae’s parents were not even surprised about finding Minseok at their table for breakfast. 

It didn’t go both ways; Jongdae never felt like Minseok’s parents would be happy about having him around all the time. They were very sweet, but he didn’t really like them, or his sister. Sometimes he had the feeling that Minseok didn’t really like them either. But even when he looked unhappy about it, Minseok just dismissed the issue.

There’s a roundabout, exactly in the middle point between their houses. It never failed to amaze Jongdae that someone would place a whole roundabout and build a whole fountain in it in the middle of the less congested area of South Korea, where if two cars happened to cross each other the drivers would look at each other in pure amazement. 

But the fountain came in handy during those hot summer evenings, when there would still be sunlight after dinner and they would meet each other there, to take a sip of fresh water and wet their damp, sweaty skin before taking off for the next small big adventure on their bikes. They explored the corners of a town that they already knew like the back of their hands and explored the corners of each other’s character, unconsciously studying the way the other was growing into himself. They talked to stave off the fear of the looming forest, or pedaled in silence under the street lights, because they were too comfortable with each other to even need to speak, because there was nothing on their minds that they hadn’t told the other already, either face to face or in a letter.

Or so Jongdae had thought.

When Jongdeok drives around that roundabout, Jongdae doesn’t look at the fountain. How many mornings, afternoons, nights, epic and forgettable alike, started with a note, a shout, a text, that said: meet me at the fountain later?

Yet they all were wiped away by the very last time they met there. 

Until the police started questioning him, Jongdae never told anyone what they told each other then. But what was supposed to be an evening spent sitting on the cement of the fountain base, ranting about high school course loads and talking about the upcoming Sangdong cross-country race, quickly turned into the worst day of Jongdae’s life. 

Well, not the worst. At least none of them woke up at the hospital the next morning. 

That would happen only a week later. 

Jongdae deems it safe to look up only when he feels the car driving straight on again, fountain out of sight. He makes sure to keep looking ahead. He knows that on his left he would see the road that climbs the hills, the entrance of the main trail of the Wondae-ri birch forest, where Minseok vanished one day in spring, when he was eighteen.

It’s all there. Jongdae has been away from home for more than ten years, yet nothing has changed, and the things that did, somehow hurt even more. Additions and improvements to the townscape feel grotesque and wrong to the sight, as though it was not fair that the town did not freeze in time and stopped growing, after Minseok was denied the possibility to do the same thing. 

Yet underneath the renovations in the playground and the cut down trees, Jongdae can almost touch the skeleton of the town, made of a lattice of memories and emotions, happy, painful or primal in the way they were formed before Jongdae had been old enough to put labels on them. Some things changed, but not a single thing moved. Not even the weight in Jongdae’s chest.

-

Jongdae’s dad, who has never been the chatterbox of the family, is oddly talkative. Age has done Jongdae’s parents no favors, and just as it softened their appearance, making them look more fragile, so it has mellowed their characters. That, combined with the obvious excitement of having him at home for an entire week, makes them almost giddy, and if it were anyone else in the world, Jongdae would find it a funny sight. 

His mother keeps randomly smothering him in hugs whenever he moves within her reach, and even his brother seems stoked, competing with his father to see who can talk more, patting Jongdae’s back vigorously at the end of every sentence.

Jongdae feels like he’s around a bunch of kids excited about opening their Christmas gifts. 

He hates himself a little. He deprived them of this for so long, only ever allowing them to be in his company for the time of a dinner, maybe a day, and forcing them to travel to be awarded with his company. They love him so much, despite everything. They have had so much faith in him, in moments when Jongdae himself wouldn’t have believed the words he said. 

After Minseok was gone, when Jongdae announced he would rather be dead than stay a single more day in Sangdong, his parents’ first response was that they would leave the town all together, as a family. After all, they were all facing the backlash of Minseok’s disappearance, and a fresh start was much needed.

But Jongdae wanted to leave immediately, so they had to let him go. They said they’d follow him as soon as possible, leaving jobs and moving towns was not a day’s work, but back then Jongdae’s grandma had been still alive, and once she’d gotten sick she needed to be looked after. And Jongdeok had just gotten together with the girl from the northern part of Sangdong who would then become his wife and he had started a job there, so he wouldn’t go. And then Jongdae’s mother had that issue with her hips and got prostheses, and was not in any condition to take on the challenge of relocating to another city.

Jongdae had been so numb he barely even minded. And it was probably for the better, because it allowed him to apply a neater cut between his past in Sangdong and his future in Seoul. 

But as he looks at the way his mother’s eyes crinkle when she smiles at him, the way his father continues to call him to show him things around the house, the way his brother is so excited to brag about his kids, his house renovations. Jongdae can still see, underneath their love for him, the knowledge that they had lost him a long time ago, and it had not been their fault.

-

No mention of Minseok had been made. So far, so good. 

But then, on the second day, Jongdae let his family’s affection get to him, and in a rush of filial dedication he offered to drive his mother to the grocery store to help her get the last of the ingredients she needed. Jongdae’s father didn’t get the right ones the first time around, and apparently Christmas would turn into a Shakespearian tragedy if she didn’t have exactly the ones she wanted, to make everything perfect for her son who was finally home and that she wished to coddle to her heart’s content.

Jongdae was so frazzled by his headaches that would have probably been unable to tell the difference between a whole six-course banquet and a single pitiful moldy roll of kimbap, but of course he doesn’t tell her.

He had known that his week in Sangdong would be all about enduring, so he does exactly that: he endures.

Doing his best to ignore the candy vendor where Jongdae had dragged Minseok a thousand times, and where Minseok bought candy and shared it with him each and every one of those thousand times, he crosses the threshold and follows his mother inside, one hand on the shopping cart and the other ready to provide her shopping list in case she forgot something.

Because Jongdae wouldn’t be able to tell her what she needs from that list, and he doubts that she needs him x10, plus one time crossed out. So.

He just shows her the paper, and off they go. It seems to be working. Amazing.

Also amazing? No one seems to recognise Jongdae. He keeps a few steps behind his mother, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, his beanie and face mask helping him fly under the radar just as much as the fact that more than ten years had passed since the last time any of the citizens of Sangdong had laid eyes on him. Hopefully people will think he’s his brother.

Until they approach the cashier, and his mother suddenly quiets down.

“Look who’s here.”

Jongdae was too little to remember the first time he met Minseok’s mother, but he still has plenty of memories of her. Jongdae and her son had been attached at the hip, it was inevitable. She would bring Minseok over to play, would pick them up from school when it rained, would make sure they didn’t drown when they went to the river with the other kids in the summer, all the hovering that mothers do when kids are still kids.

Yet the oldest clear memory Jongdae has of her always unsettles him, because it caused that generic background feeling of not being liked. 

He was probably ten, or eleven. Jongdae sat in her kitchen. Minseok was upstairs changing his clothes; it was a warm, sunny summer day, and he’d fallen in a pond trying to fetch their ball.

She had already done her routine of asking Jongdae how he was doing, if his mother was doing alright, of telling him to tell her that she said hello and would call her soon, of offering him snacks and something to drink while they waited for Minseok.

In that moment Jongdae didn’t particularly care about much in the world except for the plate of cookies that she’d placed in front of him, even though he agreed to take only one, because his mother raised him right and not like a savage. Minseok’s mother was the kind of woman that seemed like she offered stuff just out of politeness and not out of concern, and she never insisted he take a second cookie.

But after he’d basically inhaled the single cookie he was allowed to take by the voice of his mother in his head, Jongdae started looking around and noticed she was staring at him with focused, unblinking eyes.

He asked whether he had something on his face.

She said yes, and after blinking twice, she finally stood up and looked away.

It was not unlikely, since he’d been playing in a muddy field all day long, so Jongdae excused himself to go to the bathroom and clean his face.

It had been weird to check in the mirror and realize that his face was not mud-stricken like he thought, like she said. 

Years later, Jongdae’s delirious mind, lacerated by grief, would look back to that memory and assume she’d known, then. She had felt, in that moment, with that sixth sense only mothers have, that Jongdae was no good for Minseok. She had a premonition about how Jongdae would one day be the one who let her firstborn slip away from Sangdong. And even though she would always smile at him and would never stare at him that hard again, she never lost that shadow, she never ignored that knowledge. How could she?

That memory paired really well with the last memory Jongdae had of her, at the train station the morning he left for Seoul. He was surprised to see her at the platform, since Minseok’s family had refused to have anything to do with him after what happened. And yet she was there to see him off, her eyes weighed by grief, and anger and disdain, and there had been the same sort of focus as that time in the kitchen, which made it all even more lacerating.

He felt like her gaze had followed him for miles after his train left the station and the hills of Sangdong disappeared over the horizon.

Minseok’s mother is not looking at him now.

Jongdae is a coward, so he’s grateful for that. He doesn’t look at her either. He just stands there, unable to move and to think, frozen mid-motion while filling the bags with his mother’s groceries.

He’s so stunned that for a while even the relentless, acute pinging of the written hallucinations that had been sliding towards him on the conveyor belt of the cashier alongside packs of various ingredients, suddenly seems tolerable, only a blink away from being gone.

But that was not all.

“I cannot believe it…” Another voice, one that Jongdae doesn’t instantly recognise.

He regrets trying to identify the owner of the voice.

The sight of Minyoung’s face, alone, would have made Jongdae’s heart hurt in unimaginable ways. Because she and her brother had always looked alike, more like twins than like siblings, and apparently things hadn’t changed.

Jongdae’s breath is stolen from his lungs; for a split second, it’s like Minseok is looking at him.

But then he registers the long hair, the subtle sparkle of her earrings, the elevated feminine beauty of her features. There was a reason the Kim siblings had been really popular and among the most envied and pursued, back in high school. 

“Hi, Minyoung.”

But mostly, what breaks the illusion is the way her features contort in shock. “I can’t believe… you came back?”

In the background, Minseok’s mother continues to keep her eyes on her groceries that her cashier is scanning absently, unable to mind her own business, contorting on her chair to get a clearer view of whatever is going on, mouth wide open.

“Why are you here?” Minyoung presses, suspicious. 

Jongdae’s throat is dry. “I came to visit my parents for Christmas,” he answers quietly.

She doesn’t seem satisfied by his answer. “Oh, so you’re just home for the holidays, Kim Jongdae?” Her cold question floats towards Jongdae, leaving a sudden chill in the air.

At the explicit mention of Jongdae’s name, a couple of cashiers that were still pretending not to be overhearing lift their heads. One even swivels on the chair, stretching her neck to look around. All the people in the line behind him and the one behind Minyoung start scrambling; one pushes his glasses up his nose, a couple of old ladies nearly knock their heads together in their haste to whisper something to each other, hands in front of their mouths, another drops something.

The continuous beeping of the cashiers stops, the bustle of the people in the grocery store fuzzes out, only the stupidly jolly Christmas carols playing on the radio fill the silence as every single one of the presents realizes The Kim Jongdae is there.

“Unbelievable. Showing his face around…” someone mutters behind Jongdae, close enough to reveal they hadn’t exactly been trying to go unheard.

That hasn’t changed, either.

He tries to focus on Minyoung. “Yes,” he answers calmly, even though on the inside he’s crumbling.

“He came to visit us for Christmas,” Jongdae’s mother repeats shyly. She takes the bottle Jongdae had been holding and Jongdae takes it as a sign to continue putting their groceries in the bags. He hands his card to the cashier, who doesn’t take it at first, busy as she was staring at Jongdae chewing her gum with her mouth open.

“I see,” Minyoung says quietly.

Jongdae can’t find his voice. He feels the sudden urge to scratch his back, over his scar, but he doesn’t move.

The conversation, if it could even be called that, is all the possible declension of weird. It’s awkward and seemingly does not have a reason to be taking place. It would have made more sense if Minyoung yelled and spat at him, or if Minseok’s mother started crying. It would have made Jongdae less restless.

But this? It makes Jongdae want to be the one to start screaming and bashing stuff, maybe his own head, against the grocery store checkout.

The people around them keep murmuring. A couple shake their heads.

“Let’s go, Jongdae.” Jongdae’s mother pulls at his sleeve, but Jongdae is rooted in place, his hands full of shopping bags.

“Why are you here, Kim Jongdae?” Minyoung asks again, and Jongdae can’t stand her calm inquisitive gaze. Like she actually wants a reasoned, sensible answer.

Jongdae doesn’t know why he’s in Sangdong, aside from trying to make his parents happy. Ever since he stepped foot on the train platform the common denominator to every waking moment had been that he wished with every fiber of his being to be anywhere else. He’d swung between states of vague distress and acute desperation because of it, and certainly that specific moment fell in the second category.

“Minyoung,” Minseok’s mother calls, but it’s half-assed and Jongdae can barely hear her. “Don’t make a scene.”

At least there’s enough good sense left in Jongdae that he doesn’t even attempt to say something incredibly stupid, like “I’m sorry.”

Because there’s nothing to be sorry about.

Or at least so he thinks. Or his lawyers seemed to think.

Minseok’s family didn’t seem to agree.

“Let’s go, Jongdae,” his mother repeats, with a resolved pull around his elbow. He follows her outside, docile.

As the sliding doors of the store close behind them, he remembers the way Minseok’s mother had stared at him. It was the same way Minyoung now stares at him.

Suddenly in a hurry to put as much distance as possible between himself and that assessing gaze, he drags his mother to the car and throws the groceries in the trunk.

The drive home is silent. Jongdae parks in front of their house, and none of them appears to have the intention to leave the car.

“Were they really mean to you, these past years?” he finally asks.

She sighs. “No. Your father and I tried not to cross paths with them, because we saw that it hurt them. But the few times we’ve met each other, they always pretend not to see us. I suppose Minyoung was just really surprised to see you.”

Jongdae nods, keeps his eyes trained on the windshield. He startles when she puts a hand on his. “Of course it’s not the same, but sometimes I wish they knew they were not the only ones who lost a son that day.”

Finally turning to look at her, Jongdae feels tears prickling at the corners of his eyes upon seeing her expression. “What do you mean?”

Jongdae’s mother looks outside. “When?”

“When you say you lost me that day.”

“The truth.”

And Jongdae knows. He didn’t really have to ask, he knew already. And he knew that she didn’t mean the fact that as soon as he could he left Sangdong and made himself unavailable to anything more demanding than sparse phone calls. She meant the screaming and the endless silences. The apathy and the tears. The sadness that never left.

She means the things she doesn’t know, but probably senses. The night terrors and the ragged breaths in the darkest hours before dawn. The bottles of pills. The broken glasses and the broken knuckles.

It’s all in the past, now, but it left a really deep imprint.

And now the hallucinations.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” he whispers, unable to say more. 

There’s a desperate plea for help painted on the windshield, now. Under Jongdae’s distraught gaze, it starts melting and slowly drips on the curved glass, becoming distorted.

She takes his hand and kisses it. “It’s okay. You’re okay, and you’re here with me.”

Jongdae feels neither of those things.

-

When the bell rings the next day, Jongdae is the only person in the house who is not currently elbow deep into kneading bread, wrapping gifts or changing diapers. He doesn’t miss the concerned glance Jongdeok throws at him, as he holds his eldest child by the ankle after the latter had tried to jump from the second floor, but he doesn’t receive any signal or warning to stop. 

So he has to be the one to answer the door.

Jongdeok told him there had been a time when it was not infrequent that people would ring the bell just to make sure Jongdae’s family knew how damaging it was to keep defending their son.

He should have known that showing his face around would cause a disruption in a delicate balance that took years to build. Sangdong was a pond of clear, crystalline water, and what happened to Minseok and Jongdae in that forest had stirred the sands at its bottom, lifting it up in dark underwater clouds. That debris took a long while to settle at the bottom again and let the water become once again transparent.

By going back to Sangdong, Jongdae had produced the same effect he could have gotten if he threw a boulder in the pond.

For sure some of those superficial, gossipy folks were going to try to get their daily dose of performative heroism by publicly taking, once again, the side of Minseok’s family at the expense of Jongdae’s family’s peace.

Jongdae guesses he can survive another round of that. He can endure.

But when he opens the door he’s surprised to find out the visitor is not any of Minseok’s relatives, or supporters. Not at first glance, at least; the stranger is more than a head taller than any of Minseok’s relatives could ever aspire to be, and he looks way too friendly.

“Uhm. Hello. May I help you?” Jongdae asks, unsure.

The stranger is not only remarkably tall, he’s also remarkably weird. He’s smiling with so many teeth that Jongdae almost steps back. “Hello, Jongdae! I heard you were in town, I mean, I guess everybody knows now, I heard from my aunt, she was at the grocery store yesterday. That must have been horrible, by the way, she said Sangdong’s citizens can’t behave decently to save their lives. As we needed further confirmation of that! I’m so sorry about that. But I mean, you’re here, so I thought, hey, why don’t I try contacting him? But I don’t have your number, never had it I think, or maybe you blocked me when you moved out, but I know your parents live here and since everyone knows you’re here for the holidays, I thought I’d try, and I found you! How are you doing?”

Jongdae blinks. The guy managed to say so many words in the span of just a few seconds, he could try for the Guinness World Record. 

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

The guy seems shocked for a second, and really sad the next. “I’m Chanyeol.”

Jongdae blinks again. At first the name doesn’t really ring a bell. He knows there’s an associate at the law firm called Chanyeol, he regularly sends him stuff he needs to be translated, and he remembers a guy from his high school with that name—

“Park? Park Chanyeol?”

“Yes!” Chanyeol beams.

He looks at Chanyeol from head to toe. “There is no way you’re Park Chanyeol.”

Chanyeol laughs, almost relieved. “But it is me.”

Well. Now that Jongdae is paying attention, the ears are there.

Jongdae is silent long enough that Chanyeol starts to look uncomfortable. “Do you… want me to go away? I just wanted to say hi. I can go—”

“How did you grow one meter taller than the last time I saw you? I want some of what you had. Couldn’t you leave some for us midgets?”

Chanyeol sputters something, then smiles that huge smile again, and it’s almost endeared, as though he finally recognised him, too. “Hi, Jongdae. Nice to see you again.”

And Jongdae doesn’t know exactly how, but he’s being hugged by Chanyeol. Chanyeol whom he hadn’t seen in over a decade, whom he had forgotten even existed, but that now he remembered as one of the very few people in the whole town who had not been afraid of being seen in his company after Minseok disappeared. One of the very few who had bothered to ask with genuine concern how he’d been doing, despite Jongdae’s strenuous (and successful) self-isolation efforts.

“Chanyeol, my God, it’s been so long.”

“I know! You haven’t changed a bit!”

Jongdae decides it’s best to pretend he hasn’t seen the car that slowed down in front of the house, the faces pressed against the windows, squinting at him, before the car sped up again, and he focuses on Chanyeol. “Yeah, we have already established that I am indeed still a midget.”

They both laugh. “It’s good to see you,” Chanyeol keeps smiling. “Hey, now I got to go, I was just driving by after I delivered the last pallets and I realized I was passing by your driveway so I thought I’d say hello. I can imagine you’re probably busy with preparations for Christmas, and I’m so jealous because your mother’s cooking is impeccable, but yeah, anyway, you probably haven’t seen your folks in forever, so I’ll leave you to your family now. But I thought I’d ask, would you like to catch up, one of these days?”

Still too many words in one go. Jongdae struggles to keep up. He’d spent the last month only around his colleagues, all too cranky because of work to bother putting together any kind of monologue that was not strictly related to how shitty their firm was, and even then they mostly grumbled it under their breaths and Jongdae has heard so many variations on the theme so many times already he doesn’t even register the words anymore.

And then there’s Kyungsoo, who utters three full unprompted sentences in a day (on his good days) on average.

So this stream of consciousness that Chanyeol is pouring all over him and his front door is making Jongdae a little dizzy.

“Yeah, why not?” he answers, more because he’s still in shock that someone would be so daring to risk being seen in his company than because he actually wants to catch up.

“Great! Give me your number, I’ll shoot you a text.”

When Chanyeol has driven off, Jongdae closes the door and takes a moment to recover. He lifts his brows. Maybe catching up won’t be so bad. Back in middle school, Chanyeol used to be one of the funniest guys in the whole class, and he’d always treated Jongdae with respect and kindness after Minseok disappeared. Maybe it wouldn’t be that terrible to spend some time together.

“Who was it?” Jongdae’s mother asks when he goes back to the kitchen to help.

“Chanyeol.”

“Chanyeol? Park Chanyeol?” Jongdae’s father asks.

“Yeah. How do you remember him? We didn’t even hang out that much back in high school.”

“He’s a very sweet guy,” Jongdae’s mother says affectionately. “He always makes sure to help me bring the groceries to the car when we run into each other at the grocery store. You know, in autumn, when your brother can’t give us a hand, he comes with his father’s truck and he fills our woodshed for us! And he comes to help your father with the pruning every spring, and he comes back regularly in the summer to mow the lawn…”

“Yeah, and he gives us those ridiculous discounts!” his father confirms. “So your mother always cooks for him because food is the only thing he cannot refuse without being impolite.” He chuckles.

Jongdae’s mother laughs. “Right. Ah, he’s been really nice to us all these years after—”

There’s a pause Jongdae is entirely used to, a suspension just before the syllables of Minseok’s name, almost as if that beat of silence had become part of Minseok’s name too, and it had become the only part of his name that people dared to pronounce.

He nods at his parents with a smile, to let them know that it’s okay, even though it is not okay in the slightest, because that morning Jongdae had woken up in his childhood bed convinced that Minseok’s lifeless body had been lying next to his own, and the Christmas cards that Jongdeok’s kids had filled with their wobbly handwriting that morning were just endless repetitions of Jongdae, please help me, please listen to me, please! instead of Christmas greetings.

“He’s very sweet,” his mother concludes, coughing to cover up her stumble. “And handsome. Don’t you think?”

Jongdae busies himself with the dirty utensils strewn over the counter. Whenever he lifts a plate, a squiggle-looking Jongdae, are you there? fills the empty space beneath it.

“I don’t know,” he answers, noncommittal, as he gathers cookware and ladles to put them in the sink.

She smiles knowingly, but doesn’t say anything else.

Wouldn’t she like that? Wouldn’t she be ecstatic if Jongdae found himself a nice boyfriend in Sangdong and moved back there, possibly in one of the many little two-story homes in the neighborhood, close to their house so he could visit every day? Wouldn’t it feel like a dream, to her, after years of missing him, of being constantly worried about him, to have him within reach?

He even allows himself to contemplate that possibility for a second. He does miss his parents sometimes, and he’s aware that he should visit them more frequently. He’s not against living in a small town, even though the buzz of the capital hadn’t tired him yet. Having a small house, an orchard, a garden, maybe, with trees that would swing in the winds coming from the Wondae-ri forest.

It was a nice image, in his head, one that he’s familiar with, because it had occasionally come to his mind when he was a teen, as much as he’d known it was forbidden to indulge in such fantasies.

Except that he’d always imagined someone else at his side, in that idyllic picture. And that someone is not there to complete the picture anymore.

Jongdae never felt the need to put it into words and come out before leaving Sangdong, and certainly avoided talking about the guys he met in Seoul. He didn’t need to; they already knew. If they had suspected it from before, they would have known for sure, they could read it in his eyes during those last days of April so many years ago, that what he had lost in the woods had not been just a best friend, to him.

-

Jongdae makes it through Christmas, somehow. It helps that the new painkiller prescription was for medication apparently strong enough that he could stab his own leg and barely feel a thing (which he briefly considers trying, when a vine-looking string of pleading hallucinations start climbing up the leg of his pants in the middle of lunch), and that he was not required to read anything out loud or to perform any physical feat.

Somehow his brain spared him long enough to make him able to read a couple texts from Kyungsoo and Chanyeol, the first to ask whether he could actually visit and maybe make plans for New Year’s Eve, and the second to ask whether he would take a walk the following day.

He said yes to both, even though he honestly doubted he would survive till the following day, let alone to New Year’s Eve, if he didn’t manage to get at least five minutes of sleep not interrupted by terrible nightmares.

Once the celebrations were finally over, Jongdeok had finally packed his wife and kids to go home, Jongdae had helped his mother bring the house back to its pristine state, and his presence was not required anymore, he quietly migrated to his room.

He sat on his childhood bed, staring at his room, at pictures and posters that he stopped collecting the day before Minseok was gone, and that at the moment were just desperate screams for help.

Jongdae, I don’t have much time. Please, were the new lyrics of a rock band whose poster Jongdae vaguely remembers to have been very proud of when his friends came over, when he was fourteen or something.

He gets up, pages through a couple of his old school books. He carefully avoids the yearbooks; all the pictures he had had with Minseok had been removed from sight, but he hadn’t gone as far as scratching his face from the yearbooks. Minseok had still been part of the community and of the life of the town, not just of Jongdae’s, so he left him there.

He opens one of his notebooks, something about science judging by the doodles, something currently a desperate question about being heard.

He looks up, his head heavy with tiredness and too many emotions. There’s a board hanging over his desk, and on it are pinned tickets of really old movies.

Without realizing, he had at some point picked up a pen.

If he writes a question in the notebook, maybe he will visualize an answer somewhere else?

Jongdae lifts the pen from the paper, puzzled. He feels like laughing at himself for making conversation with a movie ticket from 2007, but he also wants to cry, because it’s really sad that he spent the past decade trying not to let the events of that spring fuck him up too badly only to then result in the current predicament.

He wants answers, and he’s not sure the movie ticket would manage to give him any, or any that actually make sense, assuming that he wasn’t just schizophrenic, or talking to himself.

Which is a point that he’d like to clear up.

But that cannot be the way. He can’t look for confirmation about the veracity of what he’s seeing, in the same things he’s seeing.

A couple of sheets of paper fly out of it when he throws the notebook against the wall at his right.

Inhaling and exhaling harshly through his nose, Jongdae looks around. At the posters, at the pinboard, at his books. He wants to burn everything in the room, every paper, every drawing, poster, even his laptop, anything that could put him in contact with—whatever, whoever it was that was fucking with him.

The only reason why he doesn’t tear every paper apart is that his mother is going to walk in the room, eventually, and finding it ripped to shreds wouldn’t help with the whole “but I am doing fine ha ha ha” thing that Jongdae wants to pretend to have going on.

And also the fact that as soon as he tries to focus on a corner of the room where Minseok wouldn’t be able to manipulate any existing piece of writing, words start springing out of the darkness on their own, blooming out of the little grains that blot his vision after he presses his hands on his eyes too harshly.

So it would be pointless to destroy anything, really. There’s nowhere Jongdae would be safe.

So instead he throws himself onto bed and huddles under the covers in a mess of sheets and sweat. He looks at his clothes strewn around, at the sweater he’d been wearing in the morning to make Jongdeok’s kids laugh, something green and red with reindeers on it that supposedly said “Merry Christmas!” but the sight of which now makes Jongdae hide his face in the pillow and scream inside of it.

Jongdae, don’t give up on me.

-

Chanyeol’s legs are long. Jongdae struggles to keep up.

“So what did you do all these years, besides trying to outgrow every man currently living?”

Chanyeol laughs. “Nothing much. After high school I started working with my father. That’s pretty much it.”

“What does your father do?”

“Lumberjack in Wondae-ri. Business has been going well.”

Great, the Wondae-ri forest. Jongdae’s favorite conversation subject.

“Isn’t the Wondae-ri forest a protected area or something? How does he cut trees there?” he asks listlessly.

“It is. But it’s still a forest, and vegetation grows wild. It needs to be taken care of. The undergrowth must be cleaned, dead trunks removed, low branches cut, sick or unstable trees cut. It’s for the health of the forest itself, so that it doesn’t smother itself with excessive density, or to prevent wildfires in the summer, etcetera.”

Jongdae knows it’s childish, but he doesn’t like the passionate tone in Chanyeol’s voice. Some irrational part of Jongdae wouldn’t really shed tears seeing all those pretty slender birch trees burn.

“Mom said something about you pruning our trees,” he forces himself to comment.

“Your mother is so nice, she always cooks something delicious when I’m over cutting trees and stuff. It’s never business, when it’s about your parents. It’s a pleasure. They’re the sweetest.”

Jongdae almost grimaces and tries not to think about the downpour of compliments that his parents had reiterated about Chanyeol that day during breakfast when Jongdae casually said he was going on a walk with him. They’d been so excited about them hanging out that Jongdae almost told them they should be the ones asking Chanyeol out on a date, or signing his adoption papers, or whatever.

And all the adoration seems reciprocal.

Something very little and almost forgotten in the back of Jongdae’s mind tries to make him feel jealous, or guilty, having someone else take his place as the son who helps his father in the garden and is on the receiving hand of all that affection in the form of his mother’s cooking. But then he reminds himself why he’d chosen that path, for the benefit of all, and he quickly archives that flicker of a feeling.

“That’s us,” Chanyeol continues, pointing at an advertisement plastered on a wall. “As though anyone would need it, we’re literally the only ones in town cutting trees and stuff,” Chanyeol chuckles.

Jongdae lets out a noncommittal, vaguely appreciative hum, even though the poster supposed to advertise Chanyeol’s business is yelling at Jongdae with desperation that Minseok needs to be found, and he begs Jongdae to answer his calling.

Jongdae swallows and looks away. Chanyeol looks at him weird, but he keeps walking. “How about you?”

“I went to university and studied modern languages.”

“I remember you were good at those, back in school.”

“Yeah. I work as a translator in a law firm in Apgujeong, now.”

“Wow, isn’t that, like, super fancy and central?”

“Yeah, it’s a big firm.”

“Nice. Hey, I’m glad you’re doing okay. A lot of people here thought you’d turn out to be a fuckup, but you seem to be faring well.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about that.”

“Why do you say that?”

Jongdae clenches his fists in the pockets of his coat. Even if in that specific moment he was not imagining the line in the middle of the road contorting to create a long wail of Minseok’s written misery, all the nightmares he had had over the past decade beg to differ. But it’s not like he wants to tell Chanyeol any of that.

However, he soon finds out he doesn’t need to tell Chanyeol any of that. “Because of what happened to Minseok?” Chanyeol asks again, looking serious.

Finally someone who pronounces Minseok’s name comfortably. It’s almost a relief, if it wasn’t for the context.

“Yeah.”

“Did it help? To leave?”

“A lot, actually, yeah. And not just because aside from my parents, my brother, and maybe you, everyone treated me like a murderer. It just… helped clear my head. Not being forced to think about it all the time, start over.”

Chanyeol hums softly, walking slowly. He kicks a pebble and looks at the profile of the forest-covered hill at their right, behind a few rows of neat roofs.

“Did it last?” he asks in the end.

“What?”

“You know,” Chanyeol hedges. “Having a clear head. Not thinking about it.”

Jongdae scoffs. It’s starting to be really personal, and he’s not sure he likes it. “It did.”

“It did? It doesn’t anymore?”

That’s quite intrusive. After all, Jongdae hasn’t seen this guy for like twelve years. “What the fuck, Chanyeol? Yeah, well, lately I’ve had… issues. That’s it.”

“What kind of issues?”

“I have trouble—sleeping.”

“Is that why you’re here?” Chanyeol’s questions are more and more insistent, as though he’s on a close chase for some specific answer that Jongdae not only doesn’t know, but definitely doesn’t want to give.

“I’m here to visit my parents,” he answers dryly.

“You did not come back for Minseok?”

Jongdae stops in his tracks. “What do you mean?”

Chanyeol stutters. “Uhm. I don’t know, like, to—uh. He was your best friend. And after what happened. It would make sense that you’d…” he trails off, almost hoping Jongdae would continue.

Jongdae was so stupid. He should have seen it coming.

“Chanyeol, what are you trying to do?”

Chanyeol frowns. “Nothing. I’m not doing anything.”

“What’s with the questions?”

“I’m sorry, I—you never talked much about what happened and—”

Jongdae scoffs and turns on his heels. “I’m going home.”

“No! Jongdae, please wait, I’m sorry!”

Jongdae continues to walk. He’d let Chanyeol lead the way, before, but one look around is enough to identify his location in the lattice of streets like he knows the back of his hand, which surprises him considering the titanic efforts he’d made over the years to not think about Sangdong, in an attempt at erasing it from his mind.

If he takes two left turns and a right turn, he’ll get to Minseok’s house. If he continues straight on and then turns right, he’ll get to the trail head. So he makes sure to continue on the left. He can get home without Chanyeol’s guidance just fine.

“I am so sorry, Jongdae, this came out all wrong, I just—”

“Leave me alone or so help me God.”

A couple of strides are enough for Chanyeol to reach him immediately. He puts a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, I—”

Jongdae snaps.

“Don’t touch me. What are you, one of those sick people fascinated with past scandals and mysteries? What, lumberjacking isn’t cutting it for you so now you want to set up a new business, and you want to get big in the dark tourism sector? Are you a vlogger or something? Do you need first hand material from the key witness and first suspect?” Jongdae seethes, getting all up in Chanyeol’s personal space, making him take several steps backwards.

Remembering what Chanyeol had said about how he found out that Jongdae was in town makes a new possibility surface. “Wait a minute. No way. Apparently you’re good at ingratiating yourself with the aunties who like gardening, so what, did Minseok’s mother send you to ask me for details?”

“What the—”

“Well, I’m really sorry to disappoint you, Chanyeol, I do not have any juicy details other than those I already told the police, so you should keep looking elsewhere!”

“No!” Chanyeol seems more horrified each passing second. “No, Jongdae, you got it all wrong! I know you didn’t—I’m just trying to help!”

“Help? I already have a licensed therapist taking care of me in Seoul in exchange for a substantial portion of my salary, Chanyeol. I don’t think your curiosity, however free, might help me or benefit me in the slightest!”

“But Minseok might still be out there!” Chanyeol cries out. There’s a streak of desperation in his voice that Jongdae decides not to question.

“Yeah, well, that’s what I have been trying to tell everyone for the past twelve years, but since no one believes that, I’m not even sure I believe that, I beg you to understand that going with you on a quest to find what is left of Minseok’s decomposed corpse is not at the top of my priority list! Unless you want to be the one telling my mother that I hung myself!”

Chanyeol remains frozen in place, his mouth slightly open.

After turning around to march away, Jongdae’s brain experiences a single, rare split second of clarity.

He fucked up.

He walks back to Chanyeol, who had hardly moved a muscle. He grabs his coat and menaces him with a finger. “I am doing fine. You hear me?” he seethes. “I find out you tell any of this to my parents, I’ll fucking break your face. I’ll ruin you. I already am the psycho killer of the town, might as well act the part. I work in a fancy ass law firm, I have powerful friends, I could even get away with it,” he spits out. “Now forget about Minseok, wherever he is, if he’s dead, bless his soul. You can forget about all this once and for all. And leave me and my family the fuck alone.”

Chanyeol doesn’t follow him.

Jongdae thinks Chanyeol must be staring at his retreating back really intensely, to make his scar burn like that.

-

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Jongdae seethes through gritted teeth, walking briskly with the hood of his coat on, his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t need to look at the road signs to know where he is, but they’re all yelling at him anyway, and the only alternative would be to walk with his eyes closed. And he does that, for ten steps at a time, even though there’s ice on the pavement, because he can’t bear the endless stream of Jongdae, help me! that occupies every lettered piece of surface his gaze lands on. 

It got worse after he left Chanyeol. He stomps on the ice because there are things written on the asphalt underneath it, and the only way to make it go away is to make the clear surface crack and shatter.

“Shut up, shut the fuck up!” he growls.

He looks around, but he can’t see anyone. Chanyeol disappeared behind a corner minutes ago, he can’t feel his gaze on himself anymore.

He rings the bell at his parents’ home. He blows onto his hands and rubs them together to warm them as he waits for someone to get the door. “Fuck, fuck, shut up, stop, you have to stop—”

“Hey! How was it?” his father asks as soon as he opens the door.

“I was not impressed,” Jongdae blurts out, trying to blink away the scrawls that have replaced the geometric patterns on his father’s sweater. As much as he’s sure his father loves him, getting a sweater knitted in patterns of Jongdae’s name in Hangul seems a little extreme even for him.

Jongdae’s mother appears, clutching her pearls. “What do you mean?”

He pushes past them, marching inside. “He was nosy, and inappropriate, and I really hope I won’t have to see him ever again.”

He can almost hear the sound his mother’s hopes for his future in Sangdong make when he shatters them. “I don’t believe you, Chanyeol is such a sweetheart—”

“Yeah, to you, maybe.”

“He’s not nosy,” his father continues, scoffing in disbelief. “He probably just wanted to know how you’re doing. You’re just very hermetic and defensive.”

It’s Jongdae who scoffs, now. “Well, yeah! He’s a stranger to me. Last time I saw him we were still going through puberty and we exchanged ten words a month, tops. You don’t ask strangers certain things about probably dead people. If that makes me extremely… what did you just call it? Oh, yeah, defensive, then I’m fine being that way!” By now, Jongdae is screaming. He really hopes Jongdeok and the kids went home while he was out.

“You know,” his mother says calmly after a brief pause. “Chanyeol was the one who found you.”

Jongdae stops trying to shrug his padded coat off, confused. “What?”

“The day after you… and Minseok… got lost. The search party was led by his father, of course, he’s the park ranger. Chanyeol grew up helping his father in the woods, he knows the hills very well, so he was among those who kept searching night and day. It was Chanyeol who found you and called for help.”

Jongdae can feel himself starting to sweat, at the same time as the sound of rain and the scent of the forest let him know that he’s about to relieve his worst memories. He shrugs them off, alongside his coat.

“I did not know that.”

That would also explain why his parents seem so infatuated with Chanyeol.

She nods. “He asked us not to tell you, that day at the hospital while we were waiting for you to wake up. He…” She looks up at Jongdae’s father, looking for help.

Jongdae’s father clears his throat. “He said he felt guilty about not having been able to find Minseok, too.”

Clenching his jaw, Jongdae looks away. He inhales deeply through his nose.

“And you were sixteen, you were just kids…” his mother continues. “Chanyeol looked so sad about the whole thing. He didn’t want you to be mad at him for not finding Minseok, and on the other hand he didn’t want you to feel indebted because he saved you before it was too late, so we didn’t tell you right away. And then it never came up.”

Jongdae is definitely sweating. He doesn’t know why. It’s like something, some little voice at the back of his head, is trying to tell him to focus, to pay attention, because he’s getting closer to something, and it might be big, it might be an answer, and it’s scary.

Minseok’s scribbles are weirdly silent for a few heartbeats, holding their breath.

“Well,” Jongdae coughs. He takes time. “He sure sounded like he felt like I owed him something, and that something was explanations.”

“He was a little curious, so what?”

“Mom,” Jongdae groans. “He probably knows more than I do about what happened! I don’t remember a fucking thing, and I woke up a long time after they—after he found me, apparently. I don’t have a single fucking clue!”

“I know, Son,” she whispers, looking at the floor. “I know. He just probably thought that it was safe for you to talk about it after so many years.”

There is nothing Jongdae wants more than to be able to yell back that it is absolutely fucking not safe to ever talk about it. That even in fifty years, Jongdae will still feel like a part of himself has withered and died and that death continues spreading like a nefarious venom within his soul.

But he cannot say that. Because his parents already had to endure so much because of him, he cannot give them any more burdens.

He rubs a hand over his face.

“Fine,” he exhales in the end. “Okay. You’re right. I overreacted,” he admits, and he grimaces when he realizes he’s not fully lying.

“It’s okay,” his mother whispers, walking up to him to rub a hand on his back.

“I’m sorry,” he insists. “I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s so weird to be back here. The way the people still believe that I—and those questions, he creeped me out.”

“I know.” She looks at him with tenderness. “I’m sure he’ll forgive you.”

As though Chanyeol was the one who needed to forgive Jongdae, and not vice-versa.

As though Jongdae had the intention to face the weird sensation that this conversation left behind, and to see Chanyeol ever again.

-

After dinner, he squeezes his brain trying to come up with something to have a moment of peace by himself.

“Peace” is quite the exaggeration, since he can’t even remember the last time he’s known any, but still. Trying to pretend he isn’t dealing with a probably dead person scribbling stuff wherever he lays eyes on is much easier when there’s no one around.

He feels guilty, obviously, because they’re making an effort to make him feel at home in his own home, and they try to make the most of the limited time he’s willing to give them. Jongdeok has his own family, but comes over as often as he can anyway, just to have a little chat, just to lay eyes on him a little more before he goes back to Seoul and lets the capital swallow him.

“Sorry Mom, when I was out I got a call from work, I need to go check my emails now. I procrastinated enough.”

“But you’re on vacation!”

“Yeah, well, certain lawyers at the law firm are demonic, they literally never stop working, and expect the rest of us to be like that, too.”

“That doesn’t sound like a healthy work environment,” Jongdeok says, still munching around his dessert.

Jongdae snorts, standing up. He can’t help but visualize a clear image of Kyungsoo’s, Baekhyun’s and Yixing’s disgruntled faces behind their desks. He misses them. “Lawyers are insane, Jongdeok. I’m glad you wanted to be one for only like five minutes after high school and then forgot about it,” he says, clasping his brother’s shoulder. And he means it.

Jongdeok nods slowly and solemnly. “Amen to that.”

Once in his room, Jongdae closes his eyes and starts pacing, kicking the stuff he threw around that morning trying to desperately hide any writing from sight.

A useless attempt, since it’s getting darker outside, and as the last slithers of sunlight fade from view, Minseok’s messages start creeping from the darkness in the corners of the room, slowly expanding, trying to occupy Jongdae’s entire sight, and mind, and soul.

Jongdae, promise me you’ll listen. Promise me you’ll stay. I won’t ask for anything else after this, but I have been trying to reach you for so long, and now I finally can—

Jongdae rummages in a pile of clothes and finally finds the notebook. He pages through it frantically, then throws it again. He pulls at his hair, grunting, biting his fist not to be heard from his family downstairs.

He keeps scavenging through the content of his drawers until he finds a stash of some old birthday cards he used to keep because they were particularly meaningful, given to him on special occasions or by special people. Needless to say, he’d kept each and every card Minseok had given him.

He closes his eyes, rubs at his closed eyelids and presses with the heels of his hands until he sees stars. He inhales deeply. He doesn’t have much time; soon Minseok’s pleas won’t allow him to tell themselves and reality apart.

When he’s able to see again, he’s relieved to be able to read his grandma’s handwriting as she wishes him well for his university exam. He shuffles through the stash, smiling at cards from his family and some from friends that nowadays would cross the road to avoid him if they were ever about to walk past him on a sidewalk.

He gets to Minseok’s last birthday card.

He sighs.

He didn’t need any further confirmation, he was not mistaken. It is definitely Minseok’s handwriting.

He glances at the wall, then back at the card, then up again, at those words that slowly start intermingling, until what’s on the card bleeds onto the wall behind it, and it all becomes one.

And he remembers a really important piece of the puzzle.

With tears in his eyes, Jongdae steps on and crushes several lines of Jongdae, I need you as he crosses the space between the desk and the closet.

It takes him a while but there it is, buried under several layers of other boxes of old clothes or gadgets he will never use again. He knows no one has touched it, let alone opened it. After Minseok disappeared, after the rushy, listless police inspections, after the trial, Jongdae had put a lock on it.

He takes it out of the closet and he kneels in front of it, hunching over to put his forehead on the dusty lid. He exhales.

In that box is a treasure of inestimable value. It’s just paper, but it’s all of Jongdae’s and Minseok’s essence. Their friendship is in that box. Their souls are in that box. Minseok is in that box.

For six years Minseok and Jongdae wrote each other letters, despite living so close to each other that if one shouted from the window the other would probably be able to hear the message clearly. They wrote each other letters to say things they never told each other even though they met at the fountain and cycled together to school, spent recess together, and they cycled back home together, and did their homework (when they bothered doing it) at the same table. They liked the secret, the game, the thrill, the tacit agreement. They wrote each other letters because even though they grew up together, they wanted to know each other better than they knew themselves, and paper was more reliable than spoken words when they needed aid doing that.

They’re all there. All of Minseok’s letters are in that box in Jongdae’s hands.

All of Minseok’s feelings, thoughts, fears and joys. All those marvelous and harrowing things he’d wanted to entrust to someone, and he chose to share them with Jongdae.

Jongdae left the key to the box in Seoul. He knows where it is, but he actively ignores it on a daily basis, and he purposely left it there when he left to go back to Sangdong for Christmas.

Like that would be enough to prevent him from gravitating back to it.

It’s ridiculously easy to break the lock.

Everything stops as soon as he picks up the first letter.

He looks around in disbelief.

Words stop crawling from the corners, filling the floor and caking Jongdae’s feet in a mud of desperation. The posters on the wall are just posters, and the tickets on the pin boards are just tickets. Jongdae’s sweater is just a silly Christmas sweater, and his book has, for the first time in weeks, a title and an author listed on the cover.

“So this is what you wanted, you fucker,” Jongdae mutters to himself, wiping a tear.

He unfolds the first letter.

Dear Jongdae,

Sorry I stole your letter. I was so curious. Can I answer?

It’s dawn when Jongdae forces himself to stop shuffling through the letters, his eyes jumping from page to page, reading Minseok’s calligraphy and feeling more at home than he’d felt in years, drinking up those little snippets of Minseok’s existence like a wanderer in the desert takes big sips of fresh, clear water.

He calmly gets up and gets a clean sheet of paper from the stash. He sits back down, he closes the lid of the box, and presses the pen gently against the page.

Jongdae could fill pages, books, encyclopedias with the things he wants to tell Minseok. About how he feels, how difficult it has been, about how he’s sorry, about how he misses him, about the doubts he has, and about how ardently he wishes the mysterious written entity that has been harassing him for weeks was actually Minseok himself, so that he would be able to talk to him for real.

But that is not real.

Whether what Jongdae is living is just something sprung from his trauma and his imagination, some loose screw in his brain, or something darker, something that would find its place in a low-budget horror movie, in a novel about dark magic or in a folkloristic legend—he doesn’t know.

And he doesn’t care. It’s not real, and Jongdae indulging it, feeding into it, cannot be good.

The silence in the room is deafening, and when Jongdae looks up from the blank sheet of paper, he feels as though the walls were closing in, leaning to spy over his shoulder to read what he would say to Minseok. The air is rarefied, as though time itself was holding its breath in anticipation.

Jongdae puts down the pen and crumples the still immaculate paper.

He straightens his back, expands his chest, fights back against the pressure of that something , of that expectation.

The scar on his back is burning, but Jongdae doesn’t even try to reach it to scratch at it. He has tried multiple times to touch it over the years, but he could never get even close. In the end he just had to agree with the court-appointed medical experts when they said that he couldn’t have possibly hurt himself that way.

Someone else had done that to him, in that forest.

Jongdae and Minseok were lost and alone that day, in that forest.

Don’t give up on me, Minseok asks again from the wooden surface of the box, where the paper had been.

It’s hard to come to a conclusion, especially after having so masochistically rekindled his affection for the disappeared boy by reading some of his letters… but Jongdae is starting to think that he should. He should give up on Minseok.

Maybe who is scarring his vision with guilt-inducing pleas is the same person who scarred his back.

And whether it’s real or not, Jongdae needs to let it go.

Jongdae brushes away the words with the palm of his hand.

They disintegrate like a castle of sand at the first ocean wave.

-

Three weeks after Minseok’s eighteenth birthday, the Sangdong municipality organized the annual orienteering cross-country race in the Wondae-ri forest.

It was always a huge event, which saw the participation of the great majority of the schools of the neighboring counties of the Gangwon region. For two days every year, everywhere you looked in the small town you would find large groups of festive students stepping out of their buses, getting ready for the race. There was not a single Sangdong citizen that did not, in some way, contribute to the event. Chanyeol’s father helped clear and trace the paths for the race, Minseok’s mother sat all day at the registration desk, Jongdae’s mother helped organize the refreshments at the finish line.

Paths, trees and rocks were marked, obstacles were set up, teams were formed, maps were drafted. The usual.

Minseok was nominated captain of their town’s high school team, to no one’s surprise. He was the fastest runner in long distance trials and he had an amazing sense of direction. Jongdae was pretty good, too, so he obviously signed up and was thrilled when for the fourth consecutive year his timings allowed him to join a team as well, this time the high school team with Minseok.

Everything had been so great. Until one week before the race, when Minseok and Jongdae got into that huge fight.

So for the first time none of them was exactly looking forward to the race, and the rest of their teammates were not particularly excited either, since they’d tried to train all together after the fight and all three times Minseok and Jongdae had done their very best to punch each other in the face until either of them was persuaded or forced to leave, which did not make for the ideal training environment.

So of course when, during the race, in the middle of the forest, the team failed several consecutive turns and reached a river so far out the track that it was not even on the map, no one was surprised to hear Minseok and Jongdae blaming each other. Maps forgotten, they stopped and started yelling at each other until their team left the two of them to fend for themselves, in hopes that if they found their way back quickly enough they could still score enough points to save their school from the miserable failure of finishing last.

All the participants had started in heats, and their team was assigned to the last heat of the day. By the time Minseok and Jongdae were left alone fighting, it was getting darker and it had started raining.

Jongdae woke up two days later at the hospital, after nearly bleeding to death, covered in bruises, scratched all over, with a huge gash across his back, a mild case of hypothermia and a bad concussion.

It had taken the rescue party 15 hours to find Jongdae after every other participant got to the finish line and the alarm was raised.

Minseok was yet to be found.

Jongdae remembered nothing about what happened.

Soon they stopped believing him. They stopped asking him what had happened, how he and Minseok got to the river, how they crossed it, and why they were fighting.

Soon they handcuffed him to the bed. Soon the questions dwindled in numbers, until there was just one, always the same.

“Where is the body?”

-

“Kyungsoo? Hi. Change of plans. I’m sorry, I’m going back to Seoul, like, tomorrow,” Jongdae quickly says on the phone as soon as the other picks up, craning his neck to keep it against his shoulder as he flings his clothes in his suitcase.

“Wait, what? Did something happen? Are you okay?”

“No,” Jongdae spits. “I’m not. I’m not okay.”

“What is it? People are being horrible to you?”

Jongdae laughs. “I wish it was just that.”

“Just that? So they are being horrible? But what’s the matter? Have you been able to sleep?”

“No, no I haven’t, I have been too busy having full out conversations with a dead boy.”

“What?”

“The writings, Soo. It was him. He’s talking to me. I’m talking to Minseok.”

“Yes, you told me, but—”

“He does it constantly, even now, he’s—ugh, shut the fuck up!” Jongdae growls, hurling his book against the wall.

It bounces off with a thud, which is luckily masked by the noises his mother is making in the kitchen as she starts on breakfast.

“Jongdae,” Kyungsoo sounds very calm. “You know that is not possible, right? Minseok cannot talk to you… I thought you said he was probably dead.”

“I know, right? They never found a body. Everyone just assumed I’d killed him off. And maybe I started believing he was dead because of what everyone believed. But is he really dead? Is he?” Jongdae can hear how feverish he sounds. “They never found him alive, but they also never found his body. So is he really dead?”

“Uhm, okay, well, sure, but assuming he was alive and wanted to talk to you this desperately, why doesn’t he give you a call or something?”

“Then maybe it would make sense for him to be dead? Maybe this is how dead people communicate?”

“Dae, people don’t torture their loved ones with hallucinations if they need their help. Assuming that people are even able to do that, either dead or alive.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. I think. I think I need to be put on medication, asap. And I need a new MRI scan or whatever, the neurologist obviously fucked it up the first time around because this? This is not okay. I can’t—I can’t be here. It has to stop.”

“Okay, hold on a minute. You said you saw things here, too. What would change?”

“I don’t know? I don’t—I wouldn’t smell the forest when I open the window, if he’s dead he’s still there, he’s still here, and I—”

Jongdae crouches to the floor, sobbing as silently as possible. “I can’t stand being here. I can’t stand looking at anything. I can’t stand being awake and I can’t stand being asleep. He’s like—it’s like he’s screaming at me!”

“And what does it—uhm, he, what does he say?”

“He says I need to find him. I need to help him. What if it’s real? What if he isn’t dead, and he’s trying to contact me?”

“Jongdae, I hate to be doing this, but I feel like I should remind you that according to what you told me, the police said there’s a chance that he was the one trying to kill you off. Are you still in a rush to find him?”

Jongdae rubs his eyes with his hands. Kyungsoo does not need to remind him that, indeed.

“He would never. He would never do that to me!”

“Okay. Jongdae, listen, promise that no matter how many times you see or you think you see anything telling you that you need to find him, you won’t go looking for him?”

Jongdae laughs hysterically, huddled in a corner of his room, almost feeling the words trickling from the wall onto his back like slipstreams of cold little beings. “I don’t want to! I don’t need to promise, I don’t want to! I can’t do that! It’s not real!”

“I’m not sure you fully believe that it’s not real!”

“I don’t fucking know, Kyungsoo! I haven’t slept in a month! At this point I can’t even tell whether this phone call is real!”

“Have you told anyone about this?”

“Of course not!”

“Do you want me to pick you up?”

Jongdae hides his face in his elbow. “Yes. Please. I’m sorry, Soo, fuck, I’m so sorry.”

“No big deal. I’ll get in the car as soon as I get home from work. I’ll be there in the late evening. Do you think you can make it?”

“Yes, I think, I’ll try—Soo, you can’t tell anyone about this—please—”

“At some point I might have to.”

“No! No, please—I promise I’ll go see my therapist or something as soon as I step foot in Seoul—just don’t tell anyone, I don’t want my family to know, they have already suffered so much because of this, I just want to deal with it alone, away from them—promise me you won’t say a word—”

“Okay, Dae, okay! You don’t need to make me promise, I won’t say anything.”

“Thank you,” Jongdae whispers, his face pressed against a bundle of fabric he grabbed from the floor, just to have a physical barrier between himself and the writings on his driver license that is gaping at him from where he’d thrown his wallet, before. “Thank you, Kyungsoo, thank you.”

“Please hang on. Okay? Few hours and I’ll be there.”

“Okay. I can do it.”

“I know you can. And then we’ll fix it. It will be fine.”

And for a while after speaking to Kyungsoo, as he sits in front of his mother at the breakfast table and stuffs his face full of kongnamul bap, Jongdae really does believe he can make it.

Until that evening he retreats early with the excuse of having to work and he huddles against the wall. Exhaustion takes over and his body collapses against the corner, his head cradled by the walls, as he’s showered in Minseok’s calls, and he falls asleep.

“I already told you,” Minseok screamed, whipping around. “You need to get over yourself. It’s not that big a deal. Get a fucking life, Jongdae!”

Jongdae stomped over the undergrowth, which in his dream has the same texture of quicksand. “Really, Min? It seems to me that it is a very fucking big deal, if you’re willing to cut our friendship like that! Look, Min, this is really simple: you tell me what you’re hiding, and I’ll tell you if it’s worth not ever seeing me again like you oh so ardently wish!”

“Stay the fuck away from me.”

“Or what, huh? You’re gonna hit me or something?”

“I might! You’re really getting on my nerves!”

“You’ve been talking big this past week, big boy, but you looked so relieved whenever Minho held you back.”

“Maybe I will hit you, if that will finally get you out of my way. I tried to do it the nice way, but it’s obviously not working.”

The sound of the sky’s distant rumbling got lost under Jongdae’s next words. Jongdae feels uneasy, he knows this by heart, he knows it’s the signal he’s nearing the chasm.

“I will clear the fuck out of your way once you tell me whatever it is that you’re not telling me.”

“You’re delusional, Jongdae.”

“There is something you’re not telling me. Admit it.”

“You’re fucking delusional, and if you don’t leave me alone I swear I will fucking throw you in the fucking river.”

“I bet you’d like that, piece of shit, get me out of your sight, just like you have always liked to run away from your problems!”

“You are fucking insane.”

Jongdae laughed bitterly. “God, the fuck do I even care at this point? You never gave a shit about me, or else you wouldn’t try to get away with this! I thought that after all these years I’d deserve at least a crumb of honesty on your part—”

Minseok spun around and grabbed the collar of Jongdae’s shirt. “You’re an idiot! You’re a fucking idiot if you think I never cared about you!”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense, Minseok!” Jongdae didn’t push him away. ““Just say you can’t stand me and go! Or grow some balls and be honest!”

“Yeah, maybe right now it’s true! I can’t stand you, you’re making it very easy on me by being such a pain in the ass—”

“Then hit me!”

“I won’t do that!”

“Then leave! Leave me the fuck alone!”

“That is what I have been trying to do, you smartass, if only you’d stop knocking on my window every day!”

“Oh, sorry if I wanted the jerk I’ve been calling my best friend to look me in the eyes and tell me what the fuck is going on!”

There was lightning, far away. There’s a weird creak that almost distracts Jongdae.

“Ugh! Even if I had something to tell you, I’m not sure I would want to tell you anymore! You’re being such an asshole, why were we even friends? I don’t even know why I was worried about cutting ties with you. It obviously won’t be such a big loss. You’re fucking insufferable, I fucking hate you.”

It hurt even in his dreams.

“Same, I hate you, too. I’ll definitely not miss you.”

They stared at each other, long and hard. At that point it started raining. They both looked up at the sky.

Jongdae knows they need to look for their way back to the race track, to reach the others. He knows he has to spin around, find his bearings, but doing so is hard, because he’s been there before, several times, he knows that he won’t like what he’ll find, where his subconscious will lead him after his memories stop.

This time, what he finds is Minseok’s lifeless, pale body on a carpet of moss.

“Minseok,” Jongdae calls, falling to his knees. “Minseok!”

At some point Jongdae must have tilted and fallen to the floor. He’s cold, sweaty, and he can’t breathe. “Minseok…”

The darkness is silent. There is no sound, but also no word.

“Minseok?” Jongdae calls, bringing a hand up to his throat, trying to ease his own breathing.

That’s when he hears the same creak again.

Something has hit the glass of his window. He doesn’t dare to move, but after a while it happens again.

He’s not brave enough to look. A part of himself thinks it’s Minseok, the one throwing pebbles.

He used to do that a lot.

But a fourth pebble hits the glass, and it’s a bigger stone this time, but by then Jongdae’s foggy consciousness has regained a little stability, and he can’t allow a window to be broken in his parents’ house.

He wipes his tears and drags himself to the windowsill to spy outside.

With a mixture of relief, disappointment and annoyance, Jongdae sees that it’s just Chanyeol.

“Jongdae,” Chanyeol whisper-yells once Jongdae has opened the window, puffs of his breath like smoke in the light of a lamppost far away. “Can I talk to you?”

“It’s way past dinner time, Chanyeol, what the fuck? Didn’t I tell you to stay away from me?”

“I really need to talk to you,” Chanyeol urges. “And you said you have trouble sleeping lately, so I figured it would be as good a time as any.”

“That’s—” Jongdae huffs and hides his face in his arms, on the window frame. The cold air is clearing his head, but it’s also making him aware of being sweaty. He’s going to get sick. “Right now? Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not kidding. Jongdae, come on. The other day I messed up because I didn’t know how to approach the subject. I thought I should give you hints so you could figure it out on your own, but maybe it’s best if I tell you straight away.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jongdae whines. He straightens up, grabbing the window handle. “And why am I even listening to you? Ugh, goodnight, Chanyeol.”

“I know you want answers. I could help you find them.”

“Very noble effort, but I highly doubt you’d be able to give me the answers the police and I have been looking for for twelve years.”

“What if I told you I am a shaman?”

Jongdae snorts. “Okay, right, goodnight, Chanyeol.”

He moves to close the window, but Chanyeol doesn’t move. There’s something lingering on his features that makes Jongdae freeze in his motions.

He opens it again. “Shit, you’re actually serious.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a shaman.”

“I’m a shaman.”

“And what the hell is a shaman?”

Chanyeol fidgets, moving his weight from one leg to the other. “Uhm.”

“Shit. Okay. Well, I’m freezing my ass off, would you mind—”

“Can you come outside?”

Jongdae closes the window, and he sees through the glass the disappointment on Chanyeol’s face. It doesn’t last, though, because then Chanyeol can see him scamper around to find his coat and his hat, and his relieved smile is luminous even in the night.

Jongdae wears a double pair of socks, too, just in case. He hopes it won’t take long, but at the same time he won’t admit that he hopes it will take a while. That the things Chanyeol has to say are actually useful.

He’d climbed out of his window so many times when he was a teen that when he lands gracefully on his feet on the frozen grass of his parent’s backyard he’s almost surprised by how automatic it had been.

Chanyeol seems equally as impressed. “Dude. Couldn’t you use the door like a normal person?”

They move towards the street, where the light of the lamppost is brighter, and where there are no windows through which they can be seen by Jongdae’s parents or neighbors. Their shadows are long and slim on the stamped-on snow.

“Says the one who didn’t even think about ringing the bell like a normal person.”

Cocking a brow, Chanyeol huffs. He doesn’t even need to say anything, Jongdae gives up immediately. “Yeah, okay. This is probably not a conversation I want to have with my parents. Then bring it on, Mr. Baksu, tell me what you know.”

“I’m not a baksu,” Chanyeol mumbles, looking away. “I’m not like that.”

“Then why are we having this conversation?”

“Because the kind of shaman that I am is the one you actually need.”

“And what is the kind of shaman I need?” Jongdae knows he’s being annoying, and he’s glad it’s showing on Chanyeol’s face that it’s working. That’s what he gets for being enigmatic and shit at 10 p.m. in the evening when it’s like a billion degrees below zero out in the streets.

“The kind of shaman who can interact with the spirit world.”

All intention to be annoying disappears as quickly as their puffs of breaths in the night. “Now you have my attention.”

Chanyeol stares at him for a long while. Jongdae thinks that Chanyeol’s declaration about being a shaman might be affecting him somehow. He might be impressionable given the fact that paranormal shit had been happening around him all the time for the past weeks, but the writings seem to subside a little the closer he walks to Chanyeol. They still crowd the corners of his eyes, but it’s a soft faded murmuring instead of the bold block letter screaming he was slowly trying to get used to.

And he notices it’s not the first time he has this impression; when they took a walk the other day something similar had happened, though the phenomenon was much less apparent.

“Are you going to tell me anything?” Jongdae urges after a while. “It’s cold.”

Chanyeol swallows. “You want to find Minseok, right?”

Jongdae shrugs. “I don’t know what I want. I just want it to stop.”

“What should stop?”

Jongdae clenches his jaw and stares.

Chanyeol stares back, crossing his arms over his chest.

No one wants to back down and give away any secret.

Until Jongdae shivers. “It’s fucking cold, will you say something already?”

“I already said a lot, now you say something.”

Laughing, Jongdae puts his hands in the pockets of his coat. “Yeah, you said something, and you expected me to believe it. You think I don’t know that I’m still the town’s no. 1 public enemy? Do you think I don’t know you could tell me whatever and I would still probably believe it because I’m the poor traumatized kid? Don’t you have anything else to do with your time other than bullying me?”

Chanyeol’s horror would almost look comical; his eyes bulge out and he flaps his hands as though uncertain whether to reach for Jongdae or simply gesticulate wildly.

But it’s authentic, so Jongdae could never laugh.

“Jongdae, this cannot work if you keep jumping to the worst possible conclusions—I swear I just want to help you, and this is serious!”

“How do I believe you’re not shitting me, then?”

“I really am a shaman. Fifth generation. I swear.”

“Prove it.”

Chanyeol snorts. “What? I don’t need to prove it.”

“Then goodbye,” Jongdae singsongs, his head tilted, and before Chanyeol can reply he’s stalking back to the house to climb back into his warm bed.

Just as he expected, he hears Chanyeol exhale loudly behind his back and mutter a curse as he starts following him, the snow crunchy under their feet.

“Okay, you win!” Chanyeol almost snarls. “I know you’ve been having trouble sleeping. I know you have some kind of hallucination, or visions. I know you’re talking to Minseok. And I might know why it’s happening. Will you just listen and—”

Chanyeol nearly shrieks when Jongdae turns around so abruptly that Chanyeol nearly topples over him and slips on the snowy pavement.

“Who told you these things?” Jongdae seethes.

Chanyeol huffs, annoyed. “I told you I’m a shaman, that means that even if I don’t want to, I know this kind of things—”

“Kyungsoo told you? You know Kyungsoo?”

“Who?”

“How do you know Kyungsoo?”

“Who the hell is Kyungsoo? Another shaman?”

“Stop fucking with me!” Jongdae growls, hitting Chanyeol's padded chest lightly. “Kyungsoo is the only person who knows about this stuff. Who told you those things?”

Chanyeol grabs Jongdae’s shoulders, not as lightly, and articulates: “I told you I am a fucking shaman , for fuck’s sake. I know these things. I can see them. You walk around carrying a huge black void stemming from your back and there are things in it and I’m shocked it hasn’t crushed you yet, but I saw it. I know these things. And in your case I don’t even have to make the effort to recall your link to the spiritual plane, because it’s already here.”

Chanyeol is nearly sputtering out of breath at the end of his monologue, but he has spoken steadily, with a deep voice, and Jongdae barely noticed that Chanyeol’s presence, despite his attitude, was helping him focus on something that was not the darkness of the night curling into handwritten patterns anymore.

Still, he understood virtually nothing the other said, but the general idea he got is that it’s not something he could possibly be expected to believe. “Bullshit.”

Chanyeol closes his eyes briefly, to collect himself, then detaches one hand from Jongdae’s shoulder to fish something from his pocket. “Okay, then if you don’t believe me, it’s up to you. But I have something that belongs to you, and you might want to know how it ended up in my possession, at the very least.”

He takes a clear plastic envelope from his pocket and dangles it right in front of Jongdae’s face, so close that he almost gets cross-eyed.

Inside of the envelope there’s a little square of paper, its edges burned.

The sight of it opens a hole in Jongdae’s heart.

Dear Minseok, says Jongdae’s handwriting, your last letter was really long! Let me just start by saying th

A younger Jongdae is speaking from the page. A Jongdae that could have never foreseen the shadow that would be cast upon his life in a matter of very few years by the very same person he was writing to, wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Jongdae feels like he might never be able to breathe again. His throat closes and his hand trembles when he lifts it to retrieve the envelope from Chanyeol’s hold.

It’s not like he had never wondered what had happened to his letters, after Minseok disappeared. Even when Minseok was still in Sangdong and their life had been normal, Jongdae had occasionally been terrified by the thought that anyone could find those letters and read them; if anyone ever read and divulge their content, it would have been like taking a walk around Sangdong naked, except much worse.

And then he thought that if the police found them, they would have questioned him about them for a while, because of the implications of their existence they could have. And after Minseok was gone the chances that his parents and sister would go through his stuff and find them, read them, were high. Jongdae was sure they would confront him about them, but they never came up. He’d tried to ask Minseok’s sister, once, trying to be very vague, but she’d seemed genuinely confused.

For those reasons, Jongdae had gradually convinced himself that he’d been the only one of the two that kept all the letters in a box and treated them as though they were a precious treasure, his most prized possession, while Minseok probably threw them all away after reading them, day after day, whenever he got one, as though they bore the same level of importance as an empty candy wrapper that had served its purpose.

Or maybe, which was more realistic, Minseok had dumped them all in the trash after they fought. It was likely; didn’t he say he wanted to cut ties with Jongdae, after all?

Jongdae couldn’t decide which option hurt most, but both were very plausible occurrences. Many things had remained unchanged about his feelings for Minseok over the years, everything was still mostly intact, and the dents caused by the mysterious disappearance were only slightly bigger than the single dent caused by the possibility of Minseok never caring all that much about their correspondence, while to Jongdae it had meant the world.

Chanyeol lets the envelope go only when he’s sure Jongdae’s trembling fingers wouldn’t drop it.

Blood had started pumping so quickly in Jongdae’s head that he almost cannot hear himself when he speaks next. “He burned my letters?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.

The hole in his heart has edges as jagged and burned as the fragment of letter in his hands. It’s much worse than anything he’d imagined. Minseok dumping them in the trash, disappointed by the turn their friendship had taken to the point that he wished to erase any trace of it, was one thing, but going out of his way to actually burn them?

“Why did Minseok burn my letters?” He looks up at Chanyeol, but he’s actually asking the sky, universe, any entity, human and less so, that was probably and most definitely not listening anyway, and he’s doing so with a quivering voice which he hopes the other won’t notice.

Chanyeol clears his throat, looking at their feet. “He did not.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t Minseok who burned them.”

Inhaling, Jongdae quickly swipes his gloved hand under his eye. “What?”

“His sister did, more or less three weeks ago.”

Jongdae inhales sharply, for multiple reasons, not the last of which is the relief stemming from the fact that after all those years it felt like a life jacket being thrown at him, the meager consolation that Minseok had not, in fact, gotten rid of his letters.

But when Chanyeol finally looks at him, they’re thinking about the same thing. The other reason why Jongdae is finally starting to feel, though reluctantly, like he’s finally possessing two puzzle pieces that actually match. Even though the rest of the puzzle still has fifty thousand pieces or something that he hasn’t even found yet.

“Three weeks ago, December fourth. That’s when it started, right?” Chanyeol presses.

Jongdae nods.

Chanyeol nods slowly, gathering his thoughts. Then he seems to notice the way Jongdae is swaying on his feet, unstable. “Do you want to sit down? I will tell you everything but it might… take a while.”

Jongdae follows him around the house, to the sidewalk. They sit on the edge. There’s no one around, not a single noise disturbs the silence of the night. The lamppost casts a yellowish, eerie light on them, revealing their features only partially as their heads are cast low.

“So, I told you my dad and I, we have this lumberjacking business, and I’ll probably follow in his footsteps or become a park ranger, one day. It’s the easiest solution. He’s a shaman, too, like my sister, my aunt, my grandfather. We’ve been tied to the forest ever since the first generation. It’s a powerful beacon for those like us. Lumberjacking is just an excellent excuse to, you know, disappear in the woods so much without ever raising questions in the community.” He crushes some crisp snow with his heels. “Over time people have learned that we’re the ones who know most about the hills, they know we keep the paths in order and everything. After what happened to Minseok, not many people continued to hike the hills for fun, there’s been a lot of superstition since they never found his body, but sometimes some tourist comes, because they don’t know, or don’t care, and after all the birches are pretty.”

Jongdae listens, unable to look at anything other than the fragment of letter in his hands.

“Three weeks ago there was this bunch of college students who got the keys of one of the cabins and wanted a weekend adventure, so of course people sent them to me, and I had nothing to do that day so I led them to the trails. I wanted to make sure they’d find the cabin and had the necessary equipment to, I don’t know, not die? One of them had only tennis shoes and it was already mid-afternoon. But whatever. I went with them to the cabin, ate with them, and made my way back when it was dark.”

The Chanyeol who has the tendency to blabber is back. It’s almost reassuring. Jongdae had started to be nervous around Chanyeol the Serious Shaman.

“I’ve done it a lot of times before. Not just because of Dad’s job, but also because we, uhm, we just do that a lot. As shamans. We draw power from the forest and then we give it back. There’s not many rituals, those only my sister does, because she’s a woman and only women can get initiated, but still.” He coughs. “Uhm. Any questions?”

Jongdae has approximately a gazillion questions, and the great majority of them is not even relevant to what Chanyeol has been saying until that moment. He tries to think of one, just to show his will to cooperate, hoping that eventually Chanyeol will get to the part where he explains to Jongdae why he had been losing his mind ever since Minseok’s sister went on a random dramatic nocturnal quest to destroy something that was supposedly dear to her brother, twelve years after his disappearance and/or death.

“Uh… why only women?”

“Well, all shamans can perceive the spirit world, but interactions in the truest sense of the world can be achieved only after initiation. After initiation, shaman women become spirit-callers. Initiation is either a summon, a visiting, or a sending back of spirits. And women are the only ones able to do those three things.” He clears his throat again. “It has something to do with the fact that women can give birth, you know? And, well, the act of being pregnant and creating a whole new living being within themselves is an act of spirit-calling in itself. It’s just something they are capable of, and we aren’t.”

“Oh, I get it,” Jongdae mumbles, not sure he actually gets it. Sure, it makes sense, but it implies that the world as Jongdae thought he knew it is a lot different than how Chanyeol knows it. He doubts he’ll ever have enough strength to address that disconnection between the reality he used to know and the one he’s being catapulted in.

He continues to turn the burned letter over in his hand. “So?”

“Yeah. So. That night as I was getting back from the cabin I was not alone in the forest, I could feel it, and at some point I stopped and I waited, until I saw Minseok’s sister walk alone towards the hills.”

Chanyeol pauses.

Jongdae waits.

“Jongdae, I think at this point I should let you know that. I mean, I am pretty sure that Minseok never told you, but. Minseok’s family… they moved to Sangdong because their previous beacon was fickle and went extinct.” He sighs. “They are shamans, too. Minseok is—was a shaman, too.”

That makes Jongdae momentarily forget about the letter in his hands. He snaps his head up. “What?”

Chanyeol grimaces. “Yeah.”

With a disbelieving laughter bubbling up from deep inside his chest, Jongdae closes his eyes. “There is no way, Chanyeol. He would have told me. He told me everything.”

“That is not something that shamans simply go around and tell random people.”

“Assuming you’re not bullshitting me, you literally just told me about you and your entire family!”

“Yeah, because you’re on the brink of being spirit-visited, with all that void channel going on over your head, and you have a huge possession-gash on your back! You’re not just ‘random people!’” Chanyeol exclaims, exasperated.

“Ugh,” Jongdae hides his face in the crook of his own elbow, and draws his knees up to his chest. “This does not make any sense.” He inhales and looks up again. “I’m telling you, Minseok could have never—he would have told me!”

“Didn’t you and Minseok have that huge fight because he was hiding something from you in the first place?”

Bingo.

Jongdae glares at Chanyeol, betrayed. Chanyeol lifts his hands in surrender. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. This is not a shaman thing, literally the whole school knew.”

Jongdae simply looks away again.

“Jongdae,” Chanyeol tries again, calmly this time. “Minseok and I were not particularly close in high school. But I know that he knew about me, like he knew that I knew about him. So we never talked about it, but we always kept an eye on each other.” He sniffles, his nose bright red because of the cold. “And so I knew that you two were extremely close. I’m sure it killed him not to be able to tell you everything. I swear.”

“I don’t need your consolation, Chanyeol.”

“I’m just telling the truth.”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t even believe that you’re not fantasizing. There is no way he was a shaman.”

“I’m sure you noticed some things, though. I’m sure you noticed how his family would disappear for days at a time. Even I heard Minseok complain about that sometimes, how his parents would force him to spend time with them, or to go on little trips.”

Jongdae scoffs. “We were teenagers. What teenager in the history of teenagers would give up an entire weekend with his friends to go on a stupid camping trip with his parents? Yeah, his parents were obsessed with healthy bonding family times and had this romantic idea of connection with nature, and went to visit relatives somewhere in Gyeongsangbuk-do that were just as obsessed, and? Come on, Chanyeol. You can’t expect me to take you seriously.”

“Yeah, but Minseok really hated those bonding times, didn’t he? I know he couldn’t reveal much about what they did but I’m sure he told you at least that. He despised them. He did not even like his parents that much, and it was reciprocal. It was different with his sister though. Right?”

“Chanyeol, this is hardly incriminating evidence. Yeah, Minseok was never an easy kid, with all his sneaking out and getting in trouble, no wonder their parents always showed a strong preference for Minyoung. She was an adorable little girl, she was the younger kid, and you’re being weird about this. Hell, my parents always coddled me because I was the younger, and while I’m sure my brother cried about it maybe twice when he was five, that does not mean he resents our parents to the point of despising them, or that they loved him any less. You have a sister, too, you know how it is.”

“Minseok never told you what they did?”

“No? He didn’t like to talk about his parents. He said it was boring and that’s it.”

“I’m sure that if we had a way to trace it back, you’d find out they’d only go on those little secluded family times during certain lunar phases.”

Jongdae laughs. “Chanyeol, you can’t be serious. They were not werewolves, that much I’m confident I can say.”

Once again ignoring Jongdae’s attempts at getting under his skin, Chanyeol continues to explain. “For shamans and spirit-callers, we get stronger without the influence of the moon—”

“You are insane—”

“Minseok disappeared on the day of a new moon. And his sister burned your letters on the night of a new moon.”

Jongdae shakes his head. “This cannot make any sense.”

“Jongdae. Minseok’s sister, the only initiated spirit-caller in the Kim family, snuck out of her home at midnight on a new moon, out of all days, with a backpack full of your letters, dug a hole in the forest floor, dumped the paper in it, lit a match and threw it on the pile. She sat in front of the fire crying, calling Minseok’s name trying to summon him and failing. And on the following day, after twelve whole years, you started having hallucinations about Minseok, the one she had tried to summon with your letters. You looked pretty fine from a shamanical point of view when you left Sangdong, and now you suddenly come back and have this—” He flaps his hands in the direction of the crown of Jongdae’s head. “This thing following you around. You want to call it a coincidence? Fine!”

“Fine,” Jongdae repeats, more out of pettiness than out of actual disbelief.

Chanyeol scoffs. “You are so headstrong, I can’t with you. You admitted to having hallucinations and all that stuff, so I know that you know that something ‘paranormal’ is going on.” He says, making quotation marks with his fingers and rolling his eyes.

Jongdae honestly can’t tell why Chanyeol seems to consider the word “paranormal” ridiculous, since it is literally the only way there is to describe it.

Chanyeol is continuing on with his tirade. “Shouldn’t that be enough to accept my help? We should figure it out together.”

“What would you gain from this?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you gain from helping me? Fame in the shaman community? Do they give you a prize if you help me? What is it?”

“It is simply what we do. Keep the powers balanced. And right now, my guy, you’re the very definition of unbalanced.”

“I never heard ‘nutjob’ spelled that way, wow.”

“You’re not crazy, you’re perfectly fine, but if you’d rather keep your hallucinations and not sleep until you drop dead because of sleep deprivation, go ahead, dude.”

“Heh, okay.”

“What, you’re not scared of death?”

“Not really, no.” Then he rolls his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I have unpacked this subject with my therapist so many times already I promise I am fine.”

Chanyeol blinks several times. “Uhm. Okay. Maybe you don’t care, but I do. Can I still help you?”

Jongdae closes his eyes. He sighs. Coincidence or not, paranormal activity or not, he feels drained. He hadn’t lied when he said he just wanted it to be over. Even if it turns out to be just a prank.

“Okay,” he consents.

Chanyeol’s smile is sweet, and kind, like Jongdae hasn’t been very persistent about pissing him off. “Will you answer some questions?”

“Sure.”

“Have you been talking to Minseok?”

“I have been talking to a figment of my imagination that pretends to be Minseok, yes.”

“How often?”

“He’s talking to me even now. He never stops.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

“Dude… that’s… but how?”

Jongdae looks away. There’s a lump of emotion in his throat when he says: “He writes to me.”

Chanyeol slaps his forehead like it makes a lot of sense. “Of course. Of course, because of the letters… he probably initiated a bond with you and he didn’t even realize, he canalized it in his letters, it was an objectified link, and his sister unsealed it…” he stands up and starts pacing, muttering to himself.

Jongdae trusts that eventually Chanyeol will translate whatever his deduction will be in words a common non-paranormally educated peasant can understand, so he shrugs, glances at the Jongdae, only you can find me! that is slithering towards him on the edge of the sidewalk like some sort of glacial, prehistoric creature, and goes back to studying the burned edges of what remains of his letter.

He’s cold, but he’s so exhausted his body doesn’t even have enough energy to make him shiver.

He almost doesn’t notice Chanyeol stopping in front of him. “But how?” he’s asking him. “I mean, you receive letters, or?”

“At first I would read something and instead of the words I would read something else, something he wanted me to read. Then I started seeing it everywhere, and I stopped being able to make out what is real and what comes from him. Everything is covered in words in his handwriting.”

Chanyeol’s loud exhale is a huge cloud of vapor glistening in the cone of lamppost light. “I didn’t think it was so bad. How are you even dealing?”

“I thought we had discussed extensively the fact that I am not doing well.”

“I thought you only saw him in your sleep and that was why you wouldn’t sleep.”

“Nah. I can’t sleep because I have horrible, splatter nightmares about finding his corpse, or being responsible for his corpse-state, or him trying his best to make me a corpse. Very nice. I’ve had them for years, they’ve only intensified since his sister did some of her alleged spirit-caller stuff. I have almost lost my job and I have definitely lost my shit. If revenge served cold is what she wanted, assuming I hadn’t atoned enough yet, she’s getting it”

“So you’re talking to him when you’re awake?”

“It’s more like, he’s screaming at me all the time, and, well, I try to ignore him?”

“He’s screaming at you?”

“I guess my psychogenic amnesia has done a good job at removing the part where I kill him? And he might be mad about that and wants me to undo that?”

“You didn’t—but what does he say?”

“That he needs my help, that I need to find him, and that he wants me to tell him whether I am actually hearing, seeing him, reading, him, whatever. Which I haven’t confirmed, yet. Because that would mean I give in to whatever schizophrenic momentum I’m finding myself into and I don’t want the situation to degenerate. I’ll go back to Seoul, I’ll get a new MRI scan done, I’ll start on medication, and I’ll forget all about this shaman folklore from the countryside. I can’t wait.”

Chanyeol swallows, ignoring the last tirade. “First of all, Jongdae, you can’t seriously think you’ve killed Minseok.”

Jongdae slightly rocks back and forth. “But there is no way to know for sure,” he objects, continuing to show a nonchalance he doesn’t remotely possess.

“All this time, you thought you might have killed him?” Chanyeol asks slowly. He sits next to him, turned in his direction as though he wanted to reach for him.

“I mean, I can’t see why I could even do that, because Minseok was—” he stops, a pang in his heart revealing he will never be able to say it out loud, and swallows. “I know that no matter how angry I could get, I would never hurt him. Wanting to punch him in the face when he was being an idiot is one thing, but anything more than that? No, absolutely not. But who knows? Maybe an accident. Maybe we started shoving each other and he fell in an old abandoned quarry, or in the river, the fuck do I know? Or maybe I really did get so mad I killed him. I can’t remember. And afterwards everyone sure thought I was capable of doing that, anyway.”

“But you were cleared of all charges. There was no evidence against you. We all read those files… had I known that you had such doubts, I would have looked for you much sooner!”

“Chanyeol, you can’t know for sure that you’re not sitting next to a murderer.”

“I actually can. When you and Minseok went missing I knew immediately that you’d been involved in a spirit-calling collateral incident.”

Just as the conversation had made sense for more than five consecutive seconds. “Sure, okay.”

“Believe me. The race happened on the day of Minyoung’s initiation. When she was supposed to perform her first summon and progress to spirit-caller. When it became clear that you two were the only ones missing at the end of the race, my family and I understood immediately that something went wrong with her initiation. It can happen; spirit-calling is definitely not an exact science. It couldn’t be a coincidence.”

“Chanyeol…”

“I don’t know whether your parents ever told you, but I was the one who found you, the next day.”

Jongdae doesn’t answer.

“My father and I could find you only because we knew where to look. The signs of the demonic passing were strong. And when I found you I knew you and Minseok had been accidentally caught in the crossfire of the summon, and that I wouldn’t be able to find him no matter how much we looked.”

“That’s not true, I can assure you that I didn’t notice any paranormal shit during the race.”

“But then you got amnesia, right? So I’ll tell you what I think happened after your memories stop.”

Jongdae stands up. “No.”

“What? Why? I thought you wanted answers. You can’t continue living with this crippling doubt that you might have killed your best friend!”

The envelope in Jongdae’s hand burns, as though it was still on fire. He drops it, and watches it dance in the still air towards the snow on the ground. He turns around, paces, feeling constricted. “I can’t—do you think it would make me feel better to know that he was the one who tried to kill me?”

“But he didn’t!”

“He might have! Even the police said it was either him or me!”

“But the police—what does the police know, ugh.” Chanyeol stands up as well, grabbing his shoulders like he’d done before. “Jongdae, Minseok saved your life that day!”

Jongdae struggles to continue breathing, crushed.

He frowns. That certainly was a scenario he never considered before. Whatever his face is doing, it might be clear that he’s shocked, because Chanyeol lowers his head to be at the same level of his eyes. 

“The wound on your back,” he says slowly. “That’s what initiated spirit-callers do when a summoned demonic spirit possesses the wrong person. To free that person, and send the spirit back.”

Jongdae is shaking. “But that’s—you said he couldn’t do that. Minseok was not initiated. You said male shamans can’t be initiated. He was not a spirit-caller.”

Chanyeol nods, serious. “Exactly. But he did it anyway, because it was the only way he had to save you. Even if he knew it would likely cost him his own life.”