Chapter Text
1
Junhoe
In all honesty, Junhoe had not realized that there was something different in the way Bobby behaved around him, not until he bumped into said man on his way to the toilet backstage in Kobe. Initially, his reflexes took hold and, as soon as he realized whose shoulder he had run into, he was prepared to mutter an apology. He didn't get the chance to say anything, though, because Bobby had already walked away. The older man only spared him one glance--one short, very unwelcoming glance--before he took off to the direction from which he came from, seemingly forgetting his need to go to the bathroom.
There was no time to ponder about what was going on, because Junhoe had a bladder situation to relieve and an encore that was fast approaching. He hurriedly went in to the bathroom and finished his business, and until the concert ended a little bit later that night, he didn't have the chance to revisit his sour encounter with Bobby.
The day was soon coming to an end. With a last bow, the curtains were closed, and they all filed into the cars that would drive them back to the hotel. Junhoe was tired, but he reminded himself that tonight was their finale, and tomorrow, conveniently, they were all finally flying back home to Korea. Japan was undoubtedly great and he loved the minimarkets (the food they sold, to be exact), but it was getting tiresome to have to talk in Japanese all the time. He also missed sleeping in his room back in the dorm, where he didn't have to worry about the mess he made, or whether he left too much trouble for the cleaning service guys who had to clean up his room after him.
The cars were lined up on the street when he got to the pick up point. There didn't seem to be a rule assigning which member sat in which car tonight. The only rule everybody wordlessly agreed on was to get in the car as quickly as they could because they were all dying for a shower and a good night's sleep.
Junhoe felt his legs move almost on auto-pilot, walking wherever he saw Jinhwan, who was right in front of him, went. He saw Jinhwan climbing into one of the black vans, and he followed right after. Thinking it would be great if he got a seat on the back, he felt a little disappointed to find that the back seat was already filled with Chanwoo and then Jinhwan, plus a stack of large bags between them. With a sigh, Junhoe sat down on the seat in the middle, leaving the last seat next to him empty. He pulled out his phone, scrolling through messages and two missed calls from his mother.
A few minutes later, the door of the van opened, but it was the sound of chatter that suddenly died down that grabbed Junhoe's attention and made him look up from the screen of his phone.
Bobby was standing by the opened door, eyes narrowed and his face held an expression that could only be described as tense. Junhoe was almost a 100% certain that that tense stare was pointed at him for a whole second, before Bobby looked away to the side.
"Is that car full? No? Okay." Junhoe heard Bobby speak to someone outside of his line of sight. And without a single word to anyone inside the car, he turned and left. He didn't even close the door behind him.
For another minute, Junhoe stared at the empty space, confused and almost thoroughly convinced that Bobby was mad or at least upset at him. He turned around, trying to get a confirmation from the people who were sitting behind him.
"Hyung," he called out to Jinhwan, "is Bobby-hyung mad at me?"
A sleepy "huh?" was what he received as an answer from Jinhwan, and, "Bobby-hyung was here?" from Chanwoo, followed by the sound of beeping and zapping that must have come from his phone.
"Nevermind," Junhoe sighed, leaning back on his seat.
Soon enough, someone showed up again. Junhoe swiveled his head to see, his heart skipping a couple of beats. For some reason he expected to see Bobby, probably coming back to join them after finding the other car was already full. But apparently it was Yunhyeong, poking his fluffy head in before his entire skinny self climbed into the car and sat down on the empty seat next to Junhoe. Yunhyeong was saying something along the line of 'dying for some wagyu beef' and 'a bottle of cold beer would be great', but Junhoe automatically tuned him out.
The car started moving as soon as everyone got in. Junhoe averted his eyes back to his phone, trying to be interested in whatever his fingers scrolled through, websites and whatnot. But all the texts he saw were mostly in kanji/hiragana/katakana, which made it twice as hard to focus on, so he gave up quickly. He opened his text messages and the KaTalk app on his phone, reading and rereading the messages he received until the words blurred together.
In the end, he let his phone screen black out and turned his eyesight toward the window on his left. Kobe felt like an entirely different world out there compared to what he was used to see everyday back in Seoul, but that was probably his homesickness talking. Streetlights and buildings zipped by as the car sped ahead. Usually he would find this kind of scenery relaxing, inspirational even, but at the moment it was making him dizzy instead.
It was probably the exhaustion from the concert, he thought. He just needed a hot bath and a glass of alcohol, although he had no idea if their manager would allow him to stroll out of the hotel to buy a bottle of beer or two.
This... discomfort, whatever it was, would go away once he got some sleep. Sleep always made things better for him.
But even as the car entered the driveway toward the hotel's entrance, he still couldn't get the image of Bobby's face--dark and unfriendly and just so, so tense--out of his thoughts. It confirmed that his restlessness had nothing to do with his tired physique, and there was nothing he could do tonight, including a hot bath, drinking and getting some sleep, would put his mind to ease. Nothing, except to go ahead and confront the root of the problem.
He needed to talk to Bobby.
×××
As soon as he stepped out of his hotel room, he instantly regretted it. The warmth that had lingered after his hot bath leeched right off of his skin and left him shivering in the yellow-lit hallway. It made him desperate to go back into his room, forget the whole thing and just go to sleep like he had intended to.
Moreover, he was getting cold feet. He knew he had made up his mind. He knew he had to do this. It was just that his limbs had suddenly forgotten how to move, or was it his brain that had suddenly ceased to work? He froze in front of his room, questioning his intentions.
'This is no big deal,' he told himself. He was going to march into Bobby's room, ask him what was wrong, apologize if it turned out to be his fault, and then go back to his own room and finally get some long-awaited sleep. Knock on the door, talk, apologize, go back.
If only it really was as easy as it seemed in his head.
He took one deep breath, held it in for a few seconds, and then let it out. The next second, he was taking a shaky step forward.
Room 508, Room 508, he repeated in his mind. It was just three doors down the hall from his room. It didn't even take him more than ten steps until he was standing in front of his destination.
He forced himself to knock on the door before he could have second thoughts and balk. He felt the sound reverberating in his bones, sharp and loud, although he didn't think he knocked too hard. He wondered if the person next door--was it Donghyuk? Or Yunhyeong?--heard it.
The door opened.
"Donghyuk, I told you I didn't have your--Junhoe?!"
The change on Bobby's face was apparent and unmistakable. Junhoe felt like watching a light bulb being switched off, leaving a darkened, closed-up facade that was terrible to see.
Something inside of Junhoe cowered and quivered at the sight. This was the confirmation he was looking for, the 'Yes, Bobby is definitely mad at me.' Now, his job was to figure out what had sparked this anger.
"Bobby-hyung, I was just..." Junhoe started, and hurriedly continued when he saw Bobby shaking his head and backing up like he was about to close the door. "No, please, Hyung, don't... can we talk, please??"
Junhoe was never good at begging, but at the moment he just really needed Bobby not to slam the door on him because that would very much suck.
"It's late, Junhoe, and I'm tired," the rapper said, staring not at Junhoe but seemingly at the wall behind him. "We have an early flight tomorrow."
"It won't take five minutes, I swear," Junhoe said. "Please, Hyung, you're mad at me, I get it. I just want to..."
"We can talk once we're back in Korea."
Junhoe would usually give up by now. Had he been face to face with someone else, he would have taken the hint and left. It's true, it would make small difference whether he confronted Bobby now or tomorrow once they were home in their apartment. But for some reason Junhoe didn't want to back down now that he was here in front of Bobby. The thought of having to endure an entire flight from Japan to Korea, and then a car ride from the airport to their dorm, all under the hostile glare from Bobby, was absolutely unbearable for him.
"Just... just tell me what I've done wrong, Hyung," Junhoe insisted. It crossed his mind how inappropriate this was having this conversation--if it could even be called a conversation--on the hallway of a hotel in Japan, with the surveillance camera probably eyeing on them.
Bobby scoffed and looked away. "Why does it matter anyway? It's not like you care."
"What... Why would you say that? Of course I care, Hyung."
"You care? My my, isn't that new," Bobby griped with enough incredulity in his voice to leave a scar somewhere deep inside of Junhoe.
"I'm sorry, Hyung, I..."
"Cut it out, Goo Junhoe. You don't even know what you're apologizing for, do you?"
The question had his brain screeching to a halt. No, he really didn't know. He didn't have the slightest idea what he had done wrong that had made Bobby so angry with him. "Well, I mean, if you would just tell me..."
"And then what? You won't even..." Bobby paused, gritting his teeth as if holding something in so that he wouldn't explode. "You know what? Fine. I'll tell you."
Junhoe braced himself. He oddly felt like he was going to receive a physical blow, which, if he gave it a thought, would probably be a lot easier to deal with, compared to this invisible anxiety that felt too big to fit in his chest that it was starting to make him hyperventilate.
Bobby looked at him, and for once, he didn't waver. The two of them had never been good at staring at each other eye to eye, proven in many occasions and situations, but right now, he held on quite unnervingly. It took almost every single ounce of willpower Junhoe had not to break eye contact first.
"Remember when you came to talk to me about my album?" Bobby said. "I appreciate that, I really do. Your opinion matters a lot to me. And then do you remember what I told you afterward?"
The moment Bobby was talking about popped in Junhoe's head in an instant. It was a couple of days before the official release date of Bobby's Love and Fall album. Junhoe had heard the songs, a privilege of being fellow member of the same group plus living in the same dorm. He had immediately liked the entire album, and had wanted to tell Bobby that.
Jinhwan's pushing had played a small factor, too, if Junhoe had to be honest. "You're the only one who hasn't told Bobby anything about his album," the mathyung had said. "You're going to leave him hanging like that?"
Sometimes Junhoe thought Jinhwan knew him too well, knew exactly what to say to push him, and took that advantage to force him to do stuff he wasn't originally planning to do.
So he had approached Bobby on his own accord, which was a huge achievement for him who had always found talking to Bobby a massively difficult task. He had told Bobby that he liked the songs in the album, especially 뗀데 and Firework. Bobby had thanked him. They had had a nice, pleasant talk. Junhoe remembered Bobby had even played the raw version of 뗀데 for him.
And afterward? What did Bobby tell him?
Was it, 'I'm happy that you liked the album'? Or, 'good night, see you tomorrow'?
No. Not those.
Oh, wait. Junhoe remembered.
"Can't remember?" Bobby cut off his train of thoughts. "I'll just remind you, then. I told you I loved you, Goo Junhoe. I told you as clearly and as sincerely as I possibly could, I loved you. And then what did you do?"
Junhoe stared at Bobby. What did he do after that? He came back to his room. The next day they--minus Bobby, because he had a schedule for his solo activity--flew back to Japan, continued their Dome Tour, did a Vlive show to update their fans...
"You went and told the whole group that I said that to you, and you laughed," Bobby was practically hissing at this point. "You laughed like it was some kind of joke, like my feelings were just a source of amusement for you and everybody else."
"I... No, Hyung, I didn't..."
"Yes, yes, you did, Junhoe. I can easily open my Vlive app right now and show the damn video to you, but no, let's not do that because I'm trying really hard not to be petty," Bobby carried on. "Have you any idea how many times I've pathetically told you I loved you, only to have you shoving it aside coldly as if it didn't take a shitload of me to speak up to you? Too many times, Junhoe. And I've had enough of this."
Junhoe froze.
This was not what he had expected when he got out of his room earlier. He had presumed that Bobby was mad because of more trivial reasons, such as Junhoe forgetting to return the clothes he borrowed, which happened pretty often, a fact that he wasn't really proud of. Whatever he had thought of before, it definitely was not this. He truthfully had not prepared himself to be facing a very serious situation such as this.
The worst thing of all, he knew exactly what Bobby was talking about. He remembered that Vlive show. He remembered what he had told everyone and what their reaction had been. Bobby's anger was not completely baseless.
"Bobby-hyung, please listen to me, you misunderstood. I really didn't mean to make it sound like a joke," Junhoe said, stuttering. He was getting tongue-tied and this really wasn't the best timing at all.
"Save it, Junhoe, stop thinking about it too much, you're going to hurt your pretty head," Bobby sighed. "I said I was done. That's it. I'm done. I'll leave you alone from now on. You won't feel a difference anyway, seeing that we hardly ever talk to each other. No more stupid Bobby-hyung proclaiming his stupid feelings for you. You can go ahead, live your life, do your thing, I don't know, whatever."
Junhoe knew he should say something when he saw Bobby backing away into his room. He knew he should stop him. But he couldn't say anything. He couldn't even breathe.
"Good night."
With that, Bobby closed the door. He didn't slam it shut like Junhoe had feared, but still the noise sounded so harsh and sinister, like a bang of a revolver in the otherwise silent hallway.
But even worse than the click of that door was Bobby's 'Good night' that Junhoe thought, disturbingly, sounded just like 'Goodbye'.
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