Work Text:
“I’m not myself yet. That’s just it. Not all myself. But I’ve been becoming myself.”
— Eugene O'Neill, from The Complete Plays of E. O.; “Strange Interlude,”
Jeno was seventeen years old when he saved the world.
Everybody saw that coming. Jeno, a legend. Jeno. the Chosen One. Born a hero, shaped into a savior, every second he breathed meticulously leading to the moment he'd defeat evil once and for all.
He did that. He was seventeen. He saved them all. He got pats on his back, crying children on his lap and his face in History books. He'd been bronzed and installed in front of public libraries. He's got his own brand of morning cereal, and humanity is in debt with him for as long as he lives. A hero, a hero, a hero, if you've ever seen one.
Well, they used to shout his name. Now they only whisper it.
"Sounds like a neat story," says Mark Lee is his heavy Queens accent, both of his feet propped up on the table's top and one of his hands lazily stroking Jeno's back, warm and real. He is nothing like Jeno imagined but similar to what he'd ask for if he knew things like Mark Lee existed, as normal as one person can be and pretty much everything Jeno would wish to have if he knew he could, except that he is not his. Mark is himself's. He's made that very clear, yet he gives Jeno a bite from time to time. For that, he's very thankful. "And how do you feel?"
"Right now?" he hums. "A little tired."
Mark clicks his tongue. And Jeno clicks on yet another article he needs to read before writing his essay and waits for it: heroes don't get tired. Heroes also don't flee home and cross the world to study Architecture and pretend to be someone they're not. But all Mark does is trace random patterns on his back with his very skilled fingers of a musician and say:
"Do you want to go grab lunch?"
This is the story of the hero untold: what makes a hero, if not the weight on his shoulders? If not for the journey and the pain that comes? And what happens after the did is done? What is left to the hero after all dragons have been slain and the princesses are safe, after all quests finally come to meet their ends?
A hero, but stripped off himself. A hero, but only the echoes of it. Eleven thousand kilometers away from home, dyed hair, a scrawny cat waiting by the window. A boy's hand to hold and his mouth to kiss.
A hero, a hero, a hero, is he still?
He smiles, nodding. "Sure."
Back to the beginning, when Jeno was born, it was not only his mother that was expecting him.
"You, my dear boy," would say that funny lady from the government sent to check up on him every year, bopping him on the nose. "Are going to help so many people when you grow up. We are all very lucky to have you."
Jeno did not understand, back then. He did not bear any apparent superpower, could not make things levitate with the force of his mind or shoot flames out of his hands. Heroes, to him, they were people who could do extraordinary things without thinking much about it – they just did them. He was not like that. He thought a lot about it, and nothing would come out.
"That's not how it works," said Donghyuck, a dear friend of his, when they were both ten and had fingers stained by melting ice cream. He had curly hair back then, black locks and all, and Jeno envied the way he resembled his mother, from hair to smile and the shape of his hands. Jeno was nothing like his mother, or like his father, or like anyone at all. He was born just like himself. A myth, if you've ever seen one. "What you have is in here--" he'd touch Jeno's temple the clean side of his hand. "You just have to take it out."
"Take it out," he echoed. His voice was a tiny, tiny thing back then. "I don't know how to do that yet."
Donghyuck had shrugged. He licked his fingers clean. "Don't worry. I know you'll learn."
No one's ever told Jeno what his power was, but they always told him this: you'll learn, you'll learn, you'll learn. He didn't see the extraordinary in doing what everyone else did, but it wasn't his place to contest it, after all. He'd learn.
"I think that's what made you a hero."
Jeno frowns. His toes curl inside his socks – it's way too cold, too cold to do anything that isn't staying under the covers, but Mark doesn't think that. He stubbornly makes his way through the snow, hand tightly curled around Jeno's. "I don't follow."
"See," Mark continues. He has a huge red scarf wrapped around his neck, one that he's successfully raided from Jeno's closet. "When you're a child and you don't understand something, all people say to you is: that's because you're too young. But when you didn't understand, they told you that you'd learn. Children grow up. Heroes learn. It's semantics, Jeno. Shouldn't you have learned that back in school?"
He scoffs. "I know what semantics are. I just don't think that's what makes a hero."
Mark slips on the thin ice. He does that frequently, have his feet betraying him for no reason, and no different from other times, Jeno quickly catches him before he falls. He wraps his arms around Mark's torso like they're hugging, and Mark twists himself in his hold.
"Is that so?" he asks instead of saying thank you, and he raises a hand to pat at Jeno's cheek before pushing himself off him. "And what makes a hero, then, you know-it-all? If not the word "hero" itself?"
Jeno watches as he makes his way through the snow, not a single word ready on his tongue. The thing about Mark Lee, he soon learned, is that he's quite the catch. Jeno still doesn't know how he managed to do that, and he's often at loss of words around him.
It's like the Universe had taken them both by the hand, sat them on the bench of life and said: you will carry that the world on your shoulders like you're Atlas, and you will carry your words like the heaviest sword. Each with his own weight. Each with his own purpose.
Sometimes Jeno dreams of this.
Noticing he hasn't followed, Mark turns around, eyebrows raised. He extends a hand. "So?" he asks. "You'll freeze to death if you stand there."
"Mark," he replies instead. "Do you not care that I saved the world?"
That's a tricky question. He doesn't expect Mark not to understand it, as witty as he is, but it does take him some time to answer. He keeps looking at him, with doe eyes and snowflakes on the lenses of his glasses, and then he walks back to where Jeno is and brushes the snow off his hair.
"I care in the sense that maybe you wouldn't be here if you didn't, so thank you for saving the world, Jeno. But I don't care in the sense that being a hero should mean you're smarter than going outside without a hat in this weather, for Heaven's sake. Can we go now?"
Sounds fair. Sounds like a Mark answer, and he would accept nothing less.
Jeno takes his hand.
His first trial came in the shape of a boy.
The boy was not the trial per se, to be quite honest. The boy was much more the aftermath of the trial than the trial itself, but the memory isn't very clear, like many others in Jeno's mind. He thinks: a boy haunted, more nightmare than a boy, and the way his hands trembled, pocket-sized earthquake.
The Calamity, Jeno's learned, was more of a force than a thing itself. Or at least that's something he's told himself a billion times because no one would teach him what it was, so his words would have to do. The Calamity was a force, something that corrupted, something that tainted evil whatever it touched, so why would it be different with that poor boy
"I don't need your help," he told Jeno, nevertheless. His hands shook so much from the want to strangle him, probably, but Jeno wouldn't blame him. He, too, would run in fear of himself most times. "You should leave before it gets dark."
He looked up to the sky, dark blue and starless, and wondered.
"The Calamity isn't something you stop or destroy," the boy said at last. "Because it wasn't simply born and because of that it won't die. You know that, don't you?"
"I do," Jeno had lied. He had no idea what the Calamity truly was. He spent fourteen years trying to understand it, and he feared he never would. And he kept staring at the boy's hands, at his hollow eyes. He must have been beautiful when he wasn't this, as beautiful as scrawny boys at age fourteen can be. "But I can take it from you, Renjun. I can ease the pain if you let me."
He didn't reply straight away, and that's what it took for Jeno to take one step forward. Then another, when Renjun didn't recoil, and then another, and another.
"I know why they call you The Chosen One," he said. "It's because whatever the Calamity hands over, you take. You can only ever take, isn't that right?"
Jeno doesn't remember the rest. He only remembers the weight of Renjun's hands, and how much it hurt.
That is something he doesn't tell Mark.
Sometimes he doesn't tell Mark anything about his past. Sometimes Jeno pretends he was born two years before, and all that came after that is everything he's ever known. Such as the best hours to take the subway, such as leaving the window open for his cat to chill in the sun by the windowsill, such as how to make last minute banana pancakes, such as how to pick a locket, such as how to care for his hair.
Or such as:
"You have such a beautiful mouth," and Mark laughs hysterically. He does that sometimes, usually when Jeno is closer to him like this.
The reason, Jeno doesn't know, because he didn't know people like Mark could get nervous at anything. At first he thought Mark was like a hero himself, and that he didn't get hurt, or that he didn't get scared, or that he didn't get upset at all. That he was always bright and real, eyebrow slit and cutting his own shirts.
(But he does, sometimes. He does get hurt and upset and angry, and he gets nervous when he wakes up sometimes and presses his hands to his face and to the scars on his chest and there is that one second in which his face is of pure relief before he pretends to fall asleep once more. Jeno knows he doesn't. They both never do.
The transmasc experience to me, Mark's told Jeno once, is sometimes dreaming that the Universe is going to take me away from myself, and there will be nothing left after that. And even though it's for different reasons, Jeno has also dreamed of that before – that's another thing they share. The bad dreams, and the talks after them.)
He leans into Mark's space, feeling his minty breath on his face. "And I don't know what to do with myself because of that."
"You can kiss me any time," Mark responds. And then he adds: "If you want."
There is such a big difference, Jeno thinks, between spending time with someone because they cherish you and you cherish them, and spending time with someone because they expect you to. Most of the time, Mark doesn't expect him to do anything, hence why he lets out yet another hysterical laugh when Jeno presses his lips to his.
Someone on their right coos, hand pressing to the space between Jeno's shoulder blades. He should've known better than to try and stay away from Jaemin's prying eyes. "Aren't you two so sweet!"
He hears it when Mark tells Jaemin to fuck off, too fondly to hurt, but it sounds distant like he's hearing from another room. They're quite the pair, the two of them, and at first Jeno thought they were lovers. But that's just how Jaemin looks under the sunlight, charming and flirtatious and keen on public displays of affection.
Here, under stroboscopic lights in a club and washed out by alcohol, Jaemin acts too sober for his liking, too stiff when that one tall, dorky guy is around. Jeno thinks he needs to loosen up. He thinks Lucas would like Jaemin better if he just let it go.
That's something else he's learned. How to let it go. He was just so used to bottle everything up. Now he just has to let it go. Let it go and let it go and let it go.
"Hey,"Mark says over the music, when they're alone once more. His hands on both sides of Jeno's face, cheeks glowing like magic or maybe it's just Lucas's iridescent highlighter. "Are you still here?"
"Yes," Jeno nods. He sometimes spends too much time inside his mind, and Mark is someone waving at the distance on the beach of his ocean of thoughts. Jeno knows he's capable of swimming and catching up to him, but he stays by the shore. He'll get in the water when Jeno needs him to, and he doesn't mind waiting. "I've never been to a party before."
It's true. Growing up being him, there were few things he was allowed to do. When teens his age were going to parties, he was flying from country to country trying to stop the world from ending. Mark knows that, and he slides a hand into Jeno's hair, rubbing at his scalp. "Are you having fun?"
He is. Plenty. Jeno likes the booze, likes the people, he liked dancing until his lungs felt like collapsing. He also likes how Mark's makeup looks under the moonlight, here on this balcony, even if it's smudged on his left eye.
Jeno had mentioned it before. Mark licked his own pinky finger and tried to fix it, but it only got worse. He didn't mind, even if it was the product of spending two hours in a bathroom with Lucas and his new makeup set. And Jeno likes that he didn't mind.
He likes it when Mark starts kissing him again, like he doesn't want to stop. He likes it so much he feels like swallowing the entire world.
No, not like that. Not like swallowing the entire world – he doesn't miss the feeling. When Jeno was what he was before, he could swallow the world and it would still not be enough to quench his hunger--
"I'm having fun," he answers, so many hours later, face pressed to Mark's sternum. "I'm satisfied."
When Mark laughs, it reverberates through him like an earthquake, and Jeno feels it in his mouth. "Took you long enough, huh?"
Yes, it did.
His power, Jeno's learned, was more of a thing than a force itself. Not an extension of himself, no – something he reached out to in the corners of his mind, poking it with a stick, it's time to come out . More of a thing than a force itself, easy to be controlled, devastating when put to use. He just had to tuck it back where it belonged, that silly little thing, when he was done.
Or at least that's something he's told himself a billion times after he lost it, because it is so much easier to lose things, especially the ones you don't understand why you have to carry them. Why they chose you in the first place.
"I don't understand," Donghyuck announced, as simply and as strange that that sentence, coming from him, could be. Donghyuck was a genius of all sorts. The only thing he'd never been capable of fully understanding was Jeno, and perhaps it's why they were best friends in the first place. "It has to be somewhere."
To which Jeno, shoving yet another sweatshirt into his duffel bag, had replied: "It is anywhere. There is no Calamity anymore, so there is no power either, and there is no reason for me to stay. None at all."
Donghyuck was not pleased. That was very clear. Half of Jeno's heart started to hurt like he'd been stabbed.
"I think it makes sense," said the other, intact part of Jeno's heart, curled up on his unmade bed. As expected, Renjun was a beautiful thing when he was himself. Everybody thought that. Donghyuck thought that, frequently out loud, but never near Renjun. He pushed his ash blonde hair off his face. "Calamity exists. World gone mad. Child born to defeat Calamity. Calamity defeated. Child saves the world. What is left for the child after that?"
Something inside Jeno answered: nothing. But Donghyuck beat him to that, quite bitterly: "A restart. On the other side of the world."
The bag was made, every single piece of Jeno that was allowed to be fully his tucked carefully inside it, yet his hands ghosted over it as he didn't know what to do. Trying to find anything else that tied him to this room, to this life.
"You can come visit," he said quietly instead. "Both of you. We can have fun. We can rent a car and hit the road."
Fun. What a wonderful concept. The three of them, on the other side of the world, having fun! Fun like they should've had if Jeno wasn't a hero, if Donghyuck wasn't made for protecting him, if Renjun didn't have his childhood stolen by the Calamity and brought back to him by Jeno's hands.
The thought was so good, so tasty and real for the first time in forever, that it even brought out a smile from Donghyuck's lips. Jeno wished he could live inside that smile forever, but he had to leave now, or he wouldn't ever.
"Yeah," Donghyuck replies, finally. "Yeah, we can."
"They're a cute couple," Mark muses as he hands Jeno his phone. He's wearing basketball shorts and one of his ex-roommate's sweatshirts, ridiculously big on his frame, and Jeno suddenly realizes this is Mark Lee when he's not out and about as his eccentric musician persona. A simple guy, lying on the couch, Jeno's legs thrown lazily over his. Someone he lo--
"They're not dating," Jeno replies, pocketing his phone. He likes this new flat of them. It's better than the dorm from the year before. It's small and full of light, like Mark is, and Jeno has never felt more at home. "At least not yet. I don't know how long it's going to take them to realize they should be dating."
Mark raises both of his eyebrows. One of his hands, fallen over Jeno's leg, pinches him through the fabric of his pants. "Is that so?" he asks, chuckling. "Imagine living like that!"
He knows what that means. Jeno lets out a laugh: "What, you want to be my boyfriend, Mark Lee?"
They've never talked about it before, and Jeno has never talked about it ever. Mark is, essentially, the first-ever person that Jeno has been with. And the last, or at least he hopes so. He feels his cheeks burning at the thought, when did he get so bold, and the way Mark lets out an embarrassed giggle tells him he's not the only one affected by his words.
"I wouldn't oppose it," he responds truthfully. Mark never lies. If he does, he's very good at it, but there are certain certainties about him that Jeno never doubts: that he doesn't lie, that he's beautiful, that he likes his eggs sunny side up, that he can read backwards, and that he likes Jeno back. "Do you want to be my boyfriend, Jeno Lee?"
This is the part of the story that Jeno doesn't know yet, but he will. Does the hero deserve this happiness, he wonders, when he smiles at him and Mark smiles too. Does the hero deserve the love?
"I do."
"Of course not."
"Mom," Jeno tried. "It's just for the evening."
Renjun nodded enthusiastically, holding onto Jeno's arm for dear life. "I'll take care of him, ma'am, there's no need to worry."
Jeno's mother had a face like her mother's, and her mother's mother, and her mother's mother's mother as well, and Jeno didn't look like anyone at all. He sometimes resented looking at her face, especially when she was mad, for he remembered how much he didn't belong.
"There is no such thing as just for the evening when it comes to you," she had told him, so quietly, and he didn't want to have this conversation around Renjun. Not when he was here for a weekend only. This was the only moment in which he visited. "Donghyuck is not in town. I don't know, Jeno."
"I don't need Donghyuck to go anywhere, mom," he replied. Which was true. At least sometimes. A few times. Every now and then. Rarely. Whatever. "Everybody's going! I just want to--"
She eyed him, challenging. "Want to what?"
To feel like a normal boy, he had thought. To feel like everybody else does even if it's just a few hours. To crash against the waves and kiss a pretty girl and come home by nightfall.
"I've always wanted to go to the beach," he replied instead. He shouldn't have said it, he knew it. Even Renjun knew, with the way he flinched at his words like Jeno had wielded a sword against him.
His mother stroked his cheek with her thumb. There was no need for words – he knew what that meant. He'd ask no more.
Being him, Jeno wasn't allowed to want things, or to wish for them, or to even let himself think of doing so – desires, he thought, were a privilege of people who weren't made to save the world. Who had nothing left to do but sit and watch, and on the other end of that line of thought--
What do you want?, Mark asks him. He asks him this hours before, to be quite frank, but Jeno only allows himself to think about it now. Oh, how he relishes those words. And he traces the slope of Mark's nose with his fingertip, listening as his breath comes out in coordinated puffs, how his eyes move from time to time inside his eyelids. It almost comes out: I've never wa--
He'd fallen asleep in the middle of their talk. Well, he fell asleep while talking, while Jeno was watching him talk, and Mark's head is still turned to the side as he lays on his back, still in his loose pants and short sleeve shirt from earlier, and now Jeno watches him sleep.
I've never wanted something quite like this, he thinks. It's true. Nineteen years of wanting to want so much that his insides hurt, a lifetime of practice so he can reach out and caress Mark's jaw, smooth as a dream after he shaved this morning, watching as his eyes flutter open for a second before closing again.
"Sorry that I fell asleep," he says groggily, although it doesn't look like he's keen on the idea of getting up. When Jeno retrieves the hand, he blindly reaches out for it and tightly holds onto his fingers, pressing them to his face, his lips.
What does Jeno want?
He wants this. He's never wanted anything quite like this, and he can feel that want burning him up from inside.
"You take care," his father says, hands on both sides of Jeno's face. "Calls us when you get there. And remember--"
He doesn't finish saying it, but Jeno knows. Remember you'll always have somewhere to come home to. But does he really?
"Goodbye, dad. I'll call."
When he's waiting for the plane to take off, tucked under a cheap blanket and munching on his jelly beans, Jeno realizes he has no reason to look out of that tiny window.
College is good. College is nice. Jeno draws a lot, he's quite good with the math of it all, he's constantly out and about in field trips across the country, taking pictures of newfound friends and drawing places he likes on a sketchbook that Donghyuck got for him before he left.
Buildings. Bridges. Doors he thinks are interesting. Patterns on the street. How the shade looks when it hits that statue over there. He inks it all on the paper and catches himself going through it all later, before he goes to sleep. Memories he makes for himself.
This life is good for him. Jeno used to think there was no life for him after the Calamity, because he only existed to bring an end to it, or vice-versa. He doesn't care anymore.
He used to think he wouldn't fit in anywhere else in the world except with the role of a savior, which he wasn't much these days. But this life is good for him. There is no Calamity anymore, and it takes exactly ten months for his face to stop showing on the news and for people to stop stopping him on the street. It takes his roommate half a year to realize who the person sleeping on the other side of the room is, and the most it gets out of him is a single Cheerio falling from his open mouth in realization before he resumes his breakfast, not a word.
Jeno is a hero, but there are so many others out there. They don't have prophecies and myths told about them, but they exist. Jeno sees them on the newspapers where he used to be. Soon enough he will be just another dude who made something important, but he'll be just that. Another one. Another guy.
Sounds like a solid plan, like the ones Donghyuck would come up with. Jeno doesn't even have to think much about being forgotten, doesn't have to put an effort into it. It just happens. This life is good for him.
On the eleventh month, his mother calls for the first time. We miss you and we want you to come back. He can't, he has college, he has things to do. He has a solid five-year plan, which is more than he thought he'd live past eighteen, when he was released from the health facility after everyone was sure the Calamity wasn't anywhere in him, and he tells her that.
She doesn't take it well, but that's Jeno's mother for you. She'll come around eventually. This is not the apocalypse. The apocalypse is over, mom. This is the beginning of something entirely Jeno's, for the first time, and he's not letting it go.
See, when Jeno defeated the Calamity, it was less like a fairy tale and more like the feeling you get when you know you're coming down with a fever. Second-hand sickening, a shiver that's not quite there but it will. You know it will.
"Did it work?" he asked Donghyuck, eyes opening, and Donghyuck just stared at him in horror, like Jeno had just puked in his shoes or kicked his dog. It made Jeno throw himself back to the grass and look up at the sky. The pain was starting to fade away. He could breathe now. And he'd never seen a sky so blue.
Albania was quite nice. He'd been traveling a lot to places where the Calamity's call was stronger, where the pull at Jeno's belly was almost unbearable, calling and calling and demanding, and they ended up here. In the middle of all this green. There are castles here and there. Jeno would like to come back one day.
"I didn't know--" Donghyuck started. "I didn't know it would be like that . You didn't-- you never told me that's what you do."
He sounded betrayed. Jeno had never heard that tone in Donghyuck's tongue, ever. He spoke wittily but always gently. And he just sounded betrayed.
Jeno would be, too, if it was Donghyuck. But perhaps if the odds were reversed and it was Donghyuck who had been the Chosen One… Perhaps he'd be different. Perhaps he'd be as singular as Jeno was, but better. He blindly patted the space beside him on the grass and, unsurprisingly, Donghyuck sat down.
"I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want you to be scared," Jeno had replied. Scared of me, he would've added. Because then you wouldn't want to be my friend anymore. Because then I'd be alone. Being a hero made him so selfish. "I didn't want you to hate me."
(He was five when Donghyuck's mother had sat him down beside Jeno on the couch, on his first home, and she said: you will protect Jeno with your life, won't you, Hyuckie? That's what friends are for.)
"I could never hate you." and it's true, nevertheless. Jeno holds on to that memory more than anything. "I love you too much for that. But I wish you had told me."
"It's not that bad."
Donghyuck let out a laugh in disbelief, and Jeno looked up at him. He had lost his baseball cap a few hours before, honey-colored hair messed up by the wind, and he looked every inch of the protector he was shaped to be. "It is that bad, Jeno. The Calamity is gone, but it isn't. It is in you. How am I going to--"
He didn't finish saying that, but Jeno knew. How could Donghyuck protect Jeno from Jeno himself?
This is the story of the sidekick untold. What happens to the best friend when the hero's journey ends, when the dragon has eaten him up already, when he's the one to walk home empty-handed? What happens to the sidekick when the hero turns out to be the dragon?
"You did all you could," Jeno assured him. "You kept me alive all this time. Thank you."
Donghyuck snorted. He lied down as well. There in Albania, the sky was the bluest Jeno had ever seen. He pointed to a funny-looking cloud like he would do when they were kids, "Look," but Donghyuck was looking at his hand. He said:
"All this time I wondered what you could do. I lost nights of sleep thinking of ways to defeat everything in your name. And I thought about you dying, countless times before. But you could never die, right? Not in the hands of the Calamity, at least, because--"
He let out another laugh, and Jeno laughed with him. "I thought it was your antimatter, but it wasn't. You were the antimatter all this time, Lee Jeno. What the Calamity gave, you took. And when the Calamity gave its all, you took everything from it until there was nothing left. And you lived. You bastard of a boy. You motherfucking legend."
"You told me to do it," Jeno replied. Suddenly they were ten years old and unafraid. "You told me to take it all out. I'm sorry I wasn't allowed to give you the credit for that."
The sky was slowly painting itself pink and orange. The thing inside Jeno's belly calmed down like it had always done before. Soon enough he'd forget it was there, inside his veins, sharing space with his blood and DNA, because his cells would soon enough eat it up. That's what they told him that Jeno did. His cells ate it up, for some reason. Maybe it wasn't scientific at all and maybe it was the Universe's finger on it, but Jeno accepted that theory.
Soon enough it would be gone forever. And then it was going to be just him, no heroic purpose for the first time in seventeen years.
As Donghyuck laughed once more, Jeno knew he was ready to go move on.
"So you ate it."
Jeno nods. "You can say that, yes."
Nodding, Mark finishes tying his shoes. "I never read a story in which the villain ended up inside the hero."
"It's not inside me," Jeno responds. He presses a hand to his stomach momentaneously, just to make sure, but then reaches out to pull Mark to his feet. "Because it doesn't exist anymore. I was the filter, Mark. It was, then it went through me, and it was no more. Gone forever."
Mark nods, but he does press his hand to Jeno's stomach also, this time under his shirt. It should make him squirm and shy away from his touch, but they're past that already. Mark has touched him in other places already.
"The hero sacrifices himself to save the world because of the villain's nature, but the hero's nature brings him back to life," he says. "That's a classic, babe. Classic hero, Jeno Lee. What else now, huh?"
"The story is over," he responds in a whisper. "That's all there is."
Mark purses his lips. He takes his hand off Jeno's skin and then reaches for his hand. Jeno's never wielded a sword before, but sometimes, when Mark holds his hand, he feels like he's doing just that. He says:
"Every hero's journey comes to an end, but the hero is never truly gone. The story isn't over, because the hero lives." he smiles. "And he finds out not every quest has a dragon and its treasure waiting at the end. Which is a-okay for the worried boyfriend waiting at home."
Jeno snorts. "Maybe the dragon is at home. Maybe the dragon is the boyfriend. Maybe slaying you is my nest quest. It's a pity Hyuck threw his sword inside a wishing well in Albania."
Mark nods happily. He kisses at Jeno's knuckles and pulls him so they start walking. "So we shall see, as the story isn't over yet. But don't fret, I'm not the dragon, and I'm not the princess either. I've always been just the writer. I won't grow wings by dinner time."
Donghyuck had a sword.
Jeno didn't know things like that existed – a sword, a real sword, something he could poke with and make bleed, and he carried it on his hip like an extra limb. But Jeno figured that if the world was going to end because of an evil force and he once was able to pull it off from a haunted boy's body and several other things with his bare hands, swords might as well exist.
So Donghyuck had a sword. An extension of himself, that sword was.
He had never put it to use, though. Not that Jeno knew of. But it was a sword. Donghyuck would balance it on his knees and polish it with a cloth. Donghyuck, his knight in shining armor. Donghyuck, his best friend. Donghyuck, his protector. Donghyuck, who had always been ready to die for Jeno, and then what else?
This is the part of the story where the hero didn't feel like a hero. He felt more like a child. He had nothing to protect Donghyuck with – he was the least glorious hero ever, he shouldn't even be called that. He was just as mortal as a butterfly, and Donghyuck wasn't – Donghyuck would die for him, but he himself wouldn't die. Ever. Jeno did not think that was possible.
"Of course it's possible," Donghyuck had told him. They were sleeping in bunk beds and his sword slept beside him, and it was Jeno's birthday. Sixteen years of himself, and sixteen years since the Calamity became. Happy birthday, hero. This is your gift: "Everybody dies. But I'm not allowed to go before you go."
Jeno was shocking on his tears at that moment. He was so used to crying when no one else was around, but sometimes that extended to Donghyuck's presence. He felt like a snotty child, not sixteen. "That's a horrible thing to say."
"I know. I don't know what else to say. I am not the writer of the story."
"But I don't want you to say that ever again," Jeno demanded. Like everything else he could've asked for, Donghyuck would comply. He always did.
An hour passed, and then two, and Jeno's eyes were glued to the ceiling. He didn't like this house – he didn't like any of the houses he lived in. Thirteen in total. The Calamity found him everywhere, blossoming like an ugly flower on the ground, and they moved every year until he was able to end it.
Thirteen was the age he truly became the hero he was supposed to be, thirteen was the age he stopped running. But he didn't like this house, he was supposed to call it home, finally, but he didn't. He didn't like this house. He didn't--
"I said the wrong words, though," Donghyuck said at some point. His voice was coated with sleep, maybe choked up from crying too, but he said it anyway. "Jeno, I said them wrong. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"Don't be," Jeno replied. There was nothing in the world Donghyuck should be sorry for, except for the fact that he was stuck with Jeno, and Jeno couldn't think of a heavier burden for a child to carry.
"I am, though."
"Why?"
"Because I lied. Everybody dies, that's true. But I don't want to go before you go, so I won't."
It still felt like a horrible thing to say, but Jeno didn't like repeating himself.
"Oh, my God," Donghyuck screeches in his ear, face pressed to the side of Jeno's head, his hands gripping Jeno's jacket with all he's got. "I missed you so much."
Two years. It takes them two years, one month and fifteen days, but they're here, and Jeno looks over Donghyuck's shoulder to smile at Renjun. "I missed you too," he replies. "Both of you. I'm happy that you're here."
Not for long, though. Not for long, Jeno knows. Even after the Calamity, there is so much happiness he can have before the Universe deems it enough for now, and his best friends have plane tickets for two weeks from right fucking now, and he's had Donghyuck for a lifetime and Renjun for a considerably shorter time, so he better make every second worth it.
Thinking about it, it didn't take long for Renjun to come along as well.
Well, it did, but at the same time it didn't. Jeno felt it in his heartstrings.
He appeared on Jeno's doorstep by accident – literally, by accident. Jeno was living with his parents in a building that looked exactly like every other, the last home of all homes, and for that same reason, Renjun bumped into him by the gates.
"Renjun!" Jeno had exclaimed. He hadn't said that name out loud in so long, and didn't it taste sweet. This was two weeks after it all ended. "You're here!"
He was. And he didn't have hollow eyes anymore, and his hands weighted just the same, and it was fate, of course it was. The Universe took Huang Renjun by the hand and gave him to Jeno twice, and he was not letting go this time. "I am," he said, quite surprised at himself. "My dad got a job offer. And now that I'm not-- now that I'm not, we came." he looked up at the building, and then at the neighboring one. "I live there now."
Neighbors. Jeno now had everyone he ever cared about at arms reach. He beamed with happiness, linking his arm to Renjun's instantly. "Introduce me to your parents," he asks.
Renjun made a funny face. His cheeks were full and rosy, his eyes were full of light. "My parents know who you are. You saved my life, remember?"
He shook his head. "No. Introduce me, to your parents. As of me right now, not me back then."
It made perfect sense in Jeno's head, and even if it didn't in Renjun, he nodded, a smiling tugging at his lips.
"Alright, he said. "Let's go, then."
"You're such a fool for your friends," the blonde mess tells him, eyeing the picture of the three of them that he put inside his phone case, thrown on the grass beside him. A stranger took that picture, and it's blurry, and Jeno loves it. "That's very cute of you."
He has a name but Jeno fears that if he says it out loud too much, he'll just summon him at odd times, him and his doe eyes and the way he talks like he doesn't know who Jeno is, what Jeno has done. Which is kind of nice, actually, but Jeno's never had a friend that didn't care he was made for greatness.
Blonde mess is also pretty, and he knows that Jeno thinks he's pretty. But he talks like he doesn't know. And that's why he's unreachable, and that's why Jeno has to remind himself of that every now and then.
This is a problem. The problems are piling up. Jeno blurts out: "Why, thank you." because his mother raised him right, but it sounds more like a question than anything.
It makes blonde mess laugh, and he starts randomly plucking the chords of his guitar and making songs as he goes. He's good at that. Jeno thinks he is one of those people that are just good at everything without trying much, and he envies him a little bit for that.
His name is (Jeno lets out a shaky breath, looking down at the book on his lap, the one he's been trying to read, and failing miserably) Mark. They share their last name, as well as a dorm room. They also share a liking for this spot on the garden at their university. And they've shared so many thoughts late at night, but every time they do it, Jeno pretends they didn't.
It's been two years and five months since he left. He's allowing himself to wait for something real instead of throwing himself out there, trouble-seeking as he was supposed to be.
Blonde mess hums something under his breath timidly. It'll take around twenty minutes of this until he starts singing out loud, some song that Jeno doesn't know, and he'll dedicate it to him because of that, solely. So you get to know some quality stuff, roomie . But he'll have to wait.
Jeno has taken a liking in waiting, recently. He doesn't mind it at all.
The Calamity?
One fact about it: It talked to him all the time.
Donghyuck told him it was madness. The Calamity didn't talk, it just was. Things that simply are can't talk, or something like that, Jeno refused to listen. He was not crazy. He, for one, wasn't allowed to be crazy – so he listened. He listened to it all the time, calling to him like a siren calls a sailor, like a siren lures a sailor into swimming in cold waters, jumping onto his death.
In Albania, at age seventeen, Jeno thought he was going to die like that. Far from home, there was no home, and the only sense of belonging he ever had, he got from the thing that was killing the world in his name. He was going to die like that, and he was going to like it.
How fitting for a hero. Graceful, even, to die at the end of it all knowing he fulfilled his destiny. But he didn't die. He reached out with both hands and the Calamity was gone, and he didn't die. It hurt like a bitch, but he didn't die, and he listened to it as it went through him and never again.
This is your unbecoming, it said. It was the last thing it ever said. He thinks about it sometimes.
The unbecoming of Lee Jeno, in the strict sense of the word. He used to be, and in that moment he was unbecoming. Like tearing down a piece of clothing line by line, knot by knot, un-becoming. He was unbecoming. He thought death was unbecoming but it wasn't, death was just not being anymore, and this was him, unbecoming.
He could put himself together if he wanted to. He could become something that wasn't made up by others – something that he could build himself. With his own hands. The becoming of Lee Jeno on his own terms, finally.
Jeno opened his eyes. He asked: "Did it work?"
"Ah, hello, roomie!!" says the voice at the door, as Jeno has just begun putting his clothes on one of his drawers. This dorm is nice, better than his first, and he just can't wait for his second year at college. "I didn't know you were moving in today, so please don't mind my mess. I'm not usually like this, I promise."
He did notice his roommate had arrived before him – his side of the room was already set up with high shelves filled with fantasy books and comics, a guitar hanging on the wall, dozens of socks needing to be folded on top of the bed and stashes of music sheets on the desk alongside computer cables and a funny looking keyboard. Jeno didn't mean to pry, but he does have a pair of eyes – he'd never met a music major before, or someone that had displayed of Taylor Swift's albums on their shelf like their greatest possession.
"It's fine," he chuckles, pushing the last of his shirts onto the drawer to get up and introduce himself. "Although I did find your copy of Eragon in my bed. I left it in yours."
The roommate lets out a laugh, closing the door behind him. When Jeno turns around, he's met with a bright smile and a mop of freshly dyed hair being pushed under a snapback, eyes looking at him in expectation. He extends a hand: "I'm Jeno. You must be--"
"Mark!" says the roommate. The weight of his hand on Jeno's is that of a sword, balanced just for him somehow. "It's nice finally meeting you. I'm looking forward to this new chapter with you, roomie."
Jeno smiles: "I make your words my own."