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The thing about JBJ is that it’s actually a nightmare. A claw-your-own-throat out kind of nightmare. Because before, there was only a pathetic CEO that made empty promises—not even big ones like you’ll be on magazines, HotShot is the next Infinite. No. He plied Taehyun and San and Junhyuk, all of them, with just the promise of a practice room and a chance to sing on music shows. It’s sad that it was all the bait the six of them needed. And before this—sucked. It really did, don’t get Taehyun wrong. But it was a different anxiety altogether, one that he grew to handle almost too easily. It was frustration over not having enough money to rent a recording studio. It was embarrassment at having to wave and smile at crowds as they dwindled down over the months to practically nothing. It was rage over not being able to do anything until his contract expired and he moved onto the next no-name group in another no-name company.
This—JBJ, this opportunity, this gift as he’s meant to think of it—is worse. It’s constant schedules because suddenly everyone does know his name, the kid who tore off his necklace so coolly; the guy who krumped while his best friend sang his way into the eleventh spot of WannaOne. And those people who were nowhere before are suddenly everywhere. He made fun of Kenta’s aegyo at a showcase where ten thousand people came to see his group preform. Fans gather outside of the company building to scream at them as they dart from the practice room to their waiting van. All of the companies are pitching in to give them managers and staff and stylists and Taehyun wants to scream sometimes because nine months ago all he had was Sungwoon, and suddenly he doesn’t, and he’s drowning in faces and cameras and—
He’s terrified that this is the idol life that he imagined when he was young and naïve and trying to choreograph an audition video. He’s terrified that he hates it.
“Yo,” Taehyun blinks up to Sanggyun peering down at him. Taehyun had forgotten to start the next episode of Infinity Challenge, and the TV is just frozen on a still of Yoo Jaesuk’s face, red and distorted. “You’ve been bitching about catching up on this all week, what gives?”
“You take it.” Taehyun throws the remote over to Sanggyun. It bounces off his bare chest—because of course he doesn’t have a shirt on—and rattles loudly to the wood floors. Yongguk wakes up on the other couch long enough to glare at them, gather however many cats he’s smuggled into the dorm, and head to his room.
“Weirdo,” Sanggyun mutters under his breath, kicking lamely at Yongguk’s legs as he passes and missing comically. All it achieves is making his loose sweatpants nearly fall off his hips.
“You’re the weirdo,” Taehyun snaps. He never knew that one of his responsibilities when he took the leader position would be to scold his group members for not being fully clothed in the dorm. Junhyuk never had to deal with this shit. (Junhyuk was too busy finding part-time jobs to rent studio space like the rest of them and keeping his parents off his back for leaving SM.) “Put your damned pants on, you nudist.”
“Touchy,” Sanggyun tsks. And that should be the end of it. It would be the end of it, if it weren’t the fact that it was Sanggyun and him. But Sanggyun is well and truly a freak. And instead of snatching the remote up to play the next episode, or leave like the others when Taehyun gets hissy like this to go to their rooms and nap on their only day off: he gets up, and yanks on Taehyun’s sleeve. Rather aggressively. Taehyun might even hear a stitch or two pop.
“What the hell?” Taehyun bites.
“Did I ruin your fancy shirt?” Sanggyun whines to him, pouting to the point that it distorts his face. He drops the face almost immediately, looking blankly down at Taehyun, his fingers still on the sleeve of his old ratty practice shirt. “Let’s go get coffee.”
Taehyun rolls his eyes. “I don’t feel like getting mauled on my day off.”
Sanggyun blinks down at him and deadpans, “What sort of A-lister do you think you are?”
Taehyun feels his cheeks fill in with shame, and he finally yanks his arm out of Sanggyun’s grip. Hearing how narcissistic his own fears are to his ears burns more than his face. “Whatever. I haven’t showered today. I’m gross.”
“Neither have I,” Sanggyun sing-songs, running his fingers through his dull hair as if he’s in a shampoo CF. “Add a beanie and no one will notice that your greasy ass could be the world-famous leader of—”
“Alright,” Taehyun snaps, jerking away from Sanggyun, off the couch and towards his own room. “I’ll go. Just stop, stop saying that shit.”
The sounds of Sanggyun’s creepy self-fulfilled laugh quiet once Taehyun gets the door behind him, but he still feels them like barbs in his chest. He doesn’t smell that bad, but he changes into a hoodie that drowns him anyway, and tugs on a basic, black beanie to cover his ears.
Sanggyun is dressed (thankfully) in a similar style, and is hiding his stupid grin behind a mask. “Hyung is buying, right?”
Taehyun moves to smack him, but he has his phone in his hand, so he settles on just taking a bit of satisfaction from the way Sanggyun flinches and laughs as they head out of the apartment and into the street.
“Are you texting a manager?” Sanggyun asks as they wait for a light to change. It’s nearing November, they should have brought coats. But there’s a café at the end of the block that’s decent enough for a coffee trip Taehyun still doesn’t even want to take.
He grunts an affirmative. Gunwoo-hyung isn’t the best manager, but he’s the first one he’s had in over a year, so it’s something. “He says be careful. And to stop you from doing embarrassing things in public. Also, that you’re the worst.”
“Always so thoughtful,” Sanggyun sighs, stepping off the curb a split-second before the light changes. What is it about this stupid kid that makes him want to give Taehyun a heart attack at least twice a day? “He’s making fun of me, when I’m dragging him out of his pity party.”
“Pity party?” Taehyun asks incredulously as they take a left and head into the doors. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Taehyun seethes because Sanggyun doesn’t answer him. Instead, he orders two iced drinks and then steps back when the cashier repeats the price back to him, looking to Taehyun expectantly.
“Brat,” he mutters under his breath, but he steps forward and digs his card out of his pocket anyway.
“Leader is the best,” Sanggyun preens, and Taehyun knows that he’s fucking with him. It makes it even worse, because Sanggyun can fuck with you, the way that only a true freak can. Most people can see Sanggyun is a jokester, JBJ’s resident gagman. But Sanggyu can just look at you and know exactly how to joke, to tease, to push your buttons in away to make you unravel and have only you know he’s the one that did it. He’s the most dangerous person he’s ever met (and Taehyun has met Taemin, for Christssake).
“Cut it out,” Taehyun grips as they sit down. He feels pathetic, and it’s even more pathetic that Sanggyun just knows how Taehyun knows he’s pathetic. “I was being a jerk earlier, I get it.”
Sanggyun cocks his head to the side. He’s taken off his mask in the warm room, and he’s got a pimple on his jaw, but he’s still frustratingly handsome. It makes Taehyun want to hate him. “I don’t think you were being a jerk. I think you’re being selfish.”
Taehyun just blinks at him. Something deep and ingrained in him makes him want to protest how Sanggyun is talking to him—Sanggyun’s hyung—but he’s too surprised to do much besides stare at the boy opposite him.
“Is this why you wanted to come out?” Taehyun eventually forces past his teeth. “Talk shit to me so I can’t yell or punch you?”
Sanggyun really has a cat’s smile, Taehyun is surprised Youngguk hasn’t tried to add him to his collection. “Partly. I also didn’t want to open up a can of worms like this in front of the babies.”
“They aren’t babies.” Taehyun protests, thinking about the fits Hojung had pitched over the years, the frustrated shouting matches about age and rank and bullshit. “Well, maybe Hyunbin. But he’s different.”
Sanggyun smiles then, a little truer to his regular style than the Cheshire-like grin he’s been sporting for the last twenty minutes.
“They’re all different,” Sanggyun chides. “They aren’t like us. They don’t feel what we feel.”
For a moment, Taehyun thinks that this conversation is coming way out of left-field. That it’s suddenly going to be about the eye-contact they make in the mirror during dance practice, or the way Sanggyun’s hand will sometimes grip Taehyun’s thigh during meals or interviews, or how Taehyun can’t explain why he’ll sometimes sneak into Sanggyun’s bed, only to flee an hour before the others wake up for schedules.
A barista comes by with their drinks, and Taehyun is saved the embarrassment of actually having to voice his thoughts about that part of JBJ by what Sanggyu says next. “We both know what it’s like to fail.”
Suddenly, he’d very much like to discuss the weather or FC Seoul’s standings or the very not-straight thoughts he has about his groupmate.
“I don’t—”
“Listen,” Sanggyun sounds tired, which is a near miracle. Its a rare sight for Sanggyun to even yawn. “I just think…I think you should be a little more grateful.”
Taehyun almost wants to reach over and shake him because of course he’s grateful, what the fuck? Sungwoon’s a member of WannaOne (Wanna. One.), and at least one of the guys will be put into Unit B if the fans keep it up, and he’s the leader of fucking JBJ. And once all these project groups and units finally fucking end, there’s a group that’ll hopefully be standing on its own two feet for the first time...ever. Sanggyun’s got no idea how grateful he should…
Sanggyun laughs a little, biting his straw as Taehyun slumps down a little in his chair, numb when the knowledge hits him again. “Not a good sign when my project group leader doesn’t even remember my original group, huh?”
To be fair, Sanggyun is the one that is careful to never bring it up, not in the way that Taehyun will casually talk on the phone with San in the living room, or answer Kenta's questions about Sungwoon over breakfast. The last time someone mentioned ToppDogg was probably back in the Produce days.
Taehyun can’t decide whether it’s strength or sheer lunacy that allows Sanggyun to talk so easily about something that has had every member of HotShot on the ground at one point. The icy feeling that spreads through his stomach when he realizes that maybe Sanggyun’s probably just gotten used to that thought has nothing to do with his iced americano. “Sanggyun…”
Sanggyu shrugs, but to his credit, his shoulders look heavier than they usually do. “You know the most attention we’ve gotten in the last year is just departure news and Hansol coming out.”
“Hansol is…the dancer?” Taehyun feels like such a major, colossal dick.
Sanggyun taps his nose with his finger. “Right-o.”
“Are you…Moonkyun says Byungjoo is doing well on the Unit.”
Sanggyun purses his lips, and Taehyun has never, ever had the urge to hug or comfort someone in public as much as he does right now. It’s almost painful to keep his feet still, his hands clasped firmly around his drink. The cold of the glass bites into his palm. “No one really knows.”
Whether he means he doesn’t know if the others will make it, if the company will let ToppDogg go on, or if he’s planning on going back to them at all after JBJ, he doesn’t clarify. Taehyun doesn’t blame him. Just the thought of having to face starting over, or rejoining a group that’s a skeleton of what it once was, makes his stomach hurt.
“That’s why you’re selfish, hyung,” Sanggyun says quietly. “I can see you freaking out about your success, already planning the next steps you’ll take. Wondering if it'll pan out the way you want it to. Me? I’m not sure if I’ll ever have this again.” Sanggyun looks into Taehyun’s eyes with a determination that nearly makes Taehyun jerk away from him. “This is a dream, hyung. Just like we tell all the fans when we're being gross and sentimental. And you’re the only one who can understand what it means to me.” He sighs, and rests his chin on the palm of his hand. It covers that one blemish on the edge of his chin, and he looks perfect, like a magazine cover and how could the world have gotten a taste of Sanggyun and wanted to let him go? Taehyun will never understand. “I need you to be with me, through it all, so I know I’m not the only one living it.”
Taehyun swallows back the thoughts of nightmares, of the seas of people ebbing and flowing—and on the worst days, disappearing after they had arrived so quickly. He swallows it all, and like a fire with new fuel, feels warmth burst in his chest. It gives him the strength to shake off the cobwebs of the dark, the unknown, and reach over and twine his fingers with Sanggyun’s across the table.
“I’m with you.” Taehyun says, nodding, and not missing the spark of energy—mischievous and completely Sanggyun—that flits through the other boy’s eyes. Taehyun's voice is weak, and a little shaky with the weight of another promise that sounds just as empty as the ones he received all those years ago. But this one is real.
He can feel it.