Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When it comes down to it, it’s Johnny's own fault that he didn’t realize sooner. Because that’s the thing — it didn’t start in Vail, it didn’t start in that hospital room, it didn’t start on that Christmas. It began, when he looked back on it, years ago, and it began like a hurricane from those tales they used to weave in middle school — the butterfly wings across the ocean.

It started out as an ache. A hollowness in his ribs somewhere on the left side, not too empty as to cause concern, but noticeable enough for him to look to his right and realize there was something missing. Something vital, something spilled in multicolored ink on lined parchment pages, something precious and shown to him in illusions of inspiration.

It began as a muse.

~

I watched him live.

That was what it came down to, in the end, with all the pretense shed and discarded to the ground, as a mistress would shed her silk gown to the floor at the end of the night. No matter the circumstance of our chance meetings or the shade of the sadness he wore that day, it was not about his joy or his misery or his constricting, frozen, horrifying ache. I watched him breathe, and I watched him laugh, and I watched him suffer, and I watched him glide through the crowd like a phantom of a presence, a gentle brush of a wave to the shore, a songbird flicking through the branch. I watched him turn his head to me and smile with the corner of his mouth, a constellation of moles spilling down his cheek to his neck, carelessly strewn by the hand of fate; but it was never about that. I watched him look through me, and I watched him live.

I watched him live, and I watched him love.

2005

“Oh, honey,” Kathreen pulls out a pack of slim menthols out of her purse, the same hot-pink, and lights up. “You barely spent three years here before we moved to East Meadow.”

“Where you barely spent three collective years,” Johnny says grimly, his fists flexed. He clears his throat and stands up sharply. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He’s had his fill. It’s bad enough she has to be here when Johnny was hoping for a relaxing vacation with his friends, but it also took her barely a day to shed the pretense of a caring mother and forget what it really means to love and cherish and protect.

Johnny’s throat burns as he strides into the backyard, falling down on the ground near the fence so hard his ass explodes with pain. He hisses and pulls out his cigarettes, sending a quick gratitude to Yuta for reminding him to buy them. Because Yuta is a good fucking friend, and Yuta knows what his mother does to him, and Yuta may be the only one who knows to the fullest extent. Doyoung, perhaps, too, but Johnny prefers not thinking about Doyoung too much these days, because it’s been almost four years and Johnny is yet to determine whose side he’s on.

His own sanity’s, that’s whose side. He lights up almost angrily, scuffing his fingers on the wheel before the flame goes up. Inhales, and it burns, and that grounds him — brings him back to the simpler times, happier times. When there wasn’t Boston and New York and Chicago; when it was just East Meadow and them. Just them, a bunch of laughing kids that didn’t know any better and didn’t need to know any more.

The sun is scorching on his face, and he turns it up as his eyes flow shut. The fence is hard against his head, and it is the only solid point of contact; his body floats in the heat of the nicotine high. He thinks he hears birds, and a distant conversation, and echoing traffic, but nothing matters here. It’s his own little world, and it might have been too long ago that he came here to escape his parents clawing at each other, but it still brings him peace. He goes through a whole cigarette, but it doesn’t help that much, so he pulls out another.

He hears the door opening in the house; knows it’s Mark. Knows it on a level he doesn’t think he could access right now. It’s that rapid, almost too-perfect patter of his sneakers on the old wooden stairs. Johnny sighs and twirls the cigarette in his fingers, wondering how to face Mark now — how to tell him he won’t be going to New York with them. He can already envision the slight pout and the shine of those doe eyes, and it breaks his heart just a little. Mark had to grow up too early to accommodate for them, and sometimes Johnny wishes—

It happens in a split second before he sees Mark rounding the house and Mark approaching him. Johnny wasn’t even looking for it—he never does—but when his eyes glide over the back of the house and land on the lonely dying sunflower leaning on it, Johnny sees Him.

It only now occurs to him that perhaps this is the first place he saw Him, years ago, when they came to Chicago for a vacation. He was thirteen, he thinks, and it didn’t scare him like it should have — like it does now. The time slows as Johnny watches the boy—man now, Johnny thinks, His body taller and bulkier, less of an awkward fit than it was before—touching the petals of the sunflower with slender fingers. Johnny could never see His face, its shape just a blurry halo, but he thinks He’s smiling. A gentle, shy smile, a coquettish uptilt of his full lips. Johnny’s fingers itch.

What do you want? Why now?

Mark appears in his eyesight, and He disappears. Johnny exhales and comes back to reality.

“We keep ending up here,” he murmurs. “I’m smoking and you finding me.”

“I’ll always find you,” Mark says simply.

Johnny looks at him, his sun-kissed profile, and he thinks he recognizes something in there, a quality scattered on the invisible face of the boy in his illusion. It would make sense, he supposes; Mark has always been the boy that Johnny turned to in his mind when shit got too heavy. Because it never did with Mark. Because Mark is simple, and Mark always smiles at him like they’re special, and it would make sense that Johnny would draw inspiration from there for a novel he isn’t sure he’ll ever write.

His voice brings Johnny back to reality little by little, and he loses himself in the presence of the boy who never saw him as anything less. It’s intoxicating at times and tiring, burdening in its unassuming weight of Mark’s gaze, but as Johnny chases it now, meets his eyes and sees the sun reflect there, he thinks that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to be the person Mark thinks he is. He doesn’t think he could ever compare, doesn’t have enough strength or skill for it, but Mark believes in him, and that is quite a great tool to have at your disposal.

By the time they leave the backyard, the itch under his nails has subsided to the usual background illusion. As he passes the sunflower again, he can’t help but glance at it — and he thinks he sees the petals disturbed but not crumpled. Not by His hand, never by His hand.

Johnny tries to recall if he ever knew someone as gentle as the illusion of his fevered, non-writer soul; something itches at the back of his mind, but just as always when he tries to think about it too hard, it eludes him.

He follows Mark into the house.

~

I saw him at the gardens last Monday. He was browsing for flowers, fingers brushing over the stems but never stopping anywhere, only touching gently, as if he was leaving his own imprint on the petals as much as they left their scent on him. I wondered then, as he smiled down on dandelions, if that was how it would feel to touch him — would my fingers come away with the yellow pollen of the blossom dust?

He saw me watching but didn’t turn around. Just tilted his head funnily, as if he was listening for something, and smiled. I was too far away to hear what he said to the vendor, but the man’s eyes turned to me for a split moment before they shared a secret smile. The sun, then, hit the glass roof just right, and it shone on his face like a halo of light that I knew he carried in the folds of his soul, and I had to stop and memorize it to draw it later; it would be next to impossible to choose the colors to depict him, his beauty, that otherworldly grace he carried in his dark eyes, but I knew I had to try.

By the time I came to my senses, he was gone; my heart fell and sunk and dropped to the sandy bottom of the sea of my affections. I knew it would be futile to search for him. It would be blasphemy, even, so I went on to stop by the vendor he talked to, just to stand in the ghost of his presence for another moment.

“This is for you, sir,” a voice came suddenly.

I turned my eyes toward the man, and there, in the rough calloused hand of a generational worker, there was a single sunflower. I looked on instinct over the flower beds between us but saw only dandelions, a field of them spreading with gold and green, and there was something of a magic to it. But no sunflowers.

“Thank you,” I whispered, rendered voiceless for any other words.

I took the sunflower home and I put it in the glass vase that he was looking at last month at a flea market, and as I watched the sun set and the flower’s petals retract, I thought about him. What a hyperbole, really, because I never not thought about him those days. I wished desperately to know why. Why me, why the sunflower, why so silently and with no need for gratitude. Why could I no longer go anywhere without seeing him in the crowd, why did the fates keep crossing our paths, why I could never be brave enough to talk to him.

The sunflower bloomed again the next day. I kept expecting it to start wilting away, but it is yet to do so. I don’t think it ever will. Not in my mind, and not in my heart, and not in my journey. Because his smile would never waver; and the sunflower would never wilt.

/

“He got hotter,” Doyoung observes, calmly taking a sip of his beer.

Something constricts Johnny’s heart, and he suddenly feels like he can’t really breathe, because in the insane buzz of his thoughts, it comes over him with sudden clarity that Doyoung is right—and what in the hell is Johnny supposed to do about that?

He always found Mark easy on the eye. Pretty, handsome, whatever epithet one would want to choose — the wording didn’t matter because the fact remained. Mark was always a cute kid, with round cheeks, his glasses cutting into them as he kept fixing them on his button of a nose, and those damn shiny eyes of his certainly never lost him any points. Johnny personally witnessed Mark charm dozens with those eyes alone, present company included. From the cute kid, he grew into a sightly-with-a-squint teenager, especially when he lost the baby fat and got used to his sudden added height, and it is only natural that from there, he would go on to bloom into a handsome adult. Which he did.

But hot? Johnny never saw that one coming, mostly because he never even considered Mark as anything that could be considered attractive—which is a weird enough thought in and of itself. Because Johnny has eyes, and Johnny knows that his closest friends are the hottest pieces of asses to ever leave East Meadow, and yes, he’s biased, but he’s seen—and heard, thanks to cohabitating with Yuta—evidence of his correct assumptions. Logically, therefore, it was only a matter of time before Mark followed his brother and his friends and blossomed.

So why is it hitting Johnny so hard, exactly? Why is it that, all of a sudden, Mark’s cheekbones are no longer awkward but sharp, and his eyelashes cast a long shadow on his cute nose with a particular grace? Mark looks up at him, and Johnny falls into his eyes, and it catches him completely off-guard how lovely they are. It feels— strange.

A tinge of red high on Mark’s cheeks is elegant and painted-on by an artist, and it is no longer that silly little blush that he would get every time somebody looked at him for too long. Johnny knows he’s staring, but how, exactly, is he supposed to stop?

Mark’s eyes drop down, to Johnny’s new tattoo, and he pokes at it, tracing the long healed-over scars of the sunflower.

“Talk about changing,” he says. “What’s this, Johnathan?”

“A tattoo,” Johnny says automatically, glad to find that his voice still works, “of a sunflower. If you squeeze it, you can get oil out of it. Go on, squeeze it.”

Mark bursts out laughing and hits him on the shoulder, and it brings Johnny back into the past like a crack on the glass, and just like that, they’re back in Johnny’s car and Mark squeals at a corny joke Johnny came up with that morning and waited until he could tell it to Mark. It’s interesting — Johnny used to collect jokes to tell Mark. Now, he collects stories he will never tell him.

“It’s cute,” Mark tells him, his fingers delicate on the flower, and they leave behind trails of warmth that sinks through Johnny’s skin and into his bones.

“Thanks,” Johnny murmurs.

Mark is close to him, so close that Johnny can count the freckles that are now almost gone from his face when Mark looks up; and the time stops, and behind Mark’s shoulders, out of sight but still glaring with the illuminated outline, Johnny sees Him again. His fingers fall on top of Mark’s on the tattoo, and just for a split moment, it’s both of them, and this is the first time He has come so close — and he laughs, breathless and tingling, and it sounds just like Johnny imagined it would, and he wants to write it down before he forgets.

The illusion breaks as Mark leans away to take a picture of the tattoo, and Johnny lets him, watches his attentive eyes and his lower lip tucked under his teeth, and his chest caves in with a feeling he doesn’t know the definition for. He’s glad Mark didn’t ask why he got this tattoo, because he isn’t sure he could explain it to anybody aside from the illusion of his muse; isn’t sure he would ever be brave enough to be so vulnerable, to open himself up that strongly, to find the eyes that would accept it not with mockery but with understanding. He’s glad Mark didn’t ask, but he also can’t help but wonder if Mark would understand. It feels like he would.

Johnny sees Him again later that night, when he comes back to their makeshift picnic behind the house and stops before the others see him, the boombox clutched in his cold fingers. He’s dancing around the fire, invisible to anybody but him, and as He fades away into the night, Johnny looks beyond Him and sees Mark, his head tilted toward Charlie, and it’s— Not right. Charlie isn’t a good fit for him; nobody is, not for his perfect little Markles. But the truth is that Markles hasn’t been little for a long time, and Johnny never really had the right to tell him who to love.

And yet, as Johnny enters the backyard and steps through the fog of his muse long gone, he wishes, for the first time in the years to come, that Mark would look up — that Mark would look up and at him.

The ache grows.

~

I heard him laugh for the first time last night. I saw him almost smile countless times, and I would waste pages and canvas to try and imagine what it would be like to see—hear—it bloom, how it would glide and flow, how it would resonate within me and the air around us. I used to think it would be infinite — once it left him, it would go up to the stars and remain there in a glowing constellation of sugar powder.

But it wasn’t, not really. When he laughed, it didn’t go far — it landed into me, my bruised heart, and it remained there in a hollow space where a child of my youth should have been. I felt like a thief, a pagan who defied God, a traitor who stole what should have belonged to the stars — yet I felt blessed all the same.

But before the laugh, came something else.

This time around, I don’t think I found him — he found me. It was just another Wednesday evening, and my head was far too removed from him for once as I walked down Washington, still pondering on that senseless meeting that left me hollow and filled with a faux-inspired purpose of my pathetic career. I did not notice him at first, standing there in the snowfall of the flour from the bakery, but I felt him, and it was as if a string pulled me back, and I looked up — and there he was.

“I've kept you waiting,” he said, and his eyes shone.

“You were worth the wait,” I breathed out, too struck by his sudden proximity to say anything else.

It could have been anything else, really. I could have said something clever, impressed him with the brilliance of my cunning mind. I could have uttered one of the thousand sentences I’ve thought of in preparation for this meeting as I sat on my bed and watched the sunflower never wilt. I could have told him all the stories that waltzed into my mind with the signature spring of his soundless step.

But all I said, in the end, was the naked truth; and he found it delightful, and he laughed.

“It’s been so long,” he said, the yellow hues of the moon dancing on his pink lips.

He talked still smiling, and I stood there revered; and I watched him.

2006

“Do you write these days?” Mark asks quietly.

Johnny watches his face, that gentle uptilt of his jaw as he trains his big doe eyes on him — and how could Johnny ever lie to him? But how, in the convoluted mess that is his mind, could he tell him the truth?

Because he doesn’t know if it counts. If the paragraphs he writes down hastily with his aching fingers into a faux-parchment lined notebook he got for his fifteenth birthday and barely used since counts as writing. They never come to him consistently, those wretched words, and they only ever arrive on the heels of the illusion that he can now see behind Mark’s shoulder in another booth. The Muse is with his back to them, dark hair curling from the steam coming from Mark’s cup, and Johnny can’t see his face — never really could. All he sees is a part of his profile, tanned skin shiny and soft to the eye, a cluster of moles spilled down the side. He thinks he sees a corner of an almost-smile, and he knows that when he’s done here, when he’s back in his cold impersonal hotel room, he will get out the notebook he takes with him everywhere for no tangible reason, and he will write something down in it — a continuation of a novel that isn’t really a novel.

Even if he doesn’t write it that often, he thinks about it, constantly; it is a presence at the back of his mind occupying the hollow space where something else should be. The ache under his ribs is black with ink, and the words bubble in there like ingredients of a warlock potion meant to bring down nations and curse lovers. He is nothing but a vacant skeleton, its milky bones carved up with incantations that he doesn’t have enough strength to speak aloud.

Johnny blinks, and he watches the Polaroid of himself, and he feels Mark’s care on him, and he remembers the small bathroom and the swimming eyes of a boy with a bloody nose that looked at Johnny like he was facing a monster and told him a truth about himself that warped Johnny’s heart. He felt in that moment as if all the responsibility of the world, the responsibility that his parents always shied away from, the responsibility of a protector — was weighing on his bony shoulders, as heavy as the quarterback equipment and as easy as the knowledge that he could never allow the world to fail Mark like it failed him.

Johnny could never fail him — he would rather go through his personal hell ten times over.

“Yes and no.” He sighs and puts the picture down gingerly. “Does thinking about it count?”

It’s enough of a truth; more than he thought he could afford. Mark looks at him with all the understanding and compassion of the best friend, and it aches in Johnny.

But this ache is good; it is a mark on him unsullied by ink.

~

His touch came suddenly, like a high tide that crashed on the shore. I did not expect it, did not feel deserving of such an honor, and did not have time to prepare.

He was walking on the line painted on the road, and he was listening to me talk about something nonsensical, an irrelevant rant of a man that grasped for topics just to keep the attention on him. I knew later, in the solitude of my bedroom, that I did not need to even talk. I looked back on it then, and I remembered that I did not need to speak for his attention to be always on me. My heart sank then as I realized it, as I came to understand that, perhaps, he was as enthralled with me as I was with him.

Later, much later, he would say it to me as we laid in the gray ink of the dawn and I traced the invisible marks of my love on his skin.

“I utter the same words you do under your breath when you think I'm not listening,” he would murmur, his lips against my neck. “I look at you the same way you look at my reflection in the mirror — I feel revered, traced with need.”

I would come to know it then, but I did not know it as I spoke and spoke and spoke, words spilling from my dry tongue with one aim and one aim alone — to hear that laugh again.

And so I talked, and he walked on the line, hands spread like a child, and I saw in him the freedom that was taken away from me in the distant hazy days of my past; and then he stumbled, and I caught him without thinking about it twice, reached for him in my bloodthirsty need to keep him safe, and he grabbed for my hand, and his fingers wrapped around mine, and he stopped and looked up at me, his smile wide and overjoyed.

“In your arms, I feel powerful,” he whispered.

He never let go of my hand until we had to part, until I had to let go of the only tether to the world beyond my own I had, and as I felt his soft, delicate, warm, apple-scented skin slip from mine, I wondered if he knew — his touch was power to me, too.

2007

Mark falls asleep in his arms in the sand, and Johnny watches him for a long time, painted by the silver moonlight, and he doesn’t know where the gentle brush of the ocean waves begins and Mark’s quiet breathing ends. There is something magical about him like this, curled into Johnny’s side, his fingers still over Johnny’s tattoo, his lips pressed to Johnny’s shoulder. It tugs at him, that goddamn ache, and he looks back on the past few years and cuts an invisible scar into himself with each memory of Mark’s tired voice over the phone, the unsaid truths written between the lines of his update emails, the hollow emptiness of his eyes every time they could meet.

It was a good decision, to move to New York, and Johnny knows in his heart of hearts that all those reasons he gave to people who cared to ask were just a ruse, a fickle plastic cover, crumpled at the edges, over the glaring truth — he wanted to come back for Mark. He meant those words he said to Mark once in the blue dawn of a Christmas morning; Mark was a harbor they would all eventually drift back to. It hurts Mark to talk about Taeyong these days, but Johnny knows that it’s just a matter of time before that stray little bird comes back home and returns to his rightful place. Until then, Johnny will stand in his place, bend his head to fit all of his height into a small space left by Taeyong, rearrange himself to make sure that Mark has something in the place of his gaping wound.

He’s almost asleep when Muse comes. Johnny drifts between the edge of reality and dream when he happens to look at the shore and see him there, kneeling on the sand and stacking shells on top of each other. He’s in a thin white shirt that blows and wilds in the wind, and his hair is an unkempt, endearing mess. Once again, Johnny doesn’t see his face — just an outline of him against the sky littered with bright constellations. Mark sighs into his skin, and that is when Muse looks up, as if drawn by the sound that he couldn’t possibly hear over the wind. He smiles, and Johnny’s breath stops.

Later, when he carries Mark into the tent and settles him under the covers, he tries to fall asleep again, but his fingers itch — so he goes back to the car and snaps open the glove compartment to retrieve the notebook. It’s hard to write propped on the dashboard, but he still does, shaky fingers sending the pen flying through the pages with the words whispered into his ear by the ghost on the beach.

When he’s done, he leans away and looks at the ocean through the windshield, and it’s blurry and gray with the dust of American roads, but he thinks he sees a dark head bob in and out of the sea foam. He hides the notebook again and goes back to the tent, where Mark is whining in his sleep, and it warms Johnny’s heart, and he fits himself into the space between the tarp wall and the bundle of covers that Mark is.

But still, sleep doesn’t come. Not until he turns around and wraps his arms around Mark’s waist, warms his fingers under Mark’s body, and sighs into Mark’s hair. This feels like coming home, like sitting down next to a fireplace, like turning his face to the sun; so he stays there, with Mark. His Mark; and for once in forever, he is not plagued by nightmares. He doesn’t dream of his parents and their shouting matches that tear through walls of his mind like nails and hammers; he doesn’t dream about drowning in a space that feels like nothing and is nothing; he doesn’t dream about being crushed under the expectations of monsters in his closet, their red glowing eyes watching his every step. Next to Mark, Johnny dreams about sunlight.

~

He found me once again in the coffee shop on Sixth, and it felt mundane and wrong, to be looked upon by him in a place so removed from the magical fields of sunflowers that I always imagined him in. But it was him, and it was his smile, and I felt like I could melt away under the heat of the faulty-wired lighting right there and then, just because his warm fingers touched my saccharine shoulder as he passed by and took a place I unknowingly reserved for him in the booth.

“I want to be the one that steals the sun,” he announced with a gleeful smile as his hands reached over the table to steal my coffee. “There are universes uncharted, grounds craving the touch of life. There are expectations and visions, and responsibilities one has to shoulder to survive. I want to be the one to learn every wave and sear through the uncertainties tainting this world.”

He said it all calmly, with just a touch of breathlessness to his honeyed voice, as he went about adding more and more sugar to my already too-sweet coffee, tasting it in small sips between his words and still finding it not good enough. I watched him, mesmerized and lovesick, my chin propped by my hand yet carrying the burn of his touch.

When he finished talking, he looked up at me with a challenge in his eyes, a kind but ruthless glove thrown between us on the ground; and how could I ever do anything but bend down, coil the body that never felt like my own, and pick it up, tug it on my hand, and hold it to my heart like the Holy Grail it was? I smiled, and I reached over, my palm up, and his fingers danced over my life line before they stopped and folded into mine.

“I am just a pawn in the grand scheme of things,” he said quietly, an uncharted sadness in his eyes, and I lapped it up like a thirsty nomad, “but you make me believe I can do it all.”

With his arm in mine, I believed it too. Against all the faith in the opposite, against the thunder of voices that chased me through my life, against the anvil of the present pressed into my carved-up ribs, I believed him. Because to be revered by him was a revelation in and of itself; a scripture previously unknown and unread, a manifesto of the truth that he weaved himself, out of his own words created on the night of the winter solstice. To believe him was to live; and I wanted to live.

“Could I accompany you?” I asked then.

Instead of an answer, he curved his fingers around mine and brought them to his lips, and he pressed a smiling kiss to my skin, and his eyes met mine — and in them, I found not an infinity but a tiny, precious, fragile little space reserved just for me, and it was warmer than miles upon miles of cold, indifferent stars.

/

“Yuta’s my best friend,” Johnny says. “So is Doyoung, or at least he was, I don’t even know anymore. But you’re—” He clears his throat. “You’re more to me, Mark.”

He hears a chiming laughter upstairs, a ghostly phantom laughter of his Muse, and he knows without needing to creep up the creaking stairs that Muse is dancing in the pink glow of Mark’s old moon light, his fingertips brushing over the walls covered with the Polaroids of their childhood as he twirls because his body takes up the whole room, because in his beauty he is greater than life itself. He knows, and he sees the echoes of it in Mark’s eyes as he meets them now, the ache growing stronger and pleading for release.

“You’re my brother,” Johnny says, and the ache whines with dissatisfaction, because that’s not it—that’s not the full truth; only he doesn’t know the truth.

He thinks Muse knows it, holds it close to his chest like cards at a poker game without any rules; and Johnny isn’t sure how exactly to bluff when faced with the illusion that is, really, just a subversion of his childhood fear of loneliness.

He flinches. “God, it sounds wrong, I don’t even know why, but the thing is—” He inhales, and the icicles of the cold breath cut into him. “You’re a fixed point of stability in my life, and I can’t imagine losing that, but I don’t think it would be healthy to be in each other’s space all the time. We need at least, like, a block of streets between us.”

Mark bursts out laughing, and Johnny watches his shoulders shake, and there is something of a distant familiarity to how they curve as he bends his neck to bury his hands in his hair. It feels like the coldness of space, lonely but still searched for by thousands of dreamers hidden by the covers of their solitary beds.

“You’re right,” Mark whispers. “About stability. I need you too.”

He reaches out for Johnny, and Johnny takes his hand and squeezes it hard, and the touch is needed after so much time apart. There is love in him for this boy across from him that reaches through the ages and spaces and cities strewn across the continents, and Johnny might not understand the scope of it fully yet, but he knows he won’t be able to let go of it in a long, long time. It is the warmth that he never knew he needed, as a child, broken and left alone for days at a time, staring at the door, waiting like a fool until it opens and somebody who needs him, wants him, misses him, walks through. They never did; so eventually, Johnny walked out of it himself, and he walked and walked until he met a kid that punched bullies and tried teaching a snail to fly, and the kid brought him here, to this kitchen and this smile before him now. It was just a puffy little thing back then, pouted as its owner concentrated on his Legos, and even then, Johnny felt like that was what waited for him all those years of empty hallways.

“We’ll be fine, Markles,” Johnny tells him with a smile. “I’ll be there for you.”

“And I for you,” Mark replies. “Always.”

Johnny tugs his hand closer and presses his lips to the upside of Mark’s hand, and he smiles, and the echo grows louder, and the ache grows deeper.

“Always.”

~

I watched him dance, and he was greater than life itself, and his shoulders brushed against the sky, and he laughed, and it glowed with the pink of an undiscovered moon hiding somewhere behind the dark side of a planet he, perhaps, came from. My own Little Prince, dispatched with his great purpose; purpose that he revealed to me piece by piece, petal by petal, touch by touch.

He gave it to me in shards of a glass spilled on the ground when I was eight and broke a vase on my foot; my father carried me to the Emergency Room with anger in his voice that I only now realized was concern. I didn’t know it then, and it felt like I would vanish there, under the dark weight of his disappointed wide eyes the color of a raging sea. They pulled four shards from me then before stitching me up, and he was giving them back to me now, blood crusted on them after so many years of neglect, a secret carved into its canvas with a needle that my mother pricked her finger on before blaming me for distracting her.

He took all those things from my soul, unearthed the dusty old pain I locked up, and he brushed his fingers over it and gave it new light — and he gave it back to me, and I put them on the brightest, cleanest shelf I could find in the cluttered attic of my mind that always looked like the one in my grandmother’s house; an attic filled with old books, discarded and of no interest to anybody but my inquiring, lonely mind, and I used to find my solace there, just as discarded and unwanted, and I devoured them, and I kept the words within me like an oath — to spill now on these pages in his honor, because perhaps that was truly the first time he visited me. In the darkness of that boarded-up attic, he was a glow; and in his great dance, he was my salvation.

2008

“But it’s—” Mark sputters. “I can easily pick somebody up at the bar and get laid, but it isn’t about that. It’s about making a connection, having fun, falling in love. I would rather hold off on action and wait for something great to come around. Something real. You know?”

Johnny looks thoughtfully at the fountain in front of them, motionless now but still pretty, and he sees Muse with the cuffs of his pants rolled up, bare feet splashing in the water that isn’t really there. Yet again, Johnny doesn’t see his face, and it infuriates him for a breathless moment — because what sacrifice of ink from his fountain pen would be enough for Muse to finally turn around, look at him, turn his eyes to Johnny and show him the truth of it all?

“I don’t really know, no,” Johnny says quietly. “I mean, I— I’ve had crushes, sure, and I liked people a lot, but I don’t think there was anybody I’ve had this… connection you mean with.”

Aside from, perhaps, a phantom in his head that whispers words of poetry into his ear as he sits bent over the notebook he fears he will never fill to its entirety. But that isn’t the kind of love Mark is talking about, at least Johnny doesn’t think it is. Because it might carry the same bitterness but it does not have the same sweetness; it is the sensation of falling but it is also constantly crashing to the ground and breaking his bones against the sharp stones left there by the distant ghosts of people that never walked through the door. There is something missing from it; and he thinks—hopes—that when Muse finally looks at him, he will understand what it is.

He sniffs from the cold and looks at Mark. “Have you?”

A shadow passes Mark’s eyes, and it rings with recognition in the splash of Muse’s feet against the water. Johnny doesn’t look, couldn’t look away from Mark now for the sake of courtesy, but out of the corner of his eye, he sees that Muse leaves his place and jumps on the pavement to twirl and dance, and there, he could see the face now finally — but he knows that he will not. Could not; not when he has something much more precious before his eyes now.

Because Mark is more important than Muse; they could not compare.

“No.” Mark says, wringing his hands in Johnny’s gloves, and Johnny’s soul rebels against it.

Mark needs to love; Mark is love. He is a healer that walks through his life scooping all the love that he can from the people around him, and he stores it within himself like a secret, and he gives it out in plenty and even more — he is fearless in his devotion to fill the cracks on his family’s foundations with all affection that he can. Johnny himself has felt it so many times over their lives, and there is no cure for heartache stronger or more potent or more precious than Mark Lee and his insatiable desire to make sure that Johnny knows he is loved.

“But I still believe in it,” Mark says, and it’s good.

Because if Mark ever loses his faith, Johnny thinks he will lose himself.

If Mark loses his love, they’re all, frankly, fucking doomed.

~

“No pen is mightier than the saccharin thickness that flows through my veins upon seeing your smile,” he told me this morning, as he watched me write in the park, his nose red and his lips muffled by the crimson scarf I gave him two weeks ago.

I smiled; could not resist the urge. Just to give him the satisfaction, and because it was a blasphemy not to. When he asked, I smiled, and if he asked for the world burned down to ashes, I would do it with the same smile.

“You are a greater writer than I could ever be,” I confessed as I looked up at him, at the elusive candor of the sadness in the lines of his face. “I fear I might never be able to capture even a fraction of your light, with my ink so dark and wasted.”

He just laughed at me, and for the first time in, perhaps, forever, that laughter didn’t cut me — because it was his, and because it didn’t carry with itself the poisoned thorns of cruelty. He laughed not at me but with me, next to me, his hands wrapped in my gloves, and he was immaculate in the imperfection of his tousled hair.

I kissed him then; could not resist nor stay away any more, and he met me halfway, his lips chapped and cold under mine. He discovered me accidentally, and in kissing him, I discovered the truth — there were no accidents; he was mine before I knew that I could be anybody’s, before I felt like I could belong, was worthy enough to.

The clutter of unopened doors did not reach me there; because he walked, always, soundlessly, his feet bare on the sand of a night beach.

/

“I love you, Johnny. All of you. You’re human, and I will never hold that against you, because you’re my human.”

Mark’s voice has always had a raspiness to it that Johnny wasn’t sure anybody but him could hear, and it sneaks into it now, rough like the surface of unpolished wood, the splinters catching in Johnny’s eyes and making the tears spill. He is filled with affection so strong that for a blessedly cursed moment, it overpowers everything else, and it rushes in like a storm of thousands of small let-downs and broken-promises that clutter and break under the water.

It is a wonder to be Mark’s, a revelation, and Johnny lacks words to say all the things that push and falter in him. The ache under his ribs is almost unbearable now, the butterfly drowning under the calamity that it has brought on, and it breaks something in him — an old crusted wound inflicted by indifference and faux laughter, cold pink-lipped kisses and careless brushes over his shoulders, betrayal and grievance that chewed through his chest and left a gape in there that he could not fill with his childish, clammy hands.

“How are you so fucking amazing, Markles?” Johnny whispers, his voice wobbly.

“Mom says a fairy kissed her belly when I was in it,” Mark says, dead serious, and a wet chuckle breaks out of Johnny.

Johnny presses him even tighter to himself, and he wishes for an insane, blind moment to fuse himself with Mark, to consume and drink, to devour him and his light in a vain attempt to cast out his own darkness; but that would be wrong. It would be a crime, treason, sin. To touch Mark with ill intent, to brand him with Johnny’s pain, to ruin the image worthy of being carved into the marble of stolen statues.

But to be next to Mark, and to know that he is loved and accepted by him — that is art itself, and so Johnny shuts his eyes and ignores the glow that he feels behind his back, the glow of Muse kneeling on the windowsill and pressing his face to the murky glass. Later, he will come back to his apartment and write, he knows that he will — will have to, because that is the only thing that casts the Muse out, allows him to return to the pocket of space that he exists within when he isn’t plaguing Johnny. Later. For now, Johnny is here, and Johnny is Mark’s.

~

I didn’t love myself before I came to love him. It wasn’t a self-deprecatory bitter thing that flowed through my veins, it wasn’t a thing born out of regret and mistakes, it wasn’t a thing at all. I simply never looked in the mirror and saw somebody I could learn to like there — it was just a hollow face, a blank canvas woven out of threads of insecurity and dullness of my soul, waiting to be filled with colors and paints and brushes of his precious touch.

“Your laughter makes me want to break away from this ghastly shell they call skin,” he told me one evening, as he hid his hands in my pockets and we stood under the flickering street lamp that blinked on his face like forest lights without a home.

I didn’t hear my laughter before it became his favorite sound; I didn’t see my worth before he told me I was his. Ours was a bond forged out of the starlight that he reached up for, took with his fingers and gently brought forth between us to carve our names into the dying light. With his breath over my lips, came my paradise; not a thing sung about in poems and scriptures but my own personal garden filled with sunflowers and daisies and his beloved dandelions. His steps walked over the desolated soil of my mind and from them, flowers and plants and life sprung, and I reveled in them as if I was still a child running through my grandfather’s wheat field, my skin itching and burning and reminding me that I existed. In the golden halo of that field, he waited for me, and he led me to the garden, and there, in the grenadine sunshine of the light, I saw him.

And there, I loved him.

2009

Johnny doesn’t want to go to London. He would much rather stay home in New York and suffer through the dull days at the office because it meant coming home at the end of the day to laughter and warmth and Mark’s cookies. Those are some good fucking cookies, if he’s to say so. But he also has a career to sustain, and, despite his disdain for what he calls his job, he is still damn good at it. So, when the time comes to assemble a team to set up the new branch opening, Johnny is selected, and Johnny can’t say no, not if he wants to go any further within this company.

It’s on the flight to London, his cheek still burning with a parting kiss that Mark planted there, that Johnny remembers he never wanted this in the first place. This was supposed to be a temporary thing, just a placeholder until he figured out what to do next; and look at him now. In his starched collar, uncomfortable and itchy, clinking his whiskey glass in the business class with his colleagues, cracking jokes that they like and laugh at, because he knows exactly what to say to make people like him. It’s a skill, he supposes, that he developed as a kid who strived to do anything to make his parents notice him, and in his practise to be likable and agreeable and everybody’s favorite, he forgot the purpose — because a world of warm smiles couldn’t overshadow the two impassive ones that never landed on him. It’s been years since he tried with his parents, but all the things he programmed into himself yet remain, and they’re useful for business.

Look at me, Dad, he wants to say; I grew up to be just the type of entrepreneur you’ve always envisioned me to be. His parents are proud of him, they whisper in ecstasy over his achievements every time they talk, and they take credit for it, weaving tales of how they raised such a perfect little boy. Only they didn’t; only Yuta alone raised Johnny better than his mother ever did, not even mentioning the others. Yuta taught him to smile, Doyoung taught him to survive, Taeyong taught him to find beauty in the mundane, and Mark taught him to love. Love like there was nothing else worth living for, love like it was that single act that would save the world from damnation, love like it was his source of air and energy. Johnny could never quite nail it like Mark always did, but he strived for it, and it was, he supposed, enough.

Gah, even Jaehyun, being such a new but fresh addition to Johnny’s life, did more for him than his father ever attempted to. Jaehyun is battered and bruised and he wears his scars on his sleeves and his smile and his dimples, and he flaunts them and tells the whole world to fuck off because they can’t bring him down, no matter what they do; because he’s been through it all. Johnny loves that in him, and he slowly learns it from him, and perhaps that’s why going away to London for fuck knows how long hurts even more.

His apartment is small and empty, a narrow gray hall and a small square room with an attached balcony and a dark kitchen, and it feels so repulsively British that Johnny wants to throw up the second he walks through the doors; but still, for the unforeseeable future, it’s home. So he goes about unpacking, throwing around things that remind him of New York — Yuta’s quilt and Jaehyun’s teddy bear go on the bed and a few Polaroids Mark pressed into his hands go up on the corkboard he asked for when the company arranged for the apartment. It’s just a few little pictures, half of them with people it hurts to look at, but they bring with themselves a fraction of the light he knows is overfilling an apartment on Bedford Street an ocean away from him.

It’s late evening for him, which means Mark should be five hours behind and definitely home, so Johnny calls him and puts him on speakerphone and asks him for a recipe, any recipe. Mark’s voice dips as he asks what Johnny’s in the mood for, and Johnny doesn’t reply for a long time, because he couldn’t articulate it if he tried, and when the line is silent for long enough, Mark starts talking. He lists off the ingredients for a simple dish, and Johnny finds them all in the small pre-stocked fridge, and with Mark’s gentle voice flowing through the kitchen, Johnny makes a pie that, even with the whiff of its smell, reminds him of home. He doesn’t say it, but they both know that Mark is way smarter than he admits to, and there was a purpose to his recommendation, and it puts a smile on Johnny’s face that doesn’t fade for a long time.

When Mark hangs up almost an hour later and Johnny brushes his fingers over the hot screen, now black, he finds that he doesn’t care about the size of the phone bill if it means he can bring a little piece of home to him when he needs it. He sighs and turns around to bring the food into the bedroom and kick back before the TV, and there, behind the old yellow curtain barely hanging on over the balcony door, he sees Muse outside. It’s dark and cold, but he’s wearing that same billowy white shirt, his foot tucked under him on a fake-straw chair and another propping his cheek with the knee. Johnny watches the back of his head and knows that his eyes are mesmerized as they watch the old city spread in novelty pathways of light before him, and he leaves it be. The pie tastes a little saltier than usual but still helps him pretend Mark made it, and Muse never turns around, and Johnny falls to shallow slumber around midnight.

Days in London pass blurrily, sluggishly, lazily, only strung along by Johnny’s relentless grip on the calendar. He crosses off the days like a hopeful idiot and goes about his daily tasks and makes jokes that people like and explores the City when he gets too bored in the flat, and unrelentlessly through that, Muse follows him. He’s either behind him, taunting Johnny to turn around, or ahead, gliding through the crowd and pointing the way, and of course, Johnny always goes where his bare feet on the cold pavement lead.

He knows what would make Muse go away, but he’s selfish and lonely, and he keeps him tethered and bound by his side, just to have something to feel against his back. It grows tiring on the apparition, and it begs Johnny for release, lies behind him in the night and strokes the nape of his neck, wondering if Johnny’s ever going to let him go. Johnny wishes he could, but the words won’t come to him, and so he keeps being selfish, and he keeps calling home, and he keeps feeling the emptiness in his chest.

Johnny meets Kate on his fourth month in London, with the inevitable return home finally looming on the horizon, and by the time they cross paths in the conference room B when Kate’s firm comes in to discuss the merge, Muse is weary and tired and sad, never leaving his place on the balcony. Kate is short and lovely, her button nose scrunched up as she laughs at his jokes, and she has a particular obsession with noir novels, and they spend hours talking about them over long-cold coffee.

She warms him and makes him feel like he doesn’t need to snatch Mark or Yuta or Jaehyun away from their lives to keep him sustained, and for the first time since stepping foot on this foggy land, Johnny feels relatively happy. They go to museums and theaters, and Kate cries at an opera and he finds it heart-wrenchingly endearing, and she makes him forget about his ache; but Muse doesn’t like her. At night, as Johnny lies with Kate in his arms and watches through the yellow curtains, he sees the angry set of the shoulders and the soundless rants falling from his upset lips.

So he finally lets Muse go.

~

There was no limit to my affections for him. It felt infinite, to stand at his side and watch his impossible eyes shed tears before a painting in a gallery that he took me to just to show this one canvas to me. They ran and ran over the curves of the brush, drank in the hues hungrily, his lips twisted and his fingers tight around mine.

“What do you feel?” I asked him, driven insane by his silence and by rare inability to know what he thinks.

He shuddered before he looked at me, and his fingers reached for my cheek like petals of a rose that grew in the dark for too long to know what light was anymore. It was gentle, like a touch of a bird’s feather to my skin, and it struck me speechless as I used to be before my past’s rage and silent disapproval.

“There is a horizon to break — to shatter like a bottle made of brittle glass; to snap like a fragile spine,” he whispered, words falling from his sinless lips like red blades of grass, “and it is hazardous by all means to even imagine the ways this world would combust once there exists no limit, no veil to pull over our eyes.”

I looked at the gray painting to see what he meant, to witness the world through his wide, dark eyes, and I saw in the sea depicted on the canvas, in the storm raging and contained by the golden frame, in the sharp mountain peaks against which the waves beat and shattered, in the sky overcast with thunders of devotion and rage — I saw there what he meant, and I loved him more for it.

I kissed his fingers, curled affectionately over my cheek, and I led him away, and we walked through the dark gallery adorned with greatest nightmares a human mind could conjure, but when we walked together, we walked alone, through our own path; he blazed it with his burning soul, with the candlelight of his tears, and there was freedom in our steps, because we knew that a limit was needed, but we believed that we had none of it.

Because it was no longer him and me; it was us, and in our flight of the damned, we were limitless.

/

Johnny doesn’t get those flowers inked into his bicep because he will miss London. No, he can’t wait until he’s out of here and on the plane and back in New York, basking in the sun of his friends, back home. It’s just a little over a month now, and it is not just a fickle promise from the brass anymore; it’s a solid date printed with blue into his prepared itinerary, and he tacks it next to Polaroids and looks at it every day when he comes back from the office.

It’s even emptier now, with Muse gone and Kate choosing to cut it loose before it sinks in, and so Johnny takes to calling the others again, and Mark complains about Yuta and Jaehyun being a combined idiot force of hard-to-handle mess, and Johnny laughs in delight and memorizes every dip and curve of Mark’s voice over the grainy line. It’s a lifeline of sorts for him, a reminder that they’re still sharing a planet, and just because Mark isn’t across the hall doesn’t mean he’s gone. It’s a hollow illusion that Johnny keeps coming back to; each time he loses sight of Mark’s voice, he feels like he’s plunged into cold waters, separated from his reality and thrust into another world. A world that is dark and lonely and gray, a world that is the only thing to exist, a world beyond which there is nothing. It suffocates him sometimes, but then he looks at the Polaroids, and he finds their smiles, and he remembers that it’s just a little pocket of space; hardly a whole infinity of existence.

October is even bitchier in the UK, and it only serves to remind Johnny that he’s missing a very important appointment, so one gloomy day, when it’s damp as hell but at least not pouring down, he grabs his phone, dials Mark’s number, and invites him on an international stroll through a park. Mark laughs at him but sighs and says he’ll call back when he’s ready, and by the time Johnny’s phone rings again, he’s already in Chelsea Gardens, a good enough substitution for Central Park.

They walk in sync thousands of miles away from each other, and they get their coffees, and they talk. Mark tells him about the newest stunt that Jaehyun pulled and Yuta supported, and he complains about his newest boyfriend that he’s trying to dump before the holidays roll in, and Johnny pokes fun at him for freaking out about neither of the heathens responding to his pink post-it commands as well as Johnny did.

“I mean, to be fair,” Johnny drawls, watching the workers tend to the covered flower beds, concealed for the winter. “You don’t have quite the same grip on them as you do on me.”

“Oh really?” Mark drawls, and Johnny can see his smile, that cheeky tilted little twist of his plump lips, and the distance aches. “And what’s that grip?”

“I’m just going to say that I genuinely believe you were putting a spell on me during all those cello rides and leave it at that,” Johnny jokes.

Mark snorts in a crackle of a sound through the line, and Johnny looks over the old flowers to see Muse digging in the ground with a stick. He stops to watch it, breathless and delighted and afraid of him being back so soon, and Mark sighs into the phone.

“I miss you,” he murmurs, and there is a rustle of leaves on his side that hides his heartache.

“I’ll be back soon,” Johnny reminds him. “Before you know it, you’ll wish I’d fuck off again already.”

“Never.” Mark’s response is instant, and it is a wild contrast to the bashfullnes of his childhood, when it took Johnny coaxing and repeating his questions several times before Mark managed to crawl out of his shell enough to respond.

Johnny misses those days sometimes, misses them desperately and with the grumpiness of an old man on the porch, because it was easy and simple, and he only needed to cross the street not to be alone anymore. Sometimes, he can still smell the apples of his car and hear Mark’s snorting laughter and the dips of his voice as he told Johnny about his good days, and it felt powerful, to know that Mark craved for his approval. It was childish, but it was powerful, and Johnny, perhaps, misses the simplicity of it all.

But it’s better now. They’re on equal ground now, and Mark is confident enough to be honest with him, and with his candor, he makes Johnny believe in himself.

“Love you, Markles,” Johnny breathes out, struck by the sudden wave of affection. “I’ll see you soon.”

“You better,” Mark threatens, but Johnny knows his cheeks are red from the cold and embarrassment.

His voice, even after the line is long dead, rings in Johnny’s mind as he heads out, but he doesn’t go home just yet. Before that, he finds a coffee shop and sketches down an image persistent in his head, and then he gives it to the closest tattoo shop artist he can find. A few hours later, with his bicep aching and itching with new scars, he writes. Muse is next to him, his breath washing over Johnny’s neck, and he still, even years after, doesn’t see his face, but today, he doesn’t need Muse to look at him.

The words, inexplicably, come themselves.

~

“We carry big dreams in our little bodies like those lifetimes of sadness riding on the coattails of a single, burnished speck of stardust.”

I listened to his voice, sugary like velvet on my skin, as he whispered the words into my neck, my hand bent around his body, my fingertips kissing the bends of his spine. It was a shining late night, and the moonlight was silver on the side of his face, turned up toward me for a touch of lips. I watched the moon and the stars dance on his skin, gentle and breathless, terrified of leaving their blemish on his perfect cheek but still unable to resist touching his grace with their tails. They caught in his moles, and I caught them in my fingers to discard them, because I was greedy. Only I could touch him; he gave that permission to me and me only.

“I used to think I was not able to dream,” I told him, my honesty scalding in my throat.

He smiled, burst into the sunlight of joy, and tugged me closer to press our lips together and be consumed, by the blaze that started from a spark between the pages filled with words that made no sense before us. The book burned, and so did we, and I loved him. I loved him, and he loved me, and there was nothing simpler or more complicated than that.

“It’s you,” I whispered into the sweetness of his lips. “It’s always been you.”

“Even beyond oblivion, I only see my hand in yours,” he responded, his fingers tangled in my hair, “and your hand in mine.”

I never felt deserving of a love of a scope so great; never felt like I could bear it. I was a vessel, filled with glass and stones and blades and the metal of belts that resonated through the quietude of my childhood bedroom and brought terror to me. He poured it all out, scattered it on the frozen ground of dead gardens and empty stone of dead fountains, and he told me he would fill it again with only the things we made, him and me.

I didn’t tell him that it was already precious to me, that touch he imparted on me; because I was greedy, and I wanted more, and he was just as greedy, and he gave it all to me, and he gave me the things I never had enough wit to ask for.

2012

“Shit, alright, I don’t know what came over me,” Johnny laughs self-consciously. “What I meant to say was — let me enjoy this one quiet moment with you before my life becomes hell again. If I can pull this project off, the promotion to the head of the branch will literally fall into my lap.”

“You’ll do it,” Mark says, purely automatically, and Johnny holds in a laugh.

He wonders if Mark even realizes how much he means. Not just to Johnny or to Yuta or to Taeyong; just— how much he means. He’s a little angel created out of life and love and warmth, and he’s the only thing that makes sense sometimes, when Johnny loses himself in the darkness of his mind and his heart.

People come and go, lovers leave his bed and his soul, places change and transform — but Mark stays the same, and Johnny’s love for him only grows, and it becomes unbearable at times because it’s different. He loves the others just the same, and he’s even come to love Ten just as strongly in their short time together, because Ten carries the same brand of fucked-up Johnny is, and he loves them all, even if it feels like pulling his own teeth sometimes to admit it. But it’s not like that with Mark; with Mark, it’s the easiest thing in the world to turn to him and spill his guts, cover Mark with praise and gratitude, wait for his face to light up and his eyes to shine just so. It makes Johnny worry sometimes that he’s using Mark as a crutch, and the past two years, when shit was as chaotic as it’s never been, are enough of an evidence. Hell, the previous twenty years are enough of an evidence, and it should be worrying him much more than it does — but he couldn’t be bothered.

“See?” Johnny shakes his head. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about, and you still believe in me like crazy. You’re the best, Mark Lee.”

He removes the lid from his cup and throws it over his mouth to catch the last of his coffee along with a few remaining grains of ice, and when he looks back down, there He is — across from them, sitting on the railing over the river, naked toes hooked over the ornate iron flowers and long fingers spread through the air as if he’s trying to catch sunlight.

It has been a very long while since Johnny saw Muse last, and just like before, it brings him equal parts joy and fear, and he wants to call out, utter a simple sentence that would end his anxiety and worry, but his lips are sealed with the ice of his coffee. He wants, so desperately, to beg Muse to turn around and look at him, but that, even if he had the courage to, would be futile.

“Tell me about Richard,” Mark asks suddenly, and Johnny looks back at him and sees him already looking back. “How is it going?”

There is a peculiar look to his smile today, something akin to panic that Johnny doesn’t understand, and he looks into Mark’s eyes and searches for answers, but none come other than what Johnny already always knew — Mark has pretty eyes.

So he tells him about Richard, and he jokes around, and Mark giggles like a kid on Johnny’s passenger seat, and it’s warm and familiar. Muse takes a dive into the river and disappears, but Johnny knows he will find Him again when he comes home, lounging on the terrace of Mark’s apartment and playing with the flowers strewn about there, and there, he will belong.

~

“Tell me, why do we want what we want?”

I looked up at him from my place on the floor, where I’ve been kneeling and trying to string together a coherent tale out of shattered pages sullied with my pathetic attempts to capture his greatness in all its entirety and beauty. He wasn’t looking at me but rather gazing to the right, toward the window, where a great and lonely city spread around us two hidden in our abode of adoration. He was naked, exposed, his skin shining under the lights and dipping where the sheet covered his waist, and I could see the dark marks of my passion on his ribs, and I remembered the fire that compelled me to leave them there.

“Why does the end never fall in sight when we're hurtling towards that body of deep, endless truths day and night,” he continued, “without stopping, without sleeping, without any semblance of sanity clinging to the pores the speed drills open in our bones?”

“Because we want to catch the tail of a comet,” I responded, my knees aching from the strain, my eyes never leaving his face. “We want to feel like there is a purpose. Something beyond the horizon. A sense to all the madness. If we look back, we will see the truth, and there is nothing of greater horror.”

That brought a smile to his face, and just like always, my heart overflowed with golden-hued apple-scented affection; I never felt like I was strong enough to breathe before I knew I could make him smile. His eyes found mine, and it connected with a snap of a notch in a key slipping into its destined nick. Slowly, he slipped from under the sheet and stepped over my pages, careless in his journey but filled with purpose — and I knew I would have forgiven him for destroying it even if his feet, or anything that was his, could ever do any damage to what was mine — and he slid into my embrace, his lips sealing mine with a kiss that tasted of summer laughter and infinite stars over a bottomless ravine laid with dead leaves and pebblestone.

He saw me; even when his eyes were covered by his thin blue eyelids, he watched me and he saw me. And I never knew I wanted to be seen, never knew there would come I day I would wish to shed the disguise I took up as a child to hide from the eyes that never really looked for me, and I never knew it was even worth it to be seen until his eyes stopped on me.

Just like always, he uncovered a truth for me — and I reveled in it.

/

Breaking up with Richard doesn’t hit him as hard as he expected, and it’s probably because in the end, it all came down to just sex. Just that. A warm body to feel next to him at night, an illusion of intimacy that never quite pierced through, a placeholder for a thing Johnny wasn’t even sure how to look for. It’s been weighing on him, that eternal feeling that he isn’t doing enough — isn’t looking in the right places, isn’t saying the right words, isn’t exposing the right wounds.

The ache never lets up; the hollowness remains empty and dark, and he walks on, weaves his way through the bad days and bides his time until the good ones come. His work keeps his mind busy enough not to dwell on sad things, and he welcomes it, a rare thing for him. The business is usually just a thing he does, no emotional connotation of importance within it, because what’s really precious to him, what really keeps him going, what truly is the force behind him still keeping on doesn’t hide behind the glass walls of the Financial District skyscraper. It is there, on Bedford, behind the green doors with golden letters, on the couch eating Mark’s food or on the terrace laughing at his jokes or in the coffee house rolling their eyes at Taeyong’s antiques or in another obscure gallery in Soho gazing up at Ten’s paintings.

Which is why he keeps waking up at four and going to bed at midnight and running himself into the ground to make sure he’s succeeding and remaining the stable, solid force of man that they all look toward. Doyoung is the only other one in the group who has the same role, but he’s the quiet forcefield around them, a silent and unobtrusive strength of reassurance. Johnny is the loud one, the funny one, the keeps-his-smile-in-apocalypse one, and he has to stay like that; no weakness shown, no fault noticed.

He knows they know, of course, but it’s a game they all play, most of all Mark, who, perhaps, understands Johnny better than the two idiots he spent the majority of his life glued to. Which is why, when he wakes up on Mark’s couch groggy and tired and trudges over to his apartment to find breakfast ready for him with a signature pink note glaring in the dark, it breaks him. Nobody is awake to see or hear his tears, but Johnny still swallows them down and only lets them free when he’s in the shower and he can pretend that the salt he tastes is just shitty New York plumbing.

The glue of the note is still on his fingertips when he carries his response across the hall and sneaks into Mark’s bedroom to put it on his pillow. He lingers by him for more than he can justify, watching the steady rise and fall of Mark’s chest, his lips pouted in his sleep, and he leans over to press a kiss to his forehead. Mark stirs but doesn’t awake and brings his face up, as if to meet Johnny’s lips halfway — and it sends a jolt of shock through Johnny’s body.

He almost knocks off a lamp as he escapes the room, his heart hammering in his chest, and it takes until he’s back in his kitchen to stop and think. This was an automatic reaction of a sleepy person to affection; Mark has been doing this since he was a kid and Johnny would sit with him at night and promise him that the nightmares wouldn’t touch him, and Mark would fall asleep and Johnny would bend down to give him a kiss on the forehead, and Mark would stir and reach for more tactile expression of safety provided.

So why, exactly, is it this shocking now? Johnny rubs his chest and finds, to his horror, that the ache under it has grown stronger, and it feels now like a black hole that sucks the air out of his lungs.

His phone chimes with the first of what will be the hundreds of emails of the day, and it breaks him out of his stupor. He’s already two minutes late, so he trips over his feet getting the lunch from the fridge and throwing it into his backpack before sprinting out of the apartment and toward the subway.

As he rushes down into the underground, he brushes past a lonely figure in a billowy shirt dancing on the steps, and this time, he doesn’t even have time to stop and watch, so he apologizes silently to his Muse and rushes to work.

For a while, he restrains from kissing Mark’s forehead; but he doesn’t stop replying to the notes, can’t afford not to lay his pen down to respond to Mark’s care. Even when he’s too tired to stay upright at the end of the night, he still makes sure to eat everything Mark has prepared for him and leave a response to the unsent letter. It becomes a sort of a magical pocket universe in which they exist, never meeting but always in contact.

It makes his days brighter, even as they’re filled with endless meetings and projects and demos and sprints, because he has something to look forward to; and it’s good, and it makes him feel like he can fucking fly, and he reminds himself to get Mark the biggest goddamn bouquet he can find once this hell is over.

But, as they slowly come back into reality and each other’s physical presence, something is off. Johnny can’t put his finger on it, and for a while, he’s inclined to blame himself, just as he tends to do, which just reminds him that he shouldn’t. Mark, for all of Johnny’s nostalgic perception of him, is a wholeass adult, and if Johnny has done something wrong, he trusts Mark enough to come and tell him.

Eventually, though, when nothing changes, Johnny gets too anxious to stay away anymore. He had a theory at the start that Mark was, too, so caught up in their little game that it upset him when it ended abruptly; but it has been months since that, and surely, there is something on Mark’s mind that isn’t about Johnny (what a pity), so he decides to ask.

And that, on that one rainy evening when it’s just the three of them in the apartment, is when Mark lies to him for the first time in their lives.

Just stressed at work, he says. I feel like I’ve burned out here but I’m too afraid to look for something else, he says. I’ll figure it out so don’t worry about me, he says.

Johnny pretends to believe him in the instant shock to his system; follows a purely instinctual urge to smile and nod and tell Mark that he’s awesome and everything will work out like it’s supposed to, and then crash Mark in a hug, if only as an excuse to hide his face and hope his horror doesn’t reflect in his eyes. He doesn’t know how he knows that Mark is lying, but he knows, and it’s putrid and moist at the bottom of his stomach, and it brings up all the sickness that he pretends he doesn’t have, all the little insecurities that churn and gurgle. Mark lied to him; Mark doesn’t trust him with the truth, Mark doesn’t think he would understand the truth, Mark doesn’t want him to know. But he lets it go, he allows Mark his clueless freedom, because even in the throes of his deepest grievances, Johnny could never knowingly hurt Mark Lee. Not him, not his Mark.

It still, however, haunts him for a couple months after that, and it is certainly not made easier when one July evening, Johnny opens his door to go get a midnight snack and Mark is on the other side, his hands holding his frame, and his face— Johnny has never seen him quite this broken, this suffocating, this disheveled with worry. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, ask what’s wrong and who hurt him, who he should go out and kill, but a shadow flickers across Mark’s face that shuts Johnny up. So instead of spewing words that wouldn’t help now anyway, he reaches out and takes Mark into his arms, and like a little naked twig in the storm, Mark breaks there.

Johnny doesn’t ask anything as he leads Mark to his bed; he doesn’t care what happened, in the end. All he cares about is making sure that Mark is with him for the aftermath, that Mark has him, strong and solid and protective around him, and he feels that need in Mark as Mark presses close and grips his shoulders and breathes in sharply, like a drowning man. Johnny wishes he could open himself up and give Mark all the love he can’t express with words, do what Mark has been doing for him his whole life, heal him with everything that he has; but he isn’t powerful enough, and it is not, perhaps, his fight. Instead, he simply wipes Mark’s tears, his lips pressed firmly to Mark's forehead, and he vows that he won’t hold any grudges anymore. Because it doesn’t matter if Mark lied to him; because here, now, Mark came to him, to his embrace, and it helps him enough to fall asleep in Johnny’s bed.

Johnny passes out soon after, his knuckles numb from gripping Mark’s waist, and he dreams of the storm, and in that storm, there is a lighthouse, and he rows toward it in his broken boat, and on the shore, he finds his Muse, with his back turned as he digs a hole in the sand and fills it with apple seeds.

He wakes up alone; and the emptiness of his bed aches.

~

I saw him cry for the first time yesterday, and it broke me, reduced me to the ground-up powder of glass squelched under my heartache’s heel. It was a bad day for me, one of the gray pages that tore me up and bit into my flesh to unstitch all the grace of his touch on my pain, and it brought me to my knees in the bathroom, and that is how he found me.

He held me, his thin arms strong and eternal on my back, and he cried with me, and I hated myself even more for it, but he would not let me. He caught my tears with his lips and he consumed all my pain and he scorched his soul with it and he sealed it within himself and forbade me from ever seeing it again. He looked at me, and he kissed me, wet and cold, and he told me that he would never let it get me; in the dark infinite woods in which I ran with my feet bleeding from the thorns, he would hunt for every beast and slay them and lay their bloody corpses to my feet.

And I knew then that in my insanity of loving him, I was not alone; I already knew he loved me, but in our shared pain, I came to know just how much — just how strongly it gripped him, how fiercely he believed in my existence, how shamelessly he protected it, how bravely he was ready to fight for it. His eyes burned with the brands of madness that I could only ever see in my gaze when it fell upon him, and it was mesmerizing.

He loved me, perhaps, even before I loved him; he waited for me, perhaps, before I knew I was looking for him. I was not alone, never alone, even in the misty days of the past when I wasted hours looking at closed doors, he was with me, even then, and perhaps it was him whom I needed to walk through. He did, through the glistening dust of time, he did. He was with me now, and he was always with me, and he would never part from me again.

I saw him cry, and in those tears, I saw my pain, and I saw my love. It was him. From the start, it was him.

2013

“I love you, Johnny,” Mark blurbs.

“Love you too, Markles,” Johnny replies without missing a beat, because it’s only right, it’s only the truth, and it’s so easy to say those words to Mark that Johnny can’t not abuse every chance he gets.

Mark, his silly little drunk Mark, whines under his breath and mumbles something about snakes and spinsters, and it warms Johnny’s poor old heart like a honey balm. His soft sighs escape in bouts of beer-stained air, and even something as mundane as that, Johnny finds endearing. Mark’s body is soft and pliant next to him, and it feels for an insane moment like Johnny is going to melt and fit into the crooks of him that were always reserved for him, with his name and smile in mind.

Mark’s fingers dance over the sunflower tattoo, and it reminds Johnny of the flower inside his headspace that never dies, confined to the glass vase picked at the flea market. It is the same electric current that he has felt once before, or perhaps a million tiny times, and it surprises Johnny, tilts him off his axis, and he suddenly has to know, even if he’s not sure what it is. But Mark will know; Mark has all the answers, the wind whispers to Johnny, and he looks down on the man.

“Mark?” Johnny whispers.

Mark looks up sharply, but it gives him a little whiplash, so he steadies himself with a hand on Johnny’s chest. Their faces are close now, and Johnny sees exploding stars in Mark’s eyes, and for a lucidly painful moment, Johnny wants to lean in.

“Yeah?” Mark whispers back.

Johnny’s hand finds its way to Mark’s face, and he is taken apart now by the feeling that flows through him in a song of an old acoustic guitar. It’s a cliche comparison, Johnny knows, to feel like he’s falling through Mark’s eyes and into his soul, but perhaps that is why it’s so overused — because it’s the truth, and that is how it feels now. His body is weightless, held to the ground with just a feather touch of a fingertip to his tattoo, and Mark is close, and Mark is his.

Something crashes inside the apartment, and Mark snaps his head toward the window to see what happened, and Johnny’s hearing is muffled with the thunder of crushing disappointment.

He’s still trying to figure out what it’s about when Mark curses under his breath and shoots up to run inside, and he will forget about this in the morning; but Johnny won’t. He knows it now, sitting there numb on that old red couch, his eyes still fixated on the point in the air where Mark’s lips were just a second ago, and he can’t move. He is struck speechless and motionless and thoughtless, and all that remains is a high note that resonates in the laughter of Muse a few feet away from him. Just like forever, Johnny doesn’t see His face, and it infuriates him with scorching hot sand of an unknown beach.

“Look at me,” he whispers, begs.

Muse laughs louder but still doesn’t turn around, just shifts his face slightly backward to show Johnny the cluster of his moles, and Johnny shoots up to grab him and force him around, but his fingers close around empty air.

Later, when everybody is asleep in huddles of drunken messes on the couch and the armchairs, Johnny gets out the notebook.

~

“And there shall be no end,” he whispered, but I could not see his lips move, for he was with his back to me, arms spread in his infinite freedom over the cliff.

I used to come here as a child, dragged along by the people who were meant to be my harbor but used this lonely bay as its pathetic earthly substitute. The sea was raging and singing beneath our feet, but I could not walk closer and watch it, for I was glued to my place behind him. The old dry grass, so wilted and brown in the winter, suddenly sprouted from the dark ground and wove its nets around my bare ankles, poisoned me with the tragedies of old, and I wanted to scream, to call for him, to beg for salvation.

But my tongue was dry, and my throat was mute. I watched him throw his head up and pray to the skies erected in his name, and I wanted to scream—

“Look at me.”

He did not look; he did not hear.

Johnny leans away from the table in a jerk, the pen falling from his grasp and leaving an ugly splotch of ink on the unfinished page. His heart hammers with an unspoken tragedy, and it hurts him to realize he doesn’t know the words that should come next. It’s wrong to leave it like that, at such a tragic note for the protagonist, but the terror of what would come next is even worse.

He knows what he wants to happen, in his silly nostalgic love for happy endings. He wants to write that he turns around, reaches out for the protagonist, saves him; but would it be what should happen? This is the first time ever that Johnny could not finish a scene in one stride, and it makes his tongue taste stale.

What happens next?

2014

The butterfly finishes its flight; Mark’s ski breaks, and in the blinding reflection of the snow, Johnny is taken down by an avalanche.

He doesn’t expect Muse to come when Mark falls asleep again in the hospital room, doesn’t even think about it, but later, when they’re back in New York and Johnny can lock himself in his room and think about it, he finds it strange that it didn’t happen. He used to suspect a correlation, a connection between the boy wrapped in cast and the boy wrapped in sunlight, and only now does he realize how right—and how wrong—he was.

Mark slowly recovers; Mark is loved by people who aren’t Johnny.

Johnny watches him from afar, and he asks silently—Mark, Muse, himself, the world—how he could be quite so blind. How he could not realize that the ache in him started when he saw Mark off to New York, that the hollowness in him was Mark’s perfect shape and size, that the incantations on his ribs were all the versions of his name and his words and his laughter, that it was him. Always, it was him.

As the conversation in the living room grows louder, Jongin and his friends blending into Mark and his friends, Johnny slips away onto the terrace. Slowly, meticulously, he lights up a cigarette, and the smoke burns. He feels phantom Chicago heat on the back of his neck and he pokes at his old sunflower tattoo, the petals immaculate and undisturbed.

Johnny looks up with a gust of nicotine wind and sees him, in his favorite place, leaning on the railing and bending to see the City below them. The cuffs of his pants are rolled up, and his favorite white shirt is torn up but still stark in the barely-illuminated dark, and his slightly curled dark hair flows in the wind, and Johnny aches.

Once again and for the last time, Johnny asks.

“Look at me.”

For the first time in his life, Muse does. He straightens up gently, in one fluid motion, and puts his hand on the railing for support — and Johnny sees the calluses on his knuckles and fingertips from his guitar and hours spent in the kitchen. In the weak lighting of the street lamp near the terrace, Johnny counts his moles — one on the cheek, another just below his jaw, and the third on his neck; a constellation he looked for in all the skies he has ever seen. His hair covers his eyes as he turns, but even before he brushes it away, Johnny knows that they are the dark doe eyes that shone at him from his passenger seat for longer than he could remember.

“I have been,” Muse whispers, and he smiles, and his smile is that cheeky tilted little twist of his plump pink lips.

He talks still smiling, and Johnny sits there revered. In a graceful spring of a step, Muse comes closer and kneels before Johnny, a secret hidden in his eyes—eyes that Johnny knows, has known and loved his whole life—and leans up to press a lingering kiss to his cheek.

Johnny lets his eyes flow closed; because when he opens them, Muse won’t be there anymore, and perhaps, he will never appear again. Not until Mark looks at him, looks at him like Johnny needs him to with his entire being — but that, in its mocking iridescence of cruelty, will never happen.

So Johnny remains there, alone, with his cigarette dying in the ashtray; his chest full and his eyes shut.