Work Text:
part i. chan
it’s fitting, chan thinks, that felix was eliminated in winter. the bleak weather, lacking in sunlight, mirrors the group’s and his own feelings. without felix, their sunshine, day in, day out, the sun rises but he doesn’t feel it. (none of them feels it.)
he worries that he’s not doing enough as a leader, since his members keep getting eliminated -- first minho, now felix as well. who else will be stolen from him, as the summer’s light is stolen from him?
he fears that he’s not being supportive enough, appreciative enough of the members he does have left, enough at all -- .
their words of comfort -- telling him that he’s enough, that he’s a good leader, that he does more than enough -- fall on empty ears, like the limited sunlight falling on his skin: he doesn’t feel it.
part ii. woojin
he stares at his feet. he stares and stares as if he’s going to find answers in his shoelaces, as if they’re going to tell him how to bring back felix.
they say nothing.
(he tries the wall next. it, too, remains frustratingly silent.)
he knows the other members are crying (crying doesn’t even encapsulate it -- sobbing, weeping) and he sort of wishes he were crying too but he’s just numb. it feels as though he’s been doused in cold water and he’s being pushed underwater and his head is being pushed down and he’s drowning but he can’t feel anything it’s just empty --
and yet, he feels everything.
above all, he’s scared. their numbers keep decreasing before his very eyes and he’s entirely powerless to do anything about it. felix tried so hard -- they all saw him staying up until five in the morning, practicing his lines in the mirror, reviewing his korean grammar, doing the choreography over and over and over again -- but it didn’t matter, it didn’t save him.
he fears for himself, a bit, but he feels detached from the whole thing. it doesn’t feel real in the slightest. maybe he’ll wake up and it was all a dream, and then he can laugh about it with felix in the morning. he pinches himself, just to check. it’s not a dream, it’s the realest thing to ever happen to him and yet --
the pain of the pinch doesn’t even begin to compare to the pain in his heart.
part iii. changbin
he’s sorry. good god, he’s so sorry he doesn’t think he’ll be able to put it into words. he wishes he’d been a better hyung, been there more, helped felix more with his korean, helped him more with his rap, just done more like he ought to have done -- but he didn’t. and now felix is gone. the other members tell him that it’s not his fault, that it’s jyp’s fault for not recognizing felix’s potential and not giving him time, and maybe this seems to ring true somewhere in the back of his mind, but it doesn’t stick. (it’s easier to turn his hatred onto himself than someone else.)
he wishes he’d held on. when he was hugging felix, crouching and crying on the ground, tears dripping off of his nose and chin, shaking in his dongsaeng’s embrace, (cameras all pointed at his face but he doesn’t care, his image doesn’t matter, nothing matters but felix, felix being eliminated, him being alone) he should have held on: gripped his fingers into the back of felix’s jacket and held him so tightly that jyp wouldn’t have been able to pry them apart, no matter how hard he tried.
instead, he cries. he cries and cries and cries until what seems like rivers and lakes and oceans of tears have been formed from him alone. he cries until there are no more tears in his body, and then he cries some more.
he thinks that the tang of regret in his mouth (he can’t get it out, no matter how much he tries to cry it out) is more bitter and biting than even the sourest lemon. (he’d eat all the lemons in the world if it meant it would bring felix back.) ((he might eat them anyway, because he feels like he deserves to suffer.))
part iv. hyunjin
he bends over, clutching his knees, trying to grab onto something, anything, for stability. it doesn’t really work, since his knees are just as unstable and shaky as the rest of him is. he feels like he’s just lost his foundation, like the ground has disappeared from underneath his feet. he didn’t think that felix would be eliminated -- the optimistic, idealistic part of him had thought that no one would be eliminated, while the negative, self-deprecating part of him had thought that he would be the one to be eliminated. but he hadn’t imagined that felix would be the one to be eliminated.
he feels alone, like he’s being swallowed by the vastness of the world without a tether to hold onto any longer. he drowns in the emptiness, the wideness of it all. the wideness of the hole in his heart.
(he wonders if it can ever be filled. he doubts it.)
part v. jisung
his motto has always been “this, too, shall pass” and he’s trying, trying, to live by it, to keep it in his mind, to keep himself from falling. but it doesn’t really work. he feels lied to. he doesn’t think that this -- the loss of both minho and felix -- will ever pass; he doesn’t think that it’s possible for him (or the group) to recover entirely. he’s resigned himself to a permanent scar, a permanent trauma, always there and everpresent. maybe “passing” isn’t so much about recovery as much as learning to live with a constant tug on his heart, every laugh feeling a little hollow or like a betrayal.
perhaps above all, he feels guilty. that he’s been praised on the show while others are criticized, while others are eliminated. if he could, he’d give them the compliments he’d received and take their criticisms for his own in a heartbeat. he wishes he could take their pain onto himself, take their insecurities onto himself. take their eliminations onto himself too, if he could. he hates seeing them suffer, seeing them cry, seeing them practice until five in the morning until they can barely walk due to exhaustion.
he hated seeing felix cry after receiving the results of elimination so much that he couldn’t bear it; he automatically made the move across the room to be the first one to hug him. and he’s glad for that, at the very least. he’s glad that he could hug him. it was the least he could do.
he was glad (and he knows how bad and selfish this sounds) that his group wasn’t selected to do the vlive. he doesn’t know how he would have brought himself to smile and laugh and joke for the cameras and the fans, how he would have lived up to his title of sunshine when it feels like all of his sunshine has just disappeared.
part vi. seungmin
his room feels so quiet now. the silence in his room -- before so rare, so coveted -- is suffocating. he used to wish for quiet sometimes, but now he just wishes for noise, for something, anything, but this cruel quiet. (he heard a mosquito in the dorms, one day, and his heart leaped for a moment before remembering: oh. yeah. he’s gone.) the bed across from his is empty, entirely bare, without even a trace that there ever was someone there, sleeping, living. without even a trace that felix existed.
most nights now, he goes into the big room -- with changbin-hyung, hyunjin, jisung, and jeongin -- just to try to keep the loneliness at bay. it doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps.
(don’t tell anyone he said this, but he doesn’t think that anything will solve the problem. he’ll just have to learn to live with it. they’ll all just have to learn to live with the emptiness and the quiet.)
part vii. jeongin
he doesn’t think that this is real. it can’t be possible. if he denies it enough, do you think he could will it into falsehood? he’s ready to try.
he scrapes his braces against his bottom lip to try to get the pain to keep himself from crying, but it doesn’t work. it’s grounding, though, and he can feel everything vividly. the tears trailing down his face, the sounds of sobbing and hiccupping and sharp inhales in the room. his hyungs crying and it hurts him to see them in pain, to see felix-hyung clinging to the other members as if it’s his last opportunity.
he wishes he could go back in time and relive the past, with the new knowledge of the eliminations. he would have, should have, cherished every moment with each of them more. but now two of the original nine are gone, and he’s terrified. he misses minho-hyung, and now he’s going to miss felix-hyung as well.
he is reminded of a tree in winter. there were nine leaves originally: one for each of them. as winter -- once his favorite season, though now, he may have to reconsider -- approaches, some of the leaves are blown off, leaving the remaining leaves lonelier and the tree barer than before. (in the back of his mind, he doesn’t know whether he deserves to remain on the tree. despite his members’ reassurances and help, jyp’s words of criticism have affected him more than he wants to let on.)
he doesn’t know when (if) he’ll be able to smile again.
part viii. felix
he’s shaking like a leaf in the wind. he feels a bit like a leaf as well, being blown around, powerless, forced to merely go along with the breeze. replying to everything jyp said with “yes,” nothing less, nothing more. the quiet feels suffocating, and he has to clench his jaw to prevent himself -- from speaking or from crying, he’s not sure. (either way, it’s a lost cause.)
the only words he manages to choke and hiccup out are that he’s sorry. because he is, he’s so sorry, inexpressibly so. he’s sorry he couldn’t do more, couldn’t learn korean faster, couldn’t master the lyrics and rhythm in time. sorry that he couldn’t be enough.
he just cries, and tries to hold on. to jisung, to changbin-hyung, to chan-hyung’s words. he tries to memorize the feel of their embraces, memorize the lines of their faces, memorize the distinct scent of each of them, mingled with sweat and tears. (sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart, he’s realized.)
he tries to burn into his memory their laughs and smiles and the way that the skin around their eyes crinkles when they smile. (he knows he won’t be seeing them as much any more.)
that realization hurts more than jyp’s words ever could, he thinks.
in the meantime, he just tries to hold on to what he has in this moment: his love for his members, and their love for him. it’s the most real thing he has. (he thinks it may be the most real thing he’ll ever have.)
part ix. minho
he hears, and he cries. he understands, and just hugs felix for hours on end. physical contact is grounding and comforting -- he knows this as well as anyone, and thinks back to when jisung held his hand when he rapped for the first time before jyp. he tries to push the memory out of the forefront of his mind.
they sit, and talk. about hopes and dreams, about devastation, about feeling like it’s all over. night rises but it is irrelevant -- all hours of the day feel like night anyways, without the light of the members. loneliness, he thinks, is darker than the darkest night. he tries to focus on the stars, on the small pinpricks of light, and of hope, but it’s hard. it’s so hard. but they try, and that is what matters. they all try.
they all dream of the stars. it’s all they can do (as well as love, and hope it’ll be enough).