Taekwoon has never liked to admit that he was wrong.

“Didn’t you two only date for a week?” Hakyeon asks in a muffled voice, his bright red scarf covering up half of his face. It’s been nothing but thick blankets of snow piling up for the last month and tiny chills still shoot down Taekwoon’s spine whenever he goes outside for a breather.

“Five days,” he clarifies, the bitterness of the short-term relationship still stinging him. He takes a brief inhale of the cigarette in between his slender fingers, gray mixing with white as he exhales. “Monday through Friday.”

Hakyeon’s brow raises, but he doesn’t bring up the fact that Taekwoon is still very hung up on the boy who vanished then reappeared four years later. Four years and Taekwoon still remembers every little detail of those five days. It’s pathetic. “You’re sure that was him at the bar last night?”

“He was with Hongbin and everything,” Taekwoon grumbles, annoyed that Hakyeon won’t stop questioning him about it. The image of Sanghyuk leaning against Hongbin, inebriated and giggly with cheeks flaring red is burned against the very front of Taekwoon’s mind and he can’t shake a certain uneasiness from that. It’s been four years, but Sanghyuk still looks the same from Taekwoon’s memories, however far the distance between them was now.

His co-worker scrunches up his face. “Doesn’t meant squat,” he huffs, brushing snow off his boots before cracking open the rusty old door to the lab. “Lock up when you come back in.”

Taekwoon waves him off, still staring off into the vast nothingness of snow covering their sleepy little town. The red of his cigarette doesn’t match the color of Hakyeon’s scarf, but the color still stands out more than anything else in this emptiness and Taekwoon closes his eyes.

He can see Sanghyuk towering over him, unnecessarily tall and lanky, grinning in a way that makes his face look bigger, eyes crinkled and teeth glinting in the sunlight. He had come to scold Taekwoon about smoking indoors that day -- Wednesday -- and Taekwoon had pinched his nose and called him irritating. It was so warm that afternoon, shades of green and yellow and blue painting over the blank canvas currently in front of Taekwoon. No amount of snow could melt such warmth away from his memory.

When his eyes re-open, there is nothing but cold gray around him, a hazy effect of getting caught up in something that is far gone. All of that has already been lost.