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Seongpa district

Prix fixe breakfast menu

February 14th

9:00AM

“Why are you doing this to me?” Hyuntak asked. He wasn't exactly dragging his feet—that would’ve suggested a level of petulance he was reluctant to exhibit around the man to his left—but it came close. There was very little verve nor speed remaining in his stride. The usual intent behind his steps had been entirely overwhelmed by the impulse to turn on his heel and bolt.

Early morning Seoul was streaked rose and speckled blue, the familiar hues of a recently-risen dawn staining the charcoal streets below. It wasn’t the overwhelming expanse of midday, nor the complicated tones of a nascent dawn in conflict with night, but it was distinct and warm, so Hyuntak accepted it.

Admittedly under duress. But, still.

“Come on, boyfriend,” Seongje said, and Hyuntak nearly punched him. “Try not to look like I’m holding you captive.”

That was easier said than done.

In all honesty, this entire setup had been Hyuntak’s idea, a culmination to months of planning and reservations, but—well. If he’d known then what hindsight had provided him now, the likelihood of him ever perpetuating his 3am, soju-addled plan would’ve been near to naught.

It had started like this: Suho and Sieun had booked a couples’ day at a spa down in Gangnam, an advantage of the Valentine’s deal docking 30% off the total price for romantic partners. Upon telling Hyuntak about this venture (and after he’d spent a good few minutes hysterically laughing and teasing them for it) he’d realized that, well, frugality was important, and all that. For this year’s resolution, he’d sworn up and down to spend less money, and exploiting the capitalist regime for his own financial benefit had, at the time, seemed an ingenious idea. His innovation had impressed him greatly, right up until about ten minutes ago.

In his head, Hyuntak resolved never to follow through on his more lucrative sounding plans again.

“I changed my mind,” he declared irritably, finally falling to whim and pivoting back on the balls of his feet.

“Noted,” Seongje said, tugging at the hem of Hyuntak’s jacket. “Now, can we go in? You’re making me sad.”

Hyuntak grunted as he was whipped to face the front once more, his shirt being used as some wind-up to the spinning top inside it. He was not overly appreciative of being treated as a misbehaving child’s toy, so clamped both hands down onto Seongje’s wrist to yank himself free.

He and Seongje were huddled by the entrance of some quaint little café advertising its ‘Valentine breakfast! Two hearts, one deal! Just like bear & bear!’’, an offer Hyuntak was increasingly unimpressed by. He did not want to be like a bear. What a fucking joke. It was written in cartoonish Pantone font, looping letters punctuated with an aggressively cheerful heart dotting the ‘i’. All of it did a brilliant job offending Hyuntak’s more delicate sensibilities, considering the only thing that would make him cheerful right now was a rerun of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

The door kept swinging open and closed before them, fogging the air with cinnamon warmth and breath as couples emerged bundled and sharing paper cups. Sometimes they’d pause as they noticed the two tall men standing in their way, giving them an assessing look, which frustrated Hyuntak enough to seize Seongje by the arm and forcibly drag him from the path of entry.

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this anymore,” he muttered, releasing him to wipe his hands on his jeans.

Seongje clicked his tongue, unconcerned, and leaned in close enough for Hyuntak to feel his body heat through layers of winter fabric. “You’ve already said that. Twice. If you say it a third time, does it become legally binding?”

“I don’t–” Hyuntak began, and then shook off the more crestfallen notes to his voice. He took a cautionary step back as another couple emerged from the front door, grasping hold of Seongje again since his social awareness appeared primordial. “I no longer require your presence. You can leave now.”

Seongje, not even trying to extract his arm from Hyuntak’s ferocious grip, just rocked back on his heels, tucking a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “You’re the one who sent me a screenshot of the deal with those little heart emojis. Five of them, actually.”

“That–” He lost his track of thought when he glanced up and clocked the expression on Seongje’s face. His own cleared of anything but jagged annoyance. “That was ironic.”

“Irony,” Seongje echoed. Hyuntak arched an eyebrow at that, which he predictably ignored. He hummed, the sound pitched between disbelief and amused indulgence. An astounding combination, one that Hyuntak might have spared some energy being impressed by if it wasn't all shorn away by irritation. Distantly, Hyuntak wondered if it was less that Seongje was particularly talented at facial expressiveness, and more so that Hyuntak had grown unaccostumed to anything that wasn’t a flat scowl or pure effusiveness. (A natural consequence of his chosen social sphere including a boy with the emotive equivalence of a wet sock, and the next three constitutionally incapable of producing anything but a grin). “Sure, and the six paragraphs following. You’re just a dedicated ironist. I remember at least two mentions of ‘strategic emotional labour’.”

Hyuntak’s jaw tightened. “You have an alarmingly selective memory,” he said tersely, slanting him a sidelong glance.

“I have an excellent memory,” Seongje corrected. “You literally attached a spreadsheet.”

“That was for logistics,” Hyuntak snapped. He twisted his face into a scowl, palms flexing at his sides.

Again, Seongje ignored it.

“Right, I did like the colour co-ordination.” When Hyuntak opened his mouth, Seongje continued. “And the contingency column was very professional. I appreciated the risk assessment,” he finished, like he was reminiscing a fond childhood memory rather than the forensic documentation of Hyuntak’s impending humiliation.

Hyuntak closed his mouth, distressed by this. There was a particular, finely-honed look he’d perfected over the years; one that conveyed, with ruthless efficiency, the promise of verbal decimation should the reciprocant not correct course.

Obviously, Seongje did not correct course.

“You even colour-coded the fallback options by proximity to public transport,” he added. “What was it again? Green for walkable, blue for single transfer, red for… What was red?”

“If one of us gets a stomachache,” Hyuntak supplied, deliberately dragging a baleful blank onto his face.

Seongje waved his hand dismissively. “Eh, that’s irrelevant then. I read the risk assessment for if that happens.”

Hyuntak stared at him, visibly losing patience. There were a wide range of responses available to him—most of them rude, some of them loud, a select few involving grievous bodily harm—but what ultimately surfaced was a strangled sound straddling the edge of a groan. Very almost a deprecating laugh. It startled him, so he clamped his mouth shut immediately after, ensuring the noise could not try again.

After a tense moment, he relaxed enough to regain the ability to create audible word. “You read the stomach ache appendix?” he asked, appalled.

“Mhmhm.” Seongje nodded. “Well, most of it. By page three it started verging into implausible situations and I gave up.”

Hyuntak pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering to himself to build courage. “There were four pages. You weren’t meant to actually read them,” he said. Not unreasonable, in his opinion.

Nonetheless, Seongje rolled his eyes impatiently in the universal expression of disagreement. “You lost me somewhere between ‘sudden onset of lactose intolerance or nut allergy’ and ‘food poisoning; but only one of us’.”

“That’s called strategic planning,” Hyuntak defended weakly.

“It’s called paranoid delusion,” Seongje countered. “Do you have an anxiety condition? I feel this should have been stated in the original listing.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to be psychoanalyzed at nine in the morning,” Hyuntak said, each word clipped. “Especially not by someone I’ve known for–” He pulled his phone from his pocket and glanced down, mostly for dramatic effect. “Twelve minutes.”

Seongje crooked his lip, considering this. “Twelve minutes? Double digits already. Time really does fly when enjoying holiday cheer together.”

At that, Hyuntak tipped his head back just marginally to glare at him. This, too, was part of the problem. Seongje was taller than Hyuntak had anticipated, shoulders broader, wearing a coat that looked far too expensive for someone willing to wake at ungodly hours to commit consumer fraud with a stranger. Now, Hyuntak was no slouch when it came to jacked physiques, what with Humin being a consistent denizen of the gym and Suho’s insistence to wearing gym vests and cropped shirts no matter the occasion, but he was pretty certain this guy was just—lean.

It was actually doing something unfair to Hyuntak’s peripheral awareness.

With effort, he refocused, setting his jaw. “Do not act like this is anything but transactional. The relationship is just… narrative scaffolding. This is about discounted food and experiences.”

“And your sparkling personality,” Seongje said. Hyuntak frowned at the fogged-glasses, hands-up-in-surrender, smiling-at-him situation going on. “I’m kidding.” He paused, clearly calibrating the most annoying words possible to say. “You did make me rehearse eye contact, though.”

“That was a suggestion,” said Hyuntak stiffly.

“You wrote ‘mandatory procedure’ in bold,” Seongje pointed out, incredulous. He was watching Hyuntak steadily, eyes dark and piercing, like they saw through everything.

“Bold is excessive. It was italicised,” Hyuntak corrected, and Seongje snorted. It was light, but unmistakable.

“Alright,” he conceded a moment later. Hyuntak realized he was still holding his arm and immediately rectified it, shoving his hands deeply into his jacket pockets. “None of that matters. We just have to sit down, eat, pretend to be disgustingly in love, dismantle the… what was it you said?” He looked to Hyuntak for help, and when he received none, sighed and fished his phone from his pocket, tapping against the screen for a few seconds. “Ah. ‘Dismantle the predatory, absurd, pink-wrapped myth that affection must be quantified in prix-fixe menus and heart-shaped carbohydrates that monetize intimacy to prop up quarterly profit, undermine Valentines day as a weaponized calendar event designed to inundate and coerce emotional performance under late stage capitalism, and then leave with full stomachs and the moral satisfaction of having stolen joy back from the bourgeoisie and their industrial taxes on love.’”

“I was not that dramatic,” Hyuntak argued.

Seongje glanced up to hold his gaze over the phone for a few beats, then turned back to his screen. “‘Yes, we will siphon every won from the corporations that monetize loneliness and hollow out romance to a limited-time offer that says spending more money is the equivalent of deeper affection. We will walk away having proven love-as-a-service is a scam, compulsory sentiment is a market failure, and no pink-dyed food has ever justified’—”

“Alright,” Hyuntak interrupted, cringing. “I get the point.”

“—the price hike on pancakes," he finished anyway, a man possessed. He slid his phone back into his pocket with a satisfied sound. “I paraphrased that last bit. It actually went on for three more paragraphs.”

Hyuntak stared at the café window, his faint reflection superimposed over pastel balloons and a chalkboard drawing of two bears holding paws. He looked tired. Not physically—he’d slept fine—but spiritually. The way a man does when he’d engineered his own downfall and scheduled it for 9:15am.

The bears were smiling at him.

“I hope those bears die,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“What?” Seongje asked.

“The bears,” Hyuntak said, gesturing to the chalkboard. “They’re anthromorphized. They’re complicit.”

Seongje leaned sideways to peer at the drawing, lips pursing thoughtfully. “I think they’re just bears.”

“They’re in a committed relationship,” Hyuntak shot back. “That’s propaganda."

Seongje blinked. Once. Then again, slower, like he was recalibrating his understanding of the world in real time. "Wow," he said eventually, sounding almost awestruck. "And here I thought I was radicalized."

Hyuntak folded his arms, bristling. "You're laughing."

"I'm processing," Seongje said. "There's a difference."

"There isn't," Hyuntak said.

“Okay, let me process out loud.” Seongje held up a hand, folding down a finger for each point. “One: you put up a listing to invite a stranger to meet you at dawn so you can impersonate intimacy for material gain.” Hyuntak’s scowl deepened irrevocably as he watched Seongje drop another finger. “Two: you draft a forty-something page operational document including gastrointestinal failure scenarios to send to said stranger. Three: you implicate him in your manifesto of overthrowing the capitalist regime, making him complicit with your honestly profound Marxist ideological purity. Four: and now you’re offended by cartoon bears holding hands.”

“They don’t have hands,” Hyuntak said grimly. “They don't even have opposable thumbs.”

“That is suspicious,” Seongje allowed. He rocked back on his heels again, looking past Hyuntak’s shoulder to the entry-door swinging open behind him. “So,” he said, dragging the word out. “Do we want to keep standing here continuing our critique of ursine romance, or do we go inside and exploit the system?”

For a while, Hyuntak did not answer. He was too busy staring at the bears. Unspeakably, they were staring back.

“Fine,” he relented a moment later, after Seongje nudged his foot. “But I am not pretending to be disgustingly in love with you. I’ll tolerate you, at best.”

Seongje's face lit up in goading. “That’s basically marriage."

“Let’s sit down,” Hyuntak said, immediately grabbing Seongje’s arm and honing in on the closest table. He dragged him to the first open two-top before a server could intercept them and no doubt seat them somewhere worse. Somewhere by a window. Somewhere romantic.

Seongje sat opposite him and immediately sank about ten centimeters into the plush cushioning. A vaguely horrified expression crossed his face. “What the fuck?”

“You brought this upon yourself,” Hyuntak said. There was a definite smugness to his voice that Seongje caught and looked strangely intrigued by. He crossed his arms, rising at least three inches up his seat. “I gave you the freedom to run and you refused.”

With that, he turned and scanned the café floor.

Heartly Bear Café was a deeply horrifying place.

Hyuntak had believed this ever since Juntae dragged him there kicking and screaming back in senior year of high school. Even then it had been littered with plush bears at every corner, all pink cheeks and knitted jumpers, holding empty coffee cups. It was worse today, as each of them had their own bear-romance. Not only was this disturbing to see, it was also a reminder that Hyuntak did not possess any romantic counterpart and had instead been relegated to conning the system they upheld.

He’d sworn point-blank he would not step foot here again,, but they’d had the best deal and he was money hungry. He resolved to not tell anyone of this advancement, at least not until he had some leverage to mediate the inevitable teasing it would subject him to.

“Wow,” Seongje said, casting his gaze around the room to emphasize the statement. “Do you see the bears?”

Hyuntak bristled at once. “I’d rather I hadn’t.”

Seongje reached over, patting his hand, unflaggingly composed. “It’s alright, my love," he crooned consolingly. I will inquire about the price to bring a set home with us, so that you may never forget this moment.”

Ignoring him, Hyuntak again scanned the room, the rows of tiny, circular, supposedly romantic tables. All were inhabited by couples being awkward at each other, a blushing war of incompetence that unsettled his stomach and made him wish he had missed all of this. It made him a little worried about his future prospects, if this was the modern dating pool he was left to navigate.

Involuntarily, his eyes snagged on a table by the window where a man was feeding his girlfriend a forkful of something too-pink and too-moussey. Both of them were giggling with the fragile enthusiasm that came when putting love on the dime. Something inside him recoiled and shriveled up to die.

He would have tried again to beg to leave, but that was a losing battle he no longer had the energy to fight. All the bears and satin and clashing shades of pink had sapped the life force right out of him.

“This is a sociological experiment,” he muttered. “It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever been forced to witness. It’s unethical.”

“It’s brunch,” Seongje said. “You’re acting like they’re harvesting organs."

“I wish they were,” Hyuntak replied gravely, not looking at him. “It would be kinder.”

A server materialized at their table before Seongje could respond, armed with menus edged in scallop-pink and a smile that suggested she was having the best morning of her life. “Good morning!” she chirped, already placing the menus down between them. “Happy Valentine's day! Are we celebrating something special today?”

Hyuntak opened his mouth, but Seongje beat him to it.

“Our enduring love,” he said dreamily, resting his chin in his palm and angling himself to blink at Hyuntak. It was probably meant to look romantic, but it actually just looked like someone had bashed him around the head with the vase in the middle of their table. “It burns through me hot and sacred, and will forever more.”

Hyuntak’s soul left his body. Not metaphorically, but an actual detachment from his sternum, hovering, aghast, above the table. Somewhere deep in his animal hindbrain, an alarm was blaring. Danger. Predation. Courtship rituals.

The server’s smile spread wider, clasping a hand to her chest. “Oh my god, that’s beautiful.”

Hyuntak’s soul, still floating above the laminated menus, screamed.

“Yes,” Seongje continued smoothly. “We try to nurture it daily. Affirmations, shared breakfasts, you know. The little things.”

Hyuntak whirled his head around, back to his body. “We do not—”

Seongje kicked him under the table, effectively choking him on the rest of that sentence. He shot him a look of pure, incandescent fury.

The server mistook this entirely. “Oh, how lovely. You two are adorable. Is this your first Valentine’s together?”

“No,” Hyuntak said, at the exact same time Seongje said, “yes.”

They sent each other incredulous, slightly conspiratorial looks.

Of course, Seongje recovered first. “It feels like our first,” he amended sweetly, cloying. God, he was repulsively good at this. He reached over the table to rest his fingers over Hyuntak’s wrist, trailing the tips over the frail bone. “Every year with you feels new.”

Hyuntak froze. It wasn’t the words—those were nonsense, obvious saccharine filler designed to activate the server’s dopamine receptors and fast-track to the discounted set menu—it was the touch. The casual certainty of it made Hyuntak’s brain short-circuit.

The server melted; there was no other word for it. She made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a squeal, already scribbling something down on her notepad. “That’s so romantic,” she gushed. “I just love love. Alright, so—today we have our Valentine’s breakfast set. It’s for couples only.” She leaned in surreptitiously. "It comes with two mains, a shared dessert, and complimentary heart lattes. You'll need to... you know." Her eyes flicked pointedly between them, bright with implication. "Confirm."

Hyuntak's mouth went dry. "Confirm what."

The server smiled like a woman about to witness something life-affirming. "That you're a real couple."

Seongje's thumb brushed once over the inside of Hyuntak's wrist. "Oh, we're very real," he said softly. “How are we supposed to confirm?”

The server clapped her hands, vibrating. “Anything is fine! A kiss, holding hands, a picture together—oh!” She lowered her voice again, conspiratorial. “Some couples like to feed each other.”

Hyuntak made a strangled noise that might have been the ghost of a laugh, or a death rattle. “We will not be feeding each other.”

“That’s okay,” the server said kindly, already writing. “Holding hands is more than enough.”

Seongje immediately laced their fingers together. Hyuntak forced himself into another bout of dissociation.

The server beamed. “Perfect!” She scribbled a final flourish onto her notepad, straightening. “I’ll put in your order. The Valentine’s set comes with the strawberry soufflé pancakes or the rose cream toast for mains—”

“Two separate plates,” Hyuntak cut in quickly, seizing on the only battleground still available to him. “We will not be sharing.”

Seongje squeezed his hand once, subtle. Reassuring, even. A warning shot. “We love sharing,” he said, all gentle diplomacy. “It’s kind of our thing.”

Hyuntak did not love sharing. Hyuntak had never loved sharing. Hyuntak's kindergarten teacher had once described him as ‘volatile and remarkably uncommunal’ after he bit half the class for trying to use his animal erasers.

The server chuckled, delighted. “Oh, I love that. I’ll put one of each, then! Best of both worlds.” She tucked the menu under her arm. “And the heart lattes will be right out. Enjoy your breakfast, lovebirds!”

When the server finally left, practically floating, Seongje did not immediately let go. Hyuntak waited exactly three seconds. He counted them. One: this is happening. Two: this is still happening. Three: why is this still happening.

"Release me," he exclaimed, sounding outraged.

Seongje blinked, then glanced down like he’d forgotten their hands were still linked. “Oh, right.” He loosened their grip, withdrawing with an inconceivable reluctance. “Sorry. Muscle memory.”

Hyuntak pressed his lips together, breathing through his nose. "Physical contact was not authorized."

Seongje canted his head. "It was implied."

"It was not,” Hyuntak said tersely, slumping down in his chair and dragging a hand across his face.

"You put 'minimal public displays of affection may be required to maintain narrative plausibility' in the guidelines,” Seongje said, an easy, teasing tone to his voice.

Hyuntak's stomach dropped. "...That was under extenuating circumstances."

"This was extenuating," Seongje said. “Would you have preferred I kiss you?”

Hyuntak glared. The look was meant to cauterize, to burn the idea straight out of existence. He deployed the full arsenal: narrowed eyes, stiffened jaw, the faint twitch in his cheek that usually preceded a detonation. Seongje’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t appear chastised.

“That is disgusting,” Hyuntak fumed. “All of this is deranged.”

“I think it’s nice,” Seongje intoned smoothly. Unbothered, apparently, by the carnal depravity of St Valentine’s Day and this here situation. Hyuntak spared a moment to hate him, and to observe how pink the jumper was beneath his jacket. “You’re not very romantic, it’s quite upsetting. Would you have been happier if I'd brought flowers?”

“Flowers are a scam,” he said, voice thick with conviction. “You pay to watch something die slowly on your counter. It’s performance grief. It’s exploiting the everyday tax-payer through market deception and faux-symbolism.”

Seongje’s mouth twitched. “Noted. Next year I’ll bring you something more aligned with your values. Like a coupon booklet and a small brick.”

“A brick,” Hyuntak repeated suspiciously. He stared at him, weighing up in genuine consideration whether it would be more satisfying to hurl Seongje’s latte into his face upon arrival, or simply stand up and walk into traffic. “Why would I ever need a brick?”

“Symbolism,” Seongje said, earnest. “For the bourgerougisie. You could throw it at a bank. I bet that really gets your blood pumping.”

Hyuntak refused to say another word to him.

Seongpa district

Kiss & cookie!

10:30AM

“It’s just up here!” Seongje exclaimed, tugging deliberately on Hyuntak’s sleeve.

He’d banned hand-holding after the café incident. Any time someone so much as passed the table, Seongje had seized his palm and started waxing rhapsodic on how his eyes were like galaxies, or constellations, or tides, or some other sort of planetary phenomenon. At one particularly unforgivable point, he’d declared them the 'warm glow of sunlight through the skies of ethical consumerism’, a phrase Hyuntak was fairly certain did not exist outside of Seongje's mouth and whatever deranged corner of the earth had produced him.

By the third passerby, he’d threatened to stab him with a fork. By the fifth, Seongje had started doing it just to see what new shade of murderous Hyuntak could turn. So, Hyuntak had instituted a strict no-touching policy the moment they’d stepped back out onto the street. Enforced with elbows and a hard kick to his shin if he dared take it as a loose-suggestion.

He was letting himself be tugged by the sleeve purely because it meant he didn’t have to commit to choosing a direction. Seongje kept looking over his shoulder every few steps, as if afraid Hyuntak might dissolve into the pedestrian traffic the second his grip loosened. It was insulting. Hyuntak was not a flight risk. Hyuntak was a man of principle.

To be fair, Hyuntak was also a man who had, five minutes ago, genuinely considered walking into the road.

“What is just up here?” Hyuntak muttered, and Seongje threw him a grin over his shoulder. “There was nothing in the itinerary for ‘up here’.”

“Surprises are romantic,” Seongje said, which was clearly a non-factual statement, backed up by a resounding zero evidence. “Spontaneity. Excitement. Do you not feel joy? Does your man taking you somewhere secret and wild not get the blood pumping?”

“Do not call yourself my man,” Hyuntak blanched, wrenching his arm free to establish that boundary physically. “And no. My blood does not pump for your whimsy. If anything, going anywhere ‘secret and wild’ with you makes me fear for my neck.”

“Wow,” Seongje said, stopping short. “You make it sound so intimate.” He turned to face Hyuntak fully, drawing in a breath with the air of a man completely aware his next words were going to lead to strong protest, before saying them anyway: “I saw a bakery advertising free cookies for couples that kiss.”

Hyuntak stopped, regarded him, and frowned deeply.

“You saw,” he started, vaguely horrified, “a bakery.”

Seongje nodded. “Yes.”

“Advertising.”

“Yes.”

“Free cookies.” Hyuntak could tell his voice was going wrong, fracturing all over the place, barely producing coherent human sound at this point. He watched with a pained intensity as Seongje just nodded merrily along. “For couples.”

“Correct,” Seongje said. His eyes were alight with resolve and perhaps drugs.

Hyuntak’s own were dulled with dismay and the even deeper dullness of pain. “Who kiss.”

“Wow,” Seongje marveled. “You sure do catch on quick."

Hyuntak turned on his heel and set off in the opposite direction.

He made it exactly six steps before Seongje caught up. “Hey,” he said, catching the back of Hyuntak’s coat between two fingers. “You’re walking the wrong way.”

“I’m walking the correct way,” Hyuntak protested, yanking free. He was hysterically looking anywhere but at Seongje, and landed on his shoes. “Away from crime.”

“Free cookies aren’t a crime,” Seongje said as he tugged him back. “They’re a moral good. A community service, even.”

This was not strictly a lie, of course, but Hyuntak did not consider it true, either, since free cookies! under the requirement of kissing seemed a thinly veiled gateway into glorified pornography. He stared down at his converse and wanted, more than anything, the simple life of being a shoelace. Shoelaces didn’t have to worry about being dragged into strangers' voyeurism kinks, only if they were tied right or fraying at the edges.

“Extortion under threat of public affection is a crime,” Hyuntak shot back. “At minimum it’s coercion.”

Seongje cocked a brow. “You’re the one who framed this entire day as revolutionary praxis.”

“That,” he said, carefully enunciating the word. He pondered if shoelaces ever felt pretty when they were tied into neat little bows, or if it hurt. If he was tied up into a bow, he reckoned it would twinge a bit, at least in his spine. There was a certain doomed valor, now, to how he assessed them. “That is not carte blanche to insult my dignity. I like cookies, I do, but not under the guise of free erotic entertainment.”

He considered if it was truly that good a life to be a shoelace. People tugged on them and warped them into strange shapes, but a shoelace never asked to be mangled into a bow, did it? No. It was a shoelace. Shoelaces couldn’t talk. They were made of synthetic fibers, like nylon and polyester, and they did not have mouths. How many shoelaces have wanted to be something else? Take a jacket, maybe, or circuit board insulation. Greater things. How many synthetic dreams had been crushed under human consumerist slavery? Maybe they were not so different, he and this shoelace.

He didn’t realize any of this had been spoken aloud until Seongje said: “Er. Are you on crack?”

Hyuntak blinked. It was an innocuous motion, objectively. A biological function. But it was also the sheer bafflement of his mouth betraying him by babbling.

“No,” he said stiffly.

“It would explain the shoelace soliloquy," Seongje persevered. He peered down at Hyuntak’s shoes, then back up again to squint at his forehead. He was making a visible effort to appear respectful of whatever was going on up there. “You were really in it for a moment.”

'I was making a point," Hyuntak explained. "About autonomy."

"Of footwear,” Seongje said sagely

"People," Hyuntak replied. "And the disturbing parallels under capitalism."

"Right," Seongje drawled out, unfazed in the way of a man who had already accepted that his companion was fundamentally unwell. "Because of the cookies."

"Because of coercion," Hyuntak snapped. "Shoelaces are non-consensual participants in fashion violence. They're a metaphor."

"For kissing strangers?" Seongje prompted.

"For capitalism," Hyuntak corrected, affronted. "Try to keep up."

Seongje regarded him for a beat too long, like he was watching a documentary about an endangered species actively choosing extinction. He looked, now, a touch horrified. Perhaps from the general premise. “Okay,” he said eventually. “Counterpoint.”

Hyuntak braced himself.

“You,” Seongje continued, gesturing vaguely at Hyuntak’s chest, “are currently participating in a premeditated, multi-stop con that relies entirely on the illusion of romance to extract material goods from small businesses. You have spreadsheets. You have appendices. You have, apparently, a working theory of shoelace liberation.” He paused, inclining his head. “But the hill you’re choosing to die on is a free cookie.”

“It’s not the cookie,” Hyuntak said tightly. “It’s the optics.”

“The optics,” Seongje echoed.

“Yes. The performance. The expectation that intimacy must be rendered visible and consumable. That affection has to be demonstrated through physical acts for public approval.” He waved a hand; this was a very important distinction. “It’s voyeuristic.”

Seongje made a small huh. “So the problem isn’t kissing.”

Hyuntak shot him a look. “The problem is kissing for strangers.”

“What about kissing for cookies?” he asked.

Hyuntak’s teeth ground. “My lips are not a coupon code.”

“That’s actually beautiful. Not a coupon code,” Seongje murmured, as if he was trying it on for future use. “You have such a way with words. Your syntax truly adheres to your fucked up philosophy.”

Hyuntak cut him a scathing look, resigned to his fate. "Do you want free cookies or do you want to litigate semantics with me on a sidewalk?”

All Seongje did was smile, small, and Hyuntak squeezed his eyes shut, preparing to bite the bullet—not even proverbial, the reality was that lethal to contemplate—and be forced into lip-locked labour.

"I want free cookies," he said, and then, as if the first answer hadn't been terrible enough, added, "and I want to litigate semantics with you on a sidewalk. Ideally while holding your hand, for the narrative."

"No," Hyuntak said, a single syllable that held the emotional weight of a restraining order.

“Okay,” Seongje conceded, hands lifted in surrender. His voice did this annoying thing, like he was talking down a rabid animal instead of a man being threatened with public-mouth involvement. “No hand-holding. I respect your boundaries..”

Hyuntak narrowed his eyes. “You’re lying.”

“I am adapting,” Seongje corrected. “Compromise. Healthy communication. See? We’re already a real couple.”

Hyuntak made a noise of deep, ancestral suffering.

“Just walk,” he moaned miserably, a man suffering from an indescribable woe. He sent Seongje a look of great affliction and let himself be guided towards the bakery.

They rounded the corner, and there it was.

It was smaller than Hyuntak had feared, which was to say: still devastating. A narrow storefront with fogged windows and warm light spilling out onto the pavement, the kind of place that smelled like butter and sugar. There was a plastic sign propped out front, the horrifying threat printed into its face.

💕 Valentine’s Special! 💕

FREE COOKIES FOR COUPLES

😘Just kiss & share the love! 💋

Hyuntak stopped dead. “No,” he said, immediately.

Seongje followed his gaze, visibly delighted. “Oh, wow. They really committed to the branding.”

“This is worse than I imagined,” Hyuntak observed. He was going slightly red from lack of breath. “There are emojis.”

“There are multiple emojis,” Seongje amended, reverently. “They’ve really diversified the semiotics.”

Hyuntak turned to stare dolefully up at the sky for a few moments, beseeching. “Do we have to?”

Seongje looked up too, as if the sky might offer them a second opinion, and then back down at Hyuntak with the careful solemnity of a man about to deliver tragic news. “We don’t have to,” he said.

Hyuntak narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “You do not mean that.”

"It means I hear you," Seongje said, earnest. "I'm validating your feelings. Woah, I’m good at this boyfriend shit. You sure you aren’t gonna fall in love with me?”

Hyuntak felt his expression collapse into something empty of anything byut homicidal intent. He sort of wanted to hit him. No, he really wanted to hit him. His every word filled Hyuntak with a hot, dire hatred, and he wished more than anything to have a great metal mallet to slam against his head. “I’m certain,” he said, pushing the urge aside.

“Alright,” said Seongje.

“And I also want to make it certain I am not kissing you or anyone for cookies,” he added.

“Alright,” said Seongje.

“I am not participating in performative mouth-based validation rituals for baked goods,” he finished, voice tightening with every clause.

“Crystal,” Seongje said, nodding. “Very clear.” He tilted his head, eyes darting again to the sign, then to the door, then—infuriatingly—back to Hyuntak. “You know,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t say where.”

Hyuntak stared at him. “What?”

“The kiss,” Seongje clarified. “It just says ‘kiss.’ Very vague. No specified anatomical requirements.”

Hyuntak’s stomach dropped into his shoes. “I don’t like where this is going.”

“I’m just saying,” Seongje continued, warming to his thesis, “there’s a lot of real estate on the human body. Forehead. Cheek. Knuckles, if you’re feeling old-fashioned. You’re the one who keeps bringing up optics. This is all about interpretation.”

Hyuntak opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Well,” he breathed out eventually, straightening up. “I could exploit a loophole, I guess.”

“Very revolutionary of you,” Seongje said, and took advantage of Hyuntak’s capitulation to drag him inside.

To put it politely, it was carnage. And they had just come from a place that used bears as romantic decor, which was a pretty high bar to clear. Yet this tiny bakery, with it’s pink bunting drooped from the ceiling, heart decals stuck to every conceivable area of wall, and the sheer density of giggling couples packed shoulder-to-shoulder knocked it out of the park.

The air was thick with sugar and heat. The kind of cloying warmth that insinuated itself into Hyuntak’s hair and pores and left him feeling lightly glazed. He immediately regretted breathing.

There was a chalkboard behind the counter that read:

KISS & COOKIE! 💋🍪

One kiss = one free cookie each!

Please keep it sweet! (PG-13) 💗

Hyuntak squinted at the parenthetical and felt his spirit attempt to crawl out through his ears

“Well,” Seongje attempted. “I think I understand your bout into shoelace liberation now.”.

“Hello,” a rather harrassed-looking employee greeted them. It was such a deviance from the perpetual holiday cheer, the one that had everyone speaking in iambic pentameter with five exclamation points tacked on, that Hyuntak did a double take.

Instead, this one sounded like she’d seen God and it had been a line of fifteen couples doing tongue on a Tuesday. Her apron was dusted with flour; her eyeliner was perfect; her soul had clearly taken a tactical retreat. “Hello,” she said again, trying for exuberance and failing miserably. “Kiss and cookie?”

Hyuntak took one look at her face and decided he respected her. Deeply. In the way one respected veterans, since this had obviously been a wage of war onto her. He hoped she was getting hazard pay.

“Yes,” Seongje said, before Hyuntak could speak. “Kiss and cookie.”

“Actually,” Hyuntak said quickly, cutting in with brittle politeness, “we have a question about the parameters.”

The employee’s eyes flicked to him. They went morose, dead. “Parameters.”

“Yes,” Hyuntak said, buoyed by the intrinsic respect he held for her obvious disillusionment. “The sign states ‘kiss,’ but does not specify—”

“Where,” Seongje supplied helpfully.

Hyuntak shot him a look that promised retribution, then turned back. “—where,” he finished, tight. “This kiss must occur.”

The employee stared at them for a long moment. Then she sighed. “As long as it’s consensual and PG-13, I don’t care,” she said. “I stopped caring two hours ago.” She paused, then added, “you know what, I care so little that here you go.” She reached under the counter and slid two cookies toward them without ceremony. They were wrapped in thin wax paper, the chocolate still glossy, still warm.

Hyuntak blinked, caught off guard by the sudden, unprecedented mercy. "We didn't–”

"I said I don't care," she repeated promptly. “I have been forced to watch too much open-mouthed snogging, I can’t handle it. One man made out with his girlfriend’s elbow for five minutes. At this point, the cookies are a loss leader and my will to live is gone. Please take them before someone else tries to French a nostril."

Hyuntak blanched. “Someone tried to–”

“Enjoy your cookies,” she cut in. “Have a happy Valentine’s day. Next!”

Hyuntak stared at them. Then, very carefully, he picked one up. “Thank you,” he said, with meaning. “I hope you get paid time and a half.”

She laughed once, empty and humorless. “I don’t. Next!”

Seongje's face lit up with unearned triumph. "See?" he whispered. "The proletariat provides."

Hyuntak was going to kill himself.

LOTTE WORLD MALL

Free professional valentines photos

11:30AM

The escalator up to what must be certain hell unfolded before him. Hyuntak stared at it with the grim resolve of a man being led to execution via conveyor belt. Lotte World Mall loomed overhead in glass-and-steel enormity, a cathedral to consumption, its upper floors disappearing into polished infinity.

If Hyuntak timed it right, he could leap off the railing to his death and disfigurement, expertly avoiding the inevitable.

Hyuntak did not, in the end, leap.

This was less a triumph of will and more a failure of logistics. Seongje stepped onto the escalator first and, in an act of breathtaking malice, reached back to catch Hyuntak’s wrist, tugging him forward just enough that the step rose to meet his foot whether he wanted it to or not.

“Oh, no,” Hyuntak lamented faintly, but the machine had already swallowed them whole. He stood stiff on the escalator step, hands braced on the rubber railing like he might be flung off by centrifugal force. Seongje, meanwhile, leaned comfortably against the side, peering down over the edge with interest.

They ascended.

The mall smelled like money and perfume and freshly-polished tile. It was too bright—an artificial daylight that flattened everything beneath it, reflecting off glass balustrades and mirrored pillars with ruthless efficiency. Couples clustered everywhere, a migration of coordinated t-shirts and interlinked arms, drifting from pop-up to pop-up in the following of some invisible pheromone trail.

“This place is obscene,” he groaned.

Seongje turned his head, hair falling across his forehead and glasses in that irritatingly effortless way. “It’s just a mall,” he said cheerfully.

“It is not just a mall,” Hyuntak muttered. He glanced up. The ceiling was a vast lattice of glass, pouring sunlight down in beams that made everything shimmer. Romance! the glistening floors above sang to him. Intimacy! Don’t you want to copulate in my golden rays! Hyuntak slapped a hand against his temple to try and keep the sound of the sun saying ‘copulate’ from reverberating forever in his head. “They’ve built an aquarium to late-stage capitalism and filled it with couples like… decorative fish.”

Seongje blinked. “Decorative fish.”

“Yes,” Hyuntak insisted. “Schooling in synchronized consumer patterns. Their mating call a meagre discount.”

“That’s kind of poetic,” Seongje mused.

“Don’t,” Hyuntak warned.

“I’m not doing anything,” Seongje replied, hands held up in mock innocence. His eyes were bright, a man who was absolutely doing something and had never known a day of innocence in his life. “I’m simply admiring your ability to take in a perfectly normal environment and turn it into an allegory. It’s really quite impressive.” He paused, tapping his chin in thought, then pointed the finger at Hyuntak's chest. "Wait. Does this not make us fish, too? I would like to be a guppy."

“You do not get to be a guppy,” he said point-blank.

Seongje frowned. “Why not?”

“Because,” Hyuntak said, eyes tracking a bike on the lower level with a large heart decal stuck on its back, “guppies are complicit.”

“In what?” Seongje inquired.

“In the spectacle,” Hyuntak said. “They swim in circles and let children tap on the glass. Stupid fish. Heh, maybe you are a guppy.”

Seongje absorbed this with a sour look. “Okay, I’m not stupid. I’ll be an eel.”

Hyuntak crooked a lip to his nose in disgust. “No.”

“A shark?” he revised.

“No.”

“A mysterious deep-sea creature that only surfaces once every ten years?” he asked a little lamely.

Hyuntak paused, appraising him. “Alright.”

“Thank God,” Seongje said just as the escalator deposited them onto the upper floor with the cruel, irrevocable finality of fate. He grabbed hold of Hyuntak’s arm, then paused when he noticed Hyuntak wasn’t moving. He sighed as he looked at him. “Come on, fishie,” he said, his finger rubbing at the skin of Hyuntak’s wrist in a way that made his entire being hyperfocus on the place of contact. “We have cons to embark on, pellets to eat.” His lips quirked up at the right. “You are blocking a lovely family of four.”

Hyuntak hissed under his breath as he was coaxed further into the forward flow of foot traffic. “I am not a fish,” he declared, stiff-backed, “And I am not embarking on pellets. We are going to whatever deeply regrettable thing you have neglected to put in the itinerary, and then we are leaving.”

Seongje tutted, unrepentant. “You say that now.”

They passed a pop-up selling matching hoodies with cartoon strawberries holding hands. Hyuntak averted his gaze so hard he nearly strained something.

A massive freestanding display loomed ahead of them, glittering under spotlights with the predatory confidence of something that had been focus-tested. A pink arch studded with fairy lights curved overhead, framing a velvet backdrop printed with floating hearts and cursive script:

LOVE CAPTURE ZONE! FREE PROFESSIONAL COUPLE PHOTOS!

Hyuntak stopped so abruptly Seongje nearly dislocated his shoulder.

“No,” he said, instantly, desperately. His spine locked. His soul attempted to crawl again from his ears and under the nearest bench. “No. Absolutely not.”

Seongje inhaled in deep, sadomasochistic glee. “Oh,” he gasped. “This is perfect.”

“This is a trap,” Hyuntak decided. “This is how they get you. They take your image. They archive it. They put you on a mailing list. Next thing you know you’re getting emails about anniversary discounts and infertility cruises.”

“I… don’t think that’s how photos work,” Seongje said, having obviously no concept of the detrimental tactics of the corporations.

“It’s how surveillance capitalism works,” Hyuntak corroborated.

A peppy staff member in a pastel vest had already locked onto them. He wielded a clipboard and the kind of smile that suggested caffeine dependency and upper-management pressure. “Hi! Happy Valentine’s day!” he beamed, stepping directly into their path. “Are you a couple?”

Hyuntak pulled a face in horror, then closed his eyes.

“Yes,” Seongje said, without hesitation.

Hyuntak opened his eyes and glared. “We are temporarily aligned individuals.”

For a moment, the staff member just gaped. “So… yes?”

“No,” Hyuntak said.

“Yes,” Seongje said firmly.

“We are not,” Hyuntak said carefully, both eyes twitching in anguish, “a couple.”

The staff member’s smile wobbled, but did not fall. This was clearly not his first battlefield. “That’s okay!” he said brightly, a beat later. “Lots of couples have different labels. Partners, soulmates—”

“No,” Hyuntak cut in. “We are not any of those.”

Seongje leaned in, elbow nudging Hyuntak’s side with malice afforethought. “We’re in denial,” he said. “It’s very modern. Years of repression, you know how it is, back when we were teenag–”

“No,” Hyuntak found himself saying, cutting Seongje off before he could finish that sentence. He was suddenly extremely aware of how little he wanted to know how it would end. “How does this work?”

He watched in dreary surrender as Seongje’s face spread into a wider, calamitous grin. “Very simple,” he said, the grin in every inch of his body right now. “We stand there, they take photos, we leave.”

Hyuntak’s expression, which had already been apprehensive, deepened. He turned to the heavens in an impassioned plea for the world to make sense, everything about the precipice of this moment hitting him right on the raw.

Unfortunately, the heavens were made of mall ceiling.

“Alright!” the staff member continued, capitalizing on Hyuntak’s moment of spiritual abandonment. He flipped his clipboard around and held it out for them. “So—just sign here, quick consent for photography, and then we’ll get you in. It’s free today, but if you want prints it’s an extra—”

“No prints,” Hyuntak said instantly.

The staff member took a moment. “Oh. Okay. Digital is free.”

“No digital,” Hyuntak clarified.

“Yes digital,” Seongje said, scowling at Hyuntak with a vehemence that Hyuntak felt to be frankly unfair considering all he had done today was breath. “Actually, yes prints as well. Do you do keychains?”

While the staff member nodded, Hyuntak’s head snapped around so fast his neck clicked. “Keychains,” he repeated, voice thinned down to something perilously quiet. “Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s memorabilia,” Seongje reasoned, as if that made anything better. “Evidence of our day of crimes.”

Hyuntak’s eyes cut to the staff member, who was still holding out the clipboard with the dead-eyed patience of someone who had already watched thirty-seven variations of ‘awkward couple’ and had ascended past judgement into pure administrative duty.

“No keychains,” Hyuntak said firmly. “No prints. No digital. No archival. No—what did you say?—consent form.”

The staff member’s smile stayed plastered on, but it began to look strained around the corners. “It’s just standard. We can’t take photos without consent.”

Hyuntak’s suspicion intensified. “So you admit it. You are harvesting images.”

The staff member shook his head and his hands at the same exact time. “We’re… taking pictures.”

“Ignore him, he was in a cult,” Seongje said, which had the simultaneous effects of (one) making Hyuntak’s entire circulatory system attempt to reverse course and (two) the staff member go slack-jawed and look at Hyuntak in sudden, strenuous sympathy.

“I’m… I’m so sorry?” the staff member attempted. Hyuntak felt endlessly guilty for ruining this poor worker’s day. He stared at his vest and felt a little better about it, a little more vindicated.

“A cult,” Seongje repeated severely, patting Hyuntak’s shoulder, who recoiled on instinct. “Very intense. A lot of meetings, pamphlets. You know how it is.”

“I do not,” Hyuntak said through his teeth. “I was not in a cult.”

The staff member looked between them, the clipboard hovering midair. “Sir,” he said cautiously to Hyuntak, “are you… are you safe?”

Hyuntak rankled. “I am extremely safe. I am just a victim of harassment.”

Seongje smiled beatifically. “Ignore that. Deprogramming takes time. I have to be patient with him, but I’ve learned how to handle his more volatile moods. I know they are not his fault. He can’t resist the urge to be suspicious.”

Hyuntak resisted the urge to snap his glasses and stab them into his jugular.

The staff member cleared his throat, loudly, in the way of a man who desperately wanted this interaction to end before management noticed. “Okay! So. Consent form. Just a name and a signature. We don’t store the photos unless you ask us to.”

“Lies,” Hyuntak muttered.

“Hey,” Seongje said, lower now, pitched just for him. There was a note of sincerity there that Hyuntak did not like, because it made things complicated. “It’s fine. Look. No mailing list. No archives. Just a photo, maybe some props, maybe we can cuddle up real close…”

“Do not say the word cuddle,” he gagged, voice thin with betrayal. “That is not in the operational parameters.”

Seongje blinked, wide-eyed, all earnestness and feigned innocence. “Operational parameters,” he echoed. “God, you’re so hot when you talk like a customer service complaint, baby. It gets me all hot in the loins.”

Anguish stamped plainly across the staff members' features. “I don’t–”

“We’ll take digital and a keychain,” Seongje said, leaning forward to take the proffered pen and scribble his name on the dotted line, keeping a secure hand on Hyuntak’s wrist. “I’m so sorry about him. There was electro-therapy. He grew up deeply communist and paranoid, thinks the world is out to get him. He makes spreadsheets and risk assessments for every veritable moment of life, it's very upsetting. I’m taking him on this date to show him the truth of normal human existence, but maybe it’s too much too fast.” He shifted to drag Hyuntak forward, shoving the pen between his fingers. “Just sign, baby. If they kill us for our likeness, at least we die together.”

Hyuntak made the sound of a small dying animal, and signed.

“Thank you!” the staff member said in a ghastly, jovial sort of way. His shoulders deflate. “Great. Great. If you’ll just—uh—follow me!” He gestured toward the velvet backdrop like it was a gallows.

Hyuntak, who had already been regretting his life choices in a broad, holistic sense, felt his face go green. This—this was a new tier. “Oh, God,” he exclaimed with the haze of panic and degradation.

“Shoes on the marks,” the staff member chirped, pointing at two pink hearts taped to the floor. “Nice and close together. There’s props to the left and I will—I will go get the photographer! Aha! Ahahahahaha!”

He fled.

Hyuntak stared at the hearts on the floor. They were too close together. This was not a subjective assessment, but a measurable, empirical fact. The distance between the two pink hearts was approximately one shoe-width less than what Hyuntak considered acceptable for interpersonal coexistence. They were practically touching, practically overlapping. A KOSHA violation waiting to happen.

“I will not be standing on that,” he said, voice hoarse with the dawning realization that this was, in fact, happening.

Seongje stepped onto his mark immediately, the heel of his shoe landing squarely in the center. He looked very comfortable there. He turned his head, peering over at Hyuntak with open delight. “Why not? It’s just a heart.”

“It is not just a heart,” Hyuntak snapped. “It is an enforced proximity marker. It is symbolic. It is coercive geometry. This is how they uphold conformity in the lower classes—”

“Oh, yeah,” Seongje groaned. “Talk dirty to me, baby.”

Hyuntak stared blankly at him.

There was a very particular silence that settled over his expression, one that preceded catastrophic decisions. It was the same look he’d worn when he’d agreed, once, to host a house party despite knowing, with chilling certainty, that Humin would invite twelve strangers and Suho would take his shirt off within twenty minutes.

“Stop calling me baby,” Hyuntak demanded, settling beside him on his right and leaning as far to the left as possible. The heart under Hyuntak’s shoe felt like it was pulsing. This was not, as he told himself sternly, a measurable phenomenon since there were no capillaries in adhesive tape. It was, at best, a psychosomatic consequence of being forced into a carefully-lit intimacy booth by a man who had the moral gentleness of a coin-operated massage chair. Thump thump thump, all against his back.

Bloom in the palace

Romantic set menu

12:15PM

“Wow, these came out…” Seongje started perkily, before his expression was doused in stark reality, as was his voice. “Wow.”

He had a keychain in his hand and a print flat on the table in front of him. Hyuntak had refused to look at either, a carefully constructed preservation technique required to not rip out chunks of his hair. He reached for Seongje’s wrist, trying to no avail to get him to put the offensive item down.

After a few more moments, he retracted his hand, using it as leverage to smash his face into instead. He dropped down to his elbow, attempting to tunnel back through time to before 9:00am.

Bloom in the Palace had been his idea. Bloom in the Palace was supposed to be safe. He’d made the reservation three months ago. Three. Months. Prime window. Limited slots. A 25% Valentine’s discount that applied only to couples dining in-person, on the day, with proof of reservation and—he swallowed—romantic intent. He had read the fine print. Twice. He had annotated it and added it meticulously to the spreadsheet.

Now he was going to die here.

“Do you think,” Seongje stared cautiously.

Hyuntak groaned into his hand before he could finish. “Put it away.”

“I am putting it away,” Seongje protested, which would have been more convincing if he weren’t still holding the keychain up between two fingers, dangling it back and forth under the warm overhead lighting. The tiny acrylic heart connected to the ring swung gently. “You’re lucky you’re pretty, you know. It added a shred of dignity.”

“Put it away,” Hyuntak repeated, muffled by his palm. “If I see my own face in a heart-shaped acrylic prison one more time…”

Seongje, to his profound credit or eternal damnation, actually complied. The keychain vanished into his pocket with a reverberating plastic clink that sounded suspiciously like permanence.

“There,” he said. “Gone. Archived only in my memory and phone.”

Hyuntak’s head snapped up. “Your phone?”

Seongje froze. Just a fraction too late. “—Metaphorically.”

Hyuntak stared at him with slow, dawning horror. “Delete it.”

“I didn’t say I had it,” Seongje said carefully.

“You implied archival,” Hyuntak said, pointing an accusatory finger. “I will not be archived.”

“You’re already archived,” Seongje replied. “The mall has you. The bears have you. They know your face. They are coming for you with knives in their mouths, as they have no–”

“Opposable thumbs,” Hyuntak finished dimly, making a sound of profound pain and crumbling to the table. He was pretty sure he just had about ten consecutive panic attacks and Seongje didn’t even notice. He lay there for a full minute, contemplating whether it would count as a hunger strike if he just never raised his head again.

He listened to the sound of Seongje picking up a menu, of shifting in his seat. The chairs here were firm, civilized. No sinking ten centimetres into plush humiliation.

“Huh,” Seongje said, a long exhalation of thoughtful air. “Do you want to–”

“I would rather kill myself then share with you,” Hyuntak said, quick to preemptive the question.

Seongje made an indignant sound like he was lost for words, which, of course, barely lasted for more than three seconds. “Alright, then. Be an asshole, I guess.”

Listening to him, Hyuntak was starting to see the appeal in murder.

“I am going to shove a spoon into your neck,” he said to the table. The anguish he felt in this moment was insurmountable. He stared ahead and wished, not for the first time, to be this table. Being a table would be lovely. He would be wood and solid and have no thoughts. It would be a nice life, being a table. Maybe even better than a shoelace.

Thankfully, he said none of this outloud.

“I am never doing this again,” he continued firmly, closing his eyes. “After today, I am returning to a life of solitary eating and unexploited pricing structures.”

“That’s not very Marxist of you,” Seongje said, and Hyuntak could hear the frown in his voice.

“Oh God,” Hyuntak whined. He reckoned he was being supremely reasonable, given the circumstances. Seongje really did not deserve such greatness. “I’m not even a Marxist.”

There was a sepulchral cackle from opposite him, and so Hyuntak cracked one eye open. “Stop that.”

“Fuck, Jesus,” Seongje said, still laughing. This full, unguarded laugh, shoulders shaking, head lolled back just enough that the overhead lantern light caught in his glasses. It was ugly and real and entirely undeserved.

Hyuntak felt something in his chest tighten in a way he refused to interrogate.

“Fuck, I can’t. Hyuntak.” Seongje gasped, clutching his chest. “It wasn’t even funny. Oh, fuck. Oh, no.”

“This is concerning,” Hyuntak said bitterly, because it was.

Seongje dragged in a breath like he was trying to inhale oxygen through a straw. “No, no—” he wheezed. “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. I’m fine.” He wasn’t fine. He devolved into another bout of laughter, the aftershocks of it shuddering through his shoulders. “I just—oh my god. You’re unbelievable.”

A moment later, he leaned back in his chair, finally settled, the smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth in a way Hyuntak found deeply unsettling. “You just spent three hours calling shoelaces victims of capitalism, accused cartoon bears of ideological warfare, and threatened to stab me with cutlery over the concept of sharing food,” he said, and choked when another wave of laughter threatened to pull him under. He pumped at his sternum. “And then you capped it off by declaring—I don’t know how I was supposed to respond.”

Before Hyuntak could reply, a server approached their table with the cautious steps of someone entering the enclosure of two unpredictable animals. She was dressed in neutral tones, thank god, no pink in sight, her expression professional in a way that suggested Bloom in the Palace had standards. Hyuntak straightened immediately, spine snapping into place. “Good afternoon. Have you decided yet?”

“Yes,” he said crisply, with the air of a man who had, in fact, decided nothing except that this was his final earthly meal.

Seongje blinked at him. Then smirked, slow and predatory. “We have.”

Hyuntak shot him a look that conveyed, with remarkable economy, we absolutely have not. But the server was already smiling at them, pen poised, blissfully unaware of the civil war unfolding across the table.

“Wonderful,” she said. “And just to confirm; you’re here for the Valentine’s couple set, yes?”

Hyuntak’s jaw tightened. He could feel it, the way his molars met with a faint, ominous click. He inhaled through his nose, preparing to deliver what he hoped would be a clean, bloodless clarification.

“Yes,” Seongje said again, cheerfully. He reached out—reached out—and set his hand on the table, palm up, fingers relaxed. An offering. A trap.

Hyuntak stared at it.

The server’s gaze followed his. Her smile brightened, just a touch. “Oh, that’s sweet,” she said. “We just need a quick confirmation, then. The set is for couples dining together.”

Hyuntak closed his eyes. It was easier than staring at the hand. He took a breath, deep and resounding, before opening them again.

“Define couple,” he said bleakly.

Seongje snorted before he could stop himself, then coughed and schooled his face into something approximating sincerity. “We’re together,” he said, sliding his hand an inch closer, kicking him under the table. “Romantically. Emotionally. Spiritually. Economically, today.”

Hyuntak hissed and kicked him back. “Stop dragging economics into this.”

The server laughed, a little strained. “You two are funny,” she said. “Alright, I’ll mark you down for the set. Any allergies I should know about?”

“No,” Seongje answered at the same time Hyuntak shook his head. “He’s very fragile, though. So save off any spice, please.”

“I am not fragile,” he said, somberly. He folded his arms over his chest, hating Seongje with all his might and retribution.

“You had a full-body stress response to adhesive hearts,” Seongje reminded him, providing them an unreadable grin, quirky at the edges and thoroughly evil.

The server’s smile did that professional widening thing again, the one that meant she had decided they were both insane but was committed to riding it out for the purpose of her job’s continuity. “I’ll note no allergies,” she said, scribbling. “And for the mains—would you like to share, or—”

“No,” Hyuntak said immediately.

“Yes,” Seongje said, just as fast. Hyuntak wondered if he was sent to ruin his life. He certainly had that twitchy, incomprehensive grin. Not to mention the evil.

It was upsetting that the bane of his existence was a man wearing a pink jumper and looking awfully bespeckled.

He forced his voice pleasant, rolling it around behind his lips until they softened. “Just. Two plates, please?”

“He has contamination OCD,” Seongje added, because he was, as evidenced, evil.

The server let out a strange exhale, before shaking her head. “Alright.” She heaved a sound of unfettered stoicism, jotting something else down on her pad. “Alright. Two plates. We can accommodate that! The food does all come in an arrangement intended for sharing, but I’ll make sure the kitchen adds extra serving utensils? Yes? Please say yes.”

“Yes,” Hyuntak said, because he was not a monster. He was many things—beleaguered, persecuted, spiritually flayed—but not a monster. “Extra utensils would be great, thank you..”

The server’s shoulders visibly dropped, relief pouring off her in waves. “Wonderful,” she said, scribbling with renewed purpose. “And for drinks? We have a Valentine’s pairing: rose soda and blood orange tea.”

“No alcohol,” Hyuntak said reflexively. “I need my faculties intact.”

Seongje tilted his head. “In case you need to escape?”

“In case you do something I need to remember in court,” Hyuntak replied, deadpan.

The server laughed again, that same careful, professional laugh that said I hope you pay for my therapy. “Alright. Two non-alcoholic pairings. The food will be out shortly.” She paused, then, a little unnerved. “Happy… happy Valentine’s day?”

“Yes! Thank you!” Hyuntak said jovially, weighing up his different options for suicide.

•

“Here, let me feed you,” Seongje offered, grinning down at him in that inane way of his when he was enjoying himself, having the time of his life making Hyuntak want to end his own.

Hyuntak took a bite of his chicken, chewed exactly twenty-one times, and swallowed it down his constricting throat. Almost along with his tongue.

Their food had arrived not even five minutes ago, and Seongje had already taken to upsetting his stomach. A furtive glance up from his plate revealed Seongje staring at him, eyes dark behind his glasses, a circling vulture honed on its next meal.

He stabbed another piece of chicken with the end of his chopstick and brought it to his mouth. The food, at the very least, was good. It almost atoned for the abysmal company, though he amended that was probably of his own doing.

“For you,” Seongje tried again, brandishing a piece of pork between his own chopsticks. Hyuntak frowned down at it. It looked good, but it was also in Seongje’s possession, and so good was an unverifiable grading. He appeared too ready to pass it over. There were many reasons to be distrustful. There were many reasons to be frowning.

Honestly, if Hyuntak wasn’t so appalled by the turn of events this day had taken, he might have found the energy to tease him. As it stood, all he was capable of was gaping, aware his mouth was unattractively filled with half-chewed chicken.

“No,” he said at last. It came out more like nggh, but the intent was there.

“Shouldn’t we be sharing resources to really stick it to the man?” Seongje said, hovering the meat closer. “Think about it. What’s less capitalist than sharing wealth and nourishment? Don’t you want to practise your manifesto?”

“Okay,” Hyuntak said, hating the word for making him sound like he agreed with anything this Seongje chap said. “I’d rather get my dick bit off, thank you very much.”

“Oh, come on,” Seongje complained. “It’s just food. I’m trying to keep up the pretense. I’m a method actor.”

“Food is a gateway,” Hyuntak said darkly. “First it’s sharing bites, then it’s eating off each other’s plates, then it’s cohabitation.”

Seongje stared at him for a long, contemplative beat. “Wow,” he exhaled, finally drawing the meat back to his own mouth. "You're already projecting a future with me. That was fast.”

Stabbing at Seongje’s hand with the butt of his chopstick, Hyuntak said: “that was for karmic balance.”

LOTTE WORLD MALL

Hell.

2:00PM

What do you purchase for an insane man? Now that was the resounding question.

After finishing their lunch, Seongje had declared his brilliant plan to exploit the regime by buying each other gifts from any store they saw offering a discount, to ‘reinvest the stolen capital into interpersonal goodwill’, as he put it, which Hyuntak suspected was just a very convoluted way of making fun of him again.

Hyuntak had, naturally, refused.

This refusal had lasted approximately thirty seconds.

The compromise, if one could call it that, had been swift and cruel. Seongje had tutted and then peeled off toward the restroom with a grin that suggested malicious foreknowledge, clapping Hyuntak on the shoulder and saying, “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

So, of course, Hyuntak had immediately gone somewhere.

Specifically: two floors down, into a deep, concentric circle of Valentine’s-themed retail hell, where red tags screamed SALE!! and everything was suspiciously heart-shaped. He was on the fourth floor, which seemed fitting. That was where the hoarded and the squandered went to suffer, the final resting place for the cardinal sin of the tremendously greedy.

Now he stood alone in front of a display of discounted shirts, arms folded, jaw clenched, staring at the shelf and trying to convince himself this was not happening.

This was absolutely not happening.

He was not buying a gift. Gifts were sentimental. They implied affection, or implied continuation. This was a finite, contained con. A closed-loop systematic scam with an endpoint. There would be no emotional residue, no commemorative artifacts, no—

He glanced down at the price tag.

—70% off.

He thought for a second. As far as plans go, it was hardly a complicated one. It didn’t even seem like that much a plan, not yet. More a… how should he put this? More a prevention technique. From later grousing and goarding. If he did this now, then there was nothing for Seongje to complain about later. Buy something stupid; hand it to Seongje; have to worry no longer about what the lunatic would try to induce him into next. A three-link chain of action. Yes, this would be alright. This would work out perfectly. This would all resolve itself nicely and without any lasting problems.

What a relief.

He stared at the shelves again, reassured by the sudden, artificial calm of having justified himself. Yes. This was fine, it was rational. It was, now that he thought about it, efficient. Capitalism demanded preemptive measures; he was simply meeting the market where it stood.

He reached out and immediately recoiled. The shirt in question was pink. Valentine’s pink. A pink that put too much faith into love.

Hyuntak stared at it, offended.

“No,” he muttered, sliding it back along the rack as if it might contaminate the others. “Absolutely not.”

He moved one hanger over. Still pink. Another. Pink, but with a small embroidered heart over the chest, like a brand.

He moved faster now, riffling through the rack with growing urgency. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink with white trim. White with pink trim. Pink with ironic text. Pink with unironic text. Pink with a bear.

Hyuntak froze.

The bear was holding a heart. What was with Valentine’s and bears? Bears were not logical symbols of romance, unless romance was getting your neck mauled out in the wilderness. That was the only plausible reason a bear would make contact with a heart. It was vaguely horrifying, when given thought.

He made a low, animal sound in the back of his throat and shoved the entire section aside. The motion earned him a startled look from a nearby shopper, who clutched a discounted skirt to her chest and edged away.

“Sorry,” Hyuntak said reflexively, then frowned. He was not sorry. He was persecuted and his every reaction was justified.

He took two steps back and surveyed the wider display, reassessing. Alright. New tactic. Shirts were clearly compromised. Apparel, in general, perhaps, was a minefield.

Hyuntak nodded once to himself, satisfied with this conclusion, and pivoted away from the clothing section. Apparel was too loaded. Too interpretive. Vulnerable to Seongje’s mouth and terrible words. He could already hear it—Oh, you noticed my shoulders. Oh, you imagined me wearing this. Oh, pink suits me, don’t you think?—and the thought alone made his molars grind.

No. Clothing was out.

Hyuntak stormed in whatever direction his feet took him, before barrelling into a solid wall. He jerked, fumbled back, and blinked. Then he did a double take and leaned closer, scrutinizing the wall’s face.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded, an angry, embarrassed flush coming over his cheeks.

The wall gave him an incredulous look, down to his shoes and back up to his face. The wall grimaced. “Well, hello to you, too, I guess,” the wall said. Hyuntak frowned at the wall, and then his eyes darted down unbidden, and he frowned deeper at the wall’s t-shirt.

“Horror!” he exclaimed, drawing back, crossing himself quickly.

The wall—Suho—gave him a suspicious look, rubbing at the back of his neck. Despite the gesture usually indicating nervousness, he just looked confused. “What?”

A moment later, the wall's—Suho’s—boyfriend emerged from behind an actual wall and gave him an equally dubious look. Hyuntak took a moment to take him in, the amber-tan seriousness of him contained against the harsh daisy glow of the store back, against the assault to his senses happening down below, and could not stop the twitch happening on his face.

“What?” he, too, asked.

“...” said Hyuntak, and faltered in alarm when no sound came out. He blamed God for instilling him with poor verbal skills that always failed him in times of desperate need.

Again, he studied the wall—Suho—and his boyfriend. Suho was wearing a garish shirt with bright pink, glitter letters reading 'I'm stupid!', and Sieun was wearing the matching sibling that read 'I'm fucking stupid.'

Hyuntak stared for a moment, too bewildered to attempt to form words again, then took a step back. He shook himself off, wondering if this store sold bleach. He gagged. "That... is wrong on so many levels."

"I know what you're thinking, and if you say it, I will kill you," Sieun warned. He was looking more like the surliest kitten alive than usual. "Don't stereotype us."

"I'm not stereotyping you," Hyuntak said. "It's a well known fact that you're a pillow princess."

A laugh startled out of Suho while Sieun fixed him with wild, crazy, glaring eyes. “Say that again,” he said softly, which was never a good sign. His hands were already curling, the way they did when he was trying to stave off homicide. “Say it again and I will peel you like a fruit.”

“I am not afraid of you,” Hyuntak declared, automatically defensive. This was not true. He was extremely afraid of Sieun, but principle demanded defiance. “Also, that is not the point. Why are you wearing that?”

Suho looked down at his shirt, then back up, and gave a shrug. “It was half off. Valentine's special.”

“Awesome,” Hyuntak said, lacking all the enthusiasm normally accompanying the word. “I can’t believe you’ve fallen victim to consumerist St Valentine’s. It’s a disaster. It’s allowing evil to prevail. It’s backing the greeting-card corporations on their rise to world domination. You’ve been franchised. Oh, the horror.”

Suho had the right of mind to appear almost ashamed. Not quite there, but close enough to recognize its beginning. He scratched at the back of his neck again, sheepish in a way that did nothing to mitigate the neon crime happening on his torso. “I mean,” he started, glancing sideways at Sieun for support and finding none, “it was, like, really cheap.”

“That,” Hyuntam said intensely, “is how they get you.”

Suho winced. “You say that about everything.”

“Because everything is how they get you!” Hyuntak snapped. He gestured at Suho’s chest, before wringing his hands tragically and desperately in front of him. “This is exactly the sort of slippery slope rhetoric capitalism thrives on. First it’s ‘really cheap’, then it’s ‘kind of funny’, then it’s ‘limited edition’, and before you know it you’re wearing a shirt that openly confesses to your cognitive failure and the acceptance of the gross exploitation of the working class. You are wearing ideological surrender across your chests.”

“It’s ironic,” Suho protested weakly, giving him a look to suggest he thought him insane.

“Irony is dead,” Hyuntak replied in despair. “It was murdered in cold blood by corporations that put bears on chalkboards and cards and t-shirts. What do bears have to show for romance? What?”

With another grimace, Suho reached out to pat his head, as he often did when he found Hyuntak to be particularly crazy. “I think you’re experiencing persecutory psychosis.”

Hyuntak opened his mouth to snap, and then made the judicial decision not to say anything uncouth to Suho in his boyfriend's frightening presence. Instead, he shook himself back to sanity. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Aren’t you meant to be soaking in rose-scented water and feeding each other grapes or something?”

Suho glanced at Sieun, then back at Hyuntak, and made a vague, helpless gesture with one hand. “We finished early,” he said. “They tried to upsell us a ‘couples mud cocoon’ and Sieun threatened to sue.”

Hyuntak nodded, solemn. Now this was pleasing. “As one should.”

Sieun eyed him more closely, head inclined to the left. “Why do you look like you’ve been dragged through hell?”

Hyuntak bristled. “I was navigating hostile territory.”

“It’s just the mall,” Suho said.

“No,” Hyuntak refuted. It was not just the mall. He could not imagine anything less enjoyable than the past five hours of his life. God forbid he was allowed to lament this tragedy. “It’sworse. This is Valentine’s retail. It’s predatory. Everything is pink, everything is screaming urgent romance, and I just saw a bear with a heart.”

Suho’s mouth twitched. “Again with the bears.”

“They’re everywhere,” Hyuntak insisted. “They’re watching. They know things.”

“I’ll level with you,” Suho said carefully, though Hyuntak didn’t fail to notice he was on the verge of laughter. He supposed that was par for the course, even if not the time. “I think you need to go somewhere for a very long time and heal. This level of illness can’t be good for you in the long run.”

Hyuntak scoffed. “I’m not ill. I’m sticking it to the man.”

“Huh,” Suho exhaled. One syllable, but so full of words Hyuntak was resistant to hear. “What a romantic ideology. Truly, you know the way to the heart. I am shocked—shocked I tell you—that you are alone on this fine Valentine afternoon, instead of off kissing on the clear blue ponds of Venice.”

Hyuntak scowled furiously, planting his fists on his hips with an angry harrumph. He did not enjoy being ignominiously spoken about as if he was little more than a temperamental pooch with the romantic expertise to match. He worked his jaw, glancing at their shirts again before wrenching his head away, glaring holes into the innocent employee restocking shelves nearby. He felt somewhat bad. The employee did not deserve it.

“I’m not alone,” he protested. “I have a date.”

He realized, too late, that he had not meant to tell them this. He didn’t have any leverage.

Suho’s eyes shifted slyly to Hyuntak’s face, and Hyuntak knew immediately what was coming. “Oh, yeah? That why you here? You shopping for them? Wow, Tak, who’s giving in to the regime now?”

“No,” Hyuntak insisted. “I am merely preempting further escalation by neutralizing a potential grievance point.”

“A grievance point,” Sieun echoed, bored. “Do you always talk like this, or is it part of the metal break?”

“It is not a mental break,” Hyuntak countered ferociously, before trailing off as he lost conviction. “More like… an adaptive strategy

“Uh-huh,” Sieun replied, eyes flicking down to Hyuntak’s clenched fists, then back up. “And who, exactly, is this… strategy for?”

Hyuntak hesitated. Just a fraction. Long enough to be damning.

Suho’s grin spread slowly, sharklike. “Oh my god,” he murmured. “You are shopping for them.”

“I am not shopping for him,” Hyuntak tossed back. If Suho was alone, he reckoned he would have thrown him out the window by now. Luckily for him, Sieun was here. “I’m shopping at him. There’s a difference.”

“There really isn’t,” Sieun said, with an unexpected amount of cheer in his voice. Hyuntak startled and took a step back, ensuring a wide berth between them. “What’s his name?”

At that, his spine stiffened, coiled for escape. “You don’t need to know that.”

By his side, Suho’s gaze sharpened, feral and delighted. “Holy shit. You picked up a stranger off the internet, didn’t you?”

Hyuntak opened his mouth and then closed it again. Very carefully, he said, “He’s not a stranger. He’s, like… a vetted collaborator.”

Suho’s eyes widened. “Oh my god. Like—Craigslist?”

“No,” Hyuntak said at once, appalled. “I’m not a moron.”

“That remains to be seen,” Sieun muttered.

Hyuntak ignored him. “He responded to a listing. There was criteria. A spreadsheet.”

“A spreadsheet,” Suho echoed faintly, a man standing at the edge of revelation.

“Yes,” Hyuntak said defensively. “And before you say anything, this was strictly transactional. A Valentine’s arbitrage arrangement. We exploit couples-only discounts by performing compulsory romance. That’s it.”

Suho stared at him.

Sieun stared at him.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Hyuntak cleared his throat, squaring out his shoulders and resolutely not looking at their shirts again. “I have a task to see to, and all you guys have achieved is upsetting my lunch. I would have been happy dying without ever seeing this. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Maybe.” He paused, then added, decisive, “I pray I never see you again.”

•

“Here,” Seongje said, thrusting a bouquet of lilies to Hyuntak’s chest. His jacket was off, now, slung over one shoulder and exposing the full garish pink of his jumper, an honest assault on the eyes. “For you, my sweet boyfriend. They reminded me of the white glimmer to your eyes.”

Hyuntak froze, his face downturned in revulsion. Both at the gesture, but also at the sheer stupidity of the flower choice. How does one manage to opt for lilies on a day like this?”

“Lilies mean death,” he informed him scornfully. “That’s a great message, Seongje, thank you. Happy Valentine’s day, I can’t wait for you to die.”

Seongje’s eyebrows shot up, and he turned his gaze down to the flowers in hand. “Well,” he said, “that’s disappointing."

idk man some pottery place

50% for couples

4:00PM

Never before had Hyuntak engaged in such blatant impertinence to art.

He was sitting at a table, shifting twitchily from side to side with an expression of unfathomable suffering. The bowl in front of him was botched. Terribly, awfully botched. He mourned the smooth white circumference it had once possessed, before he had taken a brush to it and marred its virtuous countenance. He fussed with the rim, trying to turn the marsh-mud brown of his paintjob less marsh-mud, succeeded only in muddying it further. He frowned. This was a deeply distressing situation.

In desperate consternation, he glanced over at Seongje beside him, hoping sight of the no-doubt travesty of the man’s own creation would ease his feelings of genuine contrite. Instead, he was filled with a fresh, unprecedented horror.

Not only was it neat, the colours unmuddled and clean, but he’d painted fucking bears around the bowls outer curve. One was wearing glasses and a terrible smirk, the other was brandishing a chopstick with a face of righteous outrage. Unmistakable. He felt a violent surge of injustice.

“Oh, fuck off,” he muttered, staring at it. He stared at it so hard his vision fuzzed at the edges, the room slanting ever so slightly as his brain refused to process the affront before him. The silence stretched uncomfortably around them at the first spoken interruption in a long while. Possibly years. It had, until now, only been broken by the occasional murmur and scratch of bristles from the surrounding couples also taking advantage of the 50% off deal.

“Fuck off,” he repeated. “You know how I feel about bears.”

Seongje didn’t look up from his bowl. Not even when Hyuntak jabbed his own paintbrush towards the ceramic crime scene. He was too busy adding a tiny pink heart between the two bears and humming quietly to himself. “They’re cute bears.”

“They are weapons,” Hyuntak grumbled. “They are vessels. And why—why does one of them have glasses? Is that meant to be you?”

Seongje paused, finally lifting his brush. He leaned back in his chair to appraise his handiwork with exaggerated seriousness, head lolled, lips pursed. “Wow,” he remarked. “You noticed. That’s really observant of you.” He let out a long breath, swishing his paintbrush in the water cup to the side. “Yes, obviously that bear is me.”

Hyuntak stared at the bear. Then at Seongje. Then back at the bear, whose tiny painted glasses sat far too smugly on its round little face. “You have taken your likeness,” he said hoarsely. “And transposed it onto ursine propaganda. Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

“That one’s you,” Seongje said after a moment of ensuing silence, nodding his head in direction. He grabbed his brush again, dipping it into black paint.

Hyuntak’s gaze snapped back to the bowl. The chopstick bear was mid-fury, tiny mouth open in what could only be described as an impassioned rant. Its eyebrows were angled aggressively downward. The resemblance was—unfortunate.

“I do not look like that,” Hyuntak said.

Seongje added a minuscule stress mark to the bear’s forehead. “You do. It’s cute.”

To stop himself from stabbing something in the head, he looked back down at his own bowl. It was... lumpy. The glaze had pooled unevenly along one side and gone patchy; the colour was inconsistent and amalgamating; the rim looked like it had been gnawed on by a racoon with anxiety. All in all, a terrible outcome.

“This is humiliating,” he deplored. “It looks diseased.” He rotated the bowl a few degrees, then back again, as if the right angle might reveal some hidden virtue. It did not. “I have ruined this object beyond repair.”

Seongje turned to give it a once over in appraisal, a grimace pulling at his lips before he cleared it with obviously arduous effort. He shook his head, focusing back onto his own bowl, where he was painting more hearts around the two bears. Hyuntak tried very hard to not consider the implications of that, but he had never been good at not inciting his own pique.

“Stop adding hearts. Why are you adding hearts? Those bears are not in love,” Hyuntak reasoned, strangling the air in front of him. We are not in love went unvoiced, but Hyuntak felt confident that Seongje heard it regardless.

“Darling,” Seongje sighed, unchastised, bringing a hand down to Hyuntak’s thigh and squeezing. “Please calm down.”

“There is no love,” Hyuntak insisted.

“Of course, sweetheart,” Seongje intoned patiently, turning to favour him a look through his lashes, satirically fond with understanding. The panic rose in Hyuntak’s throat. “Let's just paint.”

“No love,” Hyuntak said again. He had forgotten any other word existed.

“Okay,” Seongje allowed, in the tone one might use for a man standing on the edge of a roof. “No love.”

Hyuntak exhaled sharply through his nose. “Thank you.”

Seongje nodded, solemn. Then he leaned back in his chair and, with infuriating casualness, dipped his brush back into pink. “No love,” he repeated, and painted another two hearts.

Something in Hyuntak wanted to shrivel up and die. He thought about shrivelling up and dying right now, because then he would not have to sit next to Seongje while he made an artistic rendition of their fictitious relationship. There was no way to save face in this situation. Nothing to say, nothing to do, and so he might as well take the next best option and die.

He was distracted by these thoughts as Seongje said, “If you were a bear, would you wear bottoms or a top?”

“Neither. I would be a bear,” Hyuntak replied.

“Incorrect,” Seongje said. “Bears are notoriously pants-optional. It’s a whole discourse.”

“There is no discourse,” Hyuntak sneered. “They are animals.”

“So, shoelaces are permitted winding philosophical sentience but bears are not allowed to wear clothes?” Seongje asked, sounding amused. There was a touch of something else, too, which made Hyuntak’s brow furrow, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Seongje leant over to paint a tiny paw print on the side of Hyuntak’s bowl, earning him an enraged huff and swat. “You really have some fucked up priorities.”

Ignoring that, Hyuntak bent forward to squint at the offending paw print. It was irritatingly neat. Five tiny toes, evenly spaced. “You have defiled my work with your bourgeois bear appendage.”

Seongje rolled his eyes, but beckoned Hyuntak closer. For some reason, Hyuntak obliged, swaying into Seongje’s space before his mind could catch up. He froze, then realized it would only look worse if he pulled back now, so stayed where he was, clenching his jaw.

And then, before he had time to contemplate why the hell he had just listened, he felt a splodge of something wet and thick hit his cheek. His brain stuttered, entirely derailed from its previous trajectory of bear-based grievance.

Acting on instinct, he rounded, grasped the pot of pink paint, and poured it over Seongje’s head.

Seongje chortled, a startled thing, then went deadly serious. Pink slid down his hair in slow, viscous rivulets, clinging to his fringe, catching on the bridge of his glasses before dripping off the frame and splattering onto the table. A drop fell from the tip of his nose. Another traced the curve of his ear. His jumper—already an egregious crime—darkened several shades where the glaze soaked in.

Hyuntak sat frozen, pot still upended in his hand, chest heaving. The shock of his own action registered belatedly, a delayed pain response. He stared at Seongje’s face, at the paint smeared across his temple, his cheekbone, at the way it had somehow managed to catch in his eyelashes.

“Oh,” he started to say, feeling his lips notch upwards. “Oh, you deserved—”

He never got to finish.

At that moment, Seongje lunged.

Hyuntak barely had time to register the movement before a cold, wet slap hit his shoulder and exploded outward, glaze splattering across his sleeve, collar, and neck. He yelped, an undignified, affronted sound, and recoiled, nearly tipping his chair backwards.

“You goddamn psychopath,” Seongje said, voice low with awe and promise as he dipped both hands into the nearest paint cup. Blue. A deep, treacherous cobalt. “Remember you started this.”

Hyuntak’s brain struggled for a response: deny culpability, cite provocation, threaten litigation, flee the premises. None of them arrived in time to be useful. So, instead, he shrieked.

It was an indignant sound, ripped straight from the depths of his soul, and it echoed embarrassingly loud across the pottery studio. A woman three tables over dropped her brush. Someone else gasped. A child stopped spinning their wheel and stared.

“You assaulted me first,” Hyuntak snapped, scrambling backwards on his chair as Seongje advanced, blue paint cupped menacingly in both hands, dripping through the gaps of his fingers onto the floor.

“That was flirting,” Seongje corrected, grinning maniacally, and then hurled the paint.

Hyuntak ducked. Mostly.

The cobalt caught him along the collarbone and bloomed outward, staining his sweater in a spreading bruise of colour. It was cold. It was wet. It was—oh, God. It was soaking in.

He stared down at himself in burgeoning horror. “This is wool,” he whispered. “This is natural fibre.” He lifted his head, eyes dark cavities, poised now with one intention in mind. He surged to his feet so fast his chair screeched back, legs wobbling as glaze slicked underfoot. “Oh, you are dead.”

As Hyuntak scooped low to grab the nearest weapon, Seongje yelped, more surprised than alarmed, stumbling sideways. Hyuntak snatched up a paint sponge from the table and slammed it directly into his chest. The sponge was loaded, though Hyuntak had no idea with what colour, only that it was wet and plentiful. On impact it burst out, splattering across Seongje’s jumper and collarbone in an indecipherable smear of yellow and green.

Seongje staggered back a step, blinking down at his chest as if he’d been shot. He looked up slowly. There was a beat, just one, where something feral recalibrated behind his glasses. “Oh,” he drawled. “Oh. Okay.”

And then, he moved

This time, Hyuntak was ready. He seized the water cup first, because it was closest and because, in a moment of crystalline clarity, he realized that diluted paint was still paint and water was an accelerant. He flung it with a vicious snap of the wrist and caught Seongje square in the face.

There was a sudden, startled inhale, a muffled “fuck” as water and residual pigment cascaded down his glasses, plastering his fringe flat to his forehead. Blue streaked into pink, bled into yellow, dripped in violent streams down his nose and jaw.

For half a second, the studio was silent. Hyuntak stood there, breathing hard, cup dangling from his fingers, the realization of what he had just done crashing over him in a delayed wave of regret and exhilaration. “I—” he began.

Seongje wiped his face with the heel of his hand, smearing the colours further. He squeezed his eyes shut, then open. Gasping, he laughed, the sound punched out of him. It was loud and bright and completely unhinged, echoing off the tiled floor. “Oh my god,” he wheezed. “You’re insane.”

“You’re dripping on the floor,” Hyuntak retorted, pointing at the spreading puddle beneath Seongje’s feet. “You’rea slip hazard.”

“Yeah?” Seongje said, already reaching for another paint pot; a vivid red this time. “Call KOSHA.”

He threw it.

Hyuntak screamed again, less dignified than before, and barely managed to twist aside. The red missed his face by inches and detonated on the table behind him. He ducked, sliding beneath his chair and the table to straighten at the other side, grabbing a startled couple’s palette full of mixed paints to hold it up by his shoulder, a threatening arc aimed squarely at the man still beaming a few feet away.

Seongje blinked. Then he chortled again, almost breathless, eyes alight in a way that made Hyuntak's spine itch. "Oh, you're unhinged. That’s so hot.”

“Do not sexualize me,” Hyuntak warned, drawing the palette further back.

Seongje lifted his hands in mock surrender, red-blue paint dripping languidly from his fingers. “Hey. Hey. Babe. Relax. We’re in public, I can’t be getting… y’know. There’s kids around.”

(As to be expected, five seconds later they were unceremoniously kicked out.)

Hyuntak, Humin, and Yeongi’s apartment (with only Yeongi, adult extraordinaire, on the lease)

5:25PM

“Suho called earlier to inform me you had gone crazed and your psychotic break was nigh upon us, but I must admit I was not expecting this,” Yeongi said, from where she was sat against the bath tub and holding the water to Hyuntak’s head. He watched as viscid dollops of colour slid in antipathetic reluctance from the clumps of his hair to slap against porcelain foundation. There was an impatient, awkward jangle of energy to his limbs, restrained within his too-big body forced to be a flopped cloth slung across the lip of the basin. His elbows were chafing just so against the sides, and he had impaled himself on the brim just enough for the line of contact a few inches beneath his sternum to feel chronic.

He brushed a hand across his transpyloric plane with a wince, and then a lour.

“Spho ish a pssher an’ a mpph er,” Hyuntak said sourly. That was not at all how it was meant to come out. He spit the water from his mouth, tasting the sweet, artificial sickliness of paint behind his gums, and tried again. “Suho is a traitor and a blasphemer.”

Contributing no verbal response, Yeongi adjusted her grip on the showerhead to angle it more directly against Hyuntak’s scalp. The water drummed against his skull, sluicing off the few remaining stranglers of blue-pigment.

Hyuntak watched them go with bleak, hapless resignation. It appeared, to him, the remnants of an October oceanic catastrophe, where the hurricanes were impending and precariously wanton. A whale had died up there, a ship had capsized, and now their bathroom had become the seabed grave. Water seeped along his temples and into his ears. It made a horrible, hammering roar inside his skull, drowning him gently with gentle hands and gentle cooes to go to the light. He would have preferred a more savage death, but he supposed beggars were compelled to take what they could get.

“You are going to suffocate in the bathtub,” Yeongi said, sounding entirely too unperturbed by the possibility. She was an indefatigible, fiendish girl and he could not imagine why he liked her so much. “Can you tilt your head to the left? No, your other left. Hyuntak, that is quite literally still right.”

With a sound of profound offense, he rolled his shoulders and attempted to comply. This was, unfortunately, rendered difficult by the fact his neck was currently being used as a ballast for his entire upper body, and so any tilt more severe than two degrees threatened to dislocate something vital lower down in the structure of his spine. That or send him toppling over to join the deep cerulean necropolis.

“There,” he stated, voice muffled into porcelain. “Is this what you want? To snap my vertebrae? To harvest my spinal column?”

Yeongi paused for exactly one beat, then turned the showerhead slightly so the water hit him directly in the ear.

Hyuntak yelped, jerking so hard he nearly headbutted the faucet. “Assault!” he sputtered. “That is assault! Barbarity! I have been massacred! Do you have any idea how you have atrocitied?”

“I don’t think that’s the proper–” Yeongi began, before cutting herself off, clearly labelling it a moot point.

Hyuntak spat again. “It’s the proper verb,” he insisted, though it came out as a wet, gurgled affront.

“It’s not a verb at all,” Yeongi pressed, and then, without warning, shifted her grip and pressed the showerhead flush to the side of his skull, perhaps attempting to pressure-wash the insanity out. “Hold still. You still have blue in your hairline. And—fucking hell, my man—why is there red under your ear? Did you bleed?”

In one uncontrolled motion, his limbs flailed out and his head thrashed wildly, saved only from certain death by Yeongi’s hand reaching out to snag his collar. He choked, coughing aggressively, and gasped more water into his already deluged lungs. With a hand between his shoulder blades, he was shoved ignobly back into position.

“I did not bleed,” he blurbled. He was intrinsically offended by the implication that Seongje’s paint-violence had managed to penetrate him beyond psychological damage. “It is artisanal, I think. Or maybe I’m thinking of artistrical. I’m not sure. It’s hard to think when you are bludgeoning my head with water.”

Yeongi sighed in all the insouciant serenity of being grateful you were not this mental, and tugged her fingers through his hair. She was a woman engineered for triage, and Hyuntak, unfortunately, unwittingly, was patient zero.

The water streamed down his face, down his mouth, down his throat. Hyuntak coughed and gargled and tried very hard not to consider the fact that he was being drowned by a woman who had seen him in the nude more times than the situationships he clung to in college. It was a mistiful and mortifying ordeal all round.

"Stop making that noise," Yeongi demanded.

"I'm not making a noise," Hyuntak countered, and immediately proved himself a liar by gagging. Water and paint and perhaps a small part of his soul drifted into the drain. It had finally escaped his ears. He bid it farewell and good luck.

Yeongi's hand slid across his scalp, fingers parting damp strands. "Okay," she said a moment later. "I see the problem."

Hyuntak lifted a finger, weakly. "I have a lot of problems."

"No," Yeongi revised. "Not your personality. Your hair." She pinched a section between two fingers and tugged gently. It did not move. “Well, it was your own fault,” she proclaimed.

“I was lured into ambush,” Hyuntak argued morosely, face mashing into porcelain as he lost strength in his neck and dropped it.

Yeongi made a sound that might have been sympathy had she not been born possessing the spirit of a tax auditor. Her commiseration had always been as federal as it could come. “You were lured,” she repeated dryly. “Into an ambush. At a pottery studio.”

“Yes,” Hyuntak said, voice pressed into the basin and thus imbued with an undercurrent of tragic and gloomy righteousness, as should any man in his predicament. “It is the most insidious kind.”

Yeongi turned off the showerhead.

The sudden silence hit his ears as a new form of violence, though thankfully much kinder than the last. The bathroom whispered its next, impending machination. Somewhere in the apartment, a television did what televisions did. Somewhere else, the universe continued its campaign of persecution.

Hyuntak twisted to blink up at the ceiling light, water dripping from his lashes and down the bridge of his nose. "I have survived," he whispered, rapturous.

•

“I am not wearing that,” Hyuntak said, scowling.

“Why not?” Yeongi held the shirt up to her own chest, twisted left and right, then regarded Hyuntak rather accusingly. “I think it’s nice. You have to look the part, Mr Go. It’s like… a requisite of high dining.”

“It is beige,” Hyuntak said, as if that were indictment enough. And it should be. He made a swooping gesture towards the corpse of his wool sweater collapsed against the final, dank resting space of his bedroom floor. It had once been his favourite item of clothing, and now it was a fallen victim of bioterrorism.

From his perch on Hyuntak’s bed, Humin raised a hand, and then dropped it when he caught himself. “I don’t think fancy restaurants give their patrons access to paint.” He cocked his head, eyes closing in that way strenuous thought, mapping each word across his eyelids as they came to him. “Well, maybe. I did eat paint back in middle-school,” he finished, looking faintly pleased with himself for having participated.

Ignoring the anecdote, Hyuntak did have to admit Humin had a point. (As a general rule, he hated when Humin had a point. The moments of which this occurred were when the world had slipped off its axis and was now rolling, loose and ungoverned, into the nearest ditch. An anomaly so drastic even Atlas had dropped the ball—both in the figurative and physical sense.)

Yeongi sighed and swivelled back to his closet, ruffling through his dismal array of clothing options. “How many blue jumpers do you need?” she asked, nettled. “You need colour.”

“Blue is a colour,” Hyuntak grumbled, picking at a loose piece of carpet fluff that had stuck itself to his damp, bare torso. He slumped against the wall, spreading his legs out to kick against his bedpost. He raised a brow as Humin detangled from his pretzel-knot in the middle of his bed and reached behind him.

“Fine,” Yeongi yeilded, hanging a few options onto her forearm. “What were you hoping to wear tonight, then?”

“Agggh!" he said unhelpfully.

“Thank you, Hyuntak," Yeongi acknowledged. "I'll keep that in mind."

He pried the pillow Humin had lobbed at him from his face. Through his strands of still wet hair, he threw Humin a look of the mortally wounded, clutching the pillow as a shield between both hands.

Unrepentant, Humin beamed at him serenely, having never once experienced shame. That required an application of social aptitude of which Humin simply did not possess. Not because he was stupid or anything—and Hyuntak would kill you for even thinking that—but because to him the world was a utopia in which contrition was a redundant, impractical concept. Hyuntak would never want to see the mingled understanding of guilt on Humin’s soft features.

“You look like a wet cat,” he offered genuinely an instance later.

“Thank you,” Hyuntak said. “Cats do not get waterboarded by their roommates.”

“You were not waterboarded,” Yeongi soothed, emerging from the closet with an armful of garments, a fatigued stylist. “You were rinsed.”

“I was brutalized,” Hyuntak corrected.

“You were blue,” she countered, and tossed a dark charcoal button-down at his face. “Here. Take one of Humin’s.”

He caught it just as Humin piped up to ask: “Is he hot?”

"Thats irrelevant," he said at once, clutching the shirt tighter.

Yeongi paused mid tag-check. Very slowly, she lifted her head. "Oh," she exhaled.

Hyuntak narrowed his eyes. "Oh what?”

"Oh nothing," Yeongi replied briskly. "Just that I have never in my life heard you answer a question that quickly unless the answer was yes."

"It was not yes," he retaliated. “It is not yes.”

Humin blinked, and then went bugeyed. "So he's ugly?"

Silence ensued, stretching dreadfully across the room.

“That is also not—why are those the only two options available to you?” Hyuntak asked, guiding his arms into the sleeves and beginning to button the placket. He stared in aghast at Humin, as he had just revealed an unhealed wound in the fabric of reality, one that would never again be stitched shut.

“Because,” Humin explained, like it was obvious, “people are either hot or ugly. Sometimes they’re both, but that’s just hot again. It’s a circle. Or a… venn diaphragm?” (“Diagram,” Hyuntak supplied.) “It’s a venn diagram, but like, ugly is absorbed, so it’s all one.”

“Thats not how venn diagrams work,” Hyuntak said moodily, fastening another button. He should have known better than to try and glean normal, reassuring conversation from his roommates. “Thats just a circle. You were right the first time.”

“That,” Yeongi murmured, “is certainly a worldview, Baku.”

“It is,” Humin agreed. He swung his legs off the bed and padded closer, bare feet silent on the floor. He peered down at Hyuntak like Hyuntak was a museum painting titled Man In Denial, Exhibit A. “So? Which is he?”

Hyuntak stalled on the fourth button of his shirt to give ample time to consider this, which was awful and he regretted itimmediately.

(Seongje’s lips quirked higher on the right than the left (he’d noticed this almost too fast, for someone claiming full professional disengagement) and his canine teeth were sharp enough that the crests caught the light and looked slashed and forever wet. His eyes were a deep grey, a stormcloud, a harbinger of lightning, speaking of an intensity that only came out in the most emotionally charged moments. It was all offset by the strange, incongruous softness to his face (roundness his traitorous mind provided, the mental image of a stupid bespeckled bear superimposed over that of a grinning Seongje) and he had to admit. Well, he had to admit he wasn’t ugly, for certain. Attractive, undoubtedly, but perhaps in all the wrong ways.)

“He’s alright,” Hyuntak answered lamely, his mind switched off. Something had imploded or crumpled or simply shut down. Something had connected that had not been connected before, hotwiring all the way to his very core and sending a fracture cleaved through him, until he felt about as put together as his buttons. “He’s unremarkable,” he tacked on, clearing his mind of canines and dangerous smiles from boys who slip under his skin.

“Oh, girl,” Yeongi said, sotto voce. Hyuntak was startled to catch her veering into sympathy. “You’re fucked.”

a fancy restaurant hyuntak forgot the name to

discounted prix fixe menu

6:55PM

Seongje was holding—

Okay, flowers were too generous a word, but.

“Daisies are a weed,” Hyuntak informed him.

Seongje stared at him from where he was sitting at the table. Hyuntak stared at him from where he stood a little to the edge. If they continued like this for any longer without blinking, Hyuntak reckoned, someone was going to lose an eye.

“Is that seriously what you’re focusing on?” Seongje asked. His face morphed into a scowl, then smoothed out. “I brought you a—”

“Weed,” Hyuntak said blandly. He shook his left foot out, then his right, like a bird preening. His slacks were too tight, too constricting. He did not feel put together. He felt stuffed into too-small skin with all his bones chaffing and grinding together all wrong. “I think I preferred when you were divining my funeral.”

Devious, Seongje flashed him a show of quicksilver teeth. “You’re so hard to please.”

Hyuntak poked out his tongue as discreetly as possible and sat down. “I think you’re doing it on purpose,” he said, watching the way the light flashed, an unexpected star, across the planes of Seongje's glasses. It was dim in the dining area, an ambling warmth, golden and intimate and slow. Hyuntak had never considered light to be something possible of slowness before, but here it lazed over the linen tablecloths, draped over the stems of wine glasses and cutlery, pooled into the dip between Seongje’s collarbones and the hollows of his face.

It was obscene, frankly. Atmosphere as foreplay.

“You can’t be this ignorant about flowers,” he went on, easy and calm and just the slightest bit dour. “You’re just trying to piss me off. You can’t even buy daisy bouquets."

“I didn’t buy them,” Seongje said, a defensive inflection to his voice. He got this look on his face like the two sides of his mouth were trying to pull in opposite directions, tugging the skin taut. “I, er, liberated them. In spirit.”

Hyuntak was not amused. “From where? Are you fucking offering me roadside vegetation?” he inquired dubiously.

Seongje rearranged the glasses on his nose, knuckling them into a more severe resting place and gazed ardently across at him. He assumed a love-lorn sort of expression that made him look, mostly, constipated. “I figured you’d appreciate the application,” he said, once again, defensive, and Hyuntak was, once again, emphatically not amused. “Zero market deception involved, scout’s honour. Unevil flowers, Tak. Unevil.”

“You’re so stupid,” Hyuntak announced astutely.

“Hyu-u-untak,” Seongje droned, shoving the handful of illicit daisies under his nose. He was looking darkly up at Hyuntak from beneath mused hair, brow knit in hurt that was painfully insincere. “I put so much effort into this. I wanted to prove that you, baby, are the only man I want. I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I do nothing all day but pine. Look at me! I’m withering away.”

“Seongje,” Hyuntak groaned, not prepared to give an inch. With a shudder, he pressed his knuckles to his eyes.

“I think I get it now,” Seongje continued, undeterred. “Why poets wrote sonnets. It’s you, Hyuntak. It’s always been you. It’s destiny. Fate brought us together, two souls colliding, celestial. And you, Hyuntak, are more celestial than all. The stars pale in comparison to you, made a mockery by your angelic aglow.”

“Seongje,” Hyuntak said again, insolent, still refusing to pull away from his fists. “Shut up.” He greatly considered getting up and punching Seongje's nose into teeny-tiny smithereens, and then stomping on said smithereens some more just to stamp it in. For good measure.

“Go Hyuntak,” Seongje announced, staring up with a clang. Hyuntak slumped deeper into the table, hoping it would swallow him whole. He should have just accepted the daisies. Why did he not accept the daisies? He abstained from weeping into his forearms.

“Light of my life. Fire of my loins,” Seongje went on, pulling out the chair to stand on. There was a clatter as he struggled to compose himself atop it, demonstratively unagile, and then he reached down to grab one of the empty glasses, brandishing it high, crespuscular rays catching and glinting in the low-lit room. “My sin, my soul. I ache for you, I burn.” With a snarl, Hyuntak looked up from his elbows to glare woefully at him.

Seongje met his eyes with a bright grin, abusing metaphor without a second thought to its wellbeing. “Behold!” he thundered, addressing the room at large now. He wobbled on the chair as his pleas turned ever more impassioned, sweeping his glass in a wide arc that nearly decapitated a passing server. “The vision who haunts my dreams. From the moment I saw him, I knew! I knew that my life as I understood it was over. Ruined!”

A fork clinked somewhere to their left. A woman choked, a group near them laughed, someone clapped . A waiter froze mid-pour.

Hyuntak could tell his cheeks were flushed; he could feel them, hot and harrowed. He wanted to fold himself into one of the napkins to be disposed of swiftly. “Down,” he hissed, mortified beyond language. “Get the fuck down.”

Seongje pressed on, voice rich with theatrical agony. “Each night I lie awake, trembling, thinking of your spreadsheets. Of your contingency columns. Of your beautifully itemized disdain, writ both in word and the slope of your mouth—”

Hyuntak shot upright so fast his chair legs scraped against polished wood. “I will kill you.”

“—your pivot tables!” Seongje roared, undaunted. “Your risk assessments! Oh, Hyuntak, architect of my ruin! Auditor of my affections! Have mercy!”

“Seongje,” he said through his teeth, every syllable strained through panic. There was a certain knell of gloom to the cadence. “You are not funny. You’ll get us kicked out.”

“The discount is secondary to love,” Seongje declared in grandeur, lifting the glass higher. Now, his efforts had been redoubled, as if this where the proof of their undying devotion. “For what is thirty percent off when compared to the incandescent blaze of our union? What is prix-fixe when measured against destiny?” He pressed a hand over his heart, glass still raised. “I cannot help myself! My love knows no bounds! It bleeds forth like—”

“I’ll show you bleeding,” Hyuntak warned evenly. “You’ll bleed for the rest of your life.”

A ripple of unsure amusement ran through the surrounding tables.

Seongje pointed at him triumphantly. “You see? Even now he wounds me with his wit! My cruel, radiant beloved! Strike me down again, for I deserve no less!”

Hyuntak buried his face in his hands.

“Sir,” a server began, intensely troubled. Hyuntak related keenly, even from across the room. “Please come down from the furniture."

“Hyuntak!” Seongje boomed over him, voice cracking with his operatic sincerity. "—whose lips," he carried on, lowering his voice to a husky rasp that made the elderly couple at the adjacent table audibly gasp in admiration, "speak of revolution and shoelaces and yet tremble—tremble!---at the mere suggestion of shared dessert."

“Sir,” the server tried again.

"And yet," Seongje pressed on, undeterred, "and yet! He denies me! He scorns my daisies, my humble roadside offerings, my pure and weed-based devotion! Cruel Hyuntak! Ice-hearted Hyuntak! Have mercy on this wretched man who has trespassed upon your affections without permit—"

“Get. Down.”

From his elevated perch, Seongje leaned forward dangerously, peering down at him. “Kiss me,” he stage-whispered, loudly enough for the tables to hear. “Prove our love to the—”

Too fast to even think, Hyuntak launched forward and yanked the leg of the chair. It was undignified, yet steely. It was unsubtle, yet deliberate. It was, also, endlessly effective.

Seongje yelped as the balance shifted, windmilling once before hopping gracelessly back onto the ground. The glass wobbled in his hand before Hyuntak snatched it away and slammed it back on the table, sending him his most contemptuous glower of displeasure.

“Sit,” he ordered, low and lethal.

Seongje blinked at him then smiled, molten. With a sullen, obsequious sough, he crumpled back to his seat and set to cleaning his glasses. The light continued to unfurl languorously across him. “Whatever you say, baby.”.

•

“We all thought it was very romantic,” their waiter venerated, which was so foolish, as Seongje was clearly insane and he should be running fast in the opposite direction. He slid the full glass of wine towards Seongje, eyes wide, beeseeching. “We, um. We want to ask how long you’ve been together? We’re all curious. We’ve never seen anything like that before.”

For what must be the fifteenth time today, Hyuntak’s spirit tried to ascend.

“How long?” Seongje echoed, leaning back in his chair in casual, callous provocation. “It’s hard to measure time when you’re living in eternity. Minutes bleed into hours bleed into days. Has it been five minutes? Has it been five years? What is the difference? How do you measure time if not through the preservation of love?”

Hyuntak made a strangled sound.

The waiter’s eyes grew wetter. “That’s… wow.”

“We met,” Seongje continued with intense vehemence, glancing at Hyuntak with a frenzied look in his eyes, made only more crazy by the dilation of his glasses, “in my time of greatest need.”

The waiter leaned in, conspiratorial, desperate. Hyuntak could see him practically gnawing his nails to nubs. “So… how long?”

Seongje sloped his head to the right, considering. “Twelve hours,” he said finally. “I really needed pancakes this morning.”

The waiter began to blink, but it did not complete. Hovering, forever, in the midst of a dawning alarm. A burgeoning, cresting wave in the comprehension of the cerebral damage this man could inflict. Oh, how he related.

All Hyuntak could do was laugh. He felt light. Light like he was suspended somewhere above this all. Light like a black hole took breath. Light like everything was dissipating into the air around him. They, this. it looked so small from up here, so far away, an entire cosmological system breaching him from the happenings of his current transgressions. It made him feel better, to float in the void of liminality and observe his sad thoughts rather than have to feel them.

The waiter turned to him, eyes fraught and solicitous. “Sir?” he said, sending Seongje a wary glance before clinging back on Hyuntak like driftwood. “Are you safe?”

Again, Hyuntak laughed, unable to stop it. Laughing nonetheless and despite, struggling, laughing, choking on his own uncontainable air, laughing. It left him mostly a frantic screech, elusive, intangible, not a true laugh but nameless to anything else.

“Oh,” he said when he snagged a modicum of breath, voice echoing hollow in his throat. His delirium, it seemed, was boundless as the dawn. “Oh, you have no idea.”

dude who the fuck cares its a dessert place

two-for-one dessert platter

9:00PM

Hyuntak tried to hang himself with the jacket slung over his chair.

The dessert bar was bursting with that peculiar, overwhelming Valentine’s joy: a combination of cinnamon and synthetic roses, red-heart paper cut outs and fairy lights, music with too much ooohing and aaahing and seductive chimes to the instrumental. Hyuntak hated it. From now on he would wake in February full of dire dread about it all. There was too much love in the world; people should really learn to start hiding it. Sucking it up and holding it in. Away from the children! Away from him! Won’t anybody think of him?

He’d had enough mawkish, romantic allure forced upon him for one day. One month, maybe. Perhaps his entire life. It had all been rottenly invasive.

Opposite him, Seongje was lounged with his feet propped up on the booth, leaning back against the corner wall, and sacrificed to him what must have been a truly taxing twitch in sympathy. He slid over a mug of hot chocolate, steaming into the heavy, oppressive air. Hyuntak peered, distraught, into the mug. Whoever had invented hot chocolate with its spiral of cream and spatter of sprinkles should be taken to court, and then taken round back, and then put down via firing squad.

“There is glitter,” he agitated. He threaded his fingers around the mug and pulled it closer, incipient death promised through the warmth leaching into his palms. “In what world would I want glitter in my drink?”

“The world that is against you, Tak,” Seongje said mournfully, and reached out to pat his knee beneath the table. “Forever you must struggle against the tyrannical regime of edible sparkle, where the heartless makers of desert plot your downfall, and you will everlastingly excrete glitter, until kingdom come. Thy will be done in your bowels as it is done in—”

“You are ill,” Hyuntak intercepted.

“I am inspired,” Seongje proclaimed. “It’s a cruel existence you harbour. One day they may make you a martyr.”

"I will build your coffin," Hyuntak informed him in disdain, and ventured a small sip. Mid-swallow, he froze, eyes widening infinitesimally as microscopic shards of edible tyranny dissolved against his tongue. It did not taste like glitter—because glitter did not, in fact, taste—but that was almost worse. The deception of it. The silent violence.

A glimmering fleck clinging traitorously to his lip, he lowered the mug with grave ceremony. “It is crunchy,” he said. “If I go blind from ingesting craft glitter, you know what to do.”

“Oh, of course,” Seongje agreed, reaching across the board to spear a chocolate-shelled strawberry with a tiny gold fork. He held it up between them. “Open.”

Hyuntak wanted to be ill. He wanted to be ill all over Seongje's face.

“No,” he said with great vehemence, which seemed, now, somehow misplaced. He began to gnaw convulsively on his lip.

Across the table, Seongje rolled his eyes and shifted to lean forward, removing his hand to leverage against the table edge. “You got—” he started, and reached out without ample (or any!) warning to brush against his bottom lip. “There. Better?” he asked, pressing down on the flesh a moment too long before falling back into the leather booth.

A second later, Hyuntak was scooping his jaw from off the floor.

“My mouth,” he croaked, grieving its virtue.

“You had glitter,” Seongje said, a pleasant-sounding but fundamentally flimsy excuse. “I could not stand the way it made your lips shimmer. A man has urges, you know? And only so much willpower to forbear.”

“Oh my God,” Hyuntak wavered, feeling all the blood drain from his body, overwhelming disgust welling up in the empty tubes of his veins. “You are not allowed to have urges.”

“Cruel,” Seongje sorrowed. He popped the strawberry into his own mouth instead, chewing pensively. “You deny me rhapsodic romance, you deny me lavishing you in petal, you deny me, now, the base instinct to admire your shimmering lips. What else is left for a man?”

“Castration?” suggested Hyuntak.

Seongje let out a long, low whistle, spearing another strawberry. “God, baby. You’re so hot when you talk like that.”

Hyuntak decided Seongje was abnormal, and therefore his perceptions where screwed. “Stop eating so much chocolate, you’ll ruin your figure.”

“You must have dedicated hours to appreciating my figure,” Seongje said, piling a handful of confectionery onto a little side plate to slide to his side, “for you to have so many worries at hand.”

“I’ll show you what I have at hand,” he grumbled, managing to wrestle the plate back. “I don’t understand how you’re eating all this. We literally ate dinner an hour ago.”

“The portions were tiny,” Seongje explained, sounding genuinely distressed by this. Or as distressed as somebody can sound while rending a brownie to eat. When he opened his mouth again, there was marshmallow stuck unattractively to his teeth. “I’m a growing boy.”

“You are a fully-grown man with a mortgage,” Hyuntak said bitterly, snatching one of the cookies from the platter to dunk into his cocoa. He watched, rapt with alarm, as it snapped in half and sunk to the bottom. “Oh.”

The cookie had vanished beneath the whipped-cream archipelago, swallowed whole by the chocolate depths. A single bubble surfaced. Popped. Gone. Two maritime disasters in a day. A new record; he was sure.

Seongje leaned over, peering into the cup with inappropriate fascination. “We lost him,” he said. “A brave soldier.”

“He had a family,” Hyuntak replied, rueful. He paused, then jumped back, quick as string twanging. “No. No, I am not doing that. I am not falling to your level of stupidity.”

“That’s a little mean.” Seongje sent him a lofty look.

"Durrr, I'm stupid," Hyuntak intoned, in a rather intense and impassioned impression of Seongje's voice. God that thought contained too many 'i's. He shook himself off, rolling his wrists until he felt Hyuntak again. “What is happening to me?”

Seongje blinked at him three times. Then, very slowly, he reached for a macaron, held it up like a communion wafer, and said, “Body of Christ—”

Hyuntak slapped it out of his hand.

It ricocheted off the dessert board and landed icing-side down on the polished wood table with a wet, defeated splat. The macaron lay there, pink innards bleeding onto the lacquered oak, a desecration of requiem mass.

Hyuntak stared at the corpse.

Seongje stared at Hyuntak.

“Well,” Seongje said, tearing off another piece of brownie. “I guess that’s that, then.”

um an arcade

double up on all credits

10:15PM

Hyuntak had never been this illegal so much in one day. It was getting to his head.

“None of this is illegal,” Seongje sounded reason. He was tapping against the credit screen, attempting to load up the token-card they had swindled in the name of budding romance. He clobbered his thumb against the uncooperative machine a few more times; evidently it was on the fritz. Or, maybe, it just found their skullduggery deplorable and so had decided to deprive them of digital arcade credit.

The machine beeped in monotone, bureaucratic dissent.

Hyuntak leaned his hip against the side of the machine, folding his arms as a shudder ran through him. “It knows,” he hissed darkly. “It can sense our moral decay.”

“It’s a touchscreen,” Seongje replied, jabbing at it again. “It can barely sense my finger.”

Another beep. A red error message flashed, then vanished. For a split second it emitted a shriek of retribution, and then allowed Seongje to tap onto the next screen. He exhaled in relief, pressing the button to add credits. It did not like that.

ERROR. The screen flared. TRY AGAIN.

Slowly, he turned his head to Hyuntak. Neon lights flashed over his face in vibrant pulses: green, then magenta, then a seizure—he meant blue—and making him look briefly embalmed. “You insulted it.”

He slapped the side of the screen with a flat palm.

ERROR. The screen screamed. ROUGH HANDLING. TRY AGAIN.

At once, Hyuntak bolted ramrod with surprising alacrity. “It accused you,” he burst, vindicated. “Rough handling. It knows, I told you so. We’re done.”

“It’s a stock message,” Seongje protested, though he did remove his hand from the machine. He squinted at the screen, a flicker of remorse crossing his features. “Why is it yelling? Is it meant to do that?”

Because it was. The font had shifted from polite sans-serif to something blockier. Angrier. TRY AGAIN blinked with a frequency that was punitive and formidable.

Hyuntak leaned closer, lowering his voice to not startle the machine's sensitive inner workings. He supposed he, too, would be tetchy if he was forced to think in numbers all the time. It made him miserable enough to think about them once a day. “It’s escalating.”

“It’s buffering.” Seongje said, though he looked uncertain. He bent slightly at the waist, bringing his face level with the screen. “Hey,” he coaxed, pointing an accusing finger at the machine’s chest. (Did machines have chests? How was he pointing at its chest?) “Listen to us. We want games, machine, games! You inveigled us into your depths with promises of a couple's discount, promises of tokens, and yet where are these tokens? You hold out! I have to win him a teddy bear so he’ll let me hit!”

The machine responded by timing out.

Seongje slammed a fist against it, distraught. “You’ve cockblocked me,” he told the machine.

Too violently, Hyuntak recoiled back and very nearly concussed himself on an adjacent claw-machine. Briefly, he saw God, if God was an aureole in the centre of his vision and the faint, judgemental outline of a plush giraffe hovering in the air. “Go-raffe…” he exhaled, reverent.

He shook himself, steadying against the Perspex coffin of plush atrocities and glared ahead, rubbing at his skull. Sensation returned in the form of throbbing, strobing pain. Everything was shimmering, an array of colour striated with jagged lines of white.

Beside him, Seongje diverted from the machine to glance at Hyuntak instead. “Are you concussed? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“None,” Hyuntak said.

Seongje studied him. Then, with momentous deliberation, he lifted one finger.

Hyuntak narrowed his eyes. The arcade lights were doing something horrific to his retinas—pink slicing into green, blue pummeling off chrome edges, every surface varnished in hysteria. It hurt badly “One.”

“Wow,” Seongje breathed. “A miracle recovery.”

"I am not concussed," Hyuntak asserted, though he was still staring through Seongje at something metaphysical and faintly giraffa-shaped. "I’ve glimpsed the divine. He is plush."

"You saw God and it was a stuffed animal," Seongje summarized. "That tracks."

“Do not reduce my spiritual awakening,” Hyuntak groaned, pressing two fingers to his temple to keep the image of his deity from leaking out. “He is long-necked and merciful.”

Seongje glanced at the claw machine. “That one?” he asked, pointing.

Hyuntak followed his finger. The giraffe stared back with stitched vacancy. Its embroidered eyes held no earthly judgement. It was indeed long-necked, and it was indeed saintly merciful. “Amen,” Hyuntak whispered, crossing himself.

A long, contemplative beat ensued, of which Seongje spent the entirety of staring at Hyuntak in hazy fret. He nodded, then turned back to the malfunctioning credit kiosk and slapped it again. “Load the card,” he commanded. “He has communed with the giraffe.”

The screen flickered, unresponsive to religious appeal. ERROR. SESSION EXPIRED.

“Your god has abandoned you,” Seongje said.

PLEASE SEEK ASSISTANCE. The screen told them.

“For you or for him?” Seongje asked.

Hyuntak stared at the pulsing directive and felt, in that moment, profoundly seen.

•

“I have used my skills of cozenage to acquire us a working card from the lovely lady at the front,” Seongje said, lifting a hand to wave at an employee a few paces back. “I have also acquired her number, and so I have put her moral rectitude under acute scrutiny. So far? Not looking good.”

Hyuntak, who had been perched in a Mario Kart chair and watching previews of Yoshi absolutely annihilating Peach and Matio, glanced up. He’d spent the past five-or-so minutes trying to recover from the brain injury. All the same, it grew, flooding his mind like a wet headache. The sort that swished to one side with each movement and dripped down to his neck. He much preferred his headaches solid or ephemeral. Liquid pain was the worst kind.

“Too many fancy words…” he decried, slapping a hand over his eyes. “Ugh. Engh. Phmph.”

“Come again?” Seongje said pleasantly. “I don’t speak pathetic asshole.”

Around them, the arcade continued its decision to be coloured in epileptic fervour. Neon pulsed along the ceiling in relentless, seizure-inducing strips; acid green chasing fuschia and ultrablue in manic, sickening circles. The carpet—God the carpet—was a migraine rendered expanse of radioactive splatters and geometric squiggles. It looked, kindly, as if someone had consumed a glow stick and then vomited it back up.

Hyuntak pressed his fingers harder into his eyelids. “I am overstimulated,” he announced soberly. “Ow ow ow.”

A racing demo blared behind them, ENGINE REVVING!, followed by a tinny, digitized voice screaming START YOUR ENGINES!!! with three exclamation points exactly. Hyuntak flinched so savagely he nearly met Go-raffe again on the plastic steering wheel.

“Jesus,” Seongje muttered, catching the back of his jacket before his forehead could meet Nintendo litigation. “You’re like a fainting Victorian maiden. Should I fetch you smelling salts? A chaise lounge?”

“Why are engines being revved?” he moaned, peeling his hands from his face just long enough to show the machine what he thought of the racket. He turned back to face his prerendered-Yoshi and slumped, boneless.

Sliding hip first into the plastic racing chair beside him, Seongje held the newly-attained card between two fingers and smiled suggestively at him. “Do I rev your engine, eh? Eh?”

Hyuntak turned his head very slowly. The neon caught in Seongje’s glasses, split his pupils into twin spirals of arcade-blue and hazard-pink. He waggled his eyebrows. It was atrocious.

He spinned away, refusing to look at him directly. It burnt. It exposed something tender and photosensitive behind the retina, painfully translucent. “No,” he said tersely. “You stall it, if anything.”

Despite not seeing it, he could tell Seongje's grin had widened, wolfish. "Oh, so you've thought about my effect on your engine?” he asked, fumbling with the card swipe in the centre console of both carseats. “Do you lie awake at night dreaming of my horsepower? Well, let me tell you—”

“La la la la la,” Hyuntak screeched, slamming his hands over his ears. “Na eureureong eureureong eureureong dae—”

“—-it’s remarkably high,” Seongje continued, undeterred. “I could drive all night, if you catch my—”

“NA EUREUREONG EUREUREONG EUREUREONG—!” Hyuntak yowled. He was awfully off key.

“—drift. My acceleration astounds even me,” Seongje barrelled on, mercilessly. “Once I’m in there, baby, I—”

“NEO MULLEOSEOJI ANEUMYEON—”

“—ride fast and hard. But don’t you worry, it’s not the only thing that’s horse about me,” Seongje said, and then seemed to be finished.

Hyuntak stopped mid–battle cry. The arcade swallowed the last of his off-key shrieking and fed it back to him in a tinny echo from somewhere near the skee-ball lanes. A silence followed; the worst, most garish silence of Hyuntak’s previously-thought short life. Now, he realized, he had lived thirteen-hours too long.

It was a silence of scintillation. A narrow, electric gap between them.

He dragged his gaze up to catch on Seongje in his peripheral vision. “What,” he said, voice clipped into lethal syllables, “does that mean?”

Seongje blinked at him with radiant innocence. “What does what mean?”

“You said,” Hyuntak began, enunciating each word tangling into knots within his throat, “that it is not the only thing that is horse about you.” Seongje nodded, still messing with the console, frowning at their bright-pink arcade card. “Are you implying,” he continued, each word edged in steel, “that you possess equine attributes?”

Stalling, Seongje considered this, inclining his head. “Neigh. Only where it matters,” he said. Or maybe it had been ne. Knowing Seongje, it probably was not.

“Only where it matters,” he repeated coldly. “Define matters.”

Seongje finally got the card to register. The console chimed: CREDITS LOADED! 120!! flashing in jubilant yellow. He looked up at Hyuntak with a grin so smug it could have been patented. “You know,” he singsonged. “Endurance. Stamina. A certain… length.”

The hands went back to his ears. “IT GOES DOWN DOWN—”

“Please stop singing EXO,” Seongje said.

Hyuntak did not. “IT GOES DOWN DOWN BABY!” he howled, voice cracking embarrassingly on the second down as a digital Lakitu floated across his screen. “WE GOING COCOPOP!”

“You don’t even know the lyrics,” Seongje said, affronted. He slapped his steering wheel once, twice. “You know, when I was in highschool, I really wanted to fuck Bae–”

“Do not finish that sentence,” Hyuntak grimaced. “No one wants to know. I implore you: no one wants to know.”

“—khyun,” Seongje finished anyway, completely shameless. “It was formative. I learned things about myself that summer. It was the Monster music video, I think. I saw that lip ring and things connected in my psyche that had not been connected ever before.”

Thankfully, at that moment the screens flickered to character select. A parade of pixelated faces beamed up at them in violent saturation. Mario, Luigi, Peach, the Monkey. (He gave it a capital M, which is more than it deserved.)

“Stupid monkey,” he muttered under his breath, already twisting the wheel as far from hovering on him as possible.

“That’s Donkey Kong,” Seongje chastised. “Show some respect.”

“He has a tie,” Hyuntak replied. “Do you know who else wears ties—?”

“Please don’t make this a Marxism thing.” Seongje hovered his cursor over Bowser, then Yoshi, then back to Bowser with malicious deliberation. “I’m picking someone heavy,” he decided. “Raw power. Masculine presence. You, on the other hand—” He turned his wheel toward Peach “—seem like a Princess type.”

Hyuntak’s head snapped around so fast he nearly dislodged something cervical. “I am not a princess.”

“You’d look good in pink,” Seongje mused. “Maybe lace? Cute little panties with a bow. Oh, baby, I can’t, I’m hard.”

“I’ll show you hard,” Hyuntak said, then smacked him in the face.

The smack was a crisp palm-to-cheek connection that rang out beneath the arcade’s neon canopy. He watched in glee as Seongje’s head snapped to the side, tongue pressed against cheek. For a full second, he did not move. Eventually, he rolled his shoulders out and faced back.

There was a red mark already blooming across his cheekbone in the shape of Hyuntak’s hand. “…Worth it,” Seongje said hoarsely.

Hyuntak recoiled in disgust, staring at him in mounting, existential horror.. “You are perverse,” he said, voice hollow with the weight of revelation of having contaminated himself.

“You hit me because I called you a princess,” Seongje continued, rubbing his jaw with exaggerated reverence. “That’s the hottest thing that’s happened to me all day. Maybe my whole life? Can you do it again when you’re in lace panties?”

•

Mario Kart devolved into mutual vehicular homicide within thirty seconds:

“EAT SHIT!”

“Hyuntak, that mother is giving you the evil eye. Hey, hey. What the hell? Don’t shell me. Hey.”

“It was self-defence! You keep driving into me. Stop driving into me!”

“God. Can a guy not want to be inside you anymore?”

“WHAT!”

“I meant—in the game. In the kart. Jesus, you’re so sensitive. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“You said inside me.”

“I am currently attempting to overtake you from behind, Tak. Context clues? I mean, I would also like to just take you from behind, but—”

“You are disgusting.”

“You’re the one who chose Yoshi. That’s very submissive.”

“I chose Yoshi because he is green and the cutest character available, Seongje.”

“You chose Yoshi because he sticks his tongue out and swallows things whole.”

“You need mental hel— HEY! Stop trying to knock me off, what the actual fuck? Stop it! Hey, what the fuck, stop groaning.”

“Sorry. I was imagining you swallowing me whole.”

“OH MY GOD.”

“What? I’m immersed. It’s roleplay. You’re the dinosaur.”

“I am not a dinosaur. GET AWAY FROM ME.”

“I can’t. Drafting.”

“Do not draft me.”

“I’m drafting you so hard right now.”

“Seongje, I swear to God, if you say one more sexually loaded vehicular metaphor—”

“Vehicular? Baby, I’m about to rear-end you.”

“DON’T YOU DARE.”

“Too late—ohhh—”

“STOP MOANING!”

•

“Fucking hell, princess,” Seongje whistled, reclined against the wall as Hyuntak swished another ball into the basket, eyes tracking the recoil as it rolled obediantly back to him. “Where’d you learn to handle balls like that?”

The basketball machines were lined across the back wall, wedged between a machine that measured masculinity in how hard you could punch a bag, and a photobooth framed in blinking pink LEDs that read ‘KISS CAM’ in feverish rotation. The narrow court itself glowed orange beneath the backlight, the rim haloed in white. Every successful shot triggered a burst of electronic fanfare; every miss—well. He’d have to have missed to know.

Hyuntak did not look at him. Looking at him would imply acknowledgement, and acknowledgement was the first domino in a catastrophic cascade toward validating whatever obscene metaphor Seongje was no doubt attempting to erect. Instead, he caught the next ball mid-bounce and shot again in one smooth, economical motion.

Swish.

The net snapped. The machine erupted into celebratory chimes. The digital crowd lost their collective mind with how carnally they wanted him.

“No, really. It’s impressive,” Seongje was still saying. “You’ve not bricked once, its unnatural. You been hiding this from me all day?” He clicked his tongue lasciviously. “Damn, baby. What else can you palm like that?”

Hyuntak shot again.

Swish.

“Your throat,” he said flatly.

Seongje’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh? You’re into—”

“Strangulation,” Hyuntak clarified, voice devoid of inflection. He bent, scooped two balls at once, and sent them up in rapid succession. The first hit rim and rattled in; the second kissed the backboard and dropped clean. “Specifically yours.”

“Hot,” Seongje murmured dreamily. “You’d look good on top.”

Hyuntak missed.

The ball hit the rim, bounced once, twice, and caromed off the side in a humiliating, metallic clank. The machine emitted a disappointed buzz. The digital crowd withdrew their affection.

He stared at the ball as it rolled back toward him, affronted. “You made them hate me,” he said icily, turning to Seongje with lethal precision.

Having absolutely no survival instinct, Seongje just beamed. Neon pink and toxic green skittered over his face in pulses, cutting him into something feral and flickering. “Me? I would never sabotage your handling of balls.”

"You’re disgusting," Hyuntak said darkly, snatching up the returned ball with justified violence. “Genuinely." He shot.

The machine roared its devotion again, forgiving him as lights cascading down the side panels in radioactive celebration. The score ticked higher. MULTIBALL! it screamed.

Somewhere to their right, a teenage boy muttered, "Yo," under his breath.

Four basketballs surged down the return ramp in manic succession, barrelling against his forearms. Hyuntak snapped into something preternatural. His earlier concussion dissolved into muscle memory and incandescent spite. He shot—left, right, left—barely pausing to register contact before the next was already arcing.

Swish, swish, swish.

The machine—as it should—lost its goddamn mind.

“Okay, no, that’s actually insane,” Seongje said, straightening from the wall. “You’re not even aiming anymore.”

The scoreboard climbed with rabid enthusiasm. 66. 69. 72. The timer ticked down in furious red digits.

Again: “Yo! Dude, you’re fucking crazy!”

Hyuntak did not deign to acknowledge the peanut gallery. His world had narrowed to orange rim, white net, ballistic trajectory. The arcade dissolved into peripheral smear: neon hemorrhaging at the edges, bass from distant rhythm game thudding an irregular pulse. His arms moved without consulting him. Catch. Shoot. Catch. Shoot. Rinse repeat, over and over. The rhythm was clean, well learnt, built into his muscles from months, years, decades of needing to be good, better, best.

“Again,” Hyuntak panted to the machine, to the gods of rubber and rim and red digital numerals. The balls an offering, the act transcendence. “Again.”

The machine obliged.

Another cascade. Another metallic hailstorm against the return ramp. MULTIBALL!!! it shrieked, personally invested in Hyuntak’s ascension.

He was sweating now. A faint sheen at his temples, damp at the collar of his borrowed charcoal shirt. His fringe stuck to his forehead in traitorous little commas. He did not—could not—wipe them away.

Catch. Shoot. Catch. Shoot.

The rim widened, or maybe his pupils did. Either way, the exertion softened into inevitability. The arc of each ball felt preordained, enjoined by Go-raffe Himself. A clean parabola. A righteous descent.

Swish.

The buzzer screamed in orgasmic ecstasy as the timer bled down into single digits. The scoreboard flickered, convulsed, then climaxed into a triumphant cascade of fireworks so garish it bordered on satyriasis.

NEW HIGH SCORE!!1!

Hyuntak stood there, chest rising and falling in shallow, incandescent breaths, a basketball still cradled in his palm. He stepped back from the machine to give it ample space to kneel before him.

There was a beat of stunned silence.

Then the teenage boy to the right went, “Bro, what the fuck,” in worshiping awe.

Seongje let out another low whistle. Not the wolfish, obscene kind he deployed when weaponizing innuendo; this one was softer. Unfeigned. “Princess,” he murmured, pushing off the wall fully, approaching a wild animal that had just proven it could kill with bare hands. “What the fuck.”

Hyuntak did not look at him. He was still breathing through his mouth, shoulders jerking in rickety increments, pulse thrumming behind his ears in sync with the dying electronic fanfare. The scoreboard continued flashing NEW HIGH SCORE! in aftershock, as if it, too, could not quite believe what had just occurred.

“Again,” the teenage boy said faintly, as though invoking a deity.

Seongje turned a glare on him. “Go away,” he demanded urgently. “Go away at once. I must make sexual innuendos at him and I can not do that when you are here.” He ushered the teenager away in hurried, abrupt movements. “Off with you. Shoo, shoo.”

The teenage boy’s jaw dropped so fast it creaked.“…What?”

“You heard me,” Seongje said, still half-angled toward Hyuntak, one hand extended in a frantic shooing motion. “This is a private pervert conversation. Off you pop. Shoo. I can not talk about sins of the flesh around innocent ears. Be gone with you.”

The boy looked between them, visibly in a state of perusal on his understanding of adulthood. It was obvious he found it lacking and awful. He retreated with a muttered, "Y'all weird as hell," disappearing back toward the skee-ball lanes.

Seongje wattched him go, then pivoted back to Hyuntak in pure, luminescent glee. “Fucking hell. Give me a rim job like that.”

Hyuntak threw the basketball at his head.

•

“I will name you Appendix,” Seongje declared, sweeping the plush crocodile up into his arms and pressing its soft little face to his cheek. “My baby, my love, won for me from my boyfriend.”

“I am not your—” Hyuntak hacked off, rearing back in disgust. “Appendage?”

“Dix,” Seongje corrected, then snickered into the croc’s fur, glasses fogging. “Ha ha. Dicks.”

•

They had been here for seventy minutes.

Before this machine, they had frequented seventeen others, an odyssey Hyuntak was thankful had arranged itself neatly as a fugue, nebulous dissociation so that he was unrequired to recall it. Well, at least most of it.

Here was what he did remember: The whack-a-mole incident, which was unspeakable, a variable he carefully and methodically removed from his recollection. A brief, but humiliating,, dalliance with Dance Dance Revolution, wherein Seongje had insisted on ‘expressing himself kinetically’ and nearly dislocated a hip when ‘expressing himself kinetically’ had meant trying to thrust at him . There had been skee-ball, which Hyuntak had dominated, while Seongje narrated his throws like a cricket commentator with a crippling porn addiction.

And now—

Now they were standing before a claw machine filled with plush atrocities. This one housed bears.

They were pastel abominations—pink, cream, baby blue—each with a heart stitched to its chest and a vacant, complicit smile sewn permanently into its face. They all wore tiny bows. One, horrifyingly, also wore glasses.

“Absolutely not,” Hyuntak said at once.

Seongje was already sliding their arcade card through the reader. “Oh, absolutely yes.”

The machine chimed. CREDITS: -2. REMAINING: 12.

Hyuntak had used an astounding total of three.

“I do not want a bear,” he insisted, crossing his arms. “I have made my position on bears extremely clear.”

“Yeah,” Seongje said, peering through the glass, pressing his face close enough for his breath to stick as condensation. Hyuntak watched the way he squashed his cheek for leverage, sculpting his face into softer lines for the light to dance off, and then looked at the glass when he couldn’t look at him anymore. It was turning blurry, turning opaque like the heat of Seongje’s touch had altered it’s state of being. “You’re obsessed with them. I promised to get you bears at breakfast. I need to get you the one with glasses.”

He had been trying to win him a prize for what felt an eternity. Something about pride, something about bruised ego. Appendix sat balancing by his hip, watching with goggly, judgemental eyes. Even he, in all his brainless, stuffed glory, understood this was a loosing cause.

"You've mentioned bears," Seongje counted on his fingers, squinting one eye as he mentally tabulated, "at least twelve times today. That’s yearning.”

“No. They’re just everywhere,” Hyuntak scowled. “They’re upholders of St Valentine’s Day, for some reason. They’re everywhere.”

"Yeah," Seongje murmured, lowering the claw with delicate concentration. "Big Bear is out to get you. Like Big Milk.”

There were moments in life where the human brain chose preservation over dignity. This was one of those moments. There was a distinct, crystalline clarity to it. The kind that arrived only when a man had reached the outermost edge of endurance and discovered, to his horror, that there was still further to fall.

“Big Milk,” he repeated carefully.

“Yes,” Seongje said, nudging the joystick left a millimetre. The claw drifted with arthritic reluctance over a pile of pastel sin. “You know. Dairy lobby. Nineties? Tell me you know Big Milk, Hyuntak. Please tell me.”

"I know," Hyuntak started, veering perplexed. "Of milk."

“Oh my God, he doesn’t know Big Milk,” Seongje exclaimed. “The propaganda? The calcium industrial complex? The pyramid scheme of lactose? None of it?”

“There is no calcium industrial complex,” Hyuntak said, appalled.

“The got milk? campaign?” Seongje pressed, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The way they convinced an entire generation they’d shatter into dust without a daily glass of cow secretion?”

Speechless, Hyuntak blubbered a few times. He considered this, running it past his memory of all events, and came back empty. “You’re making that up.”

“I am not!” Seongje gasped, scandalized. His breath turned the plexiglass crystalI, so that it looked permanent in its starkness. “I would never fabricate Big Milk. How are you such an ideological purist and yet know nothing of Big Milk?”

Fortunately, before he was required to answer, the claw descended.

They both leaned in.

The prongs sank into plush belly and bow and heart, metal fingers trembling with existential inadequacy. For one delirious, suspended second, it looked as though it had secured the bespectacled bear by its stupid little arm.

Then—

The bear flopped back into the pile, glasses glinting and turning its eyes ablaze in the universal signal of fuck you.

Hyuntak exhaled through his nose. “It rejects you.”

“It fears my power,” Seongje corrected, jamming the joystick again. “Again.”

CREDITS: -2. REMAINING: 10.

“You have an addictive personality,” Hyuntak observed.

Seongje shook his head, slamming his forehead to the glass to peer down his nose. His glasses made a clink! on contact. “I have a competitive spirit.”

“You have a gambling problem,” Hyuntak insisted.

“I have a boyfriend to impress,” Seongje said.

Hyuntak’s spine stiffened. “You have a delusion.”

•

“It’s alright, Seongje, really.” This was not a sentence Hyuntak had previously imagined would ever be deployed. But here he was, forced into placating a distraught twenty-three year old man in the alley behind the arcade, an event he had never seen coming. “I didn’t even want the stupid bear anyway.”

From his ball on the floor, Seongje just keened.

The alley behind the arcade was narrow and damp, a liminal strip of concrete perfumed faintly with fryer grease. A single security light buzzed overhead, bathing the scene in jaundiced fluorescence. Somewhere, an industrial fan spluttered and coughed.

Seongje had folded himself in half beside a stack of flattened cardboard boxes, knees to chest. He, too, had this sagging to his shoulders like a wet cardboard box under rain, defeated and forlorn, Appendix clutched tragically to his sternum . His white Oxford—the one he had changed into for dinner following the pottery debacle—was now dusted with alley grit.

“I had it,” he mourned into the croc’s polyester snout. “I had Bear McBearskin McGlasses. He was in my grasp. I felt his little arm between the prongs. He looked at me, Tak. He looked at me.”

“It did not,” Hyuntak said, though he shifted his weight uneasily. “It had embroidered eyes.”

Seongje lifted his head gingerly.

Under the jaundiced security light, his hair—still faintly stiff in places from residual sweat—cast fractured shadows across his forehead. Profile in stark relief of pale shadow against darker shadow. He looked frightingly young like this, the boy he was instead of the nightmare he presented.

Appendix was wedged beneath his chin, an emotional support tribunal. “You didn’t see it,” he whispered. He sounded injuured. “He blinked.”

“He did not blink,” Hyuntak replied at once, and then realized his slip.. “It did not blink. That would imply musculature.”

“He blinked at me,” Seongje insisted, hollowed out. “And in that blink was hope. Trust. A future.”

“There was polyester,” Hyuntak corrected. “And probably Chinese manufacturing.”

“You are unbelievable,” Seongje reproached. “A man is grieving.”

“You are grieving a mass-produced Valentine’s bear with ophthalmic embroidery,” Hyuntak said, rubbing at the back of his neck. The alley air was colder than he had anticipated. It snuck beneath the collar of his charcoal shirt and licked at the damp seam of his hairline. He felt abruptly, inconveniently aware of his own skin.

Seongje lowered Appendix and regarded him through a wounded squint. “You think this is about the bear.”

“It is literally about the bear,” Hyuntak said, taken aback.

“It’s about the principle,” Seongje snapped, pushing to his feet in one sudden, graceless motion. Appendix flopped against his hip. The sky looked like a bruise, a yellowing-purple bloom against the blur of Seongje hair, the ends spiked and fraying from the wind. “I said I would win you something.”

Hyuntak blinked. “You said it as a joke to try and get me to ‘let you hit’.”

“That was aspirational,” Seongje said on reflex. “We’re not talking about that. The point is I wanted to win you something. Yeah, sure maybe it was a joke, but.” He starfished his arms out, smacking them against his thighs. “I have the pictures. I have the bowl. I have Appendix. I have all these little things to remember today by and you literally have nothing. You’re gonna walk off and pretend today never happened. I wanted you to have something..” He paused, then stressed: “I wanted to win you something.”

The sincerity in all of that was offensive. It slid under Hyuntak's skin like a splinter, small but impossible to ignore, prickling every one of his pathogen responses until his whole body went into shock, silenced. Damn him and getting under his skin, seriously. Seriously.

What surfaced, after a moment of arduous effort, was: “I don’t need anything.” There was no heat in it. His focus had narrowed to a pinprick; to the entry wound where Seongje had nestled himself.

Seongje’s mouth did that thing again. The right corner lifted first, the left follower after, more uncertain. The sight of it made something in Hyuntak’s chest twinge left, and he flopped back against the wall, wholly unable to handle it.

“You’re just a big softie,” he grunted, slapping a hand to his face, palm pressed over nose and mouth. If he smothered himself and fainted, he wouldn’t have to be having this conversation, feeling these feelings.

All Seongje did was snort. “Never tell.”

club man idk club twinkling watermelon

valentine’s club night

12:45AM

He shouldn’t be this close.

That was the first coherent thought Hyuntak managed after his third drink. He was close enough to Seongje that their knees had been touching for the last five minutes, maybe ten, and neither of them had shifted. Close enough that when Seongje leaned back to laugh at something obscene he’d just said, Hyuntak could feel the warmth of it along his own cheek, pungent yet sweet with alcohol.

They were both a little drunk, though not yet sloppy. Just enough to melt loose at the edges, for any piercing thoughts to turn velvet and smooth. Seongje’s elbow was hooked over the back of the booth, fingers circling the vinyl just behind Hyuntak’s shoulder. An intrusive, solid line of heat against his side.

When he was seventeen, Hyuntak used to climb the maintenance ladder onto the roof of his high school's gym. He could climb it because, back then, he’d been narrow enough to wedge a foot in the gap where the ladder didn’t quite meet the wall, and he’d been long-limbed enough to haul himself over the lip, and he’d always hbad an amplified stubborn disposition. In the previous two years of school, he’d climbed up there a few times, usually to escape p.e class after he’d busted his knee. The asphalt shingles would scratch through his uniform trousers, branding heat straight into bare skin from the flat edge shimmering in scorch, and he liked the direct view of the basketball court baking under the sun. A haze of concrete and chainlink fence that made him forget the cavern of sensation in his left leg. With everything bleached and bleeding at the edges, a world left under the sun too long, everything looked smaller and therefore manageable. His own issues sweated away under summer scrutiny.

He’d sit there alone—both because no one else was stupid enough to climb, and because he preferred it that way—just watching the air ripple. Heat from that high rose in visible waves, bending buildings into soft, implausible versions of themselves. Sometimes he’d think, distantly, that he should climb back down before he got lightheaded or scalded, but he never did.

When sitting would make him dizzy, he’d simply flop backwards instead, letting the heat press down on him and squinting up at the hypnotic way the world distorted but didn’t quite break. Something familiar casted to something unreal, dangerous; it was comforting to see damage coming and still refuse to move.

Being this close to Seongje felt a little like that.

His knee was nudged between his, the crevices and grooves knocking together with even the most imperceptible of movements. Not intentionally, probably, just the geometry of the booth pushing them together. His face was too close: enough that Hyuntak could track the faint indentation where his glasses rest; the uneven quirk of his mouth before it became a grin. Close enough to notice the warmth coming off him, a steady, human temperature that still made the air between them swelter thinner in a way that felt solar.

The club lights strobed across his face. For a split second at a time he looked carved from shadow; the next, he was all teeth within a cushioned mouth that forever snagged right-corner first. The world titled slightly as if the booth, the lights, the entire ridiculous apparatus of Valentine’s bent with it, around it. Proximity itself a heatwave: straight lines to wavering ones, certainty becoming something scorched and washed-out at its border.

He could feel it on the horizon. The distortion; the blister.

“This is so fun, don’t you think?” Seongje was saying, dipping Appendix’s snout into his Somaek, as if he was not a grown ass man and so this was insane. There was a splash. “Just me and you, carousing the night together.” He paused, pulling his lips back in a grimace when he retrieved Appendix much more foamy than he had been five seconds prior.

"I do not wish to spend a night carousing with you, Seongje, I really do not. Honest. Honest, I do not,” he said, with more conviction than truly he felt.

Seongje blinked at him. Appendix dripped beer back into the glass. “Wow,” he said. “That was… emphatic.”

“It needed to be,” Hyuntak replied, reaching across to confiscate the crocodile before he drowned in malted liquid. He set Appendix upright on the table, squeezing his polyester jaw so a pathetic little glug of Somaek spilled out onto a napkin. “Don’t baptize him.”

“You’re just jealous I have someone to kiss at midnight,” Seongje said, reclaiming his glass and taking a long swallow that left a faint crescent of foam at his upper lip. He reached out to pat Appendix’s head, jutting out his lips in an obscene kissy-face.

“Its twelve forty-five,” Hyuntak corrected. “Midnight’s long gone.”

“Ah,” Seongje said gravely. “Then I’ll just have to kiss you at one.”

Hyuntak stopped, struggled with his conscience for a moment, then resigned himself. “You’re an awful person. Has anyone ever told you that?”

The bass thudded through the booth, up through Hyuntak’s spine and into the back of his skull. **idk what to name it insert club name here** was a cavern of pink and violet light, fairy lights strung in intricate loops along the ceiling like someone had hung Cupid and left the evidence dangling. Heart-shaped confetti clung to the floor in damp, trodden clumps. Somewhere near the bar, a remix of a song Hyuntak vaguely recognized as romantic had been fed through a blender, vomited back up, and then given a seizure for good measure. There was even more ooohing and aaahing than before.

Seongje wiped the foam from his lip with the back of his hand and squinted at him through the strobe. “Awful?” he echoed, sounding genuinely injured. “I’ve spent thir–four—fifteen? hours dedicating myself to your delusions. I have endured verbal torture. I have endured public arcadian humiliation. I have been physically assaulted with sports equipment. And yet—and YET!—you call me awful.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hyuntak said, not at all convincingly. He sent Seongje an instructable look, watching the lazy way alternating washes of light framed his features. “I think you have Stockholm syndrome.”

After a few moments of working his mouth in apparent effort to make sound come out of it, Seongje blurted, “Perhaps!” in the way old grey men used to shout eureka!, as if this was some enormous discovery, as if Hyuntak wasn't incredible and so always right. “Oh, but what a wonderful affliction to have. Chain me, Hyuntak! Whip me! Make love to me on the dank concrete floor—”

Hyuntak slapped his hand over Seongje’s mouth before he could stain the world with such filth.

Seongje went very still at the same exact time Hyuntak realized he had not merely covered his mouth, he was cupping it. His fingers had curved unconsciously along the line of Seongje’s jaw, thumb resting dangerously close to the corner of that treacherous, right-favoured smile.

With a look to his eyes, guarded, firm, the sort that channeled something deeper down in carefully measured doses, he retracted his hand. “You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re salty.” Seongje smacked his lips, dashing out a tongue to linger where Hyuntak’s hand had been. He let out a terrible, magnificent sound, low and keening and amplified for dramatics, and crumpled to the table. His arms splayed in a bodily x. “Ugh. And now I will forever fantasize how the rest of you tastes, and you will never allow me to find out,” he said, disconsolately. “Augh. Augghhhhhhhh…”

The deliberate drag along where Hyuntak’s thumb had been made him swallow thickly, all at once too aware of their proximity. Seongje was digging into his soft parts with all his pointy edges, and Hyuntak was trying to figure out why he hadn’t shoved him off yet.

“You’re genuinely disgusting,” he said mullishly, too afraid to leave that last thought uncontested in his head.

Seongje took no notice of this, lifting up just enough to look Hyuntak straight in the eyes, right through his pretty fucking, currently neon ruby, lashes. He held his gaze a second longer, then batted them, dropping instead to the table with a woebegone look of dejection. Something expanded in Hyuntak’s chest, just a little, at that. A scorching heat, aching at the backs of his neck and elbows. Every trepidation going fuzzy.

And then he pouted, which did not work on Hyuntak. It snapped him right out of heatwaves and mirage.

“Stop that,” he ordered, and grabbed Appendix. He shoved him into Seongje’s face. “Go smother yourself.”

“As I do, it will be of your thighs I dream. Thick, thick, thighs. To suffocate within them; my greatest pleasure…” Seongje professed, and got up to hopefully do just that.

•

“You are poking me in the eye. Ow, ow. Move your elbow. How are you dancing with your elbows like this? Oh, ow.”

“It is as inside you as I’ve managed to get,” Seongje lamented, grabbing Hyuntak’s wrist to spin him into his chest, and then stood on his toe. Graciously, Hyuntak did not mention it. “Hyuntak, I have a poem for you.”

In a bid for self preservation, Hyuntak twisted and shoved at Seongje’s sternum. “Oh, no. Oh, no, you do not. You don’t, you don’t.”

“Roses are red,” Seongje began in desperate, histrionic performance. “Violets are blue. Please, please, please let me cum inside you.”

“UGH!”

Seongje shook off his furious attempts at mufflement. “Your skin is so warm, my dick is so stiff, I could take you to my dorm and—” The last words turned to garbles as Hyuntak shoved two fingers against his mouth: Seonggje parted his lips to suck them, liberation granted when Hyuntak stumbled back with a startled gag. “Okay, we really don’t like that one. Ummm…”

On Hyuntak’s next censorship attempt, he grabbed both of Hyuntak’s wrists again, holding them hostage, before tugging him out of the way of an onslaught of dancing couples. The light was darker here, only half his face marked in radiant, pulsing neon. It made it easier to forget how pretty—punchable—he was. “If I spread your legs like butter on a slice of toasted bread—”

Hyuntak screeched. “STOP! STOP!”

“We would need no supper—.” Seongje continued, and lifted Hyuntak’s wrists to give him a small twirl. “—I’d be eating you instead.”

Despite himself, Hyuntak paused. “Okay. That was oddly creative. Are you coming up with these right now?”

When Seongje opened his mouth again, beaming, Hyuntak quickly shook his hands from his grip. “No, no. That wasn’t me asking for more,” he assured briskly. He could feel his face going awfully blotchy, and just hoped the darkness of the dance floor would hide it. “Please. Please no more.”

“I’ve had too much beer, ten’s getting hard to count to,” Seongje went on anyway. “If you were a deer, I would stuff and mount you.”

“I think I’m going to go be sick somewhere,” Hyuntak complained, pushing Seongje’s forehead back with two fingers. “It’s not even disgusting, its just cringe. Stop making up poems.”

“If I locked you in my cellar—”

“AHHHHH!” he screeched, shoving his fingers into his ears. “EUEUREONG EUREUREONG!”

•

They were back in the booth because Hyuntak had threatened to defect. Not leave the club: defect. As in, join another couple’s table and declare asylum. Seongje had found that threat insulting enough to actually shut the fuck up for once. Apparently he could be quite taking when he wanted to be, which Hyuntak did not appreciate and rallied against because he refused to be took.

For some reason, of which Hyuntak could not decipher, the DJ had climbed onto a little raised platform near the bar, glitter microphone in hand, headset pushed back like he was about to announce the second coming instead of a two-for-one soju voucher, or something. Hyuntak looked up to the heavens and waited for the rapture.

“Lovers!” the DJ bellowed, voice ricocheting through the droning bass of the room. “Are we in looove tonight?”

“No,” Hyuntak grumbled at the same time Seongje yelled: “OH HELLLL YEAAHHH!!!!”

The DJ cupped a hand to his ear, basking in the shriek of the club roaring back in slurred but ecstatic affirmation. Seongje had both hands in the air, whooping as he thrashed Appendix around and probably gave him shaken-baby-syndrome. Hyuntak sank lower into the vinyl booth and tried to drown himself in his cocktail.

“Couple of the night!” the DJ crowed. “You know what that means! Free champagne, VIP booth upgrade, and a professional photo shoot for our wall of eternal loooove!”

There was not enough liquid in his glass to properly asphyxiate on. He grabbed Seongje’s beer and tipped that down his throat, too. An annoying voice in his head was blaring indirect kiss! Indirect kiss! He told it to shut the fuck up.

"We have been watching you all night!" the DJ continued.("Stalkers," Hyuntak hissed.) "And we have witnessed some real steeeaaaaammyyyy displays.”

“Why is he talking like that?” Hyuntak asked, a little fraught, a little desperate. “This was not worth the discount. None of this has been worth the discounts. God strike ye down where ye stands ye are merciful ye are kind. Our Father art who ye in Heaven, hollow ye name.”

“That’s is not—you know what okay,” Seongje said from beside him.

“Ye body is bread, ye wine is water, ye are all loving, ye are kind,” Hyuntak muttered. He had his face buried in his hands, his hair sticking into his eyes. “If ye love me at all, ye will obliterate the bespeckled one.”

“—and now,” the DJ howled, stretching the word like taffy, “it’s time to pick our Couple of the Niiiight!”

A spotlight snapped on. Hyuntak felt it before he saw it, a hot, invasive beam slicing through the violet haze and landing somewhere to their left. It swept languidly across the dance floor, over grinding silhouettes and heart-shaped balloons taped to structural columns. Every now and then it would linger on a couple: one near the bar who were doing something with whipped cream that Hyuntak refused to visually process, one where a girl was sitting on her boyfriends lap and definitely fondling places that should not be fondled, one where—

“Oh, God, no. Ye smite them instead,” Hyuntak added in a panic, overwrought. “They fornicate in ye house. The bespeckled one is forgiven.”

The light slid to a couple, another couple, a third a fourth a fifth. Closer and closer it crept, in all its white, carnivorous glory, a predator, a demon, the souls of the damned come to drag them to their depths. Oh, he felt it. The dread bubbled under his skin, stretching it taunt and red as it tried to force its way out, smashing through his ribs like a hammer to candy-sugar. It’s taunting him, he knew, teasing him, prolonging the agony of just waiting for it.

“Oh say can you see,” he muttered to himself, his lungs no longer cooperating in their basic function. There was no air in his body, no inhales to be had. “By the dawn’s early light…”

“Is that the American anthem?” Seongje asked beside him, but Hyuntak could barely hear over the blood entering a fit of collective hysteria between his eardrums.

Shuddering, shaking, sundering, Hyuntak pressed his knuckles to his eyes and prayed. “God protect and preserve our nation; Hurray to Korea. Hurray. Hurray. Please, please. I will worship no idol again. With this spirit and this mind, I give all loyalty, in suffering and joy, to the love of country. Please, please. Hurray to Korea.”

In a poetic turn of phrase; blinding light.

“God you have forsaken me,” Hyuntak rasped into the heels of his palms.

Beside him, Seongje was already halfway to standing. "WE LOVE EACH OTHER!" he bellowed, one hand on his heart, the other grabbing Appendix and hoisting him skyward.

“No,” Hyuntak said to his palms, too quiet over the thudding bass. “No. We are cousins. Cousins. Brothers? God save our gracious queen…”

Seongje had fully risen now, dragging Hyuntak up by the wrist with alarming ease. “BABY!” he roared into the light, gripping Hyuntak’s face between both palms. “They’ve chosen us! Our love has triumphed!”

“Ngh mpoh augh thpo,” Hyuntak said.

“Too right!” Seongje agreed, incandescent. Before he could say anything else, Seongje pressed in so that his cheeks squashed together, and shoved his tongue more or less into Hyuntak’s nose.

“AAALRGH!” Hyuntak screeched, and pressed his hand into Seongje’s forehead.

Seongje’s tongue, misguided and damp with beer and strawberry syru, made exploratory contact with the lower ridge of Hyuntak’s nostril. There was something endlessly psychosomatic about the whole thing.

“What are you doing?” he gagged, shoving Seongje’s face back so hard his glasses skewed sideways. He wiped his face meticulously with the sleeve of his inner arm.

The DJ howled into the microphone. “WOOOOOO! GET A ROOM!”

The crowd, drunk and feral, screamed their rabid approval. And, Seongje—unrepentant, megalomaniac Seongje— staggered one step back only to lunge forward again, this time aiming marginally lower. Hyuntak caught his jaw mid-trajectory, fingers clamping over his mouth with a precision borne of dreadful foreboding.

“Are you incompetent?” Hyuntak hissed, inches from his face. “That is not where mouths go.”

Seongje’s eyes—bright, feverish, dilated in neon and ego—flicked down to Hyuntak’s lips. “Oh,” he breathed against Hyuntak’s palm. “You’re right.”

He met Hyuntak’s eye and did that – thing. It wouldn’t be a smile on anyone else’s face, but. But there was a small, secretive curve to his lips—something capricious at the corners of his eyes—and that ever-so-angle of his head. All of it raged against Hyuntak’s ribs. He was, now, so aware of his own heartbeat, of the sheen on his lips, of the fact Seongje had been holding them in his vision for too long and still not looked away.

It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t mean as much on anyone else, but on Seongje, on his unreasonably prettty face, it became fucking monumental; this intensity like he wanted to close his eyes and ignore everyone else's existence. The ache beneath Hyuntak’s sternum swelled, heart bruising itself against bone.

He thought, again, of his old school’s roof, feeling nothing but heat and life, nothing else but a lance of pure summer speared into the parts of him that hurt. How breathless he’d been watching the dream he’d once cherished melt into ripples under the strength of heat, how things he’d wanted but lost and wanted but never found yet all seemed so trivial. A swirl of everything he’d ever been, ever would be, all coalescing into just this. Into a truth you could only see at this close a distance, lying on a roof or standing in a club; a truth surrounding you, asking you to sink in.

It was funny, was what he was trying to say, the things that managed to wind him like a knee to the chest.

“Can I?” Seongje asked.

Hyuntak couldn’t parse that question, not with Seongje’s hands bracketing him in, his body heat emanating into him so deeply that he had this wild thought that Seongje, like this, could melt all of Hyuntak’s more certain, frosted-fringes. His face was so close, so intent upon Hyuntak in a way that felt a threat. And, as he’d said; it was comforting to face danger and make the decision to not move.

“What?” he gasped. It was a vacuous response, but he was having a hard time keeping up with the situation.

“You can say no,” Seonghe said, thumbs shifting imperceptibly to slide under Hyuntak’s ears, on the hinge of his jaw, pressing down until Hyuntak’s mouth parted for him. “Can I?”

Hyuntak’s brain, ever diligent in the worst ways, provided him with a list: Seongje is insane; You do not know where his mouth has been; This is a public venue; You have principles and dignity and do not kiss people you met this morning.

He blinked, and the list became: He has really soft looking lips. So, he was fucked, basically. He couldn’t look away. Not when Seongje’s eyes were like that, big and glowing and patient, focused entirely on him. Waiting him out. Drinking him in.

“Whatever,” he said on an exhale.

If Seongje heard the capitulation for what it was—a yes threaded through stubborn pride—he did not gloat. He took it for its truth, which was Hyuntak’s recalcitrant mouth admitting want, or at least not denying it, then took it as invitation to lean in.

Hyuntak did not miss the way Seongje’s manic, crowd-baiting grin ebbed at the corners, sincere and so fucking fond it was hard to believe they’d only met in person less than a day ago. It was the sort of thing that would look soft on anyone, but on Seongje it was devastating.

"Whatever?" Seongje echoed, low enough that it didn't carry past the riot of the club. (KISS! KISS! KISS! shoving in from every corner) "That's your romantic consent?"

Hyuntak's pulse was trying to escape through his throat. "Take it or leave it."

“Hyuntak,” Seongje said, like something caught behind his teeth. He kept his eyes on Hyuntak until the last moment, waiting to see if he’ll change his mind, giving him an out, but Hyuntak just closed his eyes and allocated enough space in his chest to let it happen.

There was an incredulous huff of laughter, and then suddenly Seongje was kissing him. His lips were a little chapped, but they managed to be as soft as they looked. Tender, too. Gentle and a little tentative where they meet. It was so unwholly like Seongje—at least the Seongje he had learnt in the past sixteen hours—as if afraid, now, of hurting him. Of pushing too hard and meeting a wall.

So Hyuntak reached for his face, one hand on his shoulder and the other going to his jaw, and the dam broke in Seongje. Both hands slid down to Hyuntak’s throat, thumbs digging into his mandible to knock his head back, readjusting the angle to his preference. Hyuntak went with it, surrendering directive for once.

It was warm, and incrementally more wet, and louder than Hyuntak would have expected, because just then Seongje made a wounded sound, like he’d been given something he’d been starving for. Hyuntak wanted to remember the action of it, the sensations and mechanics and the temperatures of it, but he couldn’t. Not over the joint roaring of blood in his ears and crowd around them.

Because they were loud. The chatn had thickened, wolf-whistles and cheers that would have made no sense had today not been the holiday of patent Saint Valentine. Because, suddenly, he was hyperaware of them and the fact there was a fucking plush crocodile lodged somewhere uncomfortble in his nether regions.

He wrenched back, gasping. “Wait,” he said, but didn't move his hand, watching Seongje still immediately. “Wait, wait, wait. There is a crocodile in my pelvis.”

Seongje blinked at him, lips flushed, pupils blown wide as the club lights detonated pink across his cheekbones. For a split second he looked genuinely confused, like his mind was being forced to reboot halfway through a stalled record

He glanced down. Appendix’s polyester snout was indeed wedged between them at a compromising angle, one felt eye staring accusingly up at the DJ booth.

“Oh,” Seongje said.

Hyuntak shoved at his shoulder. “Remove him. Remove him immediately. I will not have our first—” He choked on the word. “Not while we are kissing

“Our first?” Seongje echoed, faintly smug despite the way his voice had gone rough around the edges. He wet his lips, just looking at him. “Are we?”

“What?” Hyuntak demanded. He pulled back, just enough to circle a hand around the crocodile’s snout between their hips and wrench it free, ignoring the no fondling! that screeched through the speaker. He deposited Appendix on the table in front of them, awkwardly twisting in the booth. Now that he was reminded of the confined space, he realized just how crooked his torso was, the table pressing uncomfortably into the pinch of his waist.

“Kissing?” Seongje explained, then dropped one hand from his face to gesture between them. “Are we?”

Oh. As in, continuous. As in, not a kiss, but kissing, meaning present tense, meaning something to repeat in the future.

“No. We are not currently kissing,” Hyuntak said, scowling, and Seongje just did this unfairly attractive thing where he lit the fuck up.

He let out a quiet laugh, more an exhalation of breath than anything else. “You’re something else,” he said. But didn’t say it like it was a bad thing, and Hyuntak’s chest kickstarted itself back to something loud in his chest. “Wanna change that?”

outside the club man

15TH FEBRUARY

3:05AM

“So,” Seongje said, flicking the ash of his cigarette against the metal railing to the road. He was leant across it, arms folded against the top bar as he looked out at the stragglers of cars flitting across the otherwise empty road. Appendix was pressed between his hip and one of the vertical poles, eyes bulging a little from the force. “I guess that’s that.”

The club had closed five minutes ago, an event Hyuntak had been unceasingly hoping for until the exact moment it hit. He stood a little behind him, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket to escape from the outside cold, crisp and metallic in his lungs after hours of syrupy drinks and body heat. It made everything more distinct; less a mirage. Like someone had doused him in water.

“That’s what?” he asked. The wind snagged at his clothing, playing under the hem of his trousers.

Smoke curled past Seongje’s mouth, his face cast a tepid orange from the cherry of his cigarette, dissolving his features into the matching glow of the streetlights. “Y’know. The contract.” He rapped his knuckles against the metal bar. “Our illustrious partnership.”

Hyuntak scoffed.” There was so contract,” he said, walking over to lean back beside him. The bar dug into the skin beneath his shoulder blades, but he couldn’t focus on that when Seongje was so close. “You have this thing for making me sound insane.

Seongje turned his head just enough to look at him out of the corner of his eye. His mouth quirked, right corner first. God, it was embarrassing how he couldn’t stop noticing that. How he had seen it, and never been able to stop. “Baby, you are insane.”

Looking at Seongje was probably going to drive him mad, so he reached out to snatch Seongje’s cig and put that to his mouth instead. One drag, and then a second. It burnt. Trust Seongje to get the cheap shit. He took another drag, and then swallowed.

Seongje’s eyes gravitated towards the motion in his throat. Jesus Christ.

“What?” Hyuntak managed. It came out half strangled, what with the way Seongje’s expression flickered to so utterly earnest that Hyuntak didn’t know what to do with himself. “Talk.”

“Just… sucks.” He didn't volunteer further explanation, just grimaced and kept his eyes on the road. Which—part of Hyuntak understood. But mostly, it was just fucking annoying.

Hyuntak waited. The silence stretched thin between them, pulled taut as the cold air.

“Sucks how?” he pressed, because if Seongje was going to start sentences like that at three in the morning, he could damn well finish them.

Seongje huffed a laugh that didn’t quite commit. “That we’re done.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You know. The bit; The Great Valentine’s Heist of 2026. The curtains have closed, the audience has applauded, we were crowned best couple or whatever the fuck. Now we bow. Never see each other again except in the blurry recollection of my late night thoughts, hand around myself, mind off in better places.”

“You are so deeply repulsive,” he said, taking one last drag before handing the cigarette back. He watched the way Seongje scanned the damp patch before bringing it back to his mouth. Something passed his face, quick enough that Hyuntak almost convinced himself he’d imagined it, but. Fucking hell.

A beat of silence followed. Seongje was still looking at him, something a little sstrange about his gaze. It was searching, but not demanding, not expectant. Steady, but maybe something else beneath it. Hope, maybe.

They were still close, but now their faces were almost—-unaligned. Hyuntak could see the grooves in his lips as they wrapped around the filter, and irrationally, insanely, he wondered if it was his teeth that put them there. He shook his head. He’d rather not have to navigate the potentially awkward outcome of thoughts like that.

“We could do it next year,” Seongje offered, too nonchalant, really, for a boy who clearly wants it as he did. It felt like an eternity had passed since someone had spoken, but it had probably only been a few seconds. “For the deals and shit. Saves you having to indoctrinate somebody else”

“We could,” he said, instead of calling him out on it. Part of it was he thought he owed Seongje that small kindness, after the day he’d put him through, and a part was that if he called him out on it, then the natural progression was a conversation. One Hyuntak did not want to have. Not now, this late at night, when he wasn’t sure he had the capacity to unwind why Seongje wanted him. The fact he did was hard enough.

Still, Hyuntak couldn’t hide his smile.

“Yeah?” Seongje asked, still looking. Hyuntak shrugged, then offered him a subtle nod. Seongje tracked the movement, down to his clavicle, up to his eyes, and his lips stretched wider. He crushed the cigarette against the bar. “Alright. Cool. Can I kiss you again?”

“Okay,” he said. He was still smiling. He could feel it on his own face, egregious and fucking appalling, another thing to add to his list of why he should not be kissing Keum Seongje.

Anyway.

When Seongje kissed him again, it was rushed, desperate. His fingers clenched in the front of Hyuntak’s jacket, palms digging into the zipper where he begged to have him closer. He could feel the rapid pounding of Seongje’s heartbeat through his lips in the same way he could feel his own in the space between his ears, and the moment Hyuntak’s hands found purchase in his hair, Seongje shivered. An immediate whine ripped itself free from somewhere high in his throat, and Hyuntak was greedy for it the way he was greedy for little else. There was just something about kissing Seongje that coiled Hyuntak’s entire body in heat: his receptiveness, his eagerness to please, the way he folded himself small so Hyuntak could dig into his hair and tilt his head upwards, just because—in the two times they’ve done this—he’d already realized it was what Hyuntak liked.

Greedy, yeah. Everything he’d never let himself be.

They seperate—Hyuntak couldn’t tell who moved back first, or if anyone had at all, because he was too busy just looking at Seongje and feeling that want, that propriety—and Seongje searched his gaze. This time, the hope was more obvious.

“Next year?” he asked, holding his eyes.

Hyuntak huffed, still smiling. “Next week?”

Seongje’s expression brightened, summer warmth, scorching all else, worse than a mirage because it was real, and Hyuntak wanted to kiss him again.

So he did.