Chapter Text
i. Larva
While consuming its environment, the caterpillar
begins to notice ways to survive.
One thing he notices is the way the world shuns him,
but praises the butterfly.
The first time Hongjoong uses a male public restroom he feels incurably paranoid. Anxious.
Sitting on the toilet; someone’s going to see his feet beneath the door. Pulling toilet paper; someone’s going to hear the roll. Someone’s going to know.
Someone’s going to know.
They already know, they’re just confused why he’s here.
No one says anything or looks at him sideways. He washes his hands.
The whole room smells like piss.
Is this what he has to be, as a man?
"G'morning, hyung!"
There's no one else working in the studio with him. He realises a few seconds too late that means the greeting was directed at him, and when he looks over his shoulder the boy has already left the door empty and swinging gently, slowly closed.
Hyung.
He didn't even say anything.
Maybe it's because he didn't say anything, and because it's dark, and because his hair is cropped short enough to feel the odd disturbance of wind against his head when he goes outside, and because his back was to the door and the boy never saw his face.
G'morning, hyung.
Like it's that simple, and that easy.
It's nine o'clock at night, but at least half of what he'd said is true.
He stands outside the public restroom, plagued by choice and the insistent need to piss.
He hates the smell of the male restroom. He hates the anxiety. He hates feeling like he doesn't belong there.
He hates feeling like someone is going to grab him by the scruff of the neck and throw him out, or beat him up, or assault him.
He pushes through the door into the female toilet, head down, hands shoved deep into his pockets. Makes himself as invisible as possible so no one thinks to look at him, no one thinks to tell him where he is, that he shouldn't be here, because he knows that and disgust and shame is already choking him, but at least here he's safe.
Safer.
He wears a hat, and a mask as much as he can. Hides as much of himself as he can get away with under overlarge clothes and hoods and thick-soled sneakers and too-small, too-pretty hands shoved into pockets and out of sight.
Someone, holding his hand, had once asked if he played violin. Hongjoong had lied and told him yes, because it took fewer words and less of his voice to say 'no, but I'm a musician. I make music. That’s what I do.'
It turned into a date, and Hongjoong felt like a woman for every second of it.
He'd crumpled the receipt paper of a phone number in his palm, flicked it towards a bin, missed, and deleted the orchestral strings he'd been adding to the song he's working on.
"Morning, hyung!"
Hongjoong barely turns his head, afraid of what the darkness will show of him. Raises his hand in vague greeting, the sleeve of his sweater pulled down over his palm.
He only looks when he hears the click of the door swinging gently back into its latch, his friend already gone.
The silence of the car sinks him, presses soft and thick against his ears, deep into his brain, plunging him underwater, making it hard to breathe. He can’t lift it, though. He can’t bring himself to speak.
His mother is driving them home after picking him up from the studio at the open youth centre; it's late, and he can't make himself talk. He's slumped against the passenger seat, tilted back against the headrest, his barely-open eyes staring at his reflection in the side-view mirror of the car, spattered with raindrops that glint in the careful streetlights they pass under.
Here, like this, he likes the way he looks. His jaw looks stronger, effortlessly angled up like this. The long, low arc of street lamps washes across him, over and over, and shows the line of his neck.
Here, like this, it has a masculine shape. The illusion of an adams apple.
Here, in the half-dark of the streetlights, he looks more like himself than he ever has.
He doesn't want to move unless it all disappears; he doesn’t want to speak unless his voice ruptures the realism of it all.
He doesn’t ever want it to end, this quiet and subtle euphoria that is unfolding like a long, sweet ache beneath his sternum.
He'll never move or speak again, if that's what it takes to have this.
"Good morning!" his friend calls from the door, and Hongjoong takes a cursory moment to check the clock at the corner of his monitor because it has never once been morning when he's heard that greeting from this bright and buoying voice.
He looks over his shoulder, lifts his fingers in something like a wave, mostly expecting the doorway to already be empty. His friend rarely stays long enough for Hongjoong to return his greetings.
"It's six o'clock," he says, because this time his busy, too-fast friend has found the time to wait for him to speak.
A rueful smile, back-lit from the hallway light of the youth centre. Hongjoong can't really see his face, but he sees the way he reaches a hand up to tousle black hair back from his brow, a clumsy, nervous gesture, before he straightens from his casual slouch and sets his hands back to his sides.
"I wanted to apologise, actually," he says, and Hongjoong tilts his head, because this boy has never done anything to him but say 'good morning' anywhere from five to ten o'clock at night. "I was calling you 'hyung' all this time," he says, folding himself into a neat bow. "I didn't realise. I'm sorry, noo-"
"No," Hongjoong cuts him off, sharp, crisp, before he can hear that word slip off his friend’s retreating tongue. Heart in his throat. Pounding. Drowning out his thoughts, his words, when his friend tilts his head in question, small silver loop earrings catching on a glint of light. "Hyung," he says, feeling like he's drowning. Like he's screaming. His voice is barely loud enough to hear when he says, "Hyung is fine."
His friend stands as a faceless, nameless silhouette in the doorway, thoughts ticking over, cold-fingered anxiety digging into the cavity of Hongjoong’s heart until he smiles, and even though Hongjoong can't see anything else of him it's bright enough that he couldn't possibly miss it.
"Okay," he says, and folds another short bow. "Sorry about all the confusion, hyung." He brings a hand up in an easy wave, already stepping away from the heavy door jammed open with his foot. "I'll scold Yunho," he says, a sharp, clear laugh. "He's been messing with me."
The door falls back into its latch heavy and pendulant in his absence, and Hongjoong pushes the keyboard out of the way, folds his arms on the edge of the desk and rests his head against them, breathes deeply until he discovers he's already crying anyway, and lets it shake out of him in silent, aching sobs, tears caught in the sleeves of his worn out, overlarge hoodie.
That there'd been one person - just one person who didn't know, and had never known him as anything but this bare minimum of who he is. To have it ripped away in one breath and placed gently back in his hands on another, gifted to him, but still changed.
He rubs his hands up over his face, pulls in a shuddering breath and clears away his tears. Sleeves dragged roughly across his cheeks, his eyes, flushing them red and swollen but clear enough to see the screen. He sets his headphones back onto his ears, scrolls through the sample he's editing to find what he's doing, and gets back to work.
Your request for session 'BY.HONGJOONG' (studio space)
for the timeslot 7pm-9pm 12-06-2013 has been declined.
You may resubmit an application for a different time or date.
Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Regards,
Cheongnyeon Team
It's less that he won't have access to the production studio. Even though his editing software lags on the home desktop and his father tells him he's had enough screentime and sends him off at nine o'clock, it's not as though he can't finish the sample he's been working on.
He can finish it, and re-apply for the production space for next week, and record the vocal tracks and finalise the song.
But he won't see his friend.
His friend won't come to the door and call out good morning, hyung! far past anything close to morning.
It will be another week before anyone will call him hyung.
He tries not to let the thought tear him apart.
"Have you thought about changing your name?" his mother asks, all but unprompted, and he thinks that is enough for him to forgive her for almost everything.
"Yeah," he says. "I want to."
"Is there anything you like?"
"Hongjoong," he tells her.
"Oh," she says, and sounds so gently surprised. "I wanted to call you that," she says, "if you were a boy."
If.
"I want a name you chose," he mutters, picking his fingernails in the passenger seat of the car. The side-view mirror doesn't hold the right reflection tonight.
"Should I call you Hongjoong, then?" she asks, the yellow click of the indicator filtering in beneath the sound of the radio.
He nods, staring at his hands. His throat tight. "Please," he says, a whisper wavering in his voice.
Somehow it feels as though for the first time he is being introduced to his mother, after loving her for fifteen years.
There are three canvas bags sitting in the corner of the production room when Hongjoong scans into the youth centre, and he wonders if someone left them behind, or just dumped them. It seems a bit difficult to leave three overflowing bags behind on accident.
He thinks he should leave it alone, maybe just palm them off to the front desk when he leaves, but at times he's an inherently nosey person. He doesn’t consider that a personal flaw.
They're full of clothes, he finds, crouching down and pinching one of them open with his fingertips. Hoodies, sweatpants, overlarge t-shirts.
That makes both more and less sense - it isn't uncommon for the youth centre to take donations and distribute them to kids who need it. Hongjoong has no idea what the bags are doing here instead of with the administration team, until he sees a note folded on top of one of them.
Hyung!!
Our schedules got a bit mixed up, but I heard you'd be coming in tomorrow.
I forgot to take these to the front desk before they closed up for the night, could you do a favour and donate them for me?
You can take anything you want as payment ㅎㅎ
Wooyoung ♡
There should be no indication or promise of which 'hyung' is being addressed, and Hongjoong doesn't think he knows anyone by the name of Wooyoung at all.
But he knows, even before reaching out to pull the first shirt from the pile, who it's from. Even before he shakes it out and holds it up, and recognises it as one his friend had worn, standing bright in the doorway to Hongjoong’s dim room.
He sits himself on the floor, the shirt in his hands. It's well-worn in such a way as to make the fabric feel loose and soft in his hands, and smells fresh with a baby-blue laundry detergent.
He sets it in his lap and pulls out a pair of rib-cuffed sweatpants, a long grey zip-front hoodie.
He wonders how much of it was really accidental, and takes as much of the clothes as will fit in his bag.
He didn’t take the chicken out of the freezer, and that wouldn’t be a problem if they weren’t poor.
That’s what he’s thinking.
That’s what he’s thinking while he’s sitting propped up by pillows on his bed, his knees curled up to his chest, the heels of his hands pressed hard to his eyes while his father tells him, "You need to pay more attention. You need to think about other people. We're both doing as much as we can for you, we need everyone to work together, okay?"
"Yeah," he says, forcing a firmness he doesn't feel into his voice so it won't waver. "I know. Yeah."
"I told you this morning before you left for school, your mother left a note on the table for when you came home, your brother's studying late tonight, and we can't just go and buy takeout just because you didn't want to do it."
"Yeah," he tries to squeeze out from his tight lungs, but his words don't find his voice and his head is spinning. "I know."
"That's our dinner," his father says, firm. Eight chicken legs sitting pale and frozen-solid on the bench. "We're not gonna eat tonight. Are you listening?"
He nods fervently into his hands, the heels of his palms pressed hard and aching against his eyes.
"Look at me."
He shakes his head, breaths shuddering short and too-fast in his chest.
"I need you to look at me."
"I can't," he chokes out, pressing his hands harder against his eyes, bursting pain. "I can't, I can't, I'm listening," he promises, his lips trembling, "I'm trying to listen, I can't."
A sigh, lingering and defeated. His voice is softer when he speaks next, when he says, "Can you change into some clean clothes? You've been wearing that sweater all week, you'll feel better once you shower and change. Okay?"
He forces deep, gusting breaths into his turbulent lungs, nodding over and again into his hands because he knows his father is trying, they all are, and he knows his father knows he has trouble with things like showering every day and feeling good enough to do something like take the chicken out of the freezer when he gets home from school.
He knows it's meant to make him feel better - being clean, changing his clothes.
But this is a sweater his friend gave him, and it's soft, and it still kind of smells like a boy, and he doesn't know that he'll feel any better at all if he takes it off.
They're all working hard, though. They're all making sacrifices. The least he can do is have a shower and wear something clean, even if that's only the most he can do.
He slinks out of the bathroom feeling clean and calm and tired with guilt and the ennui that never really seems to leave his bones, even on the good days.
His father has made garlic rice and miso soup, the chicken still defrosting on the counter, and Hongjoong knows the soup is just miso paste in hot water with some dried seaweed from the cupboard, but it still strangles him. The way his family, over and again, will somehow make something out of the nothing he gives them.
His father puts a gentle hand on Hongjoong’s head when he slinks in guilty silence into the place set for him on the table, and it hurts to think that his father might love him enough to forgive him for almost everything.
It's the sort of day where painkillers feels like submission, like he can outlast the crimes his physiology commits against him, overpower his own body, make everything it makes of him untrue.
He feels dizzy and fuzzy all day, like he has a fever, but he knows that isn't it.
He feels sick.
That's fine. It isn't new. He kind of always feels at least a little bit sick, and he's used to this sort of thing anyway.
The blunt, persistent draw of pain is fading his vision and making him nauseous but if he just ignores it, if he just works through it - he's stronger than this, he's stronger than what his body has made of him.
At some point, hiding his face in his arms because the dim monitor display is too bright for his aching eyes and splitting head, he realises he feels like he's going to throw up, and as soon as he drags himself to stumbling feet, legs numb with pain, he finds that he also feels like he's going to pass out.
He reaches the bathroom, somehow. He thinks someone in the common room called a greeting to him. He doesn't know.
He almost makes it to one of the open toilet stalls before his skin turns cold and his vision greys out, and when he manages to blink he finds his cheek pressed to the filthy, sticky tiles, blissfully cool against his overheating skin.
He feels like he wants to throw up, but the toilet fading in his vision is just slightly too far away to be easy, and he's so tired, and he's almost comfortable here, and his body has folded under the dizzying weight of itself and he can barely twitch his fingers.
So instead he just lies there - he doesn't know how long.
The smell of stale piss fills his lungs and he can't even hate it. His rushing breaths in his ears, the pound of his blood in his cold, shaking limbs, the incessant stab of a blunt knife twisting in his gut, sickening and somehow feeling both more and less painful than it really is.
The pounding emptiness in his ears slowly subsides, and he hears the hush of the bathroom door swing open, the startled catch of shoes on the tiles, the whispered breath of, "Shit," from whoever sees him lying there.
He squeezes his eyes closed, draws in a shuddering breath, and feels beaded tears slip past his eyelids. Frustrated, hurting.
Upset.
"Hyung." It's his friend’s voice, and Hongjoong likes to believe he would know it anywhere but really it takes his spinning mind a moment to recognise him away from the dim doorway of the music room. "I'm gonna touch you, okay?" His friend’s voice sounds like water in his ears, and Hongjoong wants to dunk his overheated head under and float away. "I'm just gonna make you comfortable."
He pushes Hongjoong’s shoulder a little, rolls him onto his side and tucks a limp arm beneath his head, balances one of Hongjoong’s knees against the cold, sticky floor to keep him from tipping back on his face, and it is comfortable, incredibly so, and it takes him a long moment to realise he's been pulled into a recovery position.
"Hyung," his friend says, the back of his hand warm against Hongjoong’s hot brow, all of his skin prickling with cold sweat, his breaths still short and shallow, his eyes still closed. "I'm gonna get you some water, and something to eat," he says, and for the first time Hongjoong realises how calm he sounds, how utterly unruffled. "I'll be back in twenty seconds, okay? Just stay here, don't try to move."
He sounds very sure. Hongjoong thinks he nods, but he doesn't know if his body follows through. He's feeling somewhat distant from it, right now. They aren't on speaking terms.
He draws in a shuddering breath and realises the hand against his brow is gone, and just now processes the already-passed sound of the bathroom door opening and closing again. It's very grounding, to be alone. He realises he’s being silly, and he doesn’t actually need anyone to be running around after him.
He tries to push himself up, but his arms shake too much to even lift his heavy head from the ground, and that slight exertion is enough to break another cold sweat across his skin.
His friend comes back before Hongjoong can catch his breath to try again.
He gives Hongjoong water and a muesli bar, and tells him he should probably go home, and Hongjoong wants to argue, but he’s sitting boneless against a bathroom stall now, and his vision is clear enough to see the thinly-veiled nerves that sit in the set of his friend's mouth but don’t make it to his voice, and it’s enough to make him feel guilty, so he just drops his gaze away and nods mutely towards the floor.
"Do you need anything?" his friend asks, and he kind of sounds like he's asking if Hongjoong is ready to stand up, and some instinctive, subconscious pain shoots right through his gut at the thought, and he winces and concedes defeat to his body.
"D-" he starts to speak, and falters before his voice can reach the first word.
His friend tilts his head, and Hongjoong looks down at his hand pressed unbothered against the gross bathroom tile between them. He's leaning on a bathroom stall too, Hongjoong realises. He's sitting on the sticky floor next to Hongjoong like it doesn't bother him at all.
Hongjoong makes an odd gesture, suddenly sure that if he has to be made to speak out loud to this boy right now then he will never speak to him again. He doesn’t want that.
"Here," his friend shifts where he's sitting, pulls a phone from his pocket and unlocks it, sets it into Hongjoong’s small, shaking hands with a notes app open.
do you have any painkillers
His friend reads over his shoulder. "Yeah," he says, hooking a foot through the strap of the bag he'd brought in with him, pulling it close and opening the front pocket, offering out dented packets of aspirin, paracetamol and ibuprofen.
Hongjoong wordlessly takes the ibuprofen, his eyes low on his hands so as not to meet the concerned pitch of his friend's eyes while he takes two tablets, washes them down with a mouthful of water from the cold bottle his friend had given him.
"You need to get anything from the room?" he asks.
Hongjoong nods. hard drive, he types into his friend’s phone. my bag.
"I can…" He pauses, seems to chew on his words. "You can say no," he says, "but. If you're comfortable, would you let me take you home…?" He trails out the question, open-ended for Hongjoong to turn him down. "I just want to make sure you get home safe," he says. "I can take you home if you like. If that's okay."
Hongjoong stares at the blinking cursor on the notes app, watches the screen dim before he taps it, types out a brief okay and hands the phone back to its owner.
He looks down at the screen. "Okay," he says. whether he's reading out what Hongjoong wrote or agreeing with him. "I'll take you back to the room, and you can pack up, and I'll tell Yun I'm going," he says. "I'll call a taxi, and come get you," he says."
Hongjoong nods, plants his hands to the sticky floor in the beginnings of an effort to stand up.
His friend surges to his feet, holds out both his hands for Hongjoong to take, and he eyes them for a moment, considering, before he reaches out and lets his friend pull him firmly to his unsteady feet. The room spins a little. He leans against the stall to keep upright; breathes in the thick, piss-smell air and nods, goes to the sink to wash his hands and his face, his friend lingering behind his shoulder and trailing along all the way until Hongjoong reaches the production room before he repeats that he's going to tell Yunho, and the silence of his departure is thicker and heavier than the silence of his concern.
"What's your name?"
"...Hongjoong."
"Okay." A nod in the back seat of the taxi beside him. "I'm Wooyoung," he says, even though Hongjoong already knows.
Hongjoong doesn't like when other people see the house he lives in.
It's more expensive than his family is wealthy, and he thinks it paints a wrong picture of him when most of his father's wages go to the mortgage and most of his mother’s go to keeping him and his brother in school.
Wooyoung stands at the gate, awkward but not for the reasons Hongjoong expects.
"Do you want me to come in?" he asks, easy nonchalance that covers his hesitation. "I can leave you here, if you want."
Hongjoong glances at him, lifts a shoulder in a shrug that means yes, and leaves the door open behind him when he walks in.
He kicks his shoes off, goes straight to the couch and collapses face-down into it.
He hears the door close, and the scuff of Wooyoung taking off his shoes. He crouches beside Hongjoong, and pokes a finger almost too sharply into the soft part of his arm. "You okay?" he asks, and Hongjoong nods mutely into a cushion. He practically feels Wooyoung glancing around the room, but doesn’t lift his head. "Where's your parents?" he asks.
"Work," Hongjoong says, and it's so mumbled into the upholstery of the couch that it doesn't even sound like a word.
"What time do they come home?" Wooyoung asks.
Hongjoong doesn't have the energy to answer him.
"Should I be gone before they come back?" he asks.
That one word really took it out of him.
He feels Wooyoung rock back on his heels, feels the subtle shift of him leaning just slightly away. "Do you want me to go?"
Hongjoong’s hands clench weakly into the cushion, and he shakes his head once, just slightly.
A longer stretch of silence, Wooyoung not going anywhere. "Do you want something to eat?"
He nods weakly. His fingers are shaky again.
He hears the sigh of Wooyoung pushing up to stand, a vague mutter of, "I'll go raid your fridge."
He raids their fridge. There isn't much, but there's enough.
He doesn't really know how to say thank you, or apologise, so he doesn't. Wooyoung doesn't seem to care, chattering himself into a sense of ease while Hongjoong comes slowly back to life.
He feels somehow like he'd been sleepwalking, and doesn’t really know how he got here, and doesn’t really know what to do with Wooyoung in his house. He bites at the knuckle of his index finger, and then at the skin around his thumbnail, and watches Wooyoung’s mouth as he talks so that Hongjoong can pay attention to what he's saying.
He talks a lot, so it's hard to keep up with it all when Hongjoong’s mind is spinning like this. He speaks messily, with his lips pushed forward into a pout, his consonants dropped or blurred together, words spilling from him as though he needs to get them out as fast as he thinks them.
He must be a pretty smart person, Hongjoong decides, if he thinks enough to talk this fast, his pronunciation a mess of familiarity and affection that Hongjoong doesn't think he's done anything to deserve.
He's pretty smart, and he notices things, because he pauses every time Hongjoong shifts to pull his thumbnail from between his teeth, even mid-sentence, and gives him the space he needs to speak.
Sometimes he talks over the start of Hongjoong’s sentence, eyes wide with a preemptive apology even as he does it, but always comes back to say, "Sorry, what were you saying?" at the end of it, as though he weighs Hongjoong’s words as important as his own - just, sometimes he can't quite control the way his spill out.
He's smart, and attentive, and he thinks he's funnier than he actually is, and Hongjoong tells him that. The last part, at least.
Wooyoung tilts his head back when he laughs, unabashed and bright and nearly startling, this act of spilling joy into the air as though it costs nothing.
"I'm funnier than you," he challenges, and Hongjoong rolls his eyes because he knows Wooyoung is right.
The front door rattles open and Hongjoong’s father steps in, and he takes one look at Wooyoung, and then at Hongjoong, and then says, "You're back early."
"I was sick," Hongjoong says, reaching out to take a bite of the fried rice Wooyoung had made so that he has something to do with his eyes and hands and mouth. "Wooyoung-ssi brought me home."
"Is this your boyfriend?" his father asks.
Hongjoong sets his spoon down and wishes he hadn't filled his mouth.
"No sir," Wooyoung says for him, bright and laughing, and stands so that he can bow neatly to Hongjoong’s father. "I use the dance room at Cheongnyeon."
Hongjoong’s father eyes Wooyoung up, and Hongjoong pushes back against the couch, his legs tucked loosely up to his chest. "What school do you go to?" he says, and it surprises Hongjoong that he never thought to ask. It never seemed relevant, or important.
"I study practical dance at Hanlim Arts, sir," Wooyoung says, polite and proud. "I'll be auditioning for next season's intake, to debut with a music group."
"Don't date this one," Hongjoong’s father advises him, playful. "An idol won't have time to treat you well."
Wooyoung laughs again, and it still pulls half a smile onto Hongjoong’s lips even though it sounds different - more restrained, more polite - than it had when they were alone.
Hongjoong’s father invites him to stay for dinner, but Hongjoong doesn't really want him to, and he's relieved that Wooyoung begs off to say he needs to catch a train back to Ilsan anyway. He's equal parts relieved and disappointed when Wooyoung gathers his bag and types his number into Hongjoong’s phone, and he's mostly disappointed when Wooyoung says his goodbyes and leaves.
Hongjoong’s father asks how he's feeling.
"Tired," he mutters against his knees.
He can tell the disappointment in his silence, and knows he'd been hoping Hongjoong would be well enough to help him with dinner.
"Go lie down," he says instead. "Don't nap," he warns as Hongjoong pushes himself to stand up, the living room somehow feeling hollow and empty in the absence of Wooyoung. "You won't be able to sleep tonight."
"I'll lie on the floor," Hongjoong tells him.
He lies on his bed, and naps. His brother wakes him up for dinner and he's barely conscious for any of it, and then suddenly, back in bed, he can’t sleep at all.
He stares at the dark ceiling for an hour thinking about the ease with which Wooyoung speaks to him, the playful push of his lips as he speaks, the bright catch of his laughter, and something deep in his gut clenches and turns sour with an envy he doesn’t want, and he twists over and shoves his face into a pillow until he can't breathe, amd then forces himself to swallow some painkillers and creeps out into the office to plug his hard drive into the family computer and keep working on his song.
"You need to think about your future," his class coordinator is telling him.
He's trying to pay attention to her but his sleep has been all fucked up again and he never quite feels awake, and he should be in history right now but instead he's standing in the staff room with no real idea of what he's done wrong.
"It's only two years before you graduate," she says. "You really need to start thinking about what path you want to take out of school. With your grades you could follow law or STEM or engineering," she tells him, "but good grades don't matter if you can't apply yourself."
He blinks at her. "Okay," he says.
Her brows lift a little, so slightly surprised. There's a smudge on the corner of her glasses, and all he can smell is coffee with hot dairy milk. He wants to leave. "You'll apply yourself," she says, doubtful.
"I already do," he says. "Grades don't matter," he repeats. "I taught myself how to play and compose music, as well as recording and sound mixing," he tells her. "I'll become a producer."
She pauses, vexed. "This is an academic school," she feels the need to remind him.
"Don't worry about my grades," he says. "I'll keep them high."
"That isn't what I mean," she corrects him. He hates being corrected. "We can't support you in arts."
"Have I needed your support until now?" he finds himself saying. He hates being rude, but he hates being controlled even more. He hates being away from where he's meant to be at the time where he's meant to be there.
He hates that he can't sleep, and that even when he does he wakes up ten times in the night. He hates that he needs to take prozac every morning if he wants to make it through the day without biting his hands until they bleed, and he has to take melatonin at night if he wants to get any sort of sleep at all. He hates that every hour of his life is medicated because that's the only way he can function, and he hates that someone with no idea of who he is and the things he cares about has the audacity to tell him to think about what he wants.
He knows what he wants. It's not his fault that nobody ever listens.
"Morning, hyung," Wooyoung swings open on the door. "How are you feeling?"
It's been a few weeks since Hongjoong saw him, and they didn't really text after Hongjoong got his number.
He doesn't turn around, and pretends he didn't hear past his headphones.
The door swings shut behind him, and he thinks Wooyoung is gone.
Wooyoung kicks the leg of the chair Hongjoong is sitting on, and scares the shit out of him.
"What," he says, tugging his headphones down around his neck.
"Are you mad at me?" Wooyoung says.
"No," Hongjoong puts the headphones back on, and winces when Wooyoung immediately moves one of them back from his ear.
"Why're you shitty," he asks, leaning his hip against the desk beside Hongjoong’s keyboard.
"I'm not," he mutters, curling a leg up onto his seat and leaning forward to examine a detail on the screen. "This is how I always am."
Wooyoung seems to be waiting for Hongjoong to look at him, but Hongjoong is not going to be the first to give in.
Wooyoung sighs and pushes away from the desk, and leaves, and lets the door swing closed heavy behind him.
Hongjoong wishes he wasn't disappointed, but he also wishes the shape of Wooyoung’s voice falling uncertainly through puberty didn't make Hongjoong want to peel his own skin off and crawl inside Wooyoung’s.
He'd almost slept well last night, except he'd had a dream where his voice was lower than it really is, and it hadn't been physically painful for him to make himself speak, and then he woke up, and now he doesn't feel like being happy.
His mother only calls him Hongjoong when it's just the two of them, and he can't tell if he appreciates the effort or hates the delineation.
"Do you think," he finds himself asking while he's in the car with her, driving to pick up a pizza order because it's the end of the month and they still have some money left over, "if dad knew I was a boy, he'd keep asking if every guy I know is my boyfriend?"
She turns the indicator on and rounds the corner, a long measure of pendulant silence. "I don't know," she says.
His elbow resting on the window and his fingers forming a lazy cage for his mouth. "Do you think he'd be mad?"
"He wouldn't be mad," she tells him.
He just wouldn't care. He just wouldn't believe a word that Hongjoong says. He'd nod and laugh along and as soon as he had time he'd call Hongjoong’s psychiatrist and ask about psychosis, or delusions.
"What if I became a girl," he mutters to himself, staring at the white lines blurring past the wheels of the car. "It'd be easier."
His mother holds her silence for a long, considering moment. "Maybe."
He knows she doesn't mean it like that, except that she kind of does.
He tries not to hold it against her.
He wants to try going off prozac again, but the problem is that never lasts long, and then he has to go back on it, and it's the going back on that really messes him up, and the reason he wants to go off is because he's already messed up and he feels like it's not working.
He wants a laptop, because maybe if he works more he won't feel so insane all the time. His parents won't buy it, though - he knows that.
He calls Wooyoung because he's the closest thing Hongjoong has to a friend and says, "I need a job."
"Are you done taking me for granted now," Wooyoung responds, and it sounds like he's joking, but it also sounds like he isn't joking. Hongjoong realises he hasn't seen him at all since the day he ignored him.
"Is that what I was doing?" he asks, baffled.
"Sure felt like it," Wooyoung says, still with that air.
"Sorry," Hongjoong says, awkward. He really doesn't know how to apologise. Or talk to people, really. Or have friends. Or keep them. "Um. I'm sorry."
A sigh, a beat of silence. "What sort of job?"
"I don't know," he says. "I'd probably kill myself if I had to do customer service." He's joking, but he kind of isn't.
Wooyoung laughs for him anyway. "I can ask around," he says, which isn't really why Hongjoong had called him. Hongjoong doesn't really know why he called Wooyoung.
The next time Wooyoung pushes himself into Hongjoong’s life with that same bright call of, "Good morning, hyung," he brings coffee.
Hongjoong takes a sip and doesn't hate it, so he says, "Thanks," even though it isn't morning, and it's far past any time he should be having coffee.
"My mom's a news anchor," Wooyoung says without any messy preamble.
Hongjoong likes that he speaks without any messy preamble, but that doesn't mean he knows why Wooyoung is telling him. "Okay," he says.
"She said there's a radio station in Seoul that's gonna hire a couple of juniors soon," he says, and that makes it make sense, but Hongjoong still blinks at him in quiet surprise. "It's just an assistant position," Wooyoung says, "so it's shit pay for a stupid workload," he says, "and super fast-paced when they get on-air, and they might put you in charge of research or scriptwrite or socials or something, but you wouldn't have to talk to anyone. Or, like. Go outside," he scoffs a good-natured laugh.
He's standing with his hip cocked against Hongjoong’s desk again, his arms folded in front of his chest. He isn't talking with his lips pushed out today; he's talking like he wants to be concise and understood. His articulation is clearer, even if his tone is still playful. Hongjoong wonders what that makes of Wooyoung’s mood.
"I don't have any qualifications," he says, glancing up at Wooyoung’s eyes and then away.
He shrugs. "Good grades should be enough," he says. "Just write a solid cover letter." He pauses, as though thinking for a moment. "You do have good grades, right?"
"Better than yours, probably," Hongjoong says.
Wooyoung kicks his chair, and he holds his smile behind the cage of his fingers.
"Thanks, Woo," he says, and glances at Wooyoung again when he shifts awkwardly, silent for a long beat.
"Yeah," he says at last, something peculiar caught in the oddly mature tone of his voice. "Don't worry about it. Just text me and ask for the details," he says, pushing away from the desk and taking up his red bull. "Otherwise I’ll forget."
Hongjoong nods and throws him a wave, but he doesn’t turn around to see it, the heavy door swinging closed behind him.
His arm falls to drape across the back of his seat with a sigh.
This is why he doesn’t like it. This is why he doesn’t, generally, at all.
Just as he thinks he’s starting to piece together the sort of person Wooyoung is, his mood changes and so does the way he holds himself and speaks, and Hongjoong has another whole depth of character to understand. It’s hard, and he barely knows how to talk to Wooyoung at the best of times.
He hadn’t seemed upset. He hadn’t seemed annoyed. He hadn’t seemed flippant, either.
Maybe it has nothing to do with Hongjoong.
He pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over his fingers, rests his chin in his palm and moves the cursor across the screen, wondering if it’s any of his business or if he should just let it go.
The sleeve smells faintly of baby-blue laundry detergent; the last stolen sweater which he hasn’t worn enough to be washed, for the smell to fade. His eyes drift heavy in the comfort of it, in Wooyoung’s effortless hyung and the clothes he’s given and this brief promise that he’d help Hongjoong find a job despite that Hongjoong had never asked.
He thinks he feels okay.
He thinks he might never sleep well again, and he thinks he’s always going to think of Wooyoung with some degree of thinly-coated envy, and he’s always going to wear these sweaters wishing they fit him the way they fit Wooyoung, and he’s always going to hate the sound of his voice and the shape of his jaw and the small, dainty size of his hands. But maybe one day he’ll just make himself busy enough that none of that will matter and he won’t have time for useless things like wishing he was different than he is.
He applies for the position at the radio station, and they call him in for a trial, and he must do well because they roster him on for three shifts a week.
It’s not hard, if he just lets himself sink into the purpose of it. They trial a few other juniors before they find one that can keep up, and Hongjoong doesn’t really know anything about her. They’re kept too busy, really, to speak, and he likes that, and he likes her work ethic.
He works weekends and Friday nights. He takes reports from journalists and cuts them into bite-sized pieces which he hands to the anchor. He gets water, and coffee. He shuffles scripts. He listens, mesmerised, to the way the hosts will speak with a clean, clear articulation and a fast pace that sounds almost like a melody.
He starts taking notes of the peculiarities of speech which sound nicest to him, examines the structure and pacing of the words, and begins writing rap verses over his songs. He likes this more than he likes singing. He isn’t a great singer, and he doesn’t sound anything like himself when he sings.
Within a matter of dedicated weeks, he makes himself a great rapper.
There’s something going on outside.
There’s usually something going on outside when the team Wooyoung dances with come to practice, but Hongjoong has managed to map the tone of the muffled sound that usually slips through the heavy studio door into a clamour of lighthearted and playful.
Hongjoong pulls the headphones away from his ears, tilts his head towards the door. It does not, this time, sound lighthearted or playful. It sounds like outrage and offence.
Hongjoong wonders if it’s any of his business, and before he can decide that no, it isn’t, he finds himself wondering what Wooyoung would do.
Wooyoung would make it his business.
He pushes up from his seat and cracks open the door, peers out into the hall where all the noise is spilling from the jammed-open door to the larger dance room, and among the clamour he can hear Wooyoung’s voice, shrill and sharp with defence and anger, and Hongjoong quickens his steps.
“I didn’t do anything!” he’s yelling, his voice hoarse and thin. “Why did you bend over, you nosey fuck! I didn’t even try to hit you!”
Hongjoong shoves through the milling members arguing incoherency to the outbursts, finds one of them pushing Wooyoung firmly back towards the edge of the room with a hand on his chest, trying to talk over Wooyoung’s arguments, two others huddled around the lanky, bright-eyed boy Hongjoong recognises as Yunho, doubled over with his hands covering the lower half of his face, his eyebrows furrowed together in pain.
“What’s going on?” Hongjoong tries to ask, glancing wildly at the two of them and the empty space that’s been forced between them, but his voice is quiet and drowned out by the surging arguments, and he’s small, and his presence is almost entirely unnoticed.
A drop of blood spills from the cup of Yunho’s palm and lands red on the yellow wood floor.
“What the fuck is going on?” he snaps, louder, his words cracking out from his throat, and the unfamiliar voice gives them enough pause that for a moment all the arguments cease and everyone stills, and they all turn to look at him. “Wooyoung-ah,” Hongjoong prompts, looking directly at him.
“I didn’t do anything,” Wooyoung tries to insist, his voice wavering and weak with the force of cornered vehemence in his tone, his eyes bright with unshed tears.
Hongjoong reaches out a hand, palm-down. “Come here,” he commands.
He sees Wooyoung shrink back for a moment, small and maybe scared, before his vulnerability closes back over into anger and he pushes through the hand still holding him back, shoves bodily past the person standing before him and strides quick and firm towards the door.
“Wooyoung,” Hongjoong bites out, catches his wrist as he storms past and wrenches him to a halt, glances around to the others standing still and silent in the room and gestures towards Yunho. “Get some tissues or something,” he tells them, and tugs Wooyoung by the wrist out of the room, through to the dark, cool production studio.
Hongjoong closes the door behind them, and makes Wooyoung sit in the chair he’d left spun out from the desk.
“Are you okay?” is the first thing he asks - quiet, this time, but firm.
Wooyoung stares stubbornly at the door, his lips pressed into a tense line.
“Woo,” Hongjoong says, and crouches down in front of his seat, “are you hurt?”
Wooyoung’s lips tremble briefly and he crosses his legs up onto the chair, clenches his fists in his lap. He shakes his head once.
“Tell me what happened,” Hongjoong says.
“Nothing,” he spits out, venom and sharp.
Hongjoong presses his lips together, unimpressed. “Then why is Yunho’s nose bleeding,” he counters, and Wooyoung’s hands clench tighter for a long minute.
“He keeps getting in my business,” Wooyoung bites. “He keeps asking if I’m fine, and then getting pissed at me in practice. I’d be fine if he stops asking if I’m fine,” he snaps, his voice rising with each word.
Careful, soft, Hongjoong places a hand on Wooyoung’s knee - just to see if Wooyoung will let him.
He stares down at it, but doesn’t pull away.
“Is something wrong?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Wooyoung blows out a forceful sigh, shakes his head like it’s an irritation, “no. Just. Yeah, I just.” He runs his hand clumsily through his sweat-stuck hair, crushes his eyes closed. “I haven’t been feeling good lately,” he admits, something wavering in his voice, “and I haven’t had time to sleep in like three days,” he says, his words turning thin and fragile and tense, “and I think I haven’t eaten much, and it’s fine, and I can do it, I just need him to leave me alone so I can do it.”
Hongjoong squeezes his hand lightly around Wooyoung’s knee. “So you hit him?” he asks, and watches as Wooyoung bows down over his lap, his face hidden in his trembling hands. Watches a deep breath shudder its way forcefully into his lungs until it seems like he’s going to burst.
“I didn’t mean to,” he promises, quiet, trembling. “I was just. I just sat down a bit, ‘cause I got dizzy,” he says, another uneven breath hiccuping into his chest, “and he was like, are you okay, and he already asked ten times, and I was sick of it, and I got mad, and I told him to fuck off, and he kind of touched my shoulder,” he wraps one of his arms over as though to map the place, his head hanging heavy in his lap, his voice cracking and frayed, “and I kind of went to push him in the chest, but he was bending over. I didn’t know.”
He folds his other arm over his eyes, tears smudged into the crook of his elbow.
“I really didn’t mean to,” he swears, and sounds younger and smaller than Hongjoong has ever heard him sound.
“If you didn’t mean to,” he says, his hand still resting on Wooyoung’s knee, “do you think you should help him?”
Wooyoung nods heavy and pendulant into his arms, and draws a quiet breath like a gasp into his unsteady lungs.
“Do you want me to do anything?” he invites.
“Are you mad at me?” Wooyoung asks, his voice cracking small.
This is the second time, Hongjoong realises, that Wooyoung has asked him that.
“Do I sound mad at you?” he asks.
He shakes his head into his arms, and another shudder rocks through him, and he winds his arms tighter around himself. His voice quiet - so quiet Hongjoong almost doesn’t hear him - he asks, “Can you hug me?”
He hesitates, startled for a moment. He doesn’t really hug people. Maybe his mother, on the rare occasion. He doesn’t really remember the last time he hugged someone.
Careful, unsure, he rises onto his knees and curls his arms around Wooyoung’s slumped back, feels every silent shudder and break beneath his fingertips, and feels the quiet miracle of a breath slipping from Wooyoung’s lungs like relief. Feels him melt and fold and sink in on himself, as though this small kindness is enough for him to forgive himself the guilt and the hurt.
It isn’t much of a hug; Hongjoong can’t bring himself to have his chest brush close to Wooyoung’s, and he thinks they’re not nearly close enough for Hongjoong to rest his chin against Wooyoung’s shoulder. It’s just his arms resting light across Wooyoung’s back, brushing carefully over the stretch of his shirt until he can’t bear the contact anymore and pulls away, silencing his touch-shy shudder so that Wooyoung won’t see and think it has anything to do with him.
“Okay?” Hongjoong asks, and Wooyoung pulls in a deep, firm breath and nods, and drags the heel of his palm messily across his eyes and sits up straighter in the chair. “Let’s go get Yunho?” he proposes, and Wooyoung nods again and sniffs against his shoulder and coughs to clear his throat.
“Yeah,” he says, quiet and raw, his eyes low on the ground, and only unfolds himself from the seat when Hongjoong takes his wrist again and tugs him up, pulls him firmly, insistently from the dark studio out to the bright hall, into the noise of the dance room.
They got Yunho tissues at least and it looks like the bleeding has stopped. His nose is an angry red though, and looks tender and swollen, and he’s sitting against a wall with his eyes closed and his head leaned back, hands slumped between his knees.
Wooyoung crouches beside him without needing Hongjoong to make him and tugs at his sleeve. “Yun?” he says, his voice quiet and small, and Hongjoong watches Yunho crack open one tired eye to look at him. “I’m really sorry,” he says, still quiet, with a certainty behind his words. “There’s a clinic down the road. I can take you.”
Yunho blinks at him, slow and weary. “In a fight, or on a date?” he asks, and Wooyoung ducks his head with an unsteady laugh, pushes messily at Yunho’s shoulder.
“Clearly I can take you in a fight,” he tries to joke, and still sounds terrible about it.
“You got me by surprise,” Yunho groans, and pushes himself against the wall to his feet. “Some warning, next time,” he recommends, and glances easily over the top of Wooyoung’s head to Hongjoong, and then back to Wooyoung. “You good?” he asks, patting a hand against Wooyoung’s upper arm.
“No,” he shrugs it off, stepping away. “Stop asking, before I break your other nose.”
“My other nose,” Yunho repeats.
Wooyoung glares at him. “Do you want painkillers or not?” he demands.
“Yes sir,” Yunho affects a salute, and Wooyoung rolls his eyes and strides back through the door, snatching his bag up as he goes. Hongjoong watches Yunho watching him go, his wearied smile slipping into an expression of thoughtful consideration before he glances at Hongjoong again, catches him watching, and gives a small, warm smile. “Thanks, hyung,” he says, quiet and sincere, and it startles Hongjoong to realise that Yunho, in all his broken nosed glory, is thanking Hongjoong for making sure Wooyoung was alright.
“Yeah,” he mumbles, shuffling awkwardly out of the way so that Yunho can get his bag and follow Wooyoung out the door. “No problem.”
It’s only secondary that he realises Yunho had called him hyung.
He’s known Hongjoong longer - if not closer - than Wooyoung ever has. Hongjoong had thought Wooyoung had been joking all those months ago when he’d said he was going to scold Yunho for spreading lies.
He blinks twice, quickly, when he realises Wooyoung hadn’t been joking. That he’d told Yunho, and probably all the other dancers here too.
The realisation trickles through him, warm and sticky, honey dripped from a spoon, and he feels a shudder crawl up his throat. He feels incredibly bare, and seen. It’s not entirely a bad feeling, but it’s a lot.
“Hey,” he calls after Yunho, trying for gentle and coming off firm. “Can you make sure he gets himself a coffee or something?”
Yunho arches his brows over his swollen, red nose, the bruise slowly turning purple. “Sure,” he says. It’s nearly nine o’clock at night.
“Thanks,” he says, and brushes past towards his room. He pauses, the door held open. He doesn’t really know what to say on Yunho’s behalf. “I hope you’re not concussed,” he offers, and at the very least it makes Yunho laugh.
Hongjoong submits a playlist to the radio station and his supervisor says he’ll have a look, and then doesn’t.
So he submits another, and another, and pens down tongue twisters from the anchors, practices saying them until he doesn’t stumble over his words, and then places a pen between his teeth and tries again and again until he gets it right.
Eventually his supervisor looks over one of his playlists and says, "This isn't bad, actually," and picks three songs from the thirty Hongjoong had submitted, and schedules them to play that night.
It feels like a bigger success than it really is, and when he drags himself home at six in the morning he lets the feeling of doing something well wash over him in waves, too keyed up to sleep until his family begins drifting out for breakfast.
He buys himself a macbook two months into his job, and it costs enough that he swears to himself he's going to use it until the whole thing falls apart in his hands.
His father hates the idea of it, but Hongjoong’s grades stay strong and he takes more hours at the radio station, and somehow he feels better now that he's ended up only sleeping when he can, because it makes him tired enough to sleep well where forcing himself to sleep when he should had only ever soured him with his inability to do something so simple.
"How are you doing?” his father asks in one of those brief, odd moments where Hongjoong is having dinner after coming home from his job and his father is having breakfast before leaving for his.
Hongjoong blinks up from his screen and shoots his father a confused glance. “Fine?” he says, bemused.
“You look good lately,” his father shrugs. “You look happy lately.”
Hongjoong blinks again. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. I am, I think.”
“Are you still seeing that idol boy?” his father asks. Hongjoong would say this is too much conversation for so early in the morning, but he’s been awake nearly twenty hours so he figures it’s just too much conversation, period.
“No,” he says, his eyes back on the screen of his laptop where he’s typing out a message to Wooyoung. “Ever since I passed out on the floor and he brought me home and got me a job I haven’t spoken to him since.”
His father’s silence is brief. “I don’t really know when you’re joking,” he admits.
He shrugs, and hits send on the message demanding Wooyoung to wake up and buy Hongjoong coffee.
Fuck off, is what Wooyoung sends back to him, a small smile already curling onto Hongjoong’s lips. It’s your turn.
“I’m happy you’re happy,” he says, and smiles in a way that reminds Hongjoong he loves his father. “I always want my girls to be happy.”
Well, there goes that.
He forgot about it, honestly, and it takes him by such surprise that his nose scrunches in a visceral sort of distaste before he can think to control his expression.
The silence hangs patient between them; Hongjoong knows his father is not a bad man. He’s always sought to understand all the many things wrong with Hongjoong’s brain - which, he supposes, is almost like trying to understand Hongjoong.
“I’m not,” he says, his fingers curled away from the keyboard of his laptop, his eyes staring firmly through the screen.
“Not what?” his father asks.
Hongjoong’s tongue is stuck to his throat, and he has to swallow twice to dislodge it. “Your girl,” he says, his skin cold.
“What are you, then?” his father asks, a laugh caught in his voice.
“Your son,” he says, watching Wooyoung’s next message come in but unable to see what it says, his eyes focused but his mind spinning too empty for him to read.
“Okay,” his father laughs, and doesn't sound like he believes Hongjoong at all, “sure.”
Hongjoong blinks to clear his focus and forces himself to read Wooyoung’s message. He’s going to be at the station in forty minutes, and he expects Hongjoong to have his coffee ready. Okay. He can sit around a starbucks for half an hour. He closes his laptop and tucks it into his bag.
“It’s a bit early for school,” Hongjoong’s father says, thoroughly unaware of what he’s done.
Hongjoong doesn’t say anything as he leaves, and someone whistles at him from the passenger window of a passing car while he’s waiting to cross at an intersection, even though all he’s wearing is a grossly oversized hoodie, loose tennis shorts and a pair of scuffed-up air jordans.
He thinks about throwing a rock at their windscreen, but in the time it takes him to wonder if that’s a good idea they’re already gone and all he can do is seethe.
He doesn’t tell Wooyoung until at least two weeks later.
“I came out to my dad,” he says, the words sitting awkward in his mouth. This is the first time either of them have ever directly addressed it.
“Okay,” Wooyoung says. He’s trying to see how many empty coke cans he can stack before carrying them in a teetering tower towards the bin. “How’d it go?”
“I think he thought I was joking,” Hongjoong says, watching the cans topple and spill across the floor, wincing at the sound of it and digging a finger against his ear, wiping a splattered drop off the toe of his shoe.
“Sucks,” Wooyoung says, bending down to stack them all up again as though this time it will be different. The point is to be cleaning the dance room; not making more of a mess. “Come live with me,” he suggests, blithe.
Hongjoong snorts a derisive laugh. He knows Wooyoung well enough by now, though. He knows it isn’t an empty offer, no matter how nonchalant he says it.
"Hey, hyung."
It's Yunho, this time. Sun-gold warm and always uplifting. He took the bandage off his nose, and most of the bruising is gone. Hongjoong has often wondered how hard Wooyoung really hit him, for the damage to last that long.
Physically, at least. From what he understands, Yunho had grudgingly forgiven Wooyoung the moment his head had stopped pounding.
"They're gonna set the alarms soon," he says when Hongjoong glances over his shoulder with a hum of question.
Oh.
It's nearly midnight. He hadn’t realised.
"I called dad to come pick us up, but he’s half an hour away," Yunho says. "If you wanna wait around, me and Mingi and Woo are gonna play some rounds and we can drop you off on the way."
Hongjoong blinks at him, quietly surprised. "Rounds of what?" he asks.
Yunho shrugs and shoots him a grin. "Basketball," he says. "Woo said if you joined then we'd have two teams."
"I can't play basketball," Hongjoong admits.
Yunho laughs, bright and warm. "Neither can Mingi," he says.
The difference between Hongjoong and Mingi, he finds when he joins them outside at the floodlight-bright half-court, is that Mingi - a sharp-faced, bright-smiled, pockmarked boy whom Hongjoong has never met before - is nearly a head taller.
He's taller than Yunho, actually, if somewhat leaner. Hongjoong hadn't thought that was really possible.
He's using his height to block Wooyoung when Hongjoong arrives with Yunho, but Wooyoung is sharp and precise in twisting past Mingi’s clumsy defence into a layup that circles the basket before dropping in.
"Eat shit," Wooyoung laughs bodily, smacking the ball towards Mingi’s waiting hands.
"I'm going easy on you 'cause you're small," Mingi very clearly and boldly lies. "I've never lost a game since birth."
"Team up!" Yunho calls, interrupting Wooyoung’s retort. "Wooyoung, you go with Mingi to keep it eve-"
"I'm on Hongjoong hyung's team!" Wooyoung bursts over him, turned shrill with a boyish excitement, already bounding over to take Hongjoong’s side.
Yunho blinks at him. "Okay," he says, "stupid. Talls versus smalls and you're gonna lose," he reasons, bland.
"As if," Wooyoung snorts, his hand curled readily around Hongjoong’s arm, and Hongjoong doesn't hate it, except that he kind of does, so he gently extracts himself from Wooyoung’s hold. Wooyoung lets him, without much complaint. "Hyung," he says, staring directly at Hongjoong, his voice dipping into a firm sincerity. "Don't let us lose."
"Music," Yunho digs through his bag and emerges with a heavy Beats speaker in one hand and a bag of M&Ms in the other.
"I don't really like chocolate," Hongjoong says when Yunho offers the bag out to him.
"You don't need to eat it," he tells him. "We're just drawing lots. Check the colour."
Realisation crests nearly immediately, and once they all have a chocolate and Yunho is picking the draw from the bag he finds a foreign sort of anticipation rising in him. One in four.
"Red!" Yunho calls out, holding it up to the floodlights.
"Oh," Hongjoong says, the brief surge of excitement blinking out of him. "Red," he says, holding up his chocolate.
"Rigged," Wooyoung mutters, and tips his chocolate from the palm of his hand into his mouth. "Why do I always get orange?"
"We got half an hour," Yunho says, readily holding his phone out to Hongjoong after pairing it to the speaker. "Pick an album, and we'll play through."
"Something fun," Wooyoung says, smacking the basketball out of Mingi’s loose hold and dribbling to a three-point line, taking a lazy shot and almost getting it in.
"Upbeat," Mingi agrees, chasing the ball after Wooyoung’s loss.
“Whatever you like,” Yunho counters them, and pats briefly at Hongjoong’s back before bounding off to join them on the court.
Something fun, upbeat, that Hongjoong likes.
He finds himself searching Block B and playing the album from last year, placing the phone carefully beside Yunho’s speaker before jogging sluggishly onto the court.
“Good pick!” Mingi crows, his deep voice cracking with his excitement in a way that is abjectly fascinating to Hongjoong.
“We’re on defence,” Wooyoung mutters to Hongjoong, even though Hongjoong is pretty sure these things are usually decided by a toss-up.
Mingi tosses the ball high into the air between Yunho and Wooyoung, and Hongjoong realises exactly what he’d meant in the way Yunho jumps, his long arm stretched high, and swats the ball away before Wooyoung’s fingertips can even touch it.
It’s faster paced for a ‘friendly game’ than Hongjoong ever would have expected, Yunho’s warm smile sinking into a determined focus and Wooyoung’s near-violent competitive streak lashing out like the sharp, frenzied calls of his voice, and Hongjoong can barely keep up, but at the very least it seems like Mingi is in much of the same boat.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot. It’s more noise and rush and excitement than Hongjoong has had in a long time, and where Yunho paces himself with precision Wooyoung just simply seems tireless, bounding from one end of the half-court to the other, sending Hongjoong to the net when he gets blocked by Yunho’s defence and wheeling around as soon as the ball leaves his hands to land rough and sharp in Hongjoong’s, calling for a pass or for Hongjoong to take the shot before Mingi can crowd him with his unnecessarily long limbs.
They do alright considering the odds, and despite a brief argument about travel that had both Yunho and Wooyoung’s voices ringing off the buildings before Hongjoong cuts in to give Mingi the penalty the whole mess of it ends in high spirits, panted breaths, handshakes and breathless shoulder bumps, and sweat sticking Hongjoong’s hair to his brow in the balmy mid-spring night.
Wooyoung has rolled the sleeves of his t-shirt up to his shoulders and for a moment he’s standing with his hands planted on his knees, his head bowed for breath, and the floodlight burnishes the sweat on his skin a liquid silver against the dark; the slope of soft muscle across his shoulders, the silhouetted line of his strong neck. His brow, short and straight, and the smooth curve of his nose.
Something in Hongjoong’s throat tightens.
He’s attractive, in such a clearly masculine way despite the youthful boyishness of his body and face.
He’s attractive, but Hongjoong isn’t attracted to him - and not for any definable reason, either. It’s just that…
It’s just.
Hongjoong tugs the sleeves of his unseasonal hoodie down over his palms under the guise of using them to wipe some of the sweat from his brow.
He feels shrunk - hollow and hunched, as though his body is retreating from his chest. As though he can crawl deeper and deeper into these oversized clothes until no-one will see what he isn’t.
He isn’t Wooyoung.
He isn’t anything like him.
“Hey,” Yunho nudges his shoulder, nods towards the car pulling up at the distant curb, the horn pressed twice in quick succession. “Ready?”
Wooyoung is demanding Yunho for a rematch, Mingi is laughing bold and brash as their playful argument turns into playful wrestling, and Hongjoong is trailing along behind them thinking he’s not like these boys.
He’s not like them.
He’s not playful and loud and confident in himself. He doesn’t like to be touched. He doesn’t like having arms slung around his neck and cheeks pressed too close to his. He doesn’t like how ill-fitting he feels, as though what he thinks he wants is just a concept and this reality is so far from what he feels.
Startlingly they have never made him feel anything but himself, but by comparison to Yunho’s size and Mingi’s voice and the soft curve of Wooyoung’s shoulders only just beginning to fill out, he feels very much as though he is nothing which can be defined in terms of them.
“Hyung!” Wooyoung waves a hand out from the car, gesturing him into the back seat. “What’s your address? We’ll drop you off first.”
“You know my address,” he mutters, stepping into the car and pulling the door closed behind him, squished into the back with the sweaty-boy-bodies of Mingi and Wooyoung.
“I forgot,” he admits, easy and bland, so Hongjoong rolls his eyes and relays it to Yunho’s father, who is just as warm and agreeable a man as his son - and must be, to willingly be dragged out of bed to carpool four boys at one in the morning.
Four, Hongjoong catches his thoughts.
Four boys.
“Thanks, hyung!” is the messy chorus that spills out of the car behind him when he steps out, three different voices calling out of time and out of tune with each other, and his chest tightens around his heart even though he has no idea what they’re thanking him for.
He smiles at them, and waves, and doesn’t say anything back, because he doesn’t want his voice to make a liar of them.
He has this, at least. At the very least he has this.
Friends who will call him hyung, and be playful with him and loud to him and confident for him, who will find invisible boundaries sightless and wordless by touch alone and relent where Hongjoong draws the line.
Who will insist over and again that he is he is he is himself, and that is more than enough to be treasured.
When he collapses into bed he finds himself crying, but he isn’t sad this time, or scared, so he just lets it happen.
He isn’t sure when, exactly, he realises Wooyoung is in love with him.
It’s just a thought - a vague curiosity for why he is so insistent on pushing into Hongjoong’s life, tugging him out of his quiet and comfortable places, grinning and laughing and doing this and that and anything that Hongjoong never even gets around to asking.
Maybe he’s just nice; Hongjoong sees the periphery of Wooyoung doing the same for Yunho, and for any other of his countless friends whom Hongjoong will never find the frame of mind to keep up with.
And he is. He is nice.
He’s a very kind and generous person who gives everything he has to spare of his efforts and time to anyone who asks, who runs himself to the bone if need be, bottled up until he bursts, until he can’t hold it anymore and he’s screaming for no good reason.
That has never made him a bad person - not in Hongjoong’s eyes, and not in Yunho’s, and not anyone whom Hongjoong considers important enough to care. If they can think badly of Wooyoung, Hongjoong finds himself automatically designating them as unimportant, and therefore beyond his care.
It’s somewhere between the fifth and sixth coffee Wooyoung has brought him to the youth centre studio, and something in the way that he lingers - he always lingers.
It’s the plain curiosity with which he looks at the soundbars spread across Hongjoong’s monitor, as though he could piece together what melody he’s creating just by looking.
It’s the way he asked why Hongjoong started painting just one of his nails, and when Hongjoong had responded, “If you want me to tell you, you need to donate five dollars,” and with a shrug and no word of complaint Wooyoung had opened his wallet and slid twenty across the desk.
It’s the way he goes stilted and quiet sometimes at something Hongjoong hasn’t realised he’d said.
It’s the way he looks, sometimes, when Hongjoong catches him looking.
Hongjoong wonders how it makes him feel, to think that Wooyoung might like him, and at the end of several weeks of focused fretting he decides it makes him feel guilty.
There are flowers blooming across the city, and he’s cut down his shifts at work, and he hasn’t even tried to book studio space in the youth centre for weeks.
It’s finals, and he’s been locked inside studying, and he thinks if he doesn’t see the sun soon he’s going to go insane.
He texts Wooyoung.
I thing if I don’t see the sun soon I’m going to go insane.
He glares at the typo.
*Think
It’s maybe an hour before Wooyoung responds, and all he says is sucks.
Hongjoong sighs and resigns himself to Wooyoung’s equally busy schedule, and rests his cheek against his fist and keeps reading over and over and over the same differences between descriptive and inferential statistics until it won’t come out of his brain until someone grabs his head and shakes it.
He doesn’t really think to question when in his life he’s ever going to need to know a damn thing about statistical analysis, but purpose has long stopped being the point of him finishing school. It’s just some inarticulate necessity, now. It’s just one more year, and he’ll graduate, and his parents will be satisfied, and his resume will have a highschool certificate, and he can figure out how to go about doing what he wants.
It’s just one more year.
“I got accepted.”
Hongjoong holds his phone against his ear, staring blankly at the laptop in front of him.
“Hyung,” Wooyoung almost sounds like he’s on the verge of screaming, or sobbing. Maybe he’s already done that. Maybe he’s about to. “Hyung, I got accepted.”
“I heard you,” Hongjoong says, sinking into his chair. There’s a chilled feeling trickling down his spine like relief and anticipation and pride and regret. “That’s huge, Woo. That’s really…” Are you leaving me behind now? “You worked really, really hard. They’re lucky to have you.”
“Yeah,” Wooyoung says, and his voice breaks, and Hongjoong’s throat feels tight for no reason that he can place. “Yeah,” Wooyoung says, and he is sobbing now, gasping for breath around the admission he’s been holding back for over a year. “I worked really, really hard. I’m really. I’m really happy,” he cries, and no matter the cause the sound of it breaks Hongjoong’s heart. “I’m really lucky. I’m really, really happy.”
“I’m proud of you,” Hongjoong says, and feels hollow for this pride in watching his friend take off running for his dreams. “I’m really proud, Woo.”
It’s summer, and Hongjoong’s older brother has been accepted into an entertainment company for acting, and his mother has started calling him by his name, and his father has stopped calling him anything at all.
Wooyoung has come home from a two-week training course in Seoul. He didn’t have time to see Hongjoong - or anyone - even once.
He calls Hongjoong to come stay with him in Ilsan, and Hongjoong does, if only to get away from the silence that fills his ears and his mouth every time his mother calls him her son where her husband can hear.
He arrives early Saturday morning; he caught the first train after work and didn't go home.
Wooyoung’s mother makes them breakfast, dragging Wooyoung exhausted and grouchy out of bed, and Wooyoung’s father complains about having three sons, now, and no daughters to dote on.
Wooyoung’s brother is five years older than Hongjoong; his mother tells Hongjoong that she's pregnant, and grins, and presses a finger to her lips like it's a secret.
It isn't a secret to anyone in the family, but she isn't showing yet, and doesn’t want anyone to know.
Wooyoung’s father says that he hopes they have a girl, but the extravagant defeatism in the way he says it tells Wooyoung he doesn't think it's likely.
They're loud and bright and Hongjoong feels more like a son than he ever has in his life.
Wooyoung tells Hongjoong he learned something while he was training, and the mischief in his grin tells Hongjoong it has nothing to do with dance, and that night, once his parents are asleep, Wooyoung drags Hongjoong to the bathroom and bleaches his hair for the first time.
"Red or blue," he offers out the box dyes for Hongjoong to choose.
Red or blue.
He points wordlessly at the red, and Wooyoung nods as though he's made the right choice, though Hongjoong is certain he'd have nodded like that to any choice Hongjoong had made.
He watches, mesmerised, as Wooyoung pastes his brittle yellow hair thick with dye and then folds cling wrap around his head and laughs and says he looks like an alien, and the next morning Wooyoung’s brother says it looks good, and his father says it suits him, and his mother calls him pretty, and it's the first time in a very, very long time that Hongjoong hasn't hated the idea of being pretty.
The peace lasts until Wooyoung’s brother sees the bathroom, and no doubt sees the mess Wooyoung and Hongjoong made of it, and calls out, “Wooyoung, can you clean the damn sink?” and Wooyoung rolls his eyes and stands up without a word, and seems like he’s about to go do it, except that the long stretch of silence with no answer makes his brother yell, “Wooyoung!” from the next room.
“I’m doing it!” he yells back, louder than is strictly necessary, and then freezes, his eyes wide, until his brother pokes his head around the door with a glare and a scold for the tone waiting on his tongue, and Wooyoung screams at the top of his lungs, all the way down the hall until he slams the bathroom door, his brother running half a foot behind, and is still screaming when Hongjoong looks out into the hallway to see his brother rattling the locked doorknob.
“Open it!” he demands.
“No!” Wooyoung screeches back, barely muffled through the door. “You’ll kill me! I’m busy! I’m cleaning! I’m shitting! Go away!”
This continues for some time before their father yells at them to cut it out, and Wooyoung’s brother gives up, and Wooyoung pokes his head carefully out into the hall in the ensuing silence before slinking back to Hongjoong’s side.
“Did you clean it?” Hongjoong asks.
Wooyoung looks stricken. “I forgot,” he admits, and runs back to the bathroom before his brother can find out.
And with the way it makes Hongjoong laugh, maybe Wooyoung is the first person who has made him feel like something more real than a laminate cut-out of a person, but is that enough for love? Is that enough to have Hongjoong hand over this fragile sense of self that Wooyoung has given him room to create?
He wishes he believed it was.
His life is better with Wooyoung in it, but Hongjoong has no right to hold him.
He can't love Wooyoung, even though sometimes he wishes he did.
Sometimes, his eyes unfocused staring at the screen of the laptop which Wooyoung had put him in the position to buy, wearing sweaters that don't fit him and never will because he'd told Wooyoung he was a boy in not so many words and Wooyoung had created a way to give Hongjoong something meaningful and real to fit those unspoken words - this insignificant insignia of boyhood - Hongjoong thinks it would be so easy to just give up this stubborn insistence and let himself fall in love with the kind and generous person Wooyoung is.
Sometimes he thinks no one is ever going to love him this much, with this unfaltering approval of who he is.
No one is ever going to see him as a man the way Wooyoung does. No one is ever going to make him feel a man the way Wooyoung does, effortlessly and without expectation, like the question was never asked.
No one is ever going to be good to him the way Wooyoung is, and Hongjoong feels so selfish and so guilty for not loving him back, and for wanting this more than anything, and for even entertaining the thought of letting himself pretend to be in love if only to keep the things that Wooyoung gives to him.
He hates himself for thinking it.
He thinks about it a lot.
His parents have saved up enough money over the year for them to spend a weekend in Namhae, because Jeju is too expensive.
It's not about money; Hongjoong hates every second of sharing a cramped hotel room with his family.
It's not that he doesn't love them. He does, more than anything. But sometimes - sometimes he really can't stand them.
He spends most of the two days on the beach, walking along the sand or sitting on rocks to watch the ocean. It's beautiful, and not once has his family said anything about his hair, still bright red and lovely with Wooyoung’s care.
Hongjoong misses him.
He thinks he's always going to miss Wooyoung, in a way that can't really be placed. He's not Hongjoong’s to keep, and Hongjoong won't keep him. But he loves him, for what it's worth. Even if it isn't worth Wooyoung’s love. Even if it isn't the same as Wooyoung’s love at all.
All he can do, now, is reach out a hand and hope that someone grabs it.
He doesn’t know if it's because he's sinking, or because he wants to pull someone up for air the way Wooyoung has always pulled him.
To give a little back, even if it's not the way it's wanted or to the person who wants it.
He's slipping again and he knows it, this fragile and artificial happiness falling through his loose fingers, and he doesn't know how to hold it.
He needs to gain his footing; he needs to find something strong enough to hold his weight.
He asks his mother if she will help him find a psychiatrist that will prescribe him HRT, his small heart choking in his throat, and she looks guiltily towards the door her husband will be coming home through in a few hours and says, "This is all I can do."
This is all.
Only this, and nothing more.
He tries not to hold it against her.
He thinks of calling Wooyoung, and then doesn’t. Wooyoung is almost always too busy now with everyone but himself, and Hongjoong won't be another person begging him for miracles.
Wooyoung has already given enough of himself to Hongjoong.
He won't ask for any more.
He can do it himself.
He does it himself, and it's one of the hardest stretches of focused responsibilities that he's ever had to follow through, and he needs his parents' permission - whether or not he's an adult, the third and only willing psychiatrist had said, he will need consent from his family and testimonials from at least two peers, and a respected member of society.
He asks what a respected member of society is, and she tells him it can be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a city representative, or a teacher.
He asks the year coordinator who had told him to think about his future to sign a form for him, and says it's for work experience, and hopes that she doesn't read it thoroughly.
She doesn't read it, and she does sign it.
He asks Yunho first, awkward and cold-fingered, and he agrees with an easy nonchalance that makes Hongjoong feel incomparably at ease.
After two weeks of pretending to himself that he has any other options, he messages Wooyoung.
Wooyoung’s response is an immediate and enthusiastic yes, with the caveat that I’m going to call you tonight.
It’s nearly two in the morning before Wooyoung does call him, but that doesn’t upset Hongjoong like he thinks it might upset anyone else, because he and Wooyoung both know that both of them are working, and both of them are busy, and both of them are going to be awake at two o’clock anyway.
“Holy shit, hyung,” is what he says before any greeting. For the first time, it’s morning. For the first time, he doesn’t say good morning. “You’re not joking, right?”
“No,” Hongjoong says, and he knows that he sounds irritated but he knows that he isn’t, and he knows that he’s thrilled, and he knows that Wooyoung knows that too.
“Is this, like, a fake reference thing or a real reference thing?” Wooyoung asks. “Am I pretending to be your doctor?”
“You’re pretending to be my friend,” Hongjoong says, dry.
“Which I’m not?” Wooyoung asks, and Hongjoong can hear the tone of laughter in his voice.
“Absolutely not,” Hongjoong lies, his smile held behind the cage of his fingers, his hand moving over the trackpad of his laptop. “I’d never associate with someone like you.”
“Someone like me,” Wooyoung derides. “Kick a man while he’s down. Do you know how many trainees here are gay?” he brushes through without any indication of a tangent, a blissful wonder in his voice. “Like, I’m not saying anything, but I’m also not not saying anything.”
Hongjoong laughs at him, indulging in the conversation. He’s missed Wooyoung. Really. Really really really, he’s missed him more than he can put into words. “Found something you like?”
“No,” Wooyoung scoffs. Hongjoong kind of expected that answer, but it still makes him a little sad. “I adopted someone,” he says. “He’s Yeosang. He’s cool. He’s older than me, I think, and he’s an only child, and he goes to an academic school, and his parents don’t want him here, and he thinks that’s funny. He joined two days ago. I bit him. I think you’d like him.”
“Why did you bite him?” Hongjoong asks.
Wooyoung makes a sound like a vocal shrug. “Felt like it. Also, remember Yeonjun? Oh my god, hyung. It’s funny. Trust me, it’s funny.” Hongjoong trusts him. “His dancing is insane, the instructors keep trying to make us fight for spots, but he’s in love with me. Okay he isn’t,” he immediately self-corrects, “but he thinks it’s hilarious, and I think it’s hilarious, and it’s so stupid because he’s pretty, so they’re gonna give him centre every time.”
He pauses, as though waiting for Hongjoong to laugh.
“It’s funny,” he repeats.
Hongjoong hopes that Wooyoung only thinks that it’s funny, and nothing else.
“You should see Yeosang, actually,” Wooyoung says, his voice full of an odd sort of wonder. “I think he’s the prettiest person I’ve ever seen. I really think he’s the prettiest person I’ve seen in my life,” he emphasises. “Also,” he says, “I miss you, and I have I think a couple hours off in the afternoon next weekend. We should catch up. I want to see you.”
“You’re working hard,” Hongjoong says, because he thinks Wooyoung might get the wrong idea if he says what he means and tells him I miss you too. “I’m really proud, Woo. You’re doing well.”
“Yeah,” he says, and falls silent for a moment. “I hope so.”
Hongjoong can’t be the person to say everything that Wooyoung needs to hear to believe it. He can’t tell Wooyoung that he’s almost heartbreakingly attractive, or that he’s one of the best dancers Hongjoong has ever seen, or that he works harder than all of the hardworking people Hongjoong knows, or that he will succeed no matter what because Hongjoong knows that Wooyoung has come too far to let failure to be an option.
He’s not that sort of person, anyway. He’s not the sort to give up.
Even when it’s hard - even when he’s tired. Even when there’s pressure everywhere pushing down on all sides, he’s too stubborn and passionate and full of love and life to ever give up on this dream.
Even when it’s hard. Even when he’s tired. It’s his dream, and he’s running after it like a shooting star hurling itself towards the sun.
The day that Wooyoung had a couple of hours free in the afternoon he doesn’t turn up to the station for a while. Hongjoong isn’t worried, really. He’s used to Wooyoung being late for things, and he’s learned that he can’t allow that to be something that bothers him because it is almost intrinsically a part of who Wooyoung is.
But he still calls him, to see where he is.
“Fuck,” he says as soon as he picks up, before Hongjoong can even ask, “hyung. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I was working on a choreo and got distracted and didn’t look at the time. I’m really sorry.” He sounds stretched-thin and desperate for it to be known, for Hongjoong to understand that he didn’t mean it. “I don’t think I can make it in time before my next schedule. Fuck,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says, and stands up from his seat and pats his pockets for his wallet to buy himself the coffee that Wooyoung had promised him.
Wooyoung is quiet for a long moment and Hongjoong stands back from the line in front of the counter, phone pressed to his ear, listening to Wooyoung’s silence.
"I'm really sorry," he says at last. Small, and defeated. "Are you mad?"
"No, Woo," Hongjoong promises.
"Are you already there?" Wooyoung asks.
Hongjoong hesitates a moment before admitting, "Yeah."
"Fuck," he says, drawn thin and tired. "I'm so sorry."
"It's fine, Young-ah," Hongjoong repeats. "I'm not mad at you. You're busy," he says into Wooyoung’s fragile silence. "You're working hard. It's good," he promises. "I wouldn't be mad at you for that, no matter what." Wooyoung still doesn't say anything, his guilt not quite appeased, so Hongjoong says, "You owe me a coffee."
It startles a laugh out of him, weak and thankful when he says, "Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'll get you back." Hongjoong wonders if Wooyoung knows that really he doesn't owe Hongjoong anything at all. He's always been the one to give so much, and it's Hongjoong who owes him back all the happiness that Wooyoung has given him.
"Go back to work," Hongjoong says, firm because he doesn’t know how to be gentle. "I want to see you onstage already."
Another laugh - lighter this time, as though the weight of guilt is being eased from him. "I'm with Yeosang right now," he says. "Do you want to say hi?"
"No," Hongjoong says, because he has never met Yeosang and until he does meet him and decides for himself whether to like him, he doesn't really care.
"It's okay," Wooyoung is laughing outright now, and Hongjoong can imagine the bright burst of his smile, "he just made a face. He doesn’t want to talk to you either."
"Good," Hongjoong says. "Maybe I do like him after all."
His parents are the last people he goes to. He explains the whole thing to his mother, as brief and concise as he can, pretending he can't see the conflicted regret that draws steadily across her face.
He doesn’t really wait for an explanation, or a response. He hands her the form, the letter he's drafted, points out where he needs her and her husband's signatures, and then picks up his bag and leaves for the youth centre.
Wooyoung doesn’t come by anymore; he doesn’t need to.
He has his choice of practice rooms, and no two-hour sessions to make the most of - no other groups waiting outside for them to finish, no building alarms set at midnight.
It should be easy for Hongjoong to go back to the way things were before Wooyoung had pushed himself into Hongjoong’s space and his life, but he finds himself feeling lonely, and then he finds himself creeping into Yunho's rooms, offering dinner or energy drinks or coffee, and Yunho readily lets Hongjoong fit himself comfortably into the too-large space Wooyoung has left for both of them, even though he doesn't quite fit.
Despite everything, it's nice.
Coming home on the late bus, it's the first time Hongjoong has ever heard his parents argue.
But they're not arguing; they're fighting. Over him. Their son. Their child.
Regretfully, their daughter.
They quieten when they see him standing in the living room door; his mother resting her elbows on the table and running her hands through her hair, turning her face away so Hongjoong won't see the tears caught in her eyes. His father sitting far from her on the lounge, his hands between his knees, more tired than Hongjoong has ever seen him. Looking right at Hongjoong, stricken with conflict.
Looking right at Hongjoong, in a way he hasn't looked right at him in months.
Hongjoong wades through the thick silence to his room and crawls onto his bed, and pretends he doesn't hear it when their voices rise back to a pitch that sinks through closed doors.
I need to get out of here, he texts Wooyoung, his fingers cold and shaking, before i do something dumb.
Yeah, Wooyoung says, you do.
He doesnt ask what kind of dumb thing Hongjoong is going to do, which is good, because it sits in his throat sticky like a pill that shouldn't have been swallowed, and he doesn't think he could choke it out even if Wooyoung told him to.
For the first time Hongjoong misses his friend so much that he cries, hands fisted in his sheets. Heaving silent sobs into his pillow so desperately that he feels like he's going to throw up, and wishes Wooyoung was here to make him lie comfortably, and give him water, and take him home.
A nurse gives him his first shot, and shows him how to find his quadricep for the needle, and what dosage to measure out, and he thanks her, and figures he's going to have to get over the uneasy, nauseous feeling he has about syringes on his own.
Wooyoung invites him to Ilsan to stay with his family for a weekend, and Hongjoong takes a larger bag than he knows is necessary, and doesn’t go back to Seoul except for school and for work, and he compromises sleep for the longer commute, and helps Wooyoung’s mother set up the second bedroom for the baby because she's nearly eight months along now, and he is offered to take Wooyoung’s empty bed to share the third room with his brother, but every night insists that he's more comfortable on the couch, and once again he owes Wooyoung more than he can ever even begin to give back.
He meets Yeosang like this and Wooyoung is right; Hongjoong does like him.
He's smart and shy and awkward, and funnier than he seems to think, and somehow prettier than even Wooyoung gave him credit for - so much that Hongjoong has to catch his breath when he first sees him, and then has it all whoosh out of him when Yeosang smiles and turns his head in a nervous gesture, and Hongjoong sees the birthmark blended beautifully red against the corner of his eye.
He gives a sweet little wow when he first notices Hongjoong’s hands, and Hongjoong’s instinct is to hide them away until Yeosang says nice and I wish mine were like that and then laughs in the most quiet, wood-chime-charming way, and Hongjoong melts.
"Do you play violin?" Yeosang asks, and Hongjoong shakes his head.
"No," he says, "but I make music. I'm a musician."
"Cool," Yeosang approves. "Can you help me with piano?"
Hongjoong teaches Yeosang how to play something intricate and brief and self-taught on the electric upright in Wooyoung’s living room, and he asks what it's called, and Hongjoong shrugs and admits that he hasn't thought of a name, and Yeosang’s sweet lips part in a silent oh, his pretty eyes blinking surprise when he realises Hongjoong composed it.
Yeosang has been playing violin since before he started school, and he's taking his grade eight examination this year. He says it's funny that his parents wanted him to be a musician so bad, but hate the direction he took off running with the idea.
He says it's funny, but something about the way he says it reminds Hongjoong of the way Wooyoung had said it's funny, I promise, when he’d tried to laugh that their instructors would pit him against another talented dancer only to choose the prettier option every time.
He says it like he's trying to make himself believe it's funny, so that maybe the reality of what it means might hurt less.
Wooyoung’s father complains about having five sons in the house, and Hongjoong’s eyes widen at the realisation, and he asks for confirmation, and Wooyoung’s father smiles sheepishly and admits that maybe he wasn't meant to say anything, and Hongjoong feels his smile eclipse his whole being when he first hears Kyungmin's name.
His mother calls every few days and asks how he's doing, and asks if he'll be coming back.
Yeah, he lies to her, reluctance without regret, soon. I'm just really busy. I'll be back soon.
Wooyoung’s mother, nearly nine months pregnant, sits him down and asks if he wants to go home, and lets him say no.
"What do you want to do?" she asks, because she knows as well as Hongjoong does that this was only ever meant to be temporary.
She helps him find an apartment in the city that he likes, and then helps him organise work hours and a budget to cover the deposit and rent, and offers her first born son (complete with a driver's license and a trailer) to help him move when he's ready.
He knows exactly where Wooyoung gets it.
He never really thought to wonder how he'd feel to go through puberty again, the right way this time.
Yunho laughs at his silly little moustache, and Hongjoong glares and kicks his ankle and complains that he keeps forgetting to shave.
Yunho buys him an electric shaver, and Hongjoong doesn't know what to say, so he doesn't really say anything at all.
He has to take up washing his face properly every night again, or his skin breaks out. This becomes washing his face every time he showers, because the schedule of his life does not revolve around meaningless things like the sun.
His thighs slim a little, and his stomach softens a little, and he doesn't think his face changes all that much until he sees Mingi again, more than half a year since the first time they met, and Mingi introduces himself as though he's never seen Hongjoong before in his life.
Hongjoong is prepared to let it slide without much thought - he doesn't consider himself a particularly memorable person, really - until Yunho says with emphasis, "Mingi-yah, it's Hongjoong hyung," and Mingi's narrow eyes go wide with shock and realisation, and Yunho doubles over laughing.
He starts going home again, because it's become nearly impossible to take the extra hour to Ilsan and back between his final year of school and six shifts a week at the radio station. Most of the playlists he submits get approved now, only a few songs here and there filtered out, and he doesn't realise that anyone else has realised until one of the hosts does a double take at his voice and says it's matured nicely, and laughs and asks if he's a late bloomer or something, and then suggests they do a script readthrough after their shifts end.
The surprising part is that she follows through with the offer, and critiques him fairly, and says he mumbles his articulation and needs to wait and let his vocal tone settle, and says give it another year, and then we'll see.
He never really thought that was where this job was heading. He never really thought this job was heading anywhere beyond something to keep him alive.
He tells his parents a week before he moves, his deposit paid along with the first fortnight's rent.
His father tells him he can stay, at least until he graduates, and Hongjoong forces himself to smile. A stiff, awkward thing.
"No, I can't," he says, and he thinks he sees seventeen years of regret flash across his familiar face before he relents with a simple, quiet okay.
He asks if Hongjoong needs furniture, and Hongjoong says that he'll probably take his bed, if that's alright, and that he needs to buy a couch. Hongjoong doesn't say that Wooyoung’s parents have promised him the upright piano from their living room after hearing him play nearly every day for a month, and that he'd pretended his lips hadn’t trembled when he'd thanked them.
His father offers to buy him a couch, and Hongjoong knows that he means for it to mean much more than it does, so he agrees even though he has the money saved up. He says he's going to choose the couch, though. His father says of course, naturally, and then has to tail along behind Hongjoong while he lies across every two-seater display in Ikea until he finds one that is pretty enough and almost puts him to sleep, and he decides it's a fair enough punishment that his father let him do it without complaint to forgive him for almost everything.
He pretends he doesn't notice Wooyoung slipping, because Wooyoung never seems to want him to see.
He makes a point of calling him nearly every night, though. If only for a few minutes. If only to remind him that Hongjoong loves him, in whatever small and insignificant way he is capable.
He takes the day off school to move in, and the night off work. He offers to help carry things, but Wooyoung’s brother and Hongjoong’s father won't let him, and in one car-load and two hours, Hongjoong has an apartment with a bed and a couch and a piano, and a potted plant that Wooyoung’s brother brought him - a kind of hanging vine with pretty gold-freckled spade leaves, which he says Hongjoong can propagate by taking clippings and leaving them in water until roots grow from the knuckle of the stem, and calls it 'the gift that keeps on giving', and then laughs a bright, sweet laugh that reminds Hongjoong of Wooyoung, and tells him to call if he needs anything.
Hongjoong calls him hyung.
It's the first time he's ever called anyone hyung.
It feels like a word that has always been just shy of his tongue; this subtle linguistic indication of who he is, and who Wooyoung’s brother is, and who Wooyoung’s brother is to Hongjoong.
He grins and waves and leaves, and Hongjoong feels unaccountably exhausted for the fact he'd done barely anything in the course of moving house, which ultimately had been much easier than he'd thought.
He goes to lie on the floor while his father rummages through boxes to unpack 'essentials', and stocks the fridge with sparse food from a cold bag, and makes his bed with new sheets, and puts Hongjoong’s toothbrush and shaver and meds in the bathroom cabinet.
"Hey," he raps his knuckles against a doorframe, a nervous tic he's always had, "I gotta head to work. You'll be alright here?"
"Yeah," Hongjoong says without opening his eyes. "Yunho’s coming after school," he says. "I'll just wait here." He means exactly the place where he's collapsed himself onto the floor.
"School doesn't finish for another four hours," his father says. "You could still make the rest of the day, if you wanted."
Hongjoong wants to fold his arms over his eyes, wants the easeful comfort of them pressing around his head, but he can't move. "I don't," he says, and something in his throat wavers, and he feels his lips tremble around the loose way he frames the words. "I just wanna lie down for a bit," he says, and doesn’t know why suddenly, so suddenly, it all just doesn't feel fair, and his eyes are prickling and hot, and he's tired, and he just wants to lie here and do nothing, and his lips tremble, and he sniffs, and he feels his father come and sit down beside his head, and he turns onto his side and hides his face against his hip, and winds his arms around his waist for the first time in maybe ten years, and feels himself cry.
This is his first day off, he realises. This is his first day in over a year that he hasn't had some other thing that he needs to do, and he's tired, and he's nothing, and he's everything, and he's curled up on the floor of his new apartment hugging a father who he was never even sure would really love him, who is running his fingers through Hongjoong’s hair the way he used to do when he was a kid, and hushing out a gentle shush of shh-shh-shh-shhhh that immediately sends him back to feeling like a child, and being loved like a child, and being cared for like a child.
"You can come home," his father promises him. "Whenever you want, you can come home. I love you, Joongie," he says, and a silent sob curls through Hongjoong’s whole body. "I really love you," he says, and his voice wavers just a little, and Hongjoong buries his face further against his father's hip until his rushed breaths settle and slow, and exhaustion drapes over him, and his father takes a cushion from the couch beside him and lifts Hongjoong’s head to tuck it underneath, and stands up to find a soft blanket in the muddled boxes and pulls it over him, and presses a kiss to the side of his head and leaves him to sleep, pulling the door closed quietly behind him.