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"Jinyoung? What are you doing?" Jaebum asks, walking up to the body of his fallen comrade.
Jinyoung lays on the dance studio clean floor, unmoving.
He hums in response and that's the only indication Jaebum gets that Jinyoung is actually alive.
"Thinking about my place in the universe." He answers.
Jaebum isn't all that sure it's a joke, so he sits down besides Jinyoung's side without even sparing a polite chuckle.
"And what do you think it is?" He asks, well-mannared.
"If I'm thinking about it that means that I don't know." Jinyoung says, and Jaebum isn't all that happy with the sarcastic tone.
He makes sure to show his dissatisfaction with a slap to Jinyoung's stomach which makes him roll to his side with a huff, arms wrapped around his sides.
"Fuck you." He curses and Jaebum stands up with a shrug, having other things to worry about.
Like meeting the two new members supposedly joining the group he and Jinyoung will debut in later in JYP's office.
Debut for a second time.
Jinyoung gulps.
Watching the hair stylist running her fingers through Jaebum's hair. Tousling it like it were an afro.
Which it wasn't. She better get her hairspray smelling hands away from him.
Jinyoung's called mad dibs on him as soon as they started living together when they were trainees.
Youngjae, sitting be Jinyoung's side free of Jaebum, wonders if the anger clear on Jinyoung's face is supposed to be so obvious.
He decides against it but says nothing.
With Kunpimook asleep, Jackson and Mark off elsewhere, most likely the bathroom, Jinyoung's fuming anger is the only thing mildly entertaining while Youngjae's hair is drinking in the darker color for the second hour.
"Jinyoung." Jaebum says, first word to leave his mouth in the last half hour.
Youngjae's ears perk up.
Jinyoung flinches. Just a bit.
Youngjae notes this.
"Yes?" Jinyoung answers, a little startled.
Youngjae smirks, turning his head away so Jinyoung wouldn't notice and start a national scandal.
"Is there a reason why you've been staring at me for the past four minutes?"
Youngjae's a little surprised that Jaebum noticed with his eyes closed for the whole of that time.
Not as surprised as Jinyoung though, he notices.
Maybe they are meant to be.
Youngjae tries to remember the last time at least one member didn't think that.
"No reason." Jinyoung says. "Sorry." And his eyes roll over to Yugyeom in the mirror, sitting at the other end of the room.
They make eye contact. Shoot.
"You've counted?" Yugyeom asks and his eyebrow raises so far up Jinyoung wonders how long til it hits his hairline.
But he's all too easily ignored.
"It's fine." Jaebum dissmises, so Jinyoung decides to do the same.
Though he hardly feels that'll be possible to do at this point.
That's when Kunpimook literally jolts awake in the chair besides Yugyeom's, rattling the little wheels.
"Oh, my God, I had the weirdest dream." He says and waits for somebody to ask so he could continue.
Nobody does, because nobody fucking cares, but that doesn't discourage him from talking anyway.
"I dreamt that Jinyoung and Jaebum finally stopped pretending that they aren't so gay for one another and-- oh." He notices the daring look Jinyoung shoots him through the mirror. "I guess it was only a dream." He sighs, and leans back in his chair to hopefully fall asleep again.
Jaebum curses under his breath, Jinyoung notices because he's back to staring.
He redirects his gaze to fall onto Kunpimook, trying to make it look angry.
It clashes with the pure feeling of happiness inside his stomach.
Yugyeom whispers something to Kunpimook which sounds suspiciously like what were you expecting and Jinyoung rolls his eyes as Kunpimook shrugs and grunts.
Jaebum doesn't meet his eyes in the mirror once he opens them, probably because of the bright salon light blinding him.
Youngjae quietly giggles in his seat.
"I'm going to kill him!" Jinyoung roars and Yugyeom's pretty sure the ground shakes for a second.
Jaebum tightens his arms around Jinyoung, his chest pressed against Jinyoung's back.
With Jaebum's soft socks he slides on the floor as Jinyoung goes for Jackson, forcefully pulling Jaebum along with him to Jackson's probable doom.
Jaebum hears Jackson's loud laughter coming from the room he shares with Mark and Jaebum really thinks he should stop.
"What did he even do?" Jaebum asks, desperetaly trying to keep Jinyoung in place.
"He has my phone." Jinyoung grits out, his face red from the resistance he has to put up with.
Sure. It's that causing him to blush.
"And? You don't have any nudes on it, do you?" Jaebum asks, a little joking, but Jinyoung's expression really doesn't look like it's calling for a smile.
"I might as well."
Jaebum sees this has no way of ending good if he'll only be here using Jackson being a jackass as an excuse to hug Jinyoung and do nothing about Jinyoung's, apparently dangerous, phone.
"Yugyeom, go get the phone." Jaebum instructs Yugyeom who's watching all of this with enjoyment, eyes shining with amusement with a tip of his chin towards the room.
"Fine." Yugyeom sighs, not the least bit annoyed. He stands up and slowly shuffles his feet to past the pair and going for the door Jackson's hidden behind.
He knocks against it. With a voice verification that it is, indeed, him and not a fuming Jinyoung, he's let in.
He's pulled into the room just as Jaebum finds the fight in himself to go stepping backwards and pulling Jinyoung down onto the couch, straight on Jaebum's lap.
Jaebum doesn't dare release the grip he has around him and just hopes Jinyoung sits still on him for a minute.
He also hopes he doesn't pop a boner.
That would be awkward.
Jaebum's suddenly reminded it wouldn't be the first time this happened in their team.
It's quiet in the dorm, and Jaebum sighs, happy that the negotiations are going well.
He's about ready to ask Jinyoung about the weather, hoping he hears him with Jaebum's face smooshed by Jinyoung's back and the back of the couch when another laugh copies the last.
Jaebum sighs, not happy anymore.
He hears two different laughs mixing well together, creating a perfect harmony of annoyance, and Yugyeom exists the room, holding his sides, cheeks blown red and eyes teary.
Jaebum looks expectanly at him and Yugyeom just shakes his head, wiping a tear at the corner of his eye, not as apologetic as he's supposed to be.
"Motherfucker." Jaebum groans.
He tries to weigh and compare the posibilities.
He can either release Jinyoung now, or he can wait for Jinyoung to literally kick his way out.
With that, Jaebum's arms fall to his sides feeling like jelly, and Jinyoung stills.
Jaebum wonders if he's imagined it with the way Jinyoung's running and crashing past Yugyeom the next second, everything going too fast for him to catch up.
Yugyeom joins to sit next to Jaebum on the couch, rubbing his arm which just got hit and his shoulders still shake for a minute while they listen to Jinyoung screaming profanities and Jackson's cries of pain.
"You know," Yugyeom starts, turning to look at him.
"I don't and I'm not sure that I want to." Jaebum cuts in immediately, and Yugyeom smiles, still as amused as he was a few minutes ago.
"Man, who needs hackers when you've got Jackson who's about ready to leak the screenshots he took of it all on Twitter." Yugyeom says with a little laugh.
Then he laughs harder for around twenty seconds until Jaebum's glare finally reaches him and forces him to shuts up.
"There's more than four hundred pictures of you saved on Jinyoung's phone." He says and Jaebum doesn't answer him.
He's proven wrong.
He's kinda glad his members are absolute brats.
He's very glad that he now knows.
"Jinyoung?" Jaebum whispers and Jinyoung murmurs into his elbow. "Jinyoung. Wake up."
Jaebum shakes Jinyoung's heavy body and Jinyoung slowly opens his eyes to a phone's flashlight dimly lighting up the room.
He turns his head and finds a kneeling Jaebum, his eyes worried.
Jinyoung fell asleep on the couch again.
Like he always does during promotions.
"Go to bed, you'll have a painful back." Jaebum says as he stands up and goes into the kitchen.
Jinyoung sits up and stretches his arms out with a quiet squeal.
Jaebum comes back with a glass of water because he knows Jinyoung always wakes up in the middle of the night to get water anyway.
Jinyoung takes it with a quiet thanks and a notice that Jaebum's steps sound louder than they usually do.
He looks down to see Jaebum's wearing shoes.
"What time is it?" He asks.
Jaebum picks up his phone to check, the picture of GOT7 lighting up his face.
(He picked a picture where Jinyoung looks the prettiest.)
(Though Jaebum unapologetically thinks Jinyoung always looks pretty.)
Jinyoung admires from his place on the couch, wrapped in Mark's blanket.
"Half past three." Jaebum tells him with quiet urgency in his voice, almost demanding for Jinyoung to go back to sleep.
"Are you going somewhere?" Jinyoung asks, throwing the blanket off his lap and reaching to place the empty glass on the coffee table.
"The corner store." Jaebum answers, going to the front door to pick up his coat.
"It's three in the morning. Why?" Jinyoung asks.
"Because I've lost control of my life." Jaebum tells him with a smile.
"I'm going too." Jinyoung decides and stands up.
"No, you're not. Go to bed, you need sleep." Jaebum scolds lightly and Jinyoung rolls his eyes.
"You're going to detach a retina if you keep rolling your eyes like that." Jaebum teases and Jinyoung has to control himself not to do it again.
"I'm not tired." Jinyoung says and yawns, appropriately.
Jaebum smiles softly at him.
"Right."
It takes apoximately half a minute for Jinyoung to walk past Jaebum, kick into his shoes, throw on his coat, put on a hat to hide his monstrous hair and not care about the fact that he's wearing Jaebum's sweatpants.
"Let's go." He says and walks out the door, Jaebum going out after him with an idiotic smile, locking the door behind himself and speed walking to catch up with Jinyoung.
It's cold outside when they walk, shoulders bumping every few steps.
They talk about nothing and everything.
Think of a background story for every person they see, shady and not.
Decide that the only shop clerk working at this hour in the tiny store is a disguised superhero with a girlfriend named Mary Jewel.
When they get back home with a couple of cans of beer and a bag of chips to compliment it, everyone is still asleep.
They fall on the couch in complete darkness, don't turn on the lights nor the TV.
They just whisper in the dark until they both fall asleep, limbs tangled.
"Hyung, how much do you like Jinyoung?" Jackson asks, looking away from his phone to stare at Jaebum.
Mark also raises his eyes to look at him.
Jaebum suddenly decides there's no use in trying to hide anything anymore because him crushing on Jinyoung is apparently a very debated topic in this god-forsaken dorm.
So he sasses because at this point that's the only defense mechanism he has.
Besides socking Jackson square in the face, which he doesn't do because Jackson is out of his reach sitting in the doorway and Jaebum doesn't deem him worth the trouble of leaving the couch.
"How would I know how much I like him? Should I use a ruler? Should I get a scale?" Jaebum asks, voice angry, and Jackson does his best not to laugh.
"But, like, honestly, Jaebum." Mark says and Jaebum doesn't turn to look at him because Mark always makes sense and he doesn't want to hear it. "This is getting ridiculious."
"Okay, Jackson. If you're so curious on how much I like him - I like him five fuck you's." Jaebum tells him, almost pleased.
Jackson doesn't look offended, which is a little strange because he gets offended by Kunpimook looking at him the wrong way occasionally.
But the look Mark and Jackson is exchange is much weirder, Jaebum decides.
He also debates if he wants to know what it means, but with Jackson, he doesn't think it'll matter what Jaebum thinks.
"I'm not gonna tell you this is exactly what Jinyoung told us but that is exactly what Jinyoung told us." Jackson says and Mark nods.
"Freaky how much you're meant for each other." He comments and Jaebum has to remember the last time Mark was actually useful and if GOT7 really needed him anyway.
"Right?" Jackson nods at him and Jaebum goes to ignore them both and the happy feeling in his chest to go scroll through someone's SNS page for the third time in the last two minutes.
"There is something I gotta get off my chest!" Kunpimook declares, walking into the dance studio.
Everyone looks up at him from their phones.
"Is it your shirt? Please say no." Jinyoung says and someone snorts.
"Let the man do whatever he wants!" Yugyeom defends with glistening eyes.
The look both Jinyoung and Jaebum shoot him make him look back down with a quiet apology.
"No, it is not my shirt!" Kunpimook calls with a voice like that of a game show host.
He dramatically points a finger at Yugyeom.
"But that is a good idea!" He shouts and pulls his shirt off over his head, only to put it back on again and try to act all serious.
Jackson whistles for a second and stops to act serious as well.
"Is this, by any chance, about the fact that Jinyoung unconditionally loves Jaebum?" Yugyeom asks, and the way he says it informs the pair that this has been rehearsed more than once.
After saying it Yugyeom lets his gaze fall back down in fear, his body shudders for a beat.
He definitely lost a rock-paper-scissors match for this.
"Can you just stop? Seriously." Jaebum says from the clean floor where he's laying and everyone turns to look at him.
"We get it, you want something to be between us. Can you just fucking stop trying to make something happen?" He talks, voice annoyed.
"But you don't do anything about it yourselves." Youngjae's voice rings, far from accusing.
"Maybe because there's no need to." Jinyoung talks from the corner and Jaebum silently thanks him in his mind.
"We know we like each other. We got over it, so so should you." He says.
They didn't get over it.
"That's not a good thing." Jackson says.
"Yeah, you ignoring human emotions isn't a good thing." Mark adds.
"We live together, we sleep together, we eat together. We do everything together, what's the need to date?" Jaebum says.
"That's right. If we're dating we might have to break up and everything would fall apart. While we're friends there's no danger of that happening." Jinyoung nods at Jaebum.
And it's an excuse.
A shitty one at that.
But Jaebum doesn't care because he has to remember when they talked about this.
Only to remember that they never did.
"That just seems very... Anticlimactic." Kunpimook thinks aloud.
"We're gonna deal with our problem and you can just stay out of it." Jaebum says and everyone falls silent.
"It's not supposed to be a problem." Kunpimook says, slowly. Emphasizing Jaebum's and Jinyoung's faults but not really.
"Yeah. You're the only ones seeing it as a problem. Stop making everything so difficult." Mark agrees.
Jaebum doesn't see a reason on why everyone but him and Jinyoung have a better way dealing with this than the pair.
"You're literally in love and won't admit it, though you both know that you are. What are you so afraid of?"
"Concequences." Jinyoung asnwers for them both.
"There won't be any concequences!" Kunpimook cries frustrated and kicks at the floor like a kid in a store not getting what he wants. "You two care so much for one another, it's fine! "
"What's the problem?" Youngjae asks before Kunpimook skids across the room towards Jaebum.
He kneels down before a him and Kunpimook doesn't really care for anything anymore.
He cups Jaebum's jaw in his hands and brings his face closer, breaths mixing, lips almost touching.
"What is the problem?" He asks in english, so slowly, eyes wide and crazed.
It ony takes a single slap from Jaebum to get Kunpimook to go mind his own business with a swollen red cheek and a laughing Jackson to run after him with his phone to get a picture.
There's nothing more really left to add, and finally - it's quiet again.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jinyoung asks when they're laying in their beds that night.
"About what? Us being in love with each other?" Jaebum asks. Jinyoung hums. "I'd rather not."
"Okay." Jinyoung agrees, all too easy and unfazed. "I love you." He says.
Jaebum doesn't cringe, doesn't grimace.
He convinces himself he doesn't react, but the surge of happiness is definitely there, somewhere where Jinyoung will sooner or later find it.
"I know." Jaebum answers.
"What's with that?" Jinyoung almost whines in his groggy night voice. "What do I make of that? Do you love me? Do you not? Which one is it?"
Jaebum looks at him annoyed, because Jinyoung already knows and at this point Jaebum already feels like everything is too much.
That Jinyoung is just so past both their limits and Jaebum doesn't want to deal with it anymore.
But he's only met with darkness and it almost feels empty.
"If I told you that I do, would it make things easier for us?" Jaebum asks and it's almost rheorical because nothing will make it easier for them in this situation.
Situation where they both win, technically, but it doesn't, it just doesn't feel like it at all.
"Because I love you and it's a pain in the ass, honestly." Jaebum sighs.
"Do you... Want a kiss to recompensate for it?" Jinyoung asks, unsure.
He fully prepares himself to get hit.
Jaebum sighs again, this time louder and drastically more annoyed.
So melodramatic.
"One's not enough." He says. "A kiss doesn't begin to cover the couple of years worth of this bullshit."
"That's true." Jinyoung says as he stands up.
Jaebum feels a body fall by him in his bed.
"For all it's worth - I hope one day that this stops." Jinyoung says as Jaebum's arms wrap around him. "Loving you is easy, but I wish it wouldn't stay this way."
Jaebum doesn't flinch, his movements don't still. He's not hurt.
Because he so painfully agrees, it's driving him insane.
"Me too. But for now, let's just stay like this." Jaebum nods, Jinyoung against his chest copying the action.
Both of their phone screens light up identically with the same messages from Jackson and Kumpimook in their group chat.
Finally finally finally
Mark shows Jinyoung the seperate group chat everyone but Jinyoung and Jaebum were part of, which was called 'JJP Hell o", courtesy of Yugyeom.
And when he reads through the messages it's a war zone. Fights on fights on fights about how to make stuff happen.
Memes.
Plans and lists on how to make Jinyoung and Jaebum confess.
Spend more time together.
(At least a couple, Jinyoung recognizes, are at leasta little illegal.)
Some could've ruined JYP as a whole.
Jinyoung demands the chatroom be deleted before Jaebum sees it.
It's not.
What are you thinking about? Jaebum texts Jinyoung when they're laying on their seperate beds in their hotel room somewhere far away from their own large bed back in their dorm in Seoul.
Jinyoung picks up his phone once it vibrates by his head.
When he sees the message and who it's from he shoots Jaebum a questioning look with a really? look.
Jaebum shrugs.
"My place in the universe." Jinyoung answers, throwing the phone back down by his side, not bothering to be cute and text Jaebum back.
"Stop." Jaebum says, his eyebrows knitted in dissatisfaction. "Your place is here. By me."
"Shut up, you fucking sap." Jinyoung curses and turns away from Jaebum to look at the white wall and mess with his phone where Jaebum's judging stare doesn't reach him. "Like I don't know. What is the fucking news?"
And Jaebum says nothing, though his scowl demands him to do otherwise.
But he's happy.
And he acts like he doesn't remember the wordless promise he and Jinyoung had made back when they thought that it could be kept.
Something to do with them getting over their feelings for one another?
Jinyoung doesn't know either and he'll die of sleep deprivation before he'll ever admit he or Jaebum had even as much as thought of something like that.