Chapter Text
Sehyoon’s eyes fixate on the closed pair of another’s as he thumbs the shallow hills of cheeks once spilled onto over and over. He almost wishes he could feel that wetness now, but even his own gaze, usually pinched by a smile, is long drained, and instead, glazed over by a mask of apathy. Maybe it’s the tiredness that creeps up from his eye-bags to the wrinkle between his brows that gives him that half-beaten look. Funny, he’d rather be fully beaten than here. Not ‘here’ physically—physically he can barely handle a second out of this building, even though he’ll have to leave soon—but ‘here’ situationally.
How did he end up here?
His fingers skim through bleached locks that resemble outside’s weather as much as the head underneath it: pale, dry, and so still, holding onto a last slither of life. Pushing it out of the way, he thinks back to the first kiss, or rather, the first few, as awkwardly as first kisses can go.
It was in their old high school’s bathroom, as there were hardly any other places to keep secret. He remembers the other combing back his bangs when they were overgrown and covering his eyes all the time.
“Sehyoon,” Yuchan feels his own shyness losing to overwhelming excitement. “Have you kissed anyone before?”
The aforementioned melts into a powerful blush. “No! When would I even… have the opportunity…” He hits Yuchan on the shoulder accusingly. “What, have you?”
“In seventh grade I kissed the prettiest girl in class.”
Sehyoon coughs out a laugh. “Oh my God why would you-“
“Peer pressure,” Yuchan interrupts. “Or… not really. One of my friends called me gay. The girl slapped me in the face though.” He tries to tickle away Sehyoon’s sympathetic frown, only to learn that the boy is completely immune and unimpressed.
“Yuchan! I’ll slap you in the face!”
Unthreatened, Yuchan corners him against the sink and presses a few pecks to his cheeks until he gives in.
Sehyoon’s first kiss is kind of uncomfortable and oddly wet, but far from awkward. It’s kind of funny, like Yuchan. Everything is funny to Yuchan.
“What if someone sees us?”
“I didn’t take you to the least romantic place in the world to get caught by some homophobe during last period class.”
Yuchan’s eyes have a mischievous twinkle that Sehyoon knows is just hiding embarrassment. It’s always about hiding embarrassment with these two, between giggles and banter and hacks to the chest. However, this moment is a complete U-turn from that, like a break to shut them both up, and Sehyoon just wants to capture that twinkle and lock it up in the night skies of his mind.
Yuchan leans in again, his hand finding purchase on the curve of Sehyoon’s back, and gives him a second kiss that’s ten times slower and a hundred times sweeter. Yuchan knows it was in fact quite difficult to be gay and under the microscope of friends, teachers, and even parents that might not give punishment a second thought. But I wouldn’t mind the ridicule if it were with you.
Sehyoon has taken over by the end of it, and Yuchan can’t help but look up in awe at his overtaken confidence. “You’re cute.”
“I want a refund,” and Sehyoon is shoving the boy out of the washroom door.
Sehyoon’s thoughts are interrupted by the twitch of a colder hand in his, accompanied by the increased pace of the heart monitor beside them. He represses the jump of his own breath as the body next to him, tangled in wires and sleep, shifts for the first time in four days. Or was it five?
A dried out voice produces something feigning the sound of his name and he gently clasps his partner’s hand to his heart.
“I’m right here.”
Soothingly, he brushes more hair from the other’s eyes as they adjust to the hospital room’s light.
“Yuchan.”
A grumbled sigh leaves ghostly chapped lips, and Sehyoon winces at Yuchan’s pain like it’s his own.
“Hyung…” It’s both soft and rough, like brittle ice. Sehyoon knows Yuchan wishes he could talk more, to ask what day it is and if he’s eaten, but he can barely get passed processing the thought. With some effort, his hand reaches up to wipe a tear that Sehyoon hasn't realized he‘s let out. Yuchan is still his battery, and maybe he no longer feels too tired to cry a little. He whispers his intentions, even though they’ve never really changed. I love you.
The nurses will be here before he knows it, but if it’s close to their last moment together he wants it to himself. Even if the soundtrack of their love story is hospital monitors and hushed affections and breaths stolen by pain rather than kisses, he wants it to be with Yuchan.
From Sehyoon’s inattentive position on the frameless mattress, he hears his door open, followed by the creak of a wooden floorboard and a body making itself at home across his back. The weight of it is perpendicular to his own and comfortably warm, though he makes a rebellious act to flinch.
“What are you drawing?”
He already made assumptions on the voice’s identity from the call downstairs moments ago by his mother, informing the guest’s arrival. Still, he makes an effort to shield his sketchbook like he’s even allowed to be ashamed of it. The latter wants to remind him that he isn’t, or maybe it’s curiosity that causes arms to fold over Sehyoon in a tackle, and he barely recalls when the younger surpassed his height. Despite the fact, Sehyoon is much stronger, and pushes the offender off his back, watching an assortment of long limbs tumble off the bed, cheap markers following suit.
Yuchan is so loud and so exaggerated, he disturbs the last remnants of peace in the air.
“Hey!”
Sehyoon is giggling and leaning over his elbows, watching Yuchan scramble to his knees and fight a blush at the sound. Sehyoon’s laugh is always so soft and never forced, unlike his own, and he makes it his mission to keep it that way. It always amazes Yuchan how someone so awkward and closed off could turn out to be so free in the vastness of his mind. Yuchan thinks there’s no measure to how far one could travel through it, but as years pass he can catch another leak from it every day, and it springs a blossom of joy through him. He will never not be curious of what Sehyoon is thinking, and never under-appreciate how Sehyoon keeps so level-headed in the midst of it all.
Yuchan plays with Sehyoon’s hands and sings out a song that he heard on the radio, changing the lyrics as he goes.
“You’re the zebra in my lion king movie,
You’re the stripes on my back when I’m groovy,
Won’t you give your book to me? Give it all~
I just wanna see.”
Sehyoon is giggling so much his fingers give in, and Yuchan is awarded with access, the page still turned to what he was working on. He admires the mess of a portrait, colours outlining where edges would end, and ugliness made beautiful by the style. Sehyoon’s mind takes him all over the place, but when he’s nose deep in his sketchbook, it guides his hands instead, and Yuchan admires how the limited pages are the only visual way to capture the essence of it. Even on paper, it’s not meant to be understood, but freed and expressed.
Sehyoon doesn’t tell Yuchan that the portrait is of him.
“Ah, you’re here, perfect. I’d like to speak with you.”
Sehyoon tries not to look defeated as he walks out of Yuchan’s room at the summoning of a doctor. It’s not the first time he’s seen her, but his mind is too fatigued to swarm with whatever kind of news or instructions she might have.
The halls of the hospital are deafeningly quiet, save for the beeping of all kinds of monitors from the long stretch of rooms. The stench of over-sanitation and squeaked floors upsets his stomach, like they’re trying to hide tragedy with bleach. He passes a hallway that visitors are not allowed into, where they’ll probably take Yuchan later. The aura around it seems to pull you in like a trap that you don’t know you’ll be able to escape.
They step into an office at the other end of the floor. The doctor’s walls are decorated in framed degrees, a PhD, and other papers of the like. A surgeon.
“Any questions before we begin?” she says, taking a seat in the comfort of her rolling chair. “You seem tired, are you sleeping enough?”
“Enough,” is all he says. He’s polite, but honestly just wants her to beat around the bush. Producing full sentences requires so much thinking, and Sehyoon doesn’t want to think about anything right now.
She twirls a pen that she’s probably holding for no reason, and it reminds him of Yuchan’s own habit. Trying to appear more presentable (and less tired), he pushes the thought away.
“I’ll start with the bad news. Mr. Kang is really trying his best out there, fighting the fight, he’s very strong-minded but…” Sehyoon doesn’t want to look at her already, “his case was hard to begin with. I’m sorry Mr. Kim. However.” She puts her pen down and rotates her computer screen into Sehyoon’s view. “We're not entirely out of options. Your match results are in.”
Without really being able to process what’s on the screen, he looks at it, intaking what she’s about to say next.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this procedure?”
He’s filled with something. Hope? A second chance?
She continues, “We’ll have to go through more stuff to fill out and the all the steps, not to mention a team meeting...”
Maybe Yuchan wouldn’t want him to miss this much school, but he’s already decided. “I want it.”
She shrinks further behind her desk, and pauses. Her mouth hangs slightly open like she’s trying to fill the spaces where Sehyoon’s reasoning may have run thin. “I want to contact his family first.”
Sehyoon almost jumps at the mention of them, but she completes the thought.
“Not for permission, he’s old enough and still… responsive… for consent.” She urges Sehyoon to look her dead in the eye and understand her intentions. “They were more likely a match to begin with, Mr. Kim.”
Hyperaware of the roar of the air-conditioning like the impossible determination in his mind, he wills himself forward. “Yuchan wouldn’t want that.”
“I can ask him that.”
He tenses his whole body, and she gives him a look of understanding to contrast her assertiveness.
“I was going to require his consent on all this anyway.”
There’s no way Sehyoon could let that happen. Yuchan is in too dire of a condition to have to worry about him. He thinks of his partner, his entire world wrapped up in blankets of impossible exhaustion, back perked up so the nurses could feed him water as he gave Sehyoon an unreadable look as he walked out of the room moments ago. He thinks Yuchan wanted to lift his head, wish Sehyoon a better life, or maybe apologize. Yuchan is everything good in the world, and Sehyoon never wants him feeling so sorry and worthless at the mercy of himself.
He thinks of Yuchan’s family, so kind but unforgiving, so warm but relentless, and thinks back to the day he had to see it all unfold.
In a maze of farewells, Sehyoon steps out of dance practice about to confront the blockade of messages on his phone when he faces a teenager grasping his bike, covered in a sheen of sweat and what Sehyoon suspects were once tears.
When Yuchan makes no move for words or even eye-contact, Sehyoon walks forward with the clicking of the bike’s wheels trailing beside him. He feels worry bottling quickly in his stomach and just follows the shape of the building. He won’t stop staring at Yuchan, feeling his heart fall with every heave the other makes. Sehyoon assumes he’d arrived only moments before, and an idea lingers up his spine on why.
The rear of the dance studio faces fenced off trees, and as Yuchan leans his bike against the weaved wires, Sehyoon takes him into a hug.
The night before, Yuchan had messaged him in panic about a polaroid he found in his parents’ room. Yuchan assumes his brother had been snooping through his wallet and that’s why they found it in the open, because him and Sehyoon are very careful of their relationship. Maybe not careful enough. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken photo evidence of themselves to begin with.
Either way, Sehyoon is feeling like he should’ve skipped Saturday morning practice.
They end up hunched forward on the grass as Sehyoon tries to coax Yuchan’s breathing. Yuchan wants to scream and cry and explode all at once, but everything is getting caught in his throat, suffocating his lungs and blackening his vision. His palms shake in the grasp of the other’s, and Sehyoon can only do so much to hold Yuchan down to the earth. Whines and pleas escape Yuchan’s mouth without realizing, like a prayer of tongues to escape his own mind. The whole world shakes, almost literally, and he doesn’t want to say goodbye to everything he knows. He realizes he never knew the consequences of anything—of growing up, of loving Sehyoon, of making it this far—everything was based off a whim that they could escape the confines of their town and their parents, and he wants to regret, to break up, to forget that he’s gay and forget that all of this ever happened.
As soon as the words can come back to him, he tries, “I’m sorry.”
Sehyoon is shaking his head and he falls into Yuchan’s embrace. “Nothing was ever your fault.”
“My parents will probably call yours.”
Sehyoon doesn’t know what that would mean for them. He doesn’t care.
Tears, as they are now able to fall, soak into Sehyoon’s t-shirt.
We should break up, Yuchan wants to say. I can still try with them. Go home while you can.
“Seh-“
“I love you,” Sehyoon declares. “I don’t know what will happen, but I don’t want to do any of it without you.”
Yuchan’s worries are building and shattering in his mind like glass, the shards piercing holes into his gut. It’s faint, but Sehyoon’s words echo in his ears along with the beating of his heart, bringing it back down. His shaking has changed from a shivering fear to released sobs. Tears spill quickly and Sehyoon squeezes him tighter. He’s able to quiet down and just hug Sehyoon for real; hug him because he loves him, because he trusts every word and every moment they’ve ever shared. Sehyoon rubs his back until there’s nothing else but the two of them breathing and existing in this world.
After Sehyoon pulls Yuchan to his feet, he jumps the fence, and Yuchan doesn’t spare a second to consider the bicycle he’s leaving behind.
Sehyoon doesn’t receive it at the time, but in that moment he gets a message from his mother saying he can bring Yuchan home for the night.