star chaser and sun keeper

star chaser

Seungmin first meets Minho when he moves into a sprawling neighborhood swathed with single family houses during the middle of summer.

The sidewalk is hot underneath the thin soles of his shoes and he feels sweat begin to accumulate on the back of his neck, dripping down between his shoulder blades. He watches grasshoppers leap across lawns with scattered cicadas thrumming in his ears when his older sister holds his hand and takes him up the steps to a decrepit bungalow.

They meet their landlord by the name of Old Jung, a distant friend of their relatives, who shows them around the furnished basement. There's two small bedrooms between an even smaller bathroom. Seungmin hides behind his sister as Old Jung slurs his words, peeking at all the grime stuck between the tiles and the mold growing in the corners of the ceiling.

Sensing his unease, she leans down just a bit and whispers to him, "Do you want to start bringing your stuff into your room?"

Seungmin blinks up at her tired, smiling face, and nods.

He hurries past Old Jung, taking a whiff of his sweet, musty odor that reminds Seungmin of his father. Stepping back outside, Seungmin swats away a duo of mosquitoes and jerks his head away when one of them comes too close to his face.

Seungmin likes summer the least. He always wakes up with bites on his face, and his mother once told him it's because his blood is sweet, but Seungmin doesn't think he's sweet at all and the mosquitoes merely prefer attacking him out of the whole population.

He goes to the trunk of the car and takes out his duffel bag. When he hears the rattling of chains and a rough crash against the pavement, Seungmin looks up and around before he spots a boy not too far away on the ground with his bike tilted over on a lawn. Seungmin's eyes travel down to his scraped knee, glistening in red, and waits for the boy to cry. He doesn't.

There are band-aids scattered across the boy's face with a few on his bruised knuckles that were healing into a yellowish-green hue. He just sits there and sighs down at his knee, looking annoyed at the scrape like it was merely an inconvenience rather than an earth-shattering wound like most kids their age dramatized.

So, Seungmin takes the pouch from his bag that his sister crocheted for him and approaches the boy, looking both sides of the street when he crosses. When the boy looks up, his eyes narrow into a suspicious glare. There is a mole on his nose -- just along the ridge above his left nostril.

Seungmin ignores the stink eye and crouches down to pull out a big, Paw Patrol band-aid from his pouch. He rips off the adhesive stickers and holds it out for the boy, who's staring at the design with a quizzical frown.

"Those are for kids," he drawls. "I'm twelve, double digits, so I'm not a kid."

Seungmin frowns. He tries to tack the band-aid on the boy's knee himself, but the boy scoots back and dodges the attempt. Annoyed, Seungmin tries again and fails when the boy covers the scrape on his knee with his dirty hands, which has Seungmin gasping and trying to pry his hands away.

"Are you stupid?" he exclaims. "You're going to make it worse!"

His outburst surprises the boy into stillness, and Seungmin quickly pastes the band-aid over the boy's scrape with success this time. He beams and stands up before the boy tries to hurt him -- if those bruised knuckles and bandaged cheekbones were indicative of a bad temper. But he simply remains silent, only looking disgruntled at the Paw Patrol bandage, and gets up to grab his fallen bike.

"You're welcome," Seungmin tries.

"No thank you," the boy retorts. He's climbing his bike and turning it around, and before Seungmin knows it, he's riding off towards the sun in the distance.