(DAY 5: #20) MABGARKO
Title: mabgarko
Pairing: D.O./Sehun, Chanyeol/Suho, Kris/Luhan
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2767w
Warnings: [spoiler]someone jumps off a building but no one gets hurt
Summary: They're brothers but they're not, in an endless back and forth game of probability. They wander and look and wander and don't get lost, but they're never found. One waits to fall. One searches for understanding. They all have powers, but they're irrelevant. The world is empty; the world is full of faceless people.
The soundtrack to this story is White Lake by Deaf Center. The title is a secret.
Find me now. Before someone else does.
- Haruki Murakami
"It doesn't make any sense."
lu han lowers the telescope and looks over at his brother. The wind ruffles the fur of his hat, not cold, but not warm either. se hun shrugs, doesn't say anything. He's been looking at the map for days.
"The city should be here," lu han insists, and peers through the telescope again, but all he can see is dry grass, a road stretching out into the dust that drifts through the sky. "I can feel him."
se hun looks at his brother, and shakes his head. The maps are all twisted now, ribbons of borders and roads, such an orderly grid on the screen and yet the lines of mountain and valley swirl and blend with the wind. His fingertips tingle, and there's an earthy taste on his tongue.
MABGARKO
Maybe there will be a wheat field, golden grain and the rough hairs on the husks that tickled his arms through the fabric of his shirt. The compass points west.
"Let's go," lu han says; se hun nods, tucking the screen under one arm. Right now the ground is cracked and dry, dust rising with each footfall
"When do you you think it will be?" d.o. asks, as the kite falls from the sky. The wind has been strange lately, blowing in fits and starts, things are blowing away that should be stationary, and some things that should fly just won't. He looks at his kite again, limp in his hands, and then at the breeze that ruffles through the pages of his brother's book. su ho is frowning, a crease wrinkling his smooth forehead.
"When will what be?" su ho asks absentmindedly, not really paying attention. He's not really his brother.
"Whatever is coming," d.o. says, the words dropping like rocks into the pool the of the still air, hushed, as if waiting for a starting gun. su ho looks up, and they lock gazes. Black on black.
The wheat blows strangely, backwards, as the second hand on the clock crawls.
He climbs stairs. One foot after the other; things always make sense like this. No questions, no left or right or curving in a different direction. The light follows him, a sun that's not warm, only a stark brightness as it falls across his back.
"kris," the sky whispers. "kris." He can't see it.
What will happen when he finally reaches the top? Sometimes it feels like he's been climbing forever, and other times he can remember the beginning so clearly, a second birth. Except he hasn't emerged yet.
His legs cramp, deaden, numb, step, step, step, as his fingertips graze the wall. He keeps going, his legs keep moving. Step, step, step, the beating of his heart, pulsing through his fingers, echoing in his chest. Air slipping in and out of his mouth.
"kris." Maybe it's not the sky. Maybe it's something else.
He keeps climbing.
Leaves rustle across the ground, the sound when they rub together whispering things in languages that don't exist anymore.
MABGARKO
chan yeol flips through the pages; they're falling apart and slivers of paper crumble beneath his fingers, vellum was never meant to last universes. He can't read the words, a silent frustration that he only feels and then allows to slip away, falling to the ground with the dust from past lifetimes.
There's a crack in the ceiling, the dark sun pouring in, dappled shadows mixing with the leaves on the floor as they drift, making and unmaking the dips and lines of alien cartographies.
Something sparkles, shines, just for a moment, but that's all that he needs.
It's strange, he thinks, reaching down with fingers that are too steady to tremble, that sometimes when you finally find the beginning of what you've been looking for for so long, it doesn't feel real.
Shadows move across his back, memories of clouds as he crouches over the ground and looks at the stone.
"They're at it again," lay says, pausing mid-step to look out the window. baek hyun stops playing with sa'cha to turn and peer at the sky outside the glass, but he's not frowning.
"Look at the second hand," he says instead, gesturing to the clock on the wall. It's drifting, dreaming things that aren't seconds as it dances between the 12 and the 1. The kettle comes to a boil, a dreamy song that wails out in watery complaint before chen picks it up to pour hot water over the tea leaves in his cup.
"The lines are shifting again," he says, letting the water fall over the brown and green landscapes at the bottom of the porcelain. As the water rises, the lines disappear. lay keeps looking out the window.
"Do you ever think?" baek hyun asks half a question before he stops. sa'cha noses at his leg, and huffs air.
"Don't neglect your dog," lay says, but he's smiling. They keep watching.
lu han doesn't like driving but se hun is better at maps, so they trade, drifting off course as sehun steers in the direction he last remembers, except that roads don't lead straight, circling dusty wheat fields instead of crossing them like the wind that races ahead. se hun frowns at the map when lu han is in the driver's set; sets them straight again.
They loop back onto the same scenery after four days.
"We're going in circles," lu han complains, standing outside the camper, looking over the fields, stalks of wheat waving in the wind. It's so dry. se hun doesn't say anything, just frowns harder at the map in his hands, fluttering in the wind. The paper is crumpled, the lines blurred, and lu han can't read it at all. He listens to lines instead, the strands of energy humming. There's a tangle, but maybe things are twisting in the right direction.
se hun lifts his head at the same time as lu han opens his mouth. "I think I got it," lu han tells his brother, and se hun nods before climbing into the passengers seat. Now that lu han is listening, he can see the way they need to go, and the loops on se hun's map make startling sense.
There's a kind of music in the air today, hanging above the soft ground and still water, not really there but somewhere everywhere.
"Do you hear it?" su ho asks, looking up, but d.o. isn't looking. The kite has fallen from the sky and there's no wind to lift it into the clouds again. su ho looks at the letters on the page, they lie in orderly lines and sentences and yet every time he lifts his eyes and looks away he could swear they get up and dance around, ripples of sound spinning in the margins and only rearranging themselves hurriedly when he lowers his eyes again. They don't fit back together exactly the same way though, and the meaning seems to change a little every time.
Fire, the book says, though su ho is positive it didn't say that before.
"There's something wrong with the water," d.o. calls, and su ho stands up from his chair and treads gingerly over the soft ground to join his brother at the edge of a particularly large pool. The water looks the same to him, the faint veil of the second moon drifting in the hazy sky, mirrored in the still surface, their pale faces washed out by the black stone below.
"Look," d.o. says, instead of explaining, and drops a round black pebble in the water. su ho blinks, expecting to be splashed, but instead, the stone falls until, right above the surface, the water sinks as though it's a magnet, polar opposites with the pebble, and hollows out for a moment before it spits the stone back into the hair, water droplets stretching to follow as the water surface flattens with a snap. The black stone is back, lying in the palm of d.o.'s hand.
"I don't know," su ho says, lowering a finger to dip it into the water. The water, something that's always felt like a friend, the true brother he's never had, doesn't recognize him any more.
It's strange, reaching the top. kris stands in the sudden emptiness, the vastness of the sky spreading out over his head, blue and clouds and a feeling of loss. His legs hurt, cramping the sudden absence of movement, but he ignores the feeling, he's made it through worse, slowly walking across the flat roof of a building whose identity he's long ago forgotten.
The ground, looking over the edge, seems so far away.
"It's about trust," kris tells no one in particular, the wind maybe, the strange sense that he's not alone. Someone, somewhere, is looking for him. "So find me," he says, and spreads his arms.
The sky is swirling when he steps out of the derelict building, half expecting it to crumble to pieces behind him but it's surprisingly sturdy for being only moments from falling apart. Although maybe the strange ebbs and flows in time have something to do with it.
"What's happening?" chan yeol asks, but there's no one to answer. He starts walking, following the lines on the stone. Wait for me.
"Do you think we should do something?" lay asks. He's still standing next to the window, far too interested in the sights below to drink the tea chen poured minutes, hours, days, milliseconds ago, tao is still playing with time. The tea is cold but lay likes cold tea anyway.
"Nah," baek hyun says, and leans his head on sa'cha's furry back. chen watches the static, tiny sparks as baek hyun moves his head.
"It's already happening," chen says, and takes another sip of tea. "Chaos are moving."
There's a voice on the wind, whispering; lu han can hear it when he closes his eyes, even though he can't make out the words, as they creep over his skin, brush against his eyelids like feathers.
MABGARKO
"I have to go that way," he tells se hun, pointing before he opens his eyes. His finger is stretching towards what looks like a city, finally, the dark smudges of buildings on the horizon, and maybe the glint of sun on glass.
se hun shakes head slightly, looking away over the fields in the opposite direction. when lu han follows with his eyes, he can make out the silver of water, far in the distance, not the sea but maybe a series of inland lakes. It won't be possible to drive, but se hun doesn't seem to care, climbing down from the cab and shading his eyes against the sun, hanging heavy in the sky, too bright, like a candle about to be snuffed out.
lu han looks at the road and sighs, but when se hun looks back at him he just waves his brother along.
"I'll be fine."
It's time to finish this.
"I have to go," d.o. says, and su ho nods. He's rearranging the tiny ships on his table, white linen slips of sails pulling them along in the direction d.o. needs to be walking. The wind isn't where it's supposed to be, echoing in the ground when it should be in the sky, the paper kite heavy in his hands. He sets it down on the ground and doesn't say goodbye.
The water mirrors his progress, careful steps skirting the water, the occasional surprise as he meets his reflection in a silent pool. There's a shape on the horizon now, something that shouldn't be there.
d.o. keeps walking. It's a person, he can see how. The air feels charged, currents spinning as a curious finger of wind brushes his face.
MABGARKO
The person stops, across the water, their reflections from the two watery moons almost touching in the middle.
"I was looking for you," the man says, and the wind echoes his words. "se hun," the wind says, and d.o. can taste their weight on his tongue.
"I was waiting," d.o. says, and his name echoes through the ground, tiny ripples spreading over the water to lap at se hun's feet. He smiles, then, a quick flash and d.o. smiles back.
After climbing for so long, dragging himself up by his legs and feet and a kind of monotonous momentum, it's so strange to fall. To let himelf go, completely at the mercy of everything else, it feels like flying as the air rushes past.
It's so much faster, falling than climbing; time seems to skip ahead as kris closes his eyes and wonders what it will be like to land. He doesn't find out.
Everything slows and then stops, not like landing but more like seconds slipping to a halt, the absence of sound and motion as kris hovers in the air, softly drifting to the ground.
"Why did you jump?" a voice asks. kris looks over to see a silhouette against the brightness of the sun sinking in the sky, brightness that obstructs his vision as he sits on the cement.
"I knew you would catch me," he answers, and it's the truth. The figure nods, stepping out of the light into the shadow of another building; here at the bottom the ground is striped with light and dark.
"I'm lu han," the man says.
"kris," kris replies. Behind lu han, one of the moons starts slipping over the sun, as the shadows rise from the ground.
The lines twist and turn and seem to slip through seconds; sometimes he's back where he started but the sky is darker or brighter, the ground cracked dry or sodden with rain. chan yeol keeps walking, and the lines on the stone in his hand slowly turn blue as the sky dims.
The ground is wet, his feet skirting around pools of water when the symbol bursts into blue flames; dropping the stone in surprise, chan yeol steps back as the water from the pool splashes up, soaking his feet.
When the water recedes he can see a man, standing, an hourglass resting on his hand. The sand inside is flowing upwards, as chan yeol watches, the last grains rise to the top.
"Do you know what's happening?" the man asks, and his voice sounds like a song chan yeol has forgotten.
"I think I found what I was looking for," chan yeol says. Who I was looking for.
Steam rises from the pool as the stone sinks to the bottom, still glowing against the black rocks.
"Is this the end or the start?" the man says, because it doesn't sound like a question, and chan yeol doesn't answer, as one of the moons slips over the sun, like a curtain falling, or maybe only sliding past to rise again.
The moon is slipping over the sun as lay beckons them to the window, chen comes, tea in hand, and baek hyun slides over, a half smile on his face, looking out over the present.
lay doesn't blink as the sky grows dark, and chen just sighs. The tea is good today, the water the exact right temperature.
"So they met again," baek hyun says, "or is this the first time?"
"I forget," chen replies, wandering back to his chair as the moon slips away again, the sky filling with light, a false dawn. "I have business somewhere else, in a bit, or a while." Looking down at the dregs of his tea, he sees a forest.
"It was only tao," lay says, leaning back against the wall of glass, light growing behind him, and his voice holds a note of disappointment. baek hyun just grins, and leans down to whisper something into sa'cha's ear. His eyes twinkle, mirroring the stars that fade as the sun returns, the minute hand on the clock that waves back and forth in his direction.
There's a current of motion behind lay, the faintest flicker of finger running along skin, but it's enough to make him smile when no one is looking.
"Next time," the space between the light and the shadow says, and lay closes his eyes.
There will be a forest and xiu min will be sleeping in it. Soft footsteps will approach over the forest floor, not even crushing the delicate leaves, too lush for spring, but nowhere near autumn. Mist will drift between the blades of grass, pool in the nooks and elbows of roots, fingertips like mist reaching out over a slowly rising and falling chest. xiu min has been sleeping for a long time. It's time to wake up.
Get started.
Note: The names match the ones used in the teasers and they were lapslocked intentionally to match the stylization. The word sa'cha means tree. Bonus points if you can tell me in which language. (It's a real living language.)
Pairing: D.O./Sehun, Chanyeol/Suho, Kris/Luhan
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2767w
Warnings: [spoiler]someone jumps off a building but no one gets hurt
Summary: They're brothers but they're not, in an endless back and forth game of probability. They wander and look and wander and don't get lost, but they're never found. One waits to fall. One searches for understanding. They all have powers, but they're irrelevant. The world is empty; the world is full of faceless people.
The soundtrack to this story is White Lake by Deaf Center. The title is a secret.
Find me now. Before someone else does.
- Haruki Murakami
"It doesn't make any sense."
lu han lowers the telescope and looks over at his brother. The wind ruffles the fur of his hat, not cold, but not warm either. se hun shrugs, doesn't say anything. He's been looking at the map for days.
"The city should be here," lu han insists, and peers through the telescope again, but all he can see is dry grass, a road stretching out into the dust that drifts through the sky. "I can feel him."
se hun looks at his brother, and shakes his head. The maps are all twisted now, ribbons of borders and roads, such an orderly grid on the screen and yet the lines of mountain and valley swirl and blend with the wind. His fingertips tingle, and there's an earthy taste on his tongue.
MABGARKO
Maybe there will be a wheat field, golden grain and the rough hairs on the husks that tickled his arms through the fabric of his shirt. The compass points west.
"Let's go," lu han says; se hun nods, tucking the screen under one arm. Right now the ground is cracked and dry, dust rising with each footfall
"When do you you think it will be?" d.o. asks, as the kite falls from the sky. The wind has been strange lately, blowing in fits and starts, things are blowing away that should be stationary, and some things that should fly just won't. He looks at his kite again, limp in his hands, and then at the breeze that ruffles through the pages of his brother's book. su ho is frowning, a crease wrinkling his smooth forehead.
"When will what be?" su ho asks absentmindedly, not really paying attention. He's not really his brother.
"Whatever is coming," d.o. says, the words dropping like rocks into the pool the of the still air, hushed, as if waiting for a starting gun. su ho looks up, and they lock gazes. Black on black.
The wheat blows strangely, backwards, as the second hand on the clock crawls.
He climbs stairs. One foot after the other; things always make sense like this. No questions, no left or right or curving in a different direction. The light follows him, a sun that's not warm, only a stark brightness as it falls across his back.
"kris," the sky whispers. "kris." He can't see it.
What will happen when he finally reaches the top? Sometimes it feels like he's been climbing forever, and other times he can remember the beginning so clearly, a second birth. Except he hasn't emerged yet.
His legs cramp, deaden, numb, step, step, step, as his fingertips graze the wall. He keeps going, his legs keep moving. Step, step, step, the beating of his heart, pulsing through his fingers, echoing in his chest. Air slipping in and out of his mouth.
"kris." Maybe it's not the sky. Maybe it's something else.
He keeps climbing.
Leaves rustle across the ground, the sound when they rub together whispering things in languages that don't exist anymore.
MABGARKO
chan yeol flips through the pages; they're falling apart and slivers of paper crumble beneath his fingers, vellum was never meant to last universes. He can't read the words, a silent frustration that he only feels and then allows to slip away, falling to the ground with the dust from past lifetimes.
There's a crack in the ceiling, the dark sun pouring in, dappled shadows mixing with the leaves on the floor as they drift, making and unmaking the dips and lines of alien cartographies.
Something sparkles, shines, just for a moment, but that's all that he needs.
It's strange, he thinks, reaching down with fingers that are too steady to tremble, that sometimes when you finally find the beginning of what you've been looking for for so long, it doesn't feel real.
Shadows move across his back, memories of clouds as he crouches over the ground and looks at the stone.
"They're at it again," lay says, pausing mid-step to look out the window. baek hyun stops playing with sa'cha to turn and peer at the sky outside the glass, but he's not frowning.
"Look at the second hand," he says instead, gesturing to the clock on the wall. It's drifting, dreaming things that aren't seconds as it dances between the 12 and the 1. The kettle comes to a boil, a dreamy song that wails out in watery complaint before chen picks it up to pour hot water over the tea leaves in his cup.
"The lines are shifting again," he says, letting the water fall over the brown and green landscapes at the bottom of the porcelain. As the water rises, the lines disappear. lay keeps looking out the window.
"Do you ever think?" baek hyun asks half a question before he stops. sa'cha noses at his leg, and huffs air.
"Don't neglect your dog," lay says, but he's smiling. They keep watching.
lu han doesn't like driving but se hun is better at maps, so they trade, drifting off course as sehun steers in the direction he last remembers, except that roads don't lead straight, circling dusty wheat fields instead of crossing them like the wind that races ahead. se hun frowns at the map when lu han is in the driver's set; sets them straight again.
They loop back onto the same scenery after four days.
"We're going in circles," lu han complains, standing outside the camper, looking over the fields, stalks of wheat waving in the wind. It's so dry. se hun doesn't say anything, just frowns harder at the map in his hands, fluttering in the wind. The paper is crumpled, the lines blurred, and lu han can't read it at all. He listens to lines instead, the strands of energy humming. There's a tangle, but maybe things are twisting in the right direction.
se hun lifts his head at the same time as lu han opens his mouth. "I think I got it," lu han tells his brother, and se hun nods before climbing into the passengers seat. Now that lu han is listening, he can see the way they need to go, and the loops on se hun's map make startling sense.
There's a kind of music in the air today, hanging above the soft ground and still water, not really there but somewhere everywhere.
"Do you hear it?" su ho asks, looking up, but d.o. isn't looking. The kite has fallen from the sky and there's no wind to lift it into the clouds again. su ho looks at the letters on the page, they lie in orderly lines and sentences and yet every time he lifts his eyes and looks away he could swear they get up and dance around, ripples of sound spinning in the margins and only rearranging themselves hurriedly when he lowers his eyes again. They don't fit back together exactly the same way though, and the meaning seems to change a little every time.
Fire, the book says, though su ho is positive it didn't say that before.
"There's something wrong with the water," d.o. calls, and su ho stands up from his chair and treads gingerly over the soft ground to join his brother at the edge of a particularly large pool. The water looks the same to him, the faint veil of the second moon drifting in the hazy sky, mirrored in the still surface, their pale faces washed out by the black stone below.
"Look," d.o. says, instead of explaining, and drops a round black pebble in the water. su ho blinks, expecting to be splashed, but instead, the stone falls until, right above the surface, the water sinks as though it's a magnet, polar opposites with the pebble, and hollows out for a moment before it spits the stone back into the hair, water droplets stretching to follow as the water surface flattens with a snap. The black stone is back, lying in the palm of d.o.'s hand.
"I don't know," su ho says, lowering a finger to dip it into the water. The water, something that's always felt like a friend, the true brother he's never had, doesn't recognize him any more.
It's strange, reaching the top. kris stands in the sudden emptiness, the vastness of the sky spreading out over his head, blue and clouds and a feeling of loss. His legs hurt, cramping the sudden absence of movement, but he ignores the feeling, he's made it through worse, slowly walking across the flat roof of a building whose identity he's long ago forgotten.
The ground, looking over the edge, seems so far away.
"It's about trust," kris tells no one in particular, the wind maybe, the strange sense that he's not alone. Someone, somewhere, is looking for him. "So find me," he says, and spreads his arms.
The sky is swirling when he steps out of the derelict building, half expecting it to crumble to pieces behind him but it's surprisingly sturdy for being only moments from falling apart. Although maybe the strange ebbs and flows in time have something to do with it.
"What's happening?" chan yeol asks, but there's no one to answer. He starts walking, following the lines on the stone. Wait for me.
"Do you think we should do something?" lay asks. He's still standing next to the window, far too interested in the sights below to drink the tea chen poured minutes, hours, days, milliseconds ago, tao is still playing with time. The tea is cold but lay likes cold tea anyway.
"Nah," baek hyun says, and leans his head on sa'cha's furry back. chen watches the static, tiny sparks as baek hyun moves his head.
"It's already happening," chen says, and takes another sip of tea. "Chaos are moving."
There's a voice on the wind, whispering; lu han can hear it when he closes his eyes, even though he can't make out the words, as they creep over his skin, brush against his eyelids like feathers.
MABGARKO
"I have to go that way," he tells se hun, pointing before he opens his eyes. His finger is stretching towards what looks like a city, finally, the dark smudges of buildings on the horizon, and maybe the glint of sun on glass.
se hun shakes head slightly, looking away over the fields in the opposite direction. when lu han follows with his eyes, he can make out the silver of water, far in the distance, not the sea but maybe a series of inland lakes. It won't be possible to drive, but se hun doesn't seem to care, climbing down from the cab and shading his eyes against the sun, hanging heavy in the sky, too bright, like a candle about to be snuffed out.
lu han looks at the road and sighs, but when se hun looks back at him he just waves his brother along.
"I'll be fine."
It's time to finish this.
"I have to go," d.o. says, and su ho nods. He's rearranging the tiny ships on his table, white linen slips of sails pulling them along in the direction d.o. needs to be walking. The wind isn't where it's supposed to be, echoing in the ground when it should be in the sky, the paper kite heavy in his hands. He sets it down on the ground and doesn't say goodbye.
The water mirrors his progress, careful steps skirting the water, the occasional surprise as he meets his reflection in a silent pool. There's a shape on the horizon now, something that shouldn't be there.
d.o. keeps walking. It's a person, he can see how. The air feels charged, currents spinning as a curious finger of wind brushes his face.
MABGARKO
The person stops, across the water, their reflections from the two watery moons almost touching in the middle.
"I was looking for you," the man says, and the wind echoes his words. "se hun," the wind says, and d.o. can taste their weight on his tongue.
"I was waiting," d.o. says, and his name echoes through the ground, tiny ripples spreading over the water to lap at se hun's feet. He smiles, then, a quick flash and d.o. smiles back.
After climbing for so long, dragging himself up by his legs and feet and a kind of monotonous momentum, it's so strange to fall. To let himelf go, completely at the mercy of everything else, it feels like flying as the air rushes past.
It's so much faster, falling than climbing; time seems to skip ahead as kris closes his eyes and wonders what it will be like to land. He doesn't find out.
Everything slows and then stops, not like landing but more like seconds slipping to a halt, the absence of sound and motion as kris hovers in the air, softly drifting to the ground.
"Why did you jump?" a voice asks. kris looks over to see a silhouette against the brightness of the sun sinking in the sky, brightness that obstructs his vision as he sits on the cement.
"I knew you would catch me," he answers, and it's the truth. The figure nods, stepping out of the light into the shadow of another building; here at the bottom the ground is striped with light and dark.
"I'm lu han," the man says.
"kris," kris replies. Behind lu han, one of the moons starts slipping over the sun, as the shadows rise from the ground.
The lines twist and turn and seem to slip through seconds; sometimes he's back where he started but the sky is darker or brighter, the ground cracked dry or sodden with rain. chan yeol keeps walking, and the lines on the stone in his hand slowly turn blue as the sky dims.
The ground is wet, his feet skirting around pools of water when the symbol bursts into blue flames; dropping the stone in surprise, chan yeol steps back as the water from the pool splashes up, soaking his feet.
When the water recedes he can see a man, standing, an hourglass resting on his hand. The sand inside is flowing upwards, as chan yeol watches, the last grains rise to the top.
"Do you know what's happening?" the man asks, and his voice sounds like a song chan yeol has forgotten.
"I think I found what I was looking for," chan yeol says. Who I was looking for.
Steam rises from the pool as the stone sinks to the bottom, still glowing against the black rocks.
"Is this the end or the start?" the man says, because it doesn't sound like a question, and chan yeol doesn't answer, as one of the moons slips over the sun, like a curtain falling, or maybe only sliding past to rise again.
The moon is slipping over the sun as lay beckons them to the window, chen comes, tea in hand, and baek hyun slides over, a half smile on his face, looking out over the present.
lay doesn't blink as the sky grows dark, and chen just sighs. The tea is good today, the water the exact right temperature.
"So they met again," baek hyun says, "or is this the first time?"
"I forget," chen replies, wandering back to his chair as the moon slips away again, the sky filling with light, a false dawn. "I have business somewhere else, in a bit, or a while." Looking down at the dregs of his tea, he sees a forest.
"It was only tao," lay says, leaning back against the wall of glass, light growing behind him, and his voice holds a note of disappointment. baek hyun just grins, and leans down to whisper something into sa'cha's ear. His eyes twinkle, mirroring the stars that fade as the sun returns, the minute hand on the clock that waves back and forth in his direction.
There's a current of motion behind lay, the faintest flicker of finger running along skin, but it's enough to make him smile when no one is looking.
"Next time," the space between the light and the shadow says, and lay closes his eyes.
There will be a forest and xiu min will be sleeping in it. Soft footsteps will approach over the forest floor, not even crushing the delicate leaves, too lush for spring, but nowhere near autumn. Mist will drift between the blades of grass, pool in the nooks and elbows of roots, fingertips like mist reaching out over a slowly rising and falling chest. xiu min has been sleeping for a long time. It's time to wake up.
Get started.
Note: The names match the ones used in the teasers and they were lapslocked intentionally to match the stylization. The word sa'cha means tree. Bonus points if you can tell me in which language. (It's a real living language.)