What else ought there be?
Oct. 26th, 2022 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
surjamukhiHere is the beginning and also the ending of something that would have been a highly specific 97z AU:
I wish not to release the string of fate
When I meet you again in years
I wish our story would continue
Because I will be waiting for you here
At the edge of the sea, there is a little green house.
The road to its door is perilous and carved into the side of a forested mountain. But there is a hidden path between the trees if you are blessed with the resourcefulness to discover it, or the charm to fish its well-protected route from the mouths of the wood folk.
*
The Moon, the Lovers reversed, the Tower.
A triad of cards lay on the pine table Mingyu shaped and sanded last week. He frowns and runs his index finger along the edge of the Tower. He believes what he can touch, and what he can touch he likes to understand. He asks Soonyoung what it means.
“Stormy weather,” Soonyoung answers from the window.
Soonyoung pets the bloom of the anthurium on the sill. Its crimson head is drooping. It’s too much in the shade as of late. Soonyoung is still in his courtly clothes and his hair catches the weak sunlight that comes through the window and becomes the silver of a new knife.
Mingyu was skeptical when Minghao requested a monthly appointment with Soonyoung a year ago. Mingyu has always been a pragmatic person. He is nobility by birth but a hunter by nature, a man of the earth and the salt of the sea. When he is with Minghao, though, he becomes a dreamer, willing, eventually, to learn to map planetary charts or spend the twilights walking the shores beside Minghao and helping to bottle broken seashells in jam-jars.
Now he asks, “The prophecy?”
Soonyoung, who can sense everything, asks with a sly voice, “Minghao, what do you think?”
Mingyu laughs, because Minghao thinks as much as anyone can possibly, and even more still. But Minghao would never say so himself. He finishes his tea in silence. When he sets the cup down on the table, the dredges ringing the bottom of the porcelain have formed a celestial body, and Mingyu puts his chin on Minghao’s shoulder and peers into the cup curiously.
The sun, silhouetted in green tea leaves.
Mingyu still carves reliefs with as much ease as he hunts game, makes beautiful things with his large hands, and he cooks and cleans and tries to slow-dance with Minghao barefoot on the pine needles in the moonlight. But the pine needles have grown too sharp for dancing. Something has been threading up through the ground around them, waiting to burst into bloom.
“I feel,” Minghao says, turning to the window, at the sea beyond, “that we may be receiving our visitor soon.”
*
The house itself is not green. The green is the moss of the forest, which has crept up between its undersunned stones in the last few years, dark and verdant, obscuring most of the windows. Unnatural green for the autumn.
There used to be music streaming from the open doors every night, and people coming and going and staying and leaving. But the warmth has faded and the house has grown quiet. It has little reason to make any sound at all anymore.
*
Wonwoo makes his appearance two days before the visitor is to arrive. He singes a protecting sigil right into Mingyu’s precious table, apparently on instruction from Soonyoung. At least until Mingyu catches him in the act. They argue about it till sundown, both too busy to realize when the table has sanded itself clean with the calm press of Minghao’s palm on the pine.
“Dark in here,” Wonwoo notes later at dinner, staring into a goblet of red wine. “And so quiet. Haven’t you two grown lonely? Or sick of each other?”
“Of course not,” Mingyu retorts. “We are all we need.”
“Minghao?”
Minghao hides his smile behind a sip of wine.
“It is a temporary arrangement,” he says after a measured pause, and Mingyu rolls his eyes with forgiving exasperation.
“So you’ve heard about the prince?”
Mingyu’s eyes dart to Minghao’s. Minghao takes another deep sip of his wine.
“Of course we have,” Mingyu says in his stead.
Next morning Minghao finds Junhui perched on the windowsill, twisting the vines that have now completely braided the glass. He is drenched in seawater from head to toe.
“Oh, you’re home,” he says with excessive innocence as Minghao sighs and starts to mop up after him.
“It’s my house, after all. You’re soaked.”
“I was sweaty. I took a bath in the sea. And as for why I’m here— I’m sure you’ve heard by now. The prince?”
“We’ve heard,” Minghao says shortly.
He sits at the table and takes up his stitching again. He’s making a moving tapestry of green and gold. A trap for unwanted visitors, a false door. Most of Minghao’s beauty is deadly.
“He’s on his way,” Junhui says. “The way they talk about his prophecy! Like it’s the end of the world! Don’t you like him already?”
“I wouldn’t know if I could say I liked him until I met him,” Minghao says, even though the corners of the house seem sunnier already.
“Alright,” Junhui says, but he can’t hide his sly smile even as he turns his face towards the sea. The vines begin to grow small green hanging blooms, like curtains. “Boy, they’re tenacious. You two have got to hire a better gardener.”
“Don’t let Mingyu hear that. He’s the one who does the clippings.”
“Poor little lord. He works so hard.” Junhui slides off the sill, floating two centimetres off the ground. “I don’t know how you can stand it here. The sea is so near, but you can’t quite see it.”
Minghao puts his stitching down.
He tries to say, I am perfectly content, we both are, we have won our freedom, in a way, even as we are still fulfilling the duties we have unknowingly inherited by being born. But the words don’t come out. Instead the clouds outside bunch up and tumble over each other and it begins to rain ocean water, lashing the side of Junhui’s face and drawing an inelegant yelp from him, and the grimoire on the pine table bangs open in a gust of salt-wind.
Minghao’s mother always told him leaving books open was bad luck. All the knowledge will leave your head, she’d say gently, the nights when Minghao, reading on spellwork, was the only salve for the loneliness of her work and her destiny. For the job of being a phrase in someone else’s prophecy.
He flips the book closed with a flick of his finger and ignores Junhui, who is wiping the water from his cheek with one gloved hand and saying with his mouth that he always did think Minghao would find his house by the sea quite boring without a little discord, while asking with his expression, Are you alright? Before he leaves the next morning he cups Minghao’s chin. He says a spell so ancient it closes its jaws around Minghao’s throat and steals all of Minghao’s languages for a full minute.
When it has passed, and Minghao’s eyes are still stinging, Junhui whispers, “Will you tell me, now, what’s wrong? You’ll be free after this is over. Won’t you?”
When Minghao was ten, his mother fished a prophecy from her mouth and held its smooth pearly shape in both of her palms. She cried for eight days and eight nights before sending him, her only son, to the faraway kingdom where he would live his life the way it was written.
Minghao does not tell Junhui, So much in this world is of greater importance than my own happiness.
Because things that are already known do not need to be said out loud.
Before the visitor comes Minghao studies himself in a scratched mirror. The scarring from years ago. The souvenirs of a lifetime of honing himself for his one purpose. Marks of utility, except the recent red on his shoulder and his neck, the ones he traces now, feeling vain and ashamed. Perhaps for letting Mingyu ask Wonwoo to their bed when the candles guttered out and it began to rain, or for allowing Junhui to press kisses into the sharp jut of his hipbones and tangle his hands into his hair.
But Wonwoo is droll and kind and wily. The only kind of animal who can bite Mingyu and get away with it. And Junhui and Minghao share the sort of commune that comes from someone who slips into your dreams and makes you laugh in your sleep, who sends you songs through the conch shells when you have none for yourself.
*
They were knights for some time, Mingyu and Wonwoo. They killed a great many people together.
And Junhui, he read the stars with Soonyoung and Minghao long before the house was built, when all they did was tell the King where to defend, where to attack.
Until the land grew tired of it. Until there was green everywhere. The green of decay, the green of the lichen that can survive only on dirt watered by blood.
*
At noon, the sun at its very apex, the visitor emerges through the forest on foot whistling a song the birds take up.
Mingyu greets him while splitting deadwood with his heavy axe. Minghao watches them talk from the bedroom window, through the tangles of vines. He only catches the visitor in fractions split by green— black curls, bright eyes, a face grimy and littered with cuts. A dizzying smile.
When the door opens Minghao is waiting. The visitor stops cold on the threshold, mid-step with his mouth slightly open, his face turned upward. His armor gleams despite its spattering of dried blood. His exhausted face is full of goodness. The sacrificial sort. Noble, devoted.
“My lord,” he says, sinking to both his knees before Minghao can protest. His head is bowed and the tips of his ears are red from the evening cold. “My name is Seokmin. Thank you for letting me rest here. Please take care of me.”
He is tired and dazed from his long journey. When they lead him to the spare room, he stands in its center, frozen like a lost doe.
“I’ll help with the armor,” Mingyu says, nudging past Minghao.
Seokmin lets Mingyu lift each of his hands to slide his gauntlets off carefully. A bead of sweat trickles down his forehead, cutting a clean path through the grime, settling at the corner of his mouth. His tongue darts out to lick it. He doesn’t dare make eye contact with Minghao in front of him as Mingyu unbuckles his breastplate and removes the chainmail from behind, the tall, broad form completely enveloping his own.
“Thank you,” Seokmin says when he’s standing only in a squire’s tunic and trousers. He bows shyly yet again, his sweaty hair falling into his face, and when he stands he stumbles to one side but catches himself with a palm on the wall. Apologizes then waits for them to leave.
At the dining table Mingyu asks, “Will you tell us what your quest is, sir?”
Silence.
“You don’t have to tell us.” This is true. Mingyu likes a challenge. “But we might be able to offer you assistance.”
Seokmin still is unable to look either of them in the eye. He has bathed and is wearing a cloak of green Minghao laid out for him. He glows, catches all the candlelight, maybe multiplies it, even.
“Oh, it’s— well, I must begin by telling you that I am very foolish.” Seokmin’s bright voice is carefully cheerful. “And naive. You see, I lost something. Well, I didn’t lose it… I gave it away. Because I was scared. And now I need it back.”
“Why?”
“I– I cannot say, my lord.”
“You cannot? Or you will not?”
Mingyu is leaning forward in his seat with a challenge in his voice. This is how Minghao knows he likes Seokmin already. His gentle prickling is working. Seokmin ducks his head, then covers half his face by draping a hand over his cheek.
His mouth is trembling. With what? Anger? Despair? A wish? How curious. He is not as open a book as Minghao had first guessed.
Minghao speaks for the first time. “You are secretive for a knight. You do not sing your own praises readily.”
“I am not a knight,” Seokmin says, low and tight like he is proving something.
“Indeed not. For you are the prince.”
Such a quiet thrill when Seokmin finally looks at him straight on, eyes wide with surprise.
“I’m not very good,” the prince says.
“What do you mean?”
“I am uncourageous. I don’t take many things as seriously as I should, and others I take too much so. I’m not as smart as I should be. And often I have selfish thoughts.”
“But what are you trying to be?”
“I am trying to be kind,” Seokmin says softly. “I am trying to be loved by the world, so I’m trying to love it, too.”
He leans over the edge of the bed to press his mouth to the crown of Minghao’s head. Perhaps to him, Minghao is the one who is a golden piece of the sun. Minghao’s heart settles and the light grows and embroiders the shifting sea beyond until Minghao is forced to close his eyes.
He shifts his cheek upward so Seokmin’s mouth can touch his temple. He will tell Mingyu to carve a wood relief to evoke the stark lines of Seokmin’s jaw, the sharpness of his nose, a crown of green vines to wreathe his head. But gold-leaf for the rest of him, for his eyelids and his collarbones, and a mirror for his mouth, catching all the warm light in the world and growing it.
Minghao opens his eyes. The bedroom window is clear of green. He can see the ocean, finally. It is calm and still.
This land needs Seokmin, for the light loves him so much it would follow him anywhere.
“I know I must leave,” Seokmin says.
“You are not the kind to run from your fate anymore, little prince,” Minghao whispers.
But when he looks at Seokmin sitting at the edge of their bed he lets himself be weak for a moment. The weakness that has allowed him to find happiness by the ocean even as his prophecy drew nearer, the same shadow of the knowledge of what he wants and what he cannot have. He puts his hand on the seashell curve of Seokmin’s cheek and bends down to kiss him.
Seokmin makes a noise of surprise which wakes Mingyu up. Minghao keeps kissing him, slow and sweet, swinging a leg over his and pushing him down into the bed, and he can feel the air change, can feel Mingyu stir with interest and nuzzle closer, like a sleepy dog on a warm hearth.
Minghao is dizzy with the magic of their own selfishness. Treasure hunters, pearl divers. He breaks away and shakes his head when Seokmin tries to follow his mouth.
“Tell us now, little prince. What is it that you want?”
“Everything,” Seokmin admits.
The sea has started to churn. A ritual as ancient and as sacred as any prophecy. Over on the sill, the anthurium is blooming.
*
“This has always been my very last dream,” Minghao says when the time has come.
And so it has. A house by the sea. No prying eyes. All the time he has ever needed. The only thing it is missing is the only thing that must leave.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t keep me,” Seokmin tells them, his eyes bright with unshed tears.
They kiss his cheek and whisper blessings into the gentle hollows of his collarbone. When he is gone, the world will be as grey as sea fog.
He waves and blows a kiss over his shoulder, and that is their last sight of him.
The leaves flutter. The sea settles. The pine trees sway. Green is the color of life, too.
[The Beginning: Tell me a tale of yourself, so I might know thee.]
I wish not to release the string of fate
When I meet you again in years
I wish our story would continue
Because I will be waiting for you here
At the edge of the sea, there is a little green house.
The road to its door is perilous and carved into the side of a forested mountain. But there is a hidden path between the trees if you are blessed with the resourcefulness to discover it, or the charm to fish its well-protected route from the mouths of the wood folk.
*
The Moon, the Lovers reversed, the Tower.
A triad of cards lay on the pine table Mingyu shaped and sanded last week. He frowns and runs his index finger along the edge of the Tower. He believes what he can touch, and what he can touch he likes to understand. He asks Soonyoung what it means.
“Stormy weather,” Soonyoung answers from the window.
Soonyoung pets the bloom of the anthurium on the sill. Its crimson head is drooping. It’s too much in the shade as of late. Soonyoung is still in his courtly clothes and his hair catches the weak sunlight that comes through the window and becomes the silver of a new knife.
Mingyu was skeptical when Minghao requested a monthly appointment with Soonyoung a year ago. Mingyu has always been a pragmatic person. He is nobility by birth but a hunter by nature, a man of the earth and the salt of the sea. When he is with Minghao, though, he becomes a dreamer, willing, eventually, to learn to map planetary charts or spend the twilights walking the shores beside Minghao and helping to bottle broken seashells in jam-jars.
Now he asks, “The prophecy?”
Soonyoung, who can sense everything, asks with a sly voice, “Minghao, what do you think?”
Mingyu laughs, because Minghao thinks as much as anyone can possibly, and even more still. But Minghao would never say so himself. He finishes his tea in silence. When he sets the cup down on the table, the dredges ringing the bottom of the porcelain have formed a celestial body, and Mingyu puts his chin on Minghao’s shoulder and peers into the cup curiously.
The sun, silhouetted in green tea leaves.
Mingyu still carves reliefs with as much ease as he hunts game, makes beautiful things with his large hands, and he cooks and cleans and tries to slow-dance with Minghao barefoot on the pine needles in the moonlight. But the pine needles have grown too sharp for dancing. Something has been threading up through the ground around them, waiting to burst into bloom.
“I feel,” Minghao says, turning to the window, at the sea beyond, “that we may be receiving our visitor soon.”
*
The house itself is not green. The green is the moss of the forest, which has crept up between its undersunned stones in the last few years, dark and verdant, obscuring most of the windows. Unnatural green for the autumn.
There used to be music streaming from the open doors every night, and people coming and going and staying and leaving. But the warmth has faded and the house has grown quiet. It has little reason to make any sound at all anymore.
*
Wonwoo makes his appearance two days before the visitor is to arrive. He singes a protecting sigil right into Mingyu’s precious table, apparently on instruction from Soonyoung. At least until Mingyu catches him in the act. They argue about it till sundown, both too busy to realize when the table has sanded itself clean with the calm press of Minghao’s palm on the pine.
“Dark in here,” Wonwoo notes later at dinner, staring into a goblet of red wine. “And so quiet. Haven’t you two grown lonely? Or sick of each other?”
“Of course not,” Mingyu retorts. “We are all we need.”
“Minghao?”
Minghao hides his smile behind a sip of wine.
“It is a temporary arrangement,” he says after a measured pause, and Mingyu rolls his eyes with forgiving exasperation.
“So you’ve heard about the prince?”
Mingyu’s eyes dart to Minghao’s. Minghao takes another deep sip of his wine.
“Of course we have,” Mingyu says in his stead.
Next morning Minghao finds Junhui perched on the windowsill, twisting the vines that have now completely braided the glass. He is drenched in seawater from head to toe.
“Oh, you’re home,” he says with excessive innocence as Minghao sighs and starts to mop up after him.
“It’s my house, after all. You’re soaked.”
“I was sweaty. I took a bath in the sea. And as for why I’m here— I’m sure you’ve heard by now. The prince?”
“We’ve heard,” Minghao says shortly.
He sits at the table and takes up his stitching again. He’s making a moving tapestry of green and gold. A trap for unwanted visitors, a false door. Most of Minghao’s beauty is deadly.
“He’s on his way,” Junhui says. “The way they talk about his prophecy! Like it’s the end of the world! Don’t you like him already?”
“I wouldn’t know if I could say I liked him until I met him,” Minghao says, even though the corners of the house seem sunnier already.
“Alright,” Junhui says, but he can’t hide his sly smile even as he turns his face towards the sea. The vines begin to grow small green hanging blooms, like curtains. “Boy, they’re tenacious. You two have got to hire a better gardener.”
“Don’t let Mingyu hear that. He’s the one who does the clippings.”
“Poor little lord. He works so hard.” Junhui slides off the sill, floating two centimetres off the ground. “I don’t know how you can stand it here. The sea is so near, but you can’t quite see it.”
Minghao puts his stitching down.
He tries to say, I am perfectly content, we both are, we have won our freedom, in a way, even as we are still fulfilling the duties we have unknowingly inherited by being born. But the words don’t come out. Instead the clouds outside bunch up and tumble over each other and it begins to rain ocean water, lashing the side of Junhui’s face and drawing an inelegant yelp from him, and the grimoire on the pine table bangs open in a gust of salt-wind.
Minghao’s mother always told him leaving books open was bad luck. All the knowledge will leave your head, she’d say gently, the nights when Minghao, reading on spellwork, was the only salve for the loneliness of her work and her destiny. For the job of being a phrase in someone else’s prophecy.
He flips the book closed with a flick of his finger and ignores Junhui, who is wiping the water from his cheek with one gloved hand and saying with his mouth that he always did think Minghao would find his house by the sea quite boring without a little discord, while asking with his expression, Are you alright? Before he leaves the next morning he cups Minghao’s chin. He says a spell so ancient it closes its jaws around Minghao’s throat and steals all of Minghao’s languages for a full minute.
When it has passed, and Minghao’s eyes are still stinging, Junhui whispers, “Will you tell me, now, what’s wrong? You’ll be free after this is over. Won’t you?”
When Minghao was ten, his mother fished a prophecy from her mouth and held its smooth pearly shape in both of her palms. She cried for eight days and eight nights before sending him, her only son, to the faraway kingdom where he would live his life the way it was written.
Minghao does not tell Junhui, So much in this world is of greater importance than my own happiness.
Because things that are already known do not need to be said out loud.
Before the visitor comes Minghao studies himself in a scratched mirror. The scarring from years ago. The souvenirs of a lifetime of honing himself for his one purpose. Marks of utility, except the recent red on his shoulder and his neck, the ones he traces now, feeling vain and ashamed. Perhaps for letting Mingyu ask Wonwoo to their bed when the candles guttered out and it began to rain, or for allowing Junhui to press kisses into the sharp jut of his hipbones and tangle his hands into his hair.
But Wonwoo is droll and kind and wily. The only kind of animal who can bite Mingyu and get away with it. And Junhui and Minghao share the sort of commune that comes from someone who slips into your dreams and makes you laugh in your sleep, who sends you songs through the conch shells when you have none for yourself.
*
They were knights for some time, Mingyu and Wonwoo. They killed a great many people together.
And Junhui, he read the stars with Soonyoung and Minghao long before the house was built, when all they did was tell the King where to defend, where to attack.
Until the land grew tired of it. Until there was green everywhere. The green of decay, the green of the lichen that can survive only on dirt watered by blood.
*
At noon, the sun at its very apex, the visitor emerges through the forest on foot whistling a song the birds take up.
Mingyu greets him while splitting deadwood with his heavy axe. Minghao watches them talk from the bedroom window, through the tangles of vines. He only catches the visitor in fractions split by green— black curls, bright eyes, a face grimy and littered with cuts. A dizzying smile.
When the door opens Minghao is waiting. The visitor stops cold on the threshold, mid-step with his mouth slightly open, his face turned upward. His armor gleams despite its spattering of dried blood. His exhausted face is full of goodness. The sacrificial sort. Noble, devoted.
“My lord,” he says, sinking to both his knees before Minghao can protest. His head is bowed and the tips of his ears are red from the evening cold. “My name is Seokmin. Thank you for letting me rest here. Please take care of me.”
He is tired and dazed from his long journey. When they lead him to the spare room, he stands in its center, frozen like a lost doe.
“I’ll help with the armor,” Mingyu says, nudging past Minghao.
Seokmin lets Mingyu lift each of his hands to slide his gauntlets off carefully. A bead of sweat trickles down his forehead, cutting a clean path through the grime, settling at the corner of his mouth. His tongue darts out to lick it. He doesn’t dare make eye contact with Minghao in front of him as Mingyu unbuckles his breastplate and removes the chainmail from behind, the tall, broad form completely enveloping his own.
“Thank you,” Seokmin says when he’s standing only in a squire’s tunic and trousers. He bows shyly yet again, his sweaty hair falling into his face, and when he stands he stumbles to one side but catches himself with a palm on the wall. Apologizes then waits for them to leave.
At the dining table Mingyu asks, “Will you tell us what your quest is, sir?”
Silence.
“You don’t have to tell us.” This is true. Mingyu likes a challenge. “But we might be able to offer you assistance.”
Seokmin still is unable to look either of them in the eye. He has bathed and is wearing a cloak of green Minghao laid out for him. He glows, catches all the candlelight, maybe multiplies it, even.
“Oh, it’s— well, I must begin by telling you that I am very foolish.” Seokmin’s bright voice is carefully cheerful. “And naive. You see, I lost something. Well, I didn’t lose it… I gave it away. Because I was scared. And now I need it back.”
“Why?”
“I– I cannot say, my lord.”
“You cannot? Or you will not?”
Mingyu is leaning forward in his seat with a challenge in his voice. This is how Minghao knows he likes Seokmin already. His gentle prickling is working. Seokmin ducks his head, then covers half his face by draping a hand over his cheek.
His mouth is trembling. With what? Anger? Despair? A wish? How curious. He is not as open a book as Minghao had first guessed.
Minghao speaks for the first time. “You are secretive for a knight. You do not sing your own praises readily.”
“I am not a knight,” Seokmin says, low and tight like he is proving something.
“Indeed not. For you are the prince.”
Such a quiet thrill when Seokmin finally looks at him straight on, eyes wide with surprise.
[The Ending: Why greatness? Why is goodness not enough?]
“I’m not very good,” the prince says.
“What do you mean?”
“I am uncourageous. I don’t take many things as seriously as I should, and others I take too much so. I’m not as smart as I should be. And often I have selfish thoughts.”
“But what are you trying to be?”
“I am trying to be kind,” Seokmin says softly. “I am trying to be loved by the world, so I’m trying to love it, too.”
He leans over the edge of the bed to press his mouth to the crown of Minghao’s head. Perhaps to him, Minghao is the one who is a golden piece of the sun. Minghao’s heart settles and the light grows and embroiders the shifting sea beyond until Minghao is forced to close his eyes.
He shifts his cheek upward so Seokmin’s mouth can touch his temple. He will tell Mingyu to carve a wood relief to evoke the stark lines of Seokmin’s jaw, the sharpness of his nose, a crown of green vines to wreathe his head. But gold-leaf for the rest of him, for his eyelids and his collarbones, and a mirror for his mouth, catching all the warm light in the world and growing it.
Minghao opens his eyes. The bedroom window is clear of green. He can see the ocean, finally. It is calm and still.
This land needs Seokmin, for the light loves him so much it would follow him anywhere.
“I know I must leave,” Seokmin says.
“You are not the kind to run from your fate anymore, little prince,” Minghao whispers.
But when he looks at Seokmin sitting at the edge of their bed he lets himself be weak for a moment. The weakness that has allowed him to find happiness by the ocean even as his prophecy drew nearer, the same shadow of the knowledge of what he wants and what he cannot have. He puts his hand on the seashell curve of Seokmin’s cheek and bends down to kiss him.
Seokmin makes a noise of surprise which wakes Mingyu up. Minghao keeps kissing him, slow and sweet, swinging a leg over his and pushing him down into the bed, and he can feel the air change, can feel Mingyu stir with interest and nuzzle closer, like a sleepy dog on a warm hearth.
Minghao is dizzy with the magic of their own selfishness. Treasure hunters, pearl divers. He breaks away and shakes his head when Seokmin tries to follow his mouth.
“Tell us now, little prince. What is it that you want?”
“Everything,” Seokmin admits.
The sea has started to churn. A ritual as ancient and as sacred as any prophecy. Over on the sill, the anthurium is blooming.
*
“This has always been my very last dream,” Minghao says when the time has come.
And so it has. A house by the sea. No prying eyes. All the time he has ever needed. The only thing it is missing is the only thing that must leave.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t keep me,” Seokmin tells them, his eyes bright with unshed tears.
They kiss his cheek and whisper blessings into the gentle hollows of his collarbone. When he is gone, the world will be as grey as sea fog.
He waves and blows a kiss over his shoulder, and that is their last sight of him.
The leaves flutter. The sea settles. The pine trees sway. Green is the color of life, too.
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Date: 2022-10-27 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-27 10:49 pm (UTC)