Six members of Infinite stand around the kitchen counter, eating their breakfast in silence. As they eat, Hoya’s phone goes off in his pocket. The room’s so quiet that everyone can hear its vibration against his jeans. Hoya makes no move to check it.

            “Who is it,” Sunggyu says flatly.

            Hoya pulls his phone out of his pocket and glances at it.

            “Dongwoo.”

            “What does it say.” A little agitation creeps into Sunggyu’s voice.

            Hoya’s thumb taps the phone screen.

            “He wants me to visit him today.”

            Sunggyu brings his bowl to the sink.

            “Go.” He comes over and takes the empty bowl in front of Hoya. “Now.”

            As he turns the street corner, Hoya considers finding somewhere to stand for a couple hours, and then coming back and telling Sunggyu that he went.

            He shakes his head. That obviously wouldn’t work. What would Sunggyu do if he found out, though? What, get angry?

Earlier that morning, the managers had approached Hoya, asking him if he needed some time away from Infinite. They had already looked defeated even before they asked, thinking that there was no way in hell Hoya would agree to a break, they had looked ready to plead, but Hoya had quickly answered that he would consider it.  Infinite was like a rickety building at this point, ready to collapse at any moment, and he was somewhat anxious to get out before it did.

Without Infinite, very little could be held over Hoya’s head. He really wasn’t obligated to do much of anything.

            He kicks a pebble off the side walk and digs his hands into his pockets, sniffing loudly. It’s surprisingly cold outside. It really shouldn’t be, considering that it’s the middle of the winter, but he just never noticed it before.

            Hoya then notices that his feet have already begun to trace the route to the hospital and he shrugs. Well, he might as well go, he doesn’t know why he wouldn’t. If he owes anything to anyone, he guesses that it’s Dongwoo, he just doesn’t know why he has to make this whole thing so messy.

            When Hoya walks in, Dongwoo is lying in bed, eyes closed and hands folded over his stomach. There’s a shadow of a smile that dances on his lips, and Hoya thinks that he must be asleep, dreaming of somewhere happier than here. Dongwoo, though, is only resting, and he opens his eyes and turns when Hoya sits down on his stool.

            “Hello,” he says, breaking out in a smile.

            Hoya looks down at his hands resting on the stool between his legs. “Yeah, hi.”

            They sit in silence, familiar and comfortable.

            “What happened yesterday?” Dongwoo asks, almost casually.

            Hoya shrugs. “Messed up, I guess.”

            Dongwoo chuckles. “You don’t mess up.”

            Another silence.

            “Are you,” he forces himself to say the word, “dying?”

            “It’s… very likely,” Dongwoo replies.

            “How long do you have left?”

            “The cancer’s metastasized. The doctors say a week, maybe a month or more if the chemo goes well.”

            A week. 7 days. The idea makes Hoya feel sick and he stares at his hands, trying to ignore the churning in his stomach.

            “How can you stand it?” he whispers.

            Dongwoo turns his head and looks out the window on the other side of the room.

            “I think, I guess I just keep thinking that I’ll get better.”

            “But—you’re not.”

            “I know—I know.” Dongwoo look at his hands on his stomach, now bony instead of slender. “I know that I’m dying but… I just can’t even imagine it. I can’t see myself as dead.”

            Hoya thinks, ‘You can’t see it, but I can.’

            “You’re going to spend your last seven days hoping to get better, so what happens on the seventh day, when you don’t?”

            Dongwoo shrugs, his eyes fixed on his tense hands. “I don’t know.”

            Hoya shakes his head. He gets up and starts to pace agitatedly from one end of the small room to the other.

            “I don’t see the point of all this hoping and fighting when it doesn’t seem to matter at all anyway,” he says. Words, never before his choice medium of expression, sputter from his mouth. “You’ll be gone, then Infinite will fall apart, and the last eight years won’t have mattered. It’ll be like they never happened.” Hoya closes his eyes and digs his fingertips into his forehead, pausing his pacing for a moment. “It would be easier if everything was already gone with a clean cut. Then I could forget. But instead I get to watch both you and Infinite die, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m reminded every day of what I’m about to lose.”

            “Why did you care at all in the first place?” Dongwoo asks.

“I guess I was just an idiot who didn’t know any better.”

“So the fire that drove you here was only stupidity?”

            Hoya remembers hot nights in Yangsan, spent laughing and sweating and dancing on the street with his friends. He remembers wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, even though it would be just as drenched within seconds. That unbearable heat, though, was intrinsically tied to his pleasure, and after wandering the dark streets for many nights, he took the heat as a sort of rival. He would watch the other guys sitting on the curb, pouring water bottles over their heads and fanning themselves with flyers they ripped from lamp posts. Hoya, though, would be the last one standing, the last one dancing in the street, and he would bask in the heat, letting it seep in through his shirt and skin. He would hold it contained and controlled within him, never to escape.

            He remembers sneaking in through the back door of his house, never earlier than 2 in the morning, taking the utmost care in shutting the noisy screen door and slowly padding up the stairs to his room. No one ever heard, Hoya’s execution was perfect.

            One night, though, when he opens the back door, there’s a tall dark figure standing in the door way.

            “Where have you been?” his father asks.

            “Out.”

            Hoya tries to brush by him, but his father doesn’t move. Instead, he shoves a sheet of paper under Hoya’s nose. Hoya doesn’t even need to look to know what it is.  His school report, previously hidden at the back of his desk drawer. He also doesn’t need to look at it to know that he’s failing more than one class.

            “I told you to stop wasting your time, but you’re still dancing in the streets like an idiot! There are more important things than your dumb friends and this crazy obsession!”

            “I’m quitting school. I’m going to Seoul and I’m going to dance.” The words fall out before he can think to stop them. He suddenly feels warmer, the heat that seeped into his skin every night boiling his blood.

            A loud smack rings out into the night. Hoya feels his cheek sting.

            “You will not.”

            The stinging subsides and Hoya feels his cheek begin to burn. He touches his fingers to the side of his face and is amazed at how hot it is, hotter than any part of him before. It’s a small sun, burning the outside of his cheek, and some of it spreads to the rest of his head: To his brain, and then to his mouth.

            “Yes, I will. Actually, yes I am. I owe nothing to this dump anyway. I don’t need anything here, and I don’t need you.”

            Hoya shuts the door. He turns and walks down the street. He hears the door open behind him, and his walk turns into a jog, then a run, and finally a full on sprint. He smiles wildly as he sprints, exuberant, celebrating each stride that takes him closer to a bus to Seoul and further away from this place, this place where he had no power, where he had only been known as a failure. Even as he begins to gasp for breath, he doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow. His smile merges with his gasps, and his eyes burn with fire, like headlights showing the way ahead.

            He had been really stupid.

            Hoya wouldn’t have run half so fast if he had realized that Seoul would just be another Busan. All that defiance and effort for nothing. It would have been better if he had just stayed home. After Infinite collapsed, he would have to return, head bowed, finally and soundly defeated, and he knew who would be waiting for him when he opened that back door again.

            Hoya sits down heavily, lowering his face to his hands.

            “Yeah, it was, and now it’s gone, extinguished,” he groans. “I’m so tired now, I’m so cold.”

            Dongwoo pulls Hoya’s hands away from his face and lays his own hand on Hoya’s cheek. Hoya doesn’t react. Maybe it’s because his cheek is so cold, but he’s surprised at the hand’s warmth. It pulses against his cheek with a steady beat.

            When fire, that endless desire to move forward and live, and ice, that immovable reality of what lies at the end of every life, collide, there is water.

            Dongwoo sees Hoya’s cheeks flush below his fingers. A drop of water trickles between his fingers, and he realizes that Hoya is silently crying. Dongwoo lets his own tears fall then, overflowing from his eyes.

            That night, Hoya searches through his closet until he pulls out a small, brownish-purple, leatherbound notebook. These next seven days might be all that he has left with Dongwoo. He feels that they deserve to be recorded, remembered in some concrete fashion.

            When he opens the journal, a photo falls out from behind the inside cover, hitting the floor with a small “clap.” Hoya picks it up and sees his father, mother, older and younger brother, and himself smiling up at him. It’s a family portrait from a long time ago, before he debuted. He turns it over, already knowing what’s written there.

            “I’ll return when I’m successful.”

            It’s written boldly in sharpie in the center of the back. His named is signed underneath it, as if it’s an official declaration.

            Hoya holds the photo in his hand for a minute, flipping it back over to examine his family’s faces. They’re all dressed in their best clothing, his father in a suit too big for him, his mother in a handmade dress. They’re all positioned perfectly to compliment each other’s heights, carefully spaced to give the photo a cozy but not crowded feel. His father sits to on the left side of the picture; behind him, his youngest son. The mother sits to the right, her eldest son’s hand on his shoulder, and Hoya stands in the middle.

            Hoya trades the photo for a purple pen from his bag. He brings the pen and journal out to the foyer and sits at the desk where Dongwoo used to write every night. He stares at the first blank page and slowly sets his pen down at the top.

            The digital clock on the desk flashes as the seconds tick by and a circle of ink slowly grows around the tip of his pen. This day is one of seven left, and it carries immense, inconceivable significance. 23 years of a life and 4 years of friendship all come to rest on the top of Hoya’s pen, waiting to pour out onto the paper.

            Only ink unformed by sentences or ideas pours out, though. Hoya doesn’t even know where to start. There’s so much to say, and yet he can’t think of anything worth saying. He lifts his pen from the paper to stop the constant spread of dark ink.

            As each hour ticks by, the day weighs more heavily on him. He’s wasting time. He sits, doing absolutely nothing, as one of those last precious days slips by. He stares at the blank page, marred by a black dot, and forces himself to think. Words and phrases rush through is mind in frenzied bursts (“Today, Dongwoo…” “In seven days…” “I feel…”) but all of them sound trite and unfeeling, incapable of expressing what is happening. How do you sum up a friendship in a diary entry? How do you close a friendship in seven days?

            Despite his efforts, the frequency of the sentence fragments rushing through his head decrease until his head is empty. His eyes droop and Hoya falls asleep at the desk.