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Enough snow had fallen over night that Chanyeøl was still absent by the time they washed the lines of dried starch out of their bowls. Kāi briefly considered the small favour of cleaning the bowl Chanyeøl had been called away from—favours were scarce, being owed a favour scarcer so—and lost it to the rush of cold tap water over his hands. For a moment, he found himself in his earliest memory: suspended in fluid that burned like ice. Like ice, with the soundlessness of snow, a hand fell around his wrist, shaking the bowl from his hand. The thumb pushing into the base of his spine left no doubt whose it was.
Suhø did not speak to him any longer, so Kāi’s body had grown into preemptive obedience. He felt himself straighten, and when the damp warmth of a breath crawled along his neck, parting around it in an open collar, Kāi tilted his head back. There was no need for the threat of a hand doing it for him.
“Meet me outside once you cleaned up.”
Months of silence broken where the others were observing, Kāi felt more than heard his own bewildered acknowledgement, a noise so low it seemed to rise from his stomach. While he’d fallen from favour in secrecy, he’d fallen visibly, undeniably so, with Suhø no longer taking the trouble to bridge rifts.
Once the ice of his words had melted against skin, Suhø had left. Once the sponge, soaking, top layer dull with juk remnants yet catching on the broken rim, had been passed to smaller hands, Kāi picked the shard out of the sink. Tried to fit it back into his bowl, caught a sharp elbow in his side for holding up the others, and escaping this morning’s chores.
Escaping chores was never a good thing, especially not for Kāi, already deemed lacking and replaceable. Their stares followed him out of the kitchen door—he hurried out of earshot before their resentment boiled over. If he was quick enough, he might still have a bowl to eat from by nightfall.
Stealing past the first empty quarters, then their leader’s where a fluorescent strip of light crossed the corridor and forced him to blink, he took care to quiet his steps. Suhø’s door was never closed, although it locked from the inside, unlike Kāi’s. He’d dawdled about before during mornings, testing doors: both Sehůn’s and the neighbouring empty quarters locked from the inside as well.
Among the clones, his powers stood out: impractically defensive, wasted on him, too. Where the others were raised into weapons, Kāi found himself a tool. Too flawed to be sharpened, too precious to dare a reforging after sixty-eight’s failed, they’d relegated him to transport, to herald. Angel of death, the Red Force called him, and once he’d proven ability to piece another along with himself back together, he’d been suspended again, confined to quarters and his own head while the others trained.
Relentless were only the days of isolation before a mission, deprived of instructions, regular meals, the medication that held him together. With death taking up temporary residence in him, colour forced out, these days stoked more than his rage. Beneath simmered his power, and withdrawing into it Kāi’s understanding of its reins grew: he began slicing at everything around him, and soon himself. Came to learn that he could manipulate in parts, could—with a precision that did not visit Låy—turn outside what belonged there not. Kāi hoped they’d never starve him enough for his secret to arise. Kāi had always been careful to remain a tool.
A peculiar peace rested in his quarters on days like these, so he didn’t hurry to undress, despite Suhø’s intolerance of tardiness. ‘Cleaned up’ meant the impractical outfits. Not only meant to terrify, but a display of the Red Force’s supremacy: to us, you pose no threat. To us, this weapon is one of many, with a heart unfrightened by death. This weapon—a mirror of your humanity in skin exposed, warm, bruising and marring and bleeding like yours. Kāi, deemed unfit for battle, was dressed to captivate, to evoke a cat turned on its back, soft lines of his stomach dispelling it as a target.
It meant arms crossed to keep the stinging cold from where it gnawed at his stomach, carved a line of shivers up to his sternum where it met the iced breaths he took. It meant hasty steps across eerily dry slabs of concrete, until his boots sank into the hollow sound of parched snow.
The field lay untouched. Before him, the world bent into infinity, disrupted only by a ruby suspended in silent white velvet, a premonition of blood, a taste of copper lining the air.
Head lowered, Kāi’s breath clouded before him, boots dragging through snow as if Suhø had him by the throat. Only when something bit at the edge of his ear, he looked up from where snow had begun to line the creases of his pants to understand what had silently grazed him. There was one room of distance between them, Suhø’s nose wrinkled in distaste at Kāi’s lack of determination.
“Number eighty-eight.”
His scorn was to his voice what bowstring was to arrow, slicing through the flaring shrill in Kāi’s left ear. In battle suit himself, Suhø looked a statue of ice, life only flaming in his scar, his hair. Unlike Kāi, he wasn’t trembling, the line of his body lax with a seasoned hunter’s hum of lying in wait.
“Unwise,” Suhø began, hands pressing snow into another missile, “to walk out here. What are you, a dog on the Red Force’s leash?”
“Aren’t we both?”
Kāi could taste the heat of Suhø’s tongue in his own mouth as he watched him licking at the snowball, water turning smooth ice, before aiming it at the yellow of his shoulder where it made a flat crater of white. Beneath, he’d find a bruise in the morning; darker than any Suhø’s mouth had been willing to leave.
Whatever pain Suhø intended to cause him—Kāi was glad to be considered dog rather than tool: it afforded him blood to bleed, pain to endure. Despite his words, Kāi knew: there was not one dog-like thing about Suhø, nothing that could collar and leash his pride. (He had not asked permission to have Kāi’s ankle and wrist bracelets removed, he’d ordered, knew deeper than trust that Kāi would not disappear on his watch.)
He took another step, wondering that Suhø did know all but the customs of Kāi’s heart. When Suhø called, he followed. When the Red Force called, he needed dragging, needed the grip on his reins not to tighten but to be Suhø’s.
His grin earned a grimace in response. “They let you grow too used to the sidelines. You shouldn’t be so content to rot in your room. You should be out there with us, not hovering, but with us—” Another snowball aimed at the crater on his shoulder, adding bloom to the burgeoning bruise. “You should know how to stay alive. The Red Force isn’t preparing you, so I will. Dodge, eighty-eight.”
Kāi could not follow his order. It was the first time since the incident that Suhø looked at him with intent, even if it was one of derision, of displeasure. Every snowball another heavy gaze, impacts nothing like his touch but infused, dripping with it. Each one reminiscent of a touch, a kiss: one to his temple that carried the absent-minded confusion of their first kiss, after Kāi had seen him kiss Xiumïn, meant to hush. One to his kneecap that reminded him of Suhø’s hands running down his bare leg to find injuries, the lingering firm grip that came with his exhale of relief; another to his clean shoulder where Suhø’s head once rested, mouth wet with sleep.
Undeterred even by the one that struck his face and left a taste of blood on his lower lip, Kāi took more of the distance between them for himself. “If I wear a leash, it’s yours alone.” Some nights, he could feel a deep red anchored in his gut, soaking into him further. Some days, watching Suhø from afar, a hunger grew inside of him that knew no appetite, only wanting to belong. “If I’m a dog, I’ll feed from no one’s hands but yours.”
“Watch your speech,” Suhø hissed.
Kāi did not amend, did not bow in apology; it earned him further snowballs, aimed at exposed skin. His skin was numb with cold, like it belonged to a second body, as he brushed snow from the crescent of his navel, as more of it got under his clothes, made them sit wet with ice-cold water against skin.
Far enough away that neither of them could touch without effort but close enough that he could smell Suhø among the snow—the spice of his sweat, the absent of scent that marked his power, the volatility of his mood—Kāi stumbled, found himself on his knees. His head fell back to take his leader in: seawater decanted into the colours of a heart on fire. And Suhø’s hand, chilled by the draw of his power to snow, fell into his hair with the ease of a gesture that had become inherent—an ache of pity, no intent to soothe. Kāi ached with the apprehension that he would not receive a kiss, and sure enough: Suhø tugged, pulled aimlessly, so he merely felt the cold making a home of his limbs, still felt above all that Suhø’s heated gaze on him kept his face from frosting over.
A painful tug this time, followed by a thin sheet of water cleaning the snow off his suit, falling over his chest, stomach, back like winter itself. What Suhø lacked in command he evened out with a precise cruelty. What he lacked in cruelty, he smoothed out with the thumb gathering the blood crusting over off his lip, licking at this, too, instinct, afterthought.
A smile he knew would irk him further pushed into the corners of Kāi’s mouth: he would drain himself of blood to keep Suhø warm.
Serious as blood was his tone. “Don’t test my patience, eighty-eight. I will see you teleporting.”
He showed Suhø his tongue before he burst into particles, reassembled behind his back. The process shook the cold from his body, and he twisted away from the urge to do the same for Suhø: even with the waistcoat buttoned up, his battle suit mirrored Kāi’s, and the gold around his neck and fingers drew further ice.
Kāi guided his concern into timing his vanishings carefully, spacing them out, conjuring surprise onto his face like he’d miscalculated when a snowball grazed him because he reappeared in the near same spot; grinning brightly with a sore heart when Suhø’s brows furrowed further at the display of sloppiness, of imprecision. If Suhø cared enough to force him to stay alive, he needed to return the sentiment: without a doubt stood in his mind the image of the Red Force executing him alongside any confidant, were they to find out.
When he called a break, hands on his knees, panting in pretence, sweat trickling down his back like icicles, Suhø relented only to prepare. Soon he had to step out of the circle of his own making where frozen yellow-green grass poked through, gathered untouched snow into snowball after snowball. Kāi dabbed at split lip, forehead, temples with the back of his hand, anticipated but did not evade the end of the break, a well-aimed kick of snow that dotted him white all over.
“Don’t just stand there, fight back,” Suhø bit at him.
Kāi knew better than to make him proud, yet the ache grew bitter, sank hostile roots into him. For as long as he lived, he couldn’t tell Suhø, or any of them, about the killings he’d prevented, from the sidelines, tearing apart the direction of EXO’s powers when they were about to strike. Could not disclose to them that EXO were far from hesitant to kill, as they’d come to believe. If Suhø would ever let them share a bed again, he could only remain closed book to him, with nothing to offer but the truths of his heart. Could only ever be lacking and replaceable; the deer-hound to Suhø’s hunter.
One glance too distracted by the wild beauty of Suhø’s cold-stung hands moved Kāi close enough to be pulled into a foul semblance of an embrace, hand reaching over his shoulder towards his nape to shove unshaped snow down his collar. Worse of a distraction than the shock of cold was Suhø’s other arm flattening the hem of his jacket against skin; with ice biting into his back and effort-heated warmth leaning into his front, Kāi was lanced by the desire for more. He slung his ankle around Suhø’s, pulled his feet out from underneath him. Not one sound of surprise; only Suhø’s body responded to the weight pinning him further into snow, opened to it for a split moment like a blossom, expression sheltered by the cloud of breath forced out of his lungs.
Kāi took the handful of snow to his face for his prize: Suhø underneath him, pressed into snow that hushed the hail of his heartbeat at red hair, red fabric, reddened skin framed by silken white. Took a barrage of soon frozen handfuls hitting his ribs and sides, the size and weight of Suhø’s fists back when the fever had abated enough, mild-mannered blows Kāi had taken because he would not look away, because he felt he could dissolve some of his humiliation if he took it with him.
He expected water to push into his nose and mouth, as he’d seen Suhø doing to EXO, expected everything but all of a sudden the tension bleeding from Suhø alongside his warmth, the drop of blood squeezing from the always-wet scar under his eye.
Still. Still, Kāi moved one hand to pin his right wrist into snow, thumb pressing into the spot on his palm that dampened his power, thumb of his other pushing into the bone of his chin to expose his throat. “Yield.”
Watched the long line of Suhø’s neck, the way his adam’s apple moved underneath skin, reluctant, defiant—or, at the very least, an impression of it. Kāi, better than Suhø himself, knew that he stood no chance against him, that his remaining pinned down was a decision he had rested in Kāi’s hands.
“You’re still not fighting back,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Yield, and I’ll consider it.”
“I yield,” Suhø said, sticky lilt to his tone marking it as indulgent mockery; they both knew Kāi hadn’t won—but Suhø hadn’t won either.
“Yield,” Kāi repeated, and watched as understanding dimmed the spark of taunt in his eyes.
His throat bobbed as Kāi added the bite of nail to his hand, but there was no swallowing that could keep these words from Kāi. Every leash had two ends, and as firmly as Kāi ensured to be tied to his, as long as Suhø held it he was tied to Kāi in return.
Eventually, eyes closing, chest heaving, a shiver rushing over his skin, he did as Kāi asked: “I—love you.”
It was of the same fever-struck quality as back in the shed by the sea where he’d stumbled into Suhø, months ago, where he’d seen—for a first time—his dark eyes wide with a sibling to alarm, words brittle with the frosty heat tearing through him, with the cough settling into his lungs. Clones did not fall sick; clones who fell sick suffered seven’s or sixty-eight’s fate. He had said those words after Kāi first tried to turn on his heel, asked for water in the same shaky breath. More terrified of bearing responsibility for their leader’s demise than he was of this offering of vulnerability, Kāi had found him more than that: several villages away he pilfered blankets and mats, swept the contents of a medicine cabinet into them, sought bowls of juk and a spoon to pry Suhø’s mouth open with. With little more than minutes to spare at a time, he’d gone back and forth more often than he usually dared, until the rush of the sea, the cries of birds, the quiet of the stony beach and the salty air drew the fever from his body. He’d found a lock to withstand a fainted power, and that was the last he’d seen of Suhø until it returned.
(In his dreams, he watched himself wiping sweat and tearing fabric to wind cool and wet around burning limbs. In his dreams, beyond this night, Suhø still spoke to him—in unkind words and looming imagery, but he spoke, and awaited a reply.)
Here in the snow, love was a formality, something to end what refused to become a spat—it was Kāi tugging on his leash, and Suhø giving, it was breaking the moment, and ignoring the spillage. Kāi knew to retreat before he was thrown off. Melting snow and ice slid down his back, as did Suhø’s gaze along his arms, trembling yellow in the cold.
“You’re more useless than assumed.” Suhø rose from the ground like a hazel switch that had been held down.
His words didn’t sting—Kāi felt no more need to be in his good graces to soak in his shadow. Something else however stung, so he waited for Suhø’s gaze to fall to his own suit, knocking snow off his back, closed the fangs of his power around his wrist the moment he’d taken his attention off Kāi.
It earned him a swift smack to his arm when they reassembled a few arm’s lengths away. Suhø’s face was clear about the insult the smile Kāi was wearing was.
“Useless,” he was told again, having moved them no closer to the bunker. “At least get your wounds taken care of, and rest so you won’t splinter.”
Kāi shrugged his order off, along with the crisp disdain. Did not expect being yanked around and met with a biting stare.
“I wasn’t asking. Go before I drag you there. See me out here again tomorrow.”
Patched up, abandoned to his quarters, Kāi kept wondering until darkness poured against the slit of his window if Suhø had cared to feel the chill being shaken from his cells.
The morning after, Chanyeøl had learned to burn away the snow before their bowls were passed out. Kāi’s bowl had survived afternoon and night, and so had Suhø’s contempt: but it burned less bright, and Suhø kept to the end of the queue by the sink, graced him with a ‘no’ when Kāi tried to take the bowl from his hands. Ran, when they stood alone, a brusque finger over the lip Låy had threaded back together, like he had minded the taste of his blood—like he had grown the expectation for Kāi to wait until the day he could bring himself to forgive.