Chapter Text
The 11th of February, and it’s raining.
It was raining that day too.
Minho doesn’t take that as a sign. He gave up on signs a while ago.
But the rain’s the rain, the same fat grey drops coming down slantways off the same low sky, and if the weather wants to reach back two years and press a thumb into the bruise, well. It can. It’s only water. It doesn’t know what day it is.
He has to go anyway. Rain never once kept him in.
Boots on, coat on, and out into it.
The mud takes each step with a wet suck and gives it back grudging. Nobody comes this far into the trees now, not since the talk started.
Something walks out there. Something not quite human. Boo. Mind how you go, townsfolk.
Minho watches enough murder documentaries to drift off to—some man narrating a dismemberment in a voice built for meditation apps, and Minho, gone, drooling on the pillow by the second commercial break—but he’s never had the stomach for a conspiracy theory.
There’s a difference between a real horror with a case file and something a bored village invented over cheap soju.
He’s going to the lake.
Not far. Back by six, before the dark, in time for the cats. Then something hot on the stove, a book, sleep.
He lives like an old man—Chan says it, Changbin says it louder—but they say it from Seoul, where the two of them are dry and busy and three hundred kilometres from being able to do anything about him.
He’s up here. Has been a while now.
He drops his bag on the boardwalk and sits himself down beside it.
The rain finds the back of his neck, the one gap between collar and hairline, and follows his spine down.
He lets it.
Boots in the water. He’d put his feet in if it were July, but it’s February and the lake would bite them blue, and cold feet were always the first thing his mum went for—socks, Minho, you’ll catch a cold—so on go the boots and in they stay.
People must think he comes out here to drink. Or to fish.
The truth’s got no hobby in it.
He comes to sit by the water and be rained on and not have to be anywhere, which is the closest thing to peace he’s found since he stopped looking for the real one.
Sometimes he talks out loud. His psychologist said if it helps, it helps. He never worked out if it did, and she’s in Seoul now with everything else he left there.
Today he doesn’t talk. There’s nothing to say and nobody but the rain to say it to.
He hasn’t been living, exactly. More sort of keeping the body ticking over, damp and idling, just like you leave a car running in the cold so it doesn’t give up on you.
Maybe it’s the village that did it. Maybe it was always going to be him.
His whole year comes down to the cats, a hard hour of exercise, a sudoku with some fight in it, and dinner he grew and pulled out of the ground himself. That’s the list. That’s the man. Twenty-nine going on eighty, and the rain doesn’t care either way, keeps falling on him like he’s just one more thing out here that needs watering.
The minutes go by. He usually gives it an hour, sometimes drops off right there on the wet boards, and a neighbour finds him and goes home sure there’s something wrong with him. Probably. But hold that up to the light and it fits half the people he’s ever met; nobody comes out clean, they just stay drier about it than he does.
And they keep him because he’s useful. He mends what breaks and lifts what’s heavy and turns up when he says he will. A man under fifty is a rare bird up here, under thirty a full eclipse, so they need him, and being needed is the local currency. Spends better than being liked. Gets you let in.
He breathes in, lets the smell of the rain flood his nostrils, lets it remind him what it stole from him. What it stole from him being—
Bang!
Minho flinches. He still does, at a gun going off. It’s a sound a person isn’t meant to be able to recognise with their eyes shut—a films-only sound, for most people.
Lucky he doesn’t go in the lake. He was never much of a swimmer, and it’s deep past the boards, the current mean under a storm like this.
No sleeping out here tonight.
He gets his bag up and goes towards the sound. Hunting season would explain a shot. But nobody hunts up here. That was half the appeal, once—actually, scratch half, that was most of it. A quiet with no guns in it.
Good thing he runs. Hikes. Spends his days on his own feet—a man can only get lost so many times before the mountain hands over its shortcuts.
He’s a few minutes in when the trees start closing over him. The sensible thing would be to turn back.
He doesn’t. What if someone’s hurt out here.
He’s cynical. Closed-off, awkward, dull for the most part, a man of very few faces. But he was raised to look after what’s near him, and the rain’s coming down like it’s herding him on, cold hands flat between his shoulders, no rain ever let him stand still.
The trees won’t clear no matter how many he shoves aside. The sound does him the one favor instead. Rustling. Something dragging over wet ground. Best case a rat snake. Worst case a mamushi under the leaf litter with a mouthful of bad news.
Maybe somebody met one and shot it. That leaves something sour at the back of his tongue.
Then a new sound, and this one’s got a place it comes from. Crying, near enough. A whine. Some wounded animal—a wolf, a bear. The thing the whole village keeps its curtains shut against. Whatever it is, it’s nothing a fist and a pocketknife can settle.
He gets the knife open anyway. Gets the fist ready. The rain’s soaked clean through his coat by now and he barely feels it going.
Nothing gets him ready for the clearing.
It isn’t an animal.
And if it’s the thing from the stories, the stories got it wrong, because what’s on the ground is a boy. A naked one. Hurt—his leg’s bleeding, and heavily, though not the way a leg bleeds when a bullet’s gone through it.
Minho takes one step. The boy drags himself back three.
“I won’t hurt you,” he says. But words are cheap held out to someone whose hurt came wearing a face like yours. “Can I look at your leg?”
Another step. Another scramble backwards, until the boy’s spine meets a tree and there’s nowhere left. He’s shaking. The cold would account for it, out here, in this—but something says it isn’t the cold.
Come at him the way you’d come at a stray, Minho thinks. Or a deer, fine, the boy’s got the eyes for it, wide and round and wet and waiting to bolt. Puffy cheeks like a squirrel’s. A mouth shaped like—what was he doing again?
Right. Trust.
He puts his arm out slow, palm up, hoping the boy might smell it, which is a mad thing to hope, and the boy only folds smaller.
The wound’s worse up close. But there’s no bullet’s mark in it, no hole where a hole should be.
He edges his hand nearer, and something bites him.
“Ow— what the—”
Not the boy. Stranger than the boy. A lizard, swinging off his finger by its jaw, and shake as he might, it won’t be moved. A gecko, going by the look of it. It has opinions and it’s keeping them.
“That yours?”
The boy looks up at the sound, though nothing about his face says he understood a word of it. And he’s pretty, looking up like that—Minho catches the thought and can’t put it back.
He clears his throat. “Can you tell it to let go of my finger?”
The boy holds out both arms. The gecko lets go all at once and pours itself into them, curling up in the cradle of them.
An ordinary gecko, it looked. Beige, brown, ugly and sort of sweet, a thing you’d find sunning itself on a wall.
But the second it touches the boy, its spots come up glowing. And so does the boy. Thin stripes down his skin, lighting a blue-white that shouldn’t come out of anything living.
“What in the—”
He swallows it. Keeps still. No sudden moves—sudden moves might frighten a glowing boy, or worse, get a man killed by one.
Is he dreaming? Did he drop off on the boards after all, the way the neighbours are always finding him.
He tips his face up. The rain’s still there, still finding the back of his neck, cold and far past anything a dream would bother inventing.
So that’s it, is it. He’s to take the folklore on faith now. Him. A man with his qualifications.
“I’m Minho.”
What is he even doing? The thing could eat him. Could drag him off to some tribe of glowing people and keep him as a pet. But it looks human enough that Minho crouches anyway, guilt getting there before sense does.
Smaller. Get level. That’s the rule with anything frightened.
“I promise I mean you no harm.” He reaches for his backpack, and even that curls the boy up small again, arms over the eyes—as if not seeing Minho means Minho can’t see him either. Kids do that. So do the cats.
Good thing he always packs towels. The humidity up here is no joke. He pulls one out, unhooks the water bottle with it.
“I don’t know if you understand a word I’m saying.” He uncaps the bottle. “This’ll sting. But it’s good for you. You need it.”
He brings it close. The boy swats it away, and half the water goes on the ground.
Deep breath. Eye contact, not too long. Cat-manual stuff. “It’s okay.”
Second try, slower, and this time he’s let. He tips a little over the wound, and the boy—elf, fairy, alien, whatever he is—makes a sound so wounded and high it goes straight through Minho.
Bad, because he hurt him. Worse, because Minho knows what sound does out here.
It travels.
The voices in the distance prove him right. Harried steps, coming closer.
“I’m going to wrap this around your leg. Stop the bleeding.” No point narrating to someone who can’t follow it, but Minho keeps on, and swears the gecko is glaring at him from the boy’s shoulder. “Here goes.”
Closer for this part. He ignores the flinch. The towel goes round, a loose tie first, then he pulls the ends to cinch it and braces for the second squeal.
It doesn’t come.
He looks up. The boy’s crying without a sound, biting his own lip bloody to keep it in.
“I’m sorry. I had no choice.”
He shrugs off his coat and drops it over the boy. Watches him consider it. Doesn’t know why the thinking makes him nervous, doesn’t know why the boy burrowing down into the coat makes something in him ease off.
“Go on. Back wherever you came from. You’re not welcome here.” A beat. “For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I am either. And I don’t glow, or— whatever that is you do.”
It takes some doing, but he stands. The rain’s through his hoodie now, working on the tank top under it.
“I’ll deal with—” a nod towards the voices, close to raise the hair on his neck now “—them.”
He’d hoped, standing, to catch the boy pulling some trick. Vanishing. Lifting off into the trees. Anything that got him gone. But the boy doesn’t move. One eye still hidden, the other peering up over the collar of the coat, blinking at him.
How are anyone's eyes that big. That bright.
Minho turns. No. Absolutely not. He has to go, he’s got trouble enough of his own without adopting the local legend.
But the leg. If the boy can’t walk on it, and it’s coming down like this, does he even last the night.
Not his problem. People call him cold, hard work to get a word out of. Might as well earn it.
“Just— go. Don’t stand there.” Louder than he meant. Exasperated. “You’ve got powers or something, haven’t you. So use them.”
Nothing. Two blinks, maybe a sliver more of that second eye.
“I’m leaving now. So you leave too.”
He pushes into the shrubs. Without the coat there’s nothing between him and the thorns, and they take their cut.
He doesn’t look back. Not once.
He knows what happens if he does. He can’t have that.
He did what he could. More than, if he’s honest—anyone else would’ve thrown a net over the thing and named their price to the first buyer with a van. You don’t meddle with nature. Cubs get hurt. Cubs fall behind. That’s how the chain runs, and the world’s cruel, and Minho would know a thing or two about that.
But if. If he’d looked.
He might have seen the boy’s arm come out after him—reaching, trying to catch a fistful of him, keep him there. Stay. Or take me with you.
He never looks. And the boy, if he even can, never says a word.
࿐໋₊‧ ֹ٠
"Nah. Storm brought half the ridge down. You'll waste your night going up there."
The line that worked, somehow. Sent them all off back down the mountain with their torches.
Minho isn't much of a liar. Never took to it, doesn't like the sport of it—but this one felt small. Harmless. A white one, if lies come in colours.
The boy would use whatever it is he does and be gone, and Minho would sleep with a clean conscience.
That was the theory.
Because now, sudoku nearly beaten, the bottom of the naengmyeon bowl looking back up at him, his head's got no room left to stand in.
He takes his glasses off and pinches the top of his nose. What in God's name happened today. He'd wanted a simple life. That was all. And since that day it keeps being made clear to him that simple was never an option, not for him.
A loud meow. Then green eyes, staring up.
"I know, Dori." He drops the glasses on the coffee table with a sigh. "You don't have to rub it in."
The lightning comes through the blind in thin stripes. The thunder turns up a few seconds behind it, and then the sky just gives out and pours. Dori complains again, that meow she does when she's decided a thing and is only waiting for him to catch up.
"...Fine."
Raincoat. Boots. Out.
It's a stupid hour to go back up there, dark and pouring. The truck won't get near the clearing, and his conscience won't let him have a single hour's sleep, so it's his own two feet or nothing.
If only the boy had looked the way they all described it. Some monster. If only he hadn't looked so— boyish. Human. It might have been easier. Might. He couldn't swear to it.
Good thing that after enough mishaps up here, the backpack goes nowhere without a torch, a couple of protein bars, water, a compass. He finds the spot with less trouble than he'd braced for.
Squelch.
One boot through the shrubs and into the mud. Then the other. Then the torch, sweeping the place fast until it hits the one tree and stops.
No boy. And no blood trailing off anywhere either, which is the part he lets himself be glad about.
The last thought to arrive tells him he's an idiot. Out in a storm over nothing. Over what might well have been something his own head made up—and it could have; the weariness gets worse every February, worse still on this exact day.
He feels a bit let down. Couldn't tell you why. Relief's the only thing he should be feeling. One less problem.
A bad step nearly puts his face in the mud. He swings the torch down and there's his coat—the one he handed over—dumped in a heap on the ground.
Well. Alien creatures have manners, at least.
He reaches to pick it up. His hand meets something solid underneath. Something that, thankfully, doesn't scream or take his arm off at the elbow.
He pulls the coat back and there’s the boy under it. Small. Curled into a ball. The stripes down him barely glowing now, and the apricot that was in his lips and cheeks gone over to a flat grey.
If it isn’t the blood, then the next guess is the cold in him, which is no better.
He checks for a pulse. Those first-aid classes Hyunjin always called a waste of a Saturday, earning their keep at last. And he lets out a breath he’d been sitting on when he finds it— a heartbeat, and under it, thin, the breathing.
His need to get the boy fixed talks over his fear of what the boy is. Or maybe it’s just that Minho’s sure of one thing: nothing’s worse than people. A person did this to him, in the end, which rather makes the case.
He wraps the coat around him properly, gets a hand under his knees and one at his back, and lifts. No gecko this time. He takes that as a pass on the animal-instinct test. Or the gecko was never there to begin with.
Rain coming down, a full pack on his back, a boy in his arms, a torch gripped in his teeth— he’d have bet on it being harder than this. But the boy weighs about as much as the pack does. Minho carries a lot, or the boy’s made of less than a person, or both.
He gets home wet. Nothing new there. Wet but with everything he set out to bring back.
He kicks the door in and for once doesn’t care that he’s dripping on the parquet.
Bathroom first.
He runs the water hot, to bring the boy’s temperature up and get the mud and the rain and the blood off him in one go. He puts a clean pair of his own boxers on the boy before any of it. They’ll get soaked, and he’ll change them after, but there’s no version of tonight where Minho bathes an unconscious stranger in the altogether. What sort of man would.
On whatever planet the boy came from, nothing-on might be perfectly ordinary—the sky’s the limit, apparently—but it isn’t ordinary here, and Minho’s house runs on Minho’s rules.
He manages it. Gets the boy clean, gets him out wrapped in a dry towel. Disinfects the wound and covers it, and the boy doesn’t stir for any of it, which Minho finds mildly concerning.
After, he lays the boy on the wool rug by the fireplace—the shaggy one, cat-approved, the cat’s favourite spot in the house. Then back out. Wood in, fire going.
Hoodie, trousers, underwear, socks. If one of the many people who’ve called him a cold bastard could see him now, on his knees dressing a stranger out of the storm, they’d not believe the picture.
Everything hangs off the boy’s small frame, but it warms him, and it gets the indecency squared away, which matters more. Managed it without touching or clapping eyes on anything he shouldn’t, too.
Two blankets, when one would do. He’ll take the boy from cold straight to cooked at this rate. Gets some water into him too, though he’s got no idea whether a thing like this drinks.
And then, out of moves, he just— waits.
Watches the whole time, in case the boy goes and vanishes on him. There are soft curls in his hair, he sees now. He sleeps with his mouth a touch open, which is a terribly human way to sleep. Minho only hopes he isn’t hibernating. Long lashes, for a boy. A mole on his left cheek that Minho gets the urge to reach out and press with one finger.
He looks young. Then again he might be a thousand years young, no way to say, Minho’s never had a creature like this on his rug before.
Slow, and then sure, the apricot bleeds back into the boy’s face—watercolour taking to wet paper. Minho watches that as well, same way you’d watch the sun come up, having nothing to do with your hands until it does.
He settles on the breathing. Soft, even. More than that, it’s proof of life. The boy didn’t die of him. Didn’t die of Minho being careless, of Minho being green about it. And if he lasts the night, some of that might even be down to Minho, and not despite him.
That’s the sort of thing that would put a smile on a man after a good few years without one. He isn’t betting on it.
Either way, no documentary tonight. No stranger narrating a body in a ditch to lull him off. The boy’s breathing does the job. Does it better.
Minho only hopes he’s still there in the morning.
࿐໋₊‧ ֹ٠
There's a feeling to being looked at with your eyes shut. Minho wakes into it. Or because of it.
One eye open. A face hangs over his, and two enormous eyes in it, so close their lashes would tangle if they blinked together.
Minho goes off the couch. Takes the boy down with him. The two of them end up on the floor at opposite ends of the rug, breathing hard, and Minho's only just remembered he fell asleep with an alien in his living room.
Here is everything Minho knows about frightened animals. Don't loom. Get low. Don't hold the stare. Food comes before hands. Never corner a thing that's already been cornered once this week.
The manual is for cats. He's well aware the manual is for cats.
He gets low anyway, down onto his heels, and the boy watches him.
Morning's got into the room and it's doing the boy no favors, or too many. The hair that read black in the woods comes up blue in the sun, soft waves of it, still damp from the late night bath. Round eyes, doll's eyes, permanently asking after something. A mouth somebody drew on. And that mole, sitting on his left cheek where it was clearly placed by a professional.
People say you get moles where you were kissed the most. Minho wonders whether that carries over to wherever the boy’s from.
"I didn't mean to frighten you." And only now does he see the gecko on the boy's shoulder. When in God's name did the judgmental little critter get back in. "Let me start again. I'm Lee Minho."
The boy tilts his head. So does the gecko.
"You were hurt. Out in the woods, on your own. I carried you down. This is my house, you're safe in it, and you can leave whenever you want to."
Nothing. The same puzzled look, aimed at him like he's the one speaking in tongues.
"Did you understand any of that?"
A few blinks. Then the boy's eyes drop, past Minho, to the empty naengmyeon bowl on the table.
"Hungry?" Minho lifts the bowl and the eyes track it the whole way up.
So they don't eat people, then. That's one worry off.
Food comes before hands. Rule two.
He puts the water on. Noodles in. He keeps glancing back, hard not to with four eyes drilling a hole in his shoulder blades, and somewhere between the broth and the garnish it occurs to him how this scene would play on television. He's watched enough of those documentaries to know the shape of it. The quiet man in the last house on the road. Kept himself to himself. The neighbours always say the same two things, and they say them in the same order.
Anyway. There's broth from yesterday, so it comes together fast.
"Here."
The tray's barely down before the boy's licking his lips and going in bare-handed.
"No—" Minho's fingers close around a wrist, and the whole boy stops dead. Someone's found the off switch. "We don't eat with our hands here."
He fits the chopsticks into the small hand and shapes the fingers around them.
The boy turns them over. Inspects them. Smells them.
Then he eats with his hand anyway, and takes a mouthful no mouth that size has any business taking.
Cheeks out, packed full, storing it for a winter that isn't coming. He's cute doing it. Minho only works out that the bowl is empty because he's been watching a stranger eat the entire time. Get a grip, Minho.
"I'll wash that."
He reaches for the bowl, and the boy snatches it back and hugs it to his chest.
"You want more?"
The boy licks the inside of the bowl. That's a yes.
Something simpler this time. Eggs, rice, kimchi. It'll do.
It does. The plate comes back clean, and where a thing that size has put it all, Minho couldn't tell you.
"We need to look at your leg."
He drops the plate in the sink. He isn't expecting an answer anymore. It's talking to the cats, except the cats have the decency to meow.
When he comes back through, the boy is petting his lizard.
If smiling were still a working part of Minho, that's the thing he'd have smiled at.
He lowers himself down beside him, slow this time, lesson learned, and takes the hem of the borrowed sweats between two fingers. "Can I look?"
Nothing. No surprise. So he says it again, pointing at his own eyes, then at the boy's leg.
Nothing much changes. But when he draws the fabric up, there's no swatting. No flinch.
Small win. Still a win.
The wound's there, plain, but at least it hasn’t gotten worse. He can't work out what became of the bullet—whether the boy's body simply got rid of it, or whether the boy dug it out himself, which he can't see happening, no offence to present company.
Then again, Minho has never in his life been rewarded for underestimating anything. He leaves the question where it is.
New dressing. More disinfectant. The boy lets him do all of it.
Then quiet again. The staring again, or Minho being stared at while he sends his own eyes anywhere else in the room.
And then he sees it.
The boy is waiting to be told what happens to him. He thinks he's been taken. Which— fair. A man came down a mountain in the dark and carried him off, and nobody asked him a single question about it.
So he stands. Goes to the door. Opens it wide.
Cold comes in. The mountain's out there, rinsed and dripping, and his boots are still by the step with last night in the tread.
"You can go."
More blinking, the pair of them. Minho wonders what a thing like this talks with, if not a mouth. Some aerial. Something under the hair.
“You—” he points at the boy “—can go.” He points outside, walks two fingers through the air. “You’re free to.”
The boy doesn’t move. The gecko doesn’t move.
The cat manual has nothing for this.
“Right.” Minho shuts the door. “I’ve got work to do. You do—whatever it is you do. Don’t get under my feet.”
Scratch the cats. The cats at least have ears.
Five minutes into the weeding, a second pair of feet arrives beside his. Crouched. His crouch—the exact one, elbows on knees, weight back on the heels, copied to the last detail.
“…These have to go, they’re bad for the plants.” He points at the flowers. “These stay.” The cabbages. “Step on those and it’s back to the woods with you.”
He works on. Still winter, but the sun’s out and a sweat’s coming up under the hoodie. Off it comes. He finishes the weeds and moves down the row to the harvesting, and the boy keeps himself busy—flat on his stomach in the dirt, nose to nose with a caterpillar.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Minho tells him.
The boy points at it, eyes huge.
“I know. It’s a caterpillar. One apple, two pears, three plums, and by Saturday it’ll have been through the entire pantry.” He doesn’t say that the two of them would get along.
Then a thought. If the boy’s staying—and all the evidence says the boy is staying—he can pull his weight. There must be intelligence somewhere in… that.
“Here.” The hose goes into the boy’s arms. “Water these.” He points at the tomato bed.
Slow blinking. Maybe there’s no intelligence after all. Maybe every film got it wrong and the ships came empty.
“Watch.” Thumb over the end, the water fans out, the tomatoes get theirs. The boy gasps. Moses got less of a reaction at the Red Sea. Then the small hands are out, grabbing, wanting.
“Now you want to do it.”
He hands it over.
It’s an effort. The tomatoes get watered. So do the cucumbers, the chillies, the flowers, the wheelbarrow, the fence, and at last, generously, Minho.
He wants to snatch it back. Wants to shout. But the boy’s stood there dripping with pride over a job done, whole face lit up, and all Minho has left in him is a sigh. A long one. He should start rationing those. At this rate they won’t see out the month.
“…That’ll do,” he says, and takes the hose.
Rain never once got Minho this wet. Two years of it, coming down on that lake every February, and it never got past his collar. One boy and a garden hose.
By the time the garden’s done the boy is dirt to the elbows and mud to the knees. Minho takes him by the arm on the way in, straight past the kitchen, into the bathroom.
“This.” He shakes the shampoo. “Hair.” Pats his own head. “This one.” The body wash. “Body.”
Both bottles go into the boy’s arms.
“This way’s cold—” nothing, the blank stare, so Minho degrades himself, hugs his own ribs, performs a shiver “—and this way’s hot.” He fans himself.
Charades, against a wall.
The boy is concentrating, brow creased right down. Revising for the exam after.
“You’ll figure it out.” He turns to go—remembers. “Oh. Clothes come off first. Before the water.” He sets clean ones on the counter, washed, still warm. “These go on after.”
The boy starts pulling his shirt up on the spot.
“No—” Minho yanks it back down. “Not yet. When I’m gone. God.”
He’s seen most of it already but that was an emergency and emergencies don’t count.
He leaves him to it, and hopes the boy manages better in there than he managed with the hose. Though if Minho’s honest—and he may as well be—he’d take the flood again.
With the boy out from under his feet, Minho can finally sit out on the porch, get the glasses on, and read the local paper the way God intended—undisturbed.
The headline is about a road. The road is getting resurfaced. Riveting stuff, and he means that, because up here a resurfaced road is a genuine event and he’ll be discussing it at length with Mrs Yeom come Thursday.
Thirty minutes go by with no sign of the boy, and Minho tells himself it’s fine, that maybe aliens take long baths, that maybe they’ve got skincare routines with ten steps and imported serums. It would explain the skin.
Besides, Minho doesn’t worry. Ask anyone.
Five minutes later he’s up with his fist against the bathroom door, so much for knowing himself.
Three knocks get him nothing. Two more make it official.
“I’m coming in, so if you’re—naked—cover yourself.” A warning wasted on someone who won’t catch a word of it, but he gives it anyway, because manners die harder than sense.
The door swings in on a whole lot of nothing at first, his bathroom the same as he knows it, cat-shaped mat included. Then the flood introduces itself. Water across the tiles, foam up the walls and into places foam has no business reaching, and in the middle of it all the boy—dressed, thank God—trying to push the whole sea back with two small hands.
“Leave it.” He gathers both of those hands into one of his, and the boy pouts up at him, which is a problem, because the pout works. “I was showering after you anyway, so the foam won’t go to waste.”
He hates being inconvenienced. It’s on record. There are people in Seoul who would testify to it under oath. But the record was written before anyone pouted at him with a face like that, so the record can be revised.
“Your hair needs drying or you’ll catch something.”
His mum’s law again, alive and well and coming out of his own mouth now, so that’s her legacy sorted.
He picks up the hairdryer without thinking it through, and at the first roar the boy folds over with both hands pressed across his face.
“No, no— look, it’s good.”
Minho turns the thing on himself and blasts his own hair sideways into a dandelion, and a gap opens between the boy’s fingers. One eye. So Minho makes a proper disaster of it, because the one eye becomes two, and the two come with a smile.
What a smile it turns out to be.
The biggest anyone’s aimed at him in years, person or otherwise—he’s stopped sorting the boy into a category, there’s no point anymore. Gummy, heart-shaped, and it climbs all the way up into his eyes. Minho stares, probably with his mouth open, definitely for too long.
He clears his throat. “Here, you try.” He holds the dryer out, and the smile shuts off as fast as the water did.
Minho hates himself for it on the spot. Some things ought to be criminal, and switching that smile off is one of them.
“Fine, then I’ll do it. Up.” A wave of his hand, the boy stands, and Minho spends the next few minutes of his life as a hairdresser.
He’s never done this for anyone before, not once, not even back when there was someone to do it for. The hair is soft under his fingers, the nape of the boy’s neck honey-coloured and softer still, and when he tips the warm air across the boy’s face on purpose he gets a giggle for it, a small, ridiculous sound.
So he does it again. The giggle doesn’t run out.
Damp will have to do, in the end. Minho’s only human, and only barely.
“I’m showering now, so go play with your gecko, or whatever it is you two get up to.”
The boy dims a little on his way out.
Great. Guilt as well now, on top of the rest, and he’d only just got the quiet how he liked it.
Cleaning the bathroom eats most of an hour, but there’s a reward at the end of it, because after comes his own bath, which has been the one holy slot in Minho’s day since before the boy, since Seoul.
He’s used to taking it with the door wide open and then walking to his bedroom in nothing at all, king of an empty castle. Can’t do that anymore. Strange, that. Stranger still that he can’t find the part of himself that minds.
He figures dinner’s next, the boy will be starving again—the boy is always starving, it may be his one consistent trait—only the boy is nowhere, and the house has gone quiet in a manner Minho doesn’t care for at all.
His pulse picks up. He’s through the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, palms sweating, moving through his own house at a speed he never has before, and then he sees it.
The back door, open.
He makes himself take a breath out on the step. He didn’t think an alien boy would stay with him forever, did he. He didn’t hope. He’s smarter than hoping, a loner by his own admission and everyone else’s, and this is how it was always going to go, and honestly it’s for the best—
Then he actually steps outside, and every word of that turns out to be filler, because the moment he lays eyes on the boy his heart sits back down and his lungs go back to their usual size.
The boy’s by the shed, curled in with the cats, one more animal in the pile, fast asleep and completely unbothered by the years he just took off Minho’s life.
Another sigh off this month’s ration. Then Minho scoops him up.
“How many times. You’ll catch a cold out here.” He says it to a boy who’s asleep and wouldn’t understand it awake, and he keeps saying it the whole way in, up the stairs, into Minho’s own room, down onto Minho’s own bed. “We don’t sleep with the cats.” The duvet goes up to the boy’s nose. “This is where you sleep now.”
The boy burrows in without waking, hums at the warmth, settles the way things settle when they plan on staying.
Minho shouldn’t get used to it. He’s pushing thirty, and thirty years mostly teach a person that people leave whatever they promised, and this one never promised a thing. He can’t come up with one good reason aliens would be built better than the rest of us.
He turns the light off anyway. Leaves the door open a crack.
Because Minho’s only human, and only barely.
࿐໋₊‧ ֹ٠
The boy doesn’t leave the next day.
He doesn’t leave the day after that either.
And somewhere around the third day, Minho stops suggesting him to.
Now, Minho and company—there’s no story there. He likes his own time. Rates it just under the cats and just above a good sudoku, and he settled the big question years ago—they say there’s a person out there for every person, a matching sock for every sock, and Minho’s went missing in the wash and nobody’s looking for it. He accepted that and got on with his life.
So the strange part isn’t that the boy stayed. The strange part is that Minho minded it about as much as the rain minds falling.
Let the record show, the boy is not easy.
Week one, he stared. Full-time occupation. Kept a sofa’s length between them at all hours and stared, and at night Minho would catch him casing the kitchen cupboards, running on the theory that if he didn’t look at Minho, Minho couldn’t be there.
Then the staring turned into everything else, and Minho never lifted a finger to make it happen.
He watched Minho cook—right up until watching stopped doing it for him, and then there was a knife out and blood in the kitchen and one very sorry finger.
He met the mirror. Went back to check on it a dozen separate times before Minho understood the problem. The boy thought there was a second boy. In the wall. Copying him, trapped in there, doing everything he did. Minho explained. The explanation bounced.
Now he follows. He follows the wood-chopping. He waters the vegetables, properly helps now, ferries the can back and forth, very solemn about it. He ruins the sudoku. He sits on the book. He watches anime, and he watches the murder documentaries too, both hands up by his face the whole hour, and not once does he look away.
He can hold chopsticks now.
He knows the shampoo from the conditioner.
And he’s made best friends with Soonie. Soonie—who in seven years has warmed to exactly nobody, Minho included. Minho still hasn’t worked out how it was done. He suspects he isn’t meant to.
So it’s been a lot. He’s been a lot.
The alone that used to fill this house has gone off somewhere. Minho didn't see it go. Nobody asked him.
He wouldn’t tell you he likes it.
He couldn’t tell you it bothers him.
But the quiet doesn’t last. It never lasts in films, and films steal everything from somewhere real, so there was no reason to expect better.
They’re watching Demon Slayer, Minho’s fifth time through and the boy’s first, hands hovering by his face the whole episode same as with the documentaries, when someone knocks.
Minho gets up. By the time he’s off the couch the boy is already pressed in behind him, and Minho would swear the fur along his back has gone up. He really is a cat.
The little window in the door shows him a face he knows better than his own.
“Hyunjin?”
“Wow. Contain the excitement.” Hyunjin sets down a travel bag and a guitar case, neither of which bodes well. “You never told me you’d got a roommate.”
Nails dig into Minho’s shoulder blades, straight through the shirt.
“What are you doing all the way up here?”
“Visiting my best friend. Last I checked that was legal.” He toes at the doorstep. “I was at my parents’. It’s on the way.”
“It’s two hours out of the way.”
“Semantics.”
Minho pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. It's the exasperated version of the push, not the absentminded one. “You can’t stay here.”
“Warm. Really glad I drove up.”
“I mean it. Felix can’t sleep alone anyway, you know that.”
“Weakest excuse of your life, and relax—” Hyunjin tips his head back towards the road, where a motorbike sits idling. “I’m not staying. I came because I worry about you, idiot.”
There it is. The sigh comes out of Minho on its own. “You don’t need to.”
“You left so suddenly. Well— not suddenly, I suppose. Not after everything. But we’re not used to you being far. Nobody wants you turning into some mountain hermit when you’ve got us.”
“Hyun.”
“I know. Pushing thirty, big boy, can mind himself.” A breath. “Still.”
Minho opens his arms at the room behind him, fire going, mountain out the window and all. “Look around. I’m doing fine. You drove two hours to worry about nothing.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll fuck off.” And Minho’s relief gets exactly one second to live before Hyunjin adds, “Your roommate’s awfully shy, by the way.”
The boy, Minho realises, is up on his tiptoes behind him, peering over his shoulder at the intruder.
"You're too tall for anyone's good," — weak, and Minho knows it is — "and you showed up at night looking straight out of a horror movie. Can't blame him."
“Are you going to introduce us, or did the mountain eat your manners too?”
Minho’s brain breaks into a sprint with nowhere to go. “This is Hyunjin.” A two-finger salute from the doorway. “And this is—”
The pause runs long. Long past the border of normal, and Hyunjin leans in and whispers, “Dude. Do you not know your own roommate’s name?”
The radio’s on low in the kitchen, playing a song by an artist Minho could name in his sleep.
“Han,” he says.
“Han…?”
“Jisung.” Out it comes, no hesitation at all, and the name settles on the boy so well it spooks him a little.
“Well then. Nice to meet you, Han Jisung. Look after this lunatic for us.” A thumb jerked at Minho. “He’s grumpy and he’s allergic to smiling—”
Minho’s already got a hand on his chest, steering him out the door.
“—but he’s soft in the middle and he cooks better than my mum, so count your blessings—” The door shuts on the rest of it. “Call more often, you bastard,” arrives through the wood regardless.
The bike roars, fades, and Minho remembers how breathing works. Going by the sound at his shoulder, so does the boy.
“Sorry about him.” An awkward hand finds the back of his own neck. “He’s a lot. Good guy, though.”
The boy smiles a little, at what Minho couldn’t tell you, given that not one word of any of it got through.
Well. Worth a shot, then. He takes the boy gently by the arms and sits him down on the couch, sits himself opposite, and points a finger at his own chest.
“Me. Minho.” The finger travels. “You. Jisung.”
A head-tilt. Gears turning somewhere in there, Minho assumes. Prays, more like.
Then the boy lifts his own finger, presses it to Minho’s chest, and leaves it there.
“Min… ho.”
Minho’s heart skips a beat. Maybe two. He’s fairly sure the honest count is three and that somewhere in the middle it stopped outright. The boy spoke—and there’s no witness, nobody to confirm Minho didn’t dream up a voice that suits that face the way ketchup suits chocolate. Armstrong walked on the moon and got a flag and a famous sentence out of it. Minho gets no flag. Minho will have to carry this one alone.
He keeps his face level. Can’t go scaring him off after a step this size.
“Yes. Minho.” He wraps his hand around the boy’s finger and turns it back on its owner. “Now you. Can you try yours?”
A sweet smile, the gummy one. “Minho.”
Minho exhales. Twenty-nine years his name’s been lying around doing nothing, and it picks tonight to start earning.
“Okay,” he manages. “One step at a time.”
࿐໋₊‧ ֹ٠
Aliens learn fast.
Minho would love the credit. He’s put the hours in, fair’s fair—books, text messages, one drama episode a night with anime after, when the begging gets loud—but hand on heart, it isn’t the teaching. It’s that quick little mind, working away on its own.
Jisung knows his own name now. He knows spoon, blanket, cat, rain. He knows “more” and he knows “thank you.” And thanks to episode eight of the drama, he also knows how dare you show your face in this house, which he aims at the cats with zero comprehension and flawless delivery.
Whole sentences are still hard for him. It doesn’t matter. They understand each other, the two of them, and everything past that point is grammar being precious about itself.
The living, he learns too. Minho’s living—the only model on display up here, so it’ll have to do.
It’s been raining three days straight when Minho takes the boat out. The fishing was never a hobby; the old couple up the hill get most of what the lake decides to part with, and today it parts with three extra, generous for weather this filthy.
One to the freezer, two deboned for dinner, on the assumption that aliens eat fish. Jisung has yet to meet a plate he didn’t finish, so the odds are friendly.
He comes home dripping to a cabin that’s been transformed. Spotless—genuinely spotless, and Minho is clean but has never once been this clean.
The laundry sits in the basket, folded. Not folded the way the world folds. Folded the way you’d fold if folding had been described to you over the phone.
Folded with love, is the point.
“…You did all this?”
Jisung’s flat on his back on the floor, gecko stationed on his stomach, cats at his feet, tremendously pleased with himself. He nods.
“You folded my shirts inside out.”
The frown arrives at speed. “I have failed.” Episode eight again. Delivered with his whole chest.
“You haven’t failed. Practice makes perfect.” Then, lower, “or so they say.”
Minho refolds one, and the boy watches, and by the third shirt they’ve fallen into a rhythm without discussing it—Minho straightening, the boy passing the next one up. It’s nothing. It’s two people and a laundry basket. But it’s the first time in years Minho’s moved in time with anybody. First time he clicked.
The fish next, and the small footsteps arrive before he’s rinsed the knife. Watching Minho cook is Jisung’s favourite programme—better ratings than the anime, better than the murder documentaries even—so up he goes onto the counter, his spot, legs swinging clear of everything important.
They play the pointing game. Jisung’s finger travels, Minho supplies the words, and the finger ends up at the window, at the water coming down the glass in ropes.
“Rain,” Jisung says, before Minho can. First real word he ever learned. Fair enough. The rain introduced them, technically. It was there before Minho was.
Then the vegetables get washed and the rice gets seen to, and no, still no knives—some traumas want more time.
They’re partway through dinner and a comedy Minho isn’t following when the lights go. The TV dies with them, the fridge quits, and what’s left is the dark, the rain drumming the roof, and ten small nails arriving in Minho’s bicep. Not a cat. Cats manage the dark fine.
“It’s just the power. Happens every other week up here.”
The nails stay in.
“…Scary.”
Minho swallows. It is not every day somebody picks him as the safer option. “You’ll get used to it.”
He doesn’t pry the boy off. He stands instead, works the drawers one-handed since the other arm’s spoken for, finds the lighter, and goes candle to candle until there’s no dark corner left in the cabin. For the arm’s sake, naturally.
The claws ease out of him. The distance stays exactly put.
“What is this?” A finger at the flame.
“A candle. You don’t have them, where you’re from?”
A shake of the head. Then, “Home say humans… bad.”
“They’re not wrong.” And Minho doesn’t even leave himself out of it.
A tap at his own chest. “I come to see.” Then the leg, the bandage Minho still changes every evening, last job of the day. “But… they chase me.”
“And that was your proof.” The boy’s eyes drop, and Minho stands there embarrassed on behalf of his whole species, not for the first time. His hand finds the top of the boy’s head, careful about it. “You must be disappointed. I’d hate to cross all that sky just to learn I’d been right to stay home.”
“No.” The eyes come back up. Bigger, somehow. Softer, which shouldn’t be possible. “You make me… right.”
Simple words, by any test you could run them through. Not simple for Minho, who has spent most of a life believing he failed every person who ever loved him.
“Won’t they be looking for you?” His voice holds. Barely, but it holds.
Several quick nods. “Many looking.”
And then Jisung reaches past him for one of the books they practise with, and points at the small gold-haired figure on the cover.
The Little Prince.
“I am like this.”
Minho nearly sends the fish back out the way it came in. “You’re a prince?”
A head-shake. “Not that word.”
Minho doesn’t need the exact word. Prince, heir, future leader, something with no translation—the boy matters to his people, and the sky is holding a seat for him.
Jisung isn’t staying. There’s no version of this where he stays—even the book agrees, that’s the whole ending, the prince always goes back to his own small planet and leaves somebody standing in a desert.
Outside, the rain keeps on. It was falling the night the boy arrived. It’ll be falling when he goes.
Good thing Minho doesn’t get attached. Not anymore.
࿐໋₊‧ ֹ٠
There’s a pamphlet somewhere with Minho’s whole childhood in it.
Emotional numbing. A common trauma response, may present as part of C-PTSD. They gave it to his grandmother, patted her hand, sent the two of them home into the rain.
Minho hadn’t noticed anything was off. Trust other children to do the noticing, that unpaid council of experts on the playground, forever asking why his face just stayed shut when everyone else’s flew open at the smallest thing.
His grandmother said everyone’s born a little different, and different is what makes a person special, and special is a good thing to be.
Minho was very, very special.
She could talk his little heart down off any high ledge she found it standing on, so he stopped asking and never started again. The two people who counted loved the shut face exactly as it was. He decided that settled it.
He wakes stiff on the couch with a boy sat on his chest and two small fingers hooking the corners of his mouth upwards.
“What are you doing.”
“Making yours go like mine.” Jisung shows him—lips out, gummy.
“Why.”
The boy fishes a book up off the floor, and of every book in the house it's the one with the many faces on the front.
The Feelings Book.
Minho’s owned it longer than he’s owned most memories. There’d been whole afternoons where he stood in the bathroom holding it beside his own reflection, matching himself drawing by drawing, correcting the mouth or the eyes, rehearsing a trick that stubbornly refused to work no matter the practice.
“Book says happy is good.” A finger on the yellow one, the big curved mouth. “Happy is this.”
“I know what happy is, Jisung.”
“Minho never happy.” Out comes the lip. “Makes Jisung sad.”
Minho breathes out through his nose. Not smiling and not being happy aren’t the same thing, and how do you explain that to a boy who learned “hello” nine days ago. “It’s not about you. I don’t smile. It’s an old thing. Older than you, by a long way.”
Jisung pushes the corners up again, thumbs at the seam of his mouth, considering the result like the boy in the mirror. Full circle, that. The drawing has walked out of the book and taken over the job Minho gave up on at nine.
“Looks good.”
Minho swallows, and remembers all at once he’s got a warm boy sitting on him first thing in the morning. “Off. I need to make breakfast, then go down to the market, seeing as somebody ate everything we own.”
The jab goes clean over the boy and out the window. Jisung slides off him and folds in next to Dori, who has never turned him down.
“Can I go?”
“Go where?” Minho’s staring into a fridge with nothing in it but condiments and draught.
“Market.”
“No.” Fast, and he keeps his back turned, because he knows the exact face waiting for him and he’d rather not lose to it head-on. “Everybody knows everybody down there. You’d stand out a mile.”
“Cannot hide forever.” Lifted whole from the drama, said to the back of Minho’s head with real conviction. “Came to live with humans.”
“You are living with a human. Me. Right here.” He puts cereal and orange juice down in front of the boy, which is what an empty cupboard allows. “Eat, before Dori robs you.”
“…Go with.”
“I said no.” From the next room, pulling a clean shirt on.
He comes back and makes the mistake of looking straight at it—eyes down, hands wringing each other, cereal going to mush untouched, mouth out. Minho’s own private Medusa, and right on cue he’s stone from the neck down.
“They’d ask questions I can’t answer.” He crouches to lace his boots. “It’s easier this way.”
A nod. “…Okay.”
Four letters, and they go clean through the cold Minho’s kept strapped to his front since primary school, no resistance offered anywhere on the way in. Twenty years that front has held and it goes down flat for one alien with a soggy bowl of cereal.
He was never the superstitious type. But for a man with a clean record, no weaknesses on it anywhere, this is starting to feel like something took aim.
He goes without another word, without a look. Makes the fence. Stops. In, out, in. “…Damn it.” Then the whole turn on his heel, boots back through the mud the way they came.
Worse, when he gets there, to find Jisung already up at the window—watching him leave, presumably, wonderful, really press on the bruise.
But the door opens and the boy’s whole face comes up out of the grey like somebody flipped the lights on in him.
Minho points a finger, threatening for show and fooling nobody.
“You stay beside me.”
A nod.
“You don’t wander off, and you don’t say a single word to anyone.”
A nod, then a spare one after it.
“No glowing. No—alien whatever-it-is in front of the vegetable stand.”
The boy laughs, can’t help it, but he nods through the laugh.
“And the gecko stays home.”
That one was personal. Jisung agrees anyway, too pleased to be coming to haggle, and Minho takes some grim satisfaction in the boy grasping that a yes this size is basically a miracle.