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If you asked any one of them, they would tell you that it was impossible not to fall in love with Johnny Suh.
They would tell you that he is a pillar, and not just because of his height, but rather his place as a member of the group. He is the beam on which everyone else depends on when the going gets tough.
Falling in love with Johnny Suh happens in increments for them, mostly. But every single one of them will say that there was an “oh, shit” moment, that one pivotal split-second where they realise, “this is it, I’m in love”, which brings us back to present: Taeil, Doyoung, Taeyong, Jaehyun, Kun and Ten, all seated around a dining table in a small restaurant for dinner, looking at each other furtively, with shoulders hunched, barely touching their food.
Jaehyun wants to melt into the floor, because he had known that he wasn’t the only one in love with Johnny, but it makes no sense to him why he’s seated with everyone else who is, like they’re a book club about to discuss the novel of the week, and not how they’re essentially putting themselves in a 'The Bachelor'-type scenario where they’re going to vie for Johnny’s affections.
Ten takes one long, long exhale, and says, “So.”
“So,” Taeil replies. “Why are we here?”
“Because we’re in love with Johnny. All six of us,” Doyoung replies, resting his chin on his hand and looking around eagerly.
“Dons, I love you and I respect you, but why did you call us here?” Taeyong is fidgety. He had lied to Johnny about where they were going for dinner, and it hadn’t escaped his notice when the sides of Johnny’s lips had made a turn down, a bow stretched in the wrong direction, when Johnny realised that Taeyong meant he was going out to dinner without him. It had punched Taeyong in the gut to see.
“I just, I don’t know, okay, I just wanted all of us to stop dancing around the issue because it makes practice and meal time and rides in the van unnecessarily charged,” Doyoung says, throwing his hands up in the air.
He’s right, of course, even Ten and Kun, who rarely get to see Johnny anymore given how varied their schedules are, will agree. Meeting Johnny again in Thailand and spending the few meagre hours they had free together were not nearly enough for either of them to catch up with Johnny properly, but it was palpable that something in the air was more charged than usual. Ten himself had sulked around the resort while Taeyong and Johnny were off by the pool filming for Johnny's Communication Center, and Doyoung had picked up on it almost immediately, quietly commiserating with Ten. Seeing Johnny at the airport had been an absolute dream, and when Johnny had gone in for a hug, Ten had had to muster everything in him to let him go before the cameras caught on just how fucking smitten he was for the giant that was Youngho. Taeil had had to muster everything in him to not punch Ten for looking exactly as smitten as everyone knew he was for Johnny.
“So your plan was to what, let us all acknowledge it while we collectively pine over him?” Kun asks, taking a sip from his bottle of beer. “I mean, I guess I sort of see the logic in like a, Czennie kind of way, like, that’s how most of them are like on Twitter, right?”
“Yeah, but this is real life, and none of us are ever going to make the first move, and none of us are even sure he swings that way,” Taeil responds. He’s still thinking about Johnny talking about decorating a Christmas tree with his future wife. He’s sure everyone else is, too.
“You’re thinking about the Christmas tree decorating thing, aren’t you?” Ten asks, smiling fondly at Taeil, and everyone else nods in agreement. “Yeah, that sucked to hear, too, but maybe he’s bi?”
The tension breaks after that, with Jaehyun snorting when Kun suggests that maybe Johnny might be into men too since he’s a liberal and grew up in Chicago and had once actually mentioned that he had a massive crush on Sehun before.
-
They order a round of bul-jib and gochuchang beef and rice and beer before returning to the topic at hand. They’re still trying to scramble for breadcrumbs and clues about who Johnny might like, you know, like a bunch of teenagers would, when Taeyong asks softly, halfway through their meal, “How did you know?”
People break off then, pausing their conversations and their eating, and it’s at this point when everyone at this table gets all doe-eyed, smiling to themselves at the memories of their “oh, shit” moments.
Jaehyun would tell you that it’s Johnny’s solid, quiet strength, one night that they’re riding home together after Enana and he’s leaning on Johnny’s shoulder, dozing off until a road bump catches them both off guard, and instead of Jaehyun’s head slipping off of Johnny’s shoulder, it’s held in place there with Johnny’s hand, like he’s trying to make as few moves as possible to keep Jaehyun comfortable. Johnny didn’t know that Jaehyun had woken up from that, and Jaehyun hadn’t given him any indication of doing so, if only to have an excuse to keep his head there.
That’s how Johnny was— he did his best to keep you comfortable, and it always ate at Jaehyun knowing this, knowing that often, much too often, Johnny prioritised the rest of the team over himself.
Jaehyun says as much to the group gathered around him, and he sees Taeil smiling at himself, because it’s true, and because there’s never been anything anyone could say that could make Johnny less like that, even when Doyoung has, on multiple occasions, scolded Johnny for staying up well past everyone else, waking up much earlier than everyone else, if only to make sure they didn’t miss preparations before schedules for the day.
Taeyong closes his eyes at the swell of emotion that thinking about his own moment with Johnny brings to his chest. Before tonight, no one else has any idea that he has had to work the hardest to keep his feelings for Johnny in check, because beyond being NCT’s leader, he’s also been in love with Johnny the longest. Of this he is sure, because he’s had to watch from the sidelines as slowly, but surely, every other person in front of him tonight started to see what Taeyong had seen the first time he had ever laid eyes on Johnny Suh. He's sure.
“I’ve known since we were rookies,” Taeyong says quietly, and while Jaehyun and Taeil gasp out loud at this, Ten and Doyoung glance at each other with this look that Taeyong can’t read, and suddenly he’s no longer so sure that he’s been able to hide it as well as he thinks he has.
“There was... there was a night when I had stayed up past 2 in the morning I think, and I didn’t want to stop practicing. He came into the practice room and told me I needed to take a break and go to sleep but I ignored him and kept at it. He turned the music off and I was so angry at him, I wanted to push him down for messing up my momentum, but I tripped on a shoelace and he laughed, you know that—“
“The breathy one, yeah, we know,” Doyoung says, and he’s got the dumbest love-struck smile on as he says it. God, they’re all so fucking whipped, it’s kind of embarrassing already.
“Yeah, the breathy one. He made me sit down and he pulled my shoes off and started pressing his thumb into my feet and I didn’t know why but it was that. I was watching him just pressing his thumbs into the soles of my feet and I thought, ‘oh my god, this is it, I’m so in love with you’. I was sure then. I’m still sure now.”
Taeyong is little winded, because he’s never, ever, ever said this aloud, and suddenly Doyoung’s idea of gathering them together doesn’t seem so strange anymore. It makes sense now, how lightening it is to sit around with these people who love Johnny like he does.
“You guys have such sweet stories and mine is the dumbest one,” Doyoung says, exasperated.
“Why, it’s not like it’s the parrot imitation, is it?” Kun laughs, and Doyoung freezes.
“Wait I was kidding—“
“Yeah, no, I just— I mean,” Doyoung is stuttering, and Kun is going “oh my GOD” and Jaehyun is hanging on to Taeyong for dear life through his laughter because Doyoung goes, “I can’t believe I saw Johnny Suh do his dumb parrot impersonation and thought, ‘this man is the love of my life’.” He says this with his head in his hands, groaning into the hard wood of the table.
Kun and Ten have tears in their eyes because they had watched that episode on the plane the other day and pretty much said the same thing. Kun pulls his phone out and checks his photos in the Favorites section, and turns it to show off what he’s got on screen: a screenshot of when Johnny and Kun got matched to be roommates in Japan.
“I shared a room with him in Osaka, how could I not fall in love with him?” Kun says, as Ten passes Kun’s phone around. “I hadn’t spent nearly enough time with him since our rookie days, and it was nice to just... sit there with him.” He takes another sip, hands shaking because only Ten knew how he felt about Johnny, and even that was nerve-wracking because Kun himself knew how Ten felt about Johnny.
“I saw him talking to Blue. That’s it. I came out of the washroom and he had Blue in his arms by the window and he was showing his whale plushie the view from our hotel room. I wanted to die, or cry, or something. I couldn’t handle it,” Kun wails, and everyone murmurs some level of “yeah” and “wow big mood” and “oh my god I can’t either”.
The evening is beyond cathartic as it is, but there are still two more people who still have to speak up. Taeyong figures that apart from him, Ten is probably the other person who has pined for Johnny closest to how long Taeyong himself has, and he’s seated quite literally on the edge of his seat waiting for Tennie to bring his own story out.
Taeil calls the waiter over for a pitcher of water while Kun pulls up the episode that his photo was screencapped from, and wonders whether he should pull up his own photographic evidence, considering that he had had the screencap from the ‘Touch’ MV as his background wallpaper for a solid three months before he started getting tired of having to keep hiding his phone whenever Donghyuck bounded over to hug him from behind.
He had known about Jaehyun first, or at least had an inkling when he started noticing Jaehyun look softer and softer at Johnny as the months of recording Enana had passed. Then Taeyong, though in hindsight, Taeil really should have picked up on that much sooner. Taeil likes to think he’s extremely low-key about his feelings for Johnny, even if Yuta had called him out on it on their VLive half a year ago.
Winwin hadn’t been much help when Taeil had told him, telling Taeil that it was either he actually say something to Johnny or just learn to live with his longing. “If only I could love you completely,” Taeil had pouted, and Winwin had laughed then, his beautiful, real one, taken Taeil’s hand, and pressed a kiss to Taeil’s forehead, and left it at that.
“It was ‘Touch’,” Taeil says after downing half a glass of his water. “It’s cliche but it was then.”
“I knew it!” Taeyong says, and Doyoung shushes him.
“I’d liked him for a long time but I thought it was just cos Johnny’s so nice all the time, but when the director told us to stand in front of each other and I stood on that little platform and saw him eye to eye, it was something else entirely,” and Ten starts humming the opening to ‘Touch’ while Taeyong pulls up the MV and toggles the video only to pause it at 1:29 and Taeil’s insides flutter despite his best efforts. “He was really charming during the shoot, and a little after we filmed that scene, we did the feathers one, and he had come over to me to pluck one out of my hair. I honestly don’t know how I managed to not kiss him then, really.”
Taeil stops abruptly because it’s the first time any one of them has mentioned something beyond just the loving Johnny part, and the tension that strung them up before dinner began is back tenfold— until Ten himself chimes in and says, “oh come on, literally all of us want to kiss him, okay, and not a single one of us is man enough to even try so let’s stop pretending like jealousy is a thing we’re gonna tolerate here,” and he stretches up in his seat.
It’s palpable that they’re grateful for Ten’s intervention, because on many levels, it’s true. And for the most part, there really hasn’t been any space for jealousy here, not when they’re pretty much anointing the Official Johnny Suh Fan Club around plates of samgyupsal and (too many) bottles of beer.
“I’ve loved Johnny Suh for three years, nine months and—“ Ten counts off on his slender fingers, his rings glinting in the yellow light. “And twelve weeks.” He glances at Taeyong, and there’s this unspoken acknowledgement between them where they both know that they’re the ones who have loved Johnny the longest. “He walked in on me crying one night.”
The chatter around him slows to a stop, and Ten exhales, because he’s held on to this memory for so long, has replayed it in his head over and over so often, that even the scent of Johnny’s soap that night remains fixed in his hippocampus.
“I wanted to go home. I was tired, and I was lonely, and I just wanted to go home to my family and my dogs, and I didn’t want him to see me, I didn’t want to have to explain, but he didn’t ask questions. He saw me, and he put his arms around me, and I cried for an hour, just like that, onto his shirt. We fell asleep like that, and when we woke up the next morning, he didn’t say anything either, he just smiled, and he never brought it up,” Ten says, his hands clenching beneath the table, his palms itching with longing to reach out to the phantom Johnny in his head. “I watched him get up off my bed and he turned to me with the sunlight streaming in behind him from the window and I knew right then and there that I was gonna love him forever.”
Kun takes Ten’s hand at this point, and brings it to his lips. Jaehyun’s smiling because it’s such a Johnny thing to do, what Ten has just described. Johnny was exuberant on camera, their unofficial spokesperson, the giant goofball that helped balance out the seriousness of any interview or game show, but behind the scenes, he was their quiet strength. Everyone knew to come to him when they had problems, and somehow, Johnny always knew when a situation required his intervention, and knew to leave it when it wasn’t warranted.
Chatter continues as they finish off the last of their meal, with Taeil and Taeyong gushing over the WayV teasers and Ten preening over Yangyang’s video while they try to weasel more information about their new releases from Kun, when Doyoung’s phone chimes suddenly. He’s the only one who has his phone not on silent mode, and he says, “Johnny just messaged in the 127 group,” and his face falls.
| Johnny Suh 😺| Wednesday 10:47pm |
[ I bought ice cream for the dorm! (Haechan wanted some so I gave in 😅). Get home safe. ☺️☺️ ]
Jaehyun groans, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, and goes, “DOES HE DO THIS ON PURPOSE?”
Taeyong’s in a similar state, because Johnny could have held it against them that they were out without even inviting him, but instead he’s out there being cute and buying them ice cream to eat when they get home and he just wants to curl up and sleep because being in love with Johnny and not being able to do anything about it is exhausting.
Dongyoung figures it’s high time for them to head home, and calls the waiter over for the bill. He sees Ten and Kun pull their wallets out, and halts them in the process.
“It’s on me, don’t worry,” he says to the table.
“Doyoungieeee~” Taeyong coos from his seat, trying to plant a kiss on Doyoung’s cheek as Doyoung laughs and tries to swat him away.
This is the last they’ll be seeing of Kun and Ten for a while it seems, and when they stand outside the restaurant while the managers call over their van to take them back to their respective dorms, Ten goes over to Taeyong and hugs him close, a reminder and a reiteration that there are no hard feelings between any one of them who gathered tonight, but between the two of them especially. Taeyong has had his fair share of little jealousies over the years. He had stewed quietly when the fansite photos of Ten and Johnny’s reunion in Thailand had come out, and he confesses this to Ten quietly, and Ten’s eyes form little crescents when he scrunches his nose up and says, “You get to go home to that giant man-baby every single night, Lee Taeyong. Don’t get me started.”
They bid their goodbyes, and head home to the 127 dorm, and it’s unexpected that anyone is asleep when they arrive, given how everyone has been amped up by the fact that for one blessed week, they have time to just rest.
The car ride is peaceful, and Doyoung figures that his plan to diffuse the tension everyone had been feeling lately, at least in terms of one certain Johnny Suh, has succeeded. It could have blown up really, but he also knows his members well-enough to have had no doubt that this was something they needed. They didn’t have to skirt around the issue with each other anymore, worrying about how the other person would react to any interaction with Johnny.
There’s a shift in the air, for sure, but he knows that when he and Jaehyun go in to record another Do Digest, they’ll be able to glance at each other fondly when Johnny pulls another dad joke. Taeyong can relax around them when he goes in to his room with Johnny without worrying about setting off a landmine, and Doyoung hopes that Taeyong won’t feel the need to watch himself so much around Johnny. All four of them can shower Johnny with as much affection now, and it will be a joint effort— not that it would take much effort, given that loving Johnny was as easy as breathing.
-
The van pulls up outside their dorm, and they herd themselves in quickly, not exactly expecting anyone at the door since it’s 11:30 in the evening. They’re greeted by the sight of Donghyuck sprawled between Johnny’s legs on the couch, Donghyuck's cast completely doodled on, with markers littering the floor. Fitting, given that Haechan had only arrived back in the dorms earlier in the day after having spent the previous weeks with his family. Jungwoo and Yuta are asleep on the couch adjacent, and Mark is in the kitchen washing dishes.
“Welcome home!” Johnny shouts while he and Donghyuck watch a video on his phone, the tinny sounds of a fan chant filtering through the Bluetooth speaker they have on the table in front of them. Donghyuck's voice carries over and he says, "I really hate that I wasn't there." Johnny seems to be consoling their maknae for all the performances he's missed since being temporarily out of commission. "Everybody missed you, Full Sun," Johnny replies, resting his chin on Donghyuck's shoulder and pulling up the video of their Gayo Daechukje performance.
Taeyong, Taeil, Doyoung and Jaehyun glance at each other, trading a secret smile.
Welcome home, indeed.