✕

needle in, needle out.

Sunggyu doesn’t get why Woohyun likes embroidery so much.

Once the needle pierces the fabric, Woohyun is lost to the world, humming a tuneless melody under his breath as he works the thread into the cloth. Sunggyu watches him carefully, watches how his delicate fingertips check the spot before the needle replaces them. In, out, in and out; and Woohyun breathes easily as his chest rises, falls.

Sunggyu doesn’t breathe, not even once.

Wind whistles past their ears, blows Woohyun’s fringe out of his eyes, sends a spool of green thread tumbling out of the basket, rolling to the edge of the table. Sunggyu’s muscles move out of pure instinct, his eyes following the dark green roll as it scurries across the smooth white surface, a relentless, reckless hurtle towards its own suicide.

He catches the spool just as it tips off the edge, the wool soft and warm against palm. He turns around, finds Woohyun staring blankly in his direction, his gaze empty and distant. Sunggyu’s heart clenches a bit, hurts a little bit as he gently slips the spool back into the basket, watching the other blink slowly.

“Thank you,” Woohyun chirps, his eyes still fixed distantly on that same spot, his fingers moving carefully on the cloth. He dips his head back down, the needle piercing the cloth, and once again, lost in his own little world of thread, fabric and song.

Sunggyu finally allows himself to exhale carefully.

✕

Woohyun doesn’t remember a time when things had been clear.

He sees everything without outlines, in clouds of colour blurred into each other without the harsh edges of boundaries. Like how colour bursts into misty clumps once they hit the smooth surface of clear water and erupt once they break through to the medium of liquid on the other side. Soft, fuzzy washes overlapping to fit into forms of objects, but always colouring outside of the lines that people typically see.

Not like Woohyun really knows how the sharp images look like, of course. He doesn’t.

He had once held Sunggyu’s face in his hands, traced over his sharp nose bridge, felt the thin creases of his lips, thumbed along the edges of his narrow eyes. He had laughed, marvelling at the lack of definition offered to him by his vision, but experienced with the tips of his fingers. It had all fallen away once he pulled his hands to himself, and Sunggyu’s face still remained a palette of black, pink and brown on a background of beige.

The warmth of his face still lingered on Woohyun’s palms.

✕

Woohyun thinks that even if he can’t see lines, he can still create them.

He memorises shapes with his fingertips, tries to replicate them onto cloth. He traces again and again, committing the curves and straight lines to his muscle memory. It is a process of translation, he tells Sunggyu, of bringing something physical onto a surface. He touches, sews, traces over the thread and onto the cloth, and the cycle repeats.

He never asks Sunggyu if his embroidery resembles the real items; Sunggyu never comments.

✕

“Thread this needle for me, will you?”

Sunggyu takes the needle and the thread, the end of the string and squints at the minute hole bored into the end of the metal. He’s still not any better at it, despite having threaded needles for Woohyun since the younger took up sewing. Eight-year-old Sunggyu had pricked his fingers, complained to Woohyun that his hobby was dangerous, but still did his best to thread the needle for the younger. He had always handed the needle triumphantly to Woohyun. His heart had always soared whenever the younger boy clapped excitedly and thanked him enthusiastically.

He clicks his tongue as the needle pricks him again. He gets the thread through the eye on the third try, hands Woohyun the needle carefully. Woohyun smiles up at him in thanks, his eyes hazy and unfocused, before he looks back down at his unfinished piece and continues to work. He watches the younger fill in the outline of the rose on the cloth with a lighter blue, his fingers guiding the path of the thread.

“I like blue roses.”

“I know,” Woohyun replies, his fingers moving deftly. The pads of his fingers are rough and calloused from years of sewing and getting pricked by the sharp points of pins and needles. Woohyun doesn’t poke himself that much anymore, but he still can’t see the eye to thread the needle himself. Sunggyu watches the rose gain more colour, in awe at how Woohyun has managed to capture the curves of the rose petals despite never ever seeing a rose properly before.

He rubs the pads of his own fingers together absent-mindedly. The needles don’t hurt him anymore.

✕

Woohyun tells Sunggyu that he loves him on a sunny day.

Not explicitly; neither of them are good with direct words. It’s not like they don’t know about the love that exists between them. It has always been there, moulded by them and taken a shape of its own like how Woohyun sews the outline of his latest subject onto the cloth.

“You’re important to me, you know.”

Sunggyu laughs, sets his iced tea down on the table. The ice cubes clink against each other and the glass. “Of course, who else will thread your needles for you?”

Woohyun giggles, hands the handkerchief over to his friend. He watches the blurred rectangles of Sunggyu’s fingers move over the flower in the corner of the cloth. His face is warm, much like how he remembers Sunggyu’s face was like on the day he held it in his hands.

“Think of yourself as the thread to my needle,” he chirps, his heart thrumming in his ears, lodged in his throat, bursting in his chest, “what can a needle do without thread? It is an empty vessel with movement, but without the means to bring form that is defined only when it is loaded with thread.”

Sunggyu’s breathing is even, his fingers still moving on the handkerchief. “So, I bring definition to your world?”

“In a way,” he grins at the blurry outline of his best friend, “I mean, I have never seen definition. But I know what it is like through you, through the things you tell me, through you staying by my side.”

He feels Sunggyu’s warmth against him, head on his shoulder, fingers winding through his own, breath ghosting across his jaw. He moves closer, watching the blur of their joined hands resting on his thigh. He swallows, his heart soaring, emotions stuck in his throat, endless words resting on the tip of his tongue.

He doesn’t say any of them. “You like blue roses,” he says instead.

Sunggyu shifts gently, presses a gentle kiss to his jaw.

“I know you know,” he says simply.