The crowds outside the Court were so thick that it was impossible for them to locate any of the others. Gyuvin did his best to stand between Ricky and most of the crowd, just so he wouldn’t feel so suffocated amidst the throng of people, and Ricky extended a grateful smile to him. “It’s starting!” Gyuvin pointed into the distance. “Look!”
Fireworks bloomed in the night sky, splitting the darkness open, streaks of gold amidst the light of a thousand lanterns, the explosions booming so loud Gyuvin could feel the ground shake beneath them. Cheers rose into the air all around them as the fireworks danced across the sky; Gyuvin kept his head up, trying his best to see only gold and nothing else.
Though his father had been the sect leader’s right hand man before he was exiled, Gyuvin had a few fuzzy memories of him making the time to watch the fireworks together every New Year and every summer solstice. He could remember, in flashes of memory that came and went, his father putting five-year-old Gyuvin on his shoulders so he could crane his neck to look up into the sky. After his father left, he still came down to see the fireworks every year, but the people he was with were always different. Sect Leader Baek had come with him, the year after his father was first exiled. Some years Minwoo came down to watch with him. Most of the time it was Junhyeon, or Hanbin, or the other cultivators from Meteor Court. But as hard as he tried, he’d never found that same feeling again, that feeling he’d had sitting atop his father’s shoulders, that there was no one under the starry sky other than them.
Gyuvin looked back, grinning. “So? Are you having fun?”
Ricky smiled, the balmy night breeze making his golden hair flutter in the moonlight. “Yes, I am,” he said. “Although, it’s much warmer weather than I’ve ever seen before.”
Gyuvin had almost forgot; growing up in a place as brutally cold and dry as Moonrise Palace, Sunshower City in the middle of summer must feel like a sauna to Ricky. “It’s a hot night, isn’t it?” he asked, thinking. “Come on!”
He grabbed Ricky’s wrist and turned back, streaking through the milling crowd, brushing shoulders with a hundred people a minute as he pulled the other boy along behind him. As he ran, the belated realisation came to him; he’d found it again, even if it was just for a fleeting moment. The feeling that no one else existed other than him and the person he was pulling behind him.
“Don’t let go!” he called, laughing as he ran with reckless abandon, ducking his head to avoid a string of hanging lanterns. The balminess of the air cleared a little as they left the more densely occupied area in the heart of the city, but Gyuvin didn’t stop or let go of Ricky’s wrist until they broke through the bounds of a willow forest, the grass carpeting the ground almost silver in the light of the moon. He collapsed onto the grass by the side of the lake, laughing and panting from the sudden exhaustion.
Ricky sat down on the soft grass opposite him, panting lightly. “Why’d you bring me here?”
Gyuvin gestured to the lake. “My father used to bring me here all the time during the warmer months. Come on!”
The lake wasn’t massive, but it was large enough for people to swim comfortably in. Water lilies and lilypads blanketed the far edges of the body of water, near the banks, but the rest of the surface was so still Gyuvin could see the unbroken reflection of the moon in the water’s surface. He shrugged off as much of his clothes as he could without being indecent and dove headfirst into the lake, disappearing under its surface for a good few seconds before resurfacing.
“The water’s much cooler,” Gyuvin said, pushing water and his hair away from his face. “There are bigger lakes closer to the heart of the city that the children usually swim at during summer, but there’s always too many people there. No one knows about this lake. It’s just for me…”
Ricky sighed and gave in, slipping his outer robes and headpiece off, folding them neatly and setting them down on a rock so it wouldn’t get wet. As if on second thought, he turned back and picked up the robes Gyuvin had abandoned in a heap on the grass and folded those too. Gyuvin waited by the edge of the lake for Ricky to join him, his expression a little sheepish. “I wasn’t planning on wearing those robes again, anyway. They’re going to be washed after this.”
“Still,” Ricky said, fixing him with a look. Gyuvin could tell he had no real gripe with it, rather he’d just folded them out of habit. “Messy.”
Gyuvin spun in circles in the water, impatient. The water wasn’t chilly, but it was significantly cooler than the warm night air, and Ricky was still near the edge of the lake, slowly acclimatising to the temperature. “You’re supposed to jump right in and get a shock,” he laughed, swimming back to where Ricky was. “Come in quick, or I’ll pull you in.”
“Kim Gyuvin, don’t you da-“
Gyuvin grabbed him by the wrist and yanked hard, sending them both tumbling back into the lake. He surfaced again to catch his breath, letting the cool water wash away his sweat from earlier in the day. The night air carried the faint scent of lilies from the blooms dotting the lake’s surface, and in the background, from the distant city, he could hear the last cracks of fireworks shooting through the sky.
He’d let go of Ricky once they both fell in but Ricky resurfaced next to him anyway. Gyuvin had never seen him with his hair down before, but his long golden hair had come loose from its ponytail when he took off his headpiece, and it framed his face as he found his footing, falling over his shoulders, a smooth, unbroken moonlit gold, giving way only to the build of his shoulders which rippled with muscle as he held his back upright. The light of the full moon and the drops of water glimmering off his pale skin gave him an almost otherworldly quality, like he was something entirely not from this world.
In all possible manners of perception, he was devastatingly beautiful. Gyuvin was struck silent for a long moment. He imagined that if a heavenly being were to breathe life into a statue carved from the most delicate of moonstones, it would look just like Ricky.
Ricky reached up to push his hair back, exposing more of his chest to the dappled moonlight, and Gyuvin did his best not to look like he was looking. He fixed Gyuvin with a withering stare. “Don’t do that again,” he said, though he sounded like he knew there was no point in saying it.
“It’s more fun to dive,” Gyuvin retorted, splashing water in his direction. “Life’s too short to take things slow.”
“Life’s too short to jump into things rashly,” Ricky returned. “What if there had been a lake spirit lurking in the water? You’d have been dead within a second.”
“Ah, you think too much,” Gyuvin answered, frowning. “This lake is my kingdom. There are no lake spirits inside. This Emperor of Ten Thousand Years will not allow it.”
“More like Emperor of Ten Thousand Fish,” Ricky said dryly. “Who declared you emperor? Your kingdom has nothing in it.”
Gyuvin reached out to play with the stem of a water lily. “Nothing in it except you and I. I have no desire to be the emperor of anything else.”
“…nonsense. Keep talking and maybe I’ll drown you.”
“You can’t drown the emperor in his own kingdom. This Lord of Ten Thousand Years will not allow it.”
“…”
i’m going to start doing little meatbun-style mini theatres at the end of some chapters! they’re not significant to the plot so you can skip these if you want, they’re just for me to play around with my characters more hehehehe
the core nine and their favourite parts of the summer solstice festival
gyuvin: fireworks
ricky: eating candied strawberries (ate 5 sticks over the course of the day and contemplated having more)
hanbin: following zhanghao to watch music performances (ever since he turned twenty festivals like these became more work than play)
zhanghao: watching the music performances (he feels a certain affinity to them. perhaps in another life…?)
gunwook: making mouse-shaped dough noodles (he found one of them in his pocket later that night and got a shock, gyuvin’s doing)
jiwoong: competing with the local children on who can write the neatest on a paper lantern. unsurprisingly, he lost every time. his handwriting is unreadable.
taerae: his new friend junhyeon..?
matthew: eating cold sesame noodles and seeing how many cones he can collect in total (double digit number)
yujin: no comment, he loves everything. he competed with jiwoong for the lantern decorating and was appalled to realize he couldn’t read a single word.Â
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