Chapter Text
The salt air would chap his already-dry lips, but Yoongi stood deep in the bow of the boat and let the furious wind batter his body anyway. It was nice, in a way, to be able to feel something.
He did not shiver.
He had lingered in Jeju for far too long. How long had he been searching? Too long – and every minute of it entirely fruitless. Each person he’d sought had denied him, every cure he’d tried had had no discernible effect. His pilgrimage there had been a last resort, based on a desperate hope that perhaps the haenyeo, the women divers, might be able to help him. After all, the haenyeo had an almost preternatural knowledge of the swash and purl of the icy waves and the hidden terrors the sea held in its silent depths. Didn’t they offer up the very air in their lungs when they pushed themselves against gravity and pressure to draw treasures from the ocean floor? Didn’t they slow the very beating of their hearts in exchange for the bounty of the sea?
Surely they could crack open their ancient secrets and within them discover a way to help Yoongi. He prayed that they would put aside their own grievances. Heaven knew they had good reason to rebuff him; it had been in Jeju, after all, all those years ago, where he had first given his heart away.
But to Yoongi’s despair, the haenyeo hadn’t been able to help. The oldest was a wizened old matriarch with a missing finger where an oyster had clamped tight on it in her youth. The others had sworn that the payment of flesh and blood to the ocean had granted her skill beyond all measure, so that even in her eighties she was able to sink, weightless and effortless, into the freezing water, and always came up with net bags full to bursting. Oysters, abalones, armfuls of laver, the ocean gave up its bounty easily and willingly into her grasp.
But even she, blessed by the water, had taken one look at Yoongi and had shaken her head in deep regret. Her touch skimmed lightly over his cheek, the gap in her hand sending a shiver down the nape of his neck. “I know who you are,” she’d said, and she sounded so regretful, so sorry, that Yoongi already knew what she was going to say. He closed his eyes in defeat. “I cannot help you,” she’d said finally. “We cannot risk ourselves for you. You must understand this.”
He’d expected it, of course, but it still stung. He knew his reputation must have preceded him – gossip did not die out over just one generation, particularly not in a small, seafaring community like Jeju. And yet he’d allowed the spark of hope to fester within him, had allowed it to burn and consume him utterly from the inside out.
Yoongi stared out to where the colorless sky met the sea in a line that was deceptively straight. He knew only too well how the ocean could thrash with unmitigated fury, the way it would drag any unsuspecting victim down to the bottom if it had the chance. The haenyeo had given it her flesh and blood in exchange for her safety and prosperity. If he believed it would help anything, Yoongi would slash himself open and empty his veins, and would throw himself into the water in a heartbeat.
The corner of his lips twitched, just a little. In a heartbeat?
If only he had one.
In any case, he knew better. The ocean would probably spit him right back, just out of pure, unmitigated spite – or maybe it would pull him down to the bottom and keep him there forever, his eyes open, his lungs empty, alive but never living.
No, Yoongi wouldn’t jump in. And he’d keep his blood to himself, thank you very much. The ocean didn’t deserve a single drop of it.
As if they knew he was standing above them, the waves pressed hungrily up to the base of the boat and shattered into a mass of roiling white foam. They must be cold. This time of year, everything was cold. Yoongi shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie.
His hands were ice cold, too. He couldn’t remember when they were last warm.
Paper crinkled in his pocket. Without taking his hand out, Yoongi fingered the scrap the haenyeo had given him. He did not need to pull it out to look at the address; he had already memorized it.
“I can’t help you,” she had said, “but maybe they can.”
“They,” Yoongi had repeated bitterly. Disappointment had thinned and sharpened his voice like a blade. “Who might ‘they’ be, and how can they help me when you can’t?”
Yoongi was so, so tired. He’d been looking so long for an answer that he was starting to believe might not even exist. So when the old lady pressed the scribbled scrap of paper into his hands, he had been so tempted to just open them and let the paper be carried away by the wind, the same way his faded, useless hopes had scattered high and far on the Jeju sea breeze.
He had opened his mouth to say something dismissive, but she leaned in, furtive and hushed. Her next whispered words stopped him in his tracks.
“A shop,” she had murmured. “There is a shop hidden in the heart of Busan. The shopkeepers there may be able to help you. That’s where you should go.”
Yoongi had heard of this place. A shop with no name. The old lady wasn’t the first to speak of it, and yet no one seemed to have firsthand knowledge of it. A shop, they said, selective in their clientele; a place where wishes were granted and secrets were kept. He hadn’t believed it was real. The stories had always seemed too fanciful to be true, too frivolous.
A magic shop, they said.
Yoongi didn’t believe in magic.
But now here he was on a boat back to the mainland. He would disembark in Yeosu and travel overland, moving north-west to Busan. He couldn’t believe he was actually following this rumor on the wind. Searching for a magic shop that he wasn’t sure actually existed. Was he crazy? Perhaps.
But Yoongi had nothing but time on his hands.
He had been sent on so many wild goose chases already. Time after time he’d heard nothing but no, but maybe’s. Each person he’d sought out one after another had given him nothing but their regrets and sent him elsewhere. There was no reason to hope; no reason to think this… magic shop would be any different.
After all, Yoongi knew better.
He pulled his lip up in a smirk against the wind, a shaky half-laugh to prove he knew better.
And yet if his heart could beat it would have quickened traitorously beneath his ribs.
His grip tightened on the boat’s rail and the smile fell off his face. Behind him, the captain yelled something coarse at his crew that was mercifully carried away on the sea spray. In front of him, the mainland loomed larger and larger, a dark hulk against the gray sky. It would not be much longer before they would reach the shore. Yoongi licked his lips and felt a crack open painfully beneath his tongue. The taste of salt and iron flooded his mouth.
There was a magic shop hidden in the heart of Busan.
Well, then – Yoongi would find it.
***
Busan was nothing like Daegu.
Yoongi had been to Busan a couple times before; it wasn’t that far from his hometown. The streets reminded him too much of the ones in Seoul, dotted with neon lights and fried chicken shops, delivery boys whizzing down the street with their metal boxes precarious on the back of their bikes. The lights were sometimes dazzling and beautiful, and sometimes glaring and plastic and fake. The people could be soulless and petty, but also warm and irrepressibly friendly. Skyscrapers and shophouses, concrete and greenery jostled up against each other in a jarring pastiche. The backlit box signs seemed to scream at Yoongi to quickly seize the best the city had to offer: 24-hour norebang, all-you-can-eat, 30 percent off, 40 percent off, soju and sikhye, the chance to have his fortune told. Yoongi sighed deeply at the last one; he knew his (mis)fortune all too well. He did not need a sniffy woman with a calculator and an almanac to tell him how doomed he was.
Yoongi had been so disillusioned with Daegu once that he had made one of the biggest mistakes of his life, leaving it for what he thought would be the greatest adventure of his lifetime. He’d thought city life was the pinnacle of existence.
How wrong he had been.
Once the sheer magnitude of the city had awed him, a boy hailing from a small, provincial town from whence nothing good had ever emerged. He had felt at once small and larger than life strolling down its streets paved with promise. He’d felt a kinship with the satchel-bearing schoolchildren scampering down the pavements, clutching opened packets of soft bread tightly in their hands; with the surly businessmen who smoked incessantly at the edges of the bus stops and in every small alley; with the harried stall-owners who snapped and scolded if you took longer than thirty seconds to order your food.
It was different now. Now, everything and everyone seemed alien, as though he had blinked and the world had turned without him, even though on the surface nothing had changed. The people were the same, though their faces were more often obscured by masks and mobile phones. It wasn’t that. Perhaps it was because there was no longer anything here for him, or perhaps it was because he no longer understood the foreign yet familiar way the streets wound up and down the hills.
It had begun to rain, a light but determined drizzle that made umbrellas sprout up all around him like spiky dandelion heads. The farther Yoongi walked down the street, the fewer dandelion heads there were, until finally he found what he was looking for, on a side road bereft of people. He ducked under the scant shelter of a door mantle and pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket. He scanned the spidery writing, words he had long since committed to heart, then looked up and around him to confirm what he already knew.
This was it. This was the place.
But it wasn’t.
The row of shops he had found was old and dusty. Just a quiet, deserted street in an uncharacteristically quiet part of Busan, with nothing remotely magical in sight. A side street like any other side street. Most of the shop spaces were shuttered. The only unit that stood open was a self-help laundromat. Its machines looked tired, doors hanging half open and listless, only a faint hint of fabric softener still scenting the place as if the smell had been baked into its whitewashed walls. A single crane was missing from a string of its faded friends hanging in the doorway. The whole forlorn thing did little more than sway feebly in the tepid, humid breeze.
Yoongi looked at the unit number on the wall, then back at the paper, and back at the laundromat again.
It should have been the magic shop he was looking for.
Yoongi ground his teeth, frustration gnawing at his chest. Another baseless hope burnt into ash at his feet.
Just in case he had missed something, he stepped reluctantly into the laundromat to have a closer look. It was as standard a laundromat as one might imagine. The ancient paper calendar, forlorn and forgotten on the wall, had not stopped declaring the thirteenth of June for the last two years. Half-rusted and precarious, the wall-mounted metal detergent dispenser was just about a quarter full. One washing machine was, surprisingly, whirring and clunking, the sodden fabric inside sloshing noisily round in spasmodic circles, the only sign of life in the whole godforsaken place. Yoongi ran a finger along the machine tops and wrinkled his nose at the line he left in the dust, brushing his hand off on his jeans. Had the haenyeo been mistaken? Had the magic shop moved elsewhere? At the back there was a locked back door with a darkened glass panel set into it but when he put his face to the glass and peered through, he saw only a back room with a battered wooden desk and empty filing cabinets that were so badly dented that the drawers could not close soundly.
Nothing.
And still Yoongi hesitated, unwilling to leave.
Then he heard a loud, chunky whir, a discordant beep, and a click.
The washing machine that had been running had finished its cycle and had juddered to a stop. He wasn’t sure what internal instinct prodded him to do it, but he walked over anyway, bent over and looked through the scratched, cloudy window. What did he expect to see, other than somebody’s bedraggled laundry?
Certainly not a single faded paper crane perched perkily on top of the mound of wet clothes.
Frowning, Yoongi looked around, as though he were the butt of some hidden camera joke, but he was alone.
He pulled the door open.
“What on earth…?” he muttered. The origami crane was completely dry, at odds with its hot, damp surroundings. Baffled, he put his hand in to take it out, but with an abrupt burst of rustling movement the crane took flight and flapped right past his ear.
“The fuck,” Yoongi exclaimed, startled, and he stumbled back. The paper bird fluttered around his head like an inquisitive butterfly and ducked neatly out of his grasp when he reached out to try and grab it. It moved with purpose, every time slipping out of his reach, until it alighted on the small shrine just outside the entrance of the laundromat. The little crane’s wings stilled.
Yoongi stared at it, eyes narrowing. The paper bird sat there without moving, its head tilted at an angle as if waiting for him to act.
All right. It was obviously a test, or something of the sort; only the worthy could enter. Whatever.
Yoongi could do this.
The shrine was dusty with neglect, just like everything else. The vaulted roof of it, which the paper crane had perched on, was covered in bird shit and dirt, and underneath it… Yoongi crouched to look. There was no statuette in the shrine, only a chipped wooden slatted frame lined with mulberry paper and an empty stone bowl. Not exactly empty, either; he realized the bowl held some scraps. Yoongi poked at them with his finger. A dried flower petal, a gray pebble, a broken matchstick, a wooden button, a shard of glass, and what looked uncomfortably like a tiny bone.
It appeared that an offering was needed – but what?
Unsure what he might have had with him that would suffice, Yoongi dug in his hoodie pocket, then in his jeans pockets, but came up empty. All he had was the scrap of paper the haenyeo had given him, and that didn’t seem ideal. Yoongi groaned. Experimentally, he plucked a hair from his head and put it in the bowl, but nothing happened. He pulled a bit of loose thread from his hoodie and added that. Still nothing. There was a patch of sulky looking weeds growing nearby in a crack in the pavement. Without much hope, Yoongi tugged one out, cursing when the intractable stem smeared green over his hand, and dumped it in the bowl.
Nothing.
Yoongi had the niggling feeling that the unmoving paper crane was decidedly unimpressed with him.
“Asshole,” he muttered in its direction, just because he could.
He collapsed on his butt on the sidewalk, morose and exasperated. His feet were aching and there was definitely some sand in his shoes that was pissing him off. He pulled off a shoe to shake it out, then paused and tilted his head when the paper crane rustled its wings in interest.
Sand…?
Yoongi had crossed the beach in Jeju to walk on the black cliffs with the haenyeo matriarch.
It was worth a try. He tipped the Jeju sand from his shoe carefully into his palm. It wasn’t more than a few grains, and they made a small susurration when he dusted them into the stone bowl. He waited a beat, then two – then the shrine made a distinct humming noise, almost as if it were pleased, and a light came on behind the slatted frame. Yoongi was watching the shrine too closely so that he spluttered with surprise when the paper crane abruptly shook itself and fluttered up past his face again, so close that he flinched.
The origami bird flitted lightly back into the laundromat. Yoongi thrust his foot quickly back into his shoe and stumbled after it, nearly tripping in his haste, and got there just in time to see the crane unfold and flatten itself against the smoky glass panel of the laundromat’s office door.
There was writing on the paper, dashed off in heavy black ink.
What is your heart’s desire? it said.
Yoongi was about to sneer at how heavy-handed this seemed to be, how amateur, when a dark shimmer rippled across the glass. It reflected something strange. Yoongi saw himself, just as he was: hair tousled, dark rings under his eyes, his plain white T-shirt. But something in the reflection made him gasp as if he were in pain.
Almost imperceptibly, his chest was moving rhythmically under his white shirt.
His heart was beating.
Instinctively Yoongi pressed a shaking hand to his chest, but he found what he already knew to be true. He had no heartbeat. The reflection was not real. An illusion. A cheap trick, Yoongi told himself sternly, but the vision still made him ache in ways he had not expected.
The other Yoongi blinked when Yoongi blinked, clenched his jaw just as Yoongi was doing, and raised his right hand when Yoongi raised his left. The perfect mirror image. The only difference was that the other Yoongi had a heartbeat. This was cruelty, he thought, his grief sharp like splintered glass in his lungs.
Only then realizing he was holding his breath, Yoongi exhaled painfully. What was his heart’s desire? What did he want?
Yoongi lifted his head and spoke aloud, his voice harsh and grating. The bitterly honest words were ripped from his gut.
"I wish to die."
The other Yoongi smiled, but the smile was gentle, and the door swung open.
Instead of the dank office Yoongi had seen through the glass, a small, warmly-lit corridor led to a bead curtain, through which cheerful music and brighter light filtered. Yoongi stepped into the corridor and left the laundromat and the outside world behind.
Here, then, was the magic shop he had been looking for.
Yoongi wasn’t sure what he had imagined it to look like, as he parted the bead curtain with a sideways palm, but he was fairly sure it wasn’t this. Perhaps a brazier filled with smoky curls of incense, or signs and sigils painted on the wall? An old man, stroking his beard, dressed in hanbok? Maybe rolling an ancient pair of chipped dice in a black cup?
Instead the shop smelled a little bit like dusty potatoes and garlic. There was music playing from the overhead sound system he quickly identified as trot: some popular youngish singer he knew was a hot favorite among the market ajummas in floral pants and rubber shoes, even if he wasn’t sure of the singer’s name. So far, so not magic. The atmosphere was so unremarkable, so terrifyingly run-of-the-mill, if not for the fact that Yoongi had had to negotiate with a flying paper bird and a magic door to enter.
He stepped forward, and an electronic ding-dong startled him. One of those motion sensor things, at the doorway; the sound was so oddly ordinary. Yoongi looked around, his brow creased with confusion. The shop wasn’t very large. There were perhaps six or seven aisles all lined with shelving, filled with items that were so familiar that Yoongi recognized them all, and yet filled him with bafflement. As he passed through the aisles, his frown grew larger and more pronounced with every step, and exasperation bubbled within him. Ramyeon? Tinned eggs? Microwaveable rice? Potato chips? Fucking sausages? What sort of blasted magic shop was this? It was more like a provision shop, the kind you’d find in every neighborhood, its shelves heaving with food. Why had he bothered to go through all that just to come in here and look at dried seaweed and anchovies?
It wasn’t until he’d walked through the whole store that he realized he was being watched. All the way at the back, a man lounged behind the counter, gazing at Yoongi with knowing eyes. An old bearded man in hanbok he most definitely was not; this proprietor was tall and young and clean shaven, and he was looking interestedly at Yoongi with a twinkle in his eye. Yoongi eyed him with suspicion.
“Welcome to our shop,” the man said, smiling with lips so plush and pink Yoongi wondered if they would burst open. “Took you long enough. Thought you’d never figure out the right offering.”
Yoongi looked at him askance. “You were watching me up there?”
“I guess you could say that.” The man shrugged one shoulder, his smile growing wider. “You called me an asshole.”
Yoongi gaped. The effrontery of this man, accusing him of such a thing when they had clearly never met before! “I most certainly did not.”
He beamed at Yoongi, completely unbothered. “Oh, I think you did. Quite loud and clear.”
Indignant, Yoongi opened his mouth again to retort, but suddenly recalled his irate word to the paper crane, and abruptly flushed in realization. The little bird in the laundromat had tipped its head to the side an awful lot like the man in front of him was doing. He opened his mouth and closed it again.
The man in question waved an insouciant hand at the look of disgruntled comprehension and embarrassment that Yoongi now wore. “No matter, you didn’t know it was me.”
“I didn’t know it was anyone,” Yoongi muttered. “Paper birds don’t usually have eyes. Or ears.”
“It’s a useful trick, when someone’s looking for our shop.”
“What kind of shop is this, anyway?” Yoongi jerked an impatient thumb at the shelves stocked with everyday staples. “This is supposed to be a magic shop.”
“That all depends on how you look at it.” The man winked, and his insouciance was the most maddening thing Yoongi had ever seen. “Food is a kind of magic, isn’t it?”
“Food is food.” Restless, thrown off-balance, Yoongi turned around to give the shop another once-over, finding it just as lacking as when he’d first entered. “And nothing here makes sense.”
Yoongi had noted, with increasing bewilderment, that the items on the shelves, though tidily and neatly arranged, seemed to be stocked with no consideration for any sort of organization. Each shelf held a wild variety of items: a can of mushrooms sat next to a bottle of banana milk, which sat next to a packet of chocopies, which sat next to a jar of fermented perilla leaves and so on and so forth. It was a confusing assortment, to say the least, and it rubbed Yoongi the wrong way. He gestured at the shelving, impossibly exasperated. “Nothing is where it should be.”
“Ah,” the man said, practically sparkling. “No, everything is exactly where it should be.”
“How is that even possible?” Yoongi throttled his annoyance back, but threw his arms wide. “How would anyone ever find anything?”
“You just don’t know the system,” the man replied quite calmly.
"What system?" Yoongi snapped.
"Mine, of course."
“There is no system,” Yoongi said through gritted teeth. He wasn’t sure, actually, why this was making him so angry, but it was, and the itch under his skin was boiling over with the need to argue with this impossible shopkeeper. “There is no magic.”
“So you say,” the man agreed. He looked Yoongi square in the face, and his expression grew so suddenly somber and sympathetic, so at odds with his previous teasing smile, that Yoongi was abruptly shaken. “Then why have you come here, Min Yoongi, who wishes for nothing more than to die?”
Later, Yoongi would recognize that he had been boorish and rude, and he would feel ashamed for his poor behavior, but in the moment he was so filled with desperate fury and defensive guilt that he could not help himself. He had traveled so far and gone through so much to end up in this place that had gotten his hopes up – okay, fine, he had gotten his own hopes up – and then this? This motley assortment of junk, this aggravating man who seemed to hold his heart’s desire in a careless hand? He felt ripped apart, shorn open, so that every sullen vein and artery in his chest was brutally exposed to this simpering stranger. With one sentence he had cracked Yoongi open, like a raw egg, oozing and fractured and unable to hold himself together.
“Fuck you,” Yoongi said, his voice low and trembling, hands fisted by his sides. “You can’t help me.”
He turned on his heels and stalked out.
Yoongi didn’t let himself slow down until he was fully three streets away, didn’t let himself take a full, proper breath until he no longer felt as though the man with the light smile and serious eyes was watching him. Even then, in the bright sunlight, as he put more distance between himself and that enigmatic proprietor, Yoongi found that he could not shake the shop and its keeper from his mind. They lingered, like the scent of salt on skin after leaving the ocean.
***
The rental Yoongi had found for his sojourn in Busan could possibly be called an apartment, if one were being very generous and charitable about the whole thing. The abrasive landlady had pursed her lips and assured Yoongi in a bright, false tone that he was getting an enormous bargain; really, it was downright robbery for him to pay her such a pittance for the banjiha, or basement room, and such a hardship for her to lease it out for nothing. Considering that Yoongi was paying her a monthly rate of nearly a million won for it, it had taken him a great deal of effort not to laugh in her face. But he was desperate. He forked over two months rent as a deposit and tried his best not to think about his pitiable bank account. At the time, he had been nursing the fragile hope that the magic shop would be able to help him.
Then he wouldn’t need the banjiha, or his money, anymore.
Now, however, Yoongi was stuck with this room for the near future.
Constructed to serve as an air-raid shelter in times of war, the room was really just a largish basement; it was cold and dank and somewhere along one of the concrete walls there was a slimy drip of water that ran away into the corner and down the drain. The bathroom door was cracked down the middle, and one of the windows that offered the barest sliver of light was stuck fast, offering even less ventilation than he might have hoped for. All these things combined meant that the room constantly smelled of wet mold and mildew and sewage, a nasty smell that clung stubbornly to the insides of his nostrils. Yoongi wondered if he would ever be able to scrub it out of his skin.
The streaked, cloudy casement windows looked out onto the sidewalk, so that all he saw of other people passing by outside was their feet. It felt disconcerting and yet familiar to be part of the world and yet beneath it. Was this how it felt to look out of the inside of a grave?
He had only been in Busan for two nights, but the banjiha was so dire that he had tried to stay out as much as possible. He was grateful, at least, that he didn’t feel the cold; the heating (surprise surprise) was erratic at best and a lost cause most of the time. It wasn’t so bad when he could fall asleep – one of the only times he could find respite from the dread of existence.The night before he had stuffed tissue up his nose to block out the smell and slept restlessly.
Returning to the dismal room after the fiasco of that afternoon at the magic shop was a new low, even for Yoongi.
The day before at least, he had spent time in a neighborhood he had used to know well – where he had lived when he’d moved from Daegu. Wandering the streets had triggered an avalanche of memories he thought he had successfully erased. There had been a music shop, where he had sold his first guitar to make ends meet – now it was a fried chicken delivery outlet. There was the little restaurant where the owner had often quietly ladled out a second helping of hot soup to fill Yoongi’s hungry belly. There was the steep street he walked up every night to the room he’d rented, shared among four other dead-eyed country boys who had come to Busan to work, just like him, and had had their souls ground down to dust by it.
There was the corner where he had met Yong-wang for the first time.
Yoongi still remembered the way his eyes had shone, like sunlight reflecting off the sea, like scales glinting in the morning light. Bright and clear and beautiful. He’d leaned so artfully and yet so carelessly against the stone wall. Yoongi had thrilled at the way Yong-wang had smiled at him, like there was something precious in it. Yoongi could still feel the way Yong-wang used to wrap his hand around the meat of his arm, the way he used to rub his thumb along the soft, white skin.
There had been a time he had seen Yong-wang as his salvation, a way to escape a life that had been difficult. Yoongi almost laughed. He hadn’t understood how much more difficult life could become. For a brief few months, yes; life had been idyllic, full of joy and laughter and good things. There had been good days at the beginning. Yoongi would not deny that.
But then those good days became less frequent and then few and far between. Instead of saving him, Yong-wang had ended up condemning Yoongi to the depths of despair. How much Yoongi had suffered since then for just a few months of empty happiness.
Still, somehow, after everything that had happened, Yoongi didn’t know if he even really regretted loving Yong-wang. It seemed like an indelible part of his history, now. Something that made up the very fabric of who he was. He had been far too changed for far too long for him to muse any longer about how he had gotten here.
All Yoongi wanted now was for this to end.
He collapsed on the thin mattress, wet rot and mildew slimy in his nostrils, and buried his face in his hands. Even with tissue stuffed up his nose, however, Yoongi found it almost impossible to fall asleep. He tossed and turned uneasily like a ship on rough waves, his energy sputtering down, a candle burning away to nothing but ash and tiny pools of wax.
And when he finally drifted off, he dreamt.
He dreamt he stood by the ocean, fine black sand gritty under his feet. There were no waves, no foamy bursts. Instead the water sat strangely still and silent and stretching before him like a vast, terrible mirror reflecting the dark, empty sky above. The light felt odd – pale and muted and wrong wrong wrong. Something about the ocean pulled incontrovertibly at him. Yoongi took one unresisting step, then another, nearer to that unsettling, unmoving sea.
He dreamt he saw something ripple, far away beneath the oily black surface, as if something was coming his way. Something large. Something with teeth. Yoongi moved forward as if in a trance. The water was calling to him, and he had to answer.
I wish to die.
He inched forward. The ripple under the sea roiled hungrily towards him. The enormous thing beneath the waves was moving fast. A desperate yearning was churning in his chest. Yoongi wanted nothing more than to submerge and lose himself forever, to be consumed completely by whatever lurked under the surface.
I wish to die.
In another step he would be only an inch from the black water. Yoongi knew it would swallow him up irrevocably the minute he touched it. Hypnotized, unable to stop himself, he moved closer to the ocean and his inevitable end.
I wish to die.
In his dream Yoongi felt an annoying flutter around his head. Frowning, he looked up. It was something small, and white, and the flap of its wings sounded crisp in the dead, empty silence. Yoongi waved it away, his focus fixed on the water, but the flutter was insistent. It flapped urgently around his face, pushing him away, so that he flinched and stumbled back a split second before the water could touch his toes.
Angry, denied, he reached up and grabbed the small white thing out of the air. It shuddered and obediently subsisted, as if all along it had wanted nothing more than to be cradled in his palm.
It was a paper crane, its head tilted at a curious, searching angle.
Yoongi froze. Why did it look so familiar, this little paper bird? Why did it make him hesitate?
A soft, serious voice echoed in his dream.
Why have you found your way here, Min Yoongi, who wishes for nothing more than to die?
The urgent bubble in his chest popped. Dream-Yoongi retreated from the water’s edge and the churning, eager ripples, taking step after step backwards until he had put a respectable distance between himself and the hungry ocean. Not this time, he thought uncertainly. Maybe… maybe not this time. He gazed at the bird in his hand.
He dreamt that the invisible thing under the surface of the water abruptly receded and the world shattered into fragments around him. The sea and sand and sky disappeared, and he dreamt he was pushing through a bead curtain into a little supermarket that didn’t make sense. The light permeating it was warm and welcoming, and the shape of someone tall and broad was silhouetted at the back. The person waved, and the gesture made Yoongi feel a sudden wave of inexplicable relief. I’m here, he thought in his dream, I’m here, and I’m safe. He opened his fist, and the paper crane fluttered out, cheerfully this time.
Hi, the person said, gentle as falling dusk, teasing and friendly and light. Took you long enough.
Yoongi sucked in a breath and jerked upright.
In the murky half-light of his dim basement, he scrubbed his hands over his sweaty face and choked on the rancid breath he tried to take. He’d had bad dreams before, but this one had unsettled him, and the half-longing, half-terror he’d felt on the black beach still rattled around in his empty chest.
And yet he also remembered the warm, inviting light that shone from the magic shop, and the soft lilt of the proprietor’s voice.
Why have you come here, Min Yoongi, who wishes for nothing more than to die?
Min Yoongi – worn, ripped open, drained – too wanted to know.
***
Yoongi found it hard to admit to himself why he was walking down this particular lane. He’d told himself he would just head out for a walk, ostensibly to get away from the stench of the banjiha, but when he turned purposefully down the small side road to get to the quiet stretch with shuttered doors and an empty laundromat, he could no longer deny what – or who – he was looking for.
He knew he had been rude. He thought – perhaps he should apologize. Perhaps he should make it right.
Yoongi told himself this was why he had come.
The shop seemed just as deserted as the week before, except worse: this time, all the washing machines stood disappointingly empty and silent. Otherwise it looked the same as before. This time, Yoongi went straight to the back door and tried the handle, but it was still locked, and when he peered through the window he saw nothing but the empty back office that he now knew was merely an illusion. He knocked tentatively – no response. He looked into every single washing machine, just in case, but they were all empty and unmoving. The stone bowl of the shrine still held the scraps that were there previously. Yoongi stirred the bits of Jeju sand with his finger, but nothing happened.
The magic shop stayed closed.
At his wit’s end, he stood up, regretting the creaking of his knees as he did so. Then he realized that the string of faded paper cranes hanging by the entrance was no longer missing one. Yoongi squinted at the crane that now filled the previously empty space, quiescent and quiet. Was the proprietor watching him, even now? Waiting for him to say something? Do something? Was there a new ritual he would have to do before he could enter the shop again?
Yoongi fidgeted, unsure of himself. The air was still but cool. It felt like he had stepped into a suspended moment in time. He scrunched his nose, unscrunched it, shuffled his feet awkwardly. He aimed as sincere a look as he could manage at the unmoving paper crane, which was difficult, because he still could not bring himself to think of it as a magical object.
“I came to apologize,” Yoongi muttered out of the corner of his mouth. He steadfastly pretended he didn’t feel completely stupid, talking to an inanimate paper bird. At least the place was deserted. “So look,” he said, “I’m sorry about last time. I know I was kind of rude.”
The paper crane did not move. Uncomfortable, Yoongi straightened his shoulders. He should have prepared something, perhaps. Now he had started a half-assed speech, and he wasn’t sure what to say next. He sighed.
“I, uh… I’ve had a hard time, for quite awhile now. And I really need help. I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m running out of ideas, so.” Yoongi shrugged helplessly, and he scuffed his toe along the floor, feeling extremely foolish and out of place. Spilling his feelings to a paper crane had not been part of his day’s agenda, and yet nothing was happening. He wracked his brain for something else to say. “I shouldn’t have criticized your organization system. I’m sure it works for you,” he finally offered. “I mean. It’s your shop, and you can do whatever you want with it, so…yeah.”
The paper crane did not move even the barest tip of its wing. Its head sat stick straight on its slender neck. Yoongi huffed a breath out in frustration.
“I don’t think you’re even listening,” he muttered.
“Who’s listening?”
Yoongi whirled around. A man with deep apple-pie dimples and honey brown eyes squinting against the sun stood behind him, watching him inquiringly and not without a little amusement. He hefted a box against his hip, presumably filled with laundry.
Just his luck, that an actual customer would come to the laundromat while he was having a one-sided conversation with a paper bird.
“Ah.” Yoongi scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly exhausted. He was done. The proprietor was probably never going to open the magic shop for him again, not after his attitude the last time.
The stranger indicated Yoongi with a curious tilt of his chin. “Are you apologizing to that crane?”
“No, I…” he frowned. There wasn’t anything he could say to explain why he was talking to the air, and quite frankly Yoongi had no energy to deal with a stranger who probably just wanted to get his laundry done. Yoongi made a vague gesture, hoping to escape the conversation quickly. “Excuse me, I’m just gonna-”
“Because if you’re looking for Kim Seokjin, he’s not in the shop today,” the dimpled man continued nonchalantly as if Yoongi hadn’t spoken at all, “so you won’t get in that way.”
Yoongi was already halfway out of the laundromat before the words percolated fully into his brain. He froze and swung around, his eyes wide. “Sorry, what?”
The man pointed at the paper crane with a helpful smile. His dimples popped in bas relief. “You were trying to talk to Jin-hyung, weren’t you?”
“I…I don’t know who that is.” But he could guess. Yoongi wrinkled his nose, picturing the proprietor in his mind’s eye. The image came all too easily. “Uh, tall, broad shoulders, pouty lips?”
“That sure sounds like hyung,” the man said cheerfully. “I’m Kim Namjoon. I’m working the shop today.” He pushed open the back door which opened perfectly easily, and through it Yoongi could see the warmly lit corridor that led to the magic shop. “Are you coming in?”
“What for?”
“I have tea,” Namjoon said, almost conspiratorially. And then, as if it was merely an afterthought: “Maybe you could tell me why you’re looking for Jin-hyung.”
Yoongi stared at him for a moment, nonplussed, then shrugged. Perhaps this other proprietor would be able to help him. What other options did he have? What else did he have to do with his day, anyway? Head back to the banjiha? Yoongi would rather jump off a cliff. A jumbled up grocery store sounded like heaven in comparison.
“Sure,” he said wryly. “What the hell, why not?”
But as Yoongi followed Namjoon down the corridor and pushed through the bead curtain into the shop, he blinked, once more thrown for a loop. He stopped in the doorway and gaped. This wasn’t the randomly organized neighborhood grocery shop he had stormed out of the other day. Instead of floral wallpaper, the walls were panelled wood. A humidifier in the corner puffed pleasing, scented clouds into the air. A large rough-hewn wooden table sat low and chunky in the middle of the space, and all around him were plants. But not just any kind of plants – the low shelves along the walls were laden with small, flat pots filled with –
“Bonsai,” Namjoon noted, glancing at Yoongi. He put his things down on the table with a soft huff.
Yoongi could not stop his eyes from tracking all over the place, taking in how different it looked from before. What on earth was going on? He tried not to sound accusing and failed. “It was a grocery store the other day.”
“Right,” Namjoon agreed, muffled as he rummaged around in his box. He pulled out tools – a spool of gold wire, pliers, a small brown tub – and set them on the table. “I guess it’s your first time here. That’s because Jin-hyung was running the shop that day. It’s my shift right now, so…” he popped up from the box and indicated vaguely with his hand. “This is what I do.”
“You do…bonsai.” Yoongi wrinkled his brow. “And the other guy – Kim Seokjin-nim – he does groceries?”
Namjoon laughed, delighted with Yoongi’s obvious bafflement. “You could say that.”
The man talked as though it was a truth that everyone should know. A shop that changed according to who was on shift? If Yoongi thought about it carefully enough though, he supposed in a world of magic shops, that was handy, really, and sort of made sense. What even made sense in his life anymore?
By this time Namjoon had finished unpacking his supplies from his box and had bustled over to the corner to boil water for the tea he had promised. The electric kettle clanked softly in its cradle, a small, ordinary sound in a place that felt anything to Yoongi but normal. But as steam curled lazily into the air, he found himself relaxing, tension leaking slowly from his body as he let himself breathe properly for the first time in days. He took a seat at the table at Namjoon’s invitation and let his gaze wander over the room once more. The shelves, the plants, the strange, subtle quiet of the space – it made him curious for some inexplicable reason, but also strangely comfortable.
Namjoon put a steaming mug of tea in front of Yoongi and waved away his murmured thanks. “My partner makes the blends himself,” he said, not without some pride. “Not Seokjin-hyung – another partner. I don’t know anything about tea except how to pour hot water on it and drink it.”
“It’s good,” Yoongi said with some surprise. He didn’t normally drink tea, but this one was hot and strong and fragrant and not too sweet – just the way he liked it. “It tastes…it tastes like…” He didn’t complete his sentence out loud, but what Yoongi thought was: it tasted just like the tea his mother used to drink when he was a child. He sipped slowly at his mug, savoring it, letting the warmth settle in his bones. The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable but companionable, threaded through with steam and the soft hiss of the humidifier.
Yoongi’s gaze wandered, drawn to the strange, miniature trees that lined the room like quiet sentinels. They sat on low shelves, each one carefully shaped, as if frozen mid-motion – some twisted, some serene, all impossibly alive. The air smelled faintly of earth and sap.
“Do you like bonsai?" Namjoon asked, watching his eyes track around the room.
“Don’t know much about it.”
“You don’t need to know much about it to like it,” Namjoon gently chided. He slid the bonsai on the table forwards for Yoongi to take a better look. “It’s enough to appreciate it simply for what it is.”
“A tree in a pot?”
“Yes. Isn’t it pretty?”
Pretty? It was just a tree in a pot. Yoongi opened his mouth to say something cutting, but Namjoon was smiling warmly at him in a way that was hard to counteract. He swallowed back his words and choked them down to be polite. He’d alienated one shopkeeper already; he didn’t need to turn another against him. He nodded just a little begrudgingly. “I guess it’s all right.”
Okay, fine, it wasn’t a hardship for Yoongi to agree the tree was pretty. The bark of the tree was rough and pale, flaking in places like parchment, but the effect was delicate rather than harsh; as if it had grown that way on purpose, worn down by something gentle over a long time. The delicate twist of the tree’s spindly branches wasn’t as random as Yoongi had originally thought, either. They were being guided into a pattern, curving back on themselves, splayed out on one side, the gleaming wire holding the tree’s posture with quiet determination.
“You use the wire to tell them how to grow?”
“More like training.”
Yoongi blinked. “Training… a tree?”
“Bonsai need structure,” Namjoon explained. “They won’t grow in the right direction without guidance. The wire helps them remember.” He showed Yoongi how it worked, his hands methodical and steady as he wound golden wire around a branch. "It’s like people, right? We all need to be nudged a little to reach our full potential.”
Yoongi leaned in a little closer, eyes tracing the curve of the tree. Namjoon’s work looked careful and precise, and the tree didn’t feel like it had been restricted; in fact Yoongi could see how slowly and carefully Namjoon moved.
Yoongi wasn’t sure how it worked, but Namjoon’s words rang true: the tree almost seemed contented. The pot too was distinctive: blue and white ceramic with curling scrollwork that somehow managed to evoke a breeze winding through cotton clouds. The little bonsai arched proudly above it, natural and elegant and graceful all at once.
“Bonsai are natural amplifiers of magic,” Namjoon said, almost casually. “It’s up to me to send a message through them.”
The way Namjoon said this made Yoongi take a closer look. There was something strangely familiar about the design Namjoon was weaving into the gold wire, though.
Yoongi squinted at it, the repeated shape tugging at the edges of recognition. “Wait,” he said slowly, brow furrowing. “That’s… that’s not just for training, or decoration. That’s a sign. Isn’t it?”
Namjoon didn’t pause as he pressed the wire down carefully. “It is.”
Yoongi tilted his head, following the knots of the branch and the curl of the wire under Namjoon’s fingertips, trying to recall where he’d seen such a shape before. And then it clicked. A sigil he’d seen once, in an old scroll full of sharp ink and red warnings. His stomach went tight.
“Vengeance?”
This time, Namjoon did look up. His expression didn’t change much, but something in his gaze sharpened.
“Yes,” he said simply. “You know it?”
“I’ve…I’ve seen it before.” Yoongi was evasive. He wasn’t quite ready yet to explain that he’d seen the scroll in his hunt for a way to reclaim the steady beat of his heart.
Namjoon smiled. “That’s interesting. Almost everyone has forgotten the old ways.”
“But why? Why would you make a design like that?”
“For a girl,” Namjoon said, voice quiet but implacable. “She said no to a man who refused to understand what the word meant. He spread rumors about her that weren’t true, got her shunned, fired from her job. He stalked her and terrified her. He wouldn’t stop – not when she got a protection order, not when her family took her from Seoul to get away.”
He adjusted the wire again, as if the conversation was as mundane as trimming leaves. If Yoongi hadn’t been watching carefully, however, he wouldn’t have seen the raw emotion in Namjoon’s expression that belied his steady hand.
“Her whole life was wrecked and cut short by a piece of trash who couldn’t take no for an answer. He made sure every door closed behind her. Posted lies, called in favors, threatened people who tried to help her. She lost everything. She ended up taking her own life because all she wanted was for it to stop.”
Cold under his skin, Yoongi stayed silent. He couldn’t bring himself to admit out loud that he thought he understood exactly how the poor woman must have felt at the end, that bitter hopelessness, that yearning for oblivion.
“Her mother came to the magic shop to ask for our help. Her heart’s desire was for him to feel what her daughter felt. To know intimately what he’d wrought.” Namjoon's jaw flexed. “The fucker wanted control. Now he’ll get to feel what it’s like to lose it.”
“He deserves it,” Yoongi murmured. “But…”
“I hope you don’t misunderstand. We aren’t here to deal out punishment of our own accord,” Namjoon said with the faintest smile. He ran his hand over the pot. “That’s why I’ve grounded the tree with this.”
His interest piqued despite himself, Yoongi peered closer at the design, but unlike the tree’s branches it did not ring any bells. The curling scrollwork curved sweetly and placidly under Namjoon’s fingers. “The pattern?”
“It brings balance. To make things even. To make them fair.”
“Justice?”
“Equilibrium, more like.”
Yoongi looked down at the tree. The wire glinted beautifully as it caught the light, but all he could think of was the shape of the branches and the dark weight of the symbols gleaming against the bark.
“So what happens? You give him the tree? Then what?”
Namjoon pursed his lips. “He’ll get what he gave. Vengeance tempered with balance, right? His friends will turn against him one by one. They’ll find out what he did and reject him in horror and fury, instead of glossing over his behavior like they used to. He’ll lose his job to vicious rumors – only they’ll be the truth. He’ll lose his apartment too, eventually. He’ll leave Seoul to try and get away from it all but his deeds will follow him. He’ll never find relief. We’ll give him years of abject misery like he doled out to her.”
“And…and…” Yoongi swallows. “I suppose he’ll kill himself, too.”
“No.”
The abrupt answer took Yoongi by surprise, and he knew it showed on his face. He’d expected nothing less, with all of the shopkeeper’s talk about balance. Shouldn’t the bastard lose his life too?
Namjoon’s jaw flexed. “It would be too easy for him to die. An easy way out. All the years she would have lived, all that potential he destroyed, those years will be added to his. He doesn’t deserve the release of death. He’ll suffer in pain, unloved, alone.”
A fate that man deserved fully. Yoongi was sure of that. And yet wasn’t Yoongi living the same way? Wasn’t he suffering, in pain, unloved, alone, perpetually punished for what he had done? Did he deserve this extended life that was worse than death? He said nothing, his mind churning, face burning. There was a silence there that didn’t need filling. Namjoon was still oblivious, tucking the ends of the golden wire under itself, his motion as gentle as it was deliberate.
“All we want is to right some of the world’s wrongs,” he continued. “Tit for tat.” Then, offhandedly, he added: “The world’s full of heartless people, don’t you think?”
The word landed harder than it should have. It wasn’t meant for him, but Yoongi flinched hard before he could stop himself.
Namjoon didn’t look up again, but Yoongi had the oddest feeling he had noticed.
“So you shape these into… spells?” he asked quickly, to shift the flow of conversation. He indicated the hundreds of plants on the shelves, some seemingly potted and complete, others in bags, patiently waiting to be molded and trained. “All of them?”
Namjoon nodded. “Not all of them are trained into symbols right now, but eventually they will be. Closure, peace, health. Each tree has its own purpose. This one just happened to ask for something a little sharper.”
Yoongi opened his mouth, then closed it again. He didn’t want to ask. He did anyway. “Do they work?”
This time Namjoon looked up and directly at Yoongi. He tilted his head, studying him as if Yoongi’s opinion really mattered to him. “What do you think?”
Diffident, Yoongi shrugged. “They must work,” he conceded, “if people keep coming to you.”
Why have you come here, Min Yoongi, who wishes for nothing more than to die?
Namjoon laughed heartily, unaware of Yoongi’s internal discomfort, his eyes disappearing into twinkles as he did. “You’re right,” he agreed comfortably. “They do.”
Yoongi wasn’t sure if he was talking about people coming or his bonsai working. Maybe it was both.
“Okay,” Yoongi said slowly. “So your specialty is magic trees. And…uh, the other guy. Seokjin-ssi, who does groceries. His specialty is…?” He half expected Namjoon to say “ramyeon”, or maybe even “organizational chaos”, or “being annoyingly handsome and inscrutable”. He wouldn’t have been surprised by any of those.
“Healing,” Namjoon said brightly.
Yoongi choked. “Excuse me?”
“Healing,” Namjoon repeated. “Isn’t that why you came to see hyung?”
The question was innocent, but Yoongi was reluctant to unburden himself. He thought his visit had run its course. He made a noncommittal noise.
“I should go,” Yoongi said instead, and he rose to his feet and nodded at Namjoon to put a regretful end to the conversation. He, too, could avoid questions he did not feel like answering. He hesitated even as he made to leave. “Thank you for the tea, and the chat.”
“Oh, it was my pleasure,” Namjoon said, unruffled by Yoongi’s sudden impending departure. “I hope it made your day a little better.”
Yoongi had to admit he felt less ruffled and frustrated than before. He wasn’t sure if it was the tea, or Namjoon’s steady demeanor, or the soothing ambience or even the impromptu bonsai lesson, but he felt more on an even keel than when he entered.
He walked Yoongi to the bead curtain and through it, but as Yoongi put his hand on the doorknob to the laundromat, he hesitated, opening his mouth, but found it difficult to phrase the question in his head.
“Come back anytime,” Namjoon offered, without Yoongi having to ask. “I might not be here, but someone will be. The door will open for you.”
“Someone,” Yoongi echoed. “Someone other than you or Seokjin-ssi?”
“There are six of us,” Namjoon said. He blinked, then added, “ah, five of us who run the shop. Well – four,” he amended again sheepishly. “Our youngest hasn’t quite decided if he’ll follow in our footsteps yet.”
Four other shopkeepers, a ‘youngest’, and someone else who didn’t run the shop and presumably did something else. This was turning out to be more complicated than Yoongi had expected.
“Oh – here,” Namjoon said. Yoongi turned around, already one foot into the corridor. “This is for you. On the house.” He put a little tree in Yoongi’s hands, and shook his head adamantly when Yoongi attempted to protest. “It’s a windswept juniper,” Namjoon said, and then he winked, which startled Yoongi for a reason he could not articulate. “It reminds me of you.”
All the way home, awkwardly carrying a bonsai on the train, Yoongi puzzled over it. It wasn’t until Yoongi was almost home that he understood why he had been surprised: the way Namjoon winked had reminded him uncannily of Kim Seokjin.
Back in the banjiha, Yoongi set the small bonsai down. He wasn’t sure why he had accepted it from Namjoon so easily. The two shopkeepers had thrown Yoongi off balance in different ways, leaving him questioning himself in a way he hadn’t felt in years.
That night, there was not one but two men hovering in the darkness behind his eyelids when he tried to sleep, nose blocked with cotton balls, brain swirling with amorphous beginnings of thoughts he could not fathom the ends of. When Yoongi cracked open his eyes again, however, he found the corners of them crusted with sleep. Light streamed in through the casement windows and dusted the tips of the bonsai on the only table he had in the room.
A windswept juniper, Namjoon had said. It reminds me of you.
The tree leaned heavily to one side, blown backward by an invisible wind, and yet its little trunk was sturdy and strong. Yoongi could not discern what about it resembled him in any way. This bonsai had no wire, and its pot was simple, heavy brick-red clay.
Yoongi looked it up online, just because.
Fukinagashi, he read, was a Japanese style that created trees that looked as if they had been shaped by strong, prevailing winds. The windswept bonsai appeared dynamic, perpetually in motion, seeming to resist a wind that wanted to topple it over. The fukinagashi style captured the relentless force of nature, where trees are sculpted by their environment, but thrive despite adversity.
Yoongi put down his phone. He stared at the little tree for a long time, one hand pressed over the place where his heart should have been. The tree stared back, proud and silent. Thriving despite adversity.
Was that what Namjoon saw in him?
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Yoongi grumbled.
He supposed it was lucky the tree didn’t answer him.
This time, he waited only two days before venturing back to the magic shop.