Work Text:
It’s raining in Seoul. Yuta realizes too late that he has forgotten to bring an umbrella when a wave of raindrops pelts the back of his neck, a few slipping cold and slow under the open collar of his shirt. The leather jacket he’s wearing on top is no friend to water, and Yuta swears tiredly under his breath as he spins on his heel to duck underneath a shop awning.
The rain picks up in earnest a few minutes later. Looking out at the street, Yuta weighs his options: he could make a run for it before the moderate downpour threatens to worsen, or he could stay here until it passes. The latter doesn’t sound so bad, he muses. It’s Friday, approaching nine at night, and he doesn’t have anywhere in particular to be. Wild weekends of constantly going out are well behind him, and his roommate Ten is spending a few days at his boyfriend’s place, so Yuta’s going home to an empty apartment no matter what.
He contents himself with watching the rain. Street lamps tint the road in warm hues of yellow, and the falling water appears almost iridescent underneath them, flecking store windows lit from within.
“Need an umbrella?” asks a soft, familiar voice, startling Yuta out of his thoughts.
He whips his head around on instinct and suddenly feels unsteady on his feet. “Taeyong,” he breathes.
Taeyong gives him a tiny smile and lowers the open umbrella in his outstretched hand. “Hi.”
“What… are you doing here?”
“I was passing by.” Taeyong’s eyes are somehow even bigger and shinier than Yuta remembers. Maybe they’re reflecting the lights and the rain. Maybe Yuta just misses him. “Saw you huddled under this awning and thought you might want to share this umbrella for a bit? You always were so careful with that jacket.”
The back of Yuta’s throat dries out without warning, stubbornly refusing to cooperate in helping him form words. He doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say a hundred things at once. What ends up coming out is, “Your hair is orange.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Taeyong brings his free hand up to the back of his neck, touching it a bit self-consciously. “It was a spur of the moment thing.”
“You look good,” Yuta tells him, and he means it. He gingerly takes ahold of the umbrella’s handle, careful not to brush against Taeyong’s hand still holding on a few centimeters below, and lifts it so that both their heads are shaded. “And I’ll take you up on that offer.”
They step out onto the sidewalk together. Yuta is hyper aware of how close they are, how they automatically fall into step. Taeyong’s shoulder is not even a hand span from his own. He smells faintly of the cologne that Yuta remembers him wearing the entire time they had dated, subtle and crisp; he’d never gotten the name, but he’d know it anywhere. It smells like home.
“So how have you been?” Taeyong’s voice is light, lilting, but he doesn’t make eye contact. Yuta follows suit and keeps his gaze trained on the sidewalk ahead as he responds.
“Good. I got that internship that I was thinking of applying for.”
“Really?” Taeyong swivels around to face him, and Yuta wishes he hadn’t looked. The megawatt smile directed at him is painfully bright, still happy for him, still cheering him on despite everything. “That’s amazing! I knew you’d get it.”
“Yeah,” croaks Yuta.
They continue on in silence another few meters before Yuta musters up the strength to ask Taeyong how he’s been in turn and tries to quell the traitorous warmth blooming in his chest as he’s updated in bits and pieces. They’d decided to stay friends after the split, but it had inevitably unfolded as nothing more than an empty promise. It’s not as if the two of them had parted on bad terms, but they certainly weren’t tripping over themselves to keep in touch.
The problem, he thinks, as he and Taeyong make their way down the sidewalk in amiable quiet and perfect sync, is that he never really managed to let go. Not fully, anyway. So when they get to the subway station and he extricates himself from underneath the umbrella, he doesn’t spare more than a second to look at the hazy, sad expression clouding Taeyong’s features or allow even a brush of shoulders. He says goodbye in a tight voice and enters the subway tunnel without turning around, because his knee-jerk impulse to touch Taeyong, his collar, his cheek, can lead to nothing good—not anymore.
This is the only way, Yuta reminds himself. This is how you keep going.
*
“I heard you saw Taeyong again,” says Ten in his trademark casually offensive manner. He’s hanging upside down off the opposite end of the couch, smiling wide. As demons do.
Yuta throws a dirty sock at his face. “Who told you.”
“Johnny.” The smugness in his voice is unmistakable. “Taeyong told Johnny, and Johnny told me. And now I’m telling you.”
“Life is crazy like that,” says Yuta dryly, and readjusts the laptop balanced on his knees. He’s finally making good progress on his material religion paper and refuses to allow Ten to resurrect his crippling mental block.
“Hey.” Ten flips right side up and turns off the old rerun of Happy Together that had been playing on their cracked TV. “I don’t know why you’re hell bent on pretending like nothing ever happened when the happiest I’ve ever seen you is when you guys were together, but have you considered that talking to him again might be, like, healthy for you?”
Yuta snorts. “I thought I was the psychology student here. Since when are you invested in my dead relationships?”
“I don’t think it’s dead."
“We broke it off almost five months ago, and yesterday was the first time I’ve talked to him since then.”
“But you still think about him all the time.” Ten sounds uncharacteristically serious. “I know you. You’re hung up on him. You know that your weird forced smiles convince absolutely no one, right?”
“I’m not—” Yuta cuts himself off and sighs, rubbing his eyes. “Taeyong and I really are not a thing anymore. At all. I promise.”
Ten raises his eyebrows and pushes off the couch, presumably headed to empty out whatever’s left in their fridge. “Yeah, but see, I’m not the one you’re promising,” he says over his shoulder.
Yuta watches him go with a furrowed brow. When he turns back to his laptop screen, he realizes that he’s accidentally been holding down the period key for the full duration of their exchange, making the sentence that he was in the middle of typing appear to trail off mysteriously for half a page. Yuta heaves a long sigh, and then he gives up. Material religion will have to wait.
Even with the delay in progress, he considers it fortunate that he ended up studying something he genuinely enjoys. He wasn’t always a psych major; in fact, not too many years ago, Yuta was doubling up in business and econ and hating himself for it every single day. The stubborn determination to force himself through a high-stress area of study he couldn’t stand came from a place of wanting to prove himself in a foreign country, appear accomplished to his parents, that kind of thing, but ultimately, the soulless ambition just drained him. It had actually been Taeyong who had convinced him to pursue something he was interested in: they’d met freshman year by suffering through a grueling 8 AM Principles of Macro class together and become fast friends from there.
Yuta sinks into the couch, thinking this over. If he’s being honest with himself (and he doesn’t often like to be), Taeyong is directly or indirectly responsible for a whole lot of the fortunate things in his life.
Distantly, he recalls the time the two of them had tried to help Doyoung with some last-minute modern art project that involved five gallons of glow-in-the-dark aquamarine paint and ended up covered in fluorescent blue splatters from head to toe. They’d laughed about it and chased each other around like dumbasses, smearing paint all over their clothes and Doyoung’s walls, and in the end, those traces never properly washed away. Instead, they remained for months; longer than a year now, come to think of it. Though faint, the stains were unmistakable when you knew to look for them.
Taeyong, similarly, had become something of a fluorescent residue in Yuta’s mind: he thought he could clean it all away, but the second his mental lights flicker, it’s only Taeyong that he sees.
Yuta exits out of his open Word document and runs both hands through overgrown bangs. Slowly, slowly he drags his palms down his face, and after that, he does not move at all.
*
With the arrival of the following Saturday comes Sicheng’s birthday, and as much as Yuta would love to stay home in bed, he forces himself out from under the safety of his comforter because he loves Sicheng. Everyone does. Therefore, everyone owes it to Sicheng to show up to the party that he’d decided to have at the last minute: he deserves that much at least.
The celebration is supposed to happen at some club that Yuta’s vaguely familiar with and also maybe vaguely avoiding, since it’s one of the places that Taeyong liked to frequent before they became acquainted. This is, of course, no excuse to skip out on the invitation, Yuta reminds himself as he gets dressed. Sicheng is one of his favorite people in the entire world and he knows he’d feel shitty if he made up a better excuse not to come anyway.
He and Ten leave together almost forty minutes after they’re supposed to because the other is too busy FaceTiming Johnny a choice of three elaborate and near-identical outfits.
(“Maybe this one is too slutty,” Ten is musing as Yuta hovers in his doorway, knocking irritatedly on the wall.
“You know I don’t mind,” comes Johnny’s voice from somewhere in the center of the unmade bed, and Yuta rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might have snapped an optic nerve.
“Can you two,” he says pointedly, “wait like half an hour until we get to the actual party to do this in person?”
Ten snickers. “I’m not sure.” And then, directed at Johnny: “Babe, do you think we can wait?”
Yuta doesn’t stick around to hear the end of Johnny’s playfully extended hmmmmmm because he’d rather save throwing up for when he’s stumbling home drunk later tonight, thanks.)
About two hours later when Yuta’s just buzzed enough to be a little sloppy, it dawns on him that the ‘everyone’ Sicheng had invited definitely includes Taeyong. All their friends loop back into the same circle—he’s Johnny’s roommate, for fuck’s sake. It becomes painfully apparent that this genius revelation has come too late when said ex slides into the booth across from Johnny and Ten a string of dizzy heartbeats later, wearing a pair of jeans with these ridiculously large rips at the knees. They look kind of silly but also really good because it’s him and he looks always looks good and this, right now, is a lot to take in.
“Sicheng,” says Yuta, contemplating the murky contents of his glass.
A rumpled blond head emerges from Kun’s headlock. “Yeah?”
“I’m going to. Get another drink,” Yuta tells him, suddenly gripped with the 2040p HD realization that he is Not Drunk Enough, not for this moment and definitely not for what’s to come. (He’s realizing all kinds of things today, bless his heart.)
“Cool,” says Sicheng, more concerned with prying Kun’s floppy arms off his neck than with whatever ailment Yuta is trying to drink away. Which is just as well. Yuta already feels like enough of a mess without spectators egging him on.
An unidentifiable number of shitty beers later, he finds himself draped halfway over a very unwilling Ten’s lap, laughing drunkenly at something Johnny had said. He doesn't know why he's laughing—Johnny’s not funny, he thinks blearily, especially not when he's trying this hard to be. It just comes easy, and that’s what Yuta needs right now. He slumps forward onto the table a little, shoulders still shaking, and becomes gradually aware of two things: first, Taeyong is somehow sitting right across from him, and second, Taeyong is laughing along just as happily.
His eyes are crinkled half moons, stunning despite how unfocused they are. Yuta was once fond of describing them as planets, corny and lame as it sounds, because of the pulling, insistent gravity Taeyong’s gaze exerted. Ten made fun of him for that all the time, but it never stopped being true; Yuta never stopped being riveted.
The pale column of Taeyong’s throat practically glows when he throws his head back and the following conditioned response is entirely too quick: like Pavlov’s fucking dog, Yuta sighs with his entire chest.
Before Yuta has the chance to do anything dumber, Ten shoves him unceremoniously off his lap. Yuta allows it without protest, limbs feeling kind of rubbery.
Back in his proper seat, he chances a second look at Taeyong, but the other doesn't seem to be paying attention: his eyes are half closed and he's leaning heavy on Johnny’s shoulder the way he used to do with Yuta. He’s pouting, even, cheeks puffed out a bit. It shouldn’t look as cute as it does.
Yuta takes this in. Through a foggy veil of sensory impairment, granted, but still he absorbs the scene: the slender line of Taeyong’s body glued to Johnny’s broader form, the distance between Johnny and Ten when they’d normally be occupying the same seat. In the context of the breakup, this awkward arrangement begins to make sense. Yuta and Taeyong have put a table in between themselves and clung like vines to a friend of choice because whenever they all used to get together before, Yuta And Taeyong would sit next to each other and touch everywhere.
Pressed up tight from shoulder to hip, ankles bumping, chin to collarbone, someone's hand resting on the curve of the other’s waist. Lips brushing the shell of an ear to be heard over the background chatter, pinkies absently interlocked, Taeyong burying his face in Yuta’s neck so that his eyelashes brush right under Yuta’s jawline where he’s ticklish (but he never minded, not ever). Taeyong wasn’t usually much for acting cute, but a couple drinks never failed to bring out that side of him, endearing and childlike, unabashedly clingy. Touchy drunks. Touchy even when sober. And now, evidently, they're afraid to touch at all.
Yuta stands up abruptly, ignoring the wobble in his step, and says he’s going home.
*
Early the next afternoon, Yuta is lying facedown on the couch trying to will away the dull throb of his hangover headache. With the free hand dangling off the couch’s edge, he fumbles for his phone and types out a brief message: pick up ibuprofen on ur way back.
A few minutes later, he gets a reply. I think you meant to send this to Ten?
Yuta sits bolt upright, ignoring the consequent fresh wave of pain that pounds his temples, and immediately checks the contact name that had received his message. Taeyong. Of course. He groans and flops back down to become one with the couch cushions and hopefully melt into nothingness altogether.
Desires of the subconscious will frequently manifest when cognitive function is impaired, says the disembodied voice of his least favorite psych professor.
“Shut up,” says Yuta out loud.
He waits a cowardly twenty minutes before texting back. yeah sorry lol
No problem, answers Taeyong immediately. Yuta feels guilty for bothering him, considering that the other had probably been at least as smashed as Yuta was last night. While Taeyong hadn’t drank nearly as much, he’s always been a lightweight.
u feeling ok tho? u might wanna take some ibuprofen too, he sends before his sluggish mind can catch up to his fingers. And then, naturally, he regrets it. He regrets last night and coming to Korea and even being born in the first place. For a tortured minute, Yuta thinks about moving his big mouth and trigger-happy hands back to Osaka, where no one will ever know about any of this.
Taeyong’s little typing bubble appears and then disappears like five times in a row. He’s surprised, thinks Yuta miserably. He would be surprised himself to receive that kind of message from someone he hasn’t otherwise contacted in months. I’m fine, is what eventually shows up on the screen. I hope you’re feeling ok too.
im alright
headache and whatever but you know how it is
Yuta doesn’t know what compelled him to add the second part, to reference the time they’d spent together. Fortunately, Taeyong doesn’t seem to mind.
Oh no:( eat something!
I’ll tell Ten to bring you back the meds
He slept over lmao
lmao of course
Yuta finds himself continuing the conversation without a second thought despite every functioning brain cell left in his head telling him it’s a shit idea. In his defense, he doesn’t have very many functioning brain cells left. Before he’s really acknowledged what’s happening, they’ve been texting back and forth for an hour and a half and Yuta’s headache is all but forgotten.
By the time Ten materializes at their front door with a paper bag from the pharmacy clutched crumpled in one hand, Yuta feels enough like a human being to shower and heat up leftovers.
Ten eyes him as he emerges from the kitchen with a faintly steaming bowl in hand. “Wanna explain why Taeyong came into Johnny’s room and woke us both up just to tell me to run to the pharmacy on my way home?”
Yuta shrugs. “Texted him by accident when I meant to text you. Thanks for going, though.”
“By accident? You said you haven't spoken in months. How do you open a dusty, unused contact like that and not notice who you’re texting?”
“I’m hungover,” says Yuta. “It happens.”
The suspicious squint doesn’t leave Ten’s face. “If that's your story, sure.”
“It’s the truth!” Yuta insists through a mouthful of fried rice. He settles in front of the TV nonchalantly, conscious that he’s being watched, and starts flipping through channels. Ten follows suit a few minutes later with the remainder of the rice, plopping down pointedly close to Yuta. While he may not be saying anything, it’s clear he doesn’t intend to leave this alone.
Yuta is practically able to feel the weight of Ten’s knowing gaze on the side of his face. He tries in vain to stop looking at his phone so often for new messages, even flips it screen down after a bit just to resist the temptation, but Ten doesn’t miss this action either. The tips of his ears grow hot against his will.
They watch an episode of some mediocre drama together in relative quiet. Yuta doesn’t (or can’t) pay attention to the poorly conceived plotline anyway because there’s only one thing, one person, on his mind, and Ten (fuck him) is well aware of the fact.
After the episode ends, Ten rises to go put his bowl in the sink. “Didn’t I tell you it would be good for you to start talking to him again?”
“It’s only been one day,” says Yuta, figuring there’s no point in denying it. “How would you know?”
Ten shrugs. “That gross fond expression you keep making at your phone, for one.”
“I,” Yuta tries, and then stops in his tracks because he’s got no leverage here.
Ten grins and doesn’t bother adding anything else.
*
Less than two weeks pass before the next time Yuta sees Taeyong.
He’s come to a cafe with Mark to tutor the younger in calculus, but the arrangement quickly took a turn for the unproductive when the chatty barista, apparently a friend of Mark’s, swept him up into an incredibly engrossing conversation about a new sports anime. Yuta, admittedly, would normally be all over this, but today he finds that he can’t quite draw up the enthusiasm. So he calls it quits, heads towards the register to order a fresh drink, then promptly bumps into an orange-haired blur, and before Taeyong even has the chance to look up, Yuta knows.
“Sorry, my fault,” he says. Taeyong, polite as always, simultaneously apologizes for not watching where he was going. They laugh together, and Yuta's chest clenches a little.
Taeyong looks soft today, different from the night where he had materialized out of damp shadow like a waking, walking dream. Different from Sicheng’s birthday party, too. The ruffled mess of his bright hair suggests that he’d rolled out of bed not too long ago, and the oversized white T-shirt he’s wearing confirms it. Yuta thinks about what Taeyong used to look like in the mornings, illuminated in golden stripes by the window blinds that they preferred to never close, and then he squeezes his eyes shut hard in order to stop thinking about it. This is neither the time nor place for his special brand of sentimental headassery.
“So what's up?” he asks, relieved when the words don’t come out audibly strained. The echo of Ten’s voice rings unbidden in his head, tinny and distant. I’m not the one you're promising.
“Ah, nothing really. I stopped in to get a drink. Jaehyun’s waiting outside.” Taeyong fiddles absently with his bony fingers.
“Oh,” says Yuta. “Jaehyun. Okay, well, I don't want to hold you up.”
“I’m! Not in a rush,” Taeyong blurts out. He says it too quickly, with all the edges of his words catching against each other. “I mean, it's a long line.”
Yuta blinks at the queue in front of the counter, which is fairly short for a midweek afternoon. By his estimate, the wait should barely be longer than five minutes. “Right.”
He turns back to Taeyong and makes the mistake of looking him in the eye. Yuta should know better, should be immune by now, but the scuffed wood floor beneath his feet immediately feels like quicksand, hungry enough to swallow him whole.
“We’ll wait together, then,” he offers. The words bubble up out of him from some unknown place, too earnest for his own good. But the smile he receives in return is warm, tinted by street lamps, glossy like the puddles formed by Seoul’s nighttime rain.
*
Slowly, and then all at once, Yuta and Taeyong begin to overlap like they used to.
One day, Yuta is over at Johnny’s to offer help with a particularly troublesome Japanese literature assignment when Taeyong comes home mid-session dripping with groceries. Yuta gets up to help him put stuff away because contrary to popular belief, he’s not a giant asshole. Then, somewhere in the midst of familiarizing himself with the kitchen layout and sifting through the cupboards, Johnny gets up and slips into his room on a phone call with his mom. That leaves Yuta and Taeyong by themselves, suddenly awkward when they realize their third party slash buffer has deserted them. And then Taeyong asks why Yuta is here in the first place, leading to Yuta hesitantly explaining the themes of the short story that Johnny had been assigned to read and somehow culminating in the two of them bent side by side over the living room table as Taeyong copies phrases Yuta writes in hiragana.
The atmosphere reaches a kind of thawing point with that, diffusing rapidly until the air they breathe tastes familiar and unthreatening. Any vestiges of built-up tension drain away like water. As Yuta watches Taeyong etch characters onto his notebook in neat lines, gripping the pen too tight because he does everything with his entire heart and soul, it occurs to him that this odd recurrence of unspoken ease between them might be due to the fact that this is something the two of them used to do all the time. Yuta teaching Taeyong Japanese, guiding his pronunciation with some fluttering sense of pride.
(“Are you sure I did this correctly?” asks Taeyong, squinting at the sentence he’d just written.
“Yeah,” says Yuta earnestly. “You’re really good.”
Taeyong laughs. “You keep saying that. How am I supposed to improve my Japanese if all you do is praise me?”
“I think you’re the type of person that benefits from it,” Yuta tells him. He can feel himself smiling wider than he has in ages, the telltale tightness in his cheeks. He can’t help it.)
Another day, he gets stuck at the library because it’s pouring outside for the third time in a month and Taeyong happens to be there working on a paper. Yuta originally just means to borrow a pen, but by the time an hour has elapsed, he’s pulled up a chair beside Taeyong and spread out his notes right next to him, bumping elbows on occasion and feeling comfortable enough to laugh about it.
Not long after that, Mark gets sick and Yuta stops by his dorm to check up on him, only to find Taeyong already in the kitchen, armed with containers of homemade soup. Since he’s there for the afternoon, Yuta is honestly free to go on his way, assured in the knowledge that someone is taking care of Mark diligently—and yet, for some reason unbeknownst to him, he stays. When Mark’s fever finally breaks after sunset, he emerges from a state of veritable quarantine in his bedroom and tolerates Yuta and Taeyong aggressively mothering him for a while, even grudgingly allowing them to spoon feed him broth until Yuta starts making obnoxious cooing noises, at which point Mark tells him to leave. Again, he stays anyway. Taeyong grins at him, eyes alight with mirth, and Yuta feels his own lips automatically curving up in response.
Taeyong fits back into Yuta’s life easier than expected, maybe because it’s not so much a restructuring of his schedule as a return to how things used to be. They still share the same friends, after all, hang around mostly the same places and like the same things. They just stop trying to create a distance where there doesn’t have to be one.
Yuta goes to the movies with Taeyong. Goes to lunch with him between classes. Studies with him, sometimes. And when Taeyong puts down his unreasonably large strawberry yogurt drink at the campus Starbucks on a nondescript Thursday and says, “I’m so happy we can be friends again like this,” with the roundest, shiniest eyes known to man, Yuta coughs up half his latte because he has been punched in the gut with the thought that friends is not what this feels like.
But that’s exactly what this is. He’s just slipped back into the habit of deluding himself.
*
“I don’t get it,” declares Ten through a mouthful of nigiri as he points his chopsticks at Yuta accusingly. “So you’ve been seeing Taeyong more, whatever. You both still get along fine. Why have you spent the past week holed up in your room listening to your annoying ass emo hours playlist on repeat?”
Yuta picks halfheartedly at the sushi spread in front of them and puts his own chopsticks down with a clatter. “It just. Feels weird.”
“What does?”
“This, what do I even call it. Reconciliation? Like, we ended it with no intention of ever getting back together.”
“You ended it, dickwad.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” says Yuta mildly. “Anyway, now we’re seeing each other like every week. Texting, too. I don’t even know how it happened and I don’t mind it but I should and I can’t go back down this road again because— because—” Yuta glares unblinkingly at the little dish of soy sauce next to his plate like it’ll magically yield the right answers.
“Because,” says Ten, dragging out the syllables, “you’re the one who broke up with him and now you can’t deal with the reality that you want him back in your life.”
“Stop.”
“You’re consumed by your guilt. You feel like you don’t deserve a second chance.”
“Ten,” warns Yuta, but it’s too late. He’s on a roll, looking more and more self-assured the longer he keeps going.
“So in typical Nakamoto Yuta fashion, you internalize all of this hard as fuck because you don’t know how to talk about feelings and aggressively pretend you’re fine until nobody buys it anymore. And then you retreat to your bed and listen to One Ok Rock for nine hours straight.” Ten leans back in his chair, smug.
Fucking demon.
“Are you being paid to psychoanalyze me?” snaps Yuta. “I know you have nothing better to do because you’re a literal waste of space, but have you ever thought about, I don’t know, maybe getting a hobby?”
“Calm down,” Ten tells him, completely and totally unbothered. “I read your psych textbooks when you’re not home sometimes. You know I’m right.”
Yuta resumes glaring at the soy sauce dish because he does, in fact, know that Ten is right, and he resents this deeply. For all the time he spends studying the processes of the mind, Yuta has never once attempted to apply said knowledge to himself, probably because he's aware on a subconscious level that he represses shit like it's his job.
However, he would sooner die than admit any of this out loud, so he stuffs his mouth with the remaining sushi on his plate and fervently hopes that Ten gets hit by a car. Like, just a small one.
There follows a brief silence, during which Ten attempts to subtly open Twitter and manages to type out ctfuuuu yall i just read oomf to ashes before Yuta snatches his phone and deletes it.
Ten gives a petulant sniff. “You should be more grateful. I'm helping you.”
“Helping me do what,” says Yuta flatly. “Choke faster? From uncontrolled hypertension?”
“No! I am your friend and I care about you.”
“You were going to let your two thousand Twitter followers know that my life is falling apart.”
“First of all, it’s almost three thousand now. And second, don’t be so dramatic.” Ten has the audacity to roll his eyes.
Yuta snorts in disbelief. “You're one to talk.”
“I’m just saying! This is therapeutic. Talking about your problems is good for you. In fact, I think that your personality type specifically—”
“Okay, Carl Jung,” interrupts Yuta. “Enough.”
Ten shrugs and signals to their waitress to request the bill. “Fine. I’ll cool it for now.”
Rather than responding, Yuta only watches him, wary of the inevitable but.
Ten knocks back two-thirds of his iced tea in a single go and wipes his mouth daintily. “But,” he begins, and Yuta groans out loud. “I’ll admit I’m missing a piece in my professional psych eval.”
“And what's that?” Yuta asks tiredly.
“I don't expect you to open the depths of your heart on the spot or anything,” says Ten. “But I don't know why you guys even broke up in the first place.”
Oh.
Yuta used to think he knew the answer to that question. These days, however, he's not so sure.
*
Reluctantly, like making peace with an old rival, Yuta acknowledges that the ever-present gnawing sensation in his chest is, indeed, longing for Taeyong. It's psychosomatic, kind of. Dizzying, on occasion. It worsens during the most boring, mundane moments, too. He could be folding laundry or washing the dishes when the ghost of Taeyong’s absurdly bright smile flickers before his eyes and renders him near incapacitated for a brief moment.
Everything reminds him of Taeyong and it’s overwhelming. All Yuta wants is for it to stop. He can’t sit through a lecture anymore without his mind drifting to memories that he’d locked up and put away a long time ago: the feeling of Taeyong’s fingers interlocked with his own; Taeyong singing softly to himself while busy with daily chores, voice hesitant but beautiful. Yuta would always duck his head and pretend not to notice for fear that Taeyong would grow self-conscious and stop, but every time it happened, he wished he could fold up those fragments of song and tuck them in his chest for permanent safekeeping.
Even the notes Yuta takes during class devolve into nonsense jumbles of characters that don’t go together because his fingers only itch to write out the syllables of Taeyong’s name over and over and over again.
He’s heartsick, he thinks. How lame is that.
The worst, though, comes when Yuta finds himself heavily neglecting to use the heater until he recognizes this as a tendency developed while rooming with Taeyong on campus last year. The lingering chill around the apartment is biting now, but back then neither of them ever minded because they would cling to each other playfully in every room. Eating side by side at the table. Yuta’s head in Taeyong’s lap on the couch. Legs intertwined, sharing the same bed.
The subconscious resurrection of dead habits, Yuta tells himself sourly, is a new low. And then he stubbornly raises the heat to near scorching levels until Ten threatens to start walking around in the nude if he doesn't stop messing with the thermostat.
“Some of us,” Ten informs him, “aren't trying to grill ourselves to death in a last-ditch effort to avoid confronting our feelings.” Then, he takes a long swig of milk straight out of the carton because it’s his life mission to demonstrate every day that he is a godless heathen.
Yuta, staunchly ignoring the fact that he's about to start sweating through his shirt, tells Ten to be quiet because he doesn’t know what else to say. He goes to bed not long afterwards.
That night, he dreams for the first time in a long time.
It’s confusing and messy, shifting from one scene to the next. There’s a cat with startlingly human eyes in an empty alleyway, fur dappled orange and brown. He follows it until he reaches a dead end, at which point the cat vanishes into thin air and Yuta feels an unexplainable panic rise up to choke his throat.
Change scenes and he’s in the dorm that he and Taeyong used to share, but like the alley, it’s empty. Both beds are messy, though, covers rumpled and creased, which is strange because Taeyong could never rest if the beds were unmade. Yuta reaches out to straighten the comforter and his hand goes right through it as if he’s a ghost.
Another shift and he’s alone on the street where Taeyong had found him that night in the rain. Everything is cast in shades of orange and yellow-gold, like sunset, or maybe sunrise, he’s not sure. The skies are dry but his dream self shivers anyway, perhaps not so much feeling cold as experiencing a sense of unease. It’s blurry. His head is spinning. The street flickers into nothingness, unraveling like loose thread under his feet, and Yuta sits bolt upright in bed with his sweaty shirt plastered to his back.
He takes a moment to collect himself before kicking free of the damp sheets constraining his legs. Reluctantly, he gets up to lower the thermostat setting back to livable temperatures, but even after cool air begins to circulate, he can’t seem to get comfortable.
Yuta spends the rest of the night awake, anxious. His bed feels too big for a single body.
*
It rains again the next week. Yuta is decidedly tired of it.
At least he has an umbrella this time, though. He unfolds it as he exits the library, becoming a single speck in the colorful stream of umbrellas decorating the street. His feet move on autopilot because his mind is too swamped these days to allocate even a few minutes to focusing on boring, repetitive tasks, a large reason why the two and a half hours he’d just spent poring over lecture notes were effectively useless. God, he’s fucked for exam week.
Upon crossing the street, Yuta sees a slight frame crowned with a shock of unmistakable orange hair lingering hesitantly outside the door of a book shop. Faintly, he wonders if he’s encountering Taeyong everywhere he goes these days because the universe has it out for him or if he just never noticed before because the other didn’t look like a jack-o-lantern up until recently.
“Hi,” says Yuta, extending his arm so that his umbrella covers Taeyong’s head.
The left corner of Taeyong’s mouth quirks up. “Hey.”
“Can’t believe you headed out today unprepared. That doesn’t sound like the Lee Taeyong I know.”
A full-fledged smile, now. “I guess it’s lucky that you were passing by.”
“I guess so,” Yuta agrees.
They end up taking refuge from the rain at some hole-in-the-wall tea shop, more crowded today than it would likely be if the skies were clear because half the people coming down this street had the same idea. Yuta lets Taeyong order for both of them, not bothered with whatever he ends up getting so long as it’s hot, which indeed it turns out to be when Taeyong sets down two steaming mugs of something fragrant and herbal at their table.
Yuta wraps both hands around his mug and waits for Taeyong to finish taking a sip before he speaks.
“I think,” he says, allowing ample time for the words roll over his tongue prior to voicing them, “that we should talk. About us.”
The look on Taeyong’s face says he knew this conversation was coming. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Yuta is kind of nervous and he doesn’t know why. “Alright.”
“You brought this up and yet you look more afraid than me,” says Taeyong, soft.
“I’m not afraid!” defends Yuta immediately. “I just. Don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning is usually a good bet.” Taeyong somehow articulates this without sounding snarky in the slightest, whereas if the exact same sentence had come out of Ten’s mouth, Yuta would have told him to shut the fuck up. Maybe it’s a testament to Taeyong’s generally non-abrasive nature; more likely, Yuta is still whipped after all this time. (The idea of which is scary as all hell. It’s possible that Yuta is more afraid than he is willing to disclose.)
“Okay,” Yuta says again, exhaling. “Well. Breaking up with you is probably the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I know I told you I wanted to end it because I felt like we had run our course romantically and we were better off as friends or some bullshit like that but there was more to it. That first time you said you loved me—I thought my heart stopped beating. I was shocked speechless and I couldn’t say it back even though I wanted to.”
“This again? I told you so many times that didn’t matter.” Taeyong sounds frustrated. “It’s okay that you weren’t ready. It didn’t bother me.”
“But it bothered me,” says Yuta, a little more fiercely than intended. “And even after I managed to say it back I hardly repeated it. I felt like I couldn’t reciprocate what you were showing me. And… God, I hate telling you this out loud. You do know that Jaehyun was super into you the entire time we were dating and probably still is, right?”
“Yes,” replies Taeyong, unfazed. “He had told me. I didn’t care, though, because I only ever looked at you.” His eyes are searching, insistent.
“Still, I kept thinking. About how hard it was for me to say I loved you and how willing Jaehyun was to give you affection all the time and how… how he might be better to you. Than I was.”
“Don’t say stupid things like that.” Taeyong sounds angry now, more angry than Yuta’s heard in a long time. Even during their actual breakup, he had mostly just sounded hurt and resigned. Now, though, the set of his jaw and curl of his fists are white-hot intense. “You gave me the just friends, it’s not you it’s me etc etc spiel and now it’s because of what? An inferiority complex? Who gives a fuck about Jaehyun. You thought we should break up because of him?”
Yuta wrings his hands uselessly. “Not just because of him. Two weeks before I said we should break up, I came out to my parents.”
A pause. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, well.” Yuta laughs sort of wetly. “The bottom line is that it didn’t go so great. I just figured, like. I couldn’t even tell you how much I cared about you and there was someone else right there who would do that in a heartbeat. Plus, it scared me, you know? That you were so honest and so serious while I was used to brushing everything off like a joke. I’d never been so close to anyone before, not by a long shot, and especially with my coming out going to pieces, I guess I just tried to run away from it all by saying that we end it. I thought that in the long run, you would be happier.”
Another pause, longer this time, during which Taeyong clenches and unclenches his grip around the mug in front of him fourteen times. (Yuta counts.) Eventually, he says, “I was never happier than I was with you.”
“Oh,” is all Yuta can muster.
“And you could’ve… should’ve told me all of this instead of bottling it up to the point where it consumed you. Jaehyun was never anything more than a friend. And the not saying I love you thing… you didn’t need to say it all the time because you always showed me through touch, your actions. I knew it and I felt it every day.”
“Well, I’m saying it now.” Yuta takes a deep, deep breath. “I’m still completely in love with you. Every day that I didn’t see you, you were on my mind, and when I did it was like regaining a piece of myself that I’d lost. Jesus Christ, that sounds gross, but I mean it. You deserved a better explanation from the start—the entire truth—and I’m sorry I only found the courage to give it to you today.”
Taeyong flattens his palms on the table and heaves a sigh. “You dumbass.”
Yuta steels himself for the worst.
“You’re lucky that I’m still in love with you, too.”
*
“Seo Youngho, you fucking fool, you owe me fifty thousand won,” crows Ten, rubbing his hands together. By now, Yuta should be accustomed to these routine demon antics, but he still finds it in himself somewhere to be a little offended.
“You bet on me spilling my emo guts to Taeyong?”
Ten snorts. “Please. Everyone knew that was going to happen eventually. We bet on how soon.”
“Ten was sure it would be before Christmas,” explains Johnny casually. “We thought you would wait another couple months at least.”
“We?” chorus Yuta and Taeyong in unison.
“That’s right!” Ten snaps his fingers. “Sicheng and Mark, both of you better pay up, too. Thirty thousand each!”
Yuta shoots each of them an affronted look across the table. “Alright, Sicheng I should probably have expected, but Mark? I trusted you.”
Mark, at least, has the decency to appear somewhat shamefaced as he pulls out his wallet. “Sorry, hyung.”
“Traitors, the lot of you,” cries Yuta theatrically. Taeyong gives his shoulder a sympathetic pat.
“I prefer the term opportunist,” Ten says as he pockets his newfound wealth. Yuta sneers at him.
“To the happy couple!” cheers Kun loudly, pointedly ignoring the exchange that had just taken place. He clinks his glass with an unenthusiastic Sicheng, who is still mourning his loss.
“Which one?” asks Mark’s friend (boyfriend? yet to be confirmed significant other?) Lucas, who has come to join them for dinner at Mark’s request and appears thoroughly confused by everything going on.
“Yuta hyung and Taeyong hyung, dude, keep up,” Mark tells him.
Obligingly, Yuta clinks his own glass with everyone else’s, including that of the Lucas kid. He’s a bit slow on the uptake, but he seems alright. He also happens to work at the cafe the whole group likes to frequent and the anime he’d gotten Mark hooked on (and consequently Yuta as well) is turning out to be pretty interesting, both of which are points in his favor. Yuta even leans over to the far side of the table so that he can toast with Jaehyun, who hasn’t said much the entire time but looks amiable enough.
“Thanks for the well wishes, I guess,” says Taeyong when they’ve put their glasses down. “Although the degree of your investment in mine and Yuta’s relationship is weird, not gonna lie.”
“It’s better than reality TV,” offers Johnny with a shrug. Yuta chooses to ignore this comment.
“Yeah, congrats to the newlyweds or whatever, but I’m hungry,” Ten cuts in. “Let’s eat.”
Taeyong laughs, his face illuminated like an angel’s by the light streaming through the restaurant window. Yuta squeezes his hand under the table, grinning wide when Taeyong squeezes back. They’re pressed up tight from shoulder to hip, ankles bumping, Yuta’s chin to Taeyong’s collarbone. His lips brush the shell of Taeyong’s ear when he leans in to whisper something, not because he needs to in order to be heard over the background chatter but because he takes a special satisfaction in watching the other’s cheeks flush pink.
It’s a sunny day in Seoul.