By Zephyria 
“……Sometimes I feel like you’re even worse than me at not using your turn signal, Hyung.”
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“I mean you just dive right in without any warning.”
Recalling the correlation between a car’s turn signal and a warning, Kim Si-baek nodded.
“That’s an interesting expression. Anyway, am I right?”
Tae-un gave a short laugh, lifted his head from Si-baek’s shoulder, and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. His long, sturdy fingers tapped lightly against the folds of the sheet.
“Of course, saying I liked you is in the past tense. Asking that is unlike you, considering how you pretended not to notice until the very end when I was a kid and liked you.”
Since it wasn’t a lie, Kim Si-baek scratched the back of his neck awkwardly.
“Just hypothetically. If you found out a kid fourteen years younger than you was following you around because they liked you, how do you think you’d react?”
“I would’ve dumped them, saying I have no interest in brats.”
“…….”
“Ah, I politely declined, telling them to find a man younger and fresher than an old guy like me.”
As Kim Si-baek’s eyes narrowed, Tae-un quickly corrected himself and gave a teary-eyed look as if asking if he was going to be scolded. If Biyendwe had been there, he would have reprimanded them for playing games in the middle of a serious conversation, but since even such obvious schemes were cute, there was nothing to be done.
Kim Si-baek was aware of his own severe condition. The biggest problem was that while he was aware, he had no intention of fixing it.
Still, there was one thing he decided he had to correct, so he spoke again.
“……I probably would have done the same. If your confession hadn’t stopped twenty-one years ago.”
What were the words Tae-un had spoken just before being swept away by the rift?
〈In a few more years, I’ll be an adult. An adult just like you, Hyung. So, I… Hyung…〉
He hadn’t heard past that point, but the child’s longing, deeper and hotter than ever before, provided the answer. A child who could no longer endure the heat within him burning his immature and fragile heart would have surely tried to convey those feelings.
But Tae-un.
“Huh?”
Instead, he looked bewildered.
“I confessed? Since you were pretending not to notice, I tried to hide it as much as possible because I thought it might be burdensome for you.”
“……Oh, you didn’t?”
“Hmm, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but probably not.”
……So those words weren’t the start of a confession?
Feeling suddenly and intensely embarrassed, Kim Si-baek fanned his face with his hands. His cheeks burned hot. He was truly glad Biyendwe hadn’t heard this.
“Anyway, putting the past aside…… why do you want to sleep with me when you don’t even like me?”
“Because my body is horny?”
“…….”
Tae-un rubbed the back of his hand where he had been slapped.
“Do you need some grand reason for a single bout of sex, Si-baek Hyung? If the hearts match and the bodies match, you just do it.”
“I’ve never done that with someone I wasn’t dating.”
“Then we can just date.”
“……You said you don’t do dating.”
“If that’s what you want, I’ll pretend to date you.”
A sigh escaped him at the weightless answer, making all his previous agonizing thoughts seem pointless. If Tae-un’s thoughts were this light, it was a relief to think that Tae-un could easily forget him after returning to the mak slecht.
“You said that even if we became a relationship where we, um……”
“Sex?”
“……Yes. That, doing that wouldn’t change anything. How can you be so sure?”
Tae-un was his brother. However, he was a child who could no longer be a substitute for his dead brother, nor should he ever become one. Even though he had steeled his heart, telling himself not to bind the boy with his own obsession with family, the anxiety remained.
Even if they weren’t defined as lovers, the moment they shared and craved each other’s bodies would surely drop a drop of unfamiliar color into the time they had built together. He wouldn’t know how that color would change until it actually happened.
Would it gradually distort and eventually be shaped into a feeling of regret? Would even the memories and recollections built over time be disrupted and become a source of pain? Would the longing that had supported his entire life decay? Kim Si-baek couldn’t help but worry.
“…….”
The gaze looking down at his wavering eyes was silent. Before he could sense the unrest pooling at the bottom of those sunken black pupils, Tae-un smiled, his eyes curving thinly.
“You’re going back soon anyway.”
In the gentle gesture of his fingers playfully winding around Si-baek’s, the distant unrest vanished as if it had been a lie.
“You and I met for nine years, and we were apart for twenty-one. It was a much longer time for you, though. We’ve been apart for that long, but has anything changed?”
“……No.”
“You said the Han-gyeol you saw in the vision wasn’t much different from now. If that’s the case, the time you can spend on Earth won’t be that long, so would you and I really change just because we mix in a new relationship during that short time?”
“…….”
“You’re still you, and I’m still me.”
Well, can you really guarantee that? He thought, but the black eyes staring at him as if to enclose him conveyed a strange certainty. Wrapping around Kim Si-baek’s hand, which had been holding and playing with him, Tae-un guided it to cup his cheek. The skin was far paler than in childhood, yet the child’s unchanging warmth was transmitted to his palm.
The black eyes, which had been searching him, narrowed slightly, and their breath drew closer. A steady breath lingered softly over his skin. Feeling a stiff tension rising in his own skin instead, Kim Si-baek bit his lower lip firmly to keep his breath from escaping.
A finger with hard calluses tapped his lips, as if squeezing them where a bit of strength had gathered. Even at the light pressure of the fingertip pressing and touching, his soft lips were pushed inward. Every nerve in his body was swept away by the rhythm of the fingertip urging him to open his lips.
His body’s senses reproduced the heat of their overlapping tongues. How hot the pouring breath had been, how the hot flesh that dug in roughly had swept through his mouth, and how heavy the thing entering between his thighs had been.
Tae-un was close. Those pitch-black eyes, almost indistinguishable from darkness, wavered as if to swallow him whole. The moment the intense longing dwelling within them turned toward him, Kim Si-baek exhaled a ragged breath and pushed Tae-un’s face away.
Despite being pushed away obediently, it was Kim Si-baek whose head felt dizzy. Compared to the infinitely light words of “let’s just have sex,” how heavy was the desire directed toward him?
Catching his breath, he also feigned a light tone.
“……No, even so, sleeping with you right away seems like a separate issue.”
“Aw, Hyung. As a sex partner, I’m the best candidate. My cock is big, my ass is plump, and I won’t get clingy or pathetic. I’m pretty, cute, and lovely.”
Since Tae-un’s voice in response was no different from usual, Kim Si-baek momentarily wondered if the longing he had witnessed was an illusion.
“…….”
No. It wasn’t. Contrary to his words, the burning desire and thirst at the bottom of the gaze staring straight at him were hotter than the child who had called out to him, swept up in the heat of that summer twenty-one years ago.
Having pretended not to notice until the end, he had finally admitted it in front of him after many years. A premonition that he would eventually be swallowed by that darkness scratched his spine sharply, stimulating his nerves.
But not right now.
“Uh, to put it in your terms, my body isn’t horny.”
“…….”
When he countered using Tae-un’s own words, Tae-un’s face became utterly speechless. Kim Si-baek smiled thinly and pulled the boy’s shoulder.
“It’s late. Let’s just sleep for now, Un-ah.”
“……You’re just going to hold my hand and sleep, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t I just hold your cock and sleep?”
“I told you not to use slang.”
“Butttt……”
Holding the moping, mumbling Tae-un, who was making sure he was heard, he lay down beside him on the bed. As the light was switched off, darkness quickly descended. Tae-un, tossing and turning, leaned entirely on him.
The weight resting on his chest and the shoulder were very heavy and broad.
It was the weight of an adult man, not a small child.
One who harbored a hot longing that would one day swallow him whole.
✽ ✽ ✽
〈Hyung. Wake up.〉
At the voice that woke him with a single, monotonous phrase without even shaking his body, Kim Si-baek opened his eyes with a frown. What appeared in his blurred vision was a familiar man’s face.
Blinking as he tried to figure out who it was, he woke up instantly the moment he recognized the man’s face.
〈……Father?〉
The other person did not respond. Thanks to the lack of reaction, Kim Si-baek was able to compose his bewilderment. Logically, there was no way his dead father would appear. It wasn’t as if he was dreaming. Above all, if it were his father, he would have woken him with a kick rather than words.
The middle-aged man before him reminded him of his father, but above all, he had a face that looked exactly like his own. Staring blankly at the handsome middle-aged man, Kim Si-baek only remembered after a moment what the man had said. Hyung. He had called him Hyung.
There was only one person who called him that.
〈……Un-ah?〉
〈Don’t call me that weirdly.〉
The man replied in the same slow, toneless manner. That characteristic tone, devoid of emotion, awakened the senses that had been submerged in the depths of a drowsy slumber. Kim Si-baek’s eyes widened.
It was a truly absurd thought, but this man might be……