Notes

Renjun almost doesn’t see him.
He’s walking. Nowhere in particular. Renjun doesn’t have the knowledge or agency to be walking to a place, not in this town, not the day after he arrived. He’s just walking to walk, because the house he’s supposed to call home doesn’t feel like home. That house feels like a cave about to fall on him, ten thousand pounds of rock crashing down over his head. Not like his real home. There he has people who have his name carved in the ink stains on their hands and a building that holds the sound of his footsteps like a secret in its floorboards. There, the world is a little distorted to make space for him to stand. Here, the world doesn’t give.
There’s no space for him here.
So he's walking and he's staring at his feet because the sky is too wide. At home, the sky is cut into wrapping paper strips, split by power lines or the roofs of buildings. At home, the sky is a caged animal, forced to run along defined streets. On the outskirts of this town, the sky knows no such bounds. It’s vast, endless, and Renjun’s a little afraid that if he looks up for too long it’ll devour him whole.
Everything about this town seems just a little wrong, so Renjun’s got his eyes glued to the asphalt between the tips of his shoes as he walks forwardforwardforward. The day is silent, free from distant horns, sirens. There’s an unsettling stillness, like the world is preserved in amber and Renjun’s a ghost roaming long dead streets.
Renjun almost doesn’t see him, but for some reason he feels a pull to look up that he just can’t resist and there, tiny against the vastness of the sky, is a boy sitting on top of a gas station roof.
Back in the city, Renjun knew the type of guy that would sit on a gas station roof. The kind with sharp smirks and sharper eyes. The kind that wore rebellion in the cut of their shirts. The kind that would blow smoke and yell their laughter. The kind to be wary of.
This boy doesn’t look like the gas station guys that Renjun knew.
This boy has his legs dangling over the edge. He's a bird about to take flight. There’s something hungry in the curve of his spine, in how he leans into the air twenty feet above where heat mirages pool and run on the asphalt of the parking lot.
Renjun knows his type but there’s something about the boy on the gas station that holds him. He's got his head tilted up to the sun, up to the vastness of the sky, and his exposed throat should look vulnerable but all Renjun can think of is teeth. The boy is tiny but he's shining, shining like the sunlight itself and Renjun wants to look away but he can’t.
Then he blinks and the boy is just a boy again. A boy who no longer has the curve of his throat exposed to the world, a boy who’s turned his face to Renjun and now Renjun can’t seem to move or breathe because he's caught in the glare of those eyes.
Because this town that’s so different from his home, this town with wind like hot breath and a sky with teeth, this town that has violence in the way that sunlight spills across black asphalt, this town has this boy, sitting on top of a gas station. This boy looking at Renjun.
“Hey,” the boy calls out.
“I’m Donghyuck.”
And Renjun doesn’t know if he’ll ever be comfortable in this town, doesn’t know if he’ll ever carve out space for himself, but he does know where he fits because the world distorts around this boy and maybe there’s some space left for Renjun right next to him.
“I’m Renjun,” Renjun says.
Donghyuck grins.

-

The first thing Renjun learns about Donghyuck is that he's beautiful up close.
He didn’t talk to Donghyuck more that first day. He kept walking, kept his eyes between his feet. No, the first time he meets Donghyuck for real, Donghyuck’s sitting on the hood of a car parked on the edge of the highway just outside of town, smoke curling out of his mouth from the pen clasped loosely in his fingers. he's laughing, his eyes shut, lids thin enough that Renjun can make out the blue veins spiderwebbed just below his skin.
A car speeds by, kicking up a breeze that flings Donghyuck’s hair into his eyes, close enough that Renjun’s a little afraid for him. Donghyuck doesn’t seem scared, though. He just leans forward, leans into the wind, into the exhaust. The girl he's sitting with doesn’t seem bothered. She holds onto his arm, holds him so he can’t lean too far.
Renjun almost turns around. The girl Donghyuck is sitting with pulls him into her chest and he collapses onto her, laughing. Renjun ignores how his guts twist, lets himself coast a little bit, grips the handlebars of his bike tighter.
Renjun almost turns around, but Donghyuck takes a drag and smoke spills from his lips and Renjun can’t stop the kick between his ribs. He rides closer, sees the second Donghyuck sees him out of the corner of his eye, sees the switch in him as his eyes snap open.
“Hey,” Donghyuck yells, staring at Renjun, chin hooked over the shoulder of the girl.
“You’re that guy,” he says, and his voice is a little rough, a little raspy, doesn’t quite match with his body. It’s not the voice that Renjun expected to come out of him but he's not upset about it.
“Yeah,” Renjun says, and he's suddenly very close to them and very aware that the air around Donghyuck smells like lemonade, smells like summer, like first kisses sticky with sugar and muggy afternoons sitting on the curb as cars thunder past. he can smell city summers, his childhood and adolescence, smell a life this town could never replicate.
The entire town feels like a loading screen, feels like stasis, and that’s probably why his dad likes it so much. Peace and quiet, he said as they moved out of their apartment. Get away from the noise of the city.
Renjun rather liked the noise.
Renjun also rather likes this boy, though, and Donghyuck carries the town in the curve of his cheek and the cut of his hair. He's the antithesis of city life, a mosquito in amber, caught in the gold of the afternoon, as unchanging as the quiet streets.
“I’m Renjun,” Renjun spits out, syllables stacking up on one another as they fall from his lips in his rush to speak.
“So you said,” the boy says, voice slow as honey, a half smile playing around his lips.
“Yeah,” Renjun says. He can’t seem to think coherently. “And you’re Donghyuck,”
“I am,” Donghyuck says, then breaks into giggles, burying his face in the shoulder of the girl. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “I’m a little out of it.”
Renjun just smiles quickly at him, tight-like.
“Wanna go, like, do something? I’m bored,” Donghyuck says, and Renjun’s heart kicks itself, beating like a scared rabbit.
“Sure,” Renjun says.
“Great,” Donghyuck beams. He tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, and Renjun runs a hand through his own hair, self consciously flipping it so it parts left.
“Yeri, I’ll see you later,” Donghyuck says very seriously to the girl. She’s got her eyes half closed, staring out into the distance. She nods.
Donghyuck pats her on the shoulder, sliding off the hood of the car.
A truck roars by.
It kicks up a wind that catches Donghyuck in the folds of his sweatshirt, in the fall of his hair, and throws it forward, so Donghyuck is suddenly like a cartoon character in motion.
Donghyuck doesn’t flinch, though the truck couldn’t have been more than five feet away. He just stumbles, catching himself with a few graceful steps, and then he's reached Renjun.
“Let’s go, new guy,”

-

Donghyuck is standing on the back of Renjun’s bike, arms wrapped around his shoulders, yelling instructions in his ear as they ride to whatever destination Donghyuck picked out.
Donghyuck isn’t like anyone Renjun knew in the city.
The thing about the gas station guys in the city is that to Renjun, they always felt like performers. Actors, sitting against their gas station set. Waving around their cigarette props in their costumes, up on the gas station roof to be seen sitting up there. They’d yell, throw empty beer cans at people walking by. They existed to be observed.
The Donghyuck Renjun saw didn’t yell. He didn’t lean over and throw things at unsuspecting passers by. He sat, leaning into the wind, into the open air.
Renjun guesses he didn’t want to be seen. People don’t often look up, not when they’re not expecting to see anything. People don’t look up so Donghyuck sits upupup out of view. There’s no way it isn’t intentional. And Renjun can’t help but want to understand.
But for now he has to focus on just riding this bike.
The town streets are only starting to become recognisable but it doesn’t really matter when Donghyuck is yelling directions into his ear. They’re off main street by a few blocks when they reach a building with windows like maudlin eyes, sitting hunched on the sidewalk among the houses on the rest of the block. Renjun pushes on the brakes and skids to a stop outside it’s door, and it’s almost a relief when Donghyuck hops off the back of his bike.
Renjun’s gotten so used to the scent of Donghyuck in the back of his head that it’s weird now that he's gone, that the lingering mix of honey and lemonade have vanished from his senses. Renjun’s shoulders are cold where Donghyuck was leaning against him, his back exposed now that Donghyuck isn’t pressed up against it.
Renjun shakes his head, trying to get rid of the cobwebs of Donghyuck.
Donghyuck grins at him and Renjun isn’t sure he’ll survive the night at this rate. Not with the early heart failure he seems doomed to.
Donghyuck turns on his heel, shaking out his arms, and presses his face against the glass front of the shop they’ve stopped in front of.
“It used to be a bookstore but the owner died like a month ago,” Donghyuck says.
“Morbid,” Renjun returns, trying to peer through the dark glass as well.
“Just a bit,” Donghyuck says, pushing himself off the glass. “I worked here before it closed down. Doesn’t look like anyone’s cleaned it up yet.”
Renjun can’t see very well into the belly of the shop, but what he can make out in the dying light is thin corridors and tall shelves, a bookstore straight out of a movie, rickety ladder and all.
“Do you think it’s cursed?” he asks, throwing the words into the air. Donghyuck catches them and Renjun turns to see him narrow his eyes, like he's contemplating the question.
“Nah. Not cursed. Haunted maybe,” he says.
“Very reassuring,” Renjun grins.
Donghyuck laughs lightly and grabs Renjun by the wrist.
“C’mon. I know a way in,”
Alarm bells ring just a little in Renjun’s head.
“Why not.”
Donghyuck’s smile only widens as he pulls Renjun around the corner of the building, toward the back. As they walk, Donghyuck looks back, eyes catching on Renjun’s and sticking.
“So you’re new in town, right,” he asks, and it’s with that same half smile that he always seems to be wearing.
“Yeah,” Renjun says, rueful. “Moved from the city. Dad wanted peace and quiet.”
Donghyuck laughs.
“Peace and quiets just about all you’ll find. There’s nothing to do here but watch time pass,”
Renjun can’t help but hear a note of bitterness in his voice.
“Hey, better than never realizing it’s going at all. Some of my friends back home, well, I don’t think they realized they’d ever get older,”
Renjun’s face prickles with heat. He doesn’t quite know where that came from, doesn’t quite know anything other than it feels more honest than anything else he's said so far.
Donghyuck looks around, his eyes fixing on a rusted old fire escape. Renjun can see where this is going.
“I don’t plan on getting older,” Donghyuck says, jumping up, fingers almost catching on the lowest rung of the fire escape. “I just won’t. My birthday’ll come and I’ll just be like ‘no thanks,’”
“Really,” Renjun says, eyebrows furrowing. He feels a little weird, standing still while Donghyuck struggles to jump to the ladder, during a semi-serious conversation no less. “I can’t wait to be older. Finally get my diploma and leave. Start real life,”
Donghyuck jumps again, and he gets it the second time, the latter swinging down with a screech. He grins, satisfied, and turns to Renjun.
“You really want to have to worry about all that shit? Taxes and rent and food and everything? I think I’ll pass. Now come on, up the ladder”
“I’ll take taxes over high school any day,” Renjun says, following Donghyuck.
“You’re crazy,” Donghyuck says. Up two flights of stairs and there’s another ladder, attached to the building, up to the roof. Donghyuck scales it with the ease of experience, peering down at Renjun from the top.
Renjun takes a breath, pulls himself up the ladder, ignoring the feeling of rust under his palms.