Chapter Text
The café on the corner of Hongjoong’s block made a flat white that tasted faintly of an apology, which was appropriate, because Hongjoong was usually there to atone for something.
Today it was sleep. He had gotten three hours of it, folded sideways on the studio couch with a cushion over his eyes and the mix still running on loop through his headphones, and he had woken up when his watch buzzed against his wrist.
He hadn‘t even had to look. He knew that buzz. It was the ‘hey, your heart is doing something stupid, maybe sit down before you fall and eat shit!’ kind of buzz.
So he had come here instead of going back to the studio. He was learning.
Kinda.
He sat at the little two top table by the window with the sun laying a warm bar across the table, and he drank his flat white, and he did not open his laptop, which felt like a small heroic act of restraint. Under the table, pressed warm against his shin, Lucky lay with her chin on her paws and her ears half cocked, sweeping the room in slow lazy passes the way she always did, cataloguing exits and strangers and the general emotional weather.
She was enormous. That was the first thing anyone ever said about her, usually with their whole body leaning back a little: she’s huge.
A brown and tan chocolate Doberman with a chest like the prow of a ship and legs that went on forever, all ninety-five pounds of her, and when she stood at his side her head came past his hip. In her working vest— the soft pastel pink one with the patches, DO NOT PET stitched in white on both flanks, MEDICAL ALERT below it, she looked less like a dog and more like a body guard.
People crossed the street. People clutched purses. People who had never met a Doberman in their lives arrived preloaded with a whole opinion. Especially of a dog that size.
Hongjoong found this deeply funny, because Lucky was, off duty, the single softest creature he had ever known. A sixty kilo lapdog who groaned like an old man when she flopped over, who was frightened of the vacuum, who sat on the couch watched the TV when the nature program was playing.
But on the clock she was all business, and the business was him: his blood pressure, his pulse, the particular chemical shift in his sweat that came before an episode, the thing his own body kept trying to hide from him that she could smell coming a full minute out.
She had alerted twice in the studio this morning. He had ignored the first one. He never ignored the second. He rubbed her ear with the toe of his shoe, once, gently. Good girl, I know, we’re sitting. And she sighed an enormous dramatic sigh and settled deeper.
Hongjoong took a sip of his coffee and let the sun sit on his face and, for about ninety seconds, did nothing at all.
That was when the man stopped in the window.
There was the ordinary flow of the sidewalk students, an ajumma with a shopping cart, a man on the phone. and then there was this person who had simply stopped, half turned, arrested mid stride by the sight of the dog through the glass, and Hongjoong’s producer brain, which noticed shapes and lines the way other people noticed nothing, went: oh.
He was tall. Taller than Hongjoong, which admittedly was not the highest bar. He had long silver white hair loose past his shoulders and pushed back off his face by the wind, catching the afternoon light so it looked like something out of a shampoo commercial. Big dark eyes. A soft mouth that was, right now, parted in open delight, because he was looking at Lucky.
Keep walking, Hongjoong thought, without much hope.
Please just keep walking.
The man did not keep walking.
The man pushed open the café door with the jingle of the bell overhead, and crossed the floor and dropped straight into a crouch two feet from Hongjoong’s table with his hands already coming up, and said, in a bright voice pitched entirely at the dog:
“Hi! Hi, hello sweet thing! Aren’t you beautiful?”
Lucky lifted her head, and her tail gave one hopeful thump against the floor, because she was three years old and made mostly of love, and for one half second she was not a medical device, she was a sweet dog who had been told hello by a beautiful stranger, and she wanted to go say hello back.
She looked up at Hongjoong.
Checking. Can I?
And that half-second of her attention going somewhere else, that little tug of her wanting to break from him, Hongjoong felt it in the way his stomach dipped with anxiety.
Because two weeks ago it had gone very badly. Two weeks ago Lucky had been mid alert on the platform at Hapjeong, nose to his knee, doing her job, telling him sit down now, sit down, it’s coming — and a drunk man had come barrelling out of nowhere and grabbed her, both arms around her neck, cooing, good boy good boy — and she had startled, and pulled, and in the four seconds it took Hongjoong to get the man off her and get her refocused, the platform had gone soft and grey at the edges and he had come extremely close to going down onto the tracks. He’d caught himself on a pillar. Lucky had planted her whole body against his legs and braced and she was shaking, shaking, because she’d known what was happening and a stranger had taken her away from stopping it.
He heard his own voice come out flat and hard and unfriendly before he could stop himself.
“Please don’t say hi to her.”
The man froze, hands still out.
“She’s a service dog,” Hongjoong said. “She’s working.”
It landed like a slap. He watched it land. He watched the delight go out of the man’s face all at once, and something else come up underneath it — mortification, hot and immediate, a flush climbing right up his throat and into his cheeks and all the way to the tips of his ears, which went pink. The man’s hands snapped back to his own chest like he’d touched a stove.
“Oh my god,” he gasped.
“Oh my god, I’m — I’m so sorry, I didn’t — the vest, I didn’t even look —”
“It’s fine,” Hongjoong said, which it was not, entirely, but he could already feel the ugliness of his own tone catching up with him, could feel the way it had been too much, too sharp for a beautiful stranger who’d only been happy about a dog.
“No, it’s — I know better, I know you’re not supposed to, I just —” The man was standing now, unfolding all that height back up out of the crouch, and he was bowing, an actual bow, from the waist, hands pressed flat to his thighs.
“I’m really sorry. To both of you. To — to her.” His eyes flicked down to Lucky and then away like he wasn’t allowed to look. “I’ll — sorry. Sorry.”
And then he was gone. He got himself out of that café so fast the door bell was still swinging when he passed the window again on the sidewalk, head down, silver hair falling forward to hide his burning face, walking fast in the direction he’d come from with his shoulders up around his ears.
The café settled back into its afternoon murmur.
Hongjoong sat with his cold coffee and his warm dog and felt like garbage.
Lucky put her chin back on his shoe. She had already forgotten it. She was a dog, forgiveness was her native language.
But Hongjoong hadn’t. He kept seeing it. The light going out. I know better, the man had said, wretched, like Hongjoong had caught him at something. Like he’d done it on purpose. He hadn’t done anything on purpose. He’d been nice. He’d been happy. And Hongjoong had taken two weeks of his own fear and unloaded the whole freight of it onto a beautiful stranger who’d smiled at his dog.
“I’m a bad person,” Hongjoong informed Lucky.
Lucky thumped her tail, agreeable to anything.
“You’re supposed to disagree.”
She did not disagree. She was already half asleep.
Hongjoong finished the coffee he no longer wanted and did not open his laptop and went home the long way, and did not think about the gorgeous man nearly as little as he wanted to.
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Seonghwa made it half a block before he had to stop and put his hand flat against a wall.
His whole body had chosen that moment to do a full-system flush, heat crawling up his neck and prickling hot behind his eyes and buzzing in the very tips of his fingers, the delayed detonation of an embarrassment that had been too big to actually feel while it was happening. He pressed his palm against the cool brick of some stranger’s building and breathed through it and replayed the whole thing on a loop.
The dog. The beautiful, ridiculous, enormous dog, and how happy he’d been for one whole second — happier than he’d been about anything in weeks, if he was honest, which was its own small sad fact. And then the man’s voice going;
Please don’t say hi to her, she’s a service dog, she’s working.
And the way the delight had simply dropped out of Seonghwa’s chest and shattered on the café floor. And his own voice afterward, babbling a too loud apology, definitely turning some heads. And then — oh, god — the bow.
He’d bowed. From the waist. Like he’d wronged a magistrate.
“Park Seonghwa you absolute fool.” He muttered to himself. “Not even three weeks in Seoul and you’re already embarrassing yourself.”
The worst part was that he knew better. That was the thing that kept twisting the knife. He wasn’t ignorant about it. You do not touch a working service dog, you do not call to it, you do not distract it, because that dog is doing a job that a person’s safety depends on, and interrupting it is like walking up and grabbing someone’s wheelchair out from under them.
He knew that. He’d have lectured someone else about it. And then he’d rounded a corner, seen a pretty dog through a window, and his entire brain had clicked off like a light switch, because that was the kind of person Seonghwa was. The kind who got enchanted by things and immediately lost his whole head, who saw something lovely and walked straight toward it with his good sense left behind on the pavement
And then, because the universe enjoyed torturing him, there was the other layer, one he was even more embarrassed to be embarrassed about: the man had been so beautiful. Whoever was praying on his downfall had fucking won!
It should not have mattered. But it made everything worse by a factor of about ten, because there was a real difference between making a fool of yourself in front of an ordinary stranger and making a fool of yourself in front of someone who looked like that.
Sharp and elegant and assembled with obvious intent, brown hair falling soft into wire-framed glasses, a coat that had almost certainly cost more than Seonghwa’s rent, and a face that had been looking at Seonghwa like an inconvenience.
Seonghwa had gotten exactly one good look at that face in the half second before the man opened his mouth, and his idiot heart had gone aw shit, and then the man had said the thing, and now Seonghwa got to carry both of those around at once:
He was gorgeous
and
He thinks I’m an idiot,
stapled together, forever.
He started walking again. Fast, head down, silver hair falling forward to curtain a face that was still humiliatingly warm.
The truly unfair thing that caught up with him around the next crossing and made his eyes sting for real, which had nothing to do with the dog or the man at all — was that in Jinju this would already have been funny.
That was how it was supposed to go. You do something mortifying, and you call someone, one of the studio girls or your sister or literally anyone, and you tell it as a story, and they scream with laughter, and you screech don’t laugh at me, it was awful! And they laugh harder, and somewhere in the retelling the shame just dissolves. Turns into a bit. By dinner it would have belonged to everyone and stopped belonging to him.
But he’d been in Seoul for nearly three weeks. And there was no one here to tell it to. He’d walk back to his half unpacked apartment with its mattress on the floor and its boxes he hadn’t opened, and the mortification would just rattle around inside him with nowhere to go and no one to hand it to, because he didn’t have anyone here yet. And that, not the pretty man and his dog, or the shattered good mood, was the thing that actually pressed on his chest as he walked home in the thin afternoon light.
He got his phone out anyway. Because old habits.
omfg you’ll never believe what I just did-
He typed to his sister.
and there is no one in this whole city I can tell it to, so you have to hear it.-
The reply came before he’d reached his building, because she was good like that.
-oh no. what did u do this time…
i tried to pet a service dog. IN ITS VEST. and the owner told me off. in front of a whole cafe. and then i bowed-
-LMFAOOOOOOOOOOO NO WAY
like full on bowed from the waist down. literally bury me alive atp I don’t think I can carry on. FML-
A pause. Then a long string of the laughing-crying emoji, and then:
-girl whatever. you’ll live. its a huge city, you’ll probably never even see him agin.
-*again
And that — you’ll never see him again — was, somehow, the thing that finally let the knot in Seonghwa’s chest loosen. Because she was right. She was completely right. That was the one mercy of a place this size. Seoul was enormous, ten million people stacked on top of each other, and he had never seen that man before in his life and he would simply never see him again.
All he had to do was never go back to that particular café, a small price, and the beautiful furious man with the glasses and the cute dog would recede into the vast anonymous churn of the city and become nothing but a story Seonghwa would maybe someday have someone to tell.
He let himself into his empty apartment, and drank a glass of water, and felt somewhat better.
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The thing about karma was that it did not merely find you. It moved in next door.
Hongjoong found out four days later, on a Tuesday, at nine in the morning, in the parking garage under the building, where he was walking Lucky out for her morning circuit and came around the concrete pillar to find a moving truck backed up to the service elevator and a very tall person in an oversized T-shirt wrestling a bookshelf onto a dolly.
Silver hair. Tied up, now, in a messy knot with strands falling loose around a face shiny with effort. Long arms. That same easy verticality even doing something as unglamorous as fighting furniture.
Hongjoong stopped so fast Lucky bumped into the back of his legs.
No, he thought.
The man hadn’t seen him yet. He had the bookshelf balanced and he was frowning at it, tongue between his teeth in concentration, and he tipped it back onto the dolly wheels with a grunt and a small private “yeah” of triumph, and then he turned to steer it toward the elevator, and he saw the dog first, and Hongjoong watched the recognition hit him in stages: the dog, the specific dog, the man attached to the dog, and then—
“Oh shit,” Not quietly enough to go unheard by Hongjoong.
“Hi,” peeped Hongjoong.
Nothing happened for a moment.
The man appeared to be seriously weighing whether he could climb back into the moving truck, pull the door down, and simply live there.
“Hi,” he said, finally. “Um.”
“So you’re —” Hongjoong started.
“I’m moving in —” the man blurted, at the exact same instant, so their sentences hit each other in the middle and both of them stopped, and then both of them said “sorry” simultaneously, which was somehow worse than either sentence would have been.
Silence.
“You live here,” the man tried again. It was not really a question.
“Yeah.” Hongjoong cleared his throat. “Fourth floor.”
Something crossed the man’s face. “…Fourth floor.”
“Yeah.”
“Which —” The man stopped. Swallowed. Visibly braced against an answer he already suspected was coming for him. “Which unit.”
“403.”
The pause that followed was so total that Hongjoong could hear the fluorescent tube buzzing over the service elevator.
“…404,” the man said with a wince, freeing a hand to point at himself.
They were next door. Of course they were next door. There was one wall between them. Hongjoong could have reached out and touched, from his own bed, the exact wall that this person was, apparently, going to be sleeping on the other side of every night for the foreseeable future.
Neither of them said anything for what felt like a geological age.
“Okay,” the man said eventually, and stuck out a hand that was slightly grimy from the bookshelf. His face was pink and getting steadily pinker.
“Let’s just — hi. Hello. I’m — Park Seonghwa. And I would like to say, for the record, that I don’t usually walk up to strangers’ animals and — um.. I’ve realized I have literally no way to prove that to you, given that the only two times you’ve ever seen me, I’ve been —”
He gestured at the entire tableau: himself, the truck, the dolly, the situation.
“— this. So.” He grimaced. A muscle in his jaw ticked with the effort of holding eye contact. “Park Seonghwa. Hi.”
Hongjoong looked at the hand. Then he looked up at Seonghwa’s face, which was braced for more of what he’d gotten in the café, for the flat hard voice and vitriol, and something in Hongjoong’s chest went tight and guilty and soft all at once.
He shook the hand. Seonghwa’s grip was warm and careful, like he was being gentle on purpose.
“Kim Hongjoong,” he said. And then, because he’d been rehearsing a version of this in his head for four days without ever expecting to get to use it: “Listen, about the café—”
“Please don’t,” Seonghwa interrupted quickly. “Please, I have been trying to un-remember it every single night, if we talk about it I have to remember it, and I would genuinely rather move out again.”
“I was really rude to you.”
“You were correct to me,” Seonghwa corrected, miserably. “You were correct. I did the thing you’re not supposed to do. It’s like- it’s like walking up and grabbing someone’s wheelchair. I know that. I still just —she was so pretty and I turned my brain completely off.”
He looked down at Lucky, and kept his hands very much to himself, addressed her from a respectful distance: “You’re very good at your job and I’m very sorry, ma’am.”
Lucky, who was off-duty and out of her vest and therefore off the clock, wagged her entire back half and leaned her whole ninety-fiver pounds hopefully in Seonghwa’s direction.
Seonghwa’s hands twitched. He clasped them behind his back like a soldier with a guilty look.
“She’s not working right now,” Hongjoong heard himself say.
“She’s off-duty. No vest, no working. You can — if you want. She’d like it. She likes literally everyone, it’s a real character flaw.”
Seonghwa looked at him with naked, hopeful suspicion, like he thought it might be a trap. “Are you sure? I don’t — I don’t want to —”
“When the vest’s on, she’s working, you leave her alone,” Hongjoong smiles. “When it’s off, she’s just an enormous idiot who wants to be loved. Right now she’s an enormous idiot. Go ahead.”
And Seonghwa dropped back down into that crouch, the same crouch from the café, Hongjoong’s stomach did a strange little flip at the symmetry of it.
This time when he put his hand out, slow, palm up, and Lucky shoved her huge head into it and groaned like she’d been waiting her whole life for exactly this, the joy came back into Seonghwa’s face full force. Hongjoong stood there in the parking garage holding the leash and thought,
Oh, no. He’s — oh, no.
“She’s so soft,” Seonghwa breathed, scratching under Lucky’s chin while she leaned so hard into it she nearly toppled him. “Oh sweetheart. Look at your little face. You are just the sweetest little baby aren’t you?” Lucky’s ‘little’ face was roughly the size of a dinner plate and full of sharp teeth. “You’re the best girl. Who’s the sweetest baby girl? You are.”
“Her name’s Lucky,” Hongjoong managed.
“Lucky,” Seonghwa repeated, delighted, and Lucky’s ears went up at her name and she licked a wet stripe up his wrist, and Seonghwa laughed, bright and a little goofy. Hongjoong felt that laugh echo in his ears and bounce around his skull.
I am, Hongjoong thought, watching his neighbour get thoroughly slobbered on by his service dog in a parking garage at nine in the morning, going to have to be so normal about this.
I am going to have to be the most normal I have ever been.
He was not going to be normal about it. He knew that even then.
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Seonghwa had spent those same four days replaying the café with the same helpless horror, and that the discovery of Hongjoong living one wall away had turned that horror into something closer to a full scale strategic crisis.
Because the trouble was that Seonghwa liked him.
This was insane, and Seonghwa knew it was insane, because the sum total of his interactions with Kim Hongjoong so far was: got yelled at, felt terrible, discovered they shared a wall, got yelled at (retroactively in his memory on a loop at three a.m.).
But he’d had four days to think about it, and thinking, for Seonghwa, was a dangerous activity best done at speed on a dance floor and not lying awake in a half-unpacked apartment in a city where he knew almost no one.
He’d moved to Seoul in the spring. He’d left a good life in Jinju. A studio that loved him, a family twenty minutes away, a whole life sized net of people who knew him, because a good school had offered him a real teaching position, dance, his own classes. The thing he’d wanted since he was seventeen and sweating in front of a mirror.
And it was going well. The job was going well. The city was enormous and loud and he loved it and he was so lonely he sometimes talked to the convenience store attendant just to use his voice.
He didn’t have anyone here. That was the plain fact of it. He had colleagues who were nice and busy and had their own lives. He had a phone full of Jinju people he loved and missed and texted at odd hours. And he had four grey walls and a mattress on the floor and a bookshelf he’d finally, that morning, gotten upright.
And on the other side of one of those walls, it turned out, lived the most beautiful angry man Seonghwa had ever seen.
Because that was the other, more humiliating fact, the one Seonghwa had been trying not to look at directly.
In the café, in the exact moment before Hongjoong had opened his mouth and ruined it, Seonghwa had glanced up from the dog and gotten his first proper look at the man attached to the leash and Seonghwa’s brain had simply gone, oh, he’s gorgeous, about half a second before the same gorgeous man had told him off in front of a café full of people.
He did not, get to be attracted to someone who had just, correctly and coldly, informed him that he’d been an idiot to their working dog.
That was a betrayal of his own dignity. And then to discover that he’d have to see him, in the elevator, in the hall, at the mailboxes, forever.
It was too much. Seonghwa had decided somewhere around the second sleepless night, that he would avoid him at all costs.
It was not a good strategy. He knew it was not a good strategy.
He was twenty seven years old and a functioning adult and he was hiding from his own neighbour like a middle schooler.
But every time he pictured actually, deliberately, talking to Hongjoong and apologizing properly, being normal, maybe even making a friend, in this city where he had none, he pictured instead the look Hongjoong had given him and his cold voice, and his whole body would clench with the memory of that mortification.
No, I can’t. If I try again and it goes wrong again I’ll actually die.
So the parking garage, that Tuesday, had been a disaster of a different kind, because it had gone well.
Hongjoong had apologized. Hongjoong had let him pet the dog. Hongjoong had stood there looking almost shy about it, and Lucky had licked his wrist and been the softest and cutest thing on earth, and for about five minutes in a concrete garage Seonghwa had felt like maybe it could be fine. Like maybe they could be neighbours. Like maybe he could have this.
And then his phone had gone off, the moving company needing him, and he’d had to go, and in the flurry of the truck and the boxes and the rest of that endless day he hadn’t gotten to finish the conversation, hadn’t gotten a number, hadn’t gotten anything except a warm handshake and a dog’s affection and the sudden, ruinous knowledge that Kim Hongjoong up close, being kind, was even worse for Seonghwa’s composure than Kim Hongjoong at a distance, being cold.
So of course, when the chance came the next morning to say hi like a normal person —Hongjoong down at the mailboxes when Seonghwa came out for the recycling — Seonghwa panicked and went back inside and waited four minutes and came out again.
And that, more or less, was how it went from there.
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It became over the following weeks a kind of terrible game that only one of them knew he was playing.
Hongjoong, for his part, was trying.
He’d been rude. He’d made the pretty new neighbour, the one who laughed like that, the one who talked to Lucky like she was a person, feel like garbage, and Hongjoong hated leaving things broken, hated it in his bones. It was the same thing that kept him at the studio at 4 a.m. reworking a bridge that was already fine. So he set out, in his own way, to make friends with Park Seonghwa.
He was very bad at it. Not because he didn’t try, but because Seonghwa, it turned out, was a ghost.
Hongjoong would come out of 403 with Lucky and catch the very end of Seonghwa disappearing into 404, a flash of silver hair, the door clicking shut a beat too fast. He’d get in the elevator and Seonghwa would take the stairs.
Hongjoong knew he took the stairs, he could hear the stairwell door on that side of the hall. Four floors, every time, this tall dancer thundering down four flights rather than stand in a metal box with Hongjoong for ninety seconds. He’d time it so he was checking his mail when he heard 404’s door, and by the time he got the mailbox open the hall would be empty and the stairwell door would be swinging.
At first Hongjoong thought he’d imagined it.
Then he thought maybe Seonghwa was just busy, just shy, just a person with a life. Then, around week two, he caught Seonghwa’s actual face in the actual act.
Turning a corner in the lobby, coming face to face, and watching Seonghwa’s whole expression do a rapid and unmistakable calculation and Seonghwa say “oh… hi… sorry — I forgot something —” and physically reverse direction and go back out the front door he’d just come in through, into the rain, without an umbrella.
And Hongjoong stood there in the lobby and understood, finally, with a strange pang: he’s avoiding me. He’s actively avoiding me. He’s literally ran out into the rain to get away from me.
It should have been annoying.
It was, a little. But mostly it made Hongjoong feel, again, that same guilt, sharper now. Because he got it, he got it, he knew exactly the specific flavor of embarrassment that made a person rather stand in the rain than face someone in front of whom they’d humiliated themselves.
He had caused that, and now he couldn’t even apologize for it because the apology itself was the thing Seonghwa was fleeing.
He thought about knocking on 404. He stood in front of the door once, actually, on a Thursday night, with a hand raised. He’d made too much tteokbokki, he could bring it over, that’s what neighbours did, wasn’t it? He’d heard music through the door, something with a beat, and the rhythmic thump of someone dancing, working through a combination alone in a small apartment, and he’d stood there listening to Park Seonghwa dance through the wall (and briefly pitied his downstairs neighbour) and completely lost his nerve and gone back inside and eaten all the tteokbokki himself.
He did that a lot, actually. Listened through the wall. Not on purpose. The walls in this building were made of hope and drywall, but he noticed now, the shape of Seonghwa’s days from the sounds of them.
The music that came on in the evenings, the same eight bars over and over as Seonghwa drilled something. The thud of the mattress, closer now that Hongjoong knew whose it was. The kettle. The long stretches of silence that Hongjoong found himself reading, uncharitably to his own peace of mind, as loneliness, because he knew what an apartment sounded like when the person in it didn’t have anywhere to be.
And Seonghwa, Hongjoong would have bet money, was doing the exact same thing on the other side. Because Hongjoong’s own days were loud through the wall when he wasn’t at the studio. His music, played too loud at ungodly hours, the same phrase looped a hundred times; the front door at 2 a.m., at 4 a.m.; Lucky’s nails on the floor; the low rumble of Hongjoong talking to her because she was the only one there to talk to.
And, twice that Hongjoong knew of, the particular sounds of a bad night. The clatter of him going down. He knew Seonghwa had heard at least one of them, because the second time, the following morning, there’d been a paper bag hanging on the handle of 403 with two bottles of an electrolyte drink in it and no note. Hongjoong had stood in his doorway holding it for a long time.
He hadn’t been able to thank him for it. Every time he tried, Seonghwa was gone.
So they lived like that, for the better part of a month: one wall apart, each of them lying awake listening to the sounds of the other’s life, one of them running away and the other one unable to catch him, both of them lonely in a weird fashion.
It was, in retrospect, an almost impressively stupid situation. It could have gone on for a year. It might have.
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Thursdays were bad because Thursdays were deadline days, and Hongjoong, who knew better, who had a doctor and a dog and a whole watch on his wrist dedicated to knowing better, spent that particular Thursday doing every single thing he wasn’t supposed to.
He’d been up since… he genuinely didn’t know.
He’d stopped tracking around the point where the previous day ended, which meant he was working on something like thirty hours with maybe a broken forty minutes of sleep in the middle, mixing and re-mixing a track that was due to a very important client by end of day and that Hongjoong could not, for reasons he could not articulate, get to sit right.
He’d had two redbulls and half a protein bar. He hadn’t had water since — again, unclear. He’d been so locked in that he’d tuned Lucky out, which was the cardinal sin, the one thing, the whole reason she was trained for.
She’d alerted around ten. Nose to his thigh, insistent, that specific low whine. He’d said “not now, girl,” and given her a treat to make her stop, which was a terrible thing to do, teaching her that alerting got her food instead of getting him horizontal, and he’d done it anyway because the client email had come in and the mix wasn’t done.
She’d alerted again around eleven, harder, pawing, actually putting herself between him and the console, and he’d — god, he’d been short with her, he’d said “Lucky, down,” and she’d flinched and lain down and watched him with her ears flat and her eyes worried and he’d felt terrible and kept working.
By noon he’d finally, finally gotten the mix to a place he could live with and exported it and sent it, and the relief of it had made him stupid, made him think he’d gotten away with it, and he’d stood up too fast from the chair to go celebrate with the first real food in a day.
The room had tilted, just slightly, a grey wash coming in at the edges, and he’d thought, with the total idiot optimism of the chronically overworked;
I just need to walk it off, I need air.
He should have lain down. Every part of his training, everything the doctor had drilled into him, everything Lucky had been screaming at him for two hours .
Lie down, elevate, wait. Instead he clipped Lucky’s leash on with hands that didn’t feel quite like his and decided to take her out, get some air, get some food from the place on the corner. He made it out of the apartment and down the hall toward the elevator with the grey closing in from the edges and a high thin ringing coming up in his ears and cold sweat breaking out across the back of his neck .
His pulse climbing and climbing under the strain of the last thirty hours and then simply letting go, falling away beneath his own skin, going slow and soft and distant like something sinking out of reach.
His watch buzzed and he thought
okay, okay, I’ll sit down in the elevator —
He didn’t make it to the elevator.
He got maybe three steps from it. He remembered reaching for the wall. He remembered the wall not being where he thought it was. He remembered Lucky’s harness pulling, hard, sideways, her whole body suddenly against his legs trying to brace him, trying to steer him down the way she was trained to, get him to the floor safely instead of letting him drop —
and then he remembered nothing at all.
✦•······················•✦•······················•✦
Seonghwa almost didn’t go down for the mail.
He’d been in all morning. He had today off, and he’d been halfheartedly unpacking the last of the boxes he’d been ignoring for a month, the ones full of the stuff that didn’t have an obvious home.
He kept meaning to go get the mail.
Seonghwa’s whole avoidance apparatus had by now calcified into something he barely even decided anymore. It just ran on its own. Check the peephole. Listen for the door. Time it.
But he needed to go down. He was expecting a package! His good speakers, finally shipping from Jinju, and around noon he got the tracking notification on his phone that meant a delivery, so he sighed and pulled a hoodie on over his rehearsal clothes and stuck his head out into the hall to check, as he always did, whether the coast was clear.
The coast was not clear.
The coast had a dog in it.
Lucky was in the hallway. Not on her leash, the leash was trailing loose behind her, and not in the elevator, and not with Hongjoong, which was the first wrong thing, because Lucky was never without Hongjoong.
She was standing halfway down the hall, and the moment Seonghwa’s door opened she wheeled toward him and barked a huge, sharp, ringing sound that Seonghwa had never once heard her make.
Lucky, in the whole month Seonghwa had been half-watching her, had never made a sound louder than a groan. and the bark went straight down Seonghwa’s spine like cold water.
She barked again. And then she did something that stopped Seonghwa’s heart: she ran three steps back toward the elevator, and stopped, and looked at him, and ran back to him, and barked again, and ran toward the elevator again.
Something’s wrong. She wants me to follow. Something is really wrong.
“Okay,” Seonghwa said. His voice came out steady, which surprised him. “Okay, show me. Go on. Show me.”
Lucky spun and ran and Seonghwa ran after her, hoodie half on, socked feet slipping on the hallway floor, around the corner near the elevators —
and there was Hongjoong on the floor.
He was crumpled against the base of the wall by the elevator doors, half on his side, one arm flung out and his glasses knocked askew, and he was so still, and so pale that for one whole endless second Seonghwa’s entire body went to ice with the certainty that he was dead, that he was looking at a dead person, that Kim Hongjoong was dead on the floor of their hallway and Seonghwa’s last real interaction with him had been fleeing into the rain.
No no nonono..
Then he was on his knees skidding across the last two feet of floor, and he had two fingers pressed to the side of Hongjoong’s throat under the jaw, hands shaking so badly he had to press hard just to keep them still — and there.
There.
A pulse.
Fast and thready and wrong feeling but there, thumping under Seonghwa’s fingertips, and Seonghwa let out a sound that was half a sob and put his other hand flat against Hongjoong’s chest and felt it move, felt him breathing, shallow but breathing, and the relief was so violent it made him dizzy.
“Okay,” Seonghwa breathed, out loud to himself
“Okay. Okay. He’s breathing. You’re breathing. Okay.”
Think.
He’d done a first-aid course years ago for the studio, the certification you had to renew, and he grabbed for it now through the roaring in his head, fainting, unconscious but breathing, what do you — don’t move the neck, check he’s breathing, recovery position if - but-
Lucky made the decision for him.
She’d been circling, whining, and now she shoved in past Seonghwa and put her nose under Hongjoong’s shoulder — the one he was lying on — and pushed, clearly, deliberately, trying to roll him from his side onto his back, grunting with the effort of it, ninety-five pounds of dog trying to reposition a full grown man.
And Seonghwa understood that she knew something he didn’t, that this was trained, that this was a thing she’d been taught to do, and he said,
“Okay — okay, I’ve got him, I’ve got him, let me —” and got his hands under Hongjoong’s shoulder and hip and eased him over onto his back, gentle, gentle, supporting his head so it didn’t knock the floor, and Lucky backed off the moment the job was done and stood there vibrating, watching.
Hongjoong on his back, flat, breathing.
Grey and colourless.
Glasses hanging off one ear. Seonghwa reached up and gently took them the rest of the way off and folded them and set them aside where they wouldn’t get crushed.
Lucky went to Hongjoong’s feet. And she pawed at his legs and looked up at Seonghwa, and pawed again, insistent, the same do the thing, do the thing energy she’d used to bring him down the hall.
And Seonghwa’s first-aid course finally, finally coughed up the right page.
Fainting.
Lay them flat.
Elevate the legs.
Get the blood back to the brain.
“You’re telling me to lift his legs,” Seonghwa said
“You want me to lift his legs. Okay. Okay, good girl, I understand, I’m doing it —”
He grabbed the cushion off the little decorative bench by the elevator and he lifted Hongjoong’s calves, both of them, and slid the cushion under so his feet came up eight, ten inches off the floor, higher than his heart, exactly the way the diagram in a stuffy studio classroom four years ago had shown.
He knelt there holding Hongjoong’s ankles steady on the cushion with both hands and watched his face and whispered to him, “Come on. Come back. Come on, come on, come on —”
Lucky lay down along Hongjoong’s side, pressed the whole warm length of her body against him, and put her chin on his chest, and waited.
Seonghwa counted his own heartbeats because he had to count something. He got to about fifteen when he saw the first change.
Colour, the barest wash of it, coming back up into Hongjoong’s grey lips.
He got to twenty when Hongjoong’s brow twitched, and his hand curled, fingers closing on nothing, and his eyelids fluttered.
“There you are,” Seonghwa breathed. “There you are, hey, hi, you’re okay —”
Hongjoong opened his eyes.
The world came back to him in the wrong order. First there was the ceiling, which was not his ceiling. Then there was the specific ache of the floor against his shoulder blades and the strange fact of his own feet being up somehow.
Then there was Lucky’s weight against his side and her chin on his chest and her enormous worried eyes six inches from his, which was normal.
And then, hovering over him, upside down and haloed by the fluorescent hallway light, was a face full of silver hair and enormous dark eyes and naked, total fear, and Hongjoong’s swimming brain took a long confused moment to assemble it into a name.
Unfortunately, the part of Hongjoong that filtered thoughts on their way to becoming words was still somewhere back on the floor with the rest of him, and had not yet reported for duty.
“…Are you an angel?” he said.
There was a pause of a quality Hongjoong would spend a considerable portion of the following year thinking about.
“…What?” snorted Seonghwa.
“You’re glowing,” Hongjoong informed him, with the grave sincerity of a man delivering evidence. His voice came out as gravel.
“There’s a light. Behind your head. That’s — you’re so beautiful, has anyone — you’re really, really —”
“That’s the hallway light,” Seonghwa said faintly.
“No,” said Hongjoong.
“It’s.. it’s the fluorescent, it’s right above us, it does that to everyone.”
“No,” said Hongjoong, with total conviction, and reached up and patted Seonghwa’s cheek.
“S’you.”
Seonghwa made a sound something between a laugh and a sob.
His face, above Hongjoong, had gone an extraordinary colour.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’ve hit your head, or — have you hit your head? Did you hit your head? Oh my god, I didn’t even check if you- don’t move, okay, don’t sit up, just — you passed out, you’re okay, I’ve got you, just stay down…”
Reality arrived approximately four seconds later.
Hongjoong’s hand came down off Seonghwa’s face very slowly.
He looked at the ceiling. He replayed, in high definition, the last ten seconds of his own life. He considered his options.
“…I’d like to go back under, please,” he said.
“Sorry, no. Not an option.”
“Just for a minute.”
“You said I was glowing.”
“I’d like it on the record that I have a medical condition—”
“You asked if I was an Angel.”
“— and I was clinically unconscious about ninety seconds ago, so nothing I said in that window can be used against me, legally or otherwise —”
“— why are your feet up,” Hongjoong said loudly, in a transparent bid to change the subject.
“…My feet aren’t up.”
Hongjoong looked down the length of himself, past the dog, to where his own legs were propped in the air on a cushion.
“Why are my feet up,” he corrected, with as much dignity as the position allowed.
“Lucky told me to,” Seonghwa said, wide eyed. “She..I don’t.. she brought me here, and she pushed you onto your back, and then she made me lift your legs, I swear she made me, she pawed at them, and I remembered from a course that you’re supposed to, for fainting, so I —”
He stopped. He was babbling. He was still holding Hongjoong’s ankles. He did not let go, because he was afraid that if he did anything at all Hongjoong might stop being awake.
Hongjoong lay there and looked up at the ceiling and then up at Park Seonghwa’s terrified beautiful face and felt the situation land on him in all its dimensions.
He had passed out. In the hallway. Because he was an idiot who ignored his dog for two hours. And he’d been found by the one person in the entire building he had spent a month trying and failing to look normal in front of.
By the pretty neighbour. Who had, apparently, just performed first aid on him under the direction of a Doberman, and was currently kneeling on the floor holding his ankles up in the air and looking at him like Hongjoong was the most important thing that had ever happened, and Hongjoong’s whole chest did something complicated and awful and warm.
“You can,” Hongjoong said, faintly, “put my legs down now. I think. Probably.”
“Are you sure? The — the internet, or, the course, it said keep them up until —”
“I do this a lot,” Hongjoong said. “I know the drill. I have a condition. Vasovagal syncope. It’s a fainting thing, when I get stressed enough, or run myself down enough, my body just pulls the plug. It’s not… it’s not dangerous, it’s just stupid. And it’s a deadline week, so.”
He tried to wave a dismissive hand and it came up about four inches and flopped back down, which rather undercut the point. “This is a normal Thursday, honestly. This is barely a —”
Seonghwa did not look reassured by “this is a normal Thursday.” Seonghwa looked, if anything, more alarmed.
But he eased Hongjoong’s legs down off the cushion, slowly, watching his face the whole time like he was defusing something, and when Hongjoong didn’t immediately grey out again he let out a shaky breath and sat back on his heels and just — looked at him. Kept looking. Like he couldn’t stop.
“You scared me,” Seonghwa said, very quietly. It wasn’t an accusation. It came out too honest for that, before he could dress it up.
“I came out for the mail and — Lucky was in the hall and she barked, she’s never barked, and I followed her and you were just — you were on the floor and you were grey and I thought —” His voice did something and he stopped and pressed his lips together.
This stubborn beautiful man who had spent a month going down four flights of stairs to avoid so much as sharing an elevator with him, had knelt on the floor and put his fingers to Hongjoong’s throat and been afraid, really afraid, that Hongjoong was gone.
“Hey,” Hongjoong said, gentler than he’d said anything to Seonghwa yet, gentler than he’d said much of anything in weeks.
“Hey. I’m okay. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m — I’m really okay, I promise, this is —” He almost said normal again and stopped himself, because Seonghwa’s face couldn’t take another normal. “I’ll be okay.”
Lucky, apparently deciding the crisis had downgraded to a manageable level, lifted her chin off Hongjoong’s chest and instead heaved herself around and lay down half across him, her whole warm weight, and put her head down and let out the longest, most put upon sigh in the history of dogs.
Hongjoong huffed a weak laugh and got a hand up into her fur, finally, buried it there. “I know,” he told her. “I know, girl. You told me. You told me twice. I’m sorry. You did so good. Best girl.” His voice cracked a little on it, more emotion in it than he’d meant to let out in front of a stranger. “You did so good.”
Seonghwa watched the two of them. The pale, wrung-out man on the floor and the enormous devoted dog draped over him like a weighted blanket, and something in his chest that had been clenched for a month came loose all at once.
“She really is the best girl,” Seonghwa said thickly. He was, he realized, on the verge of crying, from adrenaline and relief and something he didn’t have a name for yet, and he laughed at himself instead, wetly. “She’s the smartest. She took me by the hand, practically, I’ve never — okay. Okay.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face and pulled himself together. Practical. He could be practical. “Okay, we need to — should I call someone? An ambulance? Is there someone I should — a doctor, or —”
“No ambulance,” Hongjoong said quickly. “Please. It’s — I have a whole plan for this, my doctor, I don’t need the ER, I just need to lie here for a minute and then get some water and some salt and lie down for real. I know this looks — I know how it looks. But I’m okay. I’ve done this before. Please don’t call anyone.”
Seonghwa looked deeply unconvinced.
“Okay,” he said finally. “No ambulance. But you’re not lying on this floor by yourself, and you’re not getting back to your apartment by yourself either. So.” He took a breath, and Hongjoong watched something settle into the line of his shoulders.
“Here’s what’s happening. You’re going to lie there for exactly as long as you need to. Then I’m getting you home, and water, and then I’m going to sit in your apartment until I am completely sure you’re not going to fall over again the second I leave. And you don’t get a vote. Okay?”
Hongjoong blinked up at him.
A month of Seonghwa fleeing into the rain, and here he was on the floor of a hallway being informed, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to be taken care of whether he liked it or not by the exact person he’d spent that entire month trying to apologize to.
“…Okay,” Hongjoong said, and was mortifyingly aware that some traitor part of his chest had said okay about four seconds before the rest of him did.
So they waited. Seonghwa sat down properly on the cold floor beside him, close, one hand hovering near Hongjoong’s shoulder like he didn’t quite trust him not to grey out again; and Lucky lay draped across Hongjoong’s legs radiating warmth.
The three of them stayed like that while the colour crept back into Hongjoong’s face and the bell stopped ringing in his skull and the world stopped feeling like it was spinning.
It took a few minutes. When Hongjoong finally said, “okay- I think I can —” and pushed himself up to sitting, Seonghwa’s whole body went tense and ready beside him, and when Hongjoong got a hand flat on the wall and levered himself carefully up onto his feet —
the hallway swung.
Not badly. Just a soft grey lean, his legs turning to something borrowed and unreliable beneath him, and he swayed, and Seonghwa was there, an arm around him before the sway had even finished, steady and solid, taking his weight easily.
“Okay,” Seonghwa said. “Yeah. No. You’re not walking.”
“I’m fine, it’s only when I stand up too f—”
Seonghwa bent, got one arm firmly behind Hongjoong’s back and the other under his knees, and lifted.
Hongjoong squeaked.
The floor dropped away and all at once he was up, off his feet entirely, gathered against Park Seonghwa’s chest like he weighed nothing. Which, to Seonghwa, a professional dancer who lifted people for a living and had the shoulders to show for it, he apparently more or less did.
One of Seonghwa’s arms was a warm bar beneath his knees. The other lay firm across his back. Hongjoong’s own arm had, entirely without instruction from his brain, looped around Seonghwa’s neck, and Seonghwa’s face was suddenly close. Close enough to see that his eyes weren’t merely dark but a deep, warm brown, close enough to feel the breath leave him and catch a scent of his apple scented shampoo.
Hongjoong’s heart, which had spent the entire morning misbehaving in the strictly medical sense, chose this precise instant to begin misbehaving in an entirely different one, slamming up against his ribs, hard and fast and hot.
His watch beeped.
Out loud, in the chipper little synthesized voice he had never once managed to figure out how to turn off:
“Heart rate is elevated. Want me to record exercise?”
The hallway went very, very quiet.
Hongjoong stared fixedly at Seonghwa’s collarbone and felt his entire face, his neck, both ears, catch fire all at once.
He wished that the fainting earlier had simply gone ahead and finished the job.
“…That’s —” His voice came out strangled. “That’s — it does that. Umm. It thinks — the movement, it thinks I’m exercising, it’s — it’s not —”
Seonghwa had gone still. And then, above him, Hongjoong felt it before he heard it. A tremor starting up in the chest he was pressed against, Seonghwa’s jaw tightening as he fought a valiant against a smile, and lost as a wide grin broke out across his face.
“Do you,” Seonghwa managed, very unsteadily, biting down on the grin and failing completely, “want it to record the exercise?”
“No,” Hongjoong said, into his collarbone, praying for the sweet release of death.
“Don't be embarrassed! It’s cute!”
Hongjoong was going to pass out for a completely different reason.
“Park Seonghwa, I swear to god, if you do not carry me to my apartment right now—”
“Okay, okay!” Seonghwa was laughing now, properly, the whole warm rumble of it rolling straight through Hongjoong where they were pressed together, and it should have been humiliating.
Yet the sound of it, bright and helpless and delighted, the first time Hongjoong had heard him truly laugh since the parking garage, did something to the heat in Hongjoong’s chest that had nothing whatsoever to do with embarrassment.
“Okay. I’m sorry. Which pocket’s your key?”
And Park Seonghwa, who had come out for the mail, and would not get it for hours, carried Kim Hongjoong the last twenty feet down the hall to 403, with an enormous devoted Doberman trotting alongside them and a smartwatch cheerfully offering, one more time, to log the entire thing as a workout, and did not, this time, run away.