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collision course

and red bleeds into blue

It’s a place without definition. A desert, one could label hot and barren. A mountain, another could label as high and rocky. The natural want in human beings to label and to name is satiated in any other place, any other imaginable setting but here. For here is the one place that cannot simply be defined, as so - it only exists, and defies definition.

Many attempts have been made however, with some more successful than others. But in the end - as it was, and will always be evermore - all come to the conclusion that the place simply is, existing, living, breathing without definition. And they are correct; because how does one define a place without day or night, without moons or stars or sun or rain, without anything definite, anything set? Nothing changes, everything merely flows, flows with a silent music both calm and aggravating at the same time, slipping on without end in perfect intercalation. The word utopia lingers heavily on the tip of their tongues - yet again, it is more and less than that.

There is one defined line, on this map of undefined haze - they call it The Border, nothing more - because really, that is as close as a definition as it needs. It’s nothing more, really, than a drop into the intangible ink of the constant horizon where Fate’s bottle tipped into the blank skies. Yet there is no distinction of time as silent feet - feet that walk with an elegant, unintended glide - creep to The Border, unnoticed for the hour-long walk through spiny-silhouetted forest, shadowed beaches and the undulations of creased mountains, silent heaps in the horizonless navy.

He goes to the border every night. It’s more like an edge rather than a border, a steep drop into infinity, into freezing subzero that only doesn’t affect them on their chunk of rock only because Chanyeol sets fire to a few trees every day to regulate the warmth. There’s no real reason why he likes to sit with his legs over the edge, toes mind-numbingly cold but the rest of him warm enough, but he knows that he could easily stay a whole day there if it weren’t for the other four chasing after him if they found out.

It’s an unspoken rule that passes and binds all of them, a shimmering thread of promises that’s so fragile but somehow more than that. Never go to the border, Suho had said. It’s dangerous.

That’s all there was to it. And never had they gone, because Baekhyun doesn’t go. It’s not something he does out of his own volition. He takes himself there, and wants to believe that it’s not the same as going. Going is frivolous, being taken is unstoppable, irrevocable. No, he does not go. He simply - takes himself.

So there is no remorse as his breath edges closer and closer into physical tangibility, whiter and whiter and whiter in infinite blue-black and darkened brown. There is no remorse as he tilts his head back and tries to draw patterns of light with his finger using the navy as a compliant backdrop. There only is remorse when he sees the firelight seep through and around the thick brush and he has to leave the place, trying not to step on fallen rock and thorny overgrowth, when he leaves the new world he’s taken into, taking himself back into the one he knows.

He knows he shouldn’t feel any connection to that edge, treat it like it’s a person, a living, breathing being of their kind; but he can’t hold back when he laughs in the silent chatter that envelops him there.

Chanyeol laughs as he nears camp, stepping through the leaves as if it was right there where he had spent the last hours. It’s getting cold, take my jacket?  

He can’t disagree, so stretches out as he feels the warm fabric slip over his guilt-ridden shoulders. Thanks, he murmurs, smiling at the carefree wink Chanyeol shoots him before going back to reignite the blaze.

Why so quiet? Suho asks, sitting down next to him hours later when he still hasn’t moved from the fire. He shakes his head, brushing hair out of his eyes as it tickles his skin. Nothing, hyung.

☀

It’s three days later that cracks of unsettlement start to surface, tilting rationale on its helpless side. He senses the abnormality, the strange discord where there is none. It starts when he runs back into the camp, hoping desperately that they didn’t hear the crunch of his heavy footsteps through the undergrowth that seemed to have grown in the dark at the pace of an infection.

He finds them talking quietly amongst themselves, turning and stopping when he nears them and asks. They’re coming soon, Jongin snaps irritably.

Who?

Kyungsoo sighs, nudging Jongin’s side. Sleep it off, Baekhyun sees his mouth move, we’ll take care of the rest, okay?

They watch until Jongin’s lean frame disappears from sight and Chanyeol turns back to Baekhyun, mouthing for him to sit. So he has no choice but to comply, edging slightly closer to Chanyeol, letting the latter’s fingers tap on his and intertwine behind the others’ backs.

Don’t worry, Chanyeol’s long fingers seem to say. About what? he replies, looking expectantly as the firelight illuminates Suho and Kyungsoo’s features, black and orange and yellow highlighting and shadowing their features like porcelain; malleable and fragile.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Suho murmurs, voice audible even through the crackling that Chanyeol tames with a flick of a free hand. Kyungsoo looked at the charts, and – the other rock, with them, is on a set course for ours. A collision course.  

It dawns on Baekhyun now, the foreign cold ading every nerve and artery, clouding his consciousness with sickly white. The sensation of speech sends shudders through his spine, and he squeezes Chanyeol’s hand with every ounce of physical force he has within him. Warmth travels up his nerves, seeping through his pores with welcomed, needed comfort - warmth that he’s tried, and tried, and tried to search for in that other person but didn’t, hasn’t, and won’t find.

So he looks at his feet, at the dancing, tripping shadows of falling leaves growing larger and hazier as they near the ground, trying to push apprehension back into his insides where it should be but isn’t now.  

Is… is he coming? his chapped lips give way, voice raspy, lacking its usual smooth timbre. Is he coming? Chanyeol’s foot edges to close the few centimetres remaining between them. He looks down at the ground, scoffing mutely at the other for having asked such a vulnerable question, a one-way ticket to cutting open the hasty stitches on old scars again. Chanyeol is only all too aware, and that makes him defensive, on guard.

All six of them. Suho sighs, embers on the boundaries of the kindling reflecting as amber specks in Baekhyun’s shimmering, heat-woven perception.

Seven, Kyungsoo corrects hesitantly after an uneasy, strained silence, they have Sehun.

With that Suho’s trembling façade seems to ripple silently into the ground and Baekhyun no longer sees the leader he knows, the man who can flood them and extinguish even Chanyeol, the kind but disciplined senior in whom he knew thought as a safe for all his troubles. He sees Joonmyun instead – betrayed, bitter Joonmyun, the man who still hurts from separation, who stings in silence but is too goddamn protective to tell anyone, even if it meant the ache splitting into a bearable five parts. I should go now, Joonmyun mutters, running a hand through his hair. I’ll see you in a few hours, if they haven’t come by then. Kyungsoo begins a hasty apology, but Chanyeol motions for him to stop, the fire now a violent amber against the midnight blue of the sky.

What did you have to mention Sehun for? he hisses. You know how broken hyung was after they took him.

I –

Just shut up, okay, Baekhyun finds himself saying, limbs heavy and voice now unusually loud, unusually cold. It’s happening, we can’t stop that. They’re coming, we can’t stop that. So I suggest we just get on with it. The words silence all of them – including Baekhyun himself. He digs his shoe into the damp, hard-packed mud, kicking a stray leaf into the fire and watching it burn, avoiding Kyungsoo or Chanyeol’s expectant eyes. It’s unspoken fact that he’s the one hurting most inside, maybe even as much as Joonmyun - not more; more would be transcending into the realms of actual physical and mental instability. And it’s unspoken, because nobody wants to admit it. Countless times he’s physically whispered to himself that nothing mattered and it shouldn’t matter now - countless times the constriction in his throat grew too tight to hold; countless times he sits at The Border waiting.

I’m done here, Kyungsoo says, kicking up an indent in the earth as he stands. You’re second-oldest. Do what you want. He leaves, and all that remains of him is a small, barely-noticeable crack on the ground where he was, a quiet reminder of the discord that looms.

☀

Hyung, wake up! It’s Sehun. Wake up!

Excited hands clamp down on his shoulders, nails bitten down to a stub so they don’t dig into his skin. He opens his eyes, lets the darkness acclimatize itself to each and every one of his senses, stretching fatigue out of his limbs as the cold slowly starts to intensify.

He takes in the messy brown hair, almond-shaped (and coloured, though slightly darker) eyes with the small mouth that’s laughing now at how stupid he looks when shaken awake. There’s no second thought when that crazed, untamed gust of wind unleashes itself upon him into an unbreakable hug, and he doesn’t mind.

It tells him that not everything’s changed, that some things were as they thrived before.

How’re you doing? Are Luhan and all your other hyungs treating you well? The words are hard to say. Harder to say than it was meant to. He knows Sehun didn’t have to leave, that perhaps he would’ve been happy with them as well. He tries to push back the memory of the younger boy’s hand in Luhan’s the last time They came, before he turned away just not to see him go.

I’m great, I’m really great! You? I’ve seen everyone already, you were the last to wake up! Come on, everyone’s outside -

He stumbles to his feet, dragged insistently through the woods to the clearing where they were last night, embers still warm as Yifan toys lazily with fragments of them, bouncing them on the ground and watching them split apart and fizzle out. He knows he should be resentful, he knows he shouldn’t be smiling, but there’s something inside him that tells him to smile for those moments that he couldn’t have smiled for when they weren’t here.

It’s the twelve of them again.

He tries to meet their eyes, tell them that he isn’t angry like the other four are, but he’s met with unsmiling mouths and hard eyes. He stops on Luhan – perhaps they can communicate like they used to, without talking – but he hears nothing in his mind but the lonely ping of silence pushing off its walls.

And it’s almost invisible – he misses the figure on his first scan of the seven – in the bruised navy-black, just because what he’s looking for is put simply, part of it. But as soon as he sees him it’s like the exterior of bright light he built switches off. Beads of anxiety emerge and pearl on his palms as he clenches them into fists. His breath hitches in his throat, lung-skin pulled so taut it ing hurts. The walls of his nerves thin; he feels the blood pounding and rushing and dipping through him like crashing waves on a lonely seashore.

He looks up. Up into his personal expanse of blank canvas, but all he sees is his face in it, motifs here and there and distorted.

Hello.

A tap on his shoulder and his shoulders drop. He tells himself not to look up, not now, he won’t – can’t – let himself. Not this time. His eyes squeeze shut and he tries to sing to himself, hum under his breath and tell himself that he’s in control this time around. But there is nothing, he is weak.

So he looks up, and straight into black-navy irises so cold they carry no hint of brown, into midnight blue hair and an angular face he’d caressed many a forbidden hour.

Do you – go?

Do I what?

Go, Tao mimes, and Baekhyun has to smile at how his speaking still hasn’t improved. So he nods once, letting self-control slip out of his hands. He lets it go, because there’s no point in keeping it; Tao would cause it to go tangled and haywire, anyway.

He takes Tao to the beach, where the sand is soft and spongy, where they sink in ankle-deep with every step. At first Tao’s surprised by the texture, falling into one of the deeper holes, and Baekhyun instinctively reaches out a hand to grab the former’s skinny wrist and steady him. The touch is unexpected, but molds itself to the rusty familiarity he once knew.

They once knew.

But no thoughts of these are spoken, and he wills himself to forget.

They lie propped up on the darkened sand where it slopes upwards into the denser areas of wood and shrub, trousers rolled up to let their soaked ankles dry from the silvery droplets that pool around them. It’s in moments like these where nothing seems to have changed at all; it was like this, they were like this that one last time.

Can you turn back time? Baekhyun finds himself asking, tracing languid patterns in the navy canvas with his finger. There doesn’t seem to be an answer for some time, seconds silently tick-tick-ticking away in the expanse of nothing. So he turns, leaning slightly over Tao’s dark, hazy figure and asks again. Can you? For me?

Tao exhales – a sound somewhat regretful, whimsical, invisible, inaudible and incomprehensible to ears but Baekhyun’s willing ones. It’s in all that, in that little breath that Baekhyun sees what they were, and senses Tao start to glow slightly from the memories.

They go as soon as they came, and his aura is dark again.

☀

Everything is red.

The skies are a wine-burgundy, water the colour of metallic blood. It’s nothing short of disconcerting, with almost toxic red filters painting passion over what should be somewhat despondent calm.

He sees them, by the rust-crimson sand - laughing, joking, fingers unconsciously too close for normality. He sees himself, head resting on the curve of Tao’s neck as he writes something in the air with his other index - he sees Tao’s slight glances to the side, glances he never took heed of before, glances that add guilt to guilt, distance and agony to existing separation.

We were... idiots, a voice breathes from above his shoulder. We were such idiots.

And the red bleeds into blue once more.

☀

I’m sorry, he hears the darker-haired man whispering now, staring at his feet. For last time. For leaving. Sehun left you all, I could’ve – he hunches his knees into his chest, thin frame spiny in the darkness. It reminds Baekhyun of what lay – lies – beneath the darkness, that there’s a flutter of actual compassion and understanding they both wanted to find.

So he prises Tao’s hand from his elbow and their fingers meet, sandy, yet they still curl into each other. It’s the imprint on his hand that was waiting to be filled again, that he thought never would be. All previous vengeance dissipates, all fear crumbled into fractions of one grain - for what difference does one grain make in a shore of others.

So he says nothing and meets Tao’s anxious, flitting eyes, the silvery seawater reflecting in them like the navy above. They’re softer than they were before. And he’s used to them now, understands them more than he did the previous time. Maybe they weren’t what they were before, but he’s okay with that because it’ll hurt a little less when Tao has to go.

He knows those words will never be said, and he’s okay with that too. Because he’s far from perfect, Tao’s a little less far away – and two imperfects don’t make a perfect. There’s silence where the other ten of them are, an irrepressible reminder of the imperfections and distance between what used to be unity. Sometimes there are new worlds to be found in existing ones, bonds in solitude - and sometimes, just sometimes, old wounds don’t hurt.   

It’s okay, he whispers back, edging slightly closer, I messed up too.