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epicscribblestitle: three's a crowd, one's a clown
fandom: hikaru no go
contains: uh, kissing? rarepairing?
notes:readerofasaph made me. yes, I know the title is trite. unbetaed.
1. Ko Yeong-ha always means what he says and never what he implies. Taeseon never means what he says and controls his implications to the fullest; the purest of intentions. Somehow, regardless, they are friends; or at least as friendly as two people can be with opposite definitions of the truth.
Here is a truth Taeseon believes: Shindou is many things to his people, and he is but one thing to Yeong-ha. Here is a truth Yeong-ha believes: Shindou is one thing to his people -- a go player -- and many things to Yeong-ha (stubborn, reckless, interesting, spiteful, emotional). Despite this, they play together, Taeseon and Yeong-ha, and despite this, Yeong-ha invites him to witness the rematch. Because of this, Taeseon refuses. His respect is an ill-won thing, and he does not choose to witness Yeong-ha's loss.
Yeong-ha always loses.
Taeseon likes him still.
2.
"I won't," Yeong-ha promises, and the sweep of his hair, the dimple in his chin, is arrogant and sweetly honest.
Yeong-ha is only ever so when they are alone, when they are a pair: player, friends, acquaintances. (The rule of three only applies to offical matches, team games, and Suyeong's acute sense of being the youngest, the bravest, the loneliest. Taeseon knows these three things are untrue. Yeong-ha believes them: it is how he treats him as he does.)
"Besides," he continues, picking from the many conversations they have gentled into fallow lines of thought, "how many times has he said he'll defeat me, anyway?"
The discussion is not unrelated to Yeong-ha's habit of keeping his word. Taeseon does not say: How many times have you said you will defeat me?
"It's your turn," he says instead, and Yeong-ha glances the board with imperious, searching fingers, and scrapes his fingernails afterwards.
It's a disgusting habit for a beautiful man, but then, Yeong-ha is not a man, and Taeseon is not beautiful.
"Yours," Yeong-ha says, and Taeseon takes the victory.
3.
Rematches between Touya Akira, Ko Yeong-ha, and Shindou Hikaru have become infamous for their volume, their tendency to be pushed later and later into the day until the three of them are forced to play through the night, yawning while Taeseon watches, fetches cups of coffee and tea, and reminds all of them in careful Japanese and Korean to turn off the lights when they are finished.
Suyeong has long accepted that Yeong-ha's choice of travelling companion to the rematches (China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, protectorates and republics and constitutional democracies, and all of them play Go) will always be Taeseon.
Yeong-ha claims it is because Taeseon is quiet, helpful, and reliable and other such esteemed virtues, but it is because of this: after the matches Yeong-ha enters their rented hotel room, cranks up the heater to winter temperatures, and flips on each light one by one, even the desk lamps and the tiny emergency lamps in the cupboards and the balcony floodlights, and Taeseon does not tell him to stop. Nor does he tell him not to.
Instead, he gestures to a cup of tea, set out at the table across from Taeseon, and Yeong-ha will sit and think and arch his back until his eyes are staring into the lamp that is always overhead, his eyelids forced back, his mouth a little open.
It is the closest to dry-season sunlight, the closest he can give him to the humid afternoons of Seoul where Yeong-ha first learned to play and where he always thinks best, and during this time, Yeong-ha will never look at him. He blinks twice, perhaps thrice, every thirty seconds, and though he shifts in his seat, drapes his arms over the back, he does not look at Taeseon.
He is not the sun. He cannot be that for Yeong-ha. But he can be the one who makes it, and he is also the one who allows it by virtue of never taking it away from him, and that is perhaps why Yeong-ha trusts him.
Yeong-ha says he trusts him.
He knows it is closer to need.
A need for sunlight, a need for the artifical glare to be replaced by another, a need for a quiet gaze that did not waver from him no matter his consequences.
Taeseon, too, needs this illumination of Yeong-ha bathed and basking in light to truly believe that he has or will come back from the games that consume him. He needs to believe that, as the tea will be drunk, so Yeong-ha will close his eyes and be his again.
This time, as always, Yeong-ha does, and Taeseon turns off the lights and, as always, makes his excuses to Shindou and Touya the next day: a headache, please do not bother him, you are far too intense for three games in one day, let alone six in two. Leave him be.
It is always Shindou who tugs Touya away by the elbow, a cheerful "Come on already, Akira!", and it always Touya who looks back, expressionless.
It is always Taeseon who bows goodbye, revealing nothing.
4.
Yeong-ha's sister finds it amusing to sit in the kitchen of the flat she and her brother share with a cup of coffee in hand while they rewatch games from major tournaments.
She says it is because her brother is hilarious; Yeong-ha scowls at this and says extremely impolite things.
Taeseon is the one who thanks her for inviting them and the one who subtly removes her an hour later, long enough for her to tire of their discussion and short enough that she isn't quite tired enough to sleep then and there at the counter.
"Ah," Yeong-ha breathes, folding himself into careless poses, and it sounds relieved. It is relieved, and it also isn't. "She doesn't play," he says.
He means that.
Taeseon carefully not does think he means to be grateful for the tension wending up his spine through the shirt he wears, drawn tight as he slumps forward, head against his shins, his palms gripping his soles, and stretches.
It's nine in the morning, and the haze has made itself known, as well as the rain, but Yeong-ha relocates to the window and steals what little light there is. He could tell him it is a futile effort to relax at his sister's depature when it is Taeseon's presence forcing his shoulders to tense, but he doesn't.
"You'll get cold," practical. "It isn't warm enough."
Yeong-ha gracefully stumbles to his feet. "Stop fussing, Taeseon. I know my body better than you do."
This is true. He does.
"Come on," and it's not an apology, because Yeong-ha has never known that there is anything to apologise for, but Taeseon indulges himself and imagines it as one.
They eat biscuits and move to Yeong-ha's room and sit on the floor with tea. The rug is very comfortable, a plush so deep his fingers sink when he settles himself. Yeong-ha's trousers are audible when he shifts forward and takes white.
"Be good to me," a modified version of the standard greeting that, more ironically, his sister invented.
Taeseon carefully doesn't take it as sarcastic. "Be good to me."
They play many games together, Taeseon and Yeong-ha, and they take breaks to study, to dribble their fingers over the piano, to sit on the balcony with lunch steaming hot in their laps and rain blowing through under the roof, spattering socks and knees and noses, but they drift together to the privacy of Yeong-ha's room to begin again, and again.
Yeong-ha is always white.
Taeseon is always black.
A tie is possible, but entirely improbable. Neither of them would allow it. Yeong-ha because he felt it as a show of weakness; Taeseon because it would be an admission of strength.
They are incompatible, and only hold on to their friendship through their combined grips on the scratched goban between them. Fortunately, neither of them is interested in letting go.
5.
These are things he does not contemplate: Yeong-ha's swaying hair. Yeong-ha's eyebrows rising in amusement. Yeong-ha's extraordinarily ordinary eyes. Yeong-ha's callused slender fingers.
Yeong-ha's Go.
They are all things he knows by heart, perhaps better than Go, and this is the secret he will never give a shade to: if it were possible to have Yeong-ha without Go, he would, though it would mean they never met, or in the case of meeting, break apart as strangers.
As Yeong-ha believes in the power of Go to control, to enrich, to sharpen, so Taeseon believes in its strange and rare ability to make a mockery of so many things.
This is something Shindou and he know quite, quite well, and there are times Touya Akira wears the same expression Yeong-ha does when Taeseon says something particularly truthful: one of baffled, suspicious interest, as though they are listening for a radio station that does not exist on the dial.
They seem to expect it will, of course, expect a yet where there is a no. That is their truth: their expectations rule them. Yeong-ha is expected to be beautiful, and thus he is so, because how else could he be Yeong-ha? Touya Akira is the son of Touya Kouyou, and thus he is so, because how else could he be Touya?
Shindou and Taeseon know otherwise. Touya Akira is Akira, however path he comes by himself, and Yeong-ha would still be Yeong-ha, insufferable, gloriously so, even with a plain face.
But he and Shindou would not love them as much. Not quite. And when it came to Go, not quite was quite enough to break the game.
Or, perhaps, draw a tie.
6.
"Taeseon." Yeong-ha is giving him that expression, half-caught, demi-fearful. "What is wrong with you today?"
He does not give the obvious truth. "I'm not feeling too well. I don't like air travel," he complained, using the tone he took with comedians who recycled jokes from ten years ago as though they were new. But Yeong-has never bothered to visit his house on weekends, and he doesn't know the tells. It feels obscurely satisfying to deceive him. It always has. "The air's too dry in the cabins. My nose hurts."
His exasperation is familarly reassuring, the arch of his hands impatient. "Just don't get me sick too."
Taeseon allowed himself to wonder it aloud simply to test Yeong-ha's response, and wasn't disappointed. "Do you think I should put something on it?"
"How should I know?"
He looked at him. Beautiful, haughty, stumbling Yeong-ha. Always so certain, always needing certainties. And Taeseon was a certainty of the most stubborn kind, like Shindou, but where Shindou found instruction Taeseon found caution, and so he said: "I thought you might."
They stared at each other in the way of strangers.
"I thought you might," he said again.
Yeong-ha gave him a quizzical look, wary, always wary, of the unsubstantiated, of things abstracted beyond logical connection. Taeseon went on being Taeseon at him: patient, kind, familiar, virtuous.
"Oh," he said, with the expression of someone who finally remembered the name of the last great-aunt captured in a sepia-toned photograph, the tone of those wondering on the edges of reality. "When I was little, and had eczema."
They remained silent.
He shrugged, finally, twisting away at the shoulder. Taeseon chose to accept the implication of regret. "Nothing fancy. Drink a lot of water, breathe through your nose when you're in the shower."
Taeseon smiled his disappointment. "That's easy, then."
"Yes," Yeong-ha said. And for once there was very little to interpret, either truth or by omission: he was shuttered, and Taeseon was not to know, but he did in any case.
The lesson had been taught. It remained to be seen if it had been learned.
7.
Yeong-ha's sister answered the door by the efficient method of stepping directly into his path and forcing Taeseon to choose between diving against the railing, which would hurt, or diving through the doorway, which would land him in the arms of an extremely amused Yeong-ha.
He chose the railing. It did hurt. He had known that. But it was also cold, and wet, and unpleasant. Taeseon unpeeled his hands with a grimace, bowed to her back and drifting concern, and turned to Yeong-ha's laughter.
Taeseon saw him, as always, and knew he had been concerned until he had given all appearances of being fine, and it made it easier to bear the wet stripes across his stomach and chest soaking his shirt. It had stopped raining perhaps an hour before, and it was forty-five minutes to Yeong-ha's flat by commute from his family's home.
The air was very, very wet, and there were parallel stripes of dirt across his chest that hurt when he breathed, and for once he wished he didn't appreciate Yeong-ha's confidence at all.
But he did, and he peeled out of his jacket and shoes while Yeong-ha wandered off to make tea. There was a pot of Yeong-ha's favourite tea on the counter, but it was a breath from stone-cold and nearly empty.
Taeseon didn't take it as a sign to be concerned by. There was no reason to, not when it was his favourite and when the biscuit platter was half-empty with the way Yeong-ha studied, nibbling little by little as he turned the pages of whichever book of kifu.
Yeong-ha reappeared with a tray of tea, the biscuits, other sundries, and a shirt over his arm. "Put that on," he said, "meet me in five."
He obeyed, his shirt and jacket lined up above the heater to dry, Yeong-ha's shirt settling cool and soft on his shoulders.
When he came in there was tea, exquisitely arranged, and the board, also painfully neat, as Yeong-ha disliked but which Taeseon preferred.
He sat, adjusting the sleeves of his shirt. It was a little loose in the collar, too tight in the waist, too tailored to be flattering to any physique other than Yeong-ha's, but it was comfortable nonetheless.
Taeseon found black stones in his hand and did not look at Yeong-ha: it would have been staring at the sun, it would have been the heart of the game, it would have caused it all to be useless.
"Play," Yeong-ha ordered, before him, as always, and with him, for the first time. "Play me."
Not let's play, as a pair, matched and unmatched, but as two divided, as they were, and he knew from the set of Yeong-ha's hand when he placed a stone that he knew, and he was furious, and still knew nothing.
Taeseon kissed him over the board displaying his two-moku win, their hands clenched on it as he imagined they would be, ruining the game, careless, ceaseless.
"Oh," Yeong-ha said, very quietly, and when they drew away, they stared. Taseon waited with caution. Yeong-ha watched him with the logic of a mathematician until he lunged away for kifu paper and quietly, silently began the first record of a game Yeong-ha had lost to a friend, recreating the game as he went from the scattered stones.
A truth traded for another, the same secret shared and kept.
Taeseon knew Yeong-ha had learned the lesson when, instead of flaring the lights to full brightness, he linked their hands across the empty board and leaned in to kiss him, eyes closed.
fandom: hikaru no go
contains: uh, kissing? rarepairing?
notes:
readerofasaph made me. yes, I know the title is trite. unbetaed.1. Ko Yeong-ha always means what he says and never what he implies. Taeseon never means what he says and controls his implications to the fullest; the purest of intentions. Somehow, regardless, they are friends; or at least as friendly as two people can be with opposite definitions of the truth.
Here is a truth Taeseon believes: Shindou is many things to his people, and he is but one thing to Yeong-ha. Here is a truth Yeong-ha believes: Shindou is one thing to his people -- a go player -- and many things to Yeong-ha (stubborn, reckless, interesting, spiteful, emotional). Despite this, they play together, Taeseon and Yeong-ha, and despite this, Yeong-ha invites him to witness the rematch. Because of this, Taeseon refuses. His respect is an ill-won thing, and he does not choose to witness Yeong-ha's loss.
Yeong-ha always loses.
Taeseon likes him still.
2.
"I won't," Yeong-ha promises, and the sweep of his hair, the dimple in his chin, is arrogant and sweetly honest.
Yeong-ha is only ever so when they are alone, when they are a pair: player, friends, acquaintances. (The rule of three only applies to offical matches, team games, and Suyeong's acute sense of being the youngest, the bravest, the loneliest. Taeseon knows these three things are untrue. Yeong-ha believes them: it is how he treats him as he does.)
"Besides," he continues, picking from the many conversations they have gentled into fallow lines of thought, "how many times has he said he'll defeat me, anyway?"
The discussion is not unrelated to Yeong-ha's habit of keeping his word. Taeseon does not say: How many times have you said you will defeat me?
"It's your turn," he says instead, and Yeong-ha glances the board with imperious, searching fingers, and scrapes his fingernails afterwards.
It's a disgusting habit for a beautiful man, but then, Yeong-ha is not a man, and Taeseon is not beautiful.
"Yours," Yeong-ha says, and Taeseon takes the victory.
3.
Rematches between Touya Akira, Ko Yeong-ha, and Shindou Hikaru have become infamous for their volume, their tendency to be pushed later and later into the day until the three of them are forced to play through the night, yawning while Taeseon watches, fetches cups of coffee and tea, and reminds all of them in careful Japanese and Korean to turn off the lights when they are finished.
Suyeong has long accepted that Yeong-ha's choice of travelling companion to the rematches (China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, protectorates and republics and constitutional democracies, and all of them play Go) will always be Taeseon.
Yeong-ha claims it is because Taeseon is quiet, helpful, and reliable and other such esteemed virtues, but it is because of this: after the matches Yeong-ha enters their rented hotel room, cranks up the heater to winter temperatures, and flips on each light one by one, even the desk lamps and the tiny emergency lamps in the cupboards and the balcony floodlights, and Taeseon does not tell him to stop. Nor does he tell him not to.
Instead, he gestures to a cup of tea, set out at the table across from Taeseon, and Yeong-ha will sit and think and arch his back until his eyes are staring into the lamp that is always overhead, his eyelids forced back, his mouth a little open.
It is the closest to dry-season sunlight, the closest he can give him to the humid afternoons of Seoul where Yeong-ha first learned to play and where he always thinks best, and during this time, Yeong-ha will never look at him. He blinks twice, perhaps thrice, every thirty seconds, and though he shifts in his seat, drapes his arms over the back, he does not look at Taeseon.
He is not the sun. He cannot be that for Yeong-ha. But he can be the one who makes it, and he is also the one who allows it by virtue of never taking it away from him, and that is perhaps why Yeong-ha trusts him.
Yeong-ha says he trusts him.
He knows it is closer to need.
A need for sunlight, a need for the artifical glare to be replaced by another, a need for a quiet gaze that did not waver from him no matter his consequences.
Taeseon, too, needs this illumination of Yeong-ha bathed and basking in light to truly believe that he has or will come back from the games that consume him. He needs to believe that, as the tea will be drunk, so Yeong-ha will close his eyes and be his again.
This time, as always, Yeong-ha does, and Taeseon turns off the lights and, as always, makes his excuses to Shindou and Touya the next day: a headache, please do not bother him, you are far too intense for three games in one day, let alone six in two. Leave him be.
It is always Shindou who tugs Touya away by the elbow, a cheerful "Come on already, Akira!", and it always Touya who looks back, expressionless.
It is always Taeseon who bows goodbye, revealing nothing.
4.
Yeong-ha's sister finds it amusing to sit in the kitchen of the flat she and her brother share with a cup of coffee in hand while they rewatch games from major tournaments.
She says it is because her brother is hilarious; Yeong-ha scowls at this and says extremely impolite things.
Taeseon is the one who thanks her for inviting them and the one who subtly removes her an hour later, long enough for her to tire of their discussion and short enough that she isn't quite tired enough to sleep then and there at the counter.
"Ah," Yeong-ha breathes, folding himself into careless poses, and it sounds relieved. It is relieved, and it also isn't. "She doesn't play," he says.
He means that.
Taeseon carefully not does think he means to be grateful for the tension wending up his spine through the shirt he wears, drawn tight as he slumps forward, head against his shins, his palms gripping his soles, and stretches.
It's nine in the morning, and the haze has made itself known, as well as the rain, but Yeong-ha relocates to the window and steals what little light there is. He could tell him it is a futile effort to relax at his sister's depature when it is Taeseon's presence forcing his shoulders to tense, but he doesn't.
"You'll get cold," practical. "It isn't warm enough."
Yeong-ha gracefully stumbles to his feet. "Stop fussing, Taeseon. I know my body better than you do."
This is true. He does.
"Come on," and it's not an apology, because Yeong-ha has never known that there is anything to apologise for, but Taeseon indulges himself and imagines it as one.
They eat biscuits and move to Yeong-ha's room and sit on the floor with tea. The rug is very comfortable, a plush so deep his fingers sink when he settles himself. Yeong-ha's trousers are audible when he shifts forward and takes white.
"Be good to me," a modified version of the standard greeting that, more ironically, his sister invented.
Taeseon carefully doesn't take it as sarcastic. "Be good to me."
They play many games together, Taeseon and Yeong-ha, and they take breaks to study, to dribble their fingers over the piano, to sit on the balcony with lunch steaming hot in their laps and rain blowing through under the roof, spattering socks and knees and noses, but they drift together to the privacy of Yeong-ha's room to begin again, and again.
Yeong-ha is always white.
Taeseon is always black.
A tie is possible, but entirely improbable. Neither of them would allow it. Yeong-ha because he felt it as a show of weakness; Taeseon because it would be an admission of strength.
They are incompatible, and only hold on to their friendship through their combined grips on the scratched goban between them. Fortunately, neither of them is interested in letting go.
5.
These are things he does not contemplate: Yeong-ha's swaying hair. Yeong-ha's eyebrows rising in amusement. Yeong-ha's extraordinarily ordinary eyes. Yeong-ha's callused slender fingers.
Yeong-ha's Go.
They are all things he knows by heart, perhaps better than Go, and this is the secret he will never give a shade to: if it were possible to have Yeong-ha without Go, he would, though it would mean they never met, or in the case of meeting, break apart as strangers.
As Yeong-ha believes in the power of Go to control, to enrich, to sharpen, so Taeseon believes in its strange and rare ability to make a mockery of so many things.
This is something Shindou and he know quite, quite well, and there are times Touya Akira wears the same expression Yeong-ha does when Taeseon says something particularly truthful: one of baffled, suspicious interest, as though they are listening for a radio station that does not exist on the dial.
They seem to expect it will, of course, expect a yet where there is a no. That is their truth: their expectations rule them. Yeong-ha is expected to be beautiful, and thus he is so, because how else could he be Yeong-ha? Touya Akira is the son of Touya Kouyou, and thus he is so, because how else could he be Touya?
Shindou and Taeseon know otherwise. Touya Akira is Akira, however path he comes by himself, and Yeong-ha would still be Yeong-ha, insufferable, gloriously so, even with a plain face.
But he and Shindou would not love them as much. Not quite. And when it came to Go, not quite was quite enough to break the game.
Or, perhaps, draw a tie.
6.
"Taeseon." Yeong-ha is giving him that expression, half-caught, demi-fearful. "What is wrong with you today?"
He does not give the obvious truth. "I'm not feeling too well. I don't like air travel," he complained, using the tone he took with comedians who recycled jokes from ten years ago as though they were new. But Yeong-has never bothered to visit his house on weekends, and he doesn't know the tells. It feels obscurely satisfying to deceive him. It always has. "The air's too dry in the cabins. My nose hurts."
His exasperation is familarly reassuring, the arch of his hands impatient. "Just don't get me sick too."
Taeseon allowed himself to wonder it aloud simply to test Yeong-ha's response, and wasn't disappointed. "Do you think I should put something on it?"
"How should I know?"
He looked at him. Beautiful, haughty, stumbling Yeong-ha. Always so certain, always needing certainties. And Taeseon was a certainty of the most stubborn kind, like Shindou, but where Shindou found instruction Taeseon found caution, and so he said: "I thought you might."
They stared at each other in the way of strangers.
"I thought you might," he said again.
Yeong-ha gave him a quizzical look, wary, always wary, of the unsubstantiated, of things abstracted beyond logical connection. Taeseon went on being Taeseon at him: patient, kind, familiar, virtuous.
"Oh," he said, with the expression of someone who finally remembered the name of the last great-aunt captured in a sepia-toned photograph, the tone of those wondering on the edges of reality. "When I was little, and had eczema."
They remained silent.
He shrugged, finally, twisting away at the shoulder. Taeseon chose to accept the implication of regret. "Nothing fancy. Drink a lot of water, breathe through your nose when you're in the shower."
Taeseon smiled his disappointment. "That's easy, then."
"Yes," Yeong-ha said. And for once there was very little to interpret, either truth or by omission: he was shuttered, and Taeseon was not to know, but he did in any case.
The lesson had been taught. It remained to be seen if it had been learned.
7.
Yeong-ha's sister answered the door by the efficient method of stepping directly into his path and forcing Taeseon to choose between diving against the railing, which would hurt, or diving through the doorway, which would land him in the arms of an extremely amused Yeong-ha.
He chose the railing. It did hurt. He had known that. But it was also cold, and wet, and unpleasant. Taeseon unpeeled his hands with a grimace, bowed to her back and drifting concern, and turned to Yeong-ha's laughter.
Taeseon saw him, as always, and knew he had been concerned until he had given all appearances of being fine, and it made it easier to bear the wet stripes across his stomach and chest soaking his shirt. It had stopped raining perhaps an hour before, and it was forty-five minutes to Yeong-ha's flat by commute from his family's home.
The air was very, very wet, and there were parallel stripes of dirt across his chest that hurt when he breathed, and for once he wished he didn't appreciate Yeong-ha's confidence at all.
But he did, and he peeled out of his jacket and shoes while Yeong-ha wandered off to make tea. There was a pot of Yeong-ha's favourite tea on the counter, but it was a breath from stone-cold and nearly empty.
Taeseon didn't take it as a sign to be concerned by. There was no reason to, not when it was his favourite and when the biscuit platter was half-empty with the way Yeong-ha studied, nibbling little by little as he turned the pages of whichever book of kifu.
Yeong-ha reappeared with a tray of tea, the biscuits, other sundries, and a shirt over his arm. "Put that on," he said, "meet me in five."
He obeyed, his shirt and jacket lined up above the heater to dry, Yeong-ha's shirt settling cool and soft on his shoulders.
When he came in there was tea, exquisitely arranged, and the board, also painfully neat, as Yeong-ha disliked but which Taeseon preferred.
He sat, adjusting the sleeves of his shirt. It was a little loose in the collar, too tight in the waist, too tailored to be flattering to any physique other than Yeong-ha's, but it was comfortable nonetheless.
Taeseon found black stones in his hand and did not look at Yeong-ha: it would have been staring at the sun, it would have been the heart of the game, it would have caused it all to be useless.
"Play," Yeong-ha ordered, before him, as always, and with him, for the first time. "Play me."
Not let's play, as a pair, matched and unmatched, but as two divided, as they were, and he knew from the set of Yeong-ha's hand when he placed a stone that he knew, and he was furious, and still knew nothing.
Taeseon kissed him over the board displaying his two-moku win, their hands clenched on it as he imagined they would be, ruining the game, careless, ceaseless.
"Oh," Yeong-ha said, very quietly, and when they drew away, they stared. Taseon waited with caution. Yeong-ha watched him with the logic of a mathematician until he lunged away for kifu paper and quietly, silently began the first record of a game Yeong-ha had lost to a friend, recreating the game as he went from the scattered stones.
A truth traded for another, the same secret shared and kept.
Taeseon knew Yeong-ha had learned the lesson when, instead of flaring the lights to full brightness, he linked their hands across the empty board and leaned in to kiss him, eyes closed.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 10:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 10:04 pm (UTC)Thank you very much! :D
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 03:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-13 10:09 pm (UTC)Glad to see you like the POV! Thank you. :D