hold me 𐦍 yeonbin

018 ᯓᡣ𐭩

Soobin wades through knee high bluebells to reach Siyeon at the opposite end of the meadow. Behind her, a sea of trees looms and rocks and sways in front of the moon. The sky is full of stars, but they aren’t from the Milky Way. They don’t shine.

The only light comes from single candle lit atop the tallest bluebell. The fire is warm and it burns Soobin’s eyes but the flower beneath doesn’t whither.

“Do you remember the bluebells?” It’s Siyeon’s voice, but her lips aren’t moving. Her eyes are closed, legs crossed, hands resting in her lap with her thumbs pressed together forming a small triangle.

Soobin can’t find his voice. He looks around for it, brushes aside the bluebells, but it evades him. All he hears is a name muffled by the wind.

He nods.

“Do you remember what I asked you when we met?” Siyeon speaks, this time from her body.

“You asked me if you looked human.” Soobin smiles at the memory.

A silly first impression, but a lasting one. Soobin remembers her sitting against the brick wall in the courtyard on their high school campus reading a book in a language he did not recognize. When he stared at the cover for too long trying to decipher the letters and make sense of the images, a splitting pang ripped through his head.

Soobin meets Siyeon in the middle of the meadow and sits down in front of her, legs crossed and hands mimicking her own.

Soobin has never been able to place a specific scent in a dream before, but all his senses are engulfed by the bluebells in this moment. Their smell, colors, dulled by the night but bright under the flames, their rustling and waving and growing and shaking, their soft bulbs rubbing against his arms and his legs.

“And you asked me what a human was supposed to look like,” Siyeon says. “Do you remember what I said?”

“Like a pixie, but larger.” Soobin laughs.

He laughed at the time as well before he sat down next to Siyeon and asked her, “Do I look human to you?”

Siyeon said, “You look incredibly human today.”

“Did you know, even back then? About Yeonjun?” Soobin asks.

“I speak predictions, but I do not know them until they come to be. Futures change when you are given free will to decide if the one laid before you is the one you wish to pursue. Predictions is all they are.”

“Have you ever been wrong?”

The flame flickers in the wind, sending sparks flying through the air, dancing through the field of rustling bluebells. The wind blows low in the valley.

“Never wrong. Once corrected.”

“So when you told me that the next day, a man with a metal heart would steal my future—"

The flame on the bluebell floats away, taking with it the last of the orange glow, shrouding the meadow in cold blues and whites.

“Not your ‘future.’ I said, ‘tomorrow.’”

“How is that different?”

“Humans do not have a word for the yesterdays and todays and tomorrows I read. Humans only have today.”

“You failed to explain that.”

“You were fourteen. You weren’t supposed to remember your first fortune.” Siyeon sounds impressed, her expression is unwavering.

“It was a big deal for me. I’m assuming not many people are fated to save a dying pixie when they’re fourteen.”

Siyeon tilts her head, opens one eye, like she is peeking at something she should not be looking at.