---

A red, blinking dot appears on the screen. It grows stronger.

Dongwoo peers into the square-shaped glass panel on the vehicle's dashboard. The flashing red indicates that they're close to home - and to prepare for landing. He's done this hundreds of times before. He does it every day - and yet he is nervous. One wrong move and he'd send them tumbling down the wormhole - a trough leading to a million other galaxies - before randomly falling through one of those exits and finding themselves in a wholly foreign space and dimension. And when that happens, there's no way of going home.

The mere thought of it scares Dongwoo: extended periods of being physically detached from home. It makes his stomach churn. The thought of never going home is absolutely petrifying.

Dongwoo doesn't make mistakes. He's careful - always.

He presses the 'EXIT' button at exactly the right coordinates: 312.998, 42.00. A red desert shutters into his windscreen, almost like an internet image loading with very slow connection. Vegetation is a miserly existence on this wasteland without a horizon; stretches of crimson extends all the way to the faint line where the orange sky joins the earth - a gaussian blur because of the dense desert fog. Anything, or anyone deemed worthy enough does not live here.

-

His synthetic pyro-skin suit is red with white streaks - a perfect camouflage against the barren background. Dongwoo hops off the hovering vehicle - made possible by repelling magnets on the machine's underside and the highly charged underground magnetic fields - and pulls today's loot out from the back trunk.

Poison Cabbages, as the locals call them, are not for eating but for food exchange at the store counter. These parasitic creepers engulf anything and everything protuding from the vast plains of sand: people's houses, hovercrafts, and crops. A kilogram gives one loaf in return: one of those breads which are, in the words of those scientists, specially engineered and tailored to the diets of those in The Desert.

Dongwoo brings in 3.2 kilograms today. Sunwoo, the shopkeeper's son, places three loaves and a few odd potatoes on the wooden counter.

"Don't tell my father," the infinitely-cheery boy winks, "My treat today." Sunwoo, throwing a furtive glance over his shoulder, meets Dongwoo's gaze again with bright eyes peering from under a too-long curtain of hair.

"You know I really shouldn't, Sunwoo-yah."

Sunwoo swats his customer's embarassment off as though chasing off a fly. Dongwoo's always had a soft spot for the boy with the easy laugh and clear eyes, so clear they're almost naive-looking. Ever since he'd met the latter as a kid, Dongwoo has decided that he was too good for this world.

"Hyung," Sunwoo's voice has suddenly dropped a few notches lower - veiled with a certain intimacy, Dongwoo notes. "It's February the first today." His eyes are weary, carefully watching for changes in the man's facial expression.

Oh, already? Dongwoo starts with sudden realisation. I didn't realise.

Where has all the time gone?

"Yeah..." Dongwoo's lips purse into a tight, wobbly smile, his mind starting to wander.

He casts an appreciative look at him, his eyes saying the 'thank you's he could not bring his lips to form. He nods slightly and stretches his lips wider for a bigger, (hopefully more convincing) smile, then collects the food from the counter and walks in the direction of home.

It's been a year. 

-

The skies turn asphalt gray on his way home. Mere moments after stepping through the front doot, big fat droplets of water began bearing down on the tempered glass windows.

Dongwoo pads into the empty kitchen and unwraps a loaf from its plastic layer that was meant to keep out sand.  He carefully halves the stale block and puts them in two plates. He carries the ceramic wares to the bedroom, setting the plate with blue rims - his - on the thin mattress lying inconspicuously in one corner, and then placing the other plate with the red rims on the bedside table, next to a wood-framed bed.

Next to Jinyoung.

He realises he'd forgot to clear the stale bread - obviously untouched - from the day before.

(He mentally smacks himself for forgetting.)

As he ran the empty plate under the tap (after disposing of its contents), an article about memories he'd read just this morning resurfaced subconciously, as if the thought were a tiger that had been hiding all this while, waiting on the opportunity to show itself.

The article said that when one recalls something, they are in fact recalling the last time they'd thought about that moment, which explains why memories 'fade' overtime - they simply become less 'sharp' each time they are summoned in the mind.

It's as if our brains are wired to forget the bad and to treasure the good. Maybe that's why they say the heart grows fonder with time.

Dongwoo pads into their shared bedroom after placing the plate on the drying rack, while wiping his hands on the back of his sweatpants.

Maybe it's the weather, the goddamned rain making him feel things. But then again, he's Dongwoo - which means he always feels things. He knows when things go right, and senses it when they do not. (So then why hadn't he sensed it when something bad was going to fall upon their completely normal civilian lives?) 

Or maybe it's the sight of him lying there perfectly still, the body a mere shell of the man who sleeps - is trapped - in it.

The rain only falls harder, threatening to beat the earth into submission.

-

It was too late when he'd finally found him. He knew he was too late when he saw the colour of his lips, or the horrifying lack thereof. White as the rest of his face is. It was too late; his body has reduced to nothing but a body - a cruel memento of what the man used to be.  The arrow had gone far in - into his veins, where the poison had penetrated the broken cellular walls and is undoubtedly pulsing through his body. Faraway, a persistent, low-pitched scream that sounds closer to a deep, throaty moan rings in his ears. 

Did the sky rain any less? It did not. The needles of water might as well have been hailstones, because every drop that bore down upon him was a stab intent on drawing blood. They didn't hurt. Instead, he'd suddenly become aware of the excruciating pain knotting in his chest, against which the body's head laid. It was turning him inside out, just as the scream became increasingly sonorous, like it was screamed right into his ear. 

He realised he's the one screaming. 

-

Feeling as if he would crumble anytime, he slid into bed with him - for the first time in a year. His toes come in contact warm calves - and he is slightly relieved. The temperature is the only indication of life. He'd used to tower over Jinyoung, being almost twice his build. Now, after a whole year of not moving nor eating (apart from the times Dongwoo props him up in bed to towel him down), the figure splayed on the mattress is tinier than ever, as if threatening to dissolve into thin air.

Dongwoo pulls covers up over both of them, wraps an arm around the latter's body waist, and buries his nose in the pale nape of his neck.

That night, both plates of bread sit on the bedside table, untouched.

--

An hour before dawn breaks, Dongwoo is out combing the woods – his daily routine. He navigates a new part of the forest today, after just having completed the map a month earlier. But so far all he’s found are young shoots, which weigh little and worth very little because their chemical buildup makes them less-than-ideal fuel.

Just as Dongwoo lifts his gaze momentarily to the sky while wiping off a roll of perspiration, he sees a faint dot of light shoot across the expanse of the humid summer sky. If it were not for the contrast of the dark sky, the dot would’ve gone unnoticed because it was so faint. He waits for the imminent crash, eyes now trained in the exact same spot of the sky waiting for a second flash of brightness – an explosion.

But there was nothing. 

Oh well, maybe it was a fallen satellite. At least two or three of them drop through the atmosphere each day. It was simply getting too crowded in outer space.

But Dongwoo decides to head to where the object had come in contact with the earth. The ground didn’t even quiver, not even a deep rumbling in the soil Dongwoo would usually have picked up on. The best guess is that whatever’s fallen had stumbled right into the abandoned mining site filled with rainwater – a stagnant water body in the very heart of the forest.

When he got to the abandoned mine and saw nothing – no meteorite, no debris, no smoke – he knew something was wrong, there and then. The scavenger walks to the edge of the quarry and his stomach immediately knots into itself.

No room for hesitation – that’s what. Dongwoo plunges into the water heading straight towards where he’d seen a sinking hovercraft – and its driver, moments ago. The water is murky, but just clear enough for him to make out the silhouette of the drowning figure. He reaches the figure and grabs the arm. He yanks it, but something's stuck.Panic rises in his throat and  escapes into the grayish water as air bubbles.

The seatbelt.

The murkiness of the water enveloping the two of them, compounded with the lack of sunlight is making it desperately difficult to untangle the new-age contraption of a seatbelt. While Dongwoo struggles with the metal clasps, his lungs struggle to hold one-breath's worth of air in - the hovercraft is sinking and they are sinking with it. The driver's body hovers lifelessly in the water, his eyelids closed, oblivious to the stir around him. Dongwoo's feels as if his lungs were on fire. He releases his grip on the clasps.

He swims, as fast as he can, towards the surface. In one purely selfish, cruel split-second, he thinks of running away. But he knows he can't.

He knows he won't.

He feels absolutely responsible for the stranger suspended in the water beneath him, an inexplicable need to ensure he gets to see the light of day - an invisible force chaining him to the boy chained to his damned seatbelt.

Dongwoo breaks the water surface. He takes a large gulp of air mixed with water. He dives back beneath it.

The hovercraft has sank further towards the bottom than when Dongwoo left it. Perhaps it was newfound commitment and will, but he actually succeeds with the seatbelt clasps. Swimming with the boy in tow, Dongwoo only hopes it isn't too late.

-

Now watching the still chest and blue lips on the boy he'd just about dragged out of the water, Dongwoo feels a familiar pang of bile threatening to rise up his throat. Desolation - if anyone should know what it feels like, it was Dongwoo.

"He's not breathing," the second paramedic mutters while the other, older man pumps diligently at the scrawny chest. 

"Well, keep trying," Dongwoo's voice comes out deadpan, but tears are threatening to fall. 

"He's got to live - whatever it takes."

He starts pumping on the boy's chest. The paramedic's words echo in the troughs of his mind.

"S-Sir, I think he's ..." The nervous paramedic is speaking again, and Dongwoo cuts him off in a voice as sharp and cold as steel. 

"If it's anything other than "He's breathing", I don't want to hear it."

Water starts to leak from the boy's mouth. Ten seconds later, he coughs.

"Dongwoo," Minah - long-time friend and head doctor at the county's only hospital - says which placing a hand on his shoulder. "He's breathing - there's a pulse. He's alive."

Dongwoo lifts his grateful eyes only to meet with the doctor's apologetic, but resolute stare.

  "... but there is a chance," she pauses to swallow the bit of saliva, "he might never open his eyes again." 

"I'm so sorry, Dongwoo, but there's nothing much I can do." 

Slowly, a pair of very dark, very unfamiliar charcoal eyes opened to meet Dongwoo's gaze for the first time.

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