kingdom falling | gyuricky

twenty two.

The crowds outside the Court were so thick that it was impossible for them to locate any of the others. Gyuvin did his best to stand between Ricky and most of the crowd, just so he wouldn't feel so suffocated amidst the throng of people, and Ricky extended a grateful smile to him. "It's starting!" Gyuvin pointed into the distance. "Look!"

Fireworks bloomed in the night sky, splitting the darkness open, streaks of gold amidst the light of a thousand lanterns, the explosions booming so loud Gyuvin could feel the ground shake beneath them. Cheers rose into the air all around them as the fireworks danced across the sky; Gyuvin kept his head up, trying his best to see only gold and nothing else.

Though his father had been the sect leader's right hand man before he was exiled, Gyuvin had a few fuzzy memories of him making the time to watch the fireworks together every New Year and every summer solstice. He could remember, in flashes of memory that came and went, his father putting five-year-old Gyuvin on his shoulders so he could crane his neck to look up into the sky. After his father left, he still came down to see the fireworks every year, but the people he was with were always different. Sect Leader Baek had come with him, the year after his father was first exiled. Some years Minwoo came down to watch with him. Most of the time it was Junhyeon, or Hanbin, or the other cultivators from Meteor Court. But as hard as he tried, he'd never found that same feeling again, that feeling he'd had sitting atop his father's shoulders, that there was no one under the starry sky other than them.

Gyuvin looked back, grinning. "So? Are you having fun?"

Ricky smiled, the balmy night breeze making his golden hair flutter in the moonlight. "Yes, I am," he said. "Although, it's much warmer weather than I've ever seen before."

Gyuvin had almost forgot; growing up in a place as brutally cold and dry as Moonrise Palace, Sunshower City in the middle of summer must feel like a sauna to Ricky. "It's a hot night, isn't it?" he asked, thinking. "Come on!"

He grabbed Ricky's wrist and turned back, streaking through the milling crowd, brushing shoulders with a hundred people a minute as he pulled the other boy along behind him. As he ran, the belated realisation came to him; he'd found it again, even if it was just for a fleeting moment. The feeling that no one else existed other than him and the person he was pulling behind him.

"Don't let go!" he called, laughing as he ran with reckless abandon, ducking his head to avoid a string of hanging lanterns. The balminess of the air cleared a little as they left the more densely occupied area in the heart of the city, but Gyuvin didn't stop or let go of Ricky's wrist until they broke through the bounds of a willow forest, the grass carpeting the ground almost silver in the light of the moon. He collapsed onto the grass by the side of the lake, laughing and panting from the sudden exhaustion.

Ricky sat down on the soft grass opposite him, panting lightly. "Why'd you bring me here?"

Gyuvin gestured to the lake. "My father used to bring me here all the time during the warmer months. Come on!"

The lake wasn't massive, but it was large enough for people to swim comfortably in. Water lilies and lilypads blanketed the far edges of the body of water, near the banks, but the rest of the surface was so still Gyuvin could see the unbroken reflection of the moon in the water's surface. He shrugged off as much of his clothes as he could without being indecent and dove headfirst into the lake, disappearing under its surface for a good few seconds before resurfacing.

"The water's much cooler," Gyuvin said, pushing water and his hair away from his face. "There are bigger lakes closer to the heart of the city that the children usually swim at during summer, but there's always too many people there. No one knows about this lake. It's just for me..."