Chapter Text
Cellular differentiation suggested that when a cell reached a point of possibility, it did not possess one fate over another so much as carry them all at once. All pathways existed simultaneously, latent.
Potential sat inside from point of conception: muscle, bone, blood, nerve, skin. The same origin, the same genome, and yet, given the right signals, it would become something irrevocably specific. It was not a choice, but rather a commitment to one expression. Form followed function. A stem cell contained multitudes, every outcome coiled inside the same microscopic body, waiting for triggered manifestation. Environment mattered. Timing mattered. A single protein binding in the wrong place could change everything.
Once differentiation occurred, it was irreversible.
A heart cell did not decide to become a heart cell because it loved pumping blood. It did so because the conditions demanded it, because the signals aligned, because something older and quieter than choice said like this. If something existed, it existed for a reason, and if it failed, it was because the mechanism had been disrupted somewhere along the chain.
And when a cell sustained damage, there were multiple pathways: apoptosis; repair; senescence; proliferation. These were not choices in the moral sense, but outcomes dictated by context. The cell responded with what it had: cause and effect, if X, then Y, no cosmic intention required.
Hyuntak thought about that a lot, in retrospect. How inevitability did not mean simplicity. He thought of how biologists absolved things to take the weight off and make it more palatable, and then presented the clean alternative as dogma.
If you starved a cell of oxygen, it died. If you severed a signal pathway, something downstream failed.
And, catastrophically, there were times when something was cut.
Medical literature was very careful about the wording;: Severed soul-thread trauma with psychosomatic shock. They treated it like an autoimmune disease, like the body attacking something it was never meant to harm. Hyuntak remembered the pamphlets and all of the diagrams. It was hard to forget with how the ink had bled faintly from his hands wetting the paper with sweat.
All this to say, hypothetically, in one version of his life, their cells had developed as they were meant to, and he did not do it.
But in this one, he did.
· · ─ · 𖤖 · ─ · ·
Hyuntak hadn’t been particularly fond of the threads since he was eighteen years old.
For most people, they were just there, like your eyes or your hands, and no one noticed more than they noticed you breathing. They were a fact of human biology, after all, an extension of yourself given to your somebody else. The medical community hadn’t dictated it as ‘fate’ since the early seventies—when there’d been an epidemic of cuts—meaning if something went wrong it was no longer just a blip in destiny, there was something medically unwell with you.
For instance: when you tell your soulmate you love him, eighteen years old with your string fresh red and taut between you, there are two possible outcomes. He loves you, and things are normal. He doesn’t, and you are now diagnosably ill.
It was inconvenient, sure, but Hyuntak had always been a sickly child.
•
Sometimes, when Hyuntak thought about Sieun, he got the incomprehensible urge to smash his face in. It wasn’t a thing, not really (meaning: not a problem, not an issue), it was simply a fact of life he’d learnt to deal with, along with the red thread that joined him at the wrist to the uncontested second worst person he knew. Second after Humin, and that was only because Humin had stolen his last ramen packet five years ago in high school and he’d never moved past it.
He held grudges with the same devotion most held a birth right.
Anyway. The issue (the fact of life) was he’d known Sieun since they were five, and he’d known Suho since they were sixteen. Because sixteen was the year Sieun decided he liked kissing boys, actually, and would drag him around to kiss at their table and their wall and, once, Hyuntak’s bed, but they didn't talk about that anymore. Or, rather, not boys. A boy. No one had so much as blinked when Suho turned eighteen and the thread joining him to Sieun flashed red and nascently visible. That had been a fact of life, too.
For the most part, threads were just… a thing. Annoying, yeah, but not worth complaining about. Everyone had them, everyone could see them once both owner's turned eighteen, everyone treated them like God’s divine gift. And maybe it was unfair of him to hate Sieun for his thread being healthy, for him having found his soulmate before his biology even told him where to look, but.
It was hard, that was all. He’d said a lot of choice things when they’d been younger.
They were okay, now. But sometimes Hyuntak looked at their thread and he was eighteen again, wondering what was so fucking wrong with him that he hadn’t deserved that, too.
The best way to put it was that it wasn’t jagged anymore. Not the barbed thing it used to be, the first sore spot in the landscape of things he’d learn to find he didn’t deserve. And he was happy for Sieun, he was, really. If anyone deserved this, it was him.
Besides, Hyuntak learned early that attachment worked a lot like cell adhesion. Some bonds were tight junctions, impermeable and permanent, while others were loose, fleeting, and dependent on calcium concentrations or circumstance. Sieun and Suho were the former. They had anchored themselves to him before he’d known to resist, before he’d learned to cauterize the parts of himself that bled too easily.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of their apartment, back against the couch, notes spread uselessly around him. The fluorescent light buzzed faintly overhead, because Suho, who was perched on a kitchen chair backwards, was deranged and liked the big light..
“That’s not how feedback inhibition works,” Hyuntak said without looking up. “You’re anthropomorphizing enzymes again.”
Suho frowned, chin hooked over the backrest. “They’re cute. I’m giving them deeper meaning.”
“You’re wrong,” Hyuntak said. “They are literally just cells.”
Sieun sighed from where he was stretched out on the couch, laptop balanced precariously on his stomach. “You are, babe,” he said. “You’re always wrong when you try to sound smarter than you are. Don’t mess with Tak and his cells. He’s crazy.”
Suho made an offended noise. “I am smart.”
“Intellectually?” Hyuntak countered. “Debatable.”
Suho slanted an affronted look his way, then hurled a balled-up sock at his head. Hyuntak caught it without looking and dropped it onto the pile of laundry to his side. This was how it always was with them. Noise, friction, a constant low-grade irritation of proximity that somehow never tipped into rot.
He’d spent a lot of time watching them—a side effect of what he and Sieun were to each other and what Suho forced himself to be, fighting through the convoluted mess of Hyuntak’s chest, the knotted over parts of him thick like bone, to get to his heart and settle there. Warm and constant as his blood, asserting himself one of the only other people Hyuntak could trust to not slit his throat on the exit long before Hyuntak had even admitted he liked him—that he understood this progression by now. This was how they were, two people with too-sharp teeth they would never turn on each other.
Together, they were a control group Hyuntak did not belong to. He loved them enough to feel the absence of what he could never have with either of them like a missing organ.
Hyuntak swallowed. He tapped the end of his pen against his notebook carefully, the thud of plastic on the vinyl too loud in his own ears. The thread between Suho and Sieun glowed faintly where it stretched across the room, alive in that quiet, unthinking way all healthy things were. It shifted when one moved, responsive and intimate. Natural.
That was the first thing he noticed, every time, before he noticed anything else. Sieun’s end sprouted from his wrist, bright against his skin. Suho’s curled around his forearm when he leaned closer, the strand trembling faintly, something alive responding to stimulus.
Not for the first time, he wondered what it would be like to have something respond to you like that. Without trying or conscious thought. Somebody else that knew you just as well as all your atoms. Every molecule in their body in love with the shape that yours took, in love with how they formed a whole and worked together.
Hyuntak stared at the floor and felt the familiar ache settle behind his sternum.
It was disgustingly intimate, but it was also completely mundane. They argued about dishes and deadlines and who’d stolen whose charger, because to them the thread meant nothing but an affirmation to what they already knew they were.
“You’re not studying,” Sieun said, finally, glancing down at Hyuntak by his feet.
Hyuntak looked up. “I am.”
“You haven’t written anything in ten minutes.”
“I’m thinking.”
Suho twisted around in his chair, grin already half-formed. “About medicine, or about how hot I look in a tank top?”
Suho did not look hot in a tank top. He looked like an overcooked lobster, ridges and all. His arms were a crusted red from too much sun and dented from where he slung tools across them, impermanent little groves like the indentation of Sieun's teeth by his shoulder (which Hyuntak had blanched at upon arriving at their apartment, and Sieun had spent the next ten minutes trying to look indifferent as Hyuntak gagged, but failed at it spectacularly).
Instead of saying this, Hyuntak snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You should go back to your dorm if you’re not studying.” Sieun’s continued, ignoring them to pick up one of his study cards and pass it over the back of the couch for Suho to put away. He did, not even needing to be asked. The ache spread across Hyuntak's solar plexus, settling beneath the rungs of his ribs, clinging until he had to cough it up into his sleeve.
“I am studying,” Hyuntak reasserted, words muffled against the fabric before he pulled his arm away to send a look at Suho. “I’m studying the long-term effects of cohabitation on previously tolerable individuals.”
Suho beamed. “Woah. Didn't know you ever considered me tolerable, Tak.”
Hyuntak dropped his gaze back to his notes, the words blurring together with a suggestion he wasn’t going to absorb any of them no matter how long he stared.
He loved them. That was the problem, by and large. He loved them in a way that was uncomplicated and bone-deep safe, which made the rest of it painful by comparison. It wasn’t envy, exactly, because he didn’t want what they had, not in the abstract. He didn’t want a soulmate just because everyone else did, he didn’t want to wake up with someone’s thread tangled in his sheets just as proof of something.
He just wanted… to feel normal, he guessed.
Sieun caught him looking and softened immediately, how he always did. It was subtle, but Hyuntak noticed everything that mattered when it came to him.
“You good?” Sieun asked.
Tapping his pen against the textbook again, Hyuntak shrugged. “Fine.”
· · ─ · 𖡹 · ─ · ·
Hyuntak was knee-deep in second-year medicine, sleep-deprived and coffee-soaked, wearing the same three hoodies in rotation. when he met Keum Seongje, which would turn out unfortunate for everyone involved.
It was in March, which felt like an affront. Nothing important was supposed to happen in March. March was meant for midterms and seasonal depression and the long, slow realisation that winter had lied about leaving. March was meant for anatomy labs and caffeine headaches and the quiet satisfaction of knowing where every nerve in the forearm ran. March was meant for renewal, for fresh starts, for people who hadn’t already fucked up the basic premise of love before they were legally allowed to drink.
March was not meant for chance encounters in the lab hallway, because Seongje was standing exactly where Hyuntak needed to be standing and appeared constitutionally incapable of moving with any semblance of urgency.
“Sorry,” Hyuntak said, already trying to sidestep him with a stack of atlases tucked under one arm, then froze when Seongje looked across.
Ridiculous purple hair, an indent on his nose bridge from glasses, and an expression that landed somewhere between startled and amused, like he’d never expected the universe to inconvenience him. For a beat he just blinked at him, slow and incurious, then, “You dropped something.”
Hyuntak looked down. A pen. His good pen. He cursed, snatched it up, and looked back up to find Seongje still watching him, head tilted like he was annotating Hyuntak for later reference.
“Biology?” Seongje asked, glancing at the books with a tip of his chin.
“Medicine,” Hyuntak corrected automatically. “Pre-clin.”
“Oh,” Seongje said. “That explains the general aura of misery.”
Perplexed, Hyuntak stared at him. “What?”
“Nothing,” Seongje said mildly. He held out a hand which Hyuntak expertly ignored. “I’m Seongje.”
Hyuntak waited. When nothing else happened, he said, “Alright.”
Seongje clicked his tongue, completely unruffled, but thankfully put his hand away. “Korean lit.”
Despite himself, Hyuntak snorted, then scowled harder to compensate. “Get a real degree," he grumbled as he turned to leave.
“Your sleeve’s wet,” Seongje added before he could take a proper step.
That made Hyuntak jolt on instinct.
He looked down. The cuff of his hoodie was damp, faintly darker than the rest, but there was nothing exposed, nothing wrong. Still, the livewire that hung permanently from his wrist was crackling now, sinking its teeth into him, burning up through his veins. It felt noxious. It felt like it was cloaking his arms. He tugged the sleeve down immediately, the fabric catching a familiar irritation, and his pulse ticked faster.
“Sink splash?” Seongje offered, not looking at his wrist now, thank God. Not looking anywhere specific at all, actually, gaze drifting instead to the posters on the wall advertising blood drives and flu shots, as if med students gave a shit about their own health.
“Yeah,” Hyuntak said shortly. “That.”
Seongje hummed. “The bio building sinks are violent. Probably to make you feel even worse about your life choices.”
Hyuntak left before he could say something unforgivable.
•
If Seongje had stopped existing after that, Hyuntak would have assumed the encounter had been an anomaly. A benign tumor, you know? Rare, irritating, sure, but ultimately ignorable. Instead, Seongje had appeared again two days later in Hyuntak's classroom, in his seat when Hyuntak arrived, which was already strike one.
There were thirty-two empty chairs.
Hyuntak stopped short, stared, then looked down at the printed schedule in his hand. BIO203. Human Physiology. Correct room. Correct time. “You’re in the wrong place,” he said, pen already poised as a scalpel. If he acted now, he could stab Seongje with it repeatedly before medical assistance could be called. He wouldn't even care if he was sent to prison, they'd soon discover he'd been working within the Geneva conventions to preserve peace and let him right back out, exonerated and praised.
He restrained himself, but it had been a very near thing.
Especially when Seongje looked up, blinked slowly, and stretched like a cat disturbed mid-nap. He had his glasses on today, these round frames that sat crooked with finger smudges on the lenses. Hyuntak hated them on sight, entertained the idea of stabbing him through the throat with them, and took great effort to forbear.
“Oh,” Seongje said, glancing around at the dozens of empty chairs, the wide, breathing space of the quiet floor, and then looked back at Hyuntak with an expression that could only be described as politely perplexed. “You don’t own the mitochondria,” he finished.
Hyuntak stared, striving very hard to keep his face flat. “What?”
“The powerhouse of the cell,” Seongje supplied unhelpfully. “You’re reading cell biology. I can see the diagram on the board.”
Hyuntak’s eye twitched. “You’re a Korean major.”
“Yeah,” Seongje agreed. “Which means I know how to read words. Shocking.”
Hyuntak told him to get fucked. Seongje did not.
After a moment, Hyuntak ran out of patience. "You’re in my seat,” he snapped, brusquely, because it was eight-thirty in the morning and the caffeine hadn’t kicked in yet.
From where he was still perched, Seongje gave him a blank look of incredulity, elbows on the steel table, chin in his hands. He had the audacity to look comfortable, surrounded by cadavers and lurid fluorescent lighting, someone who didn’t belong to the med building and therefore had no right to exist anywhere near Hyuntak’s peripheral vision. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t realize seats were territorial.”
“They are,” Hyuntak replied instantly. “Move.”
He waited. Nothing else came. “…You’re not moving."
“I was hoping you’d get the point,” Seongje said. The sheer amusement in his expression made Hyuntak realize his irritable nature had led him too far astray and right into a trap, again.
Hyuntak ground his teeth. “This is physiology.”
“Yes,” Seongje agreed.
“You’re a Korean major.”
“Yes.”
Hyuntak stared at him. “So why are you here?”
Seongje tilted his head. “I like sitting in on classes that scare me.”
That was not an answer. That was a pathological personality defect.
“Get out,” Hyuntak demanded.
Seongje smiled, making a point of not looking apologetic, more oddly curious. “You’re very hostile.”
It was the first of many times Hyuntak would hear that phrase, delivered without accusation, without heat, an observation written in the margins of a paper. It irritated him disproportionately.
Out of spite, Hyuntak took the seat next to him. “You’re very ugly.”
When the room filled and class started, Seongje stayed.
Strike two.
•
Keum Seongje was, biologically speaking, an irritant. The most annoying organism Hyuntak had ever met, probably.
Hyuntak would have said this even without the benefit of hindsight, but time only honed the conclusion. The immune system noticed him and reacted in part. He provoked inflammatory responses.
This was not romantic.
Hyuntak thought this while pointedly paying no attention to him sat at the far end of the dorm common room Hyuntak used to study in, because it was quiet and the tables were wide enough to spread out histology slides. It wasn't even that he hated Seongje—which of course he did, a pure and sacred hatred that would live forevermore—it was that Seongje made his fun from being utterly impossible to exist around, yet alone study.
“You’re holding that upside down,” Seongje said, breaking the stalemate Hyuntak had called for in his mind to keep him from picking up a pen and stabbing him in the jugular.
He didn’t raise his head, but he sent a sour look down at the brain sculpture he was using to scrawl neural pathways into his notebook with three different coloured pens, underlined until the paper thinned. “It’s a brain.”
“Brains have orientation,” Seongje argued. “Even fake ones.”
Hyuntak pinched the bridge of his nose, nearly taking his eye out with the tip of a pen. “Do you need something?”
“No,” Seongje said in that vague, unspecific way of his. “I’m waiting for the dryer.”
“Then why are you talking to me?”
In introductory biology, they taught that when a system was placed under stress, it adapted, or it failed. Homeostasis, they called it. The quiet, constant work of maintaining balance. Cells adjusting ion gradients, enzymes changing conformation, feedback loops tightening or loosening to keep the body alive. Not the absence of disruption, but the body’s constant, exhausting effort to correct for it. Hyuntak understood early on that survival was not a steady state, it was maintenance, it was hard work.
Apparently it was, in practice, a lie.
Because Keum Seongje existed, and Hyuntak’s internal environment had been in a state of adverse reaction ever since.
There was a moment of blessed silence, of which Hyuntak spent the entirety of hoping Seongje would never speak again, and then wondering why he was even here to be talking in the first place, but before he could properly ponder the logistics of that, Seongje spoke. “Do you not have any friends, or something? You have this very antisocial look to you. AVPD chic?"
At that, Hyuntak looked up. Seongje was sitting cross-legged on the couch, a battered copy of some thick book Hyuntak didn’t recognise balanced in his lap, margins dense with handwriting that slanted clumsily. He'd sat with it for all of two minutes before doodling with his awfully scratchy pencils and deciding to spend his time distracting Hyuntak instead. His hair was pushed back off his face with his glasses, ruffled and static from old damp, and his sleeves were long. Too long, considering the heat in the room.
Seongje never showed his thread.
This was strange and conspicuous. Rude, in a quiet, socially unacceptable type of way. Hiding your thread wasn’t done. It suggested shame, or guilt, or something worse.
To let it show was considered healthy and honest, a sign you had nothing to hide. People liked to say it helped normalize variance, as if an overload of statistics would make intimacy less invasive, but, at its core, it was simply proof everyone had a soulmate. No one wanted to be reminded of how improbable that belief was.
So as to not think about that, Hyuntak asked, before he could stop himself, “Is that a poetry anthology?"
Seongje looked up, blinking. “Yes?”
Disgruntled by this, Hyuntak stared at it in contempt. “Why?”
Seongje frowned. “Why not?”
“Because it’s useless.”
As he often did when Hyuntak made astute and correct observations, Seongje tilted his head to say, “You’re very hostile.”
Hyuntak didn’t even dignify that with a scowl, only granting him a single huff of annoyance to dictate he was pushing it. Of course, Seongje spoiled the pathos of the moment by chucking a highlighter at his table. It skittered over the wood to land by Hyuntak's knuckles, dead. Hyuntak glared so that it would die again. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything, but he did. "Go away and study your metaphors. You are literally not adding anything to this room beyond carbon dioxide."
At that, Seongje laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, and everything in Hyuntak rankled to hear it, both because he sounded like a bleating goat rubbed raw against a chalkboard, and because he hated Seongje finding joy in anything at all, ever.
“I am,” Seongje said eventually. “You’re one.”
Strike three, somehow retroactive. Hyuntak hated him on principle after that.
•
“Hey,” Seongje said, leaning back against the doorframe of the dorm's laundry room.
The machines were half-broken in that way all dorm machines were. Display lights flickering, aggressively vibrating in a vendetta against structural integrity, smelling too much of sweat and long-damp fabric. Hyuntak was elbow-deep in one, depositing dry socks into his bag while counting in his head, because losing one felt like a small chaos he did not have time to pencil in and would thus lead him to prove the theory of spontaneous human combustion.
Having previously learned that acknowledging Seongje too quickly only encouraged him, he did not stop counting. “If you’re about to tell me that dryer three eats your money, I know. I live here.”
There was a breath, and then: “I wasn’t,” Seongje said. “I was going to say that your hoodie’s inside out.”
Hyuntak paused. Looked down. It was, in fact, inside out. He didn't fix it, both because he was only wearing a vest beneath it, and because giving Seongje the satisfaction of a reaction would set a dangerous precedent.
To his credit, Seongje didn't comment on it again, just watched Hyuntak barrel clothes into his bag with much more force than was necessary. It would have been creepy on literally anyone, but on Seongje it was awful. Hyuntak felt infiltrated. Invaded.
"What?" he snapped.
“You’re oddly aggressive about laundry,” Seongje observed.
Hyuntak could have told him it was because this was the only way to channel his hatred into a medium that wouldn't get him kicked out of school, instead of burrowing it into his big ugly face, but didn't, which was a great show of self control.
Seongje accepted the silence for three seconds precisely. "You look tired."
“I am tired.”
“Like,” Seongje amended, “pathologically.”
Hyuntak made a disgruntled noise, slamming the dryer hatch shut and hoisting the bag over his shoulder. He'd lost count of his socks, so he tipped them all out and started counting again. “I’m in med school.”
“Right,” Seongje acknowledged, nodding solemnly. “I forgot you’re doing the suffering degree. Biology major."
Without breaking pace, he stressed, "Med."
“Same thing but with more crying," Seongje said, then added, as obvious afterthought, "I don't know why anyone would choose to do that to themselves."
Resentment made Hyuntak's teeth hurt, so he gave a strangled grunt of disbelief and outrage to try and dull the ache. "You don't get to comment on my life choices."
"I'm a literature major," Seongje said frankly. He was still leaning against the doorframe, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, looking for all intents and purposes like he was not planning on moving any time soon. "Commentary is literally my only skill."
Hyuntak returned to his laundry, pointedly dismissing him. Seventeen socks. He had gone wrong somewhere. It was all Seongje's fault, he knew it. Warping the universe to make him lose a sock and so spoiling his life.
As he usually did when Seongje pissed him off, he simply grit out: "Go annotate a metaphor."
Silence lapsed, and they stood there in the rattling drone for a moment, the air thick with detergent and static. Hyuntak could still feel Seongje looking at him, which was starting to feel like a recurring motif. Oh, great, and now he was thinking in literature metaphors. He shoved a sock so violently into his arm he punched himself in the process and winced.
“Can I ask you something?” Seongje piped up a few moments later.
Hyuntak sighed. “You’re going to anyway.”
“Yeah,” Seongje agreed. “Do you have a name?"
Hyuntak froze just enough to be noticeable. “I have a name,” he replied icily, not liking the conclusion this was inevitably heading towards.
“I believe you. Most people do.”
Now, Hyuntak turned to look at him full on, irritation flaring hot and immediate. He waited a beat, two, as if the sentence might resolve into something less stupid if given time. It did not. “Why do you care?”
Seongje shrugged. “We’ve talked a few times. It feels weird not knowing.”
For a moment, his brain misfired. He ran back through their previous interactions automatically, cataloguing them: Seongje stealing his seat in class; Seongje asking him to explain something from his textbook and then immediately admitting he didn’t care and just wanted to be given attention; Seongje throwing annotation tabs at him for a solid twenty minutes instead of using them for the book open on the couch; Seongje taking his charger without asking from the common room and then returning it neatly coiled, which was frankly suspicious and deranged behaviour.
Instead of admitting he was right, loathe to ever be caught off guard, Hyuntak muttered, “That sounds like a you problem.”
Seongje clicked his tongue. “Might just be.”
Hyuntak studied him, dubious. Seongje didn’t look offended, as he rarely did. He looked thoughtful, eyes flicking briefly to Hyuntak’s sleeves before snapping back up, polite enough not to stare..
“You can keep calling me whatever you’ve been calling me,” Hyuntak said, which was as polite as he was willing to get in return.
“I haven’t been calling you anything,” Seongje pointed out, and Hyuntak noted how his face changed from bemused assessment to something rapt, settling on weary annoyance when all Hyuntak offered was a blank stare.
“Exactly. I don't want you calling me my name."
The glare Seongje shot at him—just for a second, a flick of his eyes before he looked across at the stack of washing machines, gaze burning a hole there instead—was hot, but Hyuntak hadn't exactly meant it as an insult.
It made him feel guilty enough to sigh, then say, "You never asked."
“I just did.” There was a slightly scornful tone to it, something that made Hyuntak do a double take, dancing the edge between flat and aggravated, but –
But there was something else there too, underneath. An earnestness Hyuntak couldn't ignore.
“No, you asked if I had one," Hyuntak said, keeping his tone dry to not expose the sudden nerve that had been exalted. "Different question.”
When Hyuntak found Seongje's eyes again, his mouth had twitched back up, a familiar irk tugging at the corners. "Okay. What's your name?"
Hyuntak stared at him. He felt, distantly, like someone had nudged a bruise.
He hated how names did that. How they were small, contained things that nevertheless implied continuity. He had a name stitched into his lab coat pocket, a name on hospital forms, a name that had been spoken softly at him when he was eighteen and shaking and trying not to throw up from pain and fear and whatever cocktail of chemicals his body had flooded itself with, a name on the ID card hanging from a lanyard in his jean pocket. Names stuck. They made things harder to walk away from.
Hyuntak turned back to the dryer, jaw tight. “Names make things stick.”
At once, Seongje went quiet .
Hyuntak regretted it immediately. He hated when things just slipped out unfiltered and unexamined, because it felt like leaving tissue exposed.
After a beat, Seongje said, “Okay.”
Hyuntak blinked. “Okay?”
“I won’t push,” Seongje elaborated. “Tell me when you want to.”
Hyuntak glanced back to him, suspicious all over. “You’re not very good at not pushing.” Seongje simply shrugged, this what can you do? sort of motion that was much too casual for how little they knew each other. Hyuntak balanced unevenly between exasperation and obstinacy. Eventually, the exasperation won out. "It's Hyuntak."
This time, Seongje was the one to blink, then smiled, skirting the line of genuine. After a moment of stunned silence, he repeated it, lips carefully shaping the word like he was testing the texture of it in his mouth. “Hyuntak.”
Hyuntak scowled, then elected to stop looking at him. He fiddled with the strap of the bag hanging limp by his side, left-right-left-right-rinse-repeat. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s interesting," he stated, rolling his eyes, trying to pretend he didn't notice Seongje's own tracking the movement of his hand.
“It is," Seongje insisted, as if Hyuntak was being extraordinarily dense on purpose. "It suits you.”
At that, Hyuntak went ramrod, gathering up his last few pieces of laundry and cramming them into the crevice of his elbow. He didn’t like how the conversation had lodged itself under his skin, uncomfortable and persistent. “I’m going to my room,” he said. “Try not to set anything on fire.”
•
“You don’t have to sit there,” Hyuntak remarked coldly the third time Seongje chose the seat beside him in a lecture he shouldn't even be in, tormenting him through proximity and the fact he was still breathing.
Seongje grinned at him, unoffended. “ Hello, Hyuntak. I know. You've said.”
“Then don’t.”
“There’s good lighting,” Seongje explained, glancing up at the window, then down to Hyuntak's hands. “And you smell like antiseptic.”
From where he'd been unloading his notebooks and atlases, Hyuntak froze. “What?”
That made Seongje frown, like he realized he'd misspoken somewhere. “Hand sanitizer,” he amended a second later. “Yours is always citrus-y. It smells nice.”
Hyuntak stared at him, pulse ticking up painfully fast. He hadn’t realized he was using it that often. Habit, maybe, or superstition. It was common to wash hands too much after learning how fragile skin could be.
“Fuck off,” Hyuntak grumbled eventually, because that was easier than having to think about why Seongje recognized what he smelt like.
Seongje nodded, accepting that, and stayed exactly where he was.
· · ─ · 𖤒 · ─ · ·
If you stripped biology to its basics, it was about classification.
Normal versus abnormal. Benign versus malignant. Self versus non-self. The immune system lived and died by its ability to recognise what belonged and what didn’t, and to destroy the rest with extreme prejudice.
Hyuntak was very good at that.
So when Seongje kept showing up places, he categorised him immediately as a pathogen.
He met Suho near the start of April, which already stacked all odds against him. Suho collected people how vacuums collected dust and with no regard for Hyuntak’s patience. Once Suho accepted you as something he wanted, he didn't let go. Hyuntak had never seen anybody hold onto anything as tightly as he did. He'd torn himself to shreds to try and keep Hyuntak—even when Hyuntak had fought tooth and nail to never be something attainable, something coveted—and years later he could not imagine a life of which Ahn Suho was not part of.
All this to say, Hyuntak was relatively pissed off (read: screamed at Suho for two hours after seeing him with an arm (an arm, the gall, the audacity, he didn't even know where Seongje had been) around Seongje's shoulders, until Sieun had kicked him out of the apartment because he'd already procured them nine noise complaints in the thirteen months they'd lived there) that Suho had decided Seongje was something he wanted to keep. No one was exactly happy when a contaminant, well, broke containment.
And then Suho had the brilliant idea to add Seongje to their groupchat, like he belonged there, which had gone something like this:
idiots + suho
Suho has added Seongje!
Baekjin has muted the chat
The apartment was already loud by the time Hyuntak arrived, which meant he was late.
He stepped through the door into heat and noise and the faintly sweet smell of cheap caramel popcorn starting to burn. Suho was in the kitchen in a tee despite it being after dark and cold, sleeves pushed up because he believed his arms were God’s gift to kinetic movement. Sieun leaned against the counter beside him, one foot braced against the cupboards, expression wry as he passed Suho a bowl.
Humin had draped himself dramatically across half the couch, socks mismatched, yelling about something to do with spoilers; Yeongi was slumped at his side with a bottle cap turning elegantly between her fingers as she pretended not to listen; Juntae sat crossed-legged between her knees on the floor, shuffling through DVDs because Suho liked to be ‘vintage’, despite them all knowing what they would be watching already, per tradition.
Threads wove through the room, stark and bright. Sieun and Suho’s stretched steady where it eased between them, even when they moved apart, alive with that subtle responsiveness that made Hyuntak want to vomit. Humin’s pulsed faintly at his wrist, stretched thin, connected across an ocean they’d all learned not to point at too much if they wanted to keep him upright and quiet. Yeongi’s arced out into the air, unanchored on the other end. Juntae’s was hidden by the hoodie he’d pulled on, but Hyuntak knew it was there, directionless as of yet.
People lived with it. They spoke over it. They passed bowls under it. They pretended the most intimate miracle of their biology was table décor.
Hyuntak toed off his shoes, rolled his shoulders, and made himself known with a faint rasp of his knuckles on the wall to the living area.
“Finally,” Humin crowed, lifting his head and catching Yeongi on the shoulder with his elbow, which earned him a well deserved shove. “We were taking bets on whether you died. I had thirty-thousand on you finally gave in and flung yourself in front of the metro.”
“I wish,” Hyuntak replied, letting the door shut behind him. “My life insurance payout could finally afford Suho a brain.”
Suho looked up from the microwave with the theatrical outrage of someone deeply content with his place in the world. “Talk to me when you figure out whats wrong with your knee, doctor.”
“Talk to me when you figure out how to use a kettle without risking electrocution, mechanic,” Hyuntak shot back, shrugging out of his jacket and scanning the room before he let himself look toward the now-familiar shape by the window.
Any joy he could have felt this evening vanished immediately.
Seongje sat at the edge of the single armchair, wearing a sweater with sleeves too long. They were tugged down to his knuckles, thread hidden as if concealment was a habit learned long before it could be questioned. His glasses glinted in the warm yellow of the lamp, hair gelled off his forehead in what might have been an attempt at looking composed if it wasn’t fighting gravity with visible rebellion. His expression, when it flicked toward the door, was… blank.
The thread from his wrist remained invisible, cell membrane folded in on itself. Hyuntak’s own phantom weight of string prickled in response, something old and animal in him registering similarity as threat.
“Tak,” Suho announced grandly, sweeping from the kitchen with his arms outstretched. “Guest.”
“I’m aware,” Hyuntak said dryly, because he’d been subjected to Suho’s relentless voice note commentary in the private group chat with him and Sieun the day he’d added Seongje to the chat. He’s funny, Tak, don’t be weird about it. He listens to me, Tak, he listened to me talk about spark plugs for two hours. He said Sieun was intimidating, Tak, so obviously he has sense. Sieun had sent exactly one period as response and then later, a very quiet He seems alright, much to Hyuntak’s derision. ‘Alright’ was high praise from Sieun, who had called Suho ‘tolerable’ for three years, and was now engaged to him.
Sieun finally shut the microwave off with a decisive click and gave Hyuntak a look that hovered somewhere near fond exasperation. “If you’re going to glower,” he said, “at least do it sitting down.”
“I’m not glowering,” Hyuntak retorted, then caught the edge of his reflection in the dark of the balcony door and had to concede he might be. He dropped to the floor beside Juntae with less grace than intended, tugging his hoodie sleeve unconsciously even though it was already secure.
Yeongi nudged her knee against his shoulder. “Hi, doom and gloom.”
“Hello,” he replied, bland. His night was already ruined, he was not going to be nice about it. Even Sieun on his worst days had nothing against Hyuntak when he was trying to be an asshole.
She went back to spinning the cap, giving him no more attention. “Be nice. He brought snacks.”
“I did,” Seongje said, nodding to the coffee table where neat packages sat. Confectionery. Something with almonds. Something with spice. “I wasn’t sure what people liked.”
“That’s because these people don’t like anything,” Humin declared, tearing open a packet with his teeth because he was a traitor and Hyuntak knew he had been right to label him number one on Go Hyuntak’s List of Foes all those years ago.
Juntae cleared his throat very softly. “I like the almond ones.”
As he passed to place the popcorn by the snacks, Suho ruffled his hair affectionately, which earned him a squawk and a set of half-hearted swats that had him chuckling to himself.
Hyuntak leaned back against the couch and let the room exist around him. It was noisy, yes, crowded, but the type of crowded that didn’t suffocate because he’d grown into the shape of it years ago. He knew when the laughs would come, when the silences would sit, when Humin would get bored halfway through and start throwing popcorn at him. He knew when Sieun would frown like the world was a disappointment, and when Suho would kiss his just cheek to prove it wasn’t.
Predictability was a balm. If you knew the variables, you could predict the curve, comfort yourself in the equations.
Which was why, when Seongje spoke, the entire delicate structure of Hyuntak’s chest tightened.
“What are we watching?” he asked simply, shuffling deeper into the armchair.
“No one knows,” Humin said. “It keeps the mystery”
“It’s a shitty horror movie from 2006,” Suho translated, taking his seat squashed beside Yeongi, pulling Sieun into his lap and wrapping his arms around his middle, chin hooked over his shoulder as he watched Juntae tinker with the old DVD player. “We watch it every year. Don’t ask anyone to justify it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Seongje said, amused.
The lights dimmed, Juntae made a satisfied noise as he settled back and the opening credits flared.
Hyuntak tried not to look. He lasted maybe seventeen seconds.
First at Seongje's face, which was turned toward the screen and faintly illuminated in washes of pale blue, tracking each frame by the light it threw over his skin—unfairly soft for someone who had forced his way into Hyuntak's life like a splinter—and then lower, drawn to what lay hidden beneath cotton.
Of course, the sleeve stayed down, tugged snug into his palm so that even his knuckles were hidden. It made something below Hyuntak’s skin scrape raw.
“Hyuntak,” Yeongi murmured under the wet scream of a jumpscare, voice so soft it barely broke the rhythm of static between Hyuntak’s ears. “Blink.”
“I am,” he muttered, and forced it. He felt the pressure of his lids dragging shut, then open as he pulled his gaze back to the screen.
The film crawled, but maybe that was because Hyuntak wasn’t really paying attention. Currently, someone was making a decision that defied reasonable rules of natural selection, which Humin was narrating with righteous indignation as he drowned himself in popcorn.
“Open the door more, king,” he garbled around another handful, feet kicked up onto Yeongi’s lap now. “Invite the demon in for brunch.”
“Shut up,” Sieun hissed, settled comfortably in Suho’s lap, shaking whenever Suho laughed against him. His hand found Suho’s were it rested around his middle, fingers stroking the thumb pressed to his navel, the gesture so offhand it barely qualified as affection anymore. Their string was looped around their wrists and forearms, tangled up in the easy way they held each other.
Hyuntak swallowed. He told himself that he was happy for them, that this was good, this was how things were supposed to go. He told himself that jealousy was an ugly emotion and he'd outgrown uglier things than that. He wasn't eighteen anymore, wasn't standing in a hallway with his heart in his throat and his promised future burning bright and visible for everyone to see, for everyone to understand, except for the one person it mattered most.
But the thing about threads, about seeing them, about being forced to see them, was that they made jealousy unavoidable. The beast in his chest was an ugly thing, an insatiable thing, a graveyard in the making for a heart he'd cut down at too young an age.
He shifted on the floor, tugging his sleeves down without thinking, and his stomach tightened.
It was somewhere near the end of the muddled second act, after the third fake-out death and before the inexplicable bathtub scene, that the room finally settled.
Humin had run out of commentary enough to only heckle every other line. Yeongi had commandeered a bottle of soda from the table and was nursing it in lazy sips, hair slipping forward over her face. Juntae had folded in on himself, hoodie turned to blanket, lips parted as he mouthed along to a line he clearly knew by heart. Sieun, who pretended not to like the movie every single time they watched it, and yet knew exactly when to brace, had gone very still, back tucked tight to Suho's chest, both of them instinctively leaning forward at the same time.
Hyuntak let himself exhale into it, eyes unfocused against the harsh flicker of the screen. It was easier not to think when his body was occupied with irritation, easier not to feel when his shoulders were already tense. He made a mental list of everything wrong with the cinematography, ranked each character in order of deserving death, replayed arguments from previous movie nights watching it. He counted down the minutes until it would be over and he could go home and pretend he hadn't spent the entire evening with his chest clamped tight around the shape of someone else's thread.
Movement twitched at the corner of his vision.
He didn’t mean to look, he’d told himself firmly that he wouldn’t. He'd survived the last hour and a half doing precisely that, existing in the careful periphery of awareness that let him register Seongje's presence without direct risk. But the body was a traitor, trained on threat and curiosity, and Seongje was shifting.
Not much; just enough to raise from the armchair, to mutter a hushed apology to no one in particular as he tried to slide off it without disturbing the quiet concentration that had fallen over the room. His shoulder hit the arm, his knee bumped the side table, and for a heartbeat he wobbled, huffing a small, embarrassed laugh.
"Do you want something?" Suho whispered through the dark. He didn't look away from the screen, but his voice carried easily through the thrum of score, fond even for someone he'd known for barely two weeks. "Kitchen's free game. Got soda top shelf of the fridge, snacks and stuff third row of the cupboard on the left."
"I'm just getting water,” Seongje whispered back, stepping awkwardly over Hyuntak’s outstretched legs.
“Glasses are in the cupboard over the sink.”
Instantly, Hyuntak froze.
Seongje's hand had brushed the edge of the armchair as he leaned forward, raising his sleeve just enough to reveal a flash of red. Thin, taut, healthy, coiling lazily out of the window behind them. It was exactly as a thread was supposed to be, alive and responsive, stretching away from him in a curve that led somewhere beyond the walls, toward something and someone else. It was gone a beat later, tucked away again in that practised motion Hyuntak understood too well.
He tugged his own hoodie sleeve over his wrist in retaliation, biting back the cold, white spike that traveled from his forearm to the pit of his stomach.
A small, furious part of him wanted to jump to his feet and yank that sleeve back up, demand why the hell he would hide it if there was nothing fucking wrong, if he thought it was some weird avante-garde perfomative male bullshit, but another, far more reasonable part of him knew what would happen if he acted on that impulse, so he swallowed it down along with a gulp of Yeongi’s cola by his hip.
He didn't get to swallow all of it. Something lodged halfway, a hard-edged bubble that refused to move, sitting in his chest and expanding with every breath until it felt like his ribs needed to splinter to make room.
From the kitchen came the soft clink of glass, the brief hiss of the tap. Background noise, domestic and unremarkable, but now Hyuntak's entire nervous system was keyed to it, twitching when the flow cut, when the cupboard door thudded shut too firmly, when the brittle silence that followed stretched one second too long.
Great. Perfect. Exactly what tonight needed. Heart palpitations over Keum Seongje getting fucking water.
He took another sip of cola purely to have something to do with his hands, the sugar burning its way down his throat, and considered if his friends would throw him into a psychiatric hospital if he made a run for it out the window. Maybe someone had put a bet on that. He wouldn’t put it past them.
•
A week later, Sieun had moved himself into Hyuntak's dorm room, because Suho was visiting his grandma and Sieun hated nothing more than being alone, not after his childhood. This resulted in Hyuntak being relegated to the floor in his own space, because he was nothing if not a gentleman. For the most part, this was fine, apart from the back aches and the interminable knot in his neck and the fact that Sieun snored like a cat (meaning: made these weird high pitched keens that were little more than exhalations of breath, yet managed to keep Hyuntak up enough to consider the benefits of throttling him in his sleep).
Anyway. Having Sieun close was nice. Sieun, who was in biochem and therefore spoke Hyuntak’s language fluently, and so could actually hold conversations on it without being listless or discursive, was good enough for the pros of keeping him alive to prevail the pros of killing him for a good night's sleep. It was a testament to the devotion to his studies and loyatly to his best friend. Hyuntak thought it made him quite chivalrous and cool, which he had already been, but this was proof.
It was a nice change from Seongje, as well, who Hyuntak had recently learned could not tell the difference between the pancreas and the spleen.
This should not have mattered. It mattered immensely.
They were in the dorm kitchen—Hyuntak’s, not Seongje’s, though Seongje seemed to have decided that those boundaries were optional—when Sieun walked in, eyes half-glazed from a nine-hour lab day. He glanced between them, took in Hyuntak’s posture (rigid), Seongje’s expression (infuriatingly calm), and sighed.
“What did you break?” Sieun asked, flicking on the kettle as he sent a furtive glance between them.
“I didn’t break anything,” Seongje said, and had the temerity (read: absolute audacity, such was his egregious solipsism) to look amused. “I asked a question.”
“You asked,” Hyuntak snapped, “whether the pancreas was the one that filtered blood or ‘useless like that other thing.’”
Sieun blinked. Then, slowly, he turned away, which was the only reasonable response when faced with someone that goddamn braindead.
To make matters worse, Seongje looked genuinely poleaxed by that. “It was a legit question.”
“No,” Hyuntak said firmly. “It was not.”
Sieun leaned against the counter, still refusing to look at them. He grabbed a mug from the cupboard above the communal stove, paused for a moment in consideration, then grabbed two more. “He’s a literature major, Tak.”
“That explains nothing,” Hyuntak muttered.
“It explains everything,” Sieun corrected. He nudged Seongje with his elbow. “Pancreas produces enzymes and hormones. More a digestive thing. I think you're thinking of the kidneys, or the spleen. They're all sort of close, and it helps regulate blood sugar, so you weren't far off. Hyuntak's just very devout when it comes to organs."
Seongje paused, thennodded solemnly, as if he was actually filing that away under essential trivia and not as ammunition to make Hyuntak hate himself later. “I see.”
Irritation began to crystallize into cold fury, so Hyuntak bit out, “You don’t. You absolutely do not.” He rounded on Sieun next, because he had to reign him in before he befell to a betrayal so vast and sacrilegious Hyuntak would have to rethink containing the urge to smother him in his sleep. "Do not encourage him."
Seongje turned to him, undeterred, and Hyuntak was left fraught and desperate when the glare he shot him did not make him explode on the spot. “I'm trying to learn, you should be more accommodating.”
Reaching his bandwidth for Seongje's bullshit, Hyuntak resorted to puerile jabs, as being around Seongje was wont to make him do. "You are a Korean major. You are useless."
Seongje blinked. “That’s not very interdisciplinary of you.”
For some reason, Hyuntak opened his mouth to argue and then stopped. He stared at him askance for a long, long while, imagining how nice it would be if he dropped dead, then hung a left and stormed from the kitchen without another word.
As he did, he heard Sieun grumble, “You’re poking a bear," and Seongje, infuriatingly, laughing as he said, “I like it when he bites.”
•
Here are five things Hyuntak learned about Keum Seongje before the end of April:
-
He knew nothing about biology. Absolutely nothing. This was not an exaggeration. Seongje understood themes, narrative arcs, symbolism, and the emotional significance of dead poets that no one fucking cared about unless they were ostentatious assholes, but not biology.This alone should not have been a problem—Hyuntak did not require the people in his life to share his interests: Suho, Juntae, Yeongi and Humin didn’t care about half the things Hyuntak cared about, and he loved them more fiercely for it—-but Seongje had opinions. About the STEM lecture halls (why are the seats designed like they want you to fail?), about dissections (fucked up, honestly), about mitosis (it's deeply unsettling, why are you just… splitting yourself in half repeatedly? It seems counterintuitive).
Hyuntak had told him he was quite literally a literature major, and so his entire life was counterintuitive once he left school with all that debt and no job prospects.
(In a fit of hysteria, he'd explained, once, curtly, that dissection was foundational to understanding structure-function relationships. Seongje had just nodded, clearly not understanding, and then said, “Yeah, well it still feels rude.”)
He confused amino acids with antibodies and then had the audacity to argue about it. He referred to the heart as ‘the thing that beat blood and shit.’ He thought mitochondria jokes were funny in an unironic way, which was worse than not knowing them at all. He once asked “Do you think the body knows it’s itself or is that, like, psychological projection?”
Hyuntak told him to shut up. Repeatedly.
-
He remembered things Hyuntak did not recall telling him, and would bring them up just to show off, to prove that he was oh-so-amazing and everyone should bend over and kiss his ass. That was, perhaps, the most insidious offense, because it would be so easy to make it sweet, and he did everything to make it anything but.
-
He was painfully contentious, and so they fought constantly. About biology. About movies. About whether pigeons could feel affection, for some inane reason. About whether free will existed in deterministic systems, which Seongje had had no idea what the phrase meant, and so the conversation had been tedious and infuriating.
Seongje argued like he didn’t care if he won, which made it feel like screaming into insulation, and so Hyuntak combated it by argueing like losing would kill him. Somewhere along the line, it had started feeling like stimulation. That moment when neural pathways light up, signaling synapses to fire faster, cleaner, learning and plasticity.
Hyuntak now detested that word.
-
He was infuriatingly competent at existing in Hyuntak’s general vicinity. That one took him a few days to properly articulate, mostly because it sounded insane when he tried to say it out loud, but Sieun had managed to wring it from him eventually. Alas drunk and screaming at a nebulous rendition he’d managed to draw in the condensation of a Soju bottle, but still. Seongje didn’t do anything overt like loom or stare creepily or ask too many invasive questions, he was just always there. Hyuntak had never seen him before on campus, and now he saw him everywhere, unavoidable, occupying his space too loudly. One could not exist in the radius of Keum Seongje and be unaware. His ubiquity was unbearable.
They ran into each other in hallways, in the cafeteria, in the library where Seongje insisted on sitting near him despite having no conceivable academic overlap.
(“What are you studying?” Seongje asked, peering over Hyuntak’s shoulder.
Hyuntak slapped the book shut on reflex. “None of your business.”
Seongje grinned at him, quick and fierce. “That’s a very long textbook for none of my business.”
“Medicine,” Hyuntak said. “Things that actually matter.”
Seongje considered this. “I study things that matter. Right now I’m on poetry from the Joseon period.”
Hyuntak winced. “My condolences.”)
-
He liked bubblegum k-pop and my little pony and watching the sunset from the sport's tower rooftop. He took his coffee with four sugars, which was honestly deranged and the predecessor to developing serious heart inflammation by the time he was twenty-five, and he always left it to go luke-warm and then forgot to drink it half the time. He spoke about everything blithely but relentlessly and harboured weird presuppositions on just about everything there was to have suppositions about. He carried his Korean-lit bag with its fraying straps and marginalia-stuffed notebooks into spaces that smelled like ethanol and formalin and then had the gall to complain it gave him migraines. He could speak English and Japanese and used to do MMA, which had made Hyuntak respect him for about forty seconds before he ruined it by saying he just liked that it was a socially acceptable way to beat on people weaker than him. Hyuntak had asked if that was the reason he liked things designed for prepubescent tween girls, to hide from his sheer mental instability and hypomanic belligerence before they locked him up for psychological study on the effects of being fucking crazy? It was meant to be rhetorical, but then Seongje had slanted him a shifty expression, so Hyuntak had lifted a brow incredulously and decided to never bring that up again.
· · ─ · 𖥚 · ─ · ·
By May, the problem had escalated. This was mostly Sieun’s fault, who was much too indulging for his own good, despite what the rumour mill had to say.
“Just because he’s not a STEM major doesn’t mean he’s an idiot,” Sieun said, watching Hyuntak glare at Seongje across the table in the biomedical study room, created specifically for people studying biomedical subjects and strictly for no one else. It had rules, most of them unspoken and sacred, the most pertinent being that it was for biomedical students. Last he checked, dogearing novels and brooding over dead people's somber thoughts, or whatever Seongje did, was not conducive at all to studying biology or medicine.
“I didn’t say that,” Hyuntak replied. Him and Sieun had been sat at the table actually being productive when they'd spotted Seongje enter. It had been so terrible that Hyuntak had curled up into his chair with his arms locked around his legs, trying to tell the world how very displeased he was with this eventuation through the method of staring icily and rather derisively at Seongje’s big, stupid head, entertaining murderous thoughts and envisaging decimating Seongje and his bloodline.
Clearly the world did not care, because Seongje had not burst into an inferno of flames hot as his hatred, and had instead come to sit at the seat across from him, all blithe and specky and so an egregious detriment to society, and, more importantly, his studying.
Sieun slanted him a flat look. “You implied it with your face.” At Hyuntak’s expression shifting, he added, "You imply a lot with your face.”
Seongje looked up from his book, which was clearly nothing but a foolish pretence. Hyuntak had started to wonder if he even could read, or if he’d been let into university as a contextual diversity admission to prove you could be dropped on your head far too much as a child and still succeed. “You do,” he agreed. “It’s very expressive. Like a rash.”
When Hyuntak lunged, Sieun caught his sleeve.
“Violence is not the answer,” he declared, bored.
“It could be,” Hyuntak argued.
Seongje tilted his head, considering him. “You’re very hostile.”
“You’re very alive,” Hyuntak shot back. “For now.”
Sieun sighed. “Please. Please do not do this. I can not be kicked out of this room, too, Tak. I can't. You already got us barred from three libraries. Please, please, please."
The moment Seongje opened his mouth, no doubt to inquire, Hyuntak shot him a look that thankfully must have read as intimidating, because he snapped it back shut. He was gratified by this enough to slump back into his chair. “It would have been a net positive for human civilization," Hyuntak muttered, miserable now. “I’m just trying to be a philanthropist."
They spent the next two hours studying, if it could be called that. Him and Sieun studied, but Seongje would open his book for all of ten seconds before he was doodling, or huffing to himself loudly, or tapping his foot against Hyuntak's chair leg, or the myriad of other ways he was leading them to distraction.
As if the huffing and the tapping and the being conceivably illiterate wasn’t enough, his eyes kept drifting back to Hyuntak, which was probably a symptom of brain injury. Too many blows to the head. Just his gaze seemed to have an atrociously irritating presence all of its own, born to torment Hyuntak for all eternity because he was quite obviously God’s least favourite person alive. It was unspeakably upsetting that Seongje’s raison d'etre seemed to be making Hyuntak want to strangle himself with his own intestines.
By the time they were ready to leave, Hyuntak had snapped five of his mechanical pencil leads and highlighted his notebook to the point it was falling apart, which had been all Seongje's fault, like everything terrible in his life had started to be. What was worse was he had to nerve to sidle up to him as Sieun and he got packed up, like he was wanted at all.
Hyuntak bared his teeth. “You know what happens when people annoy me?”
“You develop elevated cortisol levels?” he offered.
That made Hyuntak's lungs (traitors) choke on incensed air. Seongje’s face started to twitch in the predecessor to a smug smile, so Hyuntak turned on his heel, grabbed a fistful of Sieun, and speed-walked away before he had to suffer something terrible, like see it.
•
Juntae held a proper conversation with Seongje for the first time when he met him outside the humanities building, and decided then that he disliked him, because he was brilliant and Hyuntak always knew he could trust him to see sense.
“Why does he talk like that?” he asked, later, over takeout containers spread across Hyuntak’s dorm floor. “He sounds like he’s narrating his own documentary and thinks he’s above everyone else.”
“He’s a literature major,” Hyuntak explained. “They’re just like that.”
Juntae hummed, though he sent Hyuntak a brief look of offence, since he was studying creative writing and that maybe had been a bit of a mean generalization. “He hides his thread.”
Hyuntak stiffened. “You noticed?”
“I notice things,” Juntae said defensively. “It’s weird, though. He doesn’t act ashamed. More like–”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s private,” he finished, sucking off excess sauce from his chopsticks. “Which is different.”
Hyuntak frowned, but didn’t respond.
Suho, sprawled across Hyuntak’s bed, because he and Sieun had one of those fights where they argued just to have something to argue about (so he couldn't go back to theirs for at least three hours otherwise it would ruin the quasi-anger when he inevitably started calling him baby and brushing against him), chimed in, "he annoys you.”
“Yes.”
“So you care,” Suho concluded, and he now topped the list of the three worst people Hyuntak knew, having just overtaken Humin with that one comment.
“No.”
Suho snorted. “Tell that to your face."
Enraged by that, Hyuntak threw a pillow at him and did not speak to him for four days.
•
The fifth time Hyuntak seriously considered murdering Seongje was in his dorm kitchen on a Saturday, which he still kept showing up to despite the fact he lived on the opposite block. Hyuntak did not know how he kept getting in, but when he'd asked, Seongje had just given him a smile of a very, very sick man suffering great psychiatric woes, and Hyuntak had decided he didn't want to know, on second thought.
So there he was, burning ramen and asking Hyuntak if the smell of smoke was toxic.
“Depends on the concentration,” Hyuntak muttered, opening a window and trying to not cough up a lung. They felt heavy and grey, and he wondered why he was risking emphysema to help someone so incorrigibly stupid.
Seongje leaned against the counter, then said, because he was paralogically afflicted to boot: “Everything depends on concentration, doesn’t it?”
Hyuntak scowled. “That’s not profound.”
Seongje pretended to look wounded. It may have worked better if he hadn't then immediately tried to stir the ramen with a chopstick melted halfway down its own length, as if any of this situation was even a shade of salvageable.
“It is if you say it like you mean it,” he said, peering into the pot. “Is it supposed to be that color?”
Hyuntak crossed the kitchen in three strides and killed the heat, staring into the pot again. The noodles had fused into a single mass, swollen and glossy, and the broth had congealed into a noxious shade of dark brown with white foam bubbling on top, still spitting.
“No,” Hyuntak diagnosed after a moment of consideration. “Nothing edible is supposed to be that color.”
That did not deter Seongje from being an ass. “I thought maybe it was a special edition.”
“There is no special edition where the broth achieves sentience.”
They stood there for a moment, the smoke thinning, the ramen cooling until it copulated with the broth and produced an offspring so deformed Hyuntak greatly doubted his chances to see heaven now. He pinched the bridge of his nose, starting a migraine he could feel behind his eyes. It was Saturday, and he was meant to be working on his assignment, and here he was battling the urge to murder Seongje as the guy wittered nonsense, which was par for the course but entirely not the time.
“Why,” he asked, straining very hard to sound calm, “are you here?"
Seongje glanced around the kitchen, as if noticing it for the first time that this was, in fact, not where he lived. “You have better knives.”
Hyuntak had long ago accepted he was now, and for the insurmountable future, to deal with these horrors daily, and so all he said, pleasantly as he could muster, was, “I will push you into traffic.”
•
Jealousy was not a clean emotion. It didn’t arrive honest, didn’t announce itself like anger or grief. It came dressed up as irritation, as fatigue, as the perfectly reasonable observation that Suho and Sieun were being disgusting in public again, as if Hyuntak wanted to cuck that.
They were sitting in his dorm common room, knees touching as Suho leant around to stare at the textbook open in front of them like he understood a word. Their shared string—one, singular, sprouting from both wrists—looped lazily between them. Sieun wasn’t even looking at it. He never did. He traced it absently sometimes, when he was thinking, but otherwise he treated it like another vein, necessary but unremarkable enough to ignore.
Hyuntak hated him for that, just a little. He reminded himself that was an ugly feeling, that he was happy for them, that he didn't want that. More than anything, he reminded himself that the feeling wasn't fair. In every other way, Sieun’s life was nothing to envy. Everything about Yeon Sieun had been clawed and knocked at, wrenched back together by a kid who barely knew who he was when he’d been forced to figure out how to make himself resemble something normal. He was a slapdash, cobbled thing with a patchwork of absence stained at the very forefront, and Hyuntak should not hate him for the one thing life allowed him to have, to keep, but he did, no matter how much he forced himself to swallow it down.
“Can you not,” Hyuntak said, glaring hard at his notes so the words might rearrange themselves into something tolerable. “You’re blocking the light.”
Suho glanced up, squinting. “The light?”
“Yes,” Hyuntak said. “You’re ruining my entire circadian rhythm by existing in my peripheral vision.”
Sieun sighed, leaning his head briefly against Suho’s shoulder in instinctive, unthinking muscle memory. "Your enzyme kinetics are wrong,” he said, peering down at Hyuntak's notebook. “You flipped the inhibition types.”
Instantaneously, Hyuntak slapped a hand over the page. “No one asked you."
Sieun did not seem troubled by Hyuntak’s clear and passionate desire for him to perish in silence, just looked at him with that mini tilt of the mouth that counted as a smile if you had known him since childhood and so were willing to be generous. “You wrote competitive where you meant noncompetitive,” he added. Hyuntak turned back to his notes. He was right: the Vmax was changing. “Also your graph is backwards.”
Hyuntak made a tiny strangled noise, dying-animal-esque, which he felt to be extremely dignified under the circumstances. “Get out,” he said, spreading his fingers obnoxiously wider over the page. “Leave my sight. Go be co-dependent somewhere else. Preferably Antarctica where Suho's balls might freeze and I'd never have to walk in on you shagging again.”
“I don’t think Antarctica has good cellular service,” Suho mused with a frown, as if this were the point under contention. He shifted closer to Sieun, just because he could, which was frankly disgusting. “And you're the one who invited us, you can't be mad that we''re here."
As a matter of fact, Hyuntak had. He chose to ignore this because it did not feel paticularly pertinent right now. “Some of us,” he announced coldly, “are trying to study in peace. Some of us do not have magical Sieun brainpower plugged directly into our bloodstream via freaky IV drip.”
Sieun’s eyelids lowered the barest fraction. This, for Sieun, was equivalent to hurling a chair. Until he actually hurled a chair, then that was the equivalent. “Hyuntak, you sound deranged,” he said, which was extremely vitriolic invective. “Also, your turnover number is still wrong.”
“That’s it,” Hyuntak announced, pushing back from the table and flinging his pen down with enough dramatic flair to earn applause in a less cruel world. “I revoke your talking privledges. You –" he jabbed a finger at Suho, “stop letting him be smart near me. I hate it and I will kill myself. I’m going to do it and it will be your fault and at my funeral people will weep and you'll burn in hell for pushing me to this.”
“Hyuntak,” Sieun said, in the same tone one used on extremely stupid puppies that kept pissing on the floor. “You flipped the axes.”
“I,” Hyuntak declared, “will flip you out a window.”
•
“We really need to stop meeting like this,” Seongje said with an unapologetic smile, sliding his card out of his pocket to pay for Hyuntak’s drink. (The fucking audacity!)
“This is my coffee shop,” he grumbled, then fixed Seongje with a glare. “You should probably... ” He waved his hand in a gesture towards him, a vague attempt to encompass everything he saw. “Fix that.”
Seongje scoffed, then leaned closer, cocking his head in that way he did when he wanted Hyuntak to react. Hyuntak didn’t, purely on the basis that Seongje wanted it, and the Venn diagram of behaviour Seongje tried to bait and behaviour Hyuntak resultantly would never show was a circle.
“Fix what?” Seongje asked after a moment, far too pleased with himself.
Hyuntak stared at him. Just stared. He'd learned early on that pissing Hyuntak off was exactly what Seongje thrived on, and Hyuntak had survived worse than him by sheer force of spite. Hatred just made it easier.
"You know," Hyuntak said eventually, flat and unimpressed. "All of it."
Seongje's smile widened, which should constitute criminal action. "That's not very specific. If you're going to offer criticism, you should at least be constructive about it."
"I’m not offering criticism," Hyuntak snapped. "I’m offering a warning."
"Oh?" Seongje's eyebrows lifted. He leaned back against the counter, casual. "And what happens if I ignore it?"
Hyuntak imagined several things, none of them appropriate for a public café containing children.
“Alright then. Your face, your attitude, your hair, my God, definitely your hair, it’s ridiculous." He gestured again, more emphatic. “Everything.”
“Wow,” Seongje lamanted, hand pressed to his chest. “And here I thought we were bonding.”
“We are not,” Hyuntak countered.
"See, that's interesting," Seongje said, drawing the word out as he leaned his hip against the counter, wholly unbothered by the fact that he was now in Hyuntak's space. "Because you only say that when we are."
With a muttered thanks, Hyuntak took his coffee from the barista and immediately moved a step to the side. Seongje followed, like a curse, or gingivitis.
"This is my regular place," Hyuntak stressed, as if repetition might make it stick, pulling the lid off his take-out cup and throwing it into the trash behind him. "You don't get to just—show up and act like you belong here."
Sometimes he thought Seongje was doing it on purpose, existing at him. Turning up in his spaces to breathe his air and sit with his friends and eat from his fridge like he belonged. If Hyuntak had a single romantic bone left in his bitter, blackened husk of a soul, he may have called it haunting. As it stood, it was stalking, plain and simple.
"You're really territorial over things.” Seongje picked up a napkin and folded it in his hands. "It's kinda cute."
Hyuntak choked, coughing hard enough that the woman at the next table looked over in alarm. He waved her off, glaring at Seongje through watering eyes.
"Don't," he croaked. "Use that word."
"What, cute?" Seongje asked innocently. "Why? Is it inaccurate?"
"Yes.”
"Debatable."
Hyuntak pointed at him, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "You are doing this on purpose."
With a curl of his lips, Seongje's gaze flicked to his finger, then back up to his face. Something bright and amused sparked there. "What gave it away?"
Hyuntak ground his teeth. "Do you get joy out of this?"
"An unreasonable amount," Seongje agreed solemnly. "It's one of my more socially acceptable hobbies."
Hyuntak let his hand drop before he actually poured scalding coffee on him and got arrested for manslaughter. "You should find a new one."
"Why?" Seongje asked. "This one's working so well."
"It's not. I hate you," Hyuntak informed him, for clarity. "Just so you know. I hate you, and I hate your face, and I hate the stupid way you turn pages. I know you can’t read and I also hate the fact you tricked an entire institution into thinking you can."
Seongje huffed with an easy going air, as if he was not blatantly and self-evidently insane, eyes flicking briefly to the side like he was considering something genuinely complex. "That feels premature. We barely know each other."
"I know enough."
"Mm.” Seongje’s lip quirked in the world’s most useless attempt at a smile. "You say that, but you still let me buy your coffee."
"I didn't let you," Hyuntak emphaszized. "You stole my moment of financial autonomy."
That seemed to give Seongje pause, which hit as electric shock. Before Hyuntak could feel too pleased with himself, though, he spoke up again and barrelled through that latent smugness head first. “Well, I suppose that one’s on me. But you’re welcome. Should have stopped me.”
Hyuntak opened his mouth, then closed it again, because—because that was stupid. Because he wasn't going to dignify that with a response. Because the barista was looking at them like she was one raised voice away from banning them both for life.
"Also," Seongje added, lowering his voice just enough to make it worse, "for someone who hates me, you sure have a lot to say to me."
"I talk to things I dislike," Hyuntak deadpanned. "It's a survival skill. Enemy recon.”
"Is that what this is?" Seongje asked. He leaned in again, close enough that Hyuntak could see the faint freckle just under his left eye, the one he’d pretended not to have noticed for the past two-or-so months. "Recon?"
On instinct, Hyuntak took a step back. The heel of his shoe caught on the edge of the rug, just enough to throw him off-balance.
Seongje's hand shot out immediately, fingers hovering near Hyuntak's elbow before stopping short, like he'd hit an invisible wall. "Careful," he said, tone shifting to an acute focus.
"I'm fine," Hyuntak bit out, regaining his footing and yanking his arm away before Seongje could finish the motion. His sleeve rode up half an inch in the process. He felt it instantly—the awareness, the heat—and his heart lurched.
Seongje's eyes flicked down.
It lasted less than a second. He looked away immediately, expression shuttering so fast Hyuntak tried to convince himself he'd imagined it.
"Relax," Seongje said, forcing levity back into his voice. "I wasn't going to catch you. That'd be crossing enemy lines."
Hyuntak took a moment to process that statement, then another to let it sink in. He stared at him, pulse loud in his ears, in his wrists. "You're insufferable," he managed, half strangled, voice sounding as if it scraped his throat.
“Oh, big word for you,” Seongje cooed, a teasing hint. A test, maybe, of what Hyuntak would allow.
Rather than entertaining him, Hyuntak turned toward the door with a jerk of his head. He was fully intending to leave before he did something irreversible, such as throw hot coffee or words he couldn't take back, but Seongje matched the movement, falling into step beside him without missing a beat.
"You're leaving already?" Seongje asked. "We were just getting to the good part."
"There is no good part," Hyuntak said. "There is only you talking."
"See, that's where we disagree. I think my talking is the highlight."
His augmented sense of worth was so suffocating Hyuntak pushed the café door open harder than necessary. Spring breeze rushed at him, biting and immediate, a relief after the stifling warmth and how Seongje had been... everywhere.
He stepped out onto the sidewalk. Seongje followed. Of course he did.
"You don't have to walk with me," Hyuntak commented, stopping short and turning to face him. Pedestrians streamed around them, huddled and distracted, threads trailing and tugging in all directions, a living map Hyuntak refused to acknowledge lest he feel the urge to throw up.
"I know," Seongje said. "But I want to."
With no short amount of exasperation, Hyuntak laughed, tight and humourless. "Well I don’t."
They stood there for a second, the warmth settling into Hyuntak's bones, his coffee burning his hands through the cup. Seongje rocked back on his heels, looking entirely too comfortable for someone who had just been threatened with murder by tone alone.
"You're really bad at pretending you don't like this," was what he settled on eventually, as if that made any sort of sense.
Hyuntak gawked at him, two seconds away from telling him he was round the bend, when Seongje continued, “this.” He gestured between them, this infuriatingly vague motion that encompassed precisely nothing. "The arguing. The tension. The little ways you light up when you're mad."
“I do not light up.”
“Oh, you do, Tak,” he said lightly. For a moment, Hyuntak closed his eyes and imagined shoving Seongje's tongue down his throat so he would never have to hear his name on his lips again. "You're very easy to read.”
Hyuntak bristled in a rather unconvincing way. "I am not."
Seongje tilted his head again—there it was, that maddening little cant—and smiled like he'd just been proven right. "You are. When you’re annoyed, your shoulders tense. You stop blinking as much. Your eyes go bright. You get very precise with your words."
Hyuntak's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Stop analyzing me," he hissed, because it was the only safe thing left.
Seongje shrugged. "You're interesting."
"That's worse."
"I don't think so." He watched Hyuntak take a sip of his drink, eyes never leaving his face. "Most people are boring."
Hyuntak scoffed, attempting to rein in his temper. "Then why are you here? Surely you've got more stimulating places to be."
"I do," Seongje agreed.
“Then you could’ve just fucked off,” Hyuntak grumbled grouchily, hungry irritation coming now to gnaw away the end of his words. “If I was so unscintillating to your brilliant and thorough mind. So large, it is. So knowledgeable. If you offered it on a silver platter, not one would dare to touch, as marvelous and rich it is. Caviar in a skull.”
“Alright,” Seongje replied. “I get the point.”
“Do you?”
"I do," he repeated. "I just keep choosing you, and you don’t seem to mind all that much.”
Something in Hyuntak's chest pulled tight, heart unlatching to thud against his ribs. He shoved it down immediately, kneed Seongje in the gut, and stalked off.
•
It was lunch, and their usual table had been commandeered by too many people with too much giggling. Hyuntak sat in the middle of it all, a man condemned, hands wrapped around his glass as if strangling it might bring him inner peace. It did not. Peace was impossible when Seongje existed and so all he really wanted was his hands on him instead.
“Sit with us,” Humin had said, all bright and traitorous, as if these were harmless words, as if they would not destroy Hyuntak’s entire lunch, his entire mood, his entire year, his entire will to live.
Yeongi, who had engineered the whole thing because she was secretly an evil wretch, had brought her group of friends. They sat with their drinks and a shared bowl of fries (girls), whispering to each other and blushing, absolutely thrilled by the fact that Seongje was there because, of course, everyone found Seongje so very cool and fascinating. Except Hyuntak, who knew the truth. Hyuntak would gladly hurl him into oncoming traffic.
His foot was tapping—Hyuntak hated him—against the opposite chair’s leg.
“Could you not?” Hyuntak said, smiling like a perfectly normal, perfectly sane person, but with the precise tone of voice that implied there was a whole world of things Seongje should not do, and not tapping was rapidly becoming number one.
Seongje didn’t even look at him, which was rude considering Hyuntak was doing him the courtesy of glaring directly into his stupid, ugly face. No, Seongje was tilting his head at Yeongi’s friend as they spoke about her midterms, looking like he actually gave a shit. Every time he answered, it was in this calm, careful voice, and all the while he kept tapping. Like it was reflex, like he didn’t even notice he was doing it.
That was fine. Hyuntak noticed enough for the both of them.
Eventually, he was out of patience and forgot he was trying to be civil. “Stop it.”
That made Seongje turn to blink at him with wide, innocent eyes, which was insulting because nothing about him was innocent and Hyuntak refused to participate in that delusion. “Stop what?”
“Your–” Hyuntak waved his hand furiously under the table, nearly sloshing his juice everywhere and absolutely not caring if he did, because stains could be washed out but the emotional scars Seongje inflicted were forever. “Your restless demon leg thing.”
“Oh,” Seongje said, as if enlightenment had dawned and angels were singing, and then kept doing it.
Hyuntak aimed a kick at him, drawing his foot back from under the table to jam it into the junction where thigh met knee. Seongje twisted with the movement, driving his knee forward so it glanced off Hyuntak’s ankle and left them both hissing through grit teeth.
Humin choked on a fry. Yeongi set her drink down. Her friends all collectively inhaled, no doubt thrilled to be watching what they thought was sexual tension but was actually mortal combat in action.
And then—because Seongje was apparently physically incapable of letting anything go, because spite animated his limbs like puppet strings—he kicked Hyuntak back. Immediately and brutally, with precision that suggested practice, which was unfair since he had training and Hyuntak did not.
Pain exploded up his shin. He inhaled briskly, seeing his ancestors, seeing God. In his head he flipped God off for forcing this suffering on him, and flipped his ancestors off for procreating.
“What is wrong with you?” he snarled.
“What is wrong with you?” Seongje snarled back, totally abandoning his gentle, polite act like the fraud he was and had always been and would continue as for the rest of his life. “You started it.”
"I'm ending it," Hyuntak retorted, even though he absolutely was not. Their legs were still tangling under the table in a horrifying parody of intimacy, and every time either of them tried to shift, something bumped somewhere, and it was all getting very stupid very quickly.
Humin's shoulders shook. "This is—this is literally a mating dance in the animal kingdom," he choked. "I saw a documentary–”
"Humin," Yeongi said briskly.
"Right. Got it." He bit into his straw to stop himself laughing out loud. Hyuntak scowled at both of them. Traitors.
Because he was so pissed off, he kicked Seongje again.
"Stop kicking me," Seongje snapped before his leg had even fully made contact. He jerked away, causing Hyuntak’s knee to ricochet and bang the bottom of the table, knocking a drink over that had one of the girls screeching. He sent Hyuntak a flat look as if that had been his fault. "You're going to break the table."
"Maybe I want to break the table," Hyuntak said. "Maybe I want to break you. Ever thought about that?"
"This is insane," Seongje hissed under his breath. "We're adults.”
Hyuntak considered several life branches, including, but not limited to: pushing Seongje off the chair, flinging himself off the sport’s tower, or genuinely stabbing himself in the neck with a fork and bleeding out across the table. "You're unbearable."
“Look,” said Seongje. “I am literally just sitting here. What do you want me to do? Drop dead?”
“Yes,” Hyuntak replied instantly. “That would be super.”
There was a very small, very terrible silence after that.
One of Yeongi’s friends made a faint, strangled sound like a dying cat. Another clutched her drink with both hands and stared between them, eyes bright with unholy fascination.
“Okay,” Yeongi said finally, very slowly. “We’re all going to take a breath–”
“No, we’re not,” Hyuntak gasped, since proper breathing required composure and calm and he currently had neither. “We are going to take Seongje out back and humanely put him down.”
“Try it,” Seongje muttered, which was rich coming from someone who had spent all of yesterday nursing his stomach and bewailing the fact Hyuntak had tried to murder him, and back then Hyuntak hadn’t even been trying, actually. That had just been a happy accident.
He would have been quite content to sit and elaborate on all the extremely and deeply ethical ways he could put Seongje down, but unfortunately the universe had very little compassion for Hyuntak, and an alarming amount of schadenfreude for making him suffer, and so that was the exact moment Suho and Sieun decided to show up and immediately favour them with unimpressed looks.
Suho just crossed his arms, head tipped to the side, while Sieun lifted one eyebrow—which was frankly worse, because Sieun could communicate forty-seven varieties of disdain with one infinitesimal twitch of facial muscle, and Hyuntak felt personally eviscerated by about forty-six of them—and let his eyes slide between Hyuntak and Seongje until both of them began the slow labour of untangling.
“This looks normal,” Suho observed flatly. “Everyone’s behaving like functional members of society.”
“We are,” Hyuntak said, immediately lying. He attempted to rearrange his limbs into a position that did not suggest he’d been actively attempting to maim Seongje beneath the table. Unfortunately, his knee throbbed in time with his heartbeat, so the best he could manage was sitting very stiffly, like someone had replaced his bones with iron rods and concrete under his skin.
As if that wasn’t pain enough, Seongje withdrew his leg, too, acting as if this was all terribly beneath his dignity, which was laughable because he had no dignity and never would.
“I hate you,” Hyuntak growled under his breath, a bit of an understatement considering he was currently imagining the exact trajectory of a fork through Seongje’s skull. He turned back to the rest of them, which mostly meant Seongje, because Humin was doing that thing where he made frantic faces at him and Yeongi was resolutely ensuring she had nothing to do with it, both of which managed to piss Hyuntak off more than even Seongje did. Lesser of evils, or whatever.
· · ─ · 𖢄 · ─ · ·
The thing about damaged tissue was that it healed wrong if left alone.
Scar tissue was tougher than the original, but less flexible, and pulled when you moved due to its limited range. The skin protected itself by rigidity at the cost of pain and reduced function.
Hyuntak lived like that. Tight, but guarded, with jagged edges to ward people off. Seongje kept poking at them.
“You don’t like people seeing it,” Seongje said once, conversationally, when they were alone in the bathroom. Suho had dragged them all out for ice cream because he thought proximity would fix the holy hatred Hyuntak harbored in his heart. It had not, and they’d been disgracefully kicked out of the shop and told to never come back after Hyuntak had shoved a chair at Seongje, Seongje had thrown a spoon at Hyuntak, and ten minutes later the store was decorated in mint, white, and pink. Now they’d been sent to wash off together as punishment.
Hyuntak froze. “Seeing what?”
Seongje’s gaze flicked briefly to Hyuntak’s covered wrist, sleeve held tight even as he washed his hands, then away.
Hyuntak’s pulse spiked. Fight-or-flight lit up his nervous system, and there was only ever one option when it came to him. “That’s none of your business,” he said curtly.
“I know,” Seongje replied. “I wasn’t planning on making it. I don’t exactly show mine, either.”
That made Hyuntak scowl. He did not want to have something in common with the single worst person to ever be conceived beyond the fact they shared a postal code.
It would be easier, cleaner, to file him entirely under non-self, to label him pathogen and live inside that little relief. It was a well-trodden pathway, that kind of immune response: Find the not-you, attack, do not empathise. Empathy complicated things, it implied shared humanity, shared hurt, and the body did not attack what it understood.
“It’s alright, you know. I’m not going to jump you for it, that would be hypocritical.”
Hyuntak did not appreciate Seongie saying reasonable things in reasonable tones. Reasonable things in reasonable tones were how people tricked you into admitting feelings, and Hyuntak was not about to be scammed like that, not by him.
“That’s not the same,” Hyuntak said. It came out harsher than intended, but he didn’t try to take it back or soften it. He should have stopped there. Any sensible person, confronted with the looming spectre of vulnerability, would have clammed up and bitten their tongue off before letting another word escape. He did not. “You hide it for – I don’t fucking know why you hide it, but it’s different, and I don’t want to talk about it with you because I wish nothing more than for you to be disembodied and die.”
Seongje leaned back against the counter, completely unbothered, as though people routinely wished for his death in elaborate formats. Hyuntak could believe that. “Okay,” he said a few beats later. “We won’t talk about it.”
Hyuntak did not trust that for a second. “We’re talking about it right now.”
“Yes, but we’re talking about not talking about it. Very meta.” Seongje shrugged one shoulder, then slammed a hand down on Hyuntak’s tap to cut the water off. “You’ve been washing your hands for five minutes. You’ll make them sore.”
•
He didn’t look at it often. He was good at not looking at things: mirrors, old photos, how people's eyes flicked instinctively to wrists when they met someone new. He wore long sleeves in summer, coats inside, gloves thick enough that no one could see the faint red line that no longer pulled anywhere. He'd perfected the art of hiding, because hiding was surviving.
It didn’t disappear when it was cut. That was a common misconception, one corrected only when you could be bothered to really read the literature. The thread grew from you, and so it was you, in some abstract biological sense, in that indescript way that anything was itself. Severing it didn’t erase it any more than severing a nerve erased pain. It just stopped going anywhere. Stopped sending signals correctly. Misfired, sometimes.
Hyuntak had gotten used to avoiding his wrists, ignoring them completely. It had only been a couple months since he’d been able to make himself look at them properly—make him look at himself properly—and even then it was usually just his right. Untainted, a normal human wrist with the line running up it and the veins hidden below. No red string growing outwards. Just skin, flesh, and bone.
The other wrist was a whole different act, a lightstick match poised before the strike and always running out of time before the flame. A truth he’d learnt in the past three years: there was no way to make fire unobtrusive.
He’d tried, anyway. Sleeves and gloves and pockets and his bitterness disguised as jokes, pretending the heat wasn’t there at all, that it wasn’t buried in him constantly, waiting for any excuse to catch. It was easier that way. Having an inescapable reminder of how unlovable you are that even biology got it wrong was not the nicest thing to have connected to your skin, but Hyuntak had learnt to cope most days.
There were diseases no one talked about because talking about them invited judgment, and cut threads fell into that category. They were framed as this: preventable, personal failure, recklessness, a tragedy with a culprit already assigned. People thought cut threads meant one of two things:
One: That you were cruel enough to do it to someone else.
Two: That you were broken enough that someone else had done it to you.
There was no room in public discourse for nuance, no acknowledgment that sometimes the body responded to trauma by needing to amputate what hurt.
Hyuntak had learned to live with the blame, reshaping around it until the damage felt normal. It was constant and exhausting, but it was easier than reopening old wounds any time someone looked, having to explain which way they should judge him or which narrative fit him better.
Seongje hid his because.
Well.
No one knew why Seongje hid his.
· · ─ · 𖤖 · ─ · ·
Hyuntak was having a perfectly adequate day, until he wasn’t. This was, unfortunately, how most of his days went.
He’d been cutting across the side of the medical building because it shaved three minutes off the walk to the dorms, and because it was usually fairly empty at this hour. He liked emptiness. People generally annoyed him, especially after he’d spent the past two hours of his life sitting in a sterile room with the most pretentious assholes known to man, which always left him hollowed-out. Not that he could talk, really, being one of those pretentious assholes, but he was also Hyuntak, ergo awesome, ergo it cancelled out.
One of his notebooks was half open in his hand, parsing through the information he’d scrawled out because at that point his wrist had been working on autopilot and he did not remember a word of it. Something about cancer, something about apoptosis, yadda yadda, God, he liked words.
While he was busy inveighing his tendency to overwrite—overspeak, overshare, again yadda yadda—he paused at the sudden, intense prickling of proximity that had his teeth at once feeling too heavy in his mouth, stones in still water instead of the nice pearly whites he knew them to be. This could only mean one thing, and he was looking up before he had the wherewithal to consider the potential trauma such action would cause to his otherwise okay day.
Malicious fate was always cruelest to him when he felt at his safest, and so there Seongje was, a few feet away from a crowd of med-students, not talking to anyone because that would be beneath him. He was leaning against the concrete wall just outside the service entrance, one heel up, shoulders loose, sleeves tugged over his wrists as usual, all stupid purple hair and stupid fucking glasses that he thought made him look so mysterious and hot but actually just made him look fucking stupid. He was not doing anything. He was very clearly waiting.
Hyuntak almost walked straight past him. He’d spent the last year cultivating the specific skill set of not looking at things that irritated him directly, which was necessary for survival in a campus full of first-years, overzealous jocks, and now one Korean literature major who seemed to not understand it was rude to treat Hyuntak’s personal space as public thoroughfare.
He exhaled hard through his nose and kept his face forward, since if he hesitated he would end up doing something truly unhinged, like crossing the courtyard to punch his stupid hair and stupid glasses and stupid, ugly face in broad daylight. As satisfying as that would be, he did not fancy getting suspended, so he had to mince his decisions wisely.
Of course, Seongje did not accept being ignored because he was suicidal, or something. Or maybe just stupid.
“Tak,” he said firmly. Hyuntak winced, shoulders going tight, but he kept walking, eyes fixed on the close liberation of where the path from med block to dorms dipped and disappeared. If he could just make it there, if he could just get past the next twenty-or-so steps without either A: knocking someone’s teeth out or B: having his teeth knocked out, this could still be salvaged into a day that did not end with him having wet dreams about murder.
Footsteps peeled off from the cluster of med students and fell into pace beside him, close enough that Hyuntak’s peripheral vision kept catching purple hair and the glint of early afternoon orange off glass. He slowed despite himself, which was thoroughly annoying because he should have just kept walking fast. No one could outrun Hyuntak when he decided he did not want to be somewhere. He was like a whippet.
“I’m busy,” he ground out, which was not really anything, but he felt inclined to establish the atmosphere early. Braindead people like Seongje tended to need it spelled out for them. “I do not want you here.”
“Alright,” Seongje replied, and made no effort to look any less like some freaky, sociopathic stalker who probably wanted to skin Hyuntak alive and wear it on his face, traipsing around and stealing his life because he was oh-so jealous of Hyuntak’s IQ and his friends and the fact that he didn’t look like a weasel on cocaine.
Involuntarily, he shivered. “You’re following me.”
“I’m walking.”
Despite the obvious answer being to ignore him, Hyuntak’s eyes slid to Seongje, cold and narrowed. “You were loitering.”
“I was loitering,” he agreed. “Now I’m walking.”
Hyuntak’s fingers flexed where they wrapped around his backpack strap, because if he let up, he was going to put his hands on Seongje and, again, that was a line to cross in the presence of witnesses. It also was something Seongje would irrefutably enjoy, which was worse.
“Why are you here?” Hyuntak snapped.
Shrugging with one shoulder, Seongje cast a look across the courtyard, before settling back on Hyuntak. “Waiting,” he said casually (which was terrible for a multitude of reasons, the first of which being it set Hyuntak off kilter just enough to slow down furhter, which of course he took as invitation to remain close.)
And then, he stopped walking completely. It was a broken, ugly halt, the kind that sent a jolt up his calves and made the notebook slip from his palm, pages fanning in desperate panic. He caught it by his hip, grip now too-tight, paper crinkling loudly under his fingers. Around them, the courtyard noise shifted, suddenly feeling distant, the static interference of poorly mixed audio.
“Why,” Hyuntak said again, slower this time, enunciating each word so Seongje and his apparent literacy comprehension of a five-year-old may understand. Talking to Seongje felt like an unskippable cutscene most of the time. “Are you here? Don’t say waiting, I really don’t have the patience today.”
Oddly enough, Seongje said, “waiting,” anyway. Or, more likely, he said it because he’d been precisely told not to. He was like that. He found fun in making Hyuntak want to off himself ardently and meticulously. “I had a lecture nearby, then I thought of you. And here you are. Very punctual. It’s honestly sexy.”
“Say that again,” Hyuntak sneered, taking a step closer before he could stop himself. “You’re lurking outside my building like a stalker because you thought of me?”
Seongje inclined his head, jaw slackened as his voice curled around the air in the same sort of way that made Hyuntak wish to curl his hand around his throat and squeeze. “I was worried you’d gotten trapped in there forever. Preserved in a jar, maybe. Or taxidermied. You medical students have strange and peculiar traditions the rest of us dread to consider.”
“Do you have a hobby,” Hyuntak asked, the words clashing against each other in his irritation, “that isn’t being a parasite?”
“A parasite implies benefit,” Seongje said, as if that had been the intended point at all. “What benefit do I get from you, Hyuntak?”
Hyuntak froze. If he moved a muscle, he might actually turn and slam his shoulder into Seongje on principle, and then the witnesses would talk, and then Sieun would hear about it, and then he would make that quiet face that meant he was embarrassing himself, and then Hyuntak’s day would go from adequate to awful and he would kill himself.
So, instead he managed a grunted, “Move.”
“No,” Seongje said.
All at once, Hyuntak lost his hold on rational thought and self containment, grabbing him by the collar to say icily into his face: “What is your problem? Do you get off on being condescending? Invasive?”
“Invasive is medical language,” Seongje drawled, like he was pleased with himself. “I love it when you use medical language. Turns me on.”
Hyuntak swung back, shoving him to the wall. “You’re insane.”
There was awareness, somewhere in the back of his mind, that it wasn’t very clever to keep engaging with someone who seemed to make a hobby out of pushing him until he snapped, and could most definitely massacre him if that snapping eventuated with hands thrown. His pulse was already uncomfortably keyed, a feeling that was unfortunately becoming familiar. Before Seongje, he had never been the type to start fights, but he’d also never backed down once they started. Maybe the potential for this violent truculence had always been coiled within his genes and just needed the right trigger to manifest. That was a very biological hypothesis, and so it comforted him. The comfort was short-lived.
To Hyuntak’s incredulous disgust, Seongje just smiled. They were at a bit of an impasse now. Rinse, repeat. Seongje was aggravating. Seongje was impossible. Hyuntak kept making the foolish decision to continue with trench warfare, which never bode well. If Seongje could just stop existing, then everything would be fine.
Hyuntak dropped his bag to the floor. It landedwith a dull thud that echoed too loudly and made something in Seongje’s eyes zero in, bright and crazed.
“You need to stop this,” Hyuntak said, and he could hear his voice going all wrong, splintering in every direction. “Whatever game you think you’re playing–”
“I’m not playing,” Seongje cut in, eyes still boring into him.
Hyuntak stepped in close enough that he could smell the cigarette smoke clinging to Seongje’s jacket, thick and still burning, settling uncomfortably in his nose in a way he knew would linger for hours, since the universe was, as previously addressed, malicious and cruel. “Get out of my space.”
“You walked into mine,” Seongje replied, infuriatingly calm.
Hyuntak barely registered his own movement before he grabbed another fistful of Seongje’s jacket to slam him back against the wall again, harder this time.
“You enjoy this,” he accused, low and shaking. “You genuinely get off on it.”
The grin that split Seongje’s face was feral. “I enjoy you.”
Hyuntak’s vision narrowed, going red. He didn’t even have the willpower to be metaphorical about it; he actually felt it, a rush of blinding pressure behind his eyes, head feeling too full of itself, something about to rupture. All he could do was hit him properly, watching in luxuriated triumph when Seongje’s cranium banged off the stone wall and he hissed out a breath that made him want to do it again.
After, Seongje looked dazed. Hyuntak wondered if he’d given him brain damage, then concluded his brain had already been damaged enough.
“Stop,” he snarled, though what he really meant but hadn’t said was existing.
Seongje’s breath caught in an incoherent growl, and Hyuntak was vindicated to have proof the bastard truly was rabid.
While he was busy feeling that vindication, it happened too fast to register, all in a sudden succession that left Hyuntak reeling more than the sudden pain spreading across his solar plexus. Post facto, he realized Seongje had come off the wall and shoved back, harder. He caught himself where he’d stumbled, mouth pulling into something ugly.
Before he could retaliate, Seongje stepped in and hooked Hyuntak’s arm with his own, unbalancing him, so Hyuntak swung down into a headbutt
This time, Seongje swore, delighted, twisting his hold on the entrapped arm until Hyuntak cried out at the bright line of pain rending through his shoulder. Seongje dropped his weight and used Hyuntak’s own momentum to haul him down. They collided hard, impact knocking breath from Hyuntak’s chest where it was pressed to tough concrete. A bit of an escalation. In that instant, Hyuntak hated him with a purity that made him dizzy, or maybe he’d just caught his head on the fall.
He rolled instinctively, letting off a string of rather magnificent profanity when Seongje just laughed, possibly because Hyuntak had just tried to shoulder him in the shin. In response, Seongje’s knee settled neatly into the small of his back, cutting off any further protests. One hand pressed against his shoulder, the other braced beside his head as leverage to lean over, breath steady, smile vicious and sadomasochistic where it spread across Seongje’s face, looking like he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was aware, distantly, that he should not have rushed close distance with someone who knew by rote what to do with it. He was also aware that Seongje was very good at this, and perhaps he should have chosen someone to beat his anger on that was not able to annihilate him if he so wanted, and did not gain joy from punching people weaker than him.
“You’re mean,” Seongje said fondly as Hyuntak twisted onto one elbow and drove his arm into Seongje’s ankle before he was unceremonially forced back down. “Want to apologize?”
“Mmph,” Hyuntak spat derisively into the concrete. Seongje wrenched his arm to lift his jaw just enough to speak. “You’re sick.”
Seongje’s glasses were crooked. He didn’t fix them, just leant over his shoulder to keep his face close, voice soft so that it was just for him. “Oh, you don’t wanna know just how badly I’m enjoying this. I’m getting h–.”
There was a garble of surprised gasps, and Hyuntak was dragged back to the knowledge of witnesses with a start.
“Gerrof!” he complained when his face was shoved back into grit. It seemed to be more a reflex much like Hyuntak’s own jerk, rather than a deliberate attempt to smother him. When Seongje took too long to release, Hyuntak brought his hand up hard, fingers digging into the wrist by his head, and he bit down with teeth once he brought it close enough.
Again, Seongje swore, more surprised than genuinely hurt. Hyuntak used the second of shock to twist out from under him, scraping skin raw and sucking in air that tasted of dirt. He got to his knees with humiliated anger buzzing behind his eyes and blood in his mouth. He didn’t know whether it was Seongje’s or his, but he scowled anyway.
After a moment, Seongje, now crouching a few feet away on the balls of his feet and looking perfectly balanced, grinned at him, a crazed and dangerous loon administration had unknowingly set free abound the innocent and witless student body. He waited, loose and ready, which Hyuntak made the intentional choice to not reward by moving.
Seeming to get the hint, he straightened, rolling his shoulders back as he cast one quick look to his wrist before finding Hyuntak again. Hyuntak held his ground, chest heaving, grit biting into his knees. Around them, the courtyard had assimilated itself into a ring of staring faces, phones raised. Hyuntak was at once disgruntled by med students' fundamental inability to mind their own. He supposed digging around in bodies had that effect.
“You’re going to get us in trouble,” Seongje said, as if this had been Hyuntak’s fault. He had been the one discourteously shoved into a foot path.
Hyuntak wiped blood off his lip—split, it belonged to him, then—and sneered, “I don’t care.”
He did care. He cared a lot. His hands were shaking with how much he cared.
A deep voice cut in, a little muffled with the slowly raising whispers of the crowd, but with enough authority that both snapped to attention, twisting to focus behind them.
Campus security, two of them. One took in Hyuntak’s scraped hands and bloody lip, the other assessing Seongje and his frozen-feral grin, slowly straightening out in that faux, strained politeness of his.
“What’s going on here?” the first asked.
“..” Hyuntak opened his mouth to say, and drew back when nothing came out.
Seongje pushed to his feet, dusted his hands on his jeans, and smiled all student-brochure. “Misunderstaning,” he lied. “We tripped. Easy mistake, he gets distracted by me, see?”
Hysterical enough to forget reason, Hyuntak barked a cold laugh. “I do not–”
Seongje smiled genially and didn’t even glance at him. “Tak.”
Infuriatingly, Hyuntak listened.
The security guards looked between them, wholly unconvinced but probably not paid enough to actually care. The one who had been studying Seongje sighed like he couldn’t believe he had to do this, and promptly asked for their IDs. They handed them over, watching as the first marked down their names. A lecture about campus conduct followed, delivered with the bored cadence of someone who resented the fact their life had resorted to this. Hyuntak supposed he would also be sepulchral and weary if his job description was breaking up brawls between fully grown adults.
“You’re done here,” the guard said, handing their IDs back. “Both of you go. Opposite directions.”
Hyuntak snatched his ID and then his bag off the ground, shouldering it hard enough to tear at the steady, dull ache in his shoulder, reinvigorating the pain for the barest moment. He didn’t look at Seongje. If he did, he might finish this.
“Try not to assault each other again,” the guard added, without irony.
“Tripped,” Seongje corrected pleasantly, and Hyuntak detested the happy, mocking little tone to his voice. Perfectly adequate day, now dead. In consternation, he imagined all the best ways he could flay Seongje’s skin from his bones as he stalked off back to his dorm. It did a great deal to lift morale.
•
Spring ended with Seongje comfortably settled into Suho’s personal group, which meant, by extension, he was Hyuntak’s, too.
Every Friday, he was invited to movie nights. He had also managed to get himself invited to Sieun and Suho’s wedding (Hyuntak was still on the ‘maybe’ list, and Humin was on the ‘no way’ list, so he felt that was grossly unfair and a misrepresentation of their supposed importance in their lives.) The only reason he hadn’t rallied over this was due to the fact they didn’t even have a wedding planned yet, so the promise was liable to change. And it would, when they became privy to Seongje’s true psychotic behaviour.
The fight had resulted in Sieun ensuring they weren’t left alone again, though, so maybe someone was starting to key in. Or maybe he just didn’t want to sit and clean Hyuntak up any more. It was always hard to tell with him.
Anyway. Spring ended like this: Seongje vehemently protesting that he had won, which everyone could see was absurd, and Suho saying he should pick on someone his own size—rude?—and offering to fight in Hyuntak’s place next time—rude!. Thankfully both Humin and Sieun shut this down, and so they would never know if Suho’s claims to beat him into the ground were founded on truth. Hyuntak verged on the side of yes, but he was also biased, and so Yeongi had banned him from betting. Humin and Baekjin had voted that Seongje would obliterate him, but that was fraud because Humin would always choose whatever his soulmate did. Yeongi and Juntae had voted that Suho would squash him like a bug.
Obviously, they did not tell Sieun about the betting pool.