“I have a plan. For later I mean.”

Kyungsoo doesn’t react. Jongin can’t see much in the darkened room, but there’s a delicate crescent of lavender moonlight that clings, like perfume, to the curves of Kyungsoo’s face. He’d touch it if he could, and caress the white velvet that closely binds his frame but ever expanding space is in the way.

Kyungsoo would probably hit him if he tried.

Rather than his body, Jongin’s dried out and cracked lips act and speak. “I’m going to leave one day. For good.”

It’s barely a reaction at all but Kyungsoo’s breath catches in his throat, adam’s apple a quiver. Jongin can’t say he’s surprised but the wordless response renders him equally speechless, unable to articulate justifications and excuses. Even as a poorly masked tear rolls down the elder’s face, Jongin remains silent.

In much the same way, the black sky was stoic as it faded into deceptively glorious gold. The apartment was empty as dawn broke, both men too afraid to linger in the presence of one another for a second more.

*

Four months earlier:

Jongin never stays in one place for very long.

Feathers ruffle, his shoelaces frayed and stained with approximately three years and two month’s worth of grime and effort, as he skulks through the city of Goyang. His head his low but, for the first time in what feels like forever, his spirits are high and hopes soaring well above the hotels and apartment flats that surround him like a concrete forest. Not quite higher than the shadowy mountains that he can see on the horizon… but high enough.

Another new city, another new start.

In his hand is the weather worn paper flyer he had stolen from a shop window in Gimpo a week ago, colours faded and streaked with rampant lines of white where there page has been creased too many times. He usually didn’t go in proper shops, not to buy anything at least. That day however, the kindness of strangers had bestowed a rare and wonderful opportunity on him to buy some creature comforts – a bag of crisps, an apple and a can of pocari sweat – when he saw the obnoxious leaflet tacked inside the window.

“DANCE!” It read, in a loud font entirely unfitting for the ancient practise. “Yellow Opera is looking for new recruits – got what it takes? Show us your stuff at: Highwire 24/7 dance studio, Ilsanseo, Goyang. Auditions take place on Sat Feb 9^th starting at 10AM. No formal training required.”

It’s four days away but that’s not a problem, the world is Jongin’s oyster and Goyang is a pearl waiting to be snatched from its grasp. In the meantime, he has people to impress, money to earn and a whole lot of sightseeing to do. And what a sight it is.

Clean and bright, Jongin can’t help but feel as though he stands out – a cuckoo in the nest of a finch – too weathered by life and experience to belong in such a sparkling place. The buildings are tall and bedecked with advertisements, the shops are trendy and bustling and the echoing sounds of chit chatting citizens and rumbling cars skip sporadically through the air. It’s alien and yet so reminiscent of his brief time in Seoul that he feels an unspeakable and contradictory affinity with the streets that extend endlessly before him, miraculously barren of discarded trash or chewed gum.

It’s just that he’s thinking this, with eyes roaming the unfeasibly blue skyline, that he’s stopped in his tracks, foreign body colliding with his own.

“Uff.” He breathes, as air exits his lungs too quickly and returns, burning, just as fast. He blinks at the boy in front of him, a glum faced, fidgeting young man with glowing white skin and clothes in pristine condition. Even the people are immaculate, he hums as he pats himself down.

“Sorry, are you alright?”

Jongin’s not sure if ‘better than usual’ constitutes as the generally accepted ‘alright’, but he nods anyway, mildly breathless. As the rising of his chest regulates, he remembers his manners – an old skill of his that had slowly waned and died, only bursting into life when the opportune moment called for it. This, he deduced, was one of those moments.

“I wasn’t looking and I just…” One of the things Jongin had picked up over the years is that anyone will do anything to be a ‘good’ person – a fact that only served to benefit him, so long as he knew how to play up to it. All he has to do is engage the wide eyed stranger and gently coax a little help from him before he’s on his way. Initiating a conversation, however much he hated that prospect, is the smoothest course of action.

A knowing look blossoms from the collar of the tweed coat to the delicately feathered fronds of hair that fall over a naturally creased brow. It’s a faint and hard to read expression, but his lips – plumper than Jongin’s but not unattractively so – are curled delicately at the edges. Apparently it won’t take much to glean information out of this guy after all.

“Let me guess, you’re new around here?” He asks, breezy and overly friendly in the most subtle of ways. Like Jongin had noted so long ago, everyone goes out of their way to make a good impression, even more so if it’s with a stranger. “Tourist maybe?”

“Just moved in.” Jongin explains and smirks because, technically, he has just moved in. So long as he wasn’t asked where, there would be no problem. Running one hand through his unkempt hair, Jongin looks around while tensing the other, fingers curled into the now soft paper of the flyer.
Now’s the time to ask.
“I’m looking for this place. Highwire dance studio, you know it?”

Brisk and straightforward, he brandishes the flyer at the keen to help stranger. For a brief while, his eyes trace the paper, lips voicelessly moulding the words as they’re processed and, fortunately, recognised.  Jongin’s heart would skip a beat, if it could manage it, but instead the feeling settles as butterflies in his stomach, eager to meet the glass and laminate coliseum where his destiny awaits.

“You’ve just gone past the turn off.” He points down the wide street, towards a small junction that’s littered with people. Jongin looks at it for a moment longer, tracing every curve of the pavement, the concrete bollards that are painted black, even the enticing whisper of the light bouncing from glass-walled buildings. It’s so much more than he expected.

“Stay on the left, it’s down some stai-”

The words hardly even reach Jongin’s ears – he’s already progressing down the sidewalk when they fall from the stranger’s tongue. Distracted, he barely even remembers to wave a hand and call out his gratitude but he does because that’s how he was raised by his moth- never mind.

And just like that, as quickly and as fortuitously as the man, prim and clean with clothes that smelt like home and wellbeing, had appeared in Jongin’s life, he had vanished. Lost forever in the foliage of nameless faces that scattered across the utopian jungle floor.

For now, at least.