He is stumbling through the crowd and they don’t see him.  Their eyes are on the fireworks.  It is barely evening, but the small bursts explode just above their heads in the dusky air.  The sky is a smog of sunset yellow. 

With a small tug, he is pulled back.  Whirling, he is not expecting to see B Joo staring back at him.

He feels his knees go weak, his last thread of stability spent in the tensing of his muscles expecting an attack.  B Joo is the first and last person he wants to see.  He makes to step away until B Joo grabs him by the shoulders.

“Where have you been?”

Turning back, he meets B Joo’s eyes.  There isn’t enough left in him to pull the younger’s feelings to himself even in this short distance.  He can’t feel the subtleties of B Joo’s emotions but the younger’s eyes are speaking: asking questions and shouting accusations and whispering concern.

Sometimes they went a week or two without running into each other, but it had been a whole month this time.  It’s his fault.  Things had changed.  He hadn’t wanted to face the other as he does now.  Hansol imagines everything he’s felt and seen and done is burned like a brand into his face. 

B Joo’s expression falls.  “What happened to you?”

Silence.

“Please tell me you didn’t go home.”

Yes or no doesn’t matter at this point.  The accusation doesn’t hurt like it might have once.  He hadn’t, but it’s not a yes or no question, really—it’s not a question at all.

B Joo’s eyes eventually travel down to Hansol’s hand in his jacket pocket.  With the experience of someone surviving on the street, he can probably tell Hansol is holding onto a gun.

Panic made it impossible even now for Hansol to loosen his clumsy hold on it.  He doesn’t want to slip his hand out of his pocket anyway.  He doesn’t want B Joo to see the red bandana on his wrist and knows whose company he’s been keeping.  He suspects that the younger already has it figured out though.  The only way Hansol would get a gun was if he had joined up with someone and had been given one.

B Joo breaks away.  Hansol feels like he’s spiraling into a void when his hands leave his shoulders.

In that moment, for the first time, he knows that the drag in his feet and the tension of B Joo’s shoulders is the same thing.  They’d known for a while now that the universe had made them both north-end magnets.  Everything similar about them was what inevitably forced them apart.  They were only travelers in each other’s lives.  They could only stop by for moments.  That wasn’t it, though.  They hadn’t known anything.

Without the energy to read him, Hansol still knows that B Joo is afraid. 

“My mistake,” B Joo announces, like he mistook a stranger for a friend in stopping him.

Hansol realizes how tightly wound B Joo is as he hurries away, removing himself from whatever story Hansol’s face is telling.

Hansol looks down at the bandana on his wrist.  He has broken his own rule by joining up with Seokjin.  They had said they would never join a gang.  It was bad for business.  It was bad for them—for whatever that meant. 

He paces through the crowd, easily finding where B Joo stands biting his nails at the fireworks.  The purple in his hair has faded considerably, but Hansol doesn’t need it to find him.  A magnetic pull had always drawn them together.

B Joo is bouncing on his toes and even from here Hansol can feel the energy exploding and fusing and swirling like the nucleus of a star in the other.  It had been a month since they’d met last.  B Joo could have sold happiness to every junkie in the city enough to last them a week and his energy would still look like it did now.  Hansol is only realizing now that it’s his fault.

“B Joo,” he questions.

The other seems manic when he whirls around.  He seems to know why Hansol is standing there and says with a strange, soulless grin, “I can’t, sorry!”  His eyes seem too full.  Hansol isn’t sure B Joo even knows what he’s saying.  The younger spins back around, knocking himself slightly off center again.  Hansol catches him into balance, his arms wrapping around the boy’s waist.   

He is not expecting B Joo to readily rest his hands on his arms.  Hansol drops his chin to the other’s shoulder. 

Pushing unrelentingly at all corners of the younger the surge of energy is almost blinding.  He pulls it to himself.

For weeks he had felt out of balance and drained, getting ephemeral energy anywhere he could, but B Joo’s hand on his shoulder for a moment had taken it all away.  He tried to give the feeling back.  He hugged him and drew in the burgeoning volcano of energy that had been building and dormant and his fault.  B Joo’s energy built on its own.  Sometimes he gave too much away.  Sometimes, Hansol finally knows, he didn’t give enough.

In the moment between fireworks, their small universe is born and ended.  Tension sliding away, B Joo’s fingers pull absently at the ends of the bandana tied to Hansol’s wrist.  For the first time in a long time, Hansol closes his eyes and doesn’t feel lost in the darkness.  The energy he draws from B Joo is like poison in the other but it doesn’t hurt him.  Somewhere in the space between it becomes light.

Someone bumps them as they walk by.

B Joo pulled away and turned, looking down at the red bandana he now stops playing with.  “Things change, huh?” he notes, in a voice that tells Hansol this is where their paths diverge.

The weight in Hansol’s pocket reminds him of the choice he’d made.  He wishes he could undo the bandana from his wrist.  “I’m really sorry.”  He wishes at the very least he could explain, but the excuse feels like a weight in his throat he can’t heft into the air.

“Nah,” the boy tells him.  “Seokjin’s lucky to have you.”

Hansol gets it now but it’s too late.  B Joo built up energy in his bones and lost it all selling emotions to addicts for prices cheaper than their drugs.  Hansol replaced the energy he lost just from living by running halfway across town for the chance to pick up residual energy from the people he passed.  And it didn’t have to be that way.  He thinks now that B Joo knew that all along.

“We looked out for each other when we needed to,” B Joo tells him.  Hansol can’t speak.  He can’t even nod.  B Joo does it for him.

“Be safe out there, okay?” He says this with a terrible note of finality and then goes off, swallowed into the crowd.

All Hansol can do is linger with the vaguely graying taste of B Joo’s disappointment and regret under his tongue.  It might as well have been his own.

A/N  Thank you all for reading. <3 I hope this isn't too confusing but if it is let me know.  There's only one part after this before I start the main story.  Thanks to you all for subscribing or commenting or sticking around for this.  On a writing note:  the tense shifts are intentional to add a further uncertainty and instability to the moment.  I'm not sure how effective it is.  I feel like this whole prologue is an experiment in writing for me.  I'm not really sure how well it comes across.