rapture of the deep ; seodo

❝we were meant to submerge in matching scales❞

. .⃗ . ꒰12,2k꒱

A freediver ought to follow a simple set of rules: never dive alone, know yourself, stay calm - and Geonhak had provoked all of them at a single blow.

"I never took you for the yoga type of guy."

Upon hearing Hyungu's snicker, Geonhak cracked one eye open - radiant sunlight immediately assaulting his vision behind compressed lids - and let his previously outstretched arms hang loosely by his sides.

"Yoga?" he then asked with a raised eyebrow as he squinted at Hyungu who had rested both his elbows on the rim of the swaying boat, scattered shards of refracted sunlight dancing along his face.

"First these disturbing breathing exercises-..." Hyungu interrupted himself and held his index finger up as though proffering a warning, "don't ever do that again without giving me a heads-up it, I thought we had a corpse aboard - and now the stretching, looks pretty spiritual to me."

"You mean the diaphragmatic breathing?" Geonhak asked, holding back a laugh and shaking his head upon seeing Hyungu countering an exaggerated shrug in response, "oh please, there's nothing spiritual or disturbing to it. I could teach you."

Hyungu blinked at Geonhak, his unimpressed frown creating a crease between his eyebrows, before he lifted himself out of the water and reached for a towel.

"No thank you."

As Geonhak assumed that Hyungu had just declared the conversation closed, he proceeded to rummage through the basket containing his belongings in search for his wetsuit.

To be fair, Geonhak had intended to go on about the practice of diaphragmatic breathing and how he was benefitting from the lowered heart rate, the decreased oxygen demand, and the more effortless breathing that resulted from it, but given that Hyungu was a landlubber with all his might, Geonhak had only just got his act together and strangled his enthusiasm that bubbled somewhere underneath eternities spent with divers at his side who were all too familiar with the game plan - no room for him to enthuse anybody with the temptation he was seeing in the great depths, as they were all in the same boat whatsoever.

And Geonhak had to admit that he understood where Hyungu's discomfort might have emerged from, as sucking up one's own diaphragm, leaving only skin spanned over a prominent ribcage and a hollow stomach for as long as the breath was held, did look the slightest bit grotesque and inhumane - especially when seeing someone do it for the first time without having ever heard of anything other than chest breathing.

Hyungu and Geonhak had known each other ever since their early high school days, and while their relationship had never flourished into a storybook-best-friend-bond, they had never lost sight of each other regardless, and kept track of each other's whereabouts even after their ways and interests had parted after graduating.

Being friends with Hyungu was easy - not only because he was the paragon of an introvert who kept his circle of friends small and nine times out of ten chose to stay in rather than to twirl around the dance floor, but also because Hyungu never changed, which - needless to say - didn't mean that he wasn't maturing, gathering experiences and insights along the way, and building a life one step at a time.

Instead, it was the fact that his personality seemed to always remain unshaken and alike in more than just its basic framework, which allowed them to continue where they had left off never mind that they hadn't heard from each other in months. Geonhak hadn't even expected Hyungu to agree to keep him company in between the passages when he would jump into the water for a few calm and easy-going dives.