Chapter Text
“You always touch.”
Sieun was staring at Suho’s hand on his forearm. He’d been talking with over-the-top enthusiasm about getting a tattoo one day—one of the many Suho things they both knew he would probably never do, but had nonetheless come up with an intricate plan in his head about it—and had slapped his palm on Sieun’s arm to demonstrate exactly where he’d get it inked. Now, an entire minute after the point was made and stale, the hand was still there, Suho tracing lines with his fingers on Sieun’s skin.
Wings here, see? A long, jagged caress along his forearm. Folded around its body like it’s coiled to strike. A traced spiral around an imaginary dragon’s body. Fangs, for sure. But no fire. He isn’t angry. He’s just a dragon, you know? Like ‘don’t fuck with me and I won’t have to fuck with you’. He doesn’t have to be angry, people just understand. The head is angled down, like this.
Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.
“Ha?” Suho said, head tilted at Sieun’s words. “How else will you understand my dragon if I don’t show you? I can’t draw.”
He lifted his hand from Sieun’s arm and pressed firmly in the center of his forehead with his index finger.
“You have to imagine it. But you have to imagine it right. My tattoo won’t be cringe, not even in your mind.”
Sieun squinted against the pressure on his forehead, then pushed into Suho’s finger with his neck muscles and flicked his head to the side, breaking contact. He wasn’t sure what to say to that. He didn’t particularly care what sort of tattoo Suho got, or thought he was going to get but would never actually get. He failed completely to understand why Suho would care what his mental image of this never-tattoo was.
It didn’t matter, though. Suho wouldn’t be expecting a response.
He would simply carry on talk—
“And anyway, what do you mean ‘I always touch’,” Suho said, slumping back in his chair until his back was against the classroom wall, legs kicking out into the aisle between desks. “You’re always talking about the stuff I always do. I always sleep. I always eat so much. I always talk. Now I always touch. How do I have time to always do all those things at the same time, hm? Am I magic? Do I control time?”
Sieun could feel his eyes getting heavier as Suho found more and more words to machine-gun at him.
Suho waited exactly one beat before he kept going.
“Exactly. You’re not making any sense. I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”
Sieun sighed, and it was on just the right side of dramatic for Suho to notice. He’d gotten used to Suho’s rhythm by now. Exhausting as it was, it was fine as long as you knew the patterns. A long outburst like this—fake indignation, quick-fire absurd questions, and an imaginary victory against a straw-man argument he’d made up in his head—meant that he’d be done for a few seconds now. Sieun had time to think up his next sentence.
There were a few ways forward. He could change the topic entirely, or rather, let Suho do it by remaining silent. Normally, that’s what he’d do. Suho was like a TV you’d left on in another room. It didn’t care how much or how little you were paying attention to it, it would keep going and going and going at full volume until you turned it off. A long silence wouldn’t be enough to turn Suho off, but it’d be enough to make him change the channel at least.
Today, though, Sieun’s memory was nagging at him.
Could he even remember a time when someone else had touched him without a closed fist or a fentanyl patch on their fingers? Presumably it’d happened many times, but he couldn’t quite recall them for now. His mother and father must have done it sometimes. Doctors, maybe? The time he’d had the flu and a doctor had felt the glands in his neck? He’d been wearing gloves, though, and it was clinical. Strangers, accidentally, when the bus was crowded?
The catalog of touch was not big.
And then along came Ahn Suho, who had blown it out to the point where Sieun couldn’t even begin to count the times it’d happened. Taps on the shoulder. Slaps on the back. Slaps on the butt. Manhandling him into stances as part of his strength training. Shoving food into his hands. Into his mouth. Playful shoulder massages because he knew Sieun would try and squirm away from them.
“You touch me more than anyone else I know,” Sieun surprised himself by saying.
Suho raised an eyebrow.
“Oh?” he said, and he raised a hand to his chest, clutching at his heart with a theatrical flourish. “Yeon Sieun. Don’t make me sad.”
Sieun let his head tilt slightly.
“What’s sad?”
“I’m the one?” he said. “Not your family, not your loved ones. Just me?”
“Well,” Sieun said. “I don’t let them, usually, and I suppose they stopped trying.”
“Ah,” Suho scrunched his shirt beneath his hand. “You can’t do this to me.”
“It’s not sad,” Sieun said. “It’s good. I don’t like it when people touch me.”
“Sieun,” Suho said, locking eyes, “my heart is going to break. It’ll be your fault.”
“Why do you do it so much, though,” Sieun said, ignoring Suho’s performance. There was a moment where the words hung in the air, Suho’s eyes dancing on the spot as he processed them and began cooking up yet another I’m-so-heartbroken bit in this endless procession of bits. This was another one of Suho’s rhythms that Sieun had memorized, but this one required action. If Sieun didn’t intervene, Suho would never stop. It’d be endless skits about how sad he was until one or both of them were dead. “I’m not upset, I just want to know.”
It worked. Suho planted his feet flat on the floor and leaned forward a little.
“You seriously want to know why I touch you?”
Sieun held eye contact and nodded once.
Suho leaned back in his chair, balancing on the two rear legs.
“My grandmother told me something when I was a brat, being a little shit about something, I don’t remember. I ran away from her when she wanted to give me a hug. She put on a big frown and said ‘One day I won’t be here and you’ll never be able to hug me again’. She knew I’m soft inside, see. Of course she did. She’s my gran. I ran to her and we hugged the whole night, and I felt safe and closer to her than ever.”
Sieun didn’t know what to say. But that wasn’t unusual to Suho, who kept going.
“It’s like communication, you know? Language. You touch someone and it’s like saying something. I’d have thought you would love that, not having to speak. You shake someone’s hand, that’s ‘hello’. You punch someone, that’s a polite way of telling someone ‘be quiet’ or ‘that’s enough’. You hug them, that’s like saying ‘I’m sorry I was a brat’, or ‘I don’t want you to go away one day’.
“So there,” Suho said. “Don’t you feel stupid for even mentioning it, now. There’s a heartfelt explanation. I win.”
He let his chair rock forward onto all 4 legs and spun it a little so it was almost facing the front of the room again. This was Suho rhythm number three, and one of Sieun’s favorites for how peaceful it was. The umbrage rhythm. He’d pretend to have won a great moral victory so total and complete that there was nothing left to say. The gaps of silence in this rhythm could sometimes stretch to entire minutes.
There was an anomaly to this particular rhythm, though. This time—for all of Suho’s bluster and obviously fake outrage and overcooked guilt trip—he was…kind of right. And though he couldn’t quite believe he was admitting it to himself, Sieun had to look deep inside and have the courage and honesty to say that, yes.
He did feel a little stupid for even mentioning it.
“One day I won’t be here,” Sieun said softly, and Suho didn’t quite catch it.
“Hm?” Suho’s head snapped around, his chair scraping loudly on the floor as it followed his body movement and reoriented itself toward Sieun.
Sieun flicked his eyes back to Suho’s.
Held contact for a moment.
Then, slowly, gently, extended his bare arm out toward him.
Suho’s eyebrows shot up. Sieun didn’t move. He loved catching Suho in moments of genuine disbelief like this. It was like seeing the unguarded bit of him he kept inside bubble up to the surface. Got you, Sieun wanted to say. I made you make a true face.
The moment lasted all of three seconds before Suho’s expression reverted to mock-serious, he leaned forward to grab hold of Sieun’s arm, and began furiously tracing as though they hadn’t skipped a beat.
“The dragon’s guarding his treasure here, like this, but it’s not gold. Gold is cliché. This dragon’s treasure is a car. A fully restored Toyota 2000GT. Pegasus white. It’s beautiful. This is the actual car from a James Bond movie, OK, so it’s super valuable—”
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
Sieun let Suho talk.