Chapter Text
“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep ... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.”
— Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton.
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Soobin's knees are scraped. Beomgyu looks down at the shallow scratches, bearing the marks of a fall that has left dirt on the joints, the brown staining the hem of the shorts he is wearing. It doesn't look like it hurts all that much. Beomgyu's own shin itches at the sight of them left untended as the man just stands by the counter, brewing what seems to be tea. He's not sure. The smell is herby but spice tingles in Beomgyu's nostrils—making him think perhaps it's not tea at all.
The kettle whistles and that makes his ears ring. He winces with a finger in his ear, and has been so accustomed to the quiet of the house that now even the smallest sounds irritate him.
In front of him, Soobin smiles down at the shrieking vessel, though he's really just smiling at Beomgyu. "I assume you didn't sleep well?" he asks.
Beomgyu studies his profile, something he has resorted to out of what he'd like to think is lack of any other moving subject. And Soobin is plenty interesting as of now, his cup filled with a steaming liquid he'd like to look at a little closely but not taste.
"No," Beomgyu replies. "Guess it will take a little more time to settle into the new mattress."
He craves his morning coffee. Which is why he's sitting here, on the lush cushion of Soobin's kitchen furniture instead of his own room, watching the man brew tea with a ponderousness unlike Beomgyu's sleep-drowned movements when he's on his own. He itches again, this time to tap his leg on the floor but his slipper against the tile is loud, too.
Soobin steps away from the counter in due time. There's already a fresh pot on the stove, filled with coffee instead of the not-tea the utensil was boiling earlier. It's the expensive kind, a brandless box he doesn't know from where. It tastes good. He takes it without question.
He should thank the man. But the scraped knees catch his attention again, and how they go completely unregarded by Soobin.
"They must hurt," he can't help but point out.
Soobin dusts his hands over the edge of his shorts. The action makes Beomgyu hiss a little, the palm of the other man's hand brushing over the injury—no matter how surface level—with little to no care. Well, now it must hurt definitely. The dust clings to the torn skin, the faint red of blood mixing with the brown. It's an ugly sight.
"It's nothing," Soobin tells glibly. The tea-cup is empty by his side, washed and placed on the rack in a matter of seconds Beomgyu probably missed among his just-awoken fog. "I'll treat them."
There's no point in regarding the answer with something more than a hum around his coffee mug. In his heart, Beomgyu is beyond grateful for the man. Not just for the expensive coffee,
But this place, which is the best he could have hoped to find. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere, though the house sometimes feels like it is. Woods surround it on every side, trees close enough to brush against Beomgyu’s window when the wind moves through them at night. It’s beautiful, really.
The kind of place that makes his fingers twitch to sketch it. Birds are always just a short walk away, and he’s heard the forest carries a fair number of deer if you go far enough in.
Soobin disappears behind one of the doors Beomgyu is yet to open on his own. He's nosy enough to do it to a few near his own room, despite knowing how much of an invasion of privacy the action feels like. His endeavours have only proven to be nondescript anyway. Furniture, and some more of the same furniture. It's almost as if the place was built to be rented, or at least house more than the one man it does. And Beomgyu.
He's not exactly a tenant. Their agreement to let Beomgyu live in one of the rooms was cursory. Soobin offered a place and he took it, desperate to be away from the city he had spent the better of his twenty-two years in.
Almost twenty-three, now, and his life as an artist has been underwhelmingly vanilla.
The coffee drains too quickly for his liking. He considers brewing another cup, but the caffeine headache waiting at the end of that decision makes him abandon the idea and turn to the sink instead, rinsing the kettle and his mug.
The water runs from coffee-brown back to pristine, but he doesn’t withdraw his hand from the stream. Pressing the left nozzle harder finally brings warmth to the water. Beomgyu hums at the sensation.
This house is so cold. Perhaps the heating system’s broken, or it doesn’t exist at all with how old the place looks. His hands cramp every time he picks up a paintbrush.
Beomgyu sighs, watching the water swirl down the drain. He brushes his hair away from his face when a strand starts to poke in his eye—it's so long now, almost touching his shoulders.
His gaze drifts towards the closed door where Soobin had disappeared. The man is a complete mystery to him, a constant source of both fascination and frustration.
Outside, the sun hides itself before Beomgyu could catch a ray. Clouds brew in the distance, turning the sky heavy and swollen with oncoming rain. He sighs. He'd meant to go into the woods today—deeper this time and paint something if the light held—but now he cannot.
He turns the tap off when the water runs cold.
It's near sun-set that Beomgyu hears the first strike of lightning.
He's in his studio—one of the two rooms Soobin has allowed him to occupy—staring at the open expanse of a blank canvas. There's the ghost of a bird he's trying to paint, a fragile creature that had perched this morning on the branch that touched Beomgyu's bedroom window.
He had spent a long time staring at it from his bed, and the bird had seemed to have done the same. It had craned its neck in his direction, almost like matching his gaze, and perhaps that is why he cannot remember anything from the colour to its shape anymore, only the mildly unsettling stare from its beady little eyes before it flew away.
At last, he abandons his palette and doesn't think about how for the two weeks he's been here, he has painted next to nothing. All his sketches have been rough, incomprehensible forms he forgets about the next time he picks up on them. They remain unfinished.
Beomgyu reaches for the paperback version of Death in the Afternoon, taken from Soobin's vast collection shelved in one of the rooms. It did not miss his attention how the man almost never visits the library. Had it not been his own curiosity, Beomgyu would have never pegged Soobin for an avid reader.
He'd tried to read the book past the first few pages this entire week to no avail. Beomgyu enjoys art, but it’s not that type of art.
Well, lately he has found himself not enjoying even the art he creates. It's shameful. A rough patch in his creativity, and so he hoped the woods and a timeless house would get things kicking again.
It hails throughout the night.
Beomgyu tries to smother his head under the pillows but the sounds keep him awake anyway. The howling of the wind is just about a touchable thing. He wonders how well Soobin is sleeping, if the man is looking crestfallen at the garden he maintains almost with a religious dedication. Beomgyu starts to fear for the poor peonies, and whatever else the man must be growing.
A pellet lands on his windowsill, barely the size of his thumb's nail. He thinks of the little bird from last morning, where it must be hiding right now, if it would've been better had Beomgyu taken the tiny avian inside.
He chuckles under his blanket that turns into a clatter of his teeth. The temperature dropped steeply over the span of one day, and the two blankets he has been given offer meagre comfort.
The bird would not have stayed inside these walls anyway.
By morning, the hailstorm relaxes into just plain rain, still harsh and pouring down on the house but no longer brutal. He walks down the stairs with his blankets over his shoulders like a cape, the fabric sweeping the floorboards behind him. It's December-cold in June.
The air feels slightly electric as he steps barefooted into the living room, perhaps all the lightning he heard had kissed the house as well. His toes curl against the floor, and thinking about stepping into the kitchen like this, where the wood merges into tile, feels painful. The humming patter of raindrops on the room vibrates till his core and he shivers.
The blankets are of next to no use he thinks. A trip to the town may have been rather useful in the past week, had he any idea about the storm that does not seem like it will stop anytime soon.
He turns to the door which leads to the garden and predictably finds Soobin there.
Soaking, the flimsy raincoat he's wearing is more obligatory than actually useful, because with every movement it wets his clothes to the point that Beomgyu can see it from a distance as well. There's an unsettling calmness in the way Soobin is working despite the unforgiving downpour.
One would expect you to hastily bring the delicate pots inside, or shade the roses that must have taken effort and care to bloom like they do right now. But Soobin doesn't rush. He's holding a scalpel, turning the soil over in a circular motion as if to make room for the rain to seep in.
Beomgyu cannot look away. Soobin's hand mixes the moist dirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There's a small furrow to his brow, knitted together from knowing exactly what he is doing. Bent to his task, he shifts the pots away from the rain, under a make-shift shed made out of tarpaulin while the bushes are left to take the rain unguarded.
He lingers at the open doorway, watching Soobin on the other side. The wind shifts its direction and rain quickly drifts in, speckling the floor with cold droplets. When his foot touches the damp patch, he flinches and steps back.
The older man turns his head to look at him. Hair stuck to his forehead, completely at the rain's mercy.
"You're awake," he says with a smile.
Beomgyu feels oddly shy. He clutches his blankets closer to himself, hair standing on end along his bare legs as more tiny splashes dotted the floor. "Couldn't sleep at all," he admits.
Soobin hums sympathetically, pushing up his rain-soaked sleeves past his elbows. He steps closer, wiping his hands on his already-soaked jeans and it leaves a grimy brown stain. He looks a bit ridiculous, hair plastered to his forehead and eyes slightly puffy with fatigue.
"The rain kept you awake?" he asks, voice gravelly.
Beomgyu steps back deeper as Soobin steps closer. The warmth floods in, but not on his back where the house awaits, but from the proximity of the man in front of him. He tilts his head, "Too loud."
Soobin steps inside to shrug off his raincoat. Below his feet, a puddle forms with how much he's dripping all over the place. Beomgyu rushes to close the door shut, the blocked wind a relief to his frozen bones. If he were to trip, he might just break a few. But Soobin just stood there, droplets travelling down his face to his neck only to disappear into the collar of his shirt.
His clothes are nugatory, white shirt that's completely wet. Beomgyu has to look away.
"Have you eaten yet?" Soobin asks, oblivious to both his state and the effect he is having on Beomgyu. "I'll get changed, first."
Beomgyu shakes his head, side to side and then up and down, eyes on Soobin's face. It's pale, unnaturally so. White skin that looks like it'll crack like ceramic at the touch. Even after emerging from under the rain, his cheeks remain unflushed.
The kitchen tile is no longer as daunting under the soles of his feet once after he's stepped into the puddle Soobin had formed by the garden door. Beomgyu waits on one of the stools, a paired set with the other piece missing because he dragged it to his studio on the second day he moved in. Soobin didn't appear to mind, and didn't even ask Beomgyu about the missing stool.
It was perturbing if he's honest. What fazed the older man was next to nothing.
Attempting to make himself useful, he put on a kettle of tea with the bags he had seen Soobin use the other morning. He reached deeper into the cabinet, rummaging for a vaguely familiar box that smelled more distinct than it looked. His hand bumped against ceramic that clinked delicately somewhere behind a lined row of unused sprinklers.
A set. Tea cups, plates, saucers, all in pairs. A gift you'd give to two, except they look more like possessions than a present. Beomgyu pulls the cups out.
Flowers that are unmistakably painted by hand. But they look too delicate to use, thin glass cups that are clear as water. Each one painted with soft, blooming flowers in shades of rose and pink. They resembled the wild roses in Soobin's garden, the colour of the petals deepening at the center and fading at the edges, leaves adoring the negative space like afterthoughts.
Set side by side, they felt like a pair manufactured to be sold together. But Beomgyu would like to think his judgment of brushstrokes is fair enough to know better. The flowers are the same, but they are not identical. One thing stands evident, though—they were painted by hand.
He didn't know Soobin painted.
Turning the cups over in his hand, he finds faint signs of neglect. A slight cloudiness along the rims. Dust gathers where the handle meets the cup, the transparent glass no longer perfectly pristine. Yet nothing about them feels ruined. The design endures, even if the shape the blossoms hold has softened.
Lovely, Beomgyu thinks as he sets them down on the counter gingerly.
The sound of the bubbling water mingles with the petter-patter of the rain outside. Footsteps approach him from behind as Soobin steps into the kitchen in a dry shirt and loose beige pants. The outfit makes Beomgyu smile when he contrasts it with his own wrinkled night-tee, blanket-cape and shorts that are an ill choice given the storm is dragging the temperature down the longer he stands here.
Soobin doesn't seem to own any casual clothes. Truly casual, pulled-from-the-bottom-of-the closet casual. Even his night wear are all matching sets.
It's endearing.
Beomgyu steps away from the counter, stove turned off and the tea ready to be poured when Soobin takes over. He watches the man pause when he finds the tea cups out on the counter.
They're picked up and brushed off of some dust. Then placed back where Beomgyu had found them, deep inside the cabinet again.
"What would you like to eat?" Soobin asks, the kettle emptied into two different mugs that are newer, less ornamental ones.
Beomgyu chuckles, leaning his elbow on the table where he has taken his place on the stool again. "You don't have to cook for me, you know."
Soobin turns halfway, a hint of his dimple visible from Beomgyu's place on the stool. "I was going to make something for myself anyway," he says, rather flustered to launch into an earnest explanation right away. Up-close, Beomgyu could have spotted the beginnings of smile lines.
He leans down forward, cheek flat against the wood of the table. His vision tilts. It makes him shiver, the surface below his face almost freezing. "Do you cook well?"
"Terribly," Soobin replies but his hands fetch two eggs from an about-to-be-finished tray. He cracks them in the second try, movements heavy with inexpertise. Beomgyu's mind goes back to the carefully delineated flowers on the tea cups.
"Do you paint?" he finds himself asking.
Movements stop from stirring the eggs into a scrambled dish. Well, Beomgyu is sure it was supposed to be an omelette but he refrains from commenting on it.
Soobin keeps his back turned, "Certainly not as well as you." He says, voice a lilt lower as he shakes his head. "I don't, no."
Beomgyu stares for a moment. Stares as Soobin does turn around, the eggs plated against two toasts of bread each. They look edible, to his initial doubt. The tea that Beomgyu had taken off the stove is still steaming between Soobin's palms that engulf the utensil when he sips. He watches the shape of the man's lips pucker around the rim to swallow the liquid, and it brings his mind back to his own cup.
It's not tea inside he finds. Coffee, brewed the way Beomgyu has taken it for the fortnight he has spent here. Beomgyu looks at the stove before he looks at Soobin in front of him who's rather busy with his eggs.
One kettle, and for the life in him he cannot remember when the older brewed up a mug of coffee.
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The storm only gets louder, the rain even more unrelenting. Beomgyu finds himself thinking the sky may never clear.
It's the third morning that doesn't quite feel like so. The darkness only turns into daylight by the fall of lightning. His friends call him over the phone, but the reception allows a meagre exchange of worrisome jabs. Why did you even decide to go off to bumfuck nowhere when all that happens there is rain? Is that inspiration?
Beomgyu is used to it. He scoffs, jabs back or simply cuts the call under the excuse of bad connection. At least it is not that far from the truth. Among unsolicited taunts he misses his mother the most, who also happens to call the least.
He's in his studio again, the bird now wholly slipped from his mind and the scenery. The window offers no view, the tree holding on against wind that sways the branches violently, smacking against the windowpanes. He worries about the glass, hopes Soobin has taken the time to replace the bolts before it collapses under the downpour and drowns the room Beomgyu has halfheartedly curated.
At the edge of the canvas he paints a single flower. Rose and pink, the clink of glass and the light that went through them before he put them down. The rest of the canvas remains untouched.
His mother calls at the late hours of night, when Beomgyu had turned in his bed for the thousandth time to no fruition of sleep. She doesn't insist on him to come back, or ask why he's here in the first place. He has never been questioned by her before, and part of him had expected her to start now. It's a pointless thought—there's no limit on him, has never been. He made sure of that.
Are you not cold? Is all she asks, her voice a little different than what he's used to. “I can’t sleep,” he answers, voice so soft it’s almost inaudible to his own ears, “it’s too noisy outside.”
She hums but no other response comes through the line.
Beomgyu hears a low, cracking sound that barely cuts through the downpour. There’s a faint, drawn-out groan beneath it, like something giving away far off, before it disappears into the constant hush of water. It makes him pause.
What is it, honey? his mother asks at the silence.
He shakes himself out of it, or the shiver that runs down his spine does it for him. "It's—" he halts, maybe to wait for another sound to follow but there is none. "I think a tree fell or something."
He can feel the worry bleeding through the line, his mother's sigh that doesn't caress him physically but can be felt anyway. His hand comes up to rub at his cheek. Is it really that bad? asks her.
"I'll—" There's a slight uncanniness to the temperature, cold, colder. He puts his legs under the blanket, already thinking if he should wake Soobin up to ask for another or not.
"I'll be okay, mom," he tells her while trying to keep the shivers out of his voice.
They lose power the following afternoon when Beomgyu has almost started to think the rain may finally give up. His still empty canvas blacks out like a TV screen, a clean paintbrush left hovering in the air before it could touch the linen. Petulantly, he places the brush back into the water and it splashes, as if he had been full of inspiration had the lights not given out. His studio is nearly invisible, and his vision fades at the edges if he tries to look for a candle.
Even if the rain has slowed itself to just an angry drizzle, the house remains freezing. The socks he had packed with summers in mind do little as he makes his way down the stairs.
His feet drift to the garden door on instinct, life that seeks out another in this house where he and Soobin are the only moving things. Presences that breathe. And the storm. It's become a living entity as well, for the past days it had swayed, angered and slowed, then returned again. It has dictated Beomgyu, his body when he couldn't sleep, his hands that jam up if he tries to paint. He's become beyond wary of it; he thinks the sun may never be quite the same again.
The garden is empty. The plants look happy, protected under the tarpaulin and a few newer wooden planks Soobin must have added sometime when Beomgyu must have been sleeping or in his studio. The rain is loud enough over them to make him shut the door hastily, a ringing in his ear with the wind that enters the house from it. He walks back to the stairwell, then feels the same wind right on his back, again.
The front door lies open. Through it is the shadow of a familiar figure, Soobin, standing on the porch with his hands behind his back.
Beomgyu walks over to him.
Outside, they can see the road. It's a paved narrow stretch, tree-lines on both sides—the only way to town by vehicle. And between it lies a large tree horizontally across the entire pavement. Beomgyu thinks of the sound last night. A tree falling loudly that made even his mother worry for a second. It lies there befallen.
Soobin beside him stares at the scene. The rain had slowed for an hour or two, but here the raindrops clapped over the tree's leaves and perhaps Beomgyu had only imagined the momentary hush. When Beomgyu turns his face to look at the older man beside him, the skin of his cheeks matches the clouds in the sky—grey and evenly damp with droplets that race down his features, his neck. There's a placid expression there, just a blank stare as he looks at the befallen tree down the road.
Beomgyu's presence remains unacknowledged. Every other morning, when he had stumbled into the living room wary of his own uncreativity and inability to fill a single canvas, Soobin had greeted him with something. A hello, or a good morning. A simple question about if he slept well or not. Or if he had eaten yet. It had made Beomgyu feel less like a tenant and more like a guest. The thought makes room for another—how they still haven't talked about what he should pay Soobin once the month comes to an end.
He hovers next to the older, rummaging to say something about the scene. "Was this the only way to town?"
It breaks the brown study Soobin had seemed to have caught himself in. His eyes are sharp again when he looks back at Beomgyu, "We have enough to last a week."
That's not what Beomgyu was worried about, though. Food or sustenance. Something about being here, in the woods with no real way to reach another human being other than a walk through the woods that might take a day doesn't sit right in his stomach.
Some artists crave solitude, some find pride in being otherworldly, or misunderstood. Beomgyu finds himself unable to relate to any of the two. What's art that cannot be resonated with, cannot be relatable in the eye of the beholder? What's his art when it's rotting in his own room or mind?
He paints to offer, a gift you have to return with love, Beomie, so his mother used to tell him.
In art school he painted people, sketches of couples holding hands, of dogs that sit on the sidewalk and wait for their owners. He painted the world and the good in it. It brought him grades that barely managed to put a graduation hat on his head.
Solitude came to Beomgyu unsolicited. With no real friends in the city, he ran away to here.
Solitude, though. It seems that it followed him anyway.
"Can't you like…," he fidgets with the seam of his shirt. "I don't know, make a call? It can't lie there forever."
Soobin's face regards him with a comforting smile, "Once the power returns." He turns, a hand coming up to hover just behind the small of Beomgyu's back as if to turn him as well, like a habit, but it falls before it could touch. A tingle, like a weak fire's brush, runs over Beomgyu's back anyway. "Come on."
Inside, they light candles. One by one, the house gets lit into dispersed lighting as they flicker and sway when Soobin opens the door once to bring small logs of wood inside.
“What for?” Beomgyu asks, watching as Soobin tries to hold them all at once.
“The fireplace,” he responds.
He can see the edges of Soobin's silhouette, working the fireplace over until Beomgyu sees a bit of a flicker. The firebox is dusty with signs of disuse. Soobin must not start it often. The flicker turns into a blearing flame, so much that Beomgyu has to look away. But Soobin doesn't; he stares into the core of it, where the fire shades blue. An evening sky, the sun-like red that bleeds outward from it. It forms a halo-like ring over Soobin's head, a painting of a Saint. His mother would like him.
The fire rises, and rises until it touches the roof of the firebox. Momentarily, Beomgyu gets scared enough to step back from it on instinct. His face warms from the proximity, comfort that he wants to seek out.
But as quickly as it started, the flame dies down to leave just embers of glowing wood.
Beside him, Soobin huffs out a breath. "I'm afraid I'm not very good at this." It's earnest, the lines of his face down turned as he says it.
Beomgyu looks around the house and the corners that don't need to be lit.
He gathers the candles, careful with the dripping wax to not touch his skin. He sets them on the empty table, pushed together so they form a beacon-like presence in the center of the room. It illuminates his face, and Soobin's as well in the distance who just watches the action occur. The couch creaks as Beomgyu sits on it. He draws his knees up, thighs pressed against his chest and waits for the other to join.
It's not anything close to the fire; it offers light that fades with a few meters of distance and heat that could be just his imagination.
Soobin beside him is silent. He sits robotically, with a great distance between them, back straight and knees apart. Palms rested on them. Beomgyu looks at him for a while.
He looks off-kilter, though everything about him is put together. He sits in his own house like he's about to leave, stuck with one leg out the doorway of which he holds the key.
Beomgyu cups his hands over the candle flame, the heat a negligible thing if he tries to keep a safe distance. But it's soothing nonetheless, he feels a small sensation akin to a small puff of air every time the flame sways.
"Is it stupid if I say I miss my friends?" Beomgyu asks, trying to make conversation.
Soobin looks at him, half of his face orange with the reflection of candlelight. His eyes are bigger now that they sit together on eye-level. Mostly, Soobin has to look down at him, eyes going half-lidded to match Beomgyu's gaze. Here they shine despite the darkness of the room and what meagre light they have mustered up.
"No, not at all." The older reassures. "Do you not talk to them often?"
Beomgyu thinks of the last time he phoned a friend, or vice-versa. There were fleeting conversations from a few, but the most he remembers is being left with an unsolicited itch of frustration. He finds himself holding no right to actually miss his friends; or his life in the city. At the prospect of being called back he feels anger. For what, he is oblivious to.
Had anyone paid attention to his time in the city? He wanted to fit in desperately—became a party girl for the weekends, crashed at his classmate's dorms drunk out of his wits, experimented with recreational means. Hell, he even went as far as working a job in the city's most boring café, fell into bed with the guitarist that played awful songs every two weeks and felt nothing for the guy besides envy.
So abhorrently bad at his art, and yet so completely obsessed with it.
His friends—they were hardly ever present to catch his falls outside of the ones he made while drunk.
"I don't," he tells Soobin, who's looking at the candles now. "I mean, not very often."
"Why do you miss them?"
The question is harsh, Beomgyu thinks after Soobin asks it. But then again the environment demands so; they are sitting in candlelight with a storm that has cut them off from the rest of the world, albeit temporarily. It's the kind of ambience that demands for secrets to be spilt, and so he looks at Soobin and down to the man's healed knees—bearing only scars of several falls that no longer ache or bleed.
"Why do you live here?" He asks instead of answering Soobin's question.
The change in subject forces Soobin to look at him again, a micro-reaction that sends a wave of satisfaction across Beomgyu at having drawn it from the man.
But the older recovers quickly, shoulder jerking in an awkward shrug as Beomgyu looks at the collar of his shirt that lays askew. "This is my only home," he says with a spread of his arm outstretched towards the rest of the house. The candle's flame wavers.
"You could sell it," Beomgyu turns his body towards Soobin, having decided that the warmth of another presence is better than the faux of the candles. "It's only convenient."
"Who would buy a place like this?" Soobin chuckles. "And I can't bear to tear it down."
"Doesn't it get lonely?" Beomgyu asks. There's a pang of sympathy in the way the man speaks about this house. Sympathy for the house? he thinks, confused.
"If I have to be honest," Soobin's chuckle left a smile on his face, dimples that are framed by a face that looks so lived in right now in the coloured reflection of a flame nearby, and Beomgyu gets a nag to draw it. "I will be lonely anywhere."
The response makes Beomgyu pause. He lets his eyes go from Soobin's face to the melting wax on the wood of the centre table. It is the manner in which Soobin says the words, with no regret or sadness in them whatsoever. Beomgyu finds acceptance that is plain and detached. It is a tricky statement to play with; Beomgyu doesn't want to offer pity—the most ugly thing to digest.
But he doesn't want to offer indifference either, for the first time that Soobin has tried to tell him anything about himself. Beomgyu wants to say something right.
It's too late. Soobin chuckles again, an echoing sound that rings through the walls of the room.
"I'm sorry," says he. "I'm— That was a bleak thing to say, wasn't it?" He puts a finger through the flame, back and forth, back and forth as he watches the fire sway and ultimately give out. One down of the four Beomgyu had lit up. "I never have any visitors. You're the first in ages." He looks at a distance, recalibrating. "I think I have forgotten how to talk."
Beomgyu's mind runs back to the conversations he's had with Soobin over the weeks, and he's only remembering obliviousness. Or perhaps kindness.
Soobin doesn't speak much at all, so when he does it's just soft words of praise when he catches a glimpse of Beomgyu's old paintings hung in his studio, or a morning greeting. Questions regarding the house, about if there is anything he needs.
Or when Soobin doesn't say anything at all—like he said nothing about Beomgyu stealing his books, opening doors just to see what lies inside, dragging stools and glasses from the kitchen to his studio. It occurs to Beomgyu that perhaps he is not a very polite guest.
"I could talk to you, Soobin-ssi," he tries as a last resort to present a worthy offering. "It makes sense, since it is just the two of us."
"Ah, it's okay," Soobin shakes his head. "Old man like me, I'd only bore you."
At that it's Beomgyu who breaks into a laugh. "Oh my God," he wipes his cheek.
Soobin observes the reaction incredulously. There's a misaligned expression on his face, a look of amusement and his dimples return, Beomgyu's laugh reflecting on them, a contagious thing that has held onto Soobin.
And other than that he just looks embarrassed. Beomgyu cannot really see the blush on his face but it's audible when Soobin asks, voice a fraction higher, "What is it?" With his lips stretched thin across upper teeth.
Beomgyu regards the man, his pale hands that fidget now with the sleeve of his shirt. Broad upright shoulders. The faint beginnings of grey hair at the corner of his temple and his pretty eyes are adorned with the hint of crow's feet that form when one laughs with their entire face.
Beomgyu realises he has never seen the other man bark out a laugh, but Soobin does laugh. They are small sounds, as if the man is trying to relearn the feel of that sort of joy.
"You are not old," he reassures. "Not at all."
Soobin hums, almost disregarding Beomgyu's words and it makes him want to argue back, but that would only make him come off as more childish.
The window rattles as the wind slams an object against the glass, making them look outside. Beomgyu opens his mouth but the air inside the house is dry and he feels the need for water. Through the glass he sees how the rain has returned again with anger as nothing past the hazy spray is visible. The woods dissolve into nothingness. The imaginary heat of the candles renders itself useless and looking outside makes Beomgyu shudder.
"What time do you think it is?" he asks.
Soobin looks at the old wall clock hung over the fireplace, something that has slipped past Beomgyu's attention entirely before. His cell phone died a day or two ago, and ever since he's been functioning on instinct. There is no schedule here for him to follow, so he opens his eyes when they do on their own.
"It's almost past four," he's told. Beomgyu doesn't ask—day or night?
Perhaps the sun could come out and his fatigue would lift like the fog of the storm and he'd be okay again.
He wishes to keep Soobin in the small luminous circle here as the rest of the house lies daunting and cold, but the older is already slipping away, standing up and smiling at Beomgyu. But it's the empty, curt one again. Paired with the same gentle eyes.
Please don't go yet.
"Get some rest," Soobin says. "I'll go check what hit the window."
If the house is cold and daunting, then the outside is cruel. Beomgyu looks at the poor trees as they sway down to their roots every time the wind picks up. It makes him stand as well, the blanket on his shoulder slipping away with a whoosh of air and another candle gives out. Two of four. Soobin is covered in shadow.
Beomgyu says, "I'll come with you."
"No," he turned down right away. "It's dangerous."
Before Beomgyu could open his mouth, there's a hand on his shoulder—heavy and it radiates warmth that sears through layers of fabric.
"Beomgyu-ssi," a voice so soft and doting,
"You are my guest."
All words drown to their death in the swirling brown of Soobin's eyes, with the last remaining flame reflecting into the irises, like the illusion of embers he could paint.
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