Chapter Text
Woohyun woke up with a start, afraid for a second that he had overslept for a schedule. It took him a moment to notice that the room was still dark and his phone was ringing shrilly across the room. A moment further to remember that he no longer had to steel himself for days upon days of schedules. His phone stopped ringing, only to start again a beat later. Why had he thought it was funny to pick such an annoying ringtone for Kibum – in the end, he was the only one that suffered. He almost rolled over and went back to sleep, but he knew that Kibum was likely to keep calling until he picked up. As if on cue, his phone beeped once, and then twice.
When he stumbled over to his phone, along with the multiple missed calls, he also had an irritatingly large number of unread messages. It was also close to four in the morning, a time when all aging idols should be quietly in bed. He scowled at his phone, feeling even more put out when he saw that Kibum had only texted him a series of blurry pictures with no explanation.
You’re such an asshole, he started typing out and then faltered mid-word as he looked more closely at the pictures. More closely at the people in the photos, illuminated only by the pulsing lights in some club. Knowing the type of places Kibum frequented, he wasn’t surprised to see two men, curved towards one another. It looked like Kibum had caught them at the end of a kiss, in the moment just after they pulled apart.
It wasn’t that it was two men.
It was that he knew that smile, knew the line of that jaw, knew that face. It was impossible not to – not after seeing it almost every day for more than ten years.
Woohyun banged on Kibum’s front door and then paused to listen for movement inside. He had waited until ten in the morning to show up at Kibum’s apartment, which he thought was more than reasonable after Kibum had refused to pick up his phone last night and ruined any chance he could go back to sleep.
He raised his hand to knock again when he heard the faint sounds of Kibum cursing on the other side. He stepped back just in time as Kibum slammed the door open.
“Woohyun-ah,” Kibum said sweetly, with a murderous expression on his face. “Please go away. You’re scaring the neighbors.”
When Woohyun followed his pointed look, he noticed that Kibum's next-door-neighbor had her door cracked open and was indeed peeking at them. She jumped when they both turned to look at her and hurriedly closed her door.
“I can’t wait until this shows up as a blind item online. I can see it now – early morning argument between handsome idol A and increasingly irrelevant idol B.” Kibum sighed explosively. “Come inside now that the damage is already done.”
“You have only yourself to blame,” Woohyun said unsympathetically as Kibum collapsed back into bed. “Now explain.”
Groaning, Kibum rolled over and pulled his blankets over his head. “It’s a picture of Kim Sunggyu. Kissing a man. I don’t know how to explain this to you using smaller words.”
Woohyun took a deep breath to keep from shouting. Ignoring Kibum’s startled yelp, he yanked the blankets completely off both Kibum and the bed. As he moved to sit on Kibum – he was prepared to take any and all drastic measures to make him talk – Kibum threw up his hand to fend him off.
“Wait, wait, wait! If you sit on me, I’m gonna throw up.” Woohyun paused, but didn’t back off. "I’ll answer your questions but,” and Kibum pointed at him petulantly, “you have to fuck off right after. We can discuss whatever life crisis you suffer later, when I don’t hate your guts.”
Woohyun opened his mouth to argue, and then nodded tightly. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he had expected Kibum to wave it off as a drunken prank, to mock Woohyun for falling for it, to laugh at the idea of Sunggyu making out in public with a man.
“I was out last night with a few friends at a club and while I was waiting at the bar, I noticed a guy that kind of looked like Sunggyu, which was – ” Kibum made a vague expression with his hands. “Shocking. Weird. Alarming. He’s the last person I would’ve thought to see in a place like that. I always suspected, you know, but.”
Woohyun really, truly didn’t know. He wasn’t quite sure what his face was doing anymore. Whatever it was, it must have looked terrible because the expression in Kibum’s eyes softened. When he opened his mouth to continue, he looked almost apologetic.
“Sunggyu is too ambitious to be that reckless. I was convinced I was wrong or more wasted than I thought, so I tried to get as close to him as I could without him noticing me. It was dark in there, but not that dark.” Kibum looked at Woohyun steadily. “Taking the pictures was a bad idea. Sending them to you was an even worse idea. I should’ve known better.”
In the silence that followed, neither he nor Kibum knew what to say.
On paper, Infinite was on hiatus. Still, Woohyun knew and the other members knew and Woollim definitely knew that now it was only a matter of deciding when to publish the obituary. When the agency decided the date for Sunggyu’s enlistment, they had paused group activities. Temporarily, the agency assured them. But months had passed since Sunggyu and Dongwoo had returned and his own enlistment was still months away. There weren’t even rumors of a comeback. The agency had already shifted its attention to its younger and trendier groups.
At twenty, he would have never imagined that he would feel only relief when he set aside the burden of Infinite. Playing Infinite’s Woohyun had become stale and he had shrugged it off like an ill-fitting suit. Instead, he had (finally) released his solo and auditioned unsuccessfully for bit parts in dramas and movies and starred in a musical and played soccer here and there. He wanted to drop a mini or a single before enlisting, but he hadn’t yet started fighting for it with Woollim.
All seven of them stayed in touch. It was hard not to. Their group chat still buzzed with new messages every few days and they had stayed active on their SNS accounts. They no longer lived together, but Woohyun still met up with most of them every few weeks. He saw Myungsoo the least often and Dongwoo the most often; Sunggyu fell somewhere in the middle. But every time he met up with Sunggyu, it felt easy, maybe easier than when they had seen each other every day. It was easier to laugh at each other and harder to stay mad; it was, Woohyun supposed, as good a definition of adulthood as any.
After years of sharing a dorm, sharing responsibilities, sharing Infinite, Woohyun had thought that he knew all of Sunggyu’s secrets. Which was why looking at those pictures – being so wrong – felt like a physical blow.