Chapter Text
Changbin’s beautiful, magic garden had been clipped.
The roots had been dug up. The leaves had been torn. The petals had been crushed. The stems had been snipped. The earth had been salted and burned.
Changbin stared down at the huge mess. At the wicked destruction. Petals everywhere. Leaves everywhere. Every shattered chunk of his heart everywhere. The seeds of his dream dredged up from the soil by the trowel of reality.
He took a slow breath in and an even slower breath out. “Jesus.”
Hours of pruning down the drain. Hours of planning and patience wasted. All of the colors ruined. Everything delicate and precious and fragile that he’d given life to now lay flattened and dead in front of him. And Changbin couldn’t even bring himself to be distressed. It almost felt like he deserved it.
There was a noise at the classroom door, the squeak of a shoe or a door hinge, and Changbin turned his head to look.
It was early in the day. Just over half an hour before their morning design class was scheduled to start. Bright beams of gold sunlight poured in through the window, pushing light into every corner. Waking Changbin from the lofty dream he’d spent the last few days in. The light warmed Changbin’s skin despite how cold he felt. “Seungmin,” Changbin breathed out.
“Good morning.” Seungmin walked into the classroom looking wonderfully put together as always. His hair combed and gelled and styled almost excessively vertically. He’d opted for a crisp oxford-style shirt, bowtie and suspenders, thick-rimmed rectangular glasses, and pinstripe slacks that made his already long and slim legs appear to be far longer and slimmer. “How are you today?” The pleasantries felt wrong coming from Seungmin’s mouth and even more wrong entering Changbin’s ears. Every syllable was an abomination. A falsehood. A sucker punch. And both of them knew it. Seungmin looked at the mess of cloth and stitching Changbin stood in front of and didn’t even pretend to look horrified. Without a hint of remorse in his voice, he deadpanned, “Oh no. How terrible. Look at what someone did.” There was no surprise in his tone because he already knew every angle of the disaster.
“Seungmin…” Changbin felt the frustration blaze hot in his chest but he squashed the emotion down. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” Seungmin sat down in his usual seat and looked over at Changbin with such terrifying delight in his eyes. “I mean… Look at all of that.” He was visibly biting the insides of his cheeks to keep from outright smiling. “I can’t believe anyone would do that. I mean, who could be so evil?”
With a weary sigh, Changbin looked back down at the destruction.
The garment he’d been working on for the last three days now, the garment he’d made good progress on and would even complete before the deadline, hung in tatters across the shoulders of the dress form. Someone had angrily taken a pair of scissors to the piece, tearing violent gashes in the sleeves, splitting the stitching, ripping out the lining. All of that ripped fabric billowed in the gust created by the air conditioning unit above their heads. The flowers Changbin had embroidered onto the garment’s back had been ripped up, shredded, torn. Stomped on. Dirtied with the grime beneath a shoe. Nothing was left untouched. If it wasn’t on the floor, it hung in loose-knit clumps from the garment hem like insects cocooned in a spider’s web.
It was unsalvageable.
Changbin would have to start over. He would barely have the time.
“Why would you do this,” Changbin knew he would hate to hear the answer but he asked it regardless.
Seungmin put a scandalized hand on his chest. “You’re accusing me of doing this?” But then, in the next breath, he rolled his eyes and scoffed, dropping the act. “You earned it.” Even his tone of voice had changed. Gotten darker and rougher. Seungmin crossed one leg over the other at the knee and casually pulled his phone out of his pants pocket as if he hadn’t destroyed all of Changbin’s hard work. “I did it because I’m tired of you taking everything from me.”
“What?” Changbin wasn’t sure he knew what the guy meant.
“Don’t act stupid.”
Changbin lifted up a hand and ran his fingers over the destroyed garment. It didn’t even look like it could be clothes. It was just a rotten mess. Changbin dropped his hand from the wreckage and looked over at the dressform that stood behind Seungmin.
The garment was pristine. Elegant. Luxurious. The soft pinks looked almost translucent like resin. The glass beads across the bodice sparkled in the golden light of dawn like diamonds and threw fractals of rainbows across the tiled floor. The dress hung to the floor in a smooth, flowing wave. The design was perfection. A dream brought to life.
Seungmin spoke, “You’re the only other person in this class with any modicum of talent. Only half the people here know what they’re doing. And only half of them even try .” He kept his eyes on his phone, scrolling through his chat messages. “You’re good but you’re so shit.” His harsh, venomous words hit harder because he delivered them with the casual boredom of reading off a grocery list. “You have so little ambition, Changbin. You have so much talent but I can tell you don’t want to fucking be here, either. You’re just like the rest of the scum in this class. Your heart’s not in this. It’s like you’re only here because you’re supposed to be.”
Changbin felt a lump form in his throat. Seungmin’s accuracy was unnerving. To the point where Changbin got chills. It was like discovering someone had read his diary or something and was spilling all of those emotional secrets to the exact people that shouldn’t hear them.
Changbin had never felt so vulnerable.
Pressing his finger into the fresh wound, Seungmin went on, “You have no focus. Always starting and stopping. Starting and stopping. Never finishing any projects on time. Rushing things to completion at the last minute. Bumbling your way through every fucking presentation. Annoying the professor with all of your basic, no-brain questions. You always do your own thing instead of following the actual parameters of the assignment. So how…” At last, Seungmin tore his eyes away from his phone and stared up at Changbin with such heat in his gaze that Changbin instinctively looked away. “So how,” Seungmin raised his voice, “how do you still have better fucking grades than I do?”
Changbin froze. Honestly, he had never put any thought to his grades. He did his homework when it was assigned. He studied for exams when they were announced. He memorized vocabulary, learned important dates in fashion history, watched runway shows like most other people binged Netflix originals. “It’s not like I never turn in a completed project.”
“Shut up,” Seungmin snapped. “Don’t act like you don’t know. I live and breathe this shit. I work my ass off. I stay late working. I come here early to work. I’m always practicing and perfecting. I do everything right. You come in here and dick around yet, somehow, we’re supposed to be on the same level.”
Changbin didn’t even have an argument. The truth was just that apparent. Changbin sewed because his mother sewed. Because his grandmother sewed. Because, in all of his past lives, he sewed. He was set to inherit the Seo family tailor business because his mother had run it. Because his grandmother had run it. Because it had been in the family for generations. The same shop on the same corner on the same street for over a century. Changbin was only good at sewing because he’d done it for so long. Because he’d done it in every life he’d lived.
But he did not want to sew. He wanted to skateboard in the dorm parking lot with the other guys and get drunk on the weekends like any other twenty-one year old.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.” Changbin kept his voice low even though they were the only two people in the room. Even though they may as well have been the only two people left in the world. “I had no idea you felt that way.”
“Which is why I’m telling you,” Seungmin snapped. “You fuckwad. You’re always taking from me and then acting innocent.”
“I really didn’t know.”
“And now you’re going to act like you aren’t trying to steal my boyfriend,” Seungmin’s accusation was like a punch to the gut.
“I’m not,” Changbin sputtered out. He looked up at Seungmin. The eye contact was a mistake.
Seungmin stood up so quickly that his metal chair tipped over and clattered to the floor with a horrendous sound. “Are you really lying to my face? You aren’t trying to take him from me? Like you weren't here the other day saying you were madly in love with him? After I saw you two on the quad last night?”
Fuck. “I didn’t know you two were dating,” Changbin attempted to defend himself.
“Like that matters.”
“If you had told me—”
“Why would I? It’s none of your goddamn business.” Seungmin swung out a hand towards the mess of fabric swatches and paper clips and discarded sketches on the table in front of him and came out of it with a pair of scissors in his hand. He stepped menacingly towards Changbin.
Changbin took a step back but he wasn’t fast enough.
Seungmin grabbed him by the wrist. Tight and unforgiving like a vice. “Maybe I would have let it go if you hadn’t done something to him. If you hadn’t turned him against me. If you hadn’t made him go fucking crazy.”
“I… What?” Changbin choked out. He fought to free himself from Seungmin’s grasp but the strain on his wrist was so great that he feared it would break. “I didn’t… Seungmin, what are you talking about?”
Seungmin furrowed his eyebrows and leaned into Changbin’s face. “He’s been acting batshit since yesterday. Going on and on about some wacko shit, claiming he died and was born again. Telling some lunatic story that he was a king. You’ve turned him into a nutjob, Changbin. All he can talk about is you. How much he fucking misses you. How much he fucking wants you. I can be right in front of him and he won’t even see me. What the hell did you do to him? What drugs did you slip him?”
“It’s nothing like that,” Changbin said. “It’s just that…” He wasn’t even sure he could explain all of this. Reincarnation? Past lives? Knowing everything about each other after having only met once? “It’s just that he and I have this connection and it’s bigger than we know. Bigger than any of us.”
“God, you’ve been smoking the same thing. You’re both out of your minds.”
“Seungmin…” Changbin swallowed hard. Changbin’s mind scrambled to reach back through lifetimes. Across space and time. He remembered Seungmin. It had happened hundreds of years ago, but he remembered him. Seungmin hadn’t always been Seungmin, but he had always been there . In the past he shared with Chan. Seungmin had been the commander of the royal guard. An exiled aristocrat. A politician’s offspring. One of the hired workers who tended to the coffee bean trees. On and on their stories went. The three of them. Forever and ever tangled. And if it hadn’t stopped now, it would keep going in the future. He and Seungmin would always clash. Be in disagreement. Fight. They would always smash each other’s hearts to pieces.
Because they were supposed to. That was their fate.
Clearly, Seungmin didn’t know any of that. He didn’t remember their pasts and he probably wouldn’t remember their futures. Changbin couldn’t decide if such ignorance was a blessing or a curse. He couldn’t decide which would be worse, to know the pain was coming or to feel it for the first time. Again and again.
“All you know how to do is take from me, you greedy little fuck. A spot in the honor roll. That photo shoot with the magazine the other semester. The professor’s favoritism. Chan. Everything I thought I had, you steal it.” Seungmin peeled Changbin’s fingers back painfully far and then shoved the handle of the scissors onto Changbin’s palm. He squeezed Changbin’s fingers over the handle and then stepped back quickly like he was running from a bomb.
“I’m not trying to take him from you,” Changbin gasped out. He wasn’t sure what Seungmin was up to. The taller man’s panicked, jerky movements were beginning to unnerve him. “I don’t want to take Chan from anyone.” In fact, after last night, after watching Chan walk away from him for what felt like the hundredth thousandth time, Changbin had decided to give up on Chan. He’d decided to ignore the pull in his heart that led them to each other. Let the man live his own life. Feel his own feelings. Rebel against this awful, tragic, constantly repeating fate of theirs.
“If you want him so bad, you can have him.” Seungmin snatched his phone off of the table, unlocked it and held it out towards Changbin.
They were standing too far apart for it to do much good but Changbin could easily guess at the contents of the long paragraph that took up the majority of Seungmin’s phone screen.
“Now he wants to break up with me. Now he wants to take a fucking break .” Seungmin realized he was shouting and lowered his voice. His anger was barely contained. He visibly shook. “This is so humiliating. You get everything but do absolutely nothing to earn it.”
“Seungmin, I…” Changbin sputtered out.
“I hope the both of you rot in hell.” The torment was so evident on Seungmin’s face that Changbin wanted to cry. Bawl his eyes out. And not even from his own hurt!
Changbin felt awful. Miserable. “I didn’t mean to come between you.” But I just can’t help it , he wanted to say. Even in the middle of such a moment, the first thought that came to his mind was Chan. Chan holding him. Hugging him. Their fingers interlocked. Not just like last night but in similar nights in all of their past lives.
Changbin had known since he’d met Chan that their love would be fraught with obstacles. He knew that from the tears that always sprang to his eyes when he thought about their love. But he wanted to run towards it in spite of the clear warnings. He wanted to dive headfirst into the shallow waters because his body needed to experience it. His soul needed to be drawn to Chan.
“You didn’t mean to fuck shit up but you did.” Seungmin’s voice was sharp like steel. A sword held to Changbin’s throat, pressing against his jugular.
They would have argued further but someone else was coming into the classroom.
Jeongin was halfway down the aisle of work tables and chairs when he spotted Changbin’s ruined project. “Oh my god. What the flying fuck? Bitch, what ?” His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. His nostrils flared. “What? Who would do something like that!”
Seungmin let out a noise of disgust. “Can you quiet down? You’re always yelling. And stop making that hideous face. I can go spelunking up your gigantic nostrils.”
Jeongin fumed. He turned towards the upperclassman. “Seungmin, did you do this?” He waved a hand in the direction of the dress form as if he could possibly be talking about anything except for the torn ribbons of fabric all across the floor.
“I did it,” Changbin spoke up. “I did it myself.” He didn’t think he would ever want to defend Seungmin, but... “I got tired of looking at it. I may have gone overboard.”
“Shit, bitch. That’s not… That’s not cunt at all.”
Seungmin put his phone in his pocket and walked up the aisle. He bulldozed Jeongin out of his way and made a beeline to the classroom door. “I wanted to stop him but I didn’t want to get hurt.” He slowed down and halfway turned towards them. “He’s holding a pretty big pair of scissors after all.” That devilish, remorseless grin was back. Clearly, he would have owned up to ruining Changbin’s work. He did not need defending. “But I will say that it was oddly therapeutic to watch him fuck up something so pretty.” He turned back around and exited the classroom.
The silence dragged on. The scissors suddenly felt hot and dangerous in Changbin’s hand. He dropped them and they hit the floor, sliding across the tiles and towards the mess on the floor.
“Girl,” Jeongin cried out. He took a tentative step towards the dress form but then swiveled to walk towards Changbin, only to swivel again back to the dress form. “Why would you do that? You put your heart and soul into this.”
Changbin sighed. He stared at his empty hand. At the reddened impression of the scissor handles left on his skin. At the mess on the floor that he definitely wanted to clean up before the professor showed.
All he could think about was Chan.
Still.
All he could think about was how their story would keep repeating itself no matter what they did. All he could think about were the tears that always filled their relationship up, so close to the edges that the slightest movement made everything spill over and make a mess of everything. “I did it because I’m supposed to,” Changbin said. Because it was his destiny to love Chan but not to have him. Because the two of them were meant to be, but not meant to last.
Jeongin approached Changbin. He put a hand on his classmate’s shoulders and his throat tightened when he could feel how badly the shorter man was shaking. “Let’s go to the cafeteria,” he suggested. “It’s not even eight in the morning but I think some ice cream will do us both some good.”
⌲
Later that day, Changbin and Hyunjin went to the library. This time, Changbin made extra sure that Hyunjin was always in sight so that there would be no more embarrassing top shelf shenanigans. An hour of browsing later and Changbin had accrued six books that would hopefully give him the inspiration he needed to shit out a project in two days.
“Help me pick between these two fonts,” Hyunjin begged, shoving his tablet practically against Changbin’s nose.
“Why do you keep asking me stuff like this,” Changbin asked. He went cross-eyed trying to bring the screen into focus, it was so close to his face.
“From one creative to another, I value your input. Now pick a font, yo.”
The library was more crowded than usual. Every table full. Nearly every chair occupied. Every aisle packed with bodies. A low murmur like distant cicadas hung in the air as students whispered to each other. Apparently, one of the hard-ass professors from the film production major had sprang a surprise essay on her students, resulting in an overpopulation of last-minute researchers hogging all of the computers, swarming all of the bookshelves. Changbin was quietly grateful that professors in the fashion design major stuck to the syllables sentence by sentence and due date by due date. It made choosing when to skip class significantly easier.
“I like the one of the left,” Changbin readjusted the stack of books in his arms so that he could point.
Hyunjin made a face. He lowered the tablet so that he could double check the screen. “Did you just pick a serif font?” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. “I trusted you.”
“Then why would you ask me ?”
Hyunjin shrugged his shoulders up to his ears. “To be honest, I always go with the opposite of what you pick out on purpose. It’s like… my thing.”
Changbin rolled his eyes. “Glad I could help.” He led the way to the end of the aisle. He was finally ready to check out his selections. Hyunjin hadn’t rushed him or anything, but if Changbin had to hear his roommate’s stomach growl one more time, his own stomach would start caving in on itself out of sympathy.
“Seriously. You’re a lifesaver, yo. I never know what I want.”
“Then maybe I should make you pick the ugly stuff and see if you can still work with it.”
“Challenge accepted. I don’t think you’ve ever met anyone as stubborn as me when it comes to this shit.”
The two of them reached the end of the aisle. There was a miniature break in communication. Changbin turned left towards the library’s front desk. Hyunjin turned right towards their usual seating area tucked into the corner by the massive octagonal table in the center of the building.
They ran into each other.
Changbin’s books fell from his arms and hit the floor in a painful mountain of creased pages and folded-over softcovers.
Changbin groaned. “Dude!”
“You didn’t tell me where we were going,” Hyunjin griped, not taking his eyes off of his tablet screen.
Changbin squatted down to pick up the mess.
Another pair of hands reached for the same book he was about to grab. Fingers brushed. Electricity jolted across skin.
Changbin knew who it was before he looked up. “Chan.” There were so many layers attached to that name but Changbin was determined to only sift through it all and pick out the good, sweet, lovely things.
“I can’t stay away from you,” Chan mumbled. He didn’t even attempt to keep up the pretense of helping Changbin clean up. He just grabbed Changbin’s hand and squeezed. “I called myself walking away from you but the next thing I know, I’m right in front of you.”
His words sent Changbin’s heart pounding. Sent his cheeks flushing. He should walk away from this. Nothing good could come of this. He knew it. He could feel it. But his heart wanted what his heart wanted. He sucked in a breath to gather all of his courage. “Can we talk?”
He expected Chan to run from this. He expected to see nothing but the man’s broad back as he retreated, as he fled like he always did whether in this life, or in the one before that, or the one before
that
. But… “Sure,” Chan breathed out. “Let’s talk.” He was still gripping Changbin’s hand, his large one practically swallowing Changbin’s. “We have hundreds of years of catching up to do.”