Work Text:
-Jisung-
By the time My Youth reached the part that always sounded too tender for a night like this, Jisung already knew he was losing the fight.
The concert had been built for this.
Mark standing apart for one beat too long, smiling through it while the others kept their eyes on him like they were trying to turn a goodbye into a memory fans could hold onto.
Jeno, steady in the middle, bridging the distance the way a captain was supposed to.
All of them still moving, still singing, still making it beautiful because that was the job, because the show had to go on even when everyone onstage knew what this night was.
Mark’s last one.
More than the end of the concert, more than the last stop.
The last show.
The crowd was loud enough to shake the floor under Jisung’s shoes, but the song cut through anyway, soft where it should have been cruel.
Memories were already turning into a weight he would have to carry instead of live inside.
Bright years. Shared tears.
The kind of promise that ever sounded easy while you were still standing next to the person it belonged to.
He kept singing for as long as he could.
Then he raised his eyes and understood what the stage had been trying to tell him all night.
Mark at one side.
The others drawn toward the opposite end. Jeno in the middle, holding the line together for a few more seconds.
A version of the group still intact if nobody breathed too hard.
Something in Jisung gave way.
It was not graceful. It was not gradual.
It was simply there, his throat locking, his eyes burning, his breath breaking open in the middle of a song already about remembering.
He dropped his head fast, one hand coming up too late, shoulders tightening with the effort of trying not to make it visible.
He had done this before.
That was the part his body understood before his mind did.
Another stage flashed through him, older and unbearably bright in a different way.
Mark leaving before, and then later, impossibly, coming back.
The happiness of that return had felt so complete at the time, almost childish in its certainty.
Like the story had corrected itself.
Like some endings could be taken back if you loved hard enough.
For a while, Jisung had believed that.
Because this time, the joy of getting Mark back lived right beside the knowledge of losing him again, and both ached together.
His vision blurred completely.
Renjun reached him first.
Jisung barely registered the hand at his arm before Chenle was there, close and immediate, pink hair vivid even through the smear of tears and stage light.
Beyond them stood Jeno, carrying that terrible composure that made everything more real instead of less.
Jisung nodded at words he barely heard.
Or maybe he thought he had.
He could not tell anymore.
The crying had gone past embarrassment and into something worse, helpless and old and horribly familiar.
Then he lifted his head.
Across the lights and the broken line of the stage, Mark was already watching him with a stillness that landed harder than surprise would have.
As if he had known from the beginning that My Youth would be the place where Jisung finally broke.
-Mark-
Mark had known this song would be the hardest part.
The concert had been built too carefully around the ending for it not to, every cue and look arranged to turn departure into a version of beauty people could bear.
But the hardest part had always been simpler than that.
It was knowing he would have to face them while it happened.
Mark had prepared himself as much as he could.
He had braced for his own tears too, because those had come so easily all night, rising every time he let himself stop holding it back.
What he had not managed to prepare for was Jisung.
Maybe he had known from the start that Jisung would be the one to undo him and had simply refused to stand close to the thought until now.
From where he stood, he saw it happen almost all at once:
Jisung folding under the song, Renjun and Chenle reaching him before he realized and Jeno was still doing what Mark had trusted him to do, holding the center for one last impossible beat.
For one stupid second, his body wanted to move before the choreography of the moment allowed it.
Go to him now.
Forget the spacing, the crowd, the timing, the whole careful structure of the stage they had all agreed to carry through to the end.
Just go.
He didn’t.
Jisung was not alone, and that should have made it easier.
It didn’t.
It made the grief sharper.
They were all there.
All six of them inside the same light, the same song, the same ending.
And Mark had never felt the fact of leaving more clearly than he did in that moment, standing too far away to reach someone he loved while he cried because of him.
Maybe he was not the only reason.
Time and years and the long life of the group had held all of them together so long that none of them quite knew how to face it clearly while it changed. But him too.
Then Jisung raised his head.
Their eyes met across the brightness.
Mark saw it all before Jisung could hide any of it.
The old hurt under the new one.
The helplessness of being dragged back into a grief his body remembered too well.
The same devastated disbelief that had cracked through him years ago and, for a while, had been answered with a miracle.
Mark coming back.
That memory hit him then, sudden and bright, aching on impact.
The joy of it.
Jisung’s face back then, all shock and relief and that almost reckless happiness that appeared whenever when something mattered so much it went past embarrassment.
The feeling, brief and stupid and perfect, that maybe love and luck had aligned for once.
Mark had wanted to believe in that too.
Because he was not walking away from a place where he had been unloved. He was walking away from a life that had carried years of him, given him more than one version of home, a place he had returned to with his whole heart.
And still, for all that love, there was another truth underneath it.
Quiet. Persistent. Impossible to keep outrunning.
He was tired.
Not of them, never of them.
But in the way a person becomes when his life has been spoken for so long that even his own dreams start sounding distant.
Tired of becoming reliable before he had learned how to feel free.
His dream, the sound was still there, but far enough away now that he was afraid of losing it completely.
It was a terrible thought to have in the middle of a song like this, with Jisung crying under all that light, and Mark almost hated himself for it.
But it was true.
This was bad.
It was breaking something real.
And beneath the grief of it, there was honesty too.
Jeno moved first.
He turned toward Mark in a way no one else would notice as anything other than part of the flow of the stage, and bridged the distance the same way he had all night, making room instead of forcing it.
An anchor from one leader to the next one, or maybe one shared for the last time.
Mark let out a breath that caught on the way out.
Then he crossed the rest of the space.
***
By the time they stepped offstage, the noise had changed.
It was still there, fans beyond the walls, staff voices, the rush of bodies and equipment moving where they needed to go, but muted now, flattened by corridors and distance until it sounded less like a concert than its echo.
Someone helped Jisung with his in-ears.
Someone pressed a towel into his hands.
Jeno murmured low at Mark’s shoulder before peeling away again, pulled back toward the others and the rest of the night waiting to be finished properly.
Jisung kept his head down as they moved, wiping at his face, then doing it again, like he could erase the worst of it before anyone looked too closely. Mark stayed half a step beside him without touching him yet.
Jisung had always needed a moment to gather himself before he could bear being comforted, and Mark knew better than to rush him through it.
At the dressing room door, away from the worst of the noise for the first time all night, Mark reached past him, pushed it open, and let them both slip inside.
***
Jisung made it three steps into the room before stopping.
He slowed after three steps, towel caught in one hand, shoulders tight from trying to get himself back under control, and stood there half-turned away, as if he had not decided whether facing Mark would make things better or worse.
Mark closed the door behind them and let the quiet settle.
It was not silence.
Voices and feet kept moving somewhere outside, the muffled continuation of a night that had not ended because the hardest part of it had.
But compared to the stage, the cameras, and the impossible brightness of crying where everyone could see, it was close enough.
Jisung scrubbed the towel over his face, then laughed under his breath in a way that was not laughter at all.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
Jisung shrugged without looking at him.
“For doing all that.”
All that.
As if he had tripped over a cable or made some small, stupid mistake instead of breaking open under a song that had practically been built to take a knife to memory.
Mark stepped closer, slowly, giving him room to pull away if he wanted, then stopped in front of him.
“You don’t have to apologize to me for crying.”
Jisung let out a breath that shook at the edges.
“I wasn’t exactly subtle about it.”
“No,” Mark said, and because Jisung’s mouth twitched like he hated how true that was, he softened it.
“But sometimes it happens, Jisungah. Tonight was always going to be one of those nights.”
The faintest trace of a smile touched his mouth, thin and pained and gone almost as soon as it appeared.
Jisung lowered his gaze.
His hair had fallen forward again, damp at the temples and mussed by sweat, tears, and restless hands.
Mark reached up before he could think better of it and brushed it back from his forehead.
Jisung went still.
The reaction was tiny.
Nothing more than a pause.
One breath held too long, but Mark felt it anyway and he let his hand fall.
“You okay?”
It was the wrong question.
They both knew it the instant it was out.
Jisung laughed again, quieter this time, and finally met his gaze. His eyes were swollen from crying, lashes still wet.
“No,” he said, honest enough to hurt.
Then, after a second, “I mean, obviously not, hyung.”
That honesty almost undid Mark more than the tears had.
He moved closer again, careful, and set his hand lightly against Jisung’s side, above the ribs.
A point of warmth meant to ground him.
“Breathe,” he said softly.
Jisung did. So fast at first.
Then slower when Mark kept his hand there, steady and warm through the fabric, a rhythm offered instead of forced.
By the third breath, some of the strain left Jisung’s shoulders.
Mark reached for the collar of his shirt, where one of the mic wires was caught.
“You missed this.”
Jisung huffed and stood motionless while Mark untangled it, fingers brushing briefly against the damp skin at the back of his neck.
Another tiny reaction, the slightest shift of breath.
“Renjun’s probably already planning to make fun of me forever for being forgetful,” Jisung muttered.
“Only forever?”
That got another almost-smile.
Mark eased the wire free and let it fall away.
Up close like this, Jisung looked younger than he should have for a night like this, open in the face after crying, easy to read if you knew where to look.
“I already did this once. Being at this point, I mean,” Jisung said, voice low.
Mark did not answer right away.
He did not need Jisung to explain what he meant.
That was the problem.
The graduation stage, the old grief, the old version of last that had later been undone by reunion so sudden and joyful it had almost felt like mercy.
For a while, they had all lived inside that return.
“I know,” Mark said.
Jisung swallowed. “I think that’s why it got me like that.”
Mark answered with a quiet nod.
“This time,” Jisung said, then stopped.
He did not finish it.
He did not have to.
This time it would stay true.
Nobody was coming back to undo it, and love would have to survive without the miracle.
“You don’t have to say it out loud. I know.”
And Jisung’s face folded, brief and awful, some last effort at composure giving way under the relief of not having to explain himself all the way.
Mark reached for the packet of sliced honeydew someone had left on the small table by the mirror.
He held one piece out instead of handing it over.
Jisung stared at it.
“Seriously?”
“You’ve been crying for half the song and half the hallway,” Mark said.
“Eat.”
A real, startled sound escaped Jisung this time, too wrecked to be a proper laugh and fond enough to be nothing else.
He leaned in and took the fruit from Mark’s fingers, cheeks warming immediately after as if he regretted letting the gesture happen at all.
Mark pretended not to notice.
He picked up a second piece for himself, mostly so Jisung would not feel watched while chewing, then said, lighter now,
“Besides, now I’m the one who has to survive being the worst cook alone.”
Jisung made a face.
“You say that like I was helping.”
“You were moral support.”
“That is not true.”
“It is. You stood there looking stressed and helpless while I ruined things. Very valuable contribution.”
This time the smile stayed a little longer.
Good, Mark thought, and hated how desperately relieved he felt over such a small mercy.
He leaned back against the table and took Jisung in properly.
Too much remained unsaid, but Jisung had stopped shaking.
So Mark let the hush sit for a moment longer.
The harder part was coming next.
***
Jisung must have felt the shift too.
The smile Mark had managed to pull out of him faded, but not completely.
Both of them knew they had reached the part jokes and fruit could not soften anymore.
Jisung rubbed his thumb along the towel's edge, twisted in his hand.
“You were thinking about this for a long time, weren’t you?”
There was no point pretending otherwise.
“Yeah,” he said.
Jisung nodded like that answer hurt less than he had expected and more than he had hoped.
“I think,” Jisung started, then stopped to wet his lips, voice rough from earlier.
“I think that’s part of why it feels so weird. Because it’s not like you stopped loving it.”
Mark’s throat tightened.
NCT as a whole. Dream most of all.
Them, and all the years inside that world, this life.
All the versions of himself he had become beside these people under these lights.
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t stop loving it.”
Jisung’s eyes fell briefly, then lifted again.
Whenever Jisung wanted the truth, he never raised his voice.
He simply looked at you with such quiet directness that lying felt insulting.
“It gave me a lot,” he said.
“More than I’ll ever be able to explain properly.”
He smiled once, tired and small.
“It made me who I am in a lot of ways.”
“But,” Jisung said.
Mark almost laughed.
“But,” he agreed.
It was strange, trying to fit a choice this large into words that would not make it sound uglier than it was.
Anger would have been easier to defend.
This was harder because love remained.
“It also took a lot from me,” Mark said after a moment.
“Not in a way I want to blame on anybody. That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
“I think I kept telling myself I could carry all of it if I got better at it. Better at balancing, better at working, better at not feeling tired.”
His voice thinned at the edge of a laugh that never really formed.
“And for a while maybe I did.”
Jisung did not interrupt.
“But after a certain point, it started feeling like if I didn’t choose something for myself now, I might never do it.” Mark swallowed.
“Not because this wasn’t worth it. It was. It is.
But there are things I want to try while they still feel like mine.”
Jisung faced him the way he always did when the truth stripped all the performance out of his face.
Younger, somehow, and older at the same time.
“You with your guitar. That dream,” he said softly.
Mark blinked.
Recognition was there in Jisung’s face, so gentle it pulled low in Mark’s chest.
“Yeah,” Mark said.
For a moment, embarrassment flickered between them.
Enough to matter.
Mark reached to the collar of his shirt where one of the mic wires was caught.
After all the noise and schedules and roles, some part of him still wanted the quieter image of himself, walking forward with music in his own hands.
“I think I knew earlier,” Jisung admitted, while lowering his gaze.
“Not exactly, not before you told us at the meeting.”
He shrugged.
“But you looked tired in a way that went deeper than exhaustion.”
That almost undid Mark.
He reached out before thinking and rested his hand briefly against the inside of Jisung’s wrist, thumb pressing lightly there as if checking his pulse half as a joke, the old kind of gesture, casual enough to laugh off and too familiar to startle.
Jisung’s his fingers gave a tiny twitch before going still.
“You make me sound ancient,” Mark said.
Jisung huffed.
“You are ancient.”
“Unbelievable.”
A pause came to rest between them, softer now.
Then Jisung said, almost carefully,
“I’m not mad at you.”
Mark had not realized until then how tightly he had been holding that fear.
“No?”
Jisung shook his head.
“I think I would be, if it felt like you were walking away frome it.”
His voice dipped lower on the last words.
“But that’s not what this is.”
No. It wasn’t.
That was the heartbreak of it.
Mark was not walking away because none of it mattered.
He was leaving because it mattered too much to stay in it past the point where he could still recognize himself clearly.
Jisung’s eyes had gone bright again, though not in the same helpless way as before.
More controlled now.
More dangerous for that.
“I just,” he said, and stopped.
Mark waited.
Jisung’s next breath came out shaky, but he kept going.
“I don’t know how to make my head understand something my body hates this much.”
Mark nodded in understanding.
“Yeah.”
Because that was it, wasn’t it.
The whole wound of the night in one sentence.
Understanding and grief refusing to move at the same speed.
Love making room for the truth while the body still fought it like a threat.
Mark pushed himself off the table.
He stepped closer until barely any room was left between them, near enough to see the dried traces of tears at Jisung’s lashes.
Lowering his voice felt more like instinct than choice.
“Listen to me,” he said softly.
Jisung did.
“After this, a lot is going to change.”
Mark kept his eyes on him.
“I know that. I’m not going to insult you by pretending it doesn’t.”
He paused.
“I’m not your leader after this. Not like before. And I’m not going to be there every day the way I was.”
Jisung’s face flinched before steadying.
“But none of that changes that I’m still your hyung.
I can’t promise sameness, Jisungah, but I can promise that.”
Something in Jisung’s expression gave way at that.
He did not break again, but one tear slipped free before he could stop it, quiet and immediate.
The rest of him held stubbornly still, as if grief had found one narrow place to leave him instead of tearing straight through.
“That part doesn’t end because the job changes.
It doesn’t end because I’m not in the room all the time.
We grew up together.
You think that disappears because everything else does?”
Jisung turned away hard enough that it was obvious he was trying not to react too visibly.
Mark let him have the second.
Then, more gently, he added,
“You don’t stop being my dongsaeng just because I had to choose something different.”
Jisung closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the shine there was sharper than before.
“That makes it better,” he said, honest as ever.
“But not enough.”
Mark let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh.
“I know.”
He reached up then and pushed Jisung’s hair back from his forehead again, slower this time, like the gesture had room now to mean exactly what it meant.
Jisung went still under it, his throat worked as he searched for words.
“I hate that you can say all the right things.”
“That’s because I’m wise.”
“You’re annoying, hyung.”
“There he is,” Mark said with tired fondness, softer than amusement and closer to melancholy.
The corner of Jisung’s mouth pulled despite itself, and Mark felt the answering ache under his ribs.
He held his gaze for a moment longer, then said quietly,
“There are some things in the world that break beautifully.”
Jisung stilled.
“This is bad,” he said.
“I know it is. It’s supposed to hurt.”
His voice roughened on the last word, but held.
“That doesn’t make it wrong. Only hard.”
Silence settled between them.
The kind that came after the real thing had already been said and both people inside it were still trying to live with what it meant.
Jisung held his gaze in a way Mark knew he would remember later.
The words had fixed nothing.
They let the pain stand still long enough to show its real face.
And maybe that was the only mercy available tonight.
***
Jisung stayed where he was, eyes lowered, rubbing the towel’s edge between his fingers until the fabric twisted tight.
The worst of the crying had passed, but what remained was harder to manage, more feeling than he knew where to put it.
Mark stepped closer again.
“You know,” he said, “this is very bad news for your dance content.”
Jisung blinked, glassy-eyed.
“What?”
Mark’s mouth twitched.
“No one’s going to be distracted by me anymore.
You’ll have to carry the whole thing alone.”
The laugh that escaped Jisung this time came out mixed with something dangerously close to another sob.
He covered his face immediately, like that would undo it.
“That’s not funny.”
This time, Mark stepped even closer.
When he reached up, it was for more than brushing Jisung's hair back.
He set one hand at the side of Jisung’s head and drew him in until their foreheads touched.
Jisung froze.
He froze under the simple familiarity of it.
The kind of closeness that belonged to people who had known each other for so long to mistake comfort for something casual.
Mark stayed there, voice low when he spoke.
“It’s a little funny.”
“It’s not.”, Jisung whispered back.
“It is,” he said.
“You’re finally free. Center of attention. Main character.
Nobody stealing your angles.”
Jisung shook his head hard, shoulders tightening again, but the sound he made was unmistakably laughter now, even with the grief tangled through it.
For a few seconds they stayed like that, forehead to forehead, the room closed around them.
Jisung could feel the warmth of Mark’s skin, the faint dampness left behind by stage sweat, the simple impossible fact of him being there for these last few minutes.
It ached in a way that was almost gentle.
“And I’m the one who has to figure out life without you looking disappointed every time I mess up a count.”
Jisung dropped his hand to glare at him through wet lashes.
“You messed up a lot.”
“That’s a very selective memory.”
“You made it my problem.”
“I built character.”
That broke him again, softer this time.
His laugh collapsed into a wet inhale, and he turned his face aside, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Mark reached for the towel draped over the chair beside them and, more gently now, pressed it first to the damp curve of Jisung’s jaw, then the side of his neck where sweat clung from the stage lights.
The gesture was so automatic it almost undid him.
Jisung stood motionless for it.
“Sorry,” he muttered again, voice thin from trying to pull himself back together.
“You really need to stop saying that.”
Jisung laughed again.
“I know.”
His eyes were still shining, but the helplessness had changed.
Quieter now. Sadder.
Mark’s hand came to rest briefly at Jisung’s lower back, warm and careful, thumb moving in a small grounding motion.
“I mean it,” he said. “About all of it.”
Jisung nodded.
“I know.”
But he had dropped his gaze back to the floor when he said it, and Mark could see the next feeling arriving before Jisung named it, the slow, painful beginning of understanding what this would look like next week and all the days after that, when Mark would still exist in his life but not in the same easy way.
Mark’s hand stayed where it was for a moment longer.
Then he let it fall.
***
The quiet after that did not feel empty.
It had the used-up gentleness of too much already said.
Jisung stood there another moment, eyes lowered, his breathing steadier now but the traces of everything visible in the redness around his eyes and the faint strain in his mouth.
Mark took him in and felt, all at once, both the weight of staying another minute and the weight of leaving at all.
That had been the strange cruelty of the whole night.
Every kindness led them one step closer to the part neither of them wanted.
Outside, the rest of the evening kept moving.
The others would be somewhere nearby, peeling themselves out of stage clothes and into the thinner, stranger reality of afterward.
The world had not stopped because this room had.
Mark reached down automatically for the sleeve of the hoodie he had dropped over the back of a chair earlier, more instinct than thought.
It was soft from too many washes, dark and familiar, the kind of thing that had followed him through practice rooms, flights, and late schedules until it had stopped being clothing and become part of a life.
He held it for a moment without saying anything.
Jisung’s gaze lifted to it, then to him.
Mark let out a small breath that wanted to be lighter than it was.
“You should take this.”
Jisung blinked. “What?”
“The hoodie.” Mark stepped closer and held it out.
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m not freezing.”
“You were crying under air conditioning and stage sweat for half an hour.”
“You just made that up.”
Mark’s mouth twitched despite everything.
“Take the hoodie.”
Jisung glanced at it again, but did not move right away.
His fingers tightened around the towel, then loosened, like wanting it had made him feel young again.
“It’s fine,” Jisung said, quieter.
Mark did not drop his hand.
“Jisungah.”
That did it.
Jisung reached for it at last, fingers brushing Mark’s by accident or maybe not by accident at all.
The contact was brief, but it caught between them.
Jisung’s hand closed around the fabric.
He held it instead of putting it on, and Mark knew that look too.
“You can give it back later.”
The moment the words were out, he knew Jisung would hear what sat underneath them.
Not really about the hoodie.
Later. Another time. Another meeting.
A line extending beyond tonight.
Jisung’s fingers tightened on the fabric.
“Yeah,” he said.
But his voice caught on the word, and Mark understood immediately he was not talking about it as lightly as he was pretending to.
A fond, aching thought crossed Mark before he could stop it.
He is never giving that back.
Somehow, instead of making him want to protest, it made warmth flicker low in his chest.
Sad too. So much sadness.
And yet there was something else.
Maybe this was part of choosing the future honestly too, accepting that some threads stayed uncut and some things had to be carried because setting them down would be the lie.
Jisung had not put the hoodie on yet.
Then Mark stepped in once more and took the fabric gently from his hands before he could overthink it.
“Arms up.”
Jisung turned to him, exhausted and glassy-eyed and offended enough to sound like himself again.
“You’re being annoying again.”
“I know.”
“Hyung.”
“Exactly. That's me.”
The complaint had no force in it by the end.
Jisung lifted his arms.
Mark shook the hoodie open and guided it over him, tugging one sleeve down properly, then the other.
His hands settled briefly at Jisung’s shoulders to straighten the fabric where it had caught.
The sight of it hit harder than Mark expected.
Because it looked almost like it belonged to him already.
Familiar in a way that made Mark think, with a sudden sharpness, of all the ordinary moments that would no longer happen by accident.
Borrowed things. Shared rooms.
Small touchpoints of routine.
The life made of details too minor to seem important until they were the exact things being lost.
Jisung ducked his head as Mark smoothed the collar flat and almost smiled.
“There,” he said. “You look less tragic now.”
Jisung let out a wrecked sound that failed halfway between a laugh and a breath.
“That’s a lie.”
“A small one.”
They stood there for a second too long.
Close enough that moving back would count as its own kind of sentence.
Jisung’s fingers came up and caught briefly at the cuff near his wrist, rubbing the fabric between his fingers.
With the quiet familiarity of years together., Mark understood that Jisung was grounding himself on the smell already clinging there and the warmth left behind.
He turned away before the tenderness of that could undo him completely.
“I am excited, you know,” he said after a moment, quietly enough that it sounded like an admission.
Jisung lifted his gaze.
Mark kept his own voice even.
“I’m scared, yeah. And sad. But that wasn't all.“
He glanced down, then back up.
“I mean, I’m heartbroken, obviously.
Tonight would be a weird time not to be. But I’m excited too. A little.”
Jisung nodded.
It was not hurt exactly.
It was the pain of seeing it clearly at last.
“I know,” he said.
And he did. Mark could hear that much in his voice.
That was the difference between them now.
Jisung was standing with the full weight of the leaving pressing down on his chest, while Mark, for all the ache in him, had already turned to see what might exist after it.
The future was not clear or safe yet, but there was enough of it to keep moving toward.
“It doesn’t cancel anything,” Mark said quietly.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t mean this meant less.”
Jisung’s throat worked.
“I know that too.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
Jisung dropped his gaze to the sleeves hanging too long over his hands.
“It’s not that.” His voice came out rougher now.
“It’s just...” He stopped and shook his head.
“You can be hopeful about something and still be the reason somebody else is miserable.”
Mark winced before he could hide it.
Jisung lifted his head immediately.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No.” Mark let out a breath. “You kind of did.”
The guilt in Jisung’s face arrived immediately, quick and open and unfair to both of them.
Mark stepped closer before it could settle there fully and put his hand against the back of Jisung’s neck, thumb resting just below his hairline.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You’re allowed.”
Jisung went still.
“To be miserable,” Mark added, gentler now.
“Tonight, at least.”
That did it, not another breakdown, nothing public or wild, only a fresh spill of tears too quiet to stop in time, one line first and then another, as if the body had found a softer way to lose the same fight.
Jisung lowered his gaze immediately.
Mark did not let him hide in it for long.
He tipped his head up to see his face, then gave up on dignity altogether and wiped one tear away with the pad of his thumb before it could reach the edge of Jisung’s mouth.
“You’re making it very hard to leave dramatically,” he murmured.
Jisung let out a wet laugh.
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying sorry all the time.”
“It’s a habit.”
“That one you can work on while I’m gone.”
The sentence landed differently than the others had.
It was not cruel, ordinary in tone, impossible in meaning.
While I’m gone. Simple enough to say.
Impossible not to hear fully.
Jisung closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, he looked tired in the purest sense.
It was exhaustion from the concert, from crying, and from the emotional violence of a room that had held too much truth.
Tired from trying to place himself inside a world that had already started shifting shape before he was ready for it.
Mark knew that feeling too well to mistake it.
He brushed his thumb again at the back of Jisung’s neck, then let his hand fall.
“I’ll call you. That one’s a promise,” he said.
Jisung nodded.
“I know.”
“I mean it, Jisungie.”
“I know.”
Mark almost laughed at the stubbornness of that answer, at the way Jisung kept repeating it as if understanding were his last defense had left.
Maybe it was.
So Mark gave him the truest honesty he still had to offer.
“I’m going because I need to,” he said quietly.
“And I’m looking forward to what comes next.”
He swallowed. “Both things are true.”
Jisung stood very still in the hoodie that already looked almost like it belonged to him.
Then he nodded again, slower this time.
“And I’m letting you,” he said, voice thin but steady.
“I understand it, and it still hurts.”
That landed so cleanly it left Mark with nothing useful to say for a moment.
He took Jisung in, the tear-flushed face, the sleeves half-covering his hands, the effort it took to stand there and mean what he had said.
He felt pride rise through the grief with almost painful force.
Jisung was not taking it well, and he did not have to.
But he was meeting it honestly, loving so hard it hurt and still letting go of what could not stay.
Mark smiled then, small and real.
“That’s the Jisungie I know,” he said softly.
Jisung frowned, immediate and suspicious through the tears.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re still you.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does to me.”
Jisung rolled his eyes, but the expression collapsed at the edges, weaker now, sadder, fond in spite of itself.
Outside, someone passed the door. Voices, distant and moving.
Mark was going to leave the room.
His eyes drifted briefly to the door, then back to Jisung.
The next moment would be the one that stayed.
-Jisung-
The door clicked shut.
For a few seconds, Jisung did not move.
The room was not fully silent.
The leftover noise of the night being packed away, but inside the dressing room the emptiness had deepened, with Mark gone from it in a way that made every other sound feel too far away to matter.
Jisung stood there with his arms hanging uselessly at his sides, sleeves falling past his hands, the hoodie still warm where Mark's hands had lingered.
His eyes burned. His throat hurt.
Everything in him felt held together by a thread thinner than he trusted.
Then, all at once, the smell of it reached him.
Mark’s perfume, sweat, a faint skin-warm trace under both, so familiar it pulled his chest tight before he could brace for it.
He breathed in again by accident. Or maybe not by accident.
His gaze found the mirror.
At first he saw only the damage, the swollen eyes, the flushed skin, the traces of tears he had never really managed to wipe away cleanly.
Then the rest of it landed, the dark shape of the hoodie around him, the collar Mark had straightened with his own hands only minutes ago.
Jisung stood there facing himself until the truth settled where it was going to settle.
Mark had left him something to wear.
Something to breathe in.
Something to carry out of the room.
It did not come close to being enough.
But it was what he had.
He drew the sleeves over his hands, swallowed against the ache in his throat, and kept his gaze on the mirror a moment longer than he should have.
Mark was still his hyung.
The room was still empty.
Both things were true.
He had been left with something to keep, and it still felt like lost.
s.