When it gets quiet enough, Lee Ji Young likes to imagine that he can hear the voices of the trees. There's the faint murmur of an oak, cavorting next to the more innocent maples. They syllabicate in shushed murmurs, speaking just quietly enough that Ji Young can't quite make out what they're saying.

The most likely situation is that they're saying something along the lines of, "You, Lee Ji Young, are fucking crazy." Which, unfortunately, is starting to feel a little too accurate for his liking.

Ji Young lets out a sigh and tips onto the back two legs of his wooden chair, scrubbing at his eyes as they burn from staring out of his binoculars all day. One look in the small mirror propped up against the windowed wall in front of him tells Ji Young that, yes, he does have circular imprints from the device pressed around his face. And some stubble growing, Ji Young frowns. It'll have to be taken care of later, when the sun is high enough in the sky to ensure safe passage to and from the supply-drop box all the way on Taeyeon's side of the forest.

As it stands, it's much too early for him to attempt shaving himself without accidentally slitting his throat in the process. The sun is barely beginning to peek over the mountains in the distance, casting its rays of golden-yellow out in a blanket of tentative warmth. The light glints over the dew-laden treetops and turns them into a glittering display of liquid starlight—one that also blinds Ji Young's retinas when he stares for too long.

Ji Young stands to stretch his legs and feels his lower back twinge in complaint. He must've accidentally slept at the desk yesterday. It'd certainly explain why his neck feels like he's been run over by a tractor. It probably also explains the smudges of ink resting on his left cheek, smeared from the latest report that he'd been writing. Tentatively, Ji Young picks at the front of his ranger's uniform and gives it a surreptitious sniff. He grimaces—he smells like a wet dog.

As Ji Young hobbles over to his small chest in the corner, praying that he's got another spare uniform left because he really, really doesn't want to have to venture down to the stream to wash all of his laundry today, his walkie-talkie spits to life on his desk.

"This is Kim Taehyung from Snowshoe Pass Tower, clocking in at precisely five-thirty in the morning," Taeyeon's morning-gruff voice announces in a wave of static. "Currently, I'm watching Lee Ji Young's electrifying performance of 'How Many Times Can I Trip Over My Rug Before It Becomes Obvious That I'm A Toddler?' For all you folks at home, the answer is two."

Ji Young glowers, rubbing his tailbone as he sits on the floor. He had indeed just tripped twice over the corner of his red-brown rug and landed ass-first on the cold hardwood floor. Ji Young stands and shoots a middle finger towards his westward-facing window, snagging his walkie-talkie with his free hand.

"You know, it's considered bad manners to spy on people when they're getting dressed," Ji Young bitches through the receiver.

A garbled snort comes out from the other end. "Is that what you were doing?" Taeyeon laughs, "It looked like you were auditioning for a role in Swan Lake."

"Would it hurt either of you to consider someone other than yourselves for once in your life?" Jinwoo's voice interrupts on the channel. There's a yawn and then he adds, "Not all of us wake up at the crack of dawn just to have private conversations on the public channel."

Jinwoo is situated in the northernmost tower—Bear Creek Tower—and is one of the least morning-type people that Ji Young's ever met. "Hyung, as your subordinate, I feel that it's necessary to remind you that you were the one who instituted the five-thirty wake-up ordinance."

"And I feel it necessary to ask why neither of you assholes fought me harder about the mandate," Jinwoo's reply crackles right back.

Ji Young chuffs good-humoredly and sets down his receiver as Taeyeon and Jinwoo begin their daily mid-morning scuffle. Drawing the wooden blinds to retain whatever small vestige of modesty he might still have, Ji Young strips off his green-and-tan ranger's uniform. The actual process is more like peeling an onion because the uniform clings to Ji Young like a second skin, partly because it's already stiflingly humid in the tower and partly because Ji Young is soaked through with sweat.

He doesn't have to search through the recesses of his mind to know that he had another nightmare—and from the amount of moisture wicking off his clothes, it was a bad one. The shapes of it still loom in the forefront of his thoughts, another cloudy mix of past and present sent to remind Ji Young of everything he'd left behind.

With a determined shake of his head, Ji Young rummages through his chest. He finds one spare shirt smashed underneath his running sneakers. 'Ranger's Camp, '87' the shirt announces proudly as Ji Young attempts to smooth some of the worst wrinkles out of it. It's a bright, electrifying shade of yellow stamped with bright red font, and it lacks a collar, a breast pocket, or any note of formality.

With a quick glance over his shoulder to ensure that Jinwoo hasn't materialized out of thin air to tan his backside about maintaining decorum, Ji Young fights the t-shirt into submission. It's several sizes too small by now, having seen its heyday back when Ji Young was still a gangly sixteen-year-old, and Ji Young is more than a little glad that Taeyeon can't see his undignified one-footed hopping as he wrestles it over his shoulders.

He's also glad that the blinds hide the way his face falls as he catches sight of his torso in the small mirror on the desk as his eyes fall on the little crisscrossing scars on his chest—and the wicked one that slices down in between his ribcage.

Ji Young tugs the shirt over his chest and swallows hard.

"-and that's why, in my opinion, we should be focusing more on the social aspects of reintroducing native bears to the forest," Taeyeon concludes from over the receiver.

Jinwoo's sigh is long-suffering and heavy with the weight of two idiotic subordinates. "'Because I want one' isn't a sufficient reason for reintroducing a new type of fauna," Jinwoo reminds Taeyeon. "We've talked about this."

"I just feel like if you really considered my point of view for once-"

"Are we going to get any actual business done on this call, or are we going to attempt to put Jinwoo in an early grave all day?" Ji Young pipes up, rolling up the blinds again. He sifts absently through the stack of topographical maps on his desk and runs a hand through his hair.

There's a creak from Jinwoo's end as he presumably rolls out of bed and onto the floor, and then, "Just the usual. Fire danger is set to 'Moderate' for today, so be sure to adjust the dials on your lookout tower. We're also experiencing an influx of tourists down at the West Bay, Taeyeon, so keep an eye out for bonfire smoke and illegal fireworks. The display last summer nearly burned us to the ground."

"I remember," Taeyeon sighs. Ji Young grimaces at the memory too, though the flames hadn't crossed the river dividing the West forest from the East. He still remembers the burnt-umber glow of the flames in the distance and the thick smell of smoke trailing up into the midnight sky. The scars of the fire spread from just behind Taeyeon's tower directly to the rear of it—he'd been lucky to escape with his life.

Ji Young remembers the panic he'd felt as he watched the search and rescue helicopter turn in impotent circles as it attempted to locate Taeyeon amid the chaos. Thankfully, Yun Sue, the pilot, is hellishly good at his job, and Taeyeon had made it out with no more than two burnt eyebrows and some smoke inhalation.

"Oh, and be on the lookout for Long-Horned Beetles. There's been a spike in the population, and forestry has asked us to keep a close eye on the whole situation," Jinwoo adds, effectively wrenching Ji Young from his thoughts.

"Beatlemania!" Taeyeon hoots through the static. "They're taking over again!"

Rolling his eyes, Ji Young chimes in before Jinwoo can give himself an ulcer. "Did Hee Jun drop the supplies yet?" he asks. "I know he's just coming back from vacation, but I'm in desperate need of a razor. I haven't shaved in a week, and it feels like my chin is trying to light itself on fire."

"Doubtful."

"He did the drop-off last night," Jinwoo talks over Taeyeon's attempted jibe, "Supplies for the week should be ready to pick up at Box Four-Oh-Four. Oh—the cookies are for me, Taeyeon, and if you want your own, order them ahead of time like any responsible adult."

Ji Young's eyebrows flick up in surprise. "How'd you convince Hee Jun to deliver during the night? I thought he said he'd rather slide down a trail of razors into a pool of hydrogen peroxide before he walked through the forest at night."

"Level ten persuasion," Jinwoo clucks proudly. There's a momentary pause, and then he adds, somewhat worriedly, "Taeyeon, did you hear me about the cookies?"

When there's no immediate reply, Jinwoo starts, "Ji Young-"

"I'm on it," Ji Young replies with a snort. "No one touches your cookies without a fight."

He's absolutely certain that, at the first mention of Jinwoo's precious supply of frosted animal crackers, Taeyeon had peeled out of his tower in the hopes of beating Jinwoo to the box. It's been an ongoing feud, starting two summers ago when Jinwoo had accidentally taken Taeyeon's mother's homemade strawberry bars from the drop box. It had quickly escalated into all-out snack warfare with Ji Young caught in the crossfire.

"You deserve a raise, kid," Jinwoo says gratefully.

Ji Young hefts his hiking backpack onto his desk and rummages through with one hand, checking his supplies. "A new blanket would be plenty. Mine is covered with moth holes, and I'm pretty sure it was fabricated during World War One."

"New blanket added to the list. Good luck today, Ji Young. I'll check in with you both later tonight. And if you see Taeyeon at the drop box, drop kick him for me. Jinwoo signing off."

"See you," Ji Young says, but Jinwoo's already dropped off. Ji Young is alone in his tower once again, surrounded by the small desk and the wooden bookcase and the sealed cherrywood chest that hides underneath the bed, out of sight and out of mind.

But Ji Young decided a long time ago that he's not one to dwell on the past. He's learned from experience that looking backwards, even for a moment, can be pretty catastrophic. So Ji Young spends as much time as possible immersed in the present and looking forward to tomorrow. And right now, he's focused on saving Jinwoo's cookies from Taeyeon's thievery.

Without a second thought about the box of memories hiding under his bed, Ji Young checks his climbing gear, harnesses, air horn, and miscellaneous survival accoutrement. He clicks his walkie onto the belt loop of his pants, slaps the matching emerald baseball cap onto his head, and heads out the door into the wilderness.

There's not a lot that Ji Young is afraid of.

Clowns once briefly terrified him, but that was more of a fleeting fear. All it took was one venture behind the polka-dot curtain at his town's fair and the discovery that underneath all that horrendous makeup was a human being to dismiss Ji Young's coulrophobia.

There'd also been a brief but terrifying spat with a fear of heights, but Ji Young hadn't been allowed to dwell on that one for too long. It's hard to spend days and nights in a firewatch tower slung dozens of feet in the air and not get over that particular fear.

And besides, Ji Young has always liked to consider himself a fairly logical, somewhat rational person. He'd long since discovered that, if he can understand the phenomenon he's afraid of, it isn't quite so horrible. According to the gospel of Ji Young, fear can be rationalized, assessed for its evolutionary viability, and accepted or discarded accordingly.

Unfortunately, theory is always easier than praxis, and there are some things that still make cold beads of sweat run down the curve of Ji Young's back.

So as Ji Young stands at the rocky shore of Bear Creek, the river that runs from Jinwoo's tower southward and divides the forest into neat hemispheres, he tries to talk himself out of his particular fear.

It's only a stream, he reminds himself. It comes up to your mid-calf. You've crossed it before, there haven't been any floods recently, and there's no moss growing on the rocks to make you slip. You've got this. You can do this.

But his fingers are trembling, and his breath is coming quicker, and Ji Young is finding it hard to not give in to the flood of emotion that clogs up his throat.

"You can swim," Ji Young says firmly to the river as it babbles by. "You didn't have that option last time. You're stronger now." The river burbles along, unimpressed and uncaring, but the words buoy Ji Young's confidence.

With a quick breath and an expletive, Ji Young hops and skips across the water-slick rocks that protrude from the river's crystal-clear water. It's one-two-three-four jumps, and then Ji Young is safely on the other side feeling quite foolish.

He glanced around sheepishly. There was no one around, not this far east. All of the campgrounds were more to the west and south, and only a handful of trails cut this deep into the woods. Still, Ji Young felt the judgmental gaze of the maples swaying around him and wrinkled his nose in distaste.

"Well, you try it," he grumbled at the trees, hiking his pack higher up on his shoulder. It was almost noon, and the sun burned bright in the middle of the sky that peeked through the canopy. Ji Young trudged down the fire trail and enjoyed the sound his boots made as they crunched their way through the well-packed dirt.

As he walked, he hummed to himself. They were just little bits and pieces of lyrics he had come up with and tried to remember, but they worked wonders at warding off loneliness out here. Ji Young's fingers twitched across an imaginary fretboard as he imagined the chords he could fit his lyrics to, wishing for the umpteenth time that he could afford to have a guitar shipped out here. He knew that Joo Eun had one down in the first-aid pavilion by the south entrance, but it wasn't worth a three-day hike one way just to play guitar for ten minutes.

Maybe you should buy a ukulele, Ji Young mused as he ducked under the bough of a particularly vivacious tree. They were portable, easier to play. Affordable, but limited tonally. It was worth considering, at least. Any hobby was a good hobby up here, he figured.

By the time Ji Young had hammered out a steady melody to accompany his bit of lyricism, it was well into the afternoon. The sun had moved further west, glaring in his eyes and making him curse his lack of forethought for not bringing his sunglasses.

He was squinting and sweating profusely by the time he arrived in the small clearing. It was circled by sun-kissed trees and spots of wildflowers, with Supply Box Four-Oh-Four at its center. Usually, if it was quiet enough, Ji Young could sit on one of the granite rocks in the clearing and watch the magpies that hopped around periodically. He’d even caught a glimpse of a deer once.

No such wildlife sat in the clearing today, but Taeyeon was doing a remarkable impression of a self-satisfied lynx from where he perched on a rock, savoring a bag of stolen animal crackers.

“Joo Eun’s going to kill you for that,” Ji Young called by way of greeting, but he felt a smile creeping up his face. It had been a while since he’d run into Taeyeon—two months at least—and the presence of another human being was heartening.

Taeyeon pushed his aviators up with one crumb-clad, black-painted fingernail and shrugged. His white teeth gleamed as he put on a shit-eating grin. “When’s the last time Joo Eun’s walked this far south this early in the day? I swear that guy’s an owl disguised as an old man.”

“You’re horrible,” Ji Young accused. “Give me a cookie.”

With a laugh, Taeyeon patted the seat on the rock next to him. He scooched to make room and dusted off his (decidedly not uniform) volleyball shorts. “And you’re easily corrupted. Here—have another. You look gaunt as hell.”

Deciding that stolen animal crackers tasted better than their honestly-obtained counterparts, Ji Young accepted eagerly. “Gaunt?” he teased.

“I’ve been reading lately. Sue me.” Taeyeon pushed his sunglasses up into his chestnut brown hair and swept his auburn eyes up and down Ji Young critically. “You look like hell. Are you sleeping alright?”

Taeyeon, Ji Young decides, is one of the only people he’s ever met who can balance charming aloofness with knife-edged perception gracefully. “I’ve slept better,” he replies. “Just had a few nightmares recently is all.” Catching the way Taeyeon’s eyes narrow, Ji Young hastily tacks on, “It’s nothing to be worried about. Really. I’m handling it.”

“You’ve made an appointment to see Joo Eun, then?” When he’s met with silence, Taeyeon sighs and knocks his shoulder into Ji Young’s. “Come on, Ji Young. You know it’s important to talk to someone about it. It’s not really something you should be putting off.”

The grass below Ji Young’s feet is suddenly very interesting, and he fixes his eyes on a trail of ants snaking their way through the blades towards the supply box. “I’m not putting it off per se. It’s just been busy lately.”

Taeyeon snorts. “ Right . You’ve been real busy, what with all the reading and the binocular-using.”

“So you are spying on me!” Ji Young exclaims.

“I was never hiding it. I spy on everyone. That’s half the reason I took this job—people are fascinating as hell. And weird , too. Did I tell you that I saw someone try to sneak a rubber ducky, a canister of jumping snakes, and a snowshoe in the other day?” Taeyeon rambles, distracted.

Ji Young’s eyebrows tick up. “A snowshoe? What were they planning to do with that?”

“We’ll never know. But I’m now the proud owner of a rubber ducky, a can of jumping snakes, and one single snowshoe, so I’ll let you know what I come up with,” Taeyeon grins down at him. The lines around his eyes have deepened a touch over the years, and they catch in the light as Ji Young glances up at his friend.

It almost feels like a lifetime since he met Taeyeon at a ranger’s camp ten years ago. It’s even more strange to reconcile that hesitant, shy sixteen-year-old with the recalcitrant twenty-six-year-old sitting next to him. Especially when he dispenses wisdom like a vending machine gives out cans of coke. It’s a jarring sort of incongruity that Ji Young’s certain he couldn’t live without.

They lapse into an easy silence for a while, occasionally comparing the shapes they see in the clouds that drift overhead. Taeyeon swears that he sees a snowshoe in one of them; Ji Young thinks he’s full of it.

It isn’t until Ji Young is opening the chipped yellow lid to the supply box that Taeyeon brings it up again. Ji Young’s shoving his hygiene set, freeze-dried meals, and other bits and bobs into his pack when Taeyeon says gently, “Promise me that you’ll make an appointment, Ji Young.”

The box’s lid drops with a dull thump, and Ji Young clicks the lock shut with one hand. “I’ll… think about it,” he mutters, zipping up his heavier pack and hefting it onto his shoulders. He looks up in time to catch the flicker of worry that crosses over Taeyeon’s eyes, but it’s gone before Ji Young is sure he’s actually seen it at all.

“That’s not what I asked you to promise me, but since I’m so unselfish—” here Taeyeon pauses to shove the remaining bags of stolen cookies into his pack, “—I’ll accept for now.” He frowns a little and adjusts the straps on his bag. “You know I’m only bugging you so much about this because I care about you, right? It’s not a patronizing thing.”

Despite himself, Ji Young smiles. “I know,” he says, flicking Taeyeon’s nose insolently. “You just can’t help the patronizing tone. It must be genetic.”

“You’re such a brat. I hate your guts. But seriously, if you ever need to talk, I’m on the other side of the radio.” After a brief, dramatic pause, Taeyeon says in his best actor-voice, “ Always, brother.”

Ji Young rolls his eyes and makes his way back towards the trail that he’d come down earlier. “You know who else is at the other end of the line? Jinwoo.”

Taeyeon huffs. “Yeah, he’s a problem. I can work on assassinating him if you want.”

“Who’d sign our paychecks then?”

“Touché.” Clicking his fingers and walking backward towards the setting sun, Taeyeon exclaims, “Hey, wait, I know! We can finally perfect our heliograph codes! Speak by flashing mirrors at one another. It’s very James Bond.”

“Have you ever even seen a James Bond movie?” Ji Young calls over the wind that picks up in the clearing.

Taeyeon waves his hand around dismissively. “No, but I bet he’s a maverick when it comes to mirror talking, and I’m determined to be his Moneypenny.”

With a wave and a shout goodbye, Ji Young turns to go. All the worries that sweep into his head at the thought of Joo Eun and their appointments are effectively banished as a bag of animal crackers sweeps through the air, smacks him on the back of his head, and falls to the floor.

Jinwoo’s going to be pissed, Ji Young thinks delightedly.

Jinwoo is pissed, and Ji Young hears all about it on his hike back to his tower. He hears about how inconsiderate Taeyeon is while he shimmies between two sides of a rock’s cleft, sucking in his stomach to slip through.

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh?” Ji Young half-wheezes, winded from the ascent back eastwards. He looks sadly up at the rope dangling from the thirty-foot rock face in front of him that connects with the trail above. It’s easy enough to descend the face, but it’s a pain to climb back up after a day’s exercise.

Jinwoo harrumphs haughtily. “Me? Harsh? As if. If anything, I’ve spoiled the two of you in your time here. I’m not so sunny with anyone else.”

“You don’t work with anyone else,” Ji Young points out. He slides his harness on under his thighs and secures the rope to his carabiner, hefting himself up and feeling the pull in his shoulders. He’s not small anymore, nor is he by any means weak, but his lats ache with the strain.

“Well, I wasn’t so nice with the two fire-watchers who preceded you guys. They were real jerks. Cut and run as soon as fire season was over,” Jinwoo complains through the line.

Ji Young shimmies higher up the cliff face. Sweat is already beading along his brow and tanning the back of his neck. He wishes, not for the first time, that he had a bathtub back at his tower instead of a tepid water spigot that Jinwoo tries to call a shower. “That’s the job,” he says through clenched teeth, “Technically, we’re not supposed to stay in the watchtowers year-round. You lucked out with us.”

“I guess. Where else am I going to find two hard workers with zero ties to the outside world? Which, coming back to my original point, is why I spoil you both so much.”

“I have a threadbare blanket and a faulty power generator.”

“I told you, I’m working on that. Where are you, by the way? I don’t see you in your tower.” Jinwoo’s line goes staticky for a moment like it always does when he descends the steps of his tower. Being furthest north, Jinwoo has the best radio reception out of all of them. He can call all the way down to Joo Eun’s southern medical center and, on a good day, can use the little television he keeps hidden away in his wardrobe. When he descends, the quality of his radio signal deteriorates into indistinct mumbles like the rest of them.

“Please tell me that you’re not going to take up spying too,” Ji Young huffs, pulling himself to lie flat on his stomach at the top of the rock wall. “It’s bad enough to have one peeping tom in the business. You and Taeyeon are really giving fire-watchers a bad name.”

Jinwoo grumbles. “I have better things to do than watching you day and night. I’m still mad about Taeyeon. Thank you for betraying his confidence and tattling to me.”

“It isn’t tattling if I know he’s listening to us,” Ji Young laughs. He unclips his harness and stands at the edge of the small cliff looking down. The soil out here is dark brown and spotted with black-and-white pieces of granite that gleam in the late afternoon sun. From his perch above the gully, he can see over the treetops below and out into the distance. He’s not as high as he is in his tower, but he’s high enough to see Bear Creek winding happily southward. “I’m headed back to the tower. Supply drops take all day.”

“Anything unusual to report?” Jinwoo asks. He curses a moment later, and Ji Young hears the telltale snap of a branch that tells him Jinwoo’s just been backhanded by a tree.

Ji Young shrugs even though Jinwoo can’t see him. “Unless you count Taeyeon’s newfound interest in jorts, no. I haven’t actually seen anyone today—not even our usual hikers. It’s a bit lonely, actually.”

“It’s still early in the season,” Jinwoo reminds him. “Give it time, and before you know it, you’ll be up to your ears in tourists camping offroad and illegal firework shows. Joo Eun said there are hundreds of people coming in through the south gate. They should be here in the coming days, so enjoy your peace while it lasts.”

“Got it. Anything else?” Ji Young doesn’t mean to come across as cranky, but it’s late and he’s starving, and he’d left off at a really good part of his book last night. His yellow shirt has turned to a sickly shade of light brown from sweat and grime, and Ji Young would kill to be able to shave. It’s the small pleasures in life that keep him going. Jinwoo is impinging on his small pleasures.

With a hum, Jinwoo says, “That should be everything. Make sure you’re practicing with your heliographs, alright? I know you and Taeyeon hate them, but there’s a reason that we have them. Someday you’re going to be glad that you know how to use them.”

“Undoubtedly.” Ji Young sees his tower rising a few more miles in the distance and picks up his pace to a slow jog. “I’ll see you bright and early at five-thirty tomorrow, okay, hyung?”

“Don’t remind me,” comes Jinwoo’s response. Radio silence descends afterwards, and Ji Young clicks his walkie to his hip again to race up the final slope home.

It’s interesting to Ji Young how his fire tower has assumed that status in his life— home . It’s really nothing more than a wooden crows-nest built on hundred-foot stilts, but it’s comforting. His is the last tower that hasn’t yet been retrofitted to be galvanized metal, but Ji Young sort of likes that it’s made of the same wood that surrounds it. It smells like earth and sky and all of the things that Ji Young loves about being out here.

Underneath the tower is Ji Young’s manual generator to be used in emergencies, and his outhouse-slash-shower room lies a few meters away under the shade of the tower. There’s a pile of wood kindling stacked against the shack and a small stone firepit dug into the ground. Technically, he’s not supposed to have a firepit, but what Jinwoo doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Ji Young trudges up the hundred or so stairs to his loft in the sky and comes trudging right back down a few minutes later with a towel, his soap-on-a-rope, and a spare pair of pajama bottoms in hand. He makes quick work of washing all of the day’s grime away underneath the spray of the water spigot and pats himself dry. He makes a mental note to do his washing tomorrow and hangs his towel out on the clothesline.

Dinner is a pot of freeze-dried pot of spaghetti rehydrated with water and cooked over his small campfire. Sparks fly out in crackles of red-gold, lifting into the air briefly like fireflies before burning out in small bursts of glory. Ji Young watches the flicker of the light and eats his spaghetti in silence, wondering how he managed to end up here.

Here, in the place where he’s safe for the first time in his life. Where he’s surrounded by the quiet of the trees and the companionship of his books. Where nothing in the outside world can really touch him. And though the solitude sometimes gets to him, Ji Young’s long since made his peace with the fact that he’s going to grow old and die alone out here. Even that in and of itself is a small comfort.

He’s not tied to anyone or anything. He doesn’t have to worry about letting someone down or getting hurt again.

And if the worst thing that happens is that Ji Young gets sick of himself, well—there are always ways to deal with that further down the line.

So Ji Young dries his hair off in the warm glow of the fire and gazes up at the constellations overhead, recalling the stories of each in his mind as he contemplates how tiny he is in comparison. Infinitesimally, indescribably small and unimportant when compared to Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Hercules.

Every night, sitting here at his bonfire by himself, Ji Young finds himself falling in love with the forest all over again, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

...🪵...

The peace doesn’t last through the night.

It never does.

For a moment, caught between a nightmare and reality, Ji Young struggles to breathe. Behind his closed eyes, he can feel the press of fingers that weigh him down, holding tight around his throat and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing tight until his head feels all light and fuzzy and he’s not sure which way is up.

Water rushes up his nose and into his ears. Ji Young thrashes below the surface, vision hazy under the linoleum lights that swing in above the water. Someone is screaming in the background, but it isn’t him. It can’t be him, because the moment Ji Young opens up his mouth to shout, water pours in and down his lungs like liquid fire.

It burns, Ji Young remembers thinking as he scrabbles mightily at the grip on his throat, raking his nails across the calloused hands holding him under. It burns. Make it stop.

You can make it stop any time you want, the small, insidious little voice whispers into his ear. You have the power to make it stop. Just take a few deep breaths and this will all be over.

But I don’t want to die, Ji Young thinks desperately, even as he feels the life draining away from his limbs. I don’t want to die here. I’ve barely lived.

The voice in his ear laughs darkly. I don’t think you really have much of a choice, it whispers melancholically, He wants you dead. And what he wants, he gets.

The hands around Ji Young’s throat squeeze tighter. Ji Young thrashes violently once again, giving his last-ditch effort at salvation all of his remaining strength, and—

Falls to the wooden floor.

For a moment, Ji Young just lies there, staring up at the ceiling that spins dizzily above him, trying to get his bearings.

“You’re alright. It was just a nightmare,” Ji Young says out loud, just to prove it to himself. His hands shake as he runs his fingers over his neck. He can still feel the ghost of the hands that pinned him underwater. He can even still feel the water itself.

A quick swipe across his forehead tells Ji Young that it’s not water—he’s just sweat through his clothes. Better than the alternative, he sighs. He lies on the floor a minute longer and scrubs at his eyes, counting on his fingers the days since he managed to sleep through the night. It’s been ten days.

The nightmares always get worse around this time of year.

Ji Young heaves himself up to sitting and nearly has a heart attack when he finds that he can’t move his legs. He looks down. His sheet is tangled around his leg in what appears to be a very intricate sailor’s knot, and Ji Young disentangles himself with hands shaky from panic. Only once he’s lobbed the sheet back onto his wooden bed does the worst of the feeling begin to dispel.

Pushing himself to sit back against the wall, Ji Young wraps his arms around his knees and drops his head. He sits there and breathes deeply through the spinning. He really needs to make an appointment to see Joo Eun. He needs to, but he’d rather not. Because dealing with a few nightmares is better than having to tell someone everything that’s happened to him. It’s better than watching the looks of pity swim over their faces as they understand for the first time just how fragile he is. How pathetic, how weak, how-

“No,” Ji Young says decisively as the negative voice in his head starts to sound a bit too much like the man from his past. “You’re not weak,” he tells himself, using the affirmations Joo Eun told him to try. “You’re strong. You’re safe. You have people who care about you.”

The pull of the downward spiral is relentless, but Ji Young resists with all his might. He won’t let it win this time. He won’t give it the power to make him miserable again. It’s already taken enough from him, and it won’t take tonight as well.

Like he always does to ward off the ghosts of his past, Ji Young lugs himself to his feet and staggers over to his desk by the window. He tugs open his blinds, pulls on his zip-up jacket, and grabs his binoculars. The sky is clear tonight, and Ji Young can see the moon starting to rise in the distance. A look at his clock tells him that it’s just past midnight.

Ji Young settles into his chair and looks out into the night, binoculars held in one hand and his pen in the other, watching for nothing and everything.