Seoul is bigger than Busan.

It's actually bigger than any place Joon Hee has ever been to before.  It's easy to get lost, and sometimes he does. He gets lost each time he moves somewhere new, from the med-school to the hospital to the supermarket to the banks of the Han. The truth is, he gets lost a lot.

Tae Woong sunsengnim's face peers from most of the mounted projectors near the malls, announcing his ascent up the political ladder, but even that familiarity is overshadowed by the bright lights across the city, which makes the features behind the glass look smoother, harder than he remembers. Lights criss-crossing in a mesh of color and hard glitter. He thinks he maybe can't exactly remember Shi Won's face because she's brightest in the sunlight, and his recall memory sometimes messes up the color of her hair when he passes by the green strobe.

"You'd think you would know the way home by now, being a genius and all? It's been over a month since we took this place."

Yoon Jae's voice on the other end is a mixture of irritation and exasperation and residual affection, but it's familiar, and the relief that floods through his chest is embarrassing in its intensity. So he ignores that and scoffs silently at genius , thinks of the boy in the first seat next to his second place.

His second thought is: home.



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It takes forty seconds for Yoon Jae to cross him by every day, going from the kitchen to his bedroom, his coat ed, tie always skewered slightly to the left, the first button of the collar popped.

Joon Hee counts another number in his head, for the times he hasn’t reached out and fixed his tie, reached out and touched him, reached out and—

Done something. Said something. He’s not sure if it makes him courageous or a coward. Possibly a little bit of both.

What he does is this: in the forty seconds, he picks up the medical journal on the table and reads about a condition that will be on the exam, and doesn't mention anything about why his heart beats at the base of his throat and he can hear the hammering at the back of his head.

The journals don't mention things like that, he's come to realize.



.

It’s only after the three hundredth and fifty eighth time that it strikes him that this, this thing that he does, it's almost like a countdown. He's counting up, but no one counts up indefinitely. He's waiting to reach ground zero, and if he’s counting down, he’s counting down to—

(The next time, he doesn’t look up. Lets the number go. Fifty eight times later, he’s completely forgotten the count. Honestly.)

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Shi Won calls. Shi Won calls often and Very Pointedly Does Not Talk About That Person Whom She Is Not (At All) Talking About.

They talk about her godawful boss, instead, who keeps her on timings that suit only a night watchman, the woman in the next cubicle who clearly hates her for being way more, like, way more, talented than her. They talk about her mother and her father. They talk about H.O.T. They talk a lot about H.O.T.

Some days there are silences and he doesn't rush to fill them because that way, she doesn't ask and he doesn't say, but she knows that the person whom she Doesn't Want To Know Anything About (At All) (Really) is fine, because honestly, it's kind of a task being in love with him, they both know that, and there's sympathy somewhere in the quiet breathing across the line. Empathy, in fact. Because when he thinks about it, he thinks they created an understanding out of nothing and somehow it holds during silence and words, and he hopes to god he never has to let it go.

(They talk about: H.O.T. breaking up- the night after night she spent on the ground, backed against the wall, listening to their discography on repeat, mascara running down in uneven streaks, the end of something she can't quite define. And he doesn't laugh, he doesn't laugh because her voice is raw, and this is heartbreak deeper than he will ever experience, he knows, because he loves in details, and he gears himself for disappointment even before trying. He has none of her wild abandon, her too-deep intensity, her raw passion, he doesn't love like her. He is jealous of her heartbreak, but that's a secret. 

But there are days and months, and the passage of time does that thing where it lives up to the cliché about wounds, and there is a day when he realizes that he can hear her smile.)

.

They talk about his internship and she's so enthusiastic about it, it makes him laugh. It almost makes it something more glamorous, his name in gold on a plaque on a wooden door, rather than bedpans and a blood-stained lab-coat, and sleepless nights and a perpetual spin-the-wheel on someone's life.

It's odd, but with Shi Won, he always feels just the slightest bit on the north of sanity, displaced, disproportionately hopeful, even if he can never tell what exactly for. 



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