in the warmth of your bones
in the warmth of your bones
donghae/eunhyuk
pg-13
au
with his scars buried beneath his skin, hyukjae will piece donghae back together
takes place in the same verse as this skin we're in is ours to keep.
in the warmth of your bones
Hyukjae likes watching Donghae work as the sun goes down.
The brightness starts to melt away and the colors burn on Donghae’s skin, light his hair on fire and set the earth his hands dig into ablaze. Hyukjae likes Donghae best like this with his back to the porch and his figure curved, hands covered in dirt. Later, Hyukjae will flick away the dirt crusted beneath Donghae’s fingernails and swipe the stains off his cheek, but now Donghae is as he was meant to be, bags of soil at his side and seeds cupped in his palms while Hyukjae counts the cracks in the porch wood boards.
Today had been a good day. One of those rare days where they spend the hours stretched on the floor of the bedroom and make the particles in the air dance, time wilting away. Not time lost. They do nothing but stare at the ceiling, the sun crawling over their skin; talk or don’t talk; skin pressed together or not at all. But it is never time lost.
The wind starts to pick up. It rustles Donghae’s hair. Hyukjae brings his knees closer to his chest trying to keep some sort of warmth coiled between his arms. Donghae might be cold when he comes back.
The sun is lower now, a yellowish orange like the fleshy rind Donghae peeled away during breakfast. Breakfast isn’t breakfast without a glass of fresh OJ Donghae’s momma used to say. Hyukjae remembers early Sunday breakfast he spent skimming the pulp from the top of his glass with his spoon, scooping it into Donghae’s when no one was looking, then asking God for forgiveness during service for tricking Donghae’s momma. He’d ask forgiveness on his own momma’s part as well until one day he’d stopped, the same way he stopped scooping the orange pulp and drank it in one gulp instead.
Donghae has taken his mother’s advice to heart going as far as cutting his finger with the rusty paring knife when he’s still half asleep, muscles aching from sawing wood, body bent over his work table and arms straining under the effort. The way they are now as Donghae digs one last time, hands gripping the shovel and heel pushing it into the ground. The tree will grow big and strong, Donghae had said. Space for spreading roots, sunshine, and a little love, that’s all a tree needs to grow, Hyukjae.
Hyukjae waits for that day, good days like today where they can lie beneath lush leaves shading them from the sun. Maybe their skin will be wrinkled by then. Maybe the sun will have burned this world down. Regardless, Hyukjae will wait.
“What are you dreaming about, pretty boy?”
Hyukjae blinks away the sun’s rays and smiles, soft. “You.”
Donghae swipes the dirt off his hands as he sits. He cracks his bones and is unsympathetic to the creak of the porch, wood’s age and stability meaning next to nothing to Donghae. Wood can always be replaced. “Was it a good one?”
“Yeah. It’s the one with the tree. We’re lying underneath it and we fall asleep right before sunset.”
“I like that one,” Donghae says, bottle of water pressed to his mouth to quench the thirst work often leaves him. The veins in his neck are pulled taut as he drinks, half his mouth sloped into a grin, but Hyukjae stares at Donghae’s fingers instead. The cut isn’t deep but that old paring knife was rusted grim, its blade jagged prickling Donghae’s skin. The bandage has fallen off, probably yesterday when Donghae had Hyukjae pressed to the shower stall legs twisted and steam on their skin, and the cut is crusted in dry blood and dirt. Donghae will flush it out with water, dab some ointment on it, and let it heal. Run its course.
Donghae carries all his scars like this, cuts and scrapes on the surface for everyone to pick apart his scabs and let the blood rush out again. Hyukjae wonders if it’s better to leave your scars out in the open where the fresh air will eventually heal them or keep them hidden beneath your skin, under lock and key where they spread like venom and spill into your blood stream. Blood seems to constantly drip drop from Donghae’s fingers but Hyukjae isn’t sure if his venom won’t kill him one day, if he will have to cut himself open ‘till he’s all skin and bones so his poisoned blood can flow out and he can heal. Knows even less if he’s willing to take the risk.
“It’ll be time before it’s big enough for that.” Donghae sets the bottle down and knocks his feet against Hyukjae’s lightly. “It’s a nice dream though.”
“Are you tired?” Hyukjae asks. The sweat transpires through Donghae’s shirt, from sun up to sun down the day has seeped into his skin. Hyukjae reaches out to push the hair out of Donghae’s eyes, wet warmth on his fingers.
Donghae shakes his head. He takes Hyukjae’s hand, lays it flat against his own with his palm facing the falling sun. “We can stay out for a bit longer. Might catch a shooting star tonight.”
“Do you think we’ll see it from here?”
Donghae smiles. He’s lost some weight these past months, cheeks thinned and bones pushing at his skin. Hyukjae feels a stab of guilt, curses the shit salary Donghae has to live on, the half he saves each month to put back in a house that isn’t even technically his. Stubborn, he thinks. Donghae is the most stubborn boy Hyukjae has ever met and coupled with Hyukjae’s hardheadedness he’s surprised they don’t solve all their fights by beating each other to a pulp sometimes.
His skin goes from chilled to warm, Donghae’s fingers touching his neck. He brushes the fading bruise right beneath Hyukjae’s jaw, faintest of yellow melding into brown. Hyukjae flinches slightly, just barely, not out of pain but surprise.
Inching closer, Donghae presses his mouth to the bruise, his lips brushing against the wind. “Almost gone,” he whispers and Hyukjae’s throat closes up. A vice wraps itself around his chest, thick like the vines that once crawled up the side of the guest house, now wood dust that has long been blown away by the wind and soaked into the ground by the rain. Donghae kisses up the side of his face and this is why Donghae has never lifted his hand to him, why Hyukjae has never once thought of hitting Donghae in anger or resentment. One fading bruise is nothing weighed against the black eyes and busted lips his momma came home with some nights but one bruise is all it takes.
“Do you think she knew?” Donghae asks once his mouth has slid from Hyukjae’s skin, head on his shoulder.
“About you and me?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes I think she did,” he says truthfully, wonders if it they weren’t in whatever his momma’s plans had been for him. If the life of the night is what she’d wanted for her pretty little girl, if she’d wanted the boy next door to love her but not him. “But not for me. You were for her.”
Donghae stirs against Hyukjae’s neck. “What do you mean?” he asks even though they both know exactly what he means.
Night is starting to fall. The last colors of sunset are starting to fade a dark blue, almost black in its darkness. Hyukjae shivers, Donghae’s warmth no longer enough. “Momma always said you were the perfect boy. That Lee Donghae, he’s going places, she’d say.” He turns to Donghae, feels the cruelty in his next words build like bile in his mouth but they slip out anyways. It’d be odd if some of the poison hadn’t slipped into his mind. Sometimes, Hyukjae thinks that’s where most of the venom grows, festering and infecting the people around him. “Turns out she was wrong. So I guess perfect Lee Donghae had to settle for me instead.”
Donghae sits up so fast the floorboards creak harshly. His fists curl and Hyukjae wonders if he’s finally pushed too much, if Donghae is going to give him that hit Hyukjae feels he’s had coming for years.
He closes his eyes tight, breathes harshly through his nose, and waits for it. He waits. Waits and waits like the hours he spent waiting for his father to come back, like the years he wasted hoping for the step of his shoes against the front porch, and the it’s okay son, you’re my son, everything’s going to be okay.
But just like his father never came back and the word son was never uttered from his momma’s lips, the hit doesn’t come either.
Or it does but not in anger or violence, but in the softness of Donghae’s mouth. He doesn’t kiss Hyukjae like he’s trying to punish him, a forced apology, or a form of submission. Donghae kisses him as gentle as the setting sun, kind of like its rays would feel through the branches of that newly growing tree and it rips the breath from Hyukjae’s lungs and tightens the vice around his chest until he feels as if that God he’s abandoned is telling him this is it Lee Hyukjae, your time is up.
It isn’t because Donghae pulls away and he can breathe again. He looks at Hyukjae with the anger that wasn’t in his kiss and something else. Sadness. It fills Hyukjae with shame, more than any amount of lights that have touched his naked skin or make-up he’s had to cake on his face. And he wants to hate Donghae, wants to drive his fists into Donghae’s face and his chest so hard it hurts his heart because if there is any reason Hyukjae feels that shame it is Donghae. Donghae and he’s the same person who washes all that shame away.
“When are you going to get it through that head of yours that I’m not settling for anything? I’m here because I need to be. Because you are what I want and I need you, Hyukjae. If you tell me you’re leaving tomorrow I’ll get in my truck and I will drive out of this godforsaken town and never come back. I thought I’d already made it clear but you don’t.” Donghae lets out a shaky breath and uncurls his hands. He gets up, Hyukjae stunned into the silence. “You don’t want to understand that. And I don’t know how to make you.”
The slam of the screen door snaps Hyukjae out of the silence. For a second he waits for the roar of the truck’s engine, skid marks on the road. Instead, he gets the stomps of Donghae’s work boots up his stairs, the bedroom door open and banging against the wall.
Donghae’s name may not be on the deed, but this house, from the glass windows to the dust that he’d make dance through the air when they were seven and still do today, this house has always been Donghae’s.
Hyukjae is quiet as he enters the house. He turns out the light in the kitchen, leaving the back light on the porch on. He pulls off his shirt as he makes his way up the stairs and scrubs his face in the hallway bathroom. His skin has been fresh clean all day but he can always feel her, there on the surface, the thickness on his lashes and the wetness on his lips.
He’s naked by the time he reaches the doorway, jeans balled up by the banister and his socks tossed in a pile. Donghae sits on the bed, staring out the window, and from the floor to the ceiling all that stretches on is glass.
Hyukjae’s weight sinks onto the bed behind Donghae. Donghae straightens up, his shoulders a barrier Hyukjae should be wary to cross. He isn’t. He crawls on his knees and stops when they bump Donghae’s jeans, when his hands find Donghae’s shoulder blades and Donghae doesn’t shake off his touch or flinch the way Hyukjae had. His arms curl around Donghae’s neck lightly, fingers weaving into Donghae’s hair, and he lets Donghae feel his naked skin, the quick thump of his heart at Donghae’s back, and the tremble of his hands.
“I’m scared you’ll leave,” he says. His voice sounds weak to his own ears but the poison is nowhere near his tongue now. “Everyone else has left so why shouldn’t you? But then I remember the difference between you and them. You’ve stayed. You can go whenever you want and you choose to stay.”
Donghae turns in his arms, coaxes a shaking Hyukjae to lie with him on the bed in sheets that are only theirs, that don’t know of the ghosts this room knows all too well. They’re slowly being chased out, invisible in the mornings when Hyukjae lets the shower run and Donghae takes out his plans, still linger in the dark moments when Hyukjae smudges black beneath his lashes or traces his body with his own hands trying to figure out what went wrong or if there’s ever been anything wrong at all.
Donghae is the one who does the tracing tonight; his hands make love to Hyukjae’s body, to his skin, and the soul trapped beneath, the press of Hyukjae shaky and broken against Hyukjae’s clavicle and the dip in his hips from Donghae’s lips is quiet, desperate. Not a scar is left unhealed, all the poison circulating somewhere Hyukjae can’t feel it, and all that’s left is Donghae and the boy he once fell in love with.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Hyukjae promises, welcoming the scratch of rough jeans and worked hands, feeling Donghae break apart against him even though Hyukjae is the naked and vulnerable one and Donghae has all of his clothes on.
Regardless, he picks up the pieces, glues Donghae back together with his mouth and the unwinding of his own limbs, thighs caging Donghae’s hips and hands forcing Donghae’s skin towards his as close as possible but Donghae is still a little broken in his arms.
Donghae smiles into his mouth, his cheekbones almost as sharp as Hyukjae’s, and Hyukjae’s scars ache at how complete that smile makes him feel.
When the sky is pitch black they sit huddled by the window. The comforter is tossed around both of them, Donghae shirt tossed on the floor and his jeans clinging to his hips. Hyukjae searches for warmth in their stitches and finds it in Donghae’s skin instead.
Stars litter the darkness, thousands. Not a single one flies across the sky.
“Make a wish, Hyukjae,” Donghae says anyways, his eyes closed and fingers wrapped around Hyukjae’s.
Hyukjae’s eyes fall shut. He thumbs the cut on Donghae’s index finger and he doesn’t wish. He promises. Promises that one day he’ll take this broken boy, that Lee Donghae who was going somewhere, and piece him back together with something stronger than wet lips and selfish hands. With a house, maybe, made out of glass so the tree in the backyard shades him from the sun, and he’ll be perfect and beautiful in the arms of another boy who’s perfect and beautiful. Neither of them will know the taste of poison, only stars, and the arms they sleep in.
***
notes: just a little something i couldn't get out of my head. i wanted to write something in hyukjae's p.o.v. in this verse i can't seem to let go of just yet.
donghae/eunhyuk
pg-13
au
with his scars buried beneath his skin, hyukjae will piece donghae back together
takes place in the same verse as this skin we're in is ours to keep.
in the warmth of your bones
Hyukjae likes watching Donghae work as the sun goes down.
The brightness starts to melt away and the colors burn on Donghae’s skin, light his hair on fire and set the earth his hands dig into ablaze. Hyukjae likes Donghae best like this with his back to the porch and his figure curved, hands covered in dirt. Later, Hyukjae will flick away the dirt crusted beneath Donghae’s fingernails and swipe the stains off his cheek, but now Donghae is as he was meant to be, bags of soil at his side and seeds cupped in his palms while Hyukjae counts the cracks in the porch wood boards.
Today had been a good day. One of those rare days where they spend the hours stretched on the floor of the bedroom and make the particles in the air dance, time wilting away. Not time lost. They do nothing but stare at the ceiling, the sun crawling over their skin; talk or don’t talk; skin pressed together or not at all. But it is never time lost.
The wind starts to pick up. It rustles Donghae’s hair. Hyukjae brings his knees closer to his chest trying to keep some sort of warmth coiled between his arms. Donghae might be cold when he comes back.
The sun is lower now, a yellowish orange like the fleshy rind Donghae peeled away during breakfast. Breakfast isn’t breakfast without a glass of fresh OJ Donghae’s momma used to say. Hyukjae remembers early Sunday breakfast he spent skimming the pulp from the top of his glass with his spoon, scooping it into Donghae’s when no one was looking, then asking God for forgiveness during service for tricking Donghae’s momma. He’d ask forgiveness on his own momma’s part as well until one day he’d stopped, the same way he stopped scooping the orange pulp and drank it in one gulp instead.
Donghae has taken his mother’s advice to heart going as far as cutting his finger with the rusty paring knife when he’s still half asleep, muscles aching from sawing wood, body bent over his work table and arms straining under the effort. The way they are now as Donghae digs one last time, hands gripping the shovel and heel pushing it into the ground. The tree will grow big and strong, Donghae had said. Space for spreading roots, sunshine, and a little love, that’s all a tree needs to grow, Hyukjae.
Hyukjae waits for that day, good days like today where they can lie beneath lush leaves shading them from the sun. Maybe their skin will be wrinkled by then. Maybe the sun will have burned this world down. Regardless, Hyukjae will wait.
“What are you dreaming about, pretty boy?”
Hyukjae blinks away the sun’s rays and smiles, soft. “You.”
Donghae swipes the dirt off his hands as he sits. He cracks his bones and is unsympathetic to the creak of the porch, wood’s age and stability meaning next to nothing to Donghae. Wood can always be replaced. “Was it a good one?”
“Yeah. It’s the one with the tree. We’re lying underneath it and we fall asleep right before sunset.”
“I like that one,” Donghae says, bottle of water pressed to his mouth to quench the thirst work often leaves him. The veins in his neck are pulled taut as he drinks, half his mouth sloped into a grin, but Hyukjae stares at Donghae’s fingers instead. The cut isn’t deep but that old paring knife was rusted grim, its blade jagged prickling Donghae’s skin. The bandage has fallen off, probably yesterday when Donghae had Hyukjae pressed to the shower stall legs twisted and steam on their skin, and the cut is crusted in dry blood and dirt. Donghae will flush it out with water, dab some ointment on it, and let it heal. Run its course.
Donghae carries all his scars like this, cuts and scrapes on the surface for everyone to pick apart his scabs and let the blood rush out again. Hyukjae wonders if it’s better to leave your scars out in the open where the fresh air will eventually heal them or keep them hidden beneath your skin, under lock and key where they spread like venom and spill into your blood stream. Blood seems to constantly drip drop from Donghae’s fingers but Hyukjae isn’t sure if his venom won’t kill him one day, if he will have to cut himself open ‘till he’s all skin and bones so his poisoned blood can flow out and he can heal. Knows even less if he’s willing to take the risk.
“It’ll be time before it’s big enough for that.” Donghae sets the bottle down and knocks his feet against Hyukjae’s lightly. “It’s a nice dream though.”
“Are you tired?” Hyukjae asks. The sweat transpires through Donghae’s shirt, from sun up to sun down the day has seeped into his skin. Hyukjae reaches out to push the hair out of Donghae’s eyes, wet warmth on his fingers.
Donghae shakes his head. He takes Hyukjae’s hand, lays it flat against his own with his palm facing the falling sun. “We can stay out for a bit longer. Might catch a shooting star tonight.”
“Do you think we’ll see it from here?”
Donghae smiles. He’s lost some weight these past months, cheeks thinned and bones pushing at his skin. Hyukjae feels a stab of guilt, curses the shit salary Donghae has to live on, the half he saves each month to put back in a house that isn’t even technically his. Stubborn, he thinks. Donghae is the most stubborn boy Hyukjae has ever met and coupled with Hyukjae’s hardheadedness he’s surprised they don’t solve all their fights by beating each other to a pulp sometimes.
His skin goes from chilled to warm, Donghae’s fingers touching his neck. He brushes the fading bruise right beneath Hyukjae’s jaw, faintest of yellow melding into brown. Hyukjae flinches slightly, just barely, not out of pain but surprise.
Inching closer, Donghae presses his mouth to the bruise, his lips brushing against the wind. “Almost gone,” he whispers and Hyukjae’s throat closes up. A vice wraps itself around his chest, thick like the vines that once crawled up the side of the guest house, now wood dust that has long been blown away by the wind and soaked into the ground by the rain. Donghae kisses up the side of his face and this is why Donghae has never lifted his hand to him, why Hyukjae has never once thought of hitting Donghae in anger or resentment. One fading bruise is nothing weighed against the black eyes and busted lips his momma came home with some nights but one bruise is all it takes.
“Do you think she knew?” Donghae asks once his mouth has slid from Hyukjae’s skin, head on his shoulder.
“About you and me?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes I think she did,” he says truthfully, wonders if it they weren’t in whatever his momma’s plans had been for him. If the life of the night is what she’d wanted for her pretty little girl, if she’d wanted the boy next door to love her but not him. “But not for me. You were for her.”
Donghae stirs against Hyukjae’s neck. “What do you mean?” he asks even though they both know exactly what he means.
Night is starting to fall. The last colors of sunset are starting to fade a dark blue, almost black in its darkness. Hyukjae shivers, Donghae’s warmth no longer enough. “Momma always said you were the perfect boy. That Lee Donghae, he’s going places, she’d say.” He turns to Donghae, feels the cruelty in his next words build like bile in his mouth but they slip out anyways. It’d be odd if some of the poison hadn’t slipped into his mind. Sometimes, Hyukjae thinks that’s where most of the venom grows, festering and infecting the people around him. “Turns out she was wrong. So I guess perfect Lee Donghae had to settle for me instead.”
Donghae sits up so fast the floorboards creak harshly. His fists curl and Hyukjae wonders if he’s finally pushed too much, if Donghae is going to give him that hit Hyukjae feels he’s had coming for years.
He closes his eyes tight, breathes harshly through his nose, and waits for it. He waits. Waits and waits like the hours he spent waiting for his father to come back, like the years he wasted hoping for the step of his shoes against the front porch, and the it’s okay son, you’re my son, everything’s going to be okay.
But just like his father never came back and the word son was never uttered from his momma’s lips, the hit doesn’t come either.
Or it does but not in anger or violence, but in the softness of Donghae’s mouth. He doesn’t kiss Hyukjae like he’s trying to punish him, a forced apology, or a form of submission. Donghae kisses him as gentle as the setting sun, kind of like its rays would feel through the branches of that newly growing tree and it rips the breath from Hyukjae’s lungs and tightens the vice around his chest until he feels as if that God he’s abandoned is telling him this is it Lee Hyukjae, your time is up.
It isn’t because Donghae pulls away and he can breathe again. He looks at Hyukjae with the anger that wasn’t in his kiss and something else. Sadness. It fills Hyukjae with shame, more than any amount of lights that have touched his naked skin or make-up he’s had to cake on his face. And he wants to hate Donghae, wants to drive his fists into Donghae’s face and his chest so hard it hurts his heart because if there is any reason Hyukjae feels that shame it is Donghae. Donghae and he’s the same person who washes all that shame away.
“When are you going to get it through that head of yours that I’m not settling for anything? I’m here because I need to be. Because you are what I want and I need you, Hyukjae. If you tell me you’re leaving tomorrow I’ll get in my truck and I will drive out of this godforsaken town and never come back. I thought I’d already made it clear but you don’t.” Donghae lets out a shaky breath and uncurls his hands. He gets up, Hyukjae stunned into the silence. “You don’t want to understand that. And I don’t know how to make you.”
The slam of the screen door snaps Hyukjae out of the silence. For a second he waits for the roar of the truck’s engine, skid marks on the road. Instead, he gets the stomps of Donghae’s work boots up his stairs, the bedroom door open and banging against the wall.
Donghae’s name may not be on the deed, but this house, from the glass windows to the dust that he’d make dance through the air when they were seven and still do today, this house has always been Donghae’s.
Hyukjae is quiet as he enters the house. He turns out the light in the kitchen, leaving the back light on the porch on. He pulls off his shirt as he makes his way up the stairs and scrubs his face in the hallway bathroom. His skin has been fresh clean all day but he can always feel her, there on the surface, the thickness on his lashes and the wetness on his lips.
He’s naked by the time he reaches the doorway, jeans balled up by the banister and his socks tossed in a pile. Donghae sits on the bed, staring out the window, and from the floor to the ceiling all that stretches on is glass.
Hyukjae’s weight sinks onto the bed behind Donghae. Donghae straightens up, his shoulders a barrier Hyukjae should be wary to cross. He isn’t. He crawls on his knees and stops when they bump Donghae’s jeans, when his hands find Donghae’s shoulder blades and Donghae doesn’t shake off his touch or flinch the way Hyukjae had. His arms curl around Donghae’s neck lightly, fingers weaving into Donghae’s hair, and he lets Donghae feel his naked skin, the quick thump of his heart at Donghae’s back, and the tremble of his hands.
“I’m scared you’ll leave,” he says. His voice sounds weak to his own ears but the poison is nowhere near his tongue now. “Everyone else has left so why shouldn’t you? But then I remember the difference between you and them. You’ve stayed. You can go whenever you want and you choose to stay.”
Donghae turns in his arms, coaxes a shaking Hyukjae to lie with him on the bed in sheets that are only theirs, that don’t know of the ghosts this room knows all too well. They’re slowly being chased out, invisible in the mornings when Hyukjae lets the shower run and Donghae takes out his plans, still linger in the dark moments when Hyukjae smudges black beneath his lashes or traces his body with his own hands trying to figure out what went wrong or if there’s ever been anything wrong at all.
Donghae is the one who does the tracing tonight; his hands make love to Hyukjae’s body, to his skin, and the soul trapped beneath, the press of Hyukjae shaky and broken against Hyukjae’s clavicle and the dip in his hips from Donghae’s lips is quiet, desperate. Not a scar is left unhealed, all the poison circulating somewhere Hyukjae can’t feel it, and all that’s left is Donghae and the boy he once fell in love with.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Hyukjae promises, welcoming the scratch of rough jeans and worked hands, feeling Donghae break apart against him even though Hyukjae is the naked and vulnerable one and Donghae has all of his clothes on.
Regardless, he picks up the pieces, glues Donghae back together with his mouth and the unwinding of his own limbs, thighs caging Donghae’s hips and hands forcing Donghae’s skin towards his as close as possible but Donghae is still a little broken in his arms.
Donghae smiles into his mouth, his cheekbones almost as sharp as Hyukjae’s, and Hyukjae’s scars ache at how complete that smile makes him feel.
When the sky is pitch black they sit huddled by the window. The comforter is tossed around both of them, Donghae shirt tossed on the floor and his jeans clinging to his hips. Hyukjae searches for warmth in their stitches and finds it in Donghae’s skin instead.
Stars litter the darkness, thousands. Not a single one flies across the sky.
“Make a wish, Hyukjae,” Donghae says anyways, his eyes closed and fingers wrapped around Hyukjae’s.
Hyukjae’s eyes fall shut. He thumbs the cut on Donghae’s index finger and he doesn’t wish. He promises. Promises that one day he’ll take this broken boy, that Lee Donghae who was going somewhere, and piece him back together with something stronger than wet lips and selfish hands. With a house, maybe, made out of glass so the tree in the backyard shades him from the sun, and he’ll be perfect and beautiful in the arms of another boy who’s perfect and beautiful. Neither of them will know the taste of poison, only stars, and the arms they sleep in.
***
notes: just a little something i couldn't get out of my head. i wanted to write something in hyukjae's p.o.v. in this verse i can't seem to let go of just yet.