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Chapter Text

Dong-il tore open the door to the coffee shop, the aggressive tug so abrupt that the small chiming bell at the top elicited a strangled second of clinking metal before giving up as the door slammed closed behind the boy. He stood in the dim light of the café, squinting over the darkness at a silhouetted figure behind the counter and stomper over. The figure was a boy, a bit taller and broader, who froze when Dong-il had managed his way over before the cash register.

“I want a flat white, please” he grit out, the please at the end doing nothing to soften the tone of his voice whatsoever.

The boy stared back wordlessly. “I’m sorry what?”

Dong-il turned to the board behind the barista and began scanning the menu, looking for the drink so he could tell the obvious newcomer, who he didn’t recognize because honestly if he had seen this boy before – on a day not full of the hapless, impulsive transgressions of today and if Dong-il was being honest with himself – he would have dead lock hit on. But today wasn’t that day and so he scanned for the price to inform the unknowing hire so he could be out of here as quickly as possible. A look of visible confusion passed over his face as he came in contact with the colorfully scrawled scrap of construction paper taped to the bottom underneath all the normal drinks and milks and such.

“You changed over to the fall menus?” Dong-il breathed out, not exactly a question and not exactly meant for the other boy’s ears at all.

The barista didn’t say a thing, hands frozen in the air, halted from whatever he had previously been doing.

“What a fucking day!” Dong-il just let himself snap. “Do you understand what you did?” he threw at the poor gawking boy. “Do you understand that above all else, today of all days, I do not have the mental capacity to deal with this right now?”

“Uh…” the barista faltered.

“You fucking chose today? Fucking TODAY?” he continued, moving to slam his hands down on the flat surface of the counter and then thinking better and simply letting his hands fly through the air like jets, swinging through the air in a rocketing motion. “Why did it have to be today?”

“Hey,” the boy interrupted. “Can I help you?”

“I JUST WANTED A GODDAMN FLAT WHITE AND YOU VULGAR FASCISTS HAVE TO PLACATE THE AUTUMN ESTABLISHMENT OF CAPITALISM AND-”

The boy leaned forward, a hand extended, fingers having crawled it across the counter to stop before Dong-il and causing him to quiet at the sight of it.

“Are you going to order a drink?” the boy asked.

Dong-il breathed in some of deepening, darkening air of the late hour into his lungs, grasping for a chilled calm to take over and scanned the tiny tacked on autumn menu. His eyes settled on something and he turned back to the shadowed boy, cheekbones sharp in the weird amber light above the register and nothing else.

“Can I have a dirty chai then?”

The other didn’t answer.

“What?” Dong-il pried, more annoyed now at the situation than what had previously been plaguing him.

The boy just stood there a moment, his tongue poking into the inside of his cheek as his eyes drifted to the side of the room and then back to Dong-il’ face once more with a contrived look of sympathy. “I really don’t want to say.”

“What?”

“We, um…” he started, hesitating at the other’s glare.

Dong-il continued to give him an indignant glare, unabashedly letting his eyes narrow at the stranger and perhaps settling it further into his features for no real reason at all. He wasn’t what people would normally call an intimidating person either; he felt great satisfaction at having the other falter in front of him. It was this newfound vindictive agitation he found faced with tonight.

The barista seemed to mull it over and then decide to just let it out and see what would happen. “We’re out of that right now,” he finished.

“GODDAMMIT!” Dong-il yelled.

“Listen…” the boy sighed, leaning further over the table toward the other, hip connecting with the counter and propping his body sideways at a confidently casual lilt. “If you stop yelling, I’ll go make you a drink, okay? What do you want?”

Dong-il responded with an unintelligible grumble that rolled off his tongue like choppy white caps in the sea ramming into rocky cliffs.

“Excuse me?”

“A flat white,” he repeated, enunciated and loader.

If Dong-il didn’t know any better he would have sworn that the look he received in response was one of someone who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, maybe in this particular moment for the first time ever. That was it, Dong-il thought. That was precisely it. This boy, this cocky self-assured joke of a barista floundering about the store without any help or aid was someone who had never felt uncertain, never felt confused or unsure. He was a boy used to getting his way, all in due course from the humble results of competence, but he wasn’t used to the very specific emotion which shuddered cross his face in that moment.

The boy stopped and swallowed before drawing his arms back to his own body and dropping some of the performative charm and asking, “What’s in that?”

Dong-il looked at him, raging in his mind but then staring to feel empathy for the poor, obviously undertrained new employee, and really, completely, honestly, he didn’t want to still be there having this conversation any more than the other. “Just give me a latte,” he answered, giving in to the situation.

“Alright,” the boy pushed back and clapped his hands together. “That I can do. Just go sit over there okay?” he pointed toward the closest table with an elongated finger, heavy golden ring setting
at the nub of the knuckle and glinting off the tiny haze of light in the dark space.

Dong-il simply nodding in answer and extracted himself from the strange boy’s gaze, transporting himself on the shuffled steps of a madman toward said table and kicking out a leg to hook a chair’s leg which he then tugged out into the empty café and plopped himself into with a contented breath. He let his gaze trail across the coffee shop, eyes hooking on the edges of table and signs and counter as if he were running a hand along a ribbed surface and his hand caught, momentarily, in the lip of each ridge before continuing onward. He slid of the space, a different feeling settling over him as he watched and subconsciously took inside his chest every tiny detail of the familiar space, which, in that moment, hardly felt familiar at all. His mind drifted back to earlier, to the head-pounding headache of an alarm’s beating rhythm in his head, to the aching soles of his feet as they pounded relentlessly foot after foot after foot upon a concrete path to god knows where, to the screams and the shouts and the calls and the –

The boy was suddenly there, gingerly placing a drink upon the table, with a smile and hesitant lingering fingers. He was sliding a steaming drink toward Dong-il and then slotting his own weary body into the chair across from where Dong-il sat.

“Don’t you have other customers?” he inquired, eyes flitting to the soulless tables and the lifeless streets outside.

“We’re closed actually.”

Dong-il allowed himself to pry and sat his curious mind a bit more and noticing that it was indeed too deep in the night to be any sane, usual hour and that yes indeed there was only the waning wakefulness of the two gracing the café.

“Oh,” he murmured, staring down into the new drink, foam and steam wafting up to his face in a vaguely warm comfort. “I called you a fascist, didn’t I?” he said after a moment.

“Yes, you did,” the boy’s hair bounded as he laughed the words out, tipping a few stray strands over one another in a wrestling tumble. “I can’t say it’s ever happened before.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You want to tell me what’s wrong?” the boy asked, and there was an untraceable sincerity in the other’s eyes that had Dong-il really wondering who exactly he was.

He took an exaggeratedly prolonged sip of the latte before him, swigging down the coffee like a delirium induced thirst. What he expected was to contort at the heat of it, not to viscerally wince at the worst taste which had ever graced his tongue.

“Is that a no?” the boy pressed, intrigued by the silence. “Okay.”

They sat there in companionate silence for a moment, Dong-il adamantly deciding to leave his barely touched coffee on the table and choosing to heat his hands around the outside like those little packets he used to stuff in his ski boots as a kid. “I think I did something stupid,” he answered once the clock had managed to produce a healthy amount of ticks a myriad of unstrung tocks.

“And what would that be?” the barista asked. “Like an I accidentally the missed the bus kind of thing or I accidentally joined an online cult kind of thing?”

Dong-il huffed and made eye contact with the unknown boy. “Like a committed a minor crime for the sake of humour and/or convenience,” he admitted.

“Did you commit a minor crime for the sake of humour and/or convenience?”

“…maybe.”

The boy’s face erupted in a glaringly perfect, wide smile. “What would that even be? Where the hell is an overlap between humour and convenience?”

“They are,” Dong-il paused eyes falling over the window behind his head. “…surprisingly related,” he finished nodding along with the words thoughtfully.

“Learn something new every day,” the boy answered wistfully.

“Hey,” Dong-il interrupted the other’s daydream. “What time is it?”

The boy’s brow furrowed. “You don’t know what time it is?”

“No.”

“Just about 9,” he responded.

Dong-il recalled an earlier detail, and then again even still something from his many trips to this exact café and let himself eye the sign on the door and reading the backwards, back-lit letters through the glass of the window from his position. 9-5: their hours had always and forever and unchangingly been 9-5.

He returned to the boy across the table, terrible, awful coffee sat steaming between them and the lopsided and entirely indulgent grin of the other seeming out of place.

“Why are you still here?” Dong-il asked the boy.

“No reason,” he replied. “Just haven’t locked up yet.”

Without meaning to, Dong-il had someone audibly mused the word, “Suspicious.”

“Okay, fine,” the barista smiled and again Dong-il was reminded, that had the circumstances been different he would have been fumbling and falling head over heels for the new barista. “I was also committing minor crimes for humorous and convenient purposes,” the boy answered.

Dong-il couldn’t help but let the laugh bubbling up from his chest erupt into the dark, empty space, piercing through the clam, still air like an air. “Your coffee is shit by the way,” he added.

The boy shrugged.

Something in Dong-il stopped then, something had been nagged at his subconscious, tiny little stubborn talons and an effectively pointed claw. “Oh my god” he breathed glancing between the unlocked door, the closing time, the open register. “You’re fucking robbing it.”

The boy’s eyes widened a fraction before being replaced by the mask of decorum the nest second.

“No,” he said. “I work here.”

“No,” Dong-il answered. “You’re robbing it.”

They held each other’s eyes between the two of them, strong and unnervingly connected… on both their parts.

“You don’t know what a flat white is,” Dong-il said.

“People can not know that!” the boy defended with a shaky chuckle.

“Yeah, people,” Dong-il stressed. “Not baristas at coffee shops where I have previously bought that exact drink.” He stopped a second and sighed, a deep aggravated sigh that started in his gut and hefted the breath out of his chest and eventually exhaled itself. “God, you’re not even wearing a name tag!” he lamented, gesturing to the other’s shirt.

“People don’t wear name tags to rob stores,” the boy simply replied.

“What am I supposed to do?” Dong-il groaned, dropping his forehead onto the table. “I’m way too tired to deal with this right now.”

“You don’t really have to do anything.”

Dong-il picked up his head from the table and glanced at the impossibly tranquil boy. “You’re a criminal,” he simply said.

“Did you not, about two minutes ago, tell me you had committed a crime?”

“I said maybe!”

The boy made a noise in the back of his throat half between a hum and a scoff that just so emotionally grated on Dong-il.

“You’re robbing a café!” he yelled. “How can I be the untrustworthy one?”

“You know my crime,” the boy answered nonchalantly. “I don’t know yours.”

“Why on earth would I tell you?”

The nameless barista leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and relaxing down into the chair, muscles slackening and a lazy grin popping up on his face. “I did make you a drink.”

“IT SUCKED!”

Dong-il placed his palms on the table and pushed from it moving toward the door. The chair scraped across the floor, skidding against the floorboards as the boy abruptly stood and lunged for the door, running tiny frantic steps across the step to dart out his arm and hold the door closed, effectively blocking Dong-il from masking an exit.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“If it’s not already glaringly apparent. You’re really bad at this.”

“I mean… I haven’t been caught yet.”

Dong-il allowed himself the small fraction of a second of impulse to laugh at the other, to laugh at the utter ridiculous of the night and at whatever teetered precarious sanity had not yet made him call the police. No, maybe it was the unfairly bright eyes of the unnamed boy, the deceptively charming air which rolled of his shoulders, or the- no, actually, Dong-il thought. It was probably the afore mentioned reason he had ever sauntered in, irked beyond every definition of the word, so much so that had completely the fact that this random Adonis of a boy was committing low level burglary that made him not want to alert of the authorities of his presence and his whereabouts.

“Not like I’m walking into coffee shops at night and being so unashamedly distracted by my own alleged criminal activity to notice they’re being actively robbed,” the boy mocked, leaning into his shoulder, into the door.

“Okay, that’s unfair!”

The barista raised an eyebrow, all suave and smooth and ridiculously at peace with the fact that he was blocking inside, in the technicalities of the sense keeping a hostage, as he blundered about a coffee shop snatching bills and coins and espresso out of cupboards.

“Is it?” the boy asked.

Dong-il ignored him and reached his hand out to the door handle, finally, and reluctant he might like to add, giving the other boy a glance as it refused to budge. The barista’s, no not the barista Dong-il had to remind himself, the thief’s arm was still running parallel to the floor along the expanse of the door, his weight propping it closed.

“Are you going to move?”

The boy smirked. “No.”

Dong-il’s grip tightened, fingers encircling further around the handle in exasperation. “Is it because you think I’m going to tell?” he grit out.

The strange boy leaned into the door and titled his head to the side in the very same way every boy with money and a future ever did in a bar in a big city with a wad of cash in his pocket, which, to be fair, the latter was definitely and very blatantly true.

“It’s because I’m curious,” the boy of ambiguous grayed morale responded.

Dong-il flung his arms out in a hapless gesture as that spanned from one fingertip to the other that he hoped relayed his point of baffled confusion.

“Come on,” the boy coaxed. “Tell me what you did.”

“Did I not, explicitly state,” Dong-il started, hand dropping from the door to go and frantically, wildly wave at his side, “that that was a bad idea even before I realized you were a thief!”

The boy, the fake barista, the imposter, and the thief smiled. This boy, this boy so good-looking he hated his guts and his face and his arms, seemed to be enjoying the game of whatever was going on and yes Dong-il knew the other presumed a game.

“What?!” he bellowed, throwing his hands in the air the smile gracing the other’s face and the silence stretching after his question.

“You said thief,” the boy laughed. “It’s cute.”

“I cannot even begin to believe this.”

The jarring wail of what Dong-il assumed to be that telltale shriek of police sirens sounded in the not-so-distant distance and had him jumping in his skin. All of a sudden there was a hand, extended in offer before him. Dong-il looked at the hand and then up at the face holding it out, the goddamn crystal clear sparkling eyes offering it.

“What do you say?” the boy asked.

Dong-il peeked over his shoulder at the oncoming lights and the sirens and the tormented frenzy of the city street and then back to the easy smile on the boy in front of him and he decided if he was ever going to regret anything it might as well be this and so he slid his hand into the other’s palm and nodded.

“My name’s Changmin by the way,” the boy said. “And we really need to get going.”

Chapter Text

“Oh it’s raining again,” Dongil murmured, as they stepped out through the back of the shop and into the faint dripping sky.

He leaned his head up the dark expanse above them and closed it his eyes as the tiny droplets fell down onto his upturned face. It would have been soothing if not for the glaring, blaring siren of a single police car parked before the café, a mere building’s length away from them. There was a streetlamp hanging off the back of the coffee shop and illuminating the garbage bins beside the metal door. Dongil felt the silence of the other boy and turned to look at him.

“I know you,” Changmin said.

Dongil paused, eyes widening and mouth falling open in a tiny circle as he processed the situation. “No, you don’t,” he said.

“No, I definitely know you,” Changmin continued, laser focused on the other’s face. “You look so familiar.”

“I must have one of those faces.”

“No, but I could swear I-”

A voice came through the door, a yelling a voice of authority and demand that neither boy wanted to be met with and then stopped, glancing at each other briefly, before they both took off down the dark alley, sprinting from the small café and watching the tiny light fade into the night behind them. Dongil just cursed himself down deep for the stupidly propelled impulse which had ripped his makeshift life out of his hands and was now necessitating running down a random alley with an unknown boy, an unknown boy who had just been robbing his favorite café, and towards an infinite uncertain nothingness that came with running away from everything and toward nothing.

They made it about two or three blocks away, relentless and unstopped until Changmin slowed his pumping legs and decided they both needed a break. He leaned against the side of a chain link fence as the rain began to pelt harder, catching his breath. Dongil stopped too, he wasn’t sure why, and propped himself next to the other along the curb, kicking some littered cardboard from his path and shrinking back from the heavier pour that rained down. Changmin gave him a look and then shrugged off his sweatshirt, offering it to the other.

“But I-” Dongil stopped at the boy’s glaring insistence and reluctantly accepted the fabric, pulling it over his head to avoid the cold rain.

“You know the alarm didn’t go off, right?” Changmin said after a moment.

Dongil let his head roll over, still in contact with the fence where it rested in a light exhaustion. “What?”

“The alarm,” Changmin repeated. “It didn’t go off.”

He waited for the boy to elaborate, to explain what the hell he meant by that, and when he didn’t, choosing to remain neutral and tight lipped, Dongil pressed on. “Then how did they-”
Changmin raised his eyebrow and simply looked at him.
Dongil picked up on the boy’s reasoning and turned away with a huff, pushing away and starting to walk down the rest of the alley alone.

“Wait, come on,” Changmin called out, that tell-tale bouncing rattle of metal and reverberation falling at the back of Dongil’s and precluding Changmin’s hand on his shoulder. “Aren’t you the guy who-”

“Look,” Dongil whipped around. “It’s not technically kidnapping if you do it to yourself, right?”

“I mean I couldn’t really say,” the boy laughed. “I’m not exactly a lawyer.”

That gained a pissed off look from Dongil and a grumbled remark the other didn’t quite catch over the rush of rain. Dongil attempted to continued down the road, letting the wet sky cry and mat his down his hair in a soaking river that flowed from on high right down on the two boys stood frozen in the moonlight. He looked down at the abrupt halt of his body and saw Changmin’s hand on wrapped tightly around his wrist. He looked back up into Changmin’s eyes, squinting through the rain.

“The minor crime?”

Dongil snatched his hand away, but didn’t leave. “Are you this nosy with everyone you evade the police with?” he asked

“I mean, yeah” Changmin shrugged with an annoyingly perfect grin. “It’s kind of the perfect situation to be curious, don’t you think?”

There was one singular thought running through Dongil’s head and it wasn’t the reason he had been caught, it wasn’t the reason he was currently here at all, it was how stupidly sparkling Changmin’s eyes were when he smiled. Maybe that’s why he had followed him. Maybe that’s why he had let himself trail after someone he had no reason, less than no reason in fact, to trust. And so he let himself be caught.

“I might have blown my already fragile cover because I wanted to taunt my replacement in the film and let him know the only reason he got it was because I had to fake my own death,” he answered.

“Didn’t do a very good job of that, did you?” Changmin teased and yes, there was no way in hell he didn’t know who exactly Dongil was and what he was running from.

The whole city mourned, no, the whole country. A tragedy they said. It scrawled itself in bold block letters at the top runner of every newspaper, in every language, in every store. There were talk shows and bereavement hotlines sponsored by his agency. An independent, fan run vigil outside his old apartment. It seemed, for a while that people believed him. but then the conspiracy theories came and they took hold of those small little details no one had ever bothered to look before because they were too distracted that their favorite actor had disappeared without a trace and presumed deceased. And it would have been fine, Dongil convinced himself that despite the haphazard planning and the sloppy execution it would have been fine. But the police, oh the police, in some stupid P.R. move centered around ‘being more approachable’ and ‘not wanting to anger half of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful residents’ had reopened the case. They fucking reopened it. And, from that moment forward, Dongil hadn’t been dead. He had been missing.

“Like FUCK,” Dongil groaned. “He’s just so cocky about it all How was I supposed to let him get away with that?”

“I-” Changmin floundered.

“Do you remember,” Dongil interrupted with a bitter chuckle. “Remember when he used my death to soak up the publicity?! The tragedy of the decade and this young snot nosed brat comes riding in on the back of the wave like a goddamn savior! I didn’t even like him!” Dongil yelled. “We weren’t even friends!”

“So you blew it because you wanted to mock him?”

“Needed,” the boy corrected. “I really needed to mock him.”

“Just to be clear we’re talking about Heechan, right?”

“God, don’t say his name,” Dongil breathed out.

“Oh, right,” the boy’s head dripped down and then up again, a plaster of long black hair framing his face in a distractingly aesthetic setting. “Sorry.”
Dongil sighed and almost said something, almost told him he was sorry for thrusting all of his emotional rollercoaster onto the other before a siren interrupted him and had them both jumping out of their skin.

“So, uh, having established that they may in fact be here for you-” Changmin began.

“Can we go?” Dongil asked, shoulders tensing at the cycling rhythm of the siren and the now tense rolling energy suffocating him.

“That’s what I… you know what nevermind. Yeah, come on. I know a place.”

They made their way through a labyrinth of unfamiliar streets and passages, all building into a mesh of confusing steel and asphalt and the back of Changmin’s head, soaked through and glistening under each light they passed.

“Can I ask you why you were robbing the store?” Dongil asked.

Changmin glanced over his shoulder as he continued onward, turning around a corner into another alley, a habitual path guiding him without much thought. “Sure go ahead.”

“Okay. Why were you robbing the store?”

“I needed the money.”

“Wanted?”

“No,” Changmin stopped walking for a second and glanced at Dongil. “Needed,” he added and then started forward again.

It was silent then as they came to stop a few feet into the alley. Dongil didn’t even look up but stared right into Changmin’s eyes.

“Can I ask you a question?” the boy asked.

Dongil nodded wordlessly.

“Why did you do it?”

A stiffness overtook Dongil’s features and his hands balled up into defense fists at his side, the question very visibly making him wary. “You just can’t ask that one,” he answered.

“… well,” Changmin huffed and then moved to tug open the door beside him before motioning inside with his arm. “We’re here.”

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting but an old, seemingly abandoned, movie theater to greet him when he stepped inside. There was a worn concrete floor stretching out before them barren, which used to be green or blue or whatever color it was faded and peeling off the floor. There was a small stage right inside the back door, below what must have used to be the projection screen, scattered with instruments and discarded clothes and water bottles.

“You’re in a band,” Dongil said, eyeing the littered stage.

Changmin grunted as he heaved himself up and onto the platform, turning round and round for a second as he searched for the end of particular chord laid across the space like a limp snake. “Yeah.”

“Did you try to become a walking cliché?”

Changmin must have found what he was looking for, bending over to run his hands along the black wire, following the thing, picking it up and dropping it behind as he progress toward a small plug at the base of the amp, unhooked.

“What do you mean?” the boy asked, kneeling before the amp and shoving the silver nob at the end inside.

“You’re a thief,” Dongil started, faltering for a second at Changmin’s teasing smile which erupted the second he said the word and was thrown over the other’s shoulder from where he crouched a few feet away. “And you’re in a band,” he continued.

“Is that an accusation?’

“Do you smoke?” Dongil blurted, leaning into the sold pillar at the side by the stairs to the stage. “Do you have bad boy trauma too?”

Changmin didn’t answer him, hands sweeping and darting across the stage, picking at the chords of the guitars and basses and whatever they were, and arranged the mess of tangled things into a somewhat ordered madness. Before Dongil could open his mouth, a boy with bright red hair was bounding into the room, narrowly missing the corner of a table and vaulting himself onto stage like a wild animal.

“E’chan!”

Changmin shuddered slightly at the abrupt noise, the voice and the door slamming behind the other kid simultaneously. The red haired boy just laughed and then his gaze fell upon Dongil perched at the base, shoulder firmly pressed against the pillar in a leisurely lean as he watched them. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so calm if not for Changmin’s large, rumpled, grey sweatshirt pulled low across his fringe and tied tightly snug around his neck. The looked too long, spent too much time just simply staring at Dongil that he began to itch in discomfort.

“Is that-” the boy started to ask.

“Nah,” Changmin cut him off. “Just looks like him. He gets it all the time, right?” the boy looked to Dongil for confirmation, an arched brow and pointed eyes.

“Yeah,” Dongil cleared his throat and shifted forward. “Yeah, I get it all the time.”

“Crazy, dude!” the boy chirped. “Just crazy! Look just like him.”

“Hey, GK,” Changmin interrupted, hand on GK’s shoulder, pulling the other around to face him. “Where’s Teo? I got something I have to talk to him about.”

“Oh, he’s in the back,” GK tilted his chin toward the door he had just come through.

Changmin nodded, clapped the boy on the shoulder and started to the door, hopping off the stage and onto the lower floor with an self-assured jump that smacked both his feet firmly into the cement with a thud. Then he paused, swiveled around as the realization hit him, and let his eyes land on Dongil. GK seemed to notice the others hesitance and jumped to assure him.

“I got him,” the boy threw out with a dismissive wave. “Don’t worry.”

Changmin continued to look at Dongil, lips pierced slightly in thought. It took the tick of what Dongil thought must have been at least ten seconds before Changmin gave in and pushed through the door to go find Teo.

It was around an hour later, maybe more maybe less, after Dongil had effectively shrugged off all of GK’s prying questions with quipped responded and a cold eye, that Changmin re-emerged, now bearing a dark blue, fraying and cropped jean jacket

“Here,” he said, dropping the fabric into Dongil’s arms. “Don’t want you to get a cold.”

Only then did Dongil really notice that he was, in fact, shivering in the dense, rain-heavy sweatshirt Changmin had lent him earlier.

“It’s actually band merch,” the other laughed shyly, a hand going up to rub at the back of his neck sheepishly like the walking cliché that he was.

“It’s a jean jacket,” Dongil remarked turning it over in his hand and searching for a logo or a design and finding nothing.

“We wrote our names on the inside.”

“The inside?”

Changmin mumbled something in response.

“What?”

“It supposed to be like we got your back.”

Dongil went to hand the jacket back, hands still firmly sinking into the denim. “I should get going...” he thought aloud, glancing to the door.

“No,” a gentle voice drifted over. “Stay.”

He barely even needed to ask before Dongil was retracting his hand and clutching the jacket to his soaked chest with ginger fingers running over the fabric. His arms never fully reached across the space to Changmin he realized, in the deep recesses of his brain. They hadn’t really intended to.

“We have a show tonight, actually?” Changmin tacked on, but it came out like a question, the suave disposition from earlier slowly fading the longer Dongil spent with him.

“Are you sure?” Dongil teased him.

“Yes. I mean we do. I mean…” the boy gathered his thoughts with a deep breathe. “I’d like you to stay,” he added.

And who was Dongil to say no?

There were more people than he expected. Waiting tucked behind some caking, crackling paint on the balcony upstairs and watching people file in the front of the building, some tipsy and swaying into the friends, some bounding to the stage with unfiltered zeal and excitement, and some just slipping inside with bright smiles and whispers between each other. They were happy, he thought looking down at them milling and dancing and drinking before the boys came out. And then they did, and the screams were deafening. And then they started playing and Dongil was overwhelmed.

It sounded like trickling gunfire, the way they played, steady and heady and dangerous. It dripped down around him in a sticky wash of sharp chords and pounding bass. It wasn’t the same as those other relentless attacks of drum and electric and screaming gravely vocals that he, some part of him, been anticipating the second he saw all four of them onstage: Changmin in his tight pair of black jeans and a clean, dry AC/DC tee sliding behind the drum kit because of course he played the drums. There was a tall boy with sweeping blonde hair and a full sleeve of tattoos, black and white, one red like a scar that ran along his arm and continued, peeking out ever so slightly from the low slung side of his loose white tank top. GK was there, now with a whole slew of piercing up and down his left ear, dangling and shining in the stage lights and another, younger boy who held a guitar almost as big as he was.

But their music… it was systematic chaos, it was destruction and prayer and it was as beautiful as it was frightening to see them come alive, sizzling and vibrating with the music as it streamed out, pelted out, rocketed out of them like a semi-automatic. It was lulling and coaxing and seductive and abrasive and alienating. It was like feeling too far gone in your head to feel your legs all the while sinking so deeply into your bones they began to ache at the weight. There was hazy drone of confidence emitting from the mic stuck before Changmin, where his lips grazed it as sang out repeating the same chest thumping line again and again until he felt every words individually attach itself to his ribcage one by one.

Changmin beat at the drums until Dongil swore they might the sticks might rip right through the tops, enough force to pierce a human ribcage propelling them down and down and down again. the boys muscles strained and sweat flew from his brow in a streaming line as he whipped his head back and forth in a vicious headband. Dongil forgot all about the other three dancing and stomping around the stage, daring to wake the earth in challenge of seismic activity. All he saw was Changmin, beating and beating and beating the drum kit relentlessly. There was nothing but power there, nothing but utterly devoted power, enslaved to the pounding beat as much as he was ruling it. maybe both, Dongil thought. maybe neither. there could have been a fire, a raging flame forcing down the rafters, an inferno throwing flames at him and he wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have cared. He only saw Changmin and his hands wrapped tightly around some drumsticks and the impossibly stable world of chaos he had crafted around him.

That was the funny thing, the terrifying thing. Dongil had never, in all his life, ever felt this before. And it wasn’t any grand thing. It was just simply feeling something so strongly he forgot all the other moments around it and become a living, breathing, beating body of flesh and blood and utter feeling.

Chapter Text

The crowd had made them play on, urging with desperate calls and stomping feet for the boys to come back on stage, back out for their eyes, and to play until their fingers fell off and their voices ran raw. And that’s exactly what they did. There was such a strumming frenzy crashing over them all in synergy of frantic passion that demanded to be pushed and pushed to the point of dead tired muscles and blank minds. Dongil understood it, the need for people to take and take and the need for Changmin and the others to just sliver away bits of themselves, fleshy bit by bit, to give back to the crowd. There was always the call, the want for it, and if you didn’t fill that need yourself someone else was going to: someone else with more life in them to give.

The building shook, bits of dry wall and plaster drifting down at the thumping bodies and pounding noise. He watched from the retreated corner of the furthest stretch above the stage, above the open floor filled so tightly with head after head after head that he wasn’t sure they just sucked all the oxygen right out of the air with their amebic mass, reverberating sea people all high on the music. And it was all just so sickeningly, obsessively irresistible, to fall into the songs. Changmin handed over his kit to GK, stopping mid song to throw them over to the boy who had slung his own guitar around his back and sprinted over to grab hold of them before continuing the song. Changmin had danced around, more of a madman trashing about as the tall kid threw his mike over and all of a sudden it was just Changmin pouring his entire being out into the song. He looked like a tornado of hair and sweat and gravely vocal chords belting out words that stitched together and had Dongil forgetting his own mind.

It was sickeningly, obsessive irresistible until Changmin ended up on the ground, surrounded by a ring of stunned still, head banging so harshly into the concrete ground that his skull bounced back up again before resting, eyes closed and chest unmoving, on the floor for longer than it should have taken for someone to get back up again from a normal tumble. Dongil watched as his bandmates played on, worried eyes shot back and forth to the unmoving body, fumbling some of the chords as they glanced at the boy. And then, all of a sudden, he was back on his feet dancing around the crowd, falling into them with a bright infectious smile, stumbling off his left ankle that even Dongil, from a story above, could tell was refusing to bear weight.

Changmin eventually managed to crawl his way back up onto the stage and GK had relinquished the sticks out of his back pocket to the drummer. Dongil noticed that when the other threw his head back as he played there was a strained tension that crept up on his forehead. Yes, the boy’s glittering throat fully exposed to the throng of screaming people was also quite noticeable but he was more worried about the pinched brow and the discomfort radiating off the drummer. And then it quieted and the lights neon strobing clicked off, and people left. He waited there, catching his breath, blinking away the frazzled spots in his vision before a body appeared in the stairwell behind him. It was the young kid, the bassist.

“Are you-”

“What the hell was that?!” Dongil found himself asking, laced with more threat than he intended but nonetheless launching the words across the space and towards a confused and taken aback child, still recovering from the two hours he had just spent leaping all over a stage.

“He gets…” the boy quieted and then looked passed Dongil down to the cement floor, now littered with cigarettes and bottles, down to where Changmin had been. “He gets a little excited sometimes,” the kid finished.

Dongil stood there and watched as the younger boy’s eyes flitted back.

“He wants me to bring you down,” the boy explained. “I’m Harry,” he added.

Dongil gave him a small smile and motioned toward the staircase for the other to lead him on. Harry nodded and started down the steps, the old wood creaking as they both made their way down to the first level. It was narrow enough that his shoulders crushed against the walls, old band posters and album covers taped to the walls with horridly, brightly colored tape, peeling off at the corners and covered in too much dust to see proper.

“How do you know Changmin?” Harry asked him.

“Ummm…”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Harry stopped him. “He doesn’t bring a lot of people home so I bet you’re safe.”

“Safe?”

Harry ignored the question and pushed around some people still lingering and laughing, the smell of sweat and beer and happy sweetness stuck to them like glue and hanging in the air in a heavy fog. They were clinging to that giddy sensation from before, hooked on an addictive headspace of ramming drum beats and a raspy growl. One of them smiled and patted Harry on the arm in a sincere manner that looked so warm and welcoming it distracted Dongil momentarily before he noticed Harry waiting by the door both GK and Changmin had used earlier.

Inside was a ratting sofa pushed against a wall cradling a limp Changmin with the shirt he had previously been wearing tied around his ankle, dripping melting ice onto the cushion of the couch, shirtless and staring at the popcorn ceiling. GK and the blonde boy were perched on the end of a counter, what ought to have used to be a concessions storage station back when the theatre was still running. It was stuffy, windowless space, with only their haphazardly strewn and mismatched furniture to decorate it: the soda, one coffee tale, the old counter, two chairs on the opposite walls. There were some old movie reels, 35mm, sitting stacked on the floor in the corner next to some boxes Dongil assumed contained more sun damaged and corroding reels.

“Doesn’t he look like D1?” GK threw out as soon as the two boys stepped inside, Dongil following Harry through the door. “I mean seriously,” he laughed. “It’s uncanny.”

“I don’t know if I see it,” the blonde boy mused, tilting his head to side and scrutinizing Dongil’s profile. “Maybe a bit.”

Dongil supposed he was the front man, having watching the boy stand at the front and center, singing through madness out at the crowd.

“A bit?” GK almost yelled. “Are you kidding me? They could be twins!”

“Hey,” Changmin’s nearly limp head had lulled over on the couch arm at GK’s outburst.

He sleepily smiled over at Dongil as Harry wandered over and sunk into one of the open chairs, pulling his long legs up and his battered phone out as the other two bandmates continued to lightheartedly bicker of Dongil’s resemblance to a certain missing celebrity.

“How’d you like the show?” Changmin asked once Dongil had made his way over to the other.

“I would have preferred not to see someone jumping off the stage and then ignoring the fact that they have a concussion,” he answered.

“It’s not a concussion,” Changmin defended.

Dongil crossed his arms over his chest, feeling the sleeves of the jean jacket shift at the movement and then blushing faintly when he realize he was stood in the back room of an abandoned movie theater after a concert wearing the band’s merch given to him by the stupidly attractive and cocky drummer of said band. So much for clichés, Dongil thought. He had started to become one again too.

“I mean it hurts,” the boy admitted with a wince.

“Of course it fucking hurts,” Dongil sighed with a frown.

“Hey, Chan,” the blonde boy yelled over and then cringed when he saw the boy flinching at the loudness. “Sorry. Forgot. We’re gonna go eat something, dude,” he pointed at GK and Harry, who had since gotten up and was now waiting just inside the door with a black bag in his hand.

“Yeah,” the boy waved them off. “Bye, Teo. Bye, guys.”

The three bandmates poured noisily outside, shuffling feet and bumping shoulders and whispered snickers trailing after them like dutiful shadows. And then, it was quiet again. After the café and the police and the rain and the concert, it was quiet. Dongil didn’t exactly know if he was quite ready to face something like that again.

“How you feeling?” Dongil chose to ask the other, shifting himself back and forth between his two feet firmly planted into the dingy carpet.

“Like hell,” Changmin smiled back.

Dongil raised his eyebrow skeptically. “You’re in remarkably good spirits for that,” he remarked.

“You want to sit down?” Changmin asked, pulling his body away from the lip of the cushion and against the back of the sofa, leaving a small section bare for the other.

“I-” he wavered, mulling over whatever toiled, mangle of emotion was creeping up his spine despite his best efforts to shove it down. “You know what? Sure,” he agreed and stepped over the couch, settling himself down by Changmin’s knees, his back just barely brushing against the other’s extended legs.

Changmin smiled as the other relaxed into the seat. “The jacket looks good on you,” he offered, still firmly liquified into the cushion, head swirling and a dopy haze washed over him.

Dongil looked over and studied him a moment. “Thanks.”

“I lied.”

A look of uncertainty painted itself on Dongil’s face and he was left grappling at the whiplash of the other’s words. “It doesn’t look good on me?”

Changmin laughed softly at Dongil and then immediately winced in the aftermath of contracting his facial muscles. “No, I mean it’s not band shit. It’s mine,” he amended. “I made it.”

“Oh,” Dongil breathed out.

His hands involuntarily rose and began to play with the lip of the denim laid open around his chest, thumbing it softly. It was rough under his fingertips and worn in to the point of unevenly thinning of the fabric that gave him the same sensation of stumbling over cobblestones in an old European city he had been shipped off to for some reason he could no longer remember.

“You made it,” he realized.

His eyes then moved up from the jacket, from the deep denim underlit by horrible white light LEDs on a dimmer, and glanced over at Changmin’s rising and falling chest, that undulated in a slow, steady rhythm.

“Are you going to tell me why you were robbing the café?” he asked, meeting the other’s glassy gaze.

“Are you going to tell me why you ran away?” Changmin smirked in challenge.

“Touché.”

Changmin relaxed even further into the sofa with a long drawn out breath and letting his eyes flutter closed for a second and then blinking them open again. His legs tangled further together as he adjusted them behind Dongil’s back, bumping lightly into the other’s spine.
“You know I met Harry a really similar way,” Changmin said.
Dongil hummed but remained silent.

“Back when I was right out of high school and he was just a kid. Real good musician,” the boy added. “Even back when before his voice cracked, he was playing Hendrix and Nine Inch and Zeppelin. Kid’s a goddamn legend.”

“Seemed like it,” Dongil mused, watching the proud look on Changmin’s face.

“Met him outside a job,” Changmin said. “He caught me stuffing some cash into a backpack. Didn’t look scared. It was weird. It was private courtyard, you know,” he inserted, looking down his body toward Dongil at his knees. “I knew he was their neighbor. I knew he must have known them. And do you know what he said?”

“What?”

“Cool shirt.”

Dongil barked out a laugh, stretched wide on his face, that sent a tiny rumble into his chest and shook it for a second.

“Yeah,” Changmin nodded with an equally joyful smile. “I had this Judas Priest shirt on that I picked up a few years back from a thrift store and apparently it earned me a savior.”

“He really let you go?” Dongil asked.

“Oh yeah, totally,” Changmin answered. “Gave me his number too when I told him I played.”

“You just go around telling people you’re a drummer to get out of jail?” Dongil scoffed.

“No,” Changmin replied. “I told him I played guitar.”

“But you-”

The boy grinned back with a heavily satisfied and listless confidence tugging up the corners of his mouth and pulling them into his sharp cheekbones. There was something so disarming about the way Changmin’s eyes changed from earlier. The pointed way they shot out on stage piercing through bone and pulling, tugging, his attention right out of his head with a coaxing whisper. And now, most definitely concussed, softer and quieter, they were gentle and happy.

“You do realize you’re a trope, right?” Dongil told him. “All bad boy with a redemptive penchant for every instrument ever invented who steals to fund his rock band with a charming smile and a stupid jean jacket.”

“You think I have a charming smile?” Changmin teased.

“I think you have a concussion,” he shot back.

“Touché”

The hum of the air conditioner kicked on behind them, sending a wave of rattling cool air into the small room, picking up the edges of some papers and magazines and fluttering them where they sat. Changmin feet shuffled again, pushing into the far arm of the couch and Dongil tugged the jacket tighter around him.

“So…” Dongil mused, wringing his hands over themselves in his lap before pausing and smoothing out his palms on his knees and leaning forward to rest his elbows there. “How old is he anyways?”

“Harry?” Changmin asked.

He nodded.

“Kid’s 16,” the other responded.

“16?!” Dongil exclaimed. “Then why do you let him…” he stopped.

“Why do we let him what?” Changmin pressed.

“He must really like it,” Dongil decided. “Must really love music to put up with the late nights and the people and all the-” he motioned vaguely in air, unsure of the word but knowing Changmin must have known what he was referring to, known it well.

“Yeah he really does,” Changmin answered wistfully. “We all do.”

Dongil’s shoulders slumped a bit at the answer and suddenly the rustling of clothes alerted him to an upright Changmin, hand thrust out to the seat of the couch to stabilize himself as he drew nearer to Dongil.

“For such a famous actor you really are shit at hiding your emotions,” he told the other.

“Wow,” Dongil scoffed. “Thanks.”

“I mean it in the best way possible,” Changmin continued, his body heat seeping through the denim and into Dongil’s shoulder where he sat, impossibly close. “But you really wear your heart on your sleeve, don’t you?”

Dongil chanced a look over his shoulder at him. “No one else seemed to mind,” he said.

“Dare I say no one else seemed to notice.”

“That’s not-” the boy started to defend before he decided maybe he too was tired. “Maybe I didn’t notice either,” he confessed.

“I did,” Changmin smiled to himself and dropped his back onto the sofa once more with a gentle thud. “I noticed.”

“Can I take you to a hospital?” Dongil added in the next second, swiveling toward the boy.
“Honestly, I wasn’t joking about the concussion.”

Changmin groaned and batted a hand in the air dismissively. “I’ll sleep it off.”

Dongil slapped the other’s leg with a resounding thwack. “That’s literally the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do,” he chided.

“How would you know?”

“Grand Marino.”

“Oh shit. Right,” Changmin replied, eyes comically widening. “I forgot about that. You really did your own stunts?” he added, impressed.

“That’s not important.”

Changmin’s smile got impossibly wider as a scowl placed itself on Dongil’s face.

“I mean I’m curious,” he challenged. “So, yes. It is important.”

Dongil set a glare on the boy. “Changmin,” he said.

“D1.”

Dongil flinched at the name, a dreadful weight falling over him and setting itself down on his shoulders like heavily pressed hands of expectation, pushing his muscles down into the ground, tying a brick to his mind and letting it drown in the black abyss of a winter’s lake. When he had breathed out all the memories which came with that name, when he had attempted to unclasp it from his neck and given up, simply resigning himself to bear it, he turned and saw a guilty look on Changmin’s face.

“Sorry, I don’t…” the boy murmured.

“Dongil,” he simply said. “My name’s Dongil.”

“Dongil,” he tried the name out and then turned back to the other. “Did you do your own stunts in Grand Marino?”

“Some of them,” he relented.

Maybe that was the wrong answer because suddenly Changmin was more alert than before, straining himself up from the arm of the sofa and slumping towards him in interest. “Which ones?”

Dongil shrugged off the question and continued. “Do you have any ice in the building?” he pried. “A fridge or something?"

“Was it the window thing?” Changmin pressed.

Dongil pushed lightly at the other’s chest barely an inch away from his side. “Can you stop?” he grumbled.

“I’ll stop if you tell me.”

“Nice knowing you then.”

At the silence which met him afterward, Dongil was peeking out of his periphery at the other, the boy’s left arm thrown over the back of the sofa for support and his right placed on the cushion parallel to Dongil’s thigh, sitting right against it, and the boy was pouting with an expression that should not have been as endearing as it was. The virtue of ridiculously attractive boys in bands.

Dongil sighed the annoyance building in his chest as he saw the other. “Goddammit,” he whispered to himself.

Changmin’s pout dropped and he was softly smiling again. “We have a mini fridge behind the counter,” he drawled, pointing across the room. “If that counts?”

“I swear to god,” Dongil breathed out, pushing up from the sofa and going in search for a cold something to place against the other’s swelling skull.

There was a long stretching silence as he left the other on the couch, when the air conditioning had clicked off and Changmin had started faintly humming one of the songs they played earlier to himself, that Dongil paused. He paused and realized something.

“Changmin,” he called out hesitantly from across the room, a chilled can in his hand, dripping condensation onto the carpet at his feet.

“Did you find it?” the other asked, eyes closed, humming, feet tapping along on the cushion.
When Dongil didn’t answer he peeked an eye open.

“I, uh- I just wanted to say thank you.”

Changmin’s eye fell shut again and he hummed. “No problem,” he murmured in response. “I felt like you needed a friend.”

"I was the window, wasn't it?" Changmin asked after a second.

"Yeah," Dongil relented, watching a smile stretch across the other's sleepy face. "It was the window."

Chapter Text

Dongil looked up from the sink, meeting his unfocused eyes in the mirror. A few droplets of water ran down his face chasing each other in shallow, narrow rivers down his skin. The bathroom was deathly still, that eerie limbo of lifeless liminality that came in the earliest itches of mornings when no one but a lonely insomniac was awake. It felt quite like a drained swimming pool or an abandoned supermarket, devoid of purpose and still sitting there, forgotten. He exhaled a long breath, his chest almost concave around the collapsed lungs, letting the air leave him entirely as he stared at his own exhausted face in the reflection before him. There were times when he said words so often, in such repetition he ceased feeling like they were even right anymore, like they weren’t words at all and his tongue had just made them up, attached to much to its own creation to stop mumbling it like a prideful madman.

And his face, maybe he had been alone looking at it with too much intensity because he barely recognized it anymore. The hair was changed, sure, as it had been dyed near monthly this past year in efforts to revitalize his ‘youth’ branding. His earrings now missing from beside his cheek and the full weight of his cheeks sucked out by too many sleepless nights and weeks spent running and running with no stop. No, he reminded himself. He loved it. He wanted it. He had worked his entire life for exactly this. Sometimes people were scared to have dreams, scared to be alive and to fling themselves heart first into things and then impale it immediately on the sharpened reality of things.

He pushed the tap off, realizing it had been steadily pouring out into the basin as he stood there. He turned around, cutting off the reflection from his prying gaze and searching for a towel. There were fluffy white ones rolled in a basket in the corner, sat atop the dark brown marble waiting. Dongil snatched one away and ran it over his face, halfheartedly drying it and tossing the towel down into a hamper beneath the sinks. He gave himself one last look in the mirrors, the loose white button down, the faded black jeans, the litany of thin gold chains tangled round each other around his neck, and then he passed back into the bar. The noise hit him like a freight train. Logically, he had just been there, just been part of the cacophony of voices and clinking glass.

Lune was there, all shaggy black hair and designer blazer, perched on the edge of stool, one leg bent to the cooper bar of its underfoot and the other long and slanted, pushing into the floor for balance like a ramp. The younger boy’s head turned over his shoulder were he sat, waiting for Dongil, having followed the pointing hand of the bartender where it sought out Dongil at the doorway. The other boy rolled his eyes and smiled tightly at the man, waving him away as he glared through smoked eyeliner at Dongil slowly making his way over.

“God, I thought you died in there.”

Dongil glanced to the window. The city lights behind the tables and the patrons blinked a little brighter against the darker sky they stood on, blinking white and amber and little flashes of red. He used to love it. He used to love the grandeur and the luxury and the exclusivity. He watched the tiny cars far below the glittering mass of buildings streaming in streaking patterns across the bridges. It was cold and harsh and metal.

“I don’t think I want to do this anymore,” Dongil said out loud, not knowing it he really meant to or not.

“What? Drink?” Lune asked, leaning in confused. “We can head back early. I mean, I haven’t seen you in a couple months so I kind of wanted-”

“No. I mean-” he faltered, looking back to his friend, tearing his eyes away from the skyline. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I might need a little more to work with.”

“I’m getting tired,” Dongil said, moving to rest his forearms on the bar top and allowing some of his weight to rest there on the dark oak.
He was met with Lune’s signature breathy laugh, molding the boy’s face from its intimidating carved apathy to a gentler smile. “I feel that.”

“At least Budapest is pretty,” he mused

“We’re in Prague,” Lune corrected him.

Dongil sighed and met Lune’s gaze with a weary acceptance that had the other immediately stilling in recognition.

“Hey, are you alright?” the boy seemed worried.

The bartender came over and placed a short rocks glass of amber liquid in front of Dongil, winking at Lune as he slid it across the bar with a black napkin beneath it. Lune’s gaze flickered off of his friend a moment at the gesture and then promptly right back. Dongil immediately picked up the refill and began to swirl the drink around the glass with a lazily twirl of his wrist.

“Am I allowed not to be?” he asked the other.

“That’s not what I-”

“How was your shoot?” Dongil interrupted him, back straightening and shoulders turning to fully face the other.

“Dude-” Lune tried to say.

“It was with Solitaire right?”

They maintained eye contact for a couple beats, either refusing to back down. Once Lune had realized that was as far as he was getting, he relented to the other, body visibly losing its tension.

“Yeah, it was Solitaire,” he answered the older boy. “It was boring.”

“Lucky you.”

In the time they had known each other Lune had watched Dongil go downhill as his fame skyrocketed. It was… well it was dishearteningly scary to watch no one notice as he moved throughout his day a little slower. Lune was two years younger, having only become a well known face in the past year or so, but Dongil had been in the public eye forever living behind a carefully crafted persona and a name not his own but still there, so aching visibly there.

“How was…”

“You don’t even now what my movie’s called, do you?” Dongil laughed in question and Lune relaxed at the other’s genuine smile. “It’s going okay,” he answered, pausing to take a sip. “Should be able to wrap up in about a month or so.”

“Fuck, it’s like you’re going to be stuck in Europe forever,” Lune joked.

“Feels like it already.”

“You should take a break,” Lune told him. “I mean filming is finished and all that, but you should take a break.”

Dongil hummed noncommittedly in response.

“I mean it.”

“Promotions,” the boy said. “And interviews and press and publicity and-” he rattled.

“Look, I get it,” Lune cut him off. “I really do. But dude, you’re seriously burning yourself out.”

He didn’t expect Dongil to laugh at that: a short little exhale of amusement, but a laugh nonetheless, stifled under tight flat lips and a glowing cynicism which seemed to hang around the older boy now a days, hugging him in a violently demanding constriction.

“I don’t know it there’s anything left to burn off.”

“D-”

“Oh my god. You’re D1, right?” a voice inserted itself behind their backs, shrill and foreign, tumbling over their shoulders and into their conversation.

They both turned to find a woman in a glittery, silver slip top, two others behind her back with sparkling eyes and nervous smiles.

“I’m so sorry, but can I say hi? I swear, I’m probably your biggest fan,” she rambled. “I’ve seen all your movies.”

“Thanks,” Dongil smiled. “How’s your night going?”

“Oh, it’s great,” she answered. “God, I hope this isn’t weird,” she tacked on. “But can I get a picture with you? I don’t mean to interrupt but I’m seriously such a big fan.”

“Of course,” he smiled, sliding off his stool. “I’m not busy.”

“I used to stay up all night watching episodes of Faded Glory and then missing have my classes in middle school because I’d fall sleep at my desk,” she said fishing her phone out of her bag and handing it to her friend.

“Oh wow,” he laughed. “That’s an old one,” he mused.

“I’m serious. It was basically my entire personality. Still is.”

“I’m flattered,” Dongil said, moving to stand beside her as the phone was raised and snaped a bright pulsating shot of them.

She moved away and bowed her head a bit with an embarrassed smile. “Thank you so much… really.”

“No problem at all,” he nodded, retuning to Lune.

“Honestly,” she threw back at him, a few steps away, having stopped in the midst of walking out. “I just have to say that you really inspired me.”

“It was nice meeting you,” he replied with a wave and they were gone.

Dongil was met with a shit-eating grin and a quirked eyebrow plastered on Lune’s face. “So…” the kid smirked. “Faded Glory?”

“We don’t talk about that.”

“But why?” the boy pouted. “Your hair was so beautiful!”

“Is this coming from the kid who modelled a see through raincoat on-”

“Nope,” Lune cut him off with a definitive hand raised between their faces. “Never happened. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No, no,” Dongil mocked, placing a hand on his tilted cheek as if in deep thought. “I’m pretty sure I remember it.”

“Hey, remember that short film you did with Heechan?”

Both them tensed and Dongil threw a piercing glare at the younger boy. “What the fuck, Lune?”

“Okay, sorry. Yeah that was a bit much,” he admitted. “But I-”

“Should we go?” Dongil cut him off, and not waiting for answer from his friend. “You have a plane tomorrow, don’t you? We should probably go.”

“It’s Thursday,” Lune argued, his eye slowly creasing into a confused pinch. “I don’t have a flight until S-”

“Excuse me,” the boy was already calling over the bartender, waving his hand in the air. “Hi, can we get the check?”

“Okay, seriously you cannot keep avoiding this question,” Lune tried to grab his attention, a hand on his arm, slightly tightened fingers, prying eyes. “It’s bullshit,” he said.

“I’ll put it on my tab,” Dongil told the man behind the counter, nodding twice and then slipping out from behind the bar top, grabbing his suede jacket off the back of the chair, clinking silver zippers and the fabric swishing against his thigh as he moved out of the room.

Lune huffed indignantly as Dongil walked away, pressing down the urge to curse him across the bar, eyeing the laughing patrons all flitting about with barely a mind to them at all. He slammed a wad of cash onto the bar top, flattening his palms on the surface beside it as he extracted himself and all but ran to catch up to the older boy. He grabbed Dongil’s elbow, leaning into his ear.

“You could at least defend yourself for once,” he demanded.

Dongil stopped a moment, outside the doors, where the warm wood of the floorboards met the cold, harsh white tile outside before the elevator bank. “If I acknowledged it that would mean I cared.”

“You obviously do.”

“Lune, it was good to see you. I missed you. I really did,” Dongil said. “But now you really need to shut up.”

“Do you want to know why you came here tonight?”

He stilled. “What do you mean?”

The elevator thundered softly up and stopped before them with a gentle chiming ding and the little number above the center of the door lighting up briefly.

“Your manager told me you were acting off and he asked me to check on you,” Lune admitted.

Dongil glanced at the other boy and passed into the elevator, leaving Lune to follow in his wake.

“I called you because I’m your friend,” Lune said. “And it really fucking pisses me off that I had to hear about it from your manager,” he enunciated the last word with an intensity that had Dongil wanted to reel away. “Your goddamn manager,” the boy repeated, more in a breathy murmur this time.

“I’m fine.”

“I know you aren’t,” Lune sighed as the elevator rocked closed. “But it’s fine.”

It was followed by an oddly quiet lull as the bar chatter was shut out. Dongil’s hands found the back rail of the wall, resting his body on the bar.

“No, you know what? It’s not fine,” Lune reeled, facing the other in the small space. “I really need you to start talking to me.”

“I’m fine,” Dongil repeated and Lune quieted down.

When the doors dinged open there was a host of bodies outside, flashing their bright white lights through the glass and across the lobby, packed in like college age kids nearly converted to grunge at a Nirvana concert at the turn of the 90s. Lune paused at the blinding onslaught and stopped just outside the elevator, glancing at Dongil. The older smiled and nodded his head wordlessly to the side, gesturing toward the door to the stairwell with a subtle motion. Lune looked between the door and Dongil and the paparazzi smashed to the window.

“Are you sure?”

“It was nice seeing you, Lune,” he told the younger boy in a disarmingly soft voice.

Lune was met with the confident steps of a star, swinging his jacket around the back of his body and shrugging it on in one motion, brightening up a perfect white smile for the camera as he carefully sauntered right out the front door. He watched Dongil emerge from the building, a rush of wind ruffling his hair and adding a rose tinged hue to his cheeks as he waded through the cameras and the press in search of a sleek black town car waiting for him.

He turned when he caught the older boy’s profile, shining so impossibly bright in the flashing lights, standing tall and proud and perfect. There was something about it, something so right to be there upon a pedestal for them all to watch. The cautious way he laughed with a lens in front of him, the deliberate brushes of hair off his forehead letting it fly listlessly in the wind in the most systematic frenzy, strand caressing his face in a calculatedly candid. D1 wasn’t just another actor, another promising child prodigy plucked from reality and thrust in glamourous dream land. He was an entire generations it-boy, crafted and invested and engrained into the cultural milieu whether people wanted him to be or not. He was that poster boy on all the magazine covers when they ran out of ideas and needed to make money. He was the spokesperson for every good natured campaign to get it off the ground. He was… well he wasn’t Dongil. Lune might have noticed sooner, might have noticed the terribly plastic eyes and the tautness at the corners of the smile, but he didn’t. Not until now. Not until it was too late. Not until everyone’s favorite young movie star had gone missing.

Chapter Text

Changmin hadn’t noticed he’d fallen asleep until his eyes lumbered open at the sudden creek of a alley door opening. His eyelids fought against him, blinking at the incessant onslaught of florescent which met them. He spotted Teo in the door as he regained his senses, the other boy calmly hooking his keys on the rung beside him. Changmin yawned and stretched his back out with a small torque, a litany of cracks erupting from his twisting spine. Teo ran a lazy hand through his damp hair as the door came back from its swing into the dripping black abyss of night beyond the portal, a leaking velvet neon of red and orange pools reflected in shaky refractions on the concrete puddles. The boy caught the door on the toes of his shoes with a small crash.

Changmin turned away and spotted Dongil curled into the chair in the corner, the jean jacket he had given the younger draped over his folded legs like a blanket. He looked so small. He looked so quiet. He looked so… normal. Just like any other young boy out too late at a concert with his friends, seeking exhausted refuge in an unfamiliar leather recliner, stained with cigarette burns and the gentle reek of smoke. Just like any of them, expect he wasn’t and he never would be. Except that Changmin knew the other would never be that normal.

“Is it still raining?” he croaked out, turning back to Teo.

“Not anymore.”

“You take Harry home?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Teo nodded back, leaned into the frame of the doorway, letting the door swing softly shut behind him with faint jolts of an aching staccato creek. “GK said he’d stay with his cousin tonight.”

Changmin hummed in response.

Teo shrugged off his jacket and tucked a hand into his right pant pocket, stuffing the fabric through the space where his wrist met his thigh to hag there.

“So, are we going to talk about this?” he nodded toward the third boy asleep in the corner.

“About what?” Changmin asked.

Teo gave him a look that Changmin knew well: knew from the harping watchfulness the other displayed when they first moved in together at the theatre, knew from when he sprained a wrist jumping off the rusted fire ladder above the old stage door sign in the alley, knew from when he indulged slightly too much in the living and needed someone to remind him of all the rest which came with it. Teo gestured with his chin toward Dongil, stern and unforgiving, demanding an answer from his friend.

“I don’t know,” Changmin breathed out, slumping into the sofa, a deposited can next to him, seeping condensation slung around it like sweat, clattered onto the fabric. “I found him?” he offered.

Teo levelled him with a glare. “What do you mean you found him?”

“He was at the café,” the other answered.

“What café?”

The drummer simply said nothing, choosing to let the realization wash over the other all by himself and just watch as Teo put two and two together.

“For Christ’s sake, Changmin. The entire country is looking for him,” Teo almost spat at him if not for the panicked lilt to his voice. “He’s a goddamn landmark.”

“He also caught me robbing a store and then let me drag him back to an abandoned theatre half way across town so honestly, I don’t think he’s turning me in,” Changmin defended.

Dongil shifted and one of his shoes which had barely hanging on toppled off the edge of the chair causing both boy’s heads to whip toward the sound. Changmin sat up, leaning forward with a hand extended down to the sofa beneath him.

“Do you want to tell me why we have D1 in our break room?” Teo eventually asked, not taking his eyes off sleeping boy as if he would just disappear from one second to the next, which, to be fair, he had done once already with all the world’s eyes on him.

“His name is Dongil,” Changmin answered.

“Okay fine, Dongil,” Teo amended, clearly vexed. “Do you want to tell me why or I am going to have to ask him?”

“He’s sleeping,” Changmin argued.

“He’s missing,” Teo replied.

There was a small beat where they simply stared at each other, waiting, letting the words sit, and then Changmin sighed heavily.

“Where did you want me to send him?” the drummer asked, gaze falling to the ceiling, eyes barely focused on the white, white expanse of blank surface overhead.

“I don’t fucking know, Chan,” Teo grumbled. “Maybe I wanted you to not bring him here in the first place because people aren’t so forgiving about the whole situation.”

“It was raining,” he simply said.

“Remember what happened to his friend?” Teo continued. “The one who saw him last. Do you not remember?”

Changmin flitted his eyes over to Teo and then back to the ceiling. “He’s fine now,” was all the other received in response.

“He was on house arrest for weeks,” Teo stressed. “And he’s a fucking model. Did you fucking forget how long your rap sheet is? What would they do to you if they found out you were involved?”

“It’s not that big of a deal. No one is going to find out.”

“Changmin,” Teo stopped him. “He cost a lot of important people a lot of money.”

“Do you want me to get rid of him?”

Teo looked at Dongil’s sleeping body, the rising and falling chest beneath the denim floating in a rhythmic breath. Changmin watched the other’s shoulder visibly relax, melting down the previous tension and smoothing down into a sort of reluctant acceptance.

“…I don’t want you to do anything,” he responded softly.

Changmin sighed again, reaching a hand to rub a palm down the length of his face, pushing into the skin cheek and letting his fingers trail down over his eye after it. “Okay, tomorrow,” he promised. “I’ll send him off tomorrow.”

Teo gave him a silent nod of approval. “I’m gonna head upstairs now,” he waved his hand dismissively, stepping in long strides across the room. “Your head okay?”

“Not as bad as last time,” Changmin huffed, falling backward, his shoulders slamming into the cushion of the sofa and closing his eyes.

Teo barked out a short laugh. “Nothing is as bad as last time,” he smiled.

The boy started to leave, hand on the threshold toward the open theatre and then paused. Changmin peeked open an eye at the sudden stilt to the other’s footsteps, curious. He was sure the other was ready to say something, to add to the bizarre situation or berate him for impulsiveness, but then Teo simply withdrew his hand and walked away. He let his eye fall shut again and settled down into the sofa as Teo’s faint travel faded in the distance.

---

Hours later, Dongil finally awoke to the still, quiet morning that drifted inside and clung to the airwaves in a thick, chocking fog of calm. His body weighted down, sticking to the leather pressed against his cheek in a warm smooth bandage and he rolled the slumber off his shoulder, off his arms and his legs, off his hands and his feet and his eyes. It felt like molasses dripping from his bones, leaving them sore and tired and aching at the effort of wakefulness. An unfamiliar room met him, an old room all peeling plaster walls and water stained spots polka dotted across the ceiling, gathered more so in the left corner of the room above a sofa. His hand felt down along his side, contorted ball of a body and he thumbed absentmindedly at the thin navy blanket thrown over him like a baby swaddled in for the night. His eyes finally fell to the carpet, docile, inquisitive eyes seeking out the figure there.

Changmin was sitting on the floor a few feet away, legs folded into a stretch and running a hand through his unruly hair and tweaking the edge of three identical silver hoops through his left ear. He appeared to be intently reading through some discarded papers of song lyrics with the tip of a black pen stuck out of his mouth through grit teeth holding on. The boy was glancing back and forth between a laptop screen beside him and the pages in his hands, swaddled in a loose grey hoodie hung open over a thick black fabric snugged across his chest underneath, the peak of a white t. shirt below the dip of its collar where it ran in a parallel scoop to a heavy silver chain necklace. Changmin looked up at the sound of the other yawning and smiled.

“Hey, you hungry?”

Dongil blinked at the other boy’s question and swiped a hand across his eyes, rubbing away the hazy grog of sleep. “What?”

“Want some coffee?” Changmin asked him. “I know you like it. I mean at the café…” he paused. “Anyways, we can go get some breakfast.”

“I thought you had a concussion?”

“Slept it off,” he said. “Not my first time.”

Dongil looked at the boy on the floor, studied him with a slight pinch to his brow, eyes knit together in a disapproving glint. “That’s not good,” he decided.

Changmin shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

Dongil shifted his weight off his side, moving to his back and sitting up slightly, the brush of rough fabric on his arm where the jean jacket he had worn last night thrown over the side. His fingers rubbed over the surface in a gentle motion, the uneven jacket bunching beneath his fingertips. It wasn’t the raw, stiff cardboard of new denim but the soft, well-worn caress of something loved and lived-in. the end of a deep black signature, choppy and unsurely scrawled on the interior peeked out at Dongil as if winking. His eyes found Changmin again in the silence.

“Let’s get breakfast,” Changmin repeated.

Dongil extracted himself from the seat and they readied themselves with an almost whispered reverence of small questions and courteous answers, seeking shoes and coats and small talk. Changmin stopped at the exterior door, his hand reaching toward the handle but simply hanging there in the air as he looked Dongil up and down. Changmin left a confused Dongil there calling out questions before he returned, sliding a hat onto the younger’s head with deft careful fingers that tucked the hair behind the smaller boy’s ears and adjusted the front of it to dip over the other’s face. He had taken the denim jacket from the chair and swung it over Dongil’s shoulders, tugging it once before dropping his hands from the other’s front and retuning to the door.

“Ready?” he asked.

Dongil stuffed his arms into the jacket with a tine smile, his long sleeved shirt bunching near his elbow as his hand traveled down. “Ready,” he said.

There’s something about the city. It’s always loud. It’s always frenetic and teeming whether you want it to be or not, whether you’re capable enough to handle it or not, whether you’re ready to be slammed beneath the undercarriage of a double decker bus or not. It’s a city: it’s glass and steel and lights and concrete… and it doesn’t care. It’s a beautifully engineered, messy array of infrastructure of busy minded people, or crumbling regret and forgotten memories and sleek new shining progress. It’s a city. Dongil liked this one - this one city - only. Maybe because it wasn’t his. Maybe because it didn’t care.

Changmin’s lilted smirk led him through the streets, sauntered step and guiding hand, short welcoming words and a watchful eye, scrapping its way across all the faces which passed them as if waiting, as if challenging, for someone to recognize the boy beside him, but no one did. The metallic ding of a diner door resounded in an abrupt little chime above head as Changmin led him into a space, still relatively unpopulated at the earlier side of morning’s long hours, with amber honey rays and feverish daylight starting to burn off the night chill.

“I’m going to ask you a question,” Changmin said as they slid into the opposite sides of a booth near the front windows.

Dongil tensed.

“Not that kind of question,” the other clarified. “I’m going to ask you about me.”

Dongil waited a second. “…What’s the question?”

The waitress had wandered over before Changmin could answer and Dongil ordered whatever first popped into his head which seemed to be a random omelet he knew he wouldn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He was met with Changmin winking at the young waitress as she left to the kitchen and watched the girl blush as she walked away.

“Not yet,” Changmin said. “Not yet.”

“How long have you been in a band?” Dongil chose to ask.

A lazy, comfortable smile slipped over the other’s lips and he softened into the seat, a slouched back and forearms resting on the table, hands clasped between them half way across the surface.

“ACOMM? Professionally, since 2016. But, I mean,” he thought aloud. “I was in it before it was even a band,” he laughed. “Teo and I were 18 and disillusioned with reality and punk ass dreamers.”

“Yeah,” Dongil mused, watching the other’s eyes sparkle with some untraceable passion he remembered having too long ago. “Where’s that name come from?”

“ACOMM is the intellectual hybrid of whatever the hell it used to stand for, but I don't think any of us remember what is was now,” Changmin answered proudly. “GK came up with it actually.”

“And you have names too?”

“Like someone else I know.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the telltale diner clink of silverware on chipped china plates echoing in the background, some faint conversation and scuffles: a city being a city and carrying on without them.

Changmin sat back into the booth and crossed his arms. “You know Nikki Six died for two minutes once,” he mused.

“Huh?”

“He died,” Changmin said, “Legally died for two minutes before a paramedic stabbed him through the chest with some adrenaline needles.”

“Nikki Six?” Dongil asked.

“You don’t-” Changmin stopped. “I mean he-” the boy stopped and shook his head. “Nevermind. It’s not really-”

The waitress came back, gingerly pushing their food over the table toward them with a scraping slide. Dongil stared down into his coffee, the steam wafting up in a rocket and warming his face. He sat there a moment, eyes closed and muscles relaxing in the wave of heat, simply soaking in the silence.

“You’re decent,” he eventually answered Changmin, watching the other stuff a forkful of pancakes into his mouth.

The boy looked up, stuffed cheeks, and blinked. “Thanks?”

“Your band,” Dongil said. “I don’t know if that was the question you wanted to ask but… you guys are actually good.”

Changmin raised an eyebrow, swallowing his food and letting the corner of his lip tug up. “Did you think we wouldn’t be?” he joked.

“No, it’s just-”

“I’m kidding,” the other said softly. “Thank you.”

“Well…”

Neither said anything for awhile as Changmin ate an entire stack of fluffy round pancakes and Dongil leisurely picked at his omelet. Even with the ambient noise, the tick of the clock overhead could be heard, slowly making its way around the circle, step by step.

“How’d you know?” Dongil asked, gaze not leaving his fork stuffed into the mangled pile of food on his plate.

“How’d I know what?” came drifting back in question.

Dongil looked up to find Changmin’s wide, open eyes staring back. “How’d you know how I was?” he asked the other boy.
Changmin just burst out laughing, too loud for the space and causing some other patron’s heads to swivel toward the sudden sound. He sheepishly nodded at them and turned back to Dongil with a genuine smile.

“I don’t live under a rock,” Changmin chuckled.

Dongil hummed in response.

“Could I say I watched Specter every night before I went to sleep or would that make me weird?” he continued.

“I just spent the night in your band’s lounge,” Dongil countered. “I’m basically a groupie.”

Changmin laughed again, softer, eyes scrunching up and head tipping back slightly to show his shaking Adam’s apple, hair flouncing and flopping around his head as it fell back. “Well, I am,” he said. “A fan.”

“I helped write that movie,” Dongil murmured, thinking back, his gaze slipping to the window and studying the bodies that passed by on their way somewhere, fast, so fast, as they propelled down the sidewalk. “It didn’t get any press or awards or anything but I helped write it.”

“I know,” Changmin said. “It’s my favorite movie.”

Dongil peeked at the other in his peripheral, still facing the window but letting his curious mind be sated by giving into the compulsion to see the other’s reaction. It was impossible he thought, impossible not to wonder, not to look. ‘A walking cliché’ he laughed to himself inside his head.

“That’s a pretty sad movie to be someone’s favorite,” Dongil told the other, refusing to make eye contact and choosing to hide behind the glass of the diner’s wall.

“I don’t think it’s sad.”

Dongil sighed, watching as a woman did an odd little jog across the street at the short end of a light, placing herself onto the curb of the sidewalk with a brusque hop. “It is,” he said.

“I think,” Changmin started and Dongil hadn’t even thought to stop himself before he met the other’s eyes. “I think it’s beautiful,” the boy almost whispered and Dongil was nearly convinced himself.

Chapter Text

“I thought you died.”

It was cold: late November and ‘you might start thinking paying for the heating is actually justifiable’ cold. Cold like an ache you couldn’t shake from your bones, like a lump in your instep that teetered you off balance until you noticed it was just you. The wind whistled up the staircase behind Dongil in a torrent, in a torment of reluctant guilt piled high with encroaching sentiments of betrayal, on his part but palpable and charged and high-strong like an electric wire making him fidget about at the doormat. It whistled into his ear with a giddy stab, laughing at his discomfort, pocking and pocking at the old exposed, yellowing bruise.

“I might have,” he answered the boy who stood on the other side of threshold, hands wringing, knuckles white, muscles latched around each other in spirals of anticipation. “I might have wanted to,” he added with a shrug into the silence, a breathy laugh on the tip of his tongue.

It was a nice building: new, clean. He looked around…stark. It had been built so recently that Dongil remembered being invited to the grand opening, remembered cutting the fucking ribbon to the building because he had been on some neighborhood board he hadn’t signed up for and donated funds to some project he had never heard of. Pretend to care, they had told him. Pretend to care and everyone will love you. The problem was, he had realized, the problem was actually caring.

“I thought you died,” the boy said again.

Dongil swallowed. He swallowed it all down, the bitter distaste of accepting a wrongdoing when he had lived, his whole life, as the victim instead of the perpetrator. And it was bitter, so bitter that he almost spat it right back out, refusing to chock it down for the sake of social expectation and well, because he cared. What did he come here for? He had to remind himself. What did he want out of this?

He had, in the past, in days gone by and a life forgotten, showed up at someone’s door not even knowing what he wanted, not knowing how he got there or what he was going, not knowing how many finger he had on his left hand, but he was there. Not this door, no. Not this boy, not this friend. Many days he had not known where he was going and ended up there anyway. There was something so lonely about being loved, something so distrustful and exhausting about being praised. But not here. Never here.

Do you want me, he wondered, want me standing here dripping in metaphorical rain with metaphorical tears running down my cheeks and metaphorical… oh, to hell with it, Dongil slapped himself internally. To hell with cliches and to hell with whatever he had ever previously expected of himself. To hell with it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

It was silent.

“I’m sorry,” he tried again, the door not closed but not open in welcome either.

There was pause where the other sighed. “I don’t really believe you,” the boy replied.

“I wanted to come back. I wanted…” Dongil paused, letting the threat of emotion laboriously crawl its way up his windpipe and dissipate as each millimeter passed. “I don’t really know what I wanted,” he admitted.

“They thought you died too,” the boy’s head inclined toward to the side with a slight nod, gesturing to the world, gesturing to everyone else but the two of them stood there at an impulse of trust and surprise and everything else either of them chalked it up to be.

“I know.”

“They questioned me.”

“I know.”

“They thought I…”

“I know,” Dongil replied one last time and it was quiet again. “It’s hard,” he said, after a moment, after letting the air between them recirculate and dissipate and whatever the fuck it was air did. “It’s hard leaving but it’s even harder coming back.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the other simply answered. “I’ve never given up.”

Dongil’s eyes dropped from the weight of the words, his whole head hanging and his gaze latched onto the floor as if it had been shackled and pulled down with a vicious tug. “That’s fair,” he murmured.

The other didn’t respond, just stood there, just breathed.

“Lune-”

“No.”

“Lune-” he said louder.

“I don’t-“ the boy started. “I just… what the fuck am I supposed to say?” he asked. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” Dongil answered, picking his head back up and shuffling on his feet, a slight shiver from the draft rocketing up his spine.

Lune looked him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

There was a beat: a beat when it wasn’t quiet and yet no one was speaking, a beat when Dongil’s own breathe ran ragged through his eardrums and the slight shake of apprehension attacked his pupils causing Lune’s figure to blur in his sight. There was an intake, a gentle inhale, that Dongil wasn’t sure which one of them took. And then were was a huff, a sigh maybe, that he was sure came from Lune exhaled out with the fall of the boy’s chest. And he thought, he feared, he knew in that moment that the other was going to turn him way.

“I think,” Lune started, the snapping click of a door down however many flights of stairs opening in the distance. “I think you should probably come in.”

The young boy, oversized cream cardigan with a loose thread ran off the left sleeve in a drip of fabric and artfully disheveled fluff of jet black hair shagged down around his forehead in parted bangs, opened the door a little wider and stepped back. With downturned lips and distant eyes, round and feeling, he motioned the other to the empty couch and padded softly into the kitchenette Dongil remembered was inside the next room. It was the same, the same as he remembered and then again not at all. The blanket was new, thrown over the arm of the same sofa and in the same way the last had been. The pictures were all still there, some of the two of them laughing atop a rooftop bar somewhere or a tiny side-street Italian café with teetered chairs precariously resting on cobblestone, but there were more stuffed in between. There were letters strewn across the low coffee table, a tiny scratch in the glass top that brought his lips the smallest tug upward as he ran his fingers across it feeling the deep groove.

“Here,” Lune said, stepping back into the room, body facing the wall of windows with square shoulders, drowning in the blue tinged light seeping through from the city outside.

Dongil looked down at the other’s outstretched hand and saw a shaking mug, tea threatening to slosh out over the edges and so he took it. Dongil looked down into the cup now resting in his hands, his fingers curled around the glass in a gentle embrace. He looked up again and met Lune’s jittery hands itching and patting on his thighs as he settled onto the couch next to his friend.

“I didn’t-” Dongil started.

Lune’s crazed eyes rocketed up from his lap and latched onto Dongil’s like whip. He stopped. They both did.

“Are you … good?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Lune’s soft, strangled reply came out. “I mean no,” he corrected a moment later. “I mean my best friend who I haven’t seen in like 8 months because the whole world thought he died just shows up at my door out the blue on a random Tuesday night but no, I’m not dying so I guess I’m okay.”

The fabric was soft. It was lush and smooth and it felt forgivingly tranquil under his hands as Dongil’s arms dropped down beside his resting thighs. He hummed into the silence.

“What happened to you?”

“I-”

Words. Words are hard. They had always been so desperately easy for him, half the time they weren’t even his, never having entered his head before they were written onto his tongue. He remembered reverberated, hazy, glazed thoughts. He remembered bad decisions and unhealthy faith and coaxing tongues - such beautiful tongues.

“I was tired,” he eventually said.

“We’re all tired, Dongil!” Lune shouted suddenly, a rupture of his vocal chords that had both of them flinching at the sound. “But nobody fucking runs away from it!”

Running away: what had he run away from?

“I left you,” Dongil realized suddenly, the thought just occurring to them, all those months later and sat uncertainly on the edge of his best friend’s sofa who he didn’t really know anymore.

“Yeah, you did.”

“Oh my god, I left you.”

“I met you…” the younger stared quietly. “That night. We were in some stupid flashy bar in Prague. You were shooting and I was in town for the week doing some spread with Solitaire. I hadn’t seen you in,” the boy crossed his legs and leaned forward on them a bit, body smaller and defensively curled. “Maybe 3 months. I missed you,” he added, throwing a glance to Dongil over his shoulder. “And then you went missing the next morning.”

“I really left you.”

“It sure felt like, yeah.”

His hands had become calloused. Dongil hadn’t quite noticed the rough skin around the bottom of his thumbs that had cropped up in the time he spent, well the time he spent not really spending time at all. The time he spent in motels and hotels and whatever else fit the name of ephemeral, fleeting rubbing to wipe his brain clean. He hadn’t noticed his hands felt like this, hadn’t stared so long at them before, the jagged perforated lines dissecting his skin in ticklish lines and the…

“Why’d you come back?”

He didn’t know. He didn’t really know. Who did? Life was confusing and complicated and not at all full of any sentiments it was supposed to romantically hold.

“You know there are dreams,” he said. “Dreams people have in life about noncommitted things that just let them… that just them be people.”

Changmin popped into his mind… well, he didn’t so much pop as he was already there, waiting, lounging, cast into the recesses as a leisurely languid body posing for the cameras Dongil never wanted.

“Like feeling a that consumes you,” his hands flouted in the air with wide fingers and open palms. “And you’re in love with being alive and suddenly believe in a world that you never did before.”

“Yeah,” Lune smiled. “I do know that feeling.”

That feeling. Dongil hadn’t known it was ever there in the first place. Although maybe… maybe he once felt it without really recognizing it was there. He looked over at Lune, at his oldest friend, at his only real fucking friend. The boy had tears in his eyes, a pummeling attack of wallowing realization drowning the boy’s mind. Lune bit his lip, a heavy gripe of a bite sinking down into the flesh before he replied.

“I was scared you forgot about it,” Lune said.

“I remember it,” he said. “I remember now.”

---

Mangled. Torn. Battered. Disastrously unfixable. Horridly disastrous. Totally, completely, unbelievably beyond repair. It was broken. Somethings are just broken. And sometimes that’s okay and sometimes it isn’t, sometimes that’s just life and sometimes it isn’t.

“I think we need a new amp,” Harry said.

They were in a circle, a haphazard little semi-circle really, of scuffed sneakers and chipped nail varnish. All of them just stood staring down at a mangled mess on the floor on the concrete theatre floor.

“I just don’t-” Teo paused, crossed arms readjusting into an impossibly deeper fold across his chest as his face tensed and relaxed again in thought before ultimately pinching together again. “Can you explain to me how the hell that even happens?”

GK’s gaze didn’t leave the floor as he shrugged, sending his shoulder back down in a heavy drop afterward. “I thought it was unplugged.”

Changmin’s eyebrow shot up as he sought out to the younger’s face. “You thought it was… unplugged?”

The boy gulped and shifted his weight. “Yeah?”

“How much do amps cost?” Harry asked, his right foot pocking out toward the ruined heap and gently pushing the debris around with a soft scraping sound as it passed over the floor.

“You thought….” Changmin repeated. “You thought it was…”

“Unplugged,” GK finished for him, finally looking up.

Teo’s loud, perversely melodramatic hum sounded out causing Changmin to throw him an unimpressed face of passivity before returning to GK.

“Amps are expensive, right?” Harry asked them again, not having gotten an answer from the first question.

“I still don’t really…” Teo’s hand drifted up to grab his chin in a tiny fingered vice.

“I THOUGHT IT WAS UNPLUGGED!” GK yelled in defense.

Changmin’s head whipped around and the elder glared at him with an intensity unmatched. “IT’S A LIGHTER!”

“Teo?” Harry threw at the other and then continued when he received a pair of tired eyes in response. “How much do amps cost?”

“How many legs do you have?” Teo muttered back, staring thoughtfully at the pile.

“Two?”

“Hmm…”

Harry gingerly drew his leg back in which had playing with the melted metal and stepped back a step from the other.

“A lighter,” Changmin breathed to himself, head shaking back and forth. “A lighter?!” he said louder, an affronted tone creeping into the enunciation. “Really?!”

“I thought-”

“If you say, ‘I thought it was unplugged’,” Changmin grit out, glaring down GK. “Then I am going to murder you.”

The other remined silent, wide eyes and a bit tongue.

“Well, what do we do now?” Harry asked.

Teo took a second to just stare at the molten heap of once working concert equipment. It had burned a scar into the floor of the theatre, a black charring on the concrete that ran in a tiny, smudged line until it met the metal atrocity. GK had thrown it off the stage when it caught fire and the skidding track mark that had trailed behind it as it slid on the floor still remained. To be fair, Teo thought, he would have thrown it too.

“I guess we have to buy a new amp,” he said.

Their band didn’t have a lot of money. Their band didn’t have a lot of anything. There was a particular reason why Dongil had found Changmin in that café and a particular reason why Changmin usually didn’t get caught. It was practiced, and maybe in a bit of grey moral area, but it let them keep playing. When Changmin and Teo started playing music together they worked in the other’s garage, on second hand instruments and a bashed in Vox Pathfinder that sputtered out gritty hums like an ancient phonograph. When Changmin had first met Teo, and convinced the other to drop out of school and drop out of life, they had less than nothing: less than the second hand and less than the alley amps. Changmin used to have nothing but a load of coins in his pocket that clanked right along with the thin chain hung off his belt.

The store Harry brought them to had a neon sign out front of a man shredding away at one of those triangular 80s electric guitars. There were crates outside filled with artisanal root beer packaged with hand printed gothic letters and little red stars on the caps that sat shining under the heavy neon glow.

“It’s where I get my records,” Harry told them as he opened the door, bell chiming and glass frosted from the impending chill outside.

“You have a record player?” Changmin laughed.

Harry turned to him with a pout that lit up his naïve eyes and the gentle curve of his young cheeks, before he continued inside with a grumbled, “Not yet.”

“Harry!” a smile broke out on a man’s face as soon as they all managed inside the doorway.

“Hey, Johnny,” the boy smiled back.

“I got in some classic Zeppelin today,” the man stepped over to an open cardboard box on the counter beside the register. “Wanna take a look?” he threw over his shoulder, flipping through the stashed records.

“Oh cool!”

Teo elbowed the boy in the side, Changmin drawing his hand across some cassettes with a discerning eyes and GK standing, completely enamored, underneath a silver Sterling Stingray with jet black hardware.

“Oh right, yeah,” harry corrected, looking back and forth between the store owner and Teo. “Yeah, we actually came here for a new amp.”

A boy stepped out of the back room with a broad, toothy smile and his arms full of another packed box of records, the colored sleeves sticking out of the top before his chest.

“Junseo!” Harry called out excitedly. “I didn’t know you were working today!”

“Hey,” the boy smiled back. “I heard you were looking for an amp. There’s some cheap ones in the back,” he set the box down and nodded toward the back. “I can show you?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Harry answered as Teo called out a desperate “Please!” beside them.

“So, how’s the band going?” Junseo asked, leading the boys into the back.

“Good,” Harry nodded back. “Good.”

“Really good,” GK corrected, stepping over the threshold and clapping his youngest bandmate on the shoulder.

Junseo passed by some sporadically empty shelves. “Any new stuff?”

“We’re working on something right now actually,” Changmin

“Yeah,” Teo laughed. “He’s inspired,” the boy mocked.

Changmin threw him a look and shouldered the boy playfully out of the way as he walked over to the amp section.

“We’re actually trying to branch out recently,” Harry turned to Junseo. “Get some new venues. Expand the bubble.”

“Oh cool,” the boy nodded. “Have you ever tired the Royale?”

“The Royale?” Changmin whipped around.

GK immediately bounded over to them. “Stevie’s place?” he asked.

Both the boys silently faced him, confused.

“Who’s Stevie?” Junseo asked.

“He’s great. He’s actually from-”

“GK, that is not important right now.” Teo threw out, picking at the exorbitantly price tag stuck on the lower corner of an Orange amp.

“But he’s-”

“What’s the Royale?” Harry stopped them with a tight smile as he swiveled away from the two to look at Junseo.

“Oh. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. There’s a couple guys that come around here that play there quite often. It’s a pretty nice place. I mean I know you have the theatre and all…”

“No, that’s actually kind of perfect,” Changmin walked over. “We’ve been looking for ways to reach out. We should call them, yeah?” he nudged Harry.

“Yeah!”

“If only we had another fully functioning amp,” Teo called out.

Junseo made a little saluting motion with a soft nod and walked over to the wall shelves. “I got a Fender Champion,” he said, slapping his hand down onto amp, black with a gold trim. “It’s a hundred watt,” he added before moving down the shelf a bit and placing his hand on another. “And 50 watt Marshall MG50GFX.”

Teo exchanged a quick glance with Changmin, a silent conversation passing between them, and then cleared his throat. “How much is the Fender?”

“230 bucks.”

GK belted out an abrupt laugh before realizing it wasn’t in fact a joke. “And the Marshall?”

“230,” Junseo sheepishly answered.

Changmin’s strangled groan creaked out involuntarily causing Harry to immediately deflate.

“Junseo, I really appreciate it man. But I mean…”

“There’s an old Boss Katana in the way back,” Junseo supplied, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder as he pointed.

“Oh, thank god.” Changmin breathed out.

Teo whipped around from the sticker now stuck to his fingertip. “Like all that shit out front was like 800 dollars!”

“Why did we ever start playing concerts?” GK huffed.

“That was your idea?” Harry threw back.

“It’s a Katana-50 MKII,” Junseo said, leading them to the back. “Some guy brought it in last week cause he was switching out his rig. It’s like 200 dollars but I can do 175-”

“Oh my god thank you,” Harry melted with gratitude.

“If…” Junseo continued.

GK outright groaned as Changmin’s eyes turned murderous, Teo’s calming hand on his shoulder.

“If you let me come to a show sometime.”

Chapter Text

“Where are we going?” Lune questioned the other, stuck, forcibly he might add, into the back of taxi cab on a vacant street a block away from his apartment.

Dongil turned to him and hooked a finger under his mask where it passed over the bridge of his nose, pulling it down. He leaned into the other.

“I’m brave and I’m desperate and I really need you to listen to me for once,” he replied.

“For once? Are you kidding me? I-”

“Please.”

It looked for a second like Lune was going argue before the younger’s postured shoulders dropped in a visual show of acquiescence. “Okay, yeah,” he relented. “I mean I’m already here, aren’t I?” the boy added in a grumble, angling himself toward the window as he settled into the seat.

The city passed by, uncaring and blurred and alive. It bustled right outside the window and right beyond the comfortable safety of hiding his very apparently recognizable face. He liked it, the whir of the engine as it thundered down the street toward open places and open spaces that might not know, and might not remember, and might not have ever minded to begin with. A place like-

“The Stella Moon Theatre?” Lune’s confused voice drifted over.

It was flashing brightly in the clouded night, a beacon of warm vibrant light and a bastion of neo-classical architecture. It was old and crumbling and beautiful.

“Yeah, it’s… a new favorite.”

“We’re going to a movie?” Lune asked him.

Dongil remained silent as the other studied the crowd amassed outside the Stella Mun. There were neatly disordered lines trialing from the doors, people fidgeting and laughing, heads thrown about yelling and bodies dancing in the tightly packed sardine-scape on the sidewalk.

“We’re going to a concert,” Lune corrected himself with a nod, sending a knowing look toward Dongil with an unimpressed tone to match it.

The two had spent the better part of the last two days discussing what exactly the missing boy had been up to in his time ‘off the grid’ as they both had started calling it. Perhaps it seemed like one of those thrown about social termed cover-ups for kids from the Hamptons stuck in rehab for the summer or, well, A-list celebrities who had given up on their careers to disappear from the public eye and the private eye and any other eye.

“They’re a good band,” Dongil supplied. “I think you’ll like them.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Lune huffed out as he passed a wad of cash up front toward the driver through the narrow opening of the partition.

“You would have said it was stupid.”

"You’re right,” Lune answered, reaching for the door. “I would have absolutely said that.”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Normally I would haul you right back inside and lay into you about your fucking career and your image but…” the boy sighed. “Maybe you just need to be stupid for a while.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“I’m serious,” Lune insisted. “And I’m glad you came back.”

Back, Dongil thought. What a strange now. It didn’t exactly mean anything and yet it meant everything. There were too many threads that came along with it, littering the floor in thick chords that tripped him as he walked, that strangled his ankles and roped his legs. He hadn’t exactly thought about what it must mean to Lune, to find him standing there in the hall on the threshold of their old world. He didn’t really want to go back, but maybe he never really left. Maybe he never even had the choice. But the younger’s eyes were too sincere, too vulnerable and genuine and hopeful, that Dongil sighed and put on a strained smile.

“Yeah,” he answered. “It’s good to be back.”

They made it inside, weaving between the excited throng of bodies all praising the band with bright, wide smiles and sparkling eyes, humming riffs and murmured lyrics to themselves as they filtered in with tiny rhythmic sways. It had been a while since Dongil had seen people that easily happy, so purely and simply happy to be alive. It was almost deafening inside, echoed hops and hollers ricocheting off the walls and dampened into the concrete floor which did listen to dissipate the sound. It was heavy and dark and arm inside, a buzzing energy that singed in a comfortable roasted kind of way like a wild fire on a cold night.

“God, there’s a lot of people,” Lune shifted his weight between his feet, fingers reaching up to play with the side of his mask. “Are you sure they aren’t like famous or anything?”

Dongil shrugged. “They make good music.”

Lune seemed nervous, guiding the other to the side, beneath the undercroft of the balcony where fewer people mingled. Some leaned against the wall with flasks with mischievous ambiguity, too much leather and dark denim for Dongil to process without an amused smile at the archetype. No one really looked at them, no one really cared. It was everything he always wanted. And then Changmin walked out. They all did, Harry and Teo and GK, but there was really only one person Dongil had been waiting for and god had he been waiting.

They started with a crashing static beat, no drums or anything to back it, just Harry and a slow dirty riff that was arrestingly raw. And then GK joined, a raspy deep throated trance of a voice that had the crowd screaming in overwhelming excitement. Apparently the bassist’s voice was a crowd favorite.

“Wait, I didn’t actually know they were good!” Lune called out over the music to his friend.

The words barely made their way through the few saturated inches of air between his lips and the other’s ear as ACOMM bled chords into the space, beautifully frantic and weaponized.

“I knew you said they were but I didn’t actually know!” he laughed and turned back to the stage.

Why did he feel pride? Why did Dongil’s heart race a little more pumping and thumping? When he listened to them, it was all the wonderous highs without the crashing consequences. It was all the headily assured complexes without stalking self-loathing and regret. It was something without a price and he never knew he didn’t have to pay. And he sure as hell knew it felt a lot easier when it was free.

The voices of the crowd almost blended into the song themselves, gleeful screams and confidently butchered lyrics. And they loved them, they really did. ACOMM was worshipped, he realized, squeezed into their adoring fans for the first time. ACOMM had something special and they were fighting tooth and nail for it, never threatening to loose any slack of it. There weren’t a lot of people like that. There weren’t a lot of fighters.

Changmin sat behind his kit, loose black shirt nearly falling off one shoulder, a glistening collarbone scratching its way out, the bold dark swirl of a tattoo licking at his shoulder and dipping down under the fabric. There was a moment when he looked up and Dongil swore his breath ran back down his throat to seek refuge in his lungs like a frightened child. There was a whole cacophony of sound and light and movement but all he saw was sharp eyes: toying and piercing and coy and violent. Dongil had been trained to keep a poker face and Changmin was shuffling his deck clean. When he started singing, Dongil fell to a hazy drone of fascinated conquest, repeating the same chest thumping line again and again until he felt every words individually, as the words attached themselves to his ribcage one by one.

The drummer didn’t see him. No, he was too alive for that, hyper-focused on his kit and pounding into it with reckless precision. Dongil was shuddering in safe ambiguity, a faceless mass among hundreds looming before the stage and praying to whatever powers that be that he could stay there, in that theatre, forever. But that wasn’t how life worked. That wasn’t how his life worked. Dongil hoped it might be because… well, Changmin was violently inspiring like that.

Of course they ended the show with nothing but praise, making away like thieves in the night with hearts and souls and heads just utterly devoted to them. Harry’s smile was blinding as he swung his guitar around to his back, throwing his hands in the air to wave at the crowd. Teo and GK were boundlessly jumping around the stage, slapping fans’ hands with gusto and bright grins. Changmin stepped out from behind, tucking his drumsticks into his back pocket and running a lazy head through his sweaty hair with a gentle push. He waved in a more humbly calm gesture, smiling to the audience as he passed behind the others with a light pat on the back, making his way backstage where they all followed, one by one, until the stage was empty.

“They’re really good,” Lune told him and Dongil was blinking himself back to reality as he faced his friend. “How can I they sound nostalgic and grunge at the same time?”

“Yeah, I think people really like them,” he nodded back. “They’re… special.”

“And the drummer.”

Dongil instantly choked on nothing. “What about him?”

“I don’t know,” Lune drawled. “You tell me.”

Some of the others has begun to filter from the theatre in a steady, trickling stream of bodies that was picking up momentum and volume as they talked. No one but them was left under the balcony, a shallow alcove where they waited for the crowd to pick up more and cover their exit. Dongil turned back from the open centre of the room and found Lune looking at him.

“What?” he tutting his head to side, stuffing his hands into the pockets of the threadbare denim jacket and leaning into one of the support columns.

“Why’d we come here, Dongil?” Lune asked.

“Because I’m trying to make up for being a shitty friend?” Dongil joked, standing up again and stepping toward Lune. “Because I’m fucking tired of running around in the shadows? It gets really boring, you know?” he chuckled.

Lune studied him with pierced lips, silent and discerning. He didn’t respond in the next second and that’s what started to worry the other. If anyone had ever been able to read him it was Lune.

“You know him,” the younger eventually said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You fucking know him,” Lune repeated in realization. “Oh my god,” he groaned, hands fisting into his hair. “This is even dumber than I thought! Is this how you’re trying to come back?!” he threw at Dongil.

“No, I-”

There, by hapless happenstance, across too many blurred faces and too much packed space that was all too close for his liking, Dongil saw someone he shouldn’t have. His gaze connected with Harry’s, the young boy’s eyes innocent and confused. The departing audience passed through their line of sight, but the two held each other’s attention for a second and then two and then Dongil realized what was happening. Sure it hadn’t mattered. That’s what he kept telling himself: that I didn’t matter that he allowed himself to be led away somewhere that night by a sticky smile he couldn’t rid himself of and a coaxing challenge that he had always, always, been one to turn down except when he should have… except the one time he didn’t.

“Shit,” he blurted under his breath and grabbed Lune.

He dragged the boy in tow as he flung himself in between some of the lumbering bodies, instantly turning his back and rocketing toward the door with a singular focus. Lune followed, his hand coming up to vice around Dongil’s wrist in an instant, drawing the older boy’s attention instantly. He didn’t have to say anything, a pointed look of worried eyes coming into contact with Dongil’s in question.

“We have to go,” Dongil said and Lune, years of friends down the line, simply nodded and continued toward the door.

‘Amazing’, someone laughed out into his year as they moved. ‘Transcendent, heady magic’. Apparently ACOMM Eval was an ‘arcane treasure’ as one girl had put it while she shouldered a tipsy friend on one side and animatedly engaged with another on the other.

“Does he know?” Lune hissed at him, a misplaced terror of the scandal and the press should anyone have found out that their favourite actor had run off with an apparently not so underground band and left them high and dry, that the contingency of hundreds of millions of dollars of production value walked off mid-contract.

Maybe Lune had been right about it all. He usually was. Maybe it had been so impulsively, disastrously, ridiculously stupid to-

“Dongil!?” a voice called out, Harry’s, closer than the boy had expected.

Lune froze and the older came to a jolting stop once his arm, and the boy attached, refused to continue barreling toward the door in escape. Dongil tugged again, insistently without so many words, that Lune snap out of it and will his feet forward to freedom. In the next second, after Lune took control for them both and passed the other with shaky pupils, Dongil chanced a glance over his shoulder. Harry stood still in the middle of a giant moving mass, staring right at him. Dongil blinked at the younger and then passed outside into the dark street with everyone else in a massive wave. Somehow they found themselves in a cab, sudden silence ringing their eardrums and sudden wafts of cold air from the front of the vehicle smacking their gently warm faces.

“You know them all?” Lune asked after a moment, the steady hum of the passing street fading into a lulling background.

“I met them, yeah.”

Lune sighed. “So you didn’t cut yourself off from everyone, huh?”

Dongil’s hands shifted in his lap awkwardly. “For a long time I did.”

Lune looked over at him as the car stopped under the hazy glow of a red light, the color spilling into the car with unfitting saturation.

“What did you do?”

“I went to a-”

“No,” Lune cut him off. “I mean the whole time. I mean after… what did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Dongil shrugged. “I ran away and then I kind of just drifted for a while.” He paused. “It’s really easy after you’ve spent a while doing it.”

The radio made a sputtering static sound for a moment and then died again, the cab driver reaching over and clicking it off with a small twist.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Lune said again. “I missed you.”

Dongil shot him a short smile and hummed, turning to the window. The streetlights flew by like neon currents in stream of the night. A sudden buzzing in his pocket had the boy jumping before he realized it was his phone. He chanced a glance at Lune, the other having followed suit to distantly gaze out at the street, and cautiously snuck his burner out of his pocket, torqueing around to hide it between his body and the cab’s door.

“Harry wanted to say hi.”

“I didn’t notice,” he typed back. “Your show was good.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

He held his breath. “Yeah?”

There was a moment he thought the drummer was going to fall into the same pit as everyone else around him and about to ask his motivations and his fears: about to ask why he was such a coward and a liar and a cheat and why now, too far along into a dream career of fame and splendor and ease, he had decided to walk away leaving the world high and dry with nothing but a selfish impulse. But he didn’t. he didn’t because he knew Dongil hadn’t really wanted to run away all that much. He didn’t because Changmin was just violently inspired like that.

“Come back tomorrow?"

Chapter Text

“But can you imagine?” GK’s wide smile prompted at the drummer, excited eyes and a restlessly bobbing head.

Changmin pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer finger. “We are not going to do that.”

“But can you imagine it?” GK insisted.

“No,” he deadpanned.

“Come on! It’s so much bigger!”

Changmin dropped his hands down onto the table, his head following suit and finding itself flat against the surface, resting atop half a dozen scrawled pages of words and beats and meaningless scribbles. The younger had burst in nearly ten minutes ago while the drummer was in the midst of a very poetic line jolting his hand in frantic surprise at the sudden slamming of the door and then proceeded to plead- no, beg- Changmin to listen to his proposal. It was the same dream, the same words, the same optimistic drawl they all had shared and slowly but surely over the years it had faded to pragmatic realism for some, but not the others. And by others, he was fairly certain it was staunchly understood that meant GK: the fighter, the dreamer, the inspired chaotic.

“I know it is,” Changmin moaned into the wood, refusing to make eye contact with the other lest it sway him from their current predicament and he lost in the naïve lure all over again.

“And maybe,” the younger boy continued, unperturbed by the lack of substantial answer from the drummer. “Maybe, we could open for bigger band who would ask us to be their opener and then we’d go on tour with them and people would-”

“GK!” Changmin snapped, whipping his head up and then regretting his outburst once he caught sight of the bassist.

It was painfully quiet in the ticking seconds afterwards and the guilt crept its way up Changmin’s spine at each beat of the clock hand inching around.

“Sorry,” he continued. “I just really have to work on this right now,” he said, gesturing down at the lyric sheets.

“But the Riviera man,” GK pouted. “It’s like an actual real venue with actual real people.”

“And I need to write actual real lyrics for our actual real songs to earn us some actual real money.”

“Okay, okay,” the younger acquiesced, hands up as he stepped back in retreat, knowing full well when the elder was not intending on continuing a conversation.

GK had known Changmin for about 3 years, give or take any number of awkward first months spent determining if their music taste was actually compatible considering Teo and Changmin were foolheartedly married to an image of a band they had yet to make, but it all worked out. Sometimes some things just did. GK was that friend, that member, that tore through them like a botched backyard bottle rocket, never quite knowing where he’d land or who set him off or what would happen in the aftermath But it was the same giddy impulse, that same pure nostalgic carefree shriek that came when it tipped over and set off into a throng of legs. Yeah that, Changmin had always thought, that was GK.

“Just think about it,” the bassist said one last time. “Please.”

GK stared at him for a moment, idealism brimming over the top of his eyes and spilling out into the room. Changmin sighed and eventually nodded at the bassist, a show of unspoken understanding for thinking, just thinking, about it which seemed to placate the younger enough for him to leave. The younger smiled and patted Teo on the shoulder as he left, running into each other in the small upstairs hall with acknowledged smiles. Teo joined Changmin in the converted projectionist booth which now functions as the latter’s bedroom housing a mattress and a low coffee table, along with the expected mess of a young rock band’s drummer.

“What was that about?” Teo nodded to GK’s retreating back.

Changmin fought off the urge to groan in overwhelmed frustration. “He wants to play at the Riviera.”

Teo’s eyebrow went up. “They have quite a cover fee.”

“Yeah,” Changmin nodded, annoyed. “Yeah, they do.”

“And last time you picked up funds,” Teo continued, leaning into the door frame, “you got in quick the work out.”

“Didn’t think I could still climb chain-link that fast,” Changmin joked.

Judging by the other’s expression, Teo didn’t seem it was that funny.

“You’re going to get caught.”

Changmin laughed out a bitter snort, tuning back to his papers. “Are you saying I need to work out more?”

“Changmin.”

He looked over at Teo. It’s not like he didn’t understand what the other was trying to say. It’s not like he didn’t agree.

"Yeah, I know,” the drummer breathed out with a tight smile. “Trust me I know.”

He heard Harry and GK’s laughter filter up the hallway behind Teo, their voices mixing and echoing down the corridor in a warm resonance. Teo stepped fully inside the room and kicked the door shut behind him, moving to drop himself into the old projectionist’s chair beside other’s bed.

“But he’s right,” Changmin added after a moment.

“We don’t have the money.”

“That doesn’t make him wrong.”

Teo didn’t argue. “What do we do?” he asked.

“You do nothing,” Changmin answered, shuffling the lyric sheets up and standing up from his position seated on the floor with a stretch of his back.

“Listen,” Teo calmly defended. “Just wait a couple days or something and we can-”

The boy was cut off by the faint trill of Changmin’s phone and the screen lighting up on the small table beside the stacked pages the drummer had just been working on.

“Is it Dongil?” he asked.

Changmin leaned down and picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he answered, looking back up at Teo. “He’s outside.”

“Tell him I say hi.”

“But the-”

“Just go,” Teo stopped him before he could argue. “Go, already,” the boy added, waving Changmin off with a tiny smile when he noticed the other boy had paused at the door.

By some virtuous, undeserved miracle or by some insecure, fanciful indulgence Changmin opened the theatre door, a big lumber mass all solid wood with flaking light green paint, to find Dongil standing alone and small under the overhang, lost in thought as he stared at one of the band’s posters on the outside wall. The actor startled at the sound of the door opening and swiveled around sheepishly.

“Hi.”

Changmin repeated the greeting back, all warm and soft in just the slightest, most subtle indication of a smile.

“So,” the boy mused when the drummer had failed to invite him inside. “Where are we headed?”

Changmin stepped back and held the door open with an extended that tugged the sleeve of his short up his forearm and uncovered thick gothic letters on the outside of his arm. “I want to show you something,” he said.

Dongil gauged him for a moment. “It’s on the roof, isn’t it?” he asked.

A comedically strangled noise came out of the back of Changmin’s throat as the boy’s head dipped back and made a thunking contact with the door. He peeked out of one eye at Dongil stood there revealing in his misery and huffed as he right himself and gestured the other inside.

“You are… a walking cliché.”

Changmin responded in an immediate and quite loud exhale of amusement that echoed off the rafters of the tiny lobby. “And you aren’t?” he shot back.

“I’m an actor,” Dongil argued. “It’s different. I play clichés.”

“No, no,” Changmin teased, walking backwards leisurely as he continued to eye the other boy. “I’m pretty sure disillusioned child star is a cliché.”

Dongil stopped to glare at him, refusing to move a muscle.

Changmin just smiles and ran a ways up the stairs, extending his hand to the other. “Come on,” he coaxed, shaking his open palm in the air.

The only move Dongil made was to cross his arms, a statue in the room soaked in a deep, faded red of a threadbare rug.

Changmin rolled his eyes and ran back down a few steps, grabbing Dongil’s hand in his own before the other could protest and tugged the boy up the roof behind him. The drummer stopped before a small silver door, shoulder on a jacket, and gave Dongil an excited look before shouldering it open and stepping out into the night air of a world still humming into the darkness. It was quiet, or as quiet as one could get in the city. Dongil forgot the other was there, stepping out into the little sliver of rooftop empty in the twinkling labyrinth of concrete and glass and steel, breathing in the refreshing chill to fill his chest and his head with breathtaking stillness. He glanced at Changmin and found the other watching him study the cityscape with a fond look that he was scared to place.

And then he felt a cold little kiss on his cheek and looked skyward to find it was snowing. No, not snowing. It was swirling in a cotton white cyclone, thick fluffy bundles of snow that danced on the airwaves and picked up the hazy glints of a million neon signs all attacking in an inhuman barrage against the night, reds and oranges and greens and blues all mixing together in a desaturated cacophony of light barely filtering through the flurries. It was like a tiny bit of magic had been poured down his open lungs now they sat breathing in the wonder tinged air without anything to stop them.

“It’s snowing,” Dongil whispered, eyes glued to the tiny speaks as they fell slowly down from an abyss of black sky sectioned off at the ends by fuzzy skyscrapers.

Changmin laughed at his side, just as airy and content as Dongil himself felt. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that.”

“It’s so…” the boy trailed off, flecks hitting his skin and melting on impact.

“It’s beautiful,” the other answered for him, and Dongil looked back over to the boy to find he hadn’t ever glanced away.

He looked at Changmin’s rosy cheeks and the reddened tip of his nose and then realized he was staring and decided awkwardly shuffling and kicking his feet in the growing snowfall was more interesting.

“So what did you want to show me?” Dongil asked, still refusing to look up.

There was a rustling sound which caught his attention and, curiosity be damned for the being the undeniable, unignorable itch that it was, Dongil’s eyes sought out the other once again. Changmin had fished a small light brown packet out of his coat and was now gingerly holding it in his hands like it was the most precious thing in the world.

“I got you something,” he said.

“Did you steal it,” Dongil snorted out in jest, wide smile full of toothy innocence.

“Maybe.”

Dongil froze, his laugh immediately dying and a dry disappointment finding its own onto his face instead as he shot Changmin a look, fingers losing their grip of the small package.

“I’m kidding,” Changmin drawled, playing the part of an offended man when they both knew it wasn’t exactly an unwarranted worry.

He smiled at Dongil, stepping closer and letting their breathes mix together. It grew warmer between them as they stood there listening to faint, windy drifts of the snow blowing against the asphalt of the rooftop. The drummer pushed the tiny brown box further into Dongil’s space and waiting, the most unabashedly eager sincerity just dripping off him in such torrential waves it could have drowned the rain and Dongil right along with it.

“You got me something even though you didn’t know I would come back?”

“Well…” the boy breathed out, a tiny tug on the corner of his lips, shy and hesitant. “I had hoped you would.”

Dongil unwrapped the package and found himself looking down at the small cassette box, black plastic spine and a clear cover over a jarringly red backdrop, misted and pooling like someone had poured a loose layer of water of wet paint. The very top end held a heavy gothic print bearing the name ACOMM Eval in white and all their names underneath in small, black foreign lettering. There were five silhouetted figures under that, just forms, just bodies. And then the title, Dongil assumed. It said Youth in gentle scrawl, simple and faint, impressionable in its hint of an impression.

“Youth,” he breathed out softly as he read it.

“It’s our first album,” Changmin explained which had the other boy looking up from the tape in his hands to find Changmin’s profile tilted toward the dark sky. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever really been proud of.”

“You should be.”

Changmin’s head rolled downward toward Dongil, a gentle slope down to the other’s face from where he sat just a few inches taller beside him. He was so close that he could make out the tiny, fragmented pattern of a snowflake melting on the drummer’s hairline. They stood silent for a moment, just looking at each other. Dongil wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure if there were any words to be said and, even if he found them, he’s not sure he would have wanted to put them there, in between them.

“Hmm?”

Dongil shook his head slightly trying to rid his head of the distraction. “You should be proud,” he smiled at the other. “There’s a lot you should be proud of, Changmin.”

“That means a lot coming from you.”

Dongil cleared his throat and dipped his head as he looked around the vast rooftop. “Are we just going to stand in the snow?” he asked. “Because I get-”

“You get cold very easily,” Changmin chuckled back. “I know.”

The drummed looked around for a second, hands stuffed into his pockets and shoulders risen up as he sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. “One second,” he threw up a hand and ran over to a small drift that had piled up alongside the western wall of the roof.

Changmin scooped down in a flash to cradle a palmful of snow, stealing it off the rooftop and hurtling it towards the other boy as he bounded back over. Dongil had caught the other’s intentions too late and didn’t avoid the freezing smack into the back of his neck as he tried to run away.

“YOU SUCK!” he screamed out but the words barely held any weight as they came out of an impossibly wide smile that just refused to go away afterwards.

Changmin laughed lightly, so genuine and raw in the curling white breathes he emitted into the cold, snowy night. It made Dongil forget he was ever trying to be mad in the first place and so he chased the drummer around in the falling snow until they were both heaving airs into lungs amidst laughter and frozen tongues. He started to shiver and Changmin noticed immediately, guiding the other back toward the door, tucked into the smallest alcove with barely a ledge overhead. Changmin grabbed the door and shoved but it didn’t move. He stepped back for a second and then pulled again, only managing to rattle the door in its place.

“Oh, shit. It locked.”

“It's what?”

Changmin turned to face Dongil. “It locked,” he simply said, biting down a laugh.

“Are you smiling?” Dongil accused him.

“No!” the other all but laughed. “I am not smiling.”

Dongil shot the drummer an incredulous look as the boy pulled out his phone to text someone downstairs, stopping when the reply came in and just staring down at the small screen.

Dongil tried to peek over the other’s shoulder. “Did Teo answer?”

Changmin cleared his throat and looked up. “Oh, yeah. He said he just took the boys out to dinner and…”

“And?”

“And they’re like 20 minutes away.”

Dongil groaned and dropped his head onto the drummer’s shoulder.

“Hey, it’s not so bad,” Changmin offered. “I’m here.”

“Yeah, but so am I.”

Changmin mocked a laugh back at him and in the moments after the light trill of his voice faded off like ringing bells slipping into a fainter and fainter echo, Dongil finally realized how close the other was. He had never really thought about his ribcage before, about its ability to fucking hold his heart inside his chest, but it was beating double time and it was thumping out a rhythm Changmin had played either, pounding into his kit with straining arms. It was so fast he thought he might choke on the sound of it that reached his ears, vibrating in his bones and his blood and his head.

“I’m glad you came,” the drummer said.

“Me too,” Dongil answered. “I’m also glad I came.”

“Yeah.” Changmin smiled. “I was, uh…” he paused. “I was worried about you.”

“…Your show was really good.”

“Thank you.”

“People were talking about it,” Dongil said. “They really like your music and they really like you and I really like-” the boy cut himself off and chanced a glance at Changmin.

The boy stood there with a disgustingly knowing smile. “I’m sorry what?”

Dongil simply swatted him on the shoulder in response with a scoff, choosing to ignore the other.

“I thought you were good with words?” Changmin snorted.

“And I thought you were nice,” Dongil shot back with a smile.

“Now who told you that?”

Dongil just laughed.

“I was scared you wouldn’t come back,” the drummer told him.

“Why?”

“Because you have a habit of running away,” Changmin told him.

And he did. he used to. Dongil might still, even now, have a creeping sinking compulsion to jettison himself into the shadowed recesses of the city and not have to feel all the consequences that came with dream chasing. If he had known how hard it would be, well, he isn’t sure he would have gone out and done it in the first place. Maybe sat himself down as a kid and explained all the grand problematics of getting everything you ever wanted and then having eventually to pay for it all.

“I think you have a habit of making me want to stay,” he said to the other and he meant it.

A snowflake had landed on Dongil’s eyelash as he spoke, coming to rest gently there. Changmin slowly leaned down, bright red lips chapped in the cold and flushed face drawing impossibly close as he and reached out to gingerly wipe the flake from Dongil’s eyes with the most delicate hands the boy had ever seen, calloused and rough and so so delicate. Dongil thought he was done but the other didn’t draw away, instead turning his hand to cup the actor’s cheek, and drawing him in centimeter by centimeter until they came to rest just a breathe away from each other.

“And what about it?” Changmin whispered against his lips. “You tried of running?”

The same perversely unhinged glint Changmin always had in his eyes when he played came back, that same lively fervor that scared Dongil half to death when he saw it. It came back and singed inside the drummer’s pupils so clear and bright that Dongil couldn’t think of anything else and so he gave in. Kissing Changmin felt like licking bourbon off your fingers in a heady little secret between your lips and your skin that tasted sweet and burned down inside the second it was spoken. He was baseless and warm. He was distractingly grounding. He was greedy and tentative. Changmin tasted like smoke and rose water and maybe, in hindsight, the second was just wishful thinking.

The drummer’s hands smoothed their way down his cheeks to cup behind the curve at the base of his neck and tugged him in with a forceful hesitance that coaxed and pleaded without begging. Not that he would have refused. Dongil let himself be guided in, tilting his head to the side in the most natural lull as surged into the other’s grip, falling into a rhythmic motion with a latent chesty hum. Changmin made him feel viscously static, selfishly indulgent, and recklessly alive. He made him want to stop worrying about every single eye watching him every single minute of every single day. Dongil felt anger, he felt anger and passion and the most misplaced confidence he had ever dared wrestle into his chest, sewing it shut inside with the straining meat of Changmin’s palms there to guard it.

And that was the problem. He felt it like bricks had fallen from the sky, just giant unbearable lumbering masses smacking straight into his skull until it bowed and bent in a violent concave of snapping bones. He was fractured and torn under bludgeoned puncturing stabs beat until my brain turned into the smudged remains of a bug scrapped off the bottom of a boot heel. And Changmin was there, breathy and steady and messy and heavy.

Chapter Text

In and out, chocked down and expelled like a rocket, heaved and tugged. Harry’s mind went into overdrive attempting to remember exactly the capacity of his lungs and exactly how they operated when they burned and prodded and fogged and caught themselves tripping over one another in his chest. He reached a hand out toward the door, gently curled into a soft fist posed to knock but it fell before he could even think to wrap it upon the cold steel of the alley entrance.

- “You were not supposed to hear that?”

“Oh my god.”

“Harry-”

“OH MY GOD, GK! What do we do?!”

“Harry!”

“I’m kind of freaking out right now if you didn’t notice!” –

He took inside a deep chested breathe and reached a hand up again. His fingers nearly came into contact with the door when a siren sounded in the distance, echoing into the alley with sting that caused him to flinch in all his muscles and spin from the door.

“God,” he whispered out vexed and kicked into the alley grime with a scuffed kick.

- “Can’t you just ask your parents for money?” GK asked.

“Yeah, and tell them what?!” Harry floundered.

“I don’t know!”

“That my friend got arrested?!” –

“I can do this,” the boy told himself and finally knocked on the back door, stepping back into the crunch of a frosted, icy sheen that snaked over the alley like a second skin, smoothing itself over the pipes and the brick and crawling all around him in a chilled haze.

The door didn’t open for a moment and he almost turned right around and left, ready to mumble the absurdities of what he was trying to do under his breath as if it was an inevitable failure.

- “Do NOT tell Teo.”

“What do you mean don’t tell Teo?!”

“I mean don’t tell him!”

“Why the hell not??”

“Because we CAN’T!” –

Junseo was there, wide eyes unassuming and surprised, gaping slightly at the other. Harry froze under his gaze, all done up in a black puffy coat that covered his chin and snuggled itself under his nose in a toasty sheath that itched his nose.

“Harry?” Junseo’s head tilted to the side in question, a hesitant confusion in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” the younger boy immediately blurted out.

The words muffled slightly under the fabric and Junseo leaned further through the threshold into the alley. “What?”

“I-” Harry started to repeat before catching himself.

- “Come on please.”

“No!”

“Please.”

“GK, I- I can’t do that to him…”

“Then what happens to Changmin?” -

Harry swallowed down all the thickly laced emotion and guilt that sat on his tongue and blocked his throat.

“I need help,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Come in,” Junseo ushered him inside without another question, letting the door slam shut behind them.

An intense stillness overtook them then as Harry shook the snow softly from his head. Junseo cleared his throat and Harry’s head whipped up at the sound, the two making a tensely charged eye contact.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

- z “We can’t tell Teo.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

“Fine, okay!”

“It’s gonna be okay. We can fix this.” –

“I need-” he stopped. “We need money,” he corrected.

“For?” Junseo pressed, the two of them stuffed into the narrow passage at the back of the record shop that smelled like old cardboard and vinyl.

Harry groaned, his neck scrunching back into the fluffed padding of his coat. “Changmin called earlier.”

“Okay?”

Harry moved to settle himself down on a stack of milk crates along the wall, body leaning forward over his bent legs and resting his elbows along his knees, eyes drawn upon a single spot on the stained concrete floor.

“He called GK,” the eventually continued.

Junseo shuffled around a bit, leaning into the wall above Harry. “I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me right now,” he admitted.

“You don’t get it,” Harry huffed. “Changmin called GK because he knew Teo would be mad when he found out that-”

- “We could ask Dongil…”

“You know we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s - look. I know you’re not stupid, but we can’t do that.” -

Junseo waited patiently, watching the other twiddled his hands between themselves with stiff knuckles and tense veins that rolled his fingers into knots as they wrapped round each other with each passing beat.

“Changmin got arrested.”

“Oh,” was all that could make it out of the boy’s mouth.

“His bail is like two thousand dollars,” Harry whispered out, overwhelmed. “He doesn’t have two thousand dollars,” the boy’s voice cracked. “None of us have two thousand dollars.”

“The store does,” Junseo answered. "KDC does."

“I know, but I can’t ask you to do that. Maybe I could… I don’t know….”

“Harry,” Junseo cut him off with a large and comforting hand to the younger’s shoulder, molding around it in support. “It’s okay. I’ll talk to KDC.”

“But he-”

“He likes you guys,” Junseo continued. “He’d want to help.”

Harry dropped his head into his palms, smoothing them over the crown of his head with frantic hands. “I can’t believe he did something that stupid.”

“Well, I mean,” the other stumbled over his reply. “It was kind of inevitable, right?”

Two clouded eyes met Junseo’s pinched in thought. “What do you mean inevitable?”

“Because he…” Junseo paused, studying the other’s face, a naïve cluelessness practically tangible wear it sat on the smaller boy’s narrow shoulders. “Harry, do you not know?”

“Do I not know what?”

“Where do you think he gets all the money for ACOMM?” Junseo tried to prompt.

“He has a job,” the younger answered. “He has like three jobs. He works at a café.”

“Did GK honestly not tell you?”

“Tell me what?!” Harry bit out, frustration having gripped the sides of his head and shaken it loose from his spine in a frenzied whirl.

“Changmin’s got a rap sheet, dude.”

A beat: the broken clock on the wall ticked a hand along the second’s sectioned off, racing only in an alternate universe to the correct time. They both exhaled into the space a faint fog of heated air that made its visible in the drafty passage like smoke from the lips of those inclined. A blink: eyes focused and sharp taking a fleeting respite from the harshness of the LEDs overhead and their unforgiving barrage of artificial white glaring down in spotlights.

“No,” he said firmly, eyes locked onto his friend’s. “He doesn’t.”

“Listen, Harry,” Junseo reached out again, hesitant and gentle. “I know how much you love him like a brother but he-”

“But nothing,” the younger shrank back from him. “He’s a good person. He-”

“Why do you think he got arrested?”

Harry stiffened at the other’s words, shoulders slumping a second later exhausted from bolstering a defense he didn’t even know was right, but one which he would battle forever if the Changmin asked him to.

“He’s a good person,” Harry repeated, quieter.

“I know he is,” Junseo said. “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

The hall hollowed at a rush of air that wedged its way in through the door cracks and crept inside in a torrent of wind that ruffled Harry’s hair and licked at Junseo’s bare arms.

“I’ll ask Mr. Kang for the money,” the boy continued.

Harry didn’t respond right away, humming at the other’s comment and then sitting in silence. “Are you going to tell him?” he asked.

Junseo sighed, eyes darting over to the younger boy’s face from where they had been glancing at the wall, studying each brick stacked into the hall. “How could I not?”
Harry paused again. “What do you think Teo’s going to do?”

“Harry-”

“No, I know. Not your business,” the younger waved him off, moving to stand and tugging his coat impossibly tighter around his small figure. “Junseo?” he called out, paused before the door.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Junseo smiled back, so sincere it made Harry’s breath catch. “Anytime, kid.”

---

“I didn’t fucking do anything!”

The calloused hands gripping his biceps and pinching pinned shoulder blades to his back tightened, pushing the hard metal of cuffs around his wrist further into the skin. He wrestled his shoulders from side to side as they walked through the building.

“You have no right to detain me!” he yelled again. “You didn’t see shit!”

The man grunted in response, shoving Changmin forward. The boy stumbled at the force and moved to glare at the officer behind him.

“Let me the HELL go!”

“You better stop talking,” the man answered, moving to yank the cell open and pushing the boy inside.

Changmin looked up to find a disheveled man in the corner of the room, a dark paisley shirt hanging wide and billowing across his chest as the air conditioner blew into the room. His hair was long and matted with grease, some of it tied into a loose bun on his head where it rested against the concrete wall. There were no fewer than five necklaces strewn around his naked neck that clinked and jingled as he rolled his head over to look at Changmin and the guard where they entered.

“Luck you, Baron,” the officer drawled, moving to uncuff Changmin. “You get a friend tonight.”

Changmin moved to massage his wrist once they were freed, glaring at the man as he pocketed them and moved to lock the door from the hall. The other man in the cell, perched on the end of the aluminum bench, with a sloped back that curved above the seat from its edge to the wall, made no move other than to turn his head back to the t.v. placed in the corner of the room, so high it was kissing the ceiling. Changmin moved to sit down a few feet from the other.

He had called GK. God, why had he called GK. Weighing the pros and cons of just straight up confessing to Teo in the moment had seemed daunting and so he went with the next best option, which was, in hindsight, perhaps a death sentence. Not that he didn’t trust GK. Lord knows he trusted the kid with his life. But GK was… GK.

“So…” the man elongated after a few minutes. “How’d you end up in the holding cell?”

Changmin didn’t answer.

“Avoiding incrimination,” the man nodded, eyes trained on the t.v. “I respect that.”

And, of course, the news had to be on and it had to be playing a hyped up story about a certain someone with a horridly blurry picture of a person’s face through the window of a moving cab, light spots flaring up in the oddly shadowed hour and the shake, no doubt, of the photographer’s hand. It was a terrible picture, but Changmin knew, even without the blaring voice of the woman on the television, exactly who it was. The boy was wearing his jacket after all. Changmin snorted, unable to hold in the hilarity of the situation.

The other guy in the cell looked over at his outburst in interest. “You know him?” the guy nodded to the screen.

“How could I not?”

“Crazy story,” the man mumbled. “Just running away like that. Batshit.”

“Maybe he had a reason,” Changmin offered.

The man threw his head back and laughed. “I think a lot of people have reasons,” he responded. “I mean I had reasons.”

“Which were…?”

The guy shrugged. “Entertainment.”

‘What an answer,’ Changmin thought. He studied the other in more detail now, taking in the scuffed designer label on the side of his boots and the frayed tips of the laces spilling out from the under the cuff of his pants, the chipped nail polish marring his hands like an oil spill, and the peeking winks of skinny tattoos peering out from every swarth of fabric covering his body.

“Wanna tell me your name?”

Changmin cautiously eyed him. “E’chan.”

The man laughed again, seeming to be in remarkably good spirits for where he currently was. “What you in a band or something?”

The boy gave him a tiny smile in response. “Actually yeah,” he said. “I am.”

“I knew I liked you.”

“We’re in a holding cell,” Changmin reminded him with a raised brow.

The man leaned deeper into the wall and slid forward a fraction of an inch, sinking into the seat with a relaxing exhale. “That’s how I knew.”

Maybe it was just the situation but Changmin could have sworn the air thickened then, lapping at his clammy neck where the collar of his hoodie stopped. He shifted awkwardly between his knees and his tailbone, rocking in a light sway on the metal bench.

“I’m the bassist for Electric Impulse,” the man offered, a tweaked eyebrow and a jutted chin as if he was simply too bored to not goad the younger into a conversation.

Changmin leaned across the empty bench toward him, suddenly very interested. “You’re serious?” he gawked.

“Yeah,” the guy drawled. “You heard of us?”

“Dude, you’re KJ,” Changmin blurted in realization. “You’re like famous.”

Jin shrugged with a self-confident tongue seeking out the inside of his cheek to poke through a lopsided smile, clearly loving the attention.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” Changmin asked.

“Didn’t I ask you first?” Jin shot back.

The younger boy failed to respond, instantly shrinking back as his smile faded and he moved himself back from the prolonged lean he had taken towards the other like an excited child.

“Relax, I’m joking. I don’t care. I only landed here cause our usual opener quit and I wrecked their van,” Jonny explained. “Not like they didn’t deserve it though,” he added with a smirk.

“Your opener?”

“Yeah, we went on tour with them last year. Even went to Canada. And then they quit out of nowhere for no reason and I just thought ‘Fuck em’, you know?”

“Sure?”

“You guys any good?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your band? Is it any good?”

The boy paused, a weird itch coming up his spine that he couldn’t place the origin of, and clicked his tongue in the absence of an answer, moving to cross his arms and incline his head toward the bassist.

“What if I said no?” he mused.

Jin chuckled underneath his breath. “Good point.”

“What’s it feel like?”

Jin’s brows furrowed. “What’s what feel like?”

“What’s it like to be famous?”

Jin took the question in and seemed to savor it, seemed to role it around his head in a tumbling mass that intoxicated him enough to cloud his eyes with an emotion Changmin found disarmingly familiar and yet not at all. The man reached his hand up, clanking bracelets sounding in the space as he rubbed the back of his neck.

“We were invited to a festival last year,” Jin started, eyes locked onto the still blaring television set: a different story and a different voice. “And it was… it was the biggest thing to ever happen to us,” he admitted.

“Bonnaroo.”

“Yeah,” Jin seemed caught off guard at Changmin’s voice. “Yeah Bonnaroo. Anyways, my drummer had gotten pissed the night before and jumped off the second story of a Nashville ranch into a lake and broke his ankle.”

“They told him not to go, the folks at the hospital. They told him he couldn’t play. But, you know what that fucker did?”

Changmin stared at him, shaking his head silently and letting the man continue.

“He showed up on stage in a medical gown and crutches,” Jin chuckled. “Stupid ass boxers hanging out the back, and everything. He played the whole goddamn show.”

“Drummers are like that sometimes,” Changmin mused quietly, almost to himself.

“Yours?”

“He means well,” the younger said. “But he also thinks he’s invincible.”

“Just the type,” Jin breathed out, long and slow. “Just the type.”

The news let off a siren as the fuzzy video of a car chase showed on the screen, a light grey Honda racing down some highway somewhere followed by no less than three police. Changmin thought that if he focused hard enough he could hear the soundtrack to Fast and Furious sounding in the background.

“It’s not Joel,” Jin laughed to himself. “Joel just gets the rowdy musicians, doesn’t he?”

It was quiet again, of course save the t.v. sirens and Changmin’s inner soundtrack.

“Are you free Saturday?” Jin asked suddenly.

Changmin faltered. “Why?”

“Because my opener just quit.”

There are moments in life that you look back on and realize they changed your life and moments you look back on with crippling regret that could have. Changmin never, in all his life, wanted to feel the regret of not making a decision, never wanted to feel a coward, and never wanted to be too scared to stop dreaming. And, well, what else was a volatile jailed small-time indie drummer with a sparking heart of gold and a penchant for starting fires supposed to do in this situation?

“Yeah,” Changmin answered him – Kim Jin, the bassist for Electric Impulse – with the brightest eyes the world had ever seen. “I think we could make it.”

Chapter Text

Not that Dongil wasn’t used to dark lit back hallways hiding in the calm safety of a world behind the screen and the stage, but this was different. Maybe that’s why he found himself thinking and, more often than not, he was thinking about Heechan. A lot of things made Dongil think about Heechan: an unknown laugh drifting over when he wasn’t particularly inclined to humour in that moment, a sudden clap on his back that jolted alarm into his muscles like an electric current in an unwelcome sting, the haughty smirk of a boy standing in the middle of a circle of adoring fans hanging on his words and his breathe and his thoughts. Prague made him think about Heechan. It did and it didn’t.

He breathed out in a languid current of air and eyed some of the sharpied graffiti along the yellowed walls, scrawled names and dates and signatures. He sat right across the corridor, the empty silent corridor, from ACOMM Eval’s own logo, a messy mismatch of thin and chunky strokes that curved and formed into an uneven circle. Some other names, older names, were faded until they almost disappeared in the shadows like forgotten ghosts. And then, of course, Dongil was thinking about Heechan again. Surprisingly, contrary to all his own expectations, the younger boy had not taken his role when Dongil left. In the heated controversy which followed after, they had decided to choose an untethered newbie without a hint of rumor or experience to fill in for the great gaping problem of a suddenly vanished main actor. It was odd, but every time he watched the news, they didn’t mention Heechan once. Well not except for a single article boasting a spread of pictures of the boy with his arm wrapped around the up-and-comer who had beat them both out in the end.

Changmin came and leaned himself beside Dongil, tucked up on a small metal bench along the wall. The drummer met his eyes and smiled, a half-hearted, half-convinced smile before asking one of the oddest questions Dongil had ever been face with.

“You ever meet your heroes and then realize they’re all dicks?” Changmin asked.

Dongil looked up to meet the other boy’s eyes only to realized he was looking elsewhere, lost, truly lost, in some thoughts he didn’t really voice. But Dongil didn’t need him to, he already knew.

“I really hope you don’t mean me,” he laughed.

“Yeah,” the boy answered. “No, I mean I don’t,” he quickly added, retracting his arm and pulling the warmth along the other’s leg as he did so. “I just…” he paused.

“Hey,” Dongil reached out and placed his hand on the other’s bicep. “What’s up?”

Changmin huffed. “I don’t know.”

“You should be excited!” he tried again. “This is a really night for you guys. You’re finally getting you’re big break.”

The drummer was quiet in the aftermath of his words, a reeling thought circling around his head on a never ending track.

“Is it always like this?” he murmured.

Dongil’s expression unintentionally morphed into a passive surprise, akin to the one a stranger would throw down to a child asking questions too big for the life they were leading.

“Is it always disappointing?” Changmin continued when the other didn’t respond. “Life,” he said. “No, I-” he stopped and rearranged his body against the amp yet again.

“Changmin?”

“I just wonder if everything,” he waved his arms out into the air, into the space, where a faint, multicolored, hazy lights dripping over his arms and highlighting the sinew in bright blues and oranges and purple. “If all of this, if all of the hype of fame and being known and being talked about is always so…”

“Cynical?” Dongil offered.

“Yeah…” the other breathed out, latching onto his pupils with an unforgiving weight. “Yeah, that.”

“It’s not really cynical,” Dongil said. “It’s just called growing up.”

“But that’s bullshit! Isn’t it?” the boy’s voice rose before he breathed out the conviction and settled back down beside Dongil. “I mean, come on… isn’t that bullshit? Like honestly who can expect me to listen? Who can expect me to keep up with this if everything is just…”

“Just what?”

“Just a game.” Changmin answered softly.

The hallway, Prague, the faded signatures, Heechan, the band: Dongil’s head raced in a jumble. Games are so goddamn exhausting sometimes. Life is so goddamn exhausting sometimes. But not for Changmin. Or at least it shouldn’t have been, not yet.

“It’s not a game,” Dongil offered after a second, but he could tell from listening to his own words, his own voice, that he didn’t mean it.

How many nights had he spent sat up in the middle of the morning, hours too early to call anything but night, and refused to sleep because the world was so crushing and disillusioned that he needed a bottle of bourbon to drown it down, needing a reminder that he wanted this life, he had asked for this life, to coax him down to sleep with straining ties of the straight jacket of his own decisions?

“It isn’t a game if you don’t think it is,” he finished.

Changmin met his eyes then, expectant in a way which made him want to give everything and open in a way which made Dongil want to curl himself inside the other’s warm chest to seek the comfort that seemed to sit there.

“You care and you’re actually good at what you do,” Dongil told him. “You believe in it. You actually believe in the music you play.”

A door closed in the distance, a shrieking sound as it swung closed on rusted metal hinges. Dongil felt a heavy thing settle itself on him then, a heavy weight of something that had him sinking into the amp and huffing out his next breathe through constricted lungs.

“I don’t think there’s anything more worth fighting for.”

“You care,” Changmin murmured in realization. “You actually care, don’t you?”

Nothing but silence followed, all tense and thick like a fog. Dongil swallowed, refusing to answer and broke their eye contact, staring down the hall.

“Where’s Impulse?” he asked.

“I don’t care anymore,” Changmin shrugged. “I hadn’t realized they were dicks just like everyone else in this industry.”

Dongil frowned, letting his gaze slide back to the drummer, who now stood propped on the side of the amp, resting his head onto it. “Didn’t you met Jin because he assaulted some guy’s car?”

Changmin picked his head up and blinked. “That’s different,” he argued.

“How could that be-”

“I’m happy,” Changmin cut him off, standing upright and placed a hand on the other’s knee. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so unbelievably grateful but…”

“Sometimes famous people suck.”

It was quiet for a split second before Changmin burst into a wide smile and laughed at him. “I suppose it has to be true if it’s coming from you.”

Dongil rolled his eyes at the other but nonetheless smiled back. “Not everything I say is-”

Harry bounded up and wrapped his arms around the drummer in a tight vice, burying his mop of messy brown hair into the older boy’s chest. He was followed by Teo and GK, the former of which stalked up with a sour expression and knock his palm against the back of Changmin’s head.

“Ow!” the boy gripped and reached up to rub at the offended spot.

GK placed himself on Dongil’s other side with a soft smile, as he continued to tie his hair up into a loose back at the base of his neck.

“You deserve it,” Teo told the drummer before turning to Dongil with a much more neutral look. “Hey, glad you could make it.”

“Thanks for sneaking me in,” Dongil smiled back.

He and Teo had a tenuous acceptance of a friendship. Teo spent his days trying to protect ACOMM and Dongil had waltzed in one night through the alley door, soaking wet, and inserted himself into their tiny sanctum of a back room as if he had always been there. And Teo, well Teo didn’t like anomalies. He didn’t like unpredictable unknowns. He had enough of them in Changmin.

“I’m kind of nervous,” Harry spoke up, pulling away from Changmin and looking toward the others. “Not like I can’t play well, but I’m…” the younger it in his lip at the absence of a word.

“Are you kidding?” GK teased him. “You’re like a legend, June-boy.”

“Yeah but…”

“If you weren’t nervous, I’d be worried,” Changmin said.

“Why?”

The drummer stared straight into Dongil’s eyes as he answered the other boy. “Because it means you care.”
The stage wept in a hazy wash of red and purple, pouring down spotlights on them like illuminated gods sat before entranced worshipers. It doused the air of the venue in vibrant, frantic color that pulsed with the beat of the song, thumping as Changmin pounded into his drums and twinging as Harry rang out messy chords. The air always feels thicker, it gets tense and charged when they play. Dongil had come to sense the creeping sensation of oxygen deprivation that chocked around his head until he realized he was holding his breath: anticipating something nameless and amazing. The backstage was empty except a few laser focused and entirely too stressed stage hands, roaming about and weaving between whatever wired boxes and equipment found themselves piled in the shadows.

There was a moment, a moment from enshrouded darkness, from hiding - from the perpetual hiding that he had been seeming to live inside of like a thick molasses that encircled his calves in a slimy, thick, heavy viscous weight like quick sand – a moment where Changmin had looked over, a gentle cast of a glance over his shoulder toward the wings, towards the curtain, towards Dongil resting in there just silent and penitent and breathing out heady exhaled in a mesmerized state.

“None of you really know our music,” Changmin announced to the crowd when he turned back, leaving a whispered echo to erupt through the loud speakers, hesitant and projected out into the world onto the waiting, open ears of a pulsating, faceless mass of people. “But we’re gonna play something new tonight,” he continued, louder but softer but…
Dongil didn’t really know what to call it. Was it confidence? Was it sincerity? Was it the shy shackles of a boy, of an artist, that cared too much what he put into the world and too what the world thought of it, thought of him? Dongil remembered. He remembered when he used to care that much, to worry and to want to scream his convictions and ambitions into the furrowed brow of every critic who ever dared to voice something against him. But no, that was exhausting work. Fighting was exhausting work and so was caring and so were the defensive postures of someone wanting, above all else, to just make something. To just enslaves themselves to creative impulse and fulfillment and utter feeling.

“We’ve never played it before,” Changmin chuckled, and Dongil’s eyes whipped back into focus like the strike of a lash on a ship’s desk, finding the other on stage. “So I hope that’s okay,” he finished and gave GK’ a small nod at his side.

Happy Confusion, Changmin sang. Happy Confusion and Dongil was gone.

Changmin’s voice: it flayed him. How else was Dongil supposed to phrase it than a seductive itch of heady persuasion that flooded his lungs, and his eyes, and his head? Inescapable. Some things were just inescapably, inexplicably, incongruously sticky that he never could, never would, get out of. Changmin’s voice was one of those things, he realized, one of those things which would haunt him into his next life, one of those thing which would nag at his semi-conscious brain with long, poisoned talons and a penchant for humility. He hadn’t forgotten it from when he first heard it ringing out against his fragile ribcage and yet still, he could have prepared himself. Sometimes memory isn’t enough to tug tight a vest of Tungsten carbide against oncoming cannon fire, stuck in a crumbling earthen trench, feet sinking into muddy waters and head pounding in a rhythmic lull alongside the terror of ruptures tearing into the sky above. It felt like that. It felt like war, listening to Changmin and not knowing what it meant. War without wanting to surrender.

Changmin made his way off stage, sauntering into the wings with a lopsided smirk as he smacked GK on the back and ruffled Harry’s hair to the younger’s protests, finally pulling Teo into an impossibly tight hug. Before Dongil could blink, the drummer was there, sweaty and beaming and deliciously crazed right before him, flames licking at his irises. He leaned his chest in between Dongil’s knees, pushing toward the stacked amp where Dongil had taken up residence, depositing his body in the space where Dongil hung off the side with his legs dangling in the air. Changmin’s chest braced itself on either side with a thigh and he placed a hand on each side of the other’s hips, flat against the wiry black surface.

“Hi,” he breathed.

Dongil reached up to the other’s matted hair, sticking to his forehead in clumpy strands doused in sweat, and brushed it back from Changmin’s skin. “Hi,” he answered.

“Did you like it?” Changmin asked, burning eyes and dilated pupils.

“Of course I liked it.”

Changmin smiled, all sharp and wide, before leaning his head down into the other’s chest with ragged breaths as he caught up with his heaving lungs. Dongil felt each inhale as the other rested against him and wound a hand around to play with the drummer’s hair. He watched as an overenthusiastic GK yanked Teo’s arm out of its socket as he propelled both of them through the backstage, passing through a door on the side with Harry hot on their heels, phone in his hands and fingers frantically typing out something. Dongil laughed quietly as GK’s hollering sounded through the swinging door, drifting along the walls and soon joined by Teo’s own voice. The audience cried in the background, a chorus of whistles and cheers, some chanting for Impulse and some for ACOMM. And there, in a little bubble, sat Dongil lulled by the sound of Changmin’s breathing filling his ears.

“Aren’t you needed somewhere?” he asked softly.

Changmin picked his head up and looked at Dongil, unwavering. “I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” he answered.
Sometimes Dongil felt blinded, like all the cameras and all the lights would one day assault his pupils to such an alarming degree that they would just up and leave, burying themselves into the ground with more conviction than a frightened grave digger. He hadn’t, in months, been attacked by that barrage of paparazzi infiltrating every corner of his mind, every recess of his insides. It was disarmingly real and it frightened him right before he remembered snow and soft hands and warm lips. And then it just felt real.

“You’re amazing, you know that?” Dongil told him. “You amaze me.”

“You’ve been so amazing for so long that I wasn’t sure you could see anybody else and then…” Changmin paused, leaning further into Dongil, hands sliding up to cup the younger’s hips in a gentle curve. “I get to remind you.”

“Why can’t life be like a movie,” Dongil breathed out, a million scripts of a million romantic problems reconciled so easily and so cleanly.

“Because it isn’t you,” Changmin said. “And because I’m not there.”

A flash, a camera, a yelling disembodied voice all rang in his ears. And then he was down on his knees in the rain forgetting the words that had been written down. That had been erased and then rewrote, argued and fought over. He was on down on his knees, the bone sinking into the concrete, and his brain wiped clean expect the grounding feeling of artificial rain drops against his skin.

“Dongil,” Changmin said and it brought him back to reality, back to the concert and the boy and the moment. “I-“ the boy tried to continue but it was so breathy the word barely made it out.

Changmin’s face sat before him, unguarded and raw, just flayed wide open in excitable vulnerability. Dongil reached out a hand toward his side, settling it into the drummer’s calloused palm, desperately locked hands settled into each other.

“I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes in front of everyone,” Dongil confessed. “And I’ve never felt seen by anyone.”

“Your eyes are beautiful,” Changmin said, moving a hand inward across the other’s hip. “Your lips are quiet and powerful,” he added, the other hand coming to rest on top of the other’s leg, fingers gracing themselves inside Dongil’s thigh. “And your mind is fucking mesmerizing.”

Changmin whispered out the last part, right against the shell of his ear in a tickling breath that wafted through his nerves and stung his head until it succumbed to a fuzzy waft of Changmin’s voice, deep and flowing and perfect.

“I-”

“Do you trust me?” the drummer asked him, the question tingling down the other’s spine.

It was breathy and barely audible, tumbling out before his tongue could catch it: “Yes.”

Changmin’s lips crashed onto his and Dongil’s eyes were fluttering shut, hands frantically gripping at the body between his legs, squeezing into the flesh of the boy’s sides. Changmin’s fingers carded into his hair, messily stroking at the back as he tugged the younger boy’s head closer, holding it there like it might disappear should he let go for even a second. The sweat from Changmin’s arms, left itself smeared on Dongil’s skin along his jawline where the other’s rough hand now gripped the soft curve of his cheek. He pulled Changmin in until there wasn’t a part he couldn’t feel, yanking the drummer’s soul into his chest, hoping it tie it there inside his ribcage with roped tendons and a bit of lawless conviction.

And then he heard a click, a loud echoing click that rocketed straight into his head with a familiar resonance. Dongil pulled away and made eye contact with someone over Changmin’s shoulder: someone standing in the wings with a camera.

Chapter Text

“Changmin…”

The boy in his arms fidgeted as Dongil pulled away, hands falling down from the other’s arms and slamming onto the top of the amp with a hollow thud. Changmin wedged his head over to look at Dongil in confusion.

“He has a camera.”

“What?” the drummer asked, following Dongil’s eyes across the space toward a man silhouetted from the stage lights as the stage hands carted over Impulse Control’s rig.

“He has a fucking camera,” Dongil extracted himself as if burned, pushing Changmin back and jumping down the stacked equipment with a bit in his voice, frantically sweeping eyes and shaking hands that grabbed and shoved at the chest before him.

“Dongil, what are you-”

“Oh my god,” the boy chocked on a breathe, moving back, moving away. “I can’t do this,” he gasped, looking for a way out.

Dongil ignored Changmin’s coaxing pleas and outstretched hands as he fled, a slight hesitance in the ability of his legs to hold his own weight not deterring the frenetic urgency that pummeled his chest to find a place to fucking breathe. A place that was quiet and dark and safe and not at all under the prying eyes of a nosy goddamn tabloid reporter looking to ruin his life. Changmin followed, he was right there, right behind him after every shaky step trying to catch up. Dongil’s arm slid out from his as the boy thundered toward the door, shrugging the world from his shoulders and watching the drummer’s hands grasp at nothing.

“Woah, hold on,” he pleaded.

“Changmin he has a camera!” the younger bit back, slamming his shoulder into the door and rocketing his body into a back hallway that was awash in faint mutterings and muffled bass thumps.

“People have cameras,” Changmin tried as he ran to meet Dongil’s side. “He’s probably just a venue photographer or something. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” the younger faltered in his step for a second, Changmin’s chest bumping into his shoulder in a solid weight. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve managed to disappear?”

“It’s okay. I’m sure he’s not here for you. No one knows-”

“No people do know!” Dongil cut him off. “They caught me the other week because I was fucking sloppy and comfortable and I kept on visiting you!”

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” the drummer argued. “Maybe it was supposed to happen.”

“No. I-” Dongil looked up and met the other’s eyes.

He stared into them a moment before muttering a soft refusal and turning away, no words finding their way to his lips.

“Dongil-”

“No!” he threw over his shoulder, a swiveled step sending the words directly into Changmin’s face and watching as they hit.

Oh, how Dongil really wished he hadn’t seen it: hadn’t seen the way he seemed to break Changmin’s heart right in his eyes, the tiny little pieces shattering in the older boy’s irises as it was shrapnel from a bomb. Dongil thought he felt his hand tingle for a second, the thin cold metal noose of a grenade pin swinging around his finger. And then he kept walking.

“I’m surprised it took this long!” Changmin called out, still stood in the hall.

“What do you mean?” he demanded, exhausted and scared, feet slowing at the distance seeming to echo from the other’s voice down the corridor.

The music changed beats, sinking into a deeper heavier sound that came slower and in between more distances seconds. It was smooth and rough and impossibly loud in his ears like his mind was being waterboarded. He was drowning in that second and he wasn’t quite sure which way the surface was.

“You weren’t seriously planning on running away forever, were you?” Changmin asked, not moving a step nearer like he knew Dongil was going to stop, like he knew the younger wouldn’t really run that far.

And he did. Because Dongil stopped.

“You can’t just keep hiding,” the drummer said.

“Why not?” the other asked, refusing to turn around.

“Because you can’t.”

“Why not?” Dongil repeated, sterner and colder, shoulders tensing and hands balling up, the hall swallowing him whole with its dark walls and lawless scribbles.

They both paused and Dongil registered soft footfalls down the concrete floor until they grew louder and stopped right behind him. Changmin’s fingertips dusted the back of his forearm before deciding better and falling down open. He waited in a tense silence until the other finally spoke.

“Because it makes you coward,” Changmin said quietly.

“You don’t get it,” Dongil whipped around, spitting the words out sharply from his lips. “You don’t fucking get it, do you? I’m not ready!”

“Then when will you be ready?” Changmin pushed.

“I don’t know!” he admitted.

It was quiet then. Maybe Changmin had heard those words before spoke in much the same way because, in the next thumping tick of a beat, he was stepping back with eyes fluttering downward, so fleeting Dongil might not have caught it if his own gaze hadn’t been glued to the other’s face. The drummer sighed and Dongil’s eyes in a vice of naked contact.

“How do you know you ever will be?” he asked.

When the words touched Dongil, it was the intoxicating adulty of a cold scythe wrapped around his neck, all sharp and rusted and pretty. Maybe he needed it, needed the slap. And maybe he wasn’t strong enough to take it. He had a track record of running. Running is easy. Running is safe.

“Why do I have to go back?” Dongil demanded. “Why does that matter?”

“Because you can’t just keep pretending.”

“Here’s the thing Changmin,” Dongil started, taking a pause to breath in the resignation he had already made up before they had even met. “You’re a dreamer and I… haven’t slept in a long time.”

First it was the giddy fame and then it was the constant nagging worry he wasn’t worth it, wasn’t enough to fill the gaping whole in the world he had cut out for himself. And then it became a necessity to be the person he had convinced himself he always wanted to be, to fill the role of what everyone else excepted and wanted and called for. But after that, after a short and fleeting brutal tryst with that, it was nothing but ennui that held his hand at night.

Changmin merely stared at him before replying in a steady tone. “I’m kind of over your bullshit poetry right now.”

“If it’s pretty it doesn’t matter what it is.”

There wasn’t anything hesitation in his reply and he watched as the drummer reeled back from the whip of his words, a gentle scoff emitting from his chest. Changmin crossed his arms and settled back into one of his feet off-kilter, a raised eyebrow and a clicked tongue.

“And who taught you that, D1?” he threw back.

The boy flinched violently, a scowl he never taught he’d give Changmin rising on his face. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why?” Changmin goaded, stepping toward him, crowding the shorter boy with his chest. “Because you don’t want to deal with it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s still you, even if you’re trying to run away.”

“I’m not ready to go back yet,” Dongil grit out again.

“Life’s never easy but that doesn’t mean I don’t like trying!” Changmin’s voice rose in frustration before he matted it down again and placed a hand on the younger’s shoulder. “Just come back to the theatre,” he coaxed. “We can figure it out.”

“I don’t-”

“You can’t just keep ignoring the world,” Changmin continued, his thumb now lightly brushing its way back and forth on the other’s shirt.

"You don’t get it!” Dongil pleaded, stepping back. “You're in love with so many ideas but I'm a real fucking person!” he yelled. “And I can't be all those things! I'm not an idea, Changmin! And I don't need saving!"

“But I-”

“I need to leave,” Dongil cut him off, another step backwards, more of a stagger.

“No, Dongil. I-”

“I need to leave,” the boy repeated, foot sliding back on unsure ground.

Changmin lunged forward to catch his hand and held it there steady and familiar and warm.

“Where are you going?” he asked, but they both knew he meant more than just the night.

“I don’t know,” Dongil said, breathing the words out in equal guilt and resignation.

Changmin sighed and slowly released his grip on the other, finger by finger falling away until Dongil’s wrist sat there lonely and cold in the air, dropping to his side limply.

“Come back when you have some answers,” he said.

It was harsh in a way. The ease with which Changmin gave up on him. But you can’t help a dying thing that wishes it. So maybe it was something else. Maybe it was self-preservation. Dongil took in a breath as his eyes glazed over in something he refused to admit and the smallest tear escape the corner, rolling down his cheek in an aching show of just how much he felt.
Changmin’s arm tensed before he lost the battle with his impulses and reached out a gentle hand to swipe just under the other’s eye.

And then he left.

--

When Dongil showed up tear stained and frantic at his door, wrapped in a jacket he seldom refused to take off now-a-days, fingers fisted so desperately into the fabric that his knuckles turned white, Lune did what he always did. There was the night after Dongil’s awards nomination for the Spirit Awards when he came pounding on the younger’s door drunk off his mind. There was the night, or rather the morning, after the two of them had gone out for a friend’s birthday and Dongil had run off in the middle with Heechan and the two boys, seldom inseparable back then, had come to sing carols at his doorstep. There was the night he came back after waiting in shadowed anonymous oblivion for months when Lune thought he might have died. And he always did the same thing. He always let him in.

“I told you not to go,” was all Lune said.

Dongil was folded into the other’s light grey sofa in much the same fashion as he had been just over a month ago when he had first showed up at Lune’s door. It was raining, more of a freezing sleet that melted right when it hit the window panes, dripping along the glass in heavy tendrils. Lune sat across from him, ankles crossed along the carpet, bare feet fidgeting and playing with the end of the fabric in little scuffs and kicks.

“I know,” Dongil mumbled to himself, chin tucked into his chest. “But I did it anyways.”

Lune hummed in response, turning to look at the deep marbled sky, blinking at the thick, dark clouds and the torment outside.

“Thank you,” he said, still facing the storm.

Dongil’s neck whipped up, his eyes snapping into place latched onto Lune’s figure. Dongil noticed the younger boy’s hands clasped tight in his lap, fingers running around each other in a tiny cyclical chase.

“For not running this time,” Lune added when the other failed to respond.

“What does it matter?”

Lune’s eyes found his again.

“Dongil, we haven’t even-” the boy gulped. “Are you okay?” he asked.

The actor shifted, shuffled his legs around underneath himself and fingers moving to pick at the fabric of the younger’s couch. “They don’t need me to be okay.”

He was met with silence.

“They don’t care,” he continued. “They just need me there.”

“Dongil-”

“I’m not ready,” the boy repeated again, a different place and a different face meeting the words than before and it felt easier every time he spoke it, convincing himself it was true by speaking it into existence. “But it’s not like I have a choice now, right?” he chuckled bitterly. “I have to go back.”

Lune’s legs pulled in, sweeping across the floor towards the edge of his seat where they spread enough to allow the boy to lean forward onto his knees. He took a moment to think, to sit there in the quiet of nothing but distant raindrops.

“You do,” he said.

Lune didn’t want to say it, forcing the words out because he had to, because he promised a long time ago that he would never lie to Dongil.

“I was..." Dongil drew out in a breath of resignation, a tiny laugh after the words. "Cursed with luck," he clicked out the end of the word like a key having spun around a sticky lock and jolting the last bit into place in a tiny metal spasm.

"You sound ungrateful," Lune mused: no judgment, only words.

"I know I do because I am,” Dongil said. “I resent it. I resent my luck for where it's put me. It's ended me up here, hasn’t it?"

“That’s bullshit.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed into a confused pinch. “What?”

"You did," Lune corrected him. "Don't blame or praise anyone else for where you've ended up but yourself."

“You sound like-” Dongil started subconsciously before catching the thought as it rested right on the edge on his tongue, forcing himself to swallow it back down.

He didn’t miss the soft melancholic smile which dusted across Lune’s face.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” Dongil admitted in a huff, jolting at the rattle of increasingly frozen sleet against the side of the building. “I have no fucking clue.”

“None of us do,” Lune replied almost whispering. “We’re just better at faking it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

Lune faltered. “Tell you what?”

Dongil’s eyes found the window again and he let his pupils follow the drops down the glass, falling with the.

“That I wasn’t the only one falling apart?”

They lay there on the floor of Lune’s living room later, on the blatantly flat hardwood floor next to the soft plush of the rug, their spines wheezing out the air from between their vertebra as they melted into the wood. It was still raining in a gentle blowing spit that coated the world in a saturated mist.

“What’s going to happen?” Dongil asked, voice carrying in the dark up to the vacuum of a black abyss of ceiling. “When everyone finds out?”

He heard a rustling sound and felt Lune’s hip brush up against his own as the other squirmed for a moment. The boy breathed out a long drag of air like one would a cigarette behind a club in the waxing hours of the morning as the night fell away.

“They’re going to eat you alive,” Lune tole him.

He didn’t answer. Lune’s hand crawled across the floor until it bumped into Dongil and the younger boy reached out to card his fingers in between the other’s. He squeezed so hard Dongil almost winced, but it was warm and steady and he needed it.

“But I’m here” Lune continued. “You won’t be alone this time, okay? Promise me you won’t be alone,” he pleaded.

“Sure,” Dongil squeezed his hand back. “Why not?”

Chapter Text

A week later - a week after a photo of him had surfaced on every goddamn screen in the entire world, accompanied by messages and slander of ir-responsibility, criminal connections, and selfish impulse - and Dongil found himself here. If he was being honest, he hadn’t really expected any different from himself. Running a body, running a mind as far away from reality as he could get. Not until something came and yanked him back by the ends of his hair, stinging his scalp with a hearty tug. He’d run until someone decided it was too far. And maybe no one ever would and Dongil would end up falling right off the edge of the world. That’s what happens when you’re married to your own self-sabotaging impulses. It was habit. It was learned. It was disarmingly familiar.

The harried thumping of the dizzy lights, creeping around like neon snakes shot out of a ray gun, splashed onto the floor in a wash of confusing modernity that beset the privileged grace of the space in the gritty, spinning cyber fest of metallic whispers. Inside, the rush of the summer air and the blurred songs finally raced through into his head in streaks, it was a swirling gyre of colour and noise and disorienting breath as the streets respired. Everything inside itched to melt into the lights and so he did. El Manana welcomed him with open sweaty arms, swaying on unsteady legs, glaringly content to swivel about in languid little turns and shuffles. El Manana knew his face, mapped his scars and noted his freckles with a bright orange pen, and the club certainly missed him. Like a deliriously weak and narcissistic pagan god, it was happy to drag another worshiper back inside.

Hot, so stifling hot. The earth shook so harshly against Dongil's feet that his spine joined in the reverberations to such an extent his head decided to leave, to feel so deeply that it just rocketed right out of his pounding skull. There were no words down here, it seemed blasphemous to try to put something so, unfeeling, unviscerally guttural, into such a purely raw place like that. And Dongil, he didn’t belong. His body did, his skin did and his muscles, but not his mind. Theirs were all writhing on the floor beneath their stomping, spinning feet, crawling toward the dark recesses in the corners and out of the neon rays that shot at them like snipers on rooftops, laser after laser after spraying bullet fire.

“Hey, look!” someone called out over the crowd, voice scratching at the octave, a stretched arm curving above their heads. “D1 is back!”

Dongil remembered beating heartbeats pounding out a rhythmic syncopation that was seduced unnaturally to different patterns, thumping and grinding strings within chests lured from the ribcage like an innocently pulled rope, luridly dragged further and further until the organ was squeezed through the bone and flopped listlessly down to the shuddering dancefloor. That’s what they looked like. That’s what these people always looked like. That’s what they felt like: children of neon and wire and metal clinking lullabies, swung round like a babe in arms until they kept spinning along, round and round until the ground came up to meet them. Frenzied, innocuous, acquitted and naïve: they poured out their lungs and their hearts, reveling in the dripping blood as it poured over their sweat soaked skin in a sheen of adulterated adolescence. He desperately remembered the people who fell on their knees to pray to youth, to pray to forgetfulness, and to pray to astral dreams: people like he used to be and that he couldn’t seem to escape being.

There was a chorus of cheers and congratulations, sloshing drinks and stumbling bodies and then there was something shoved into his hand, a kiss at his cheek all sloppy and sticky, and he was engulfed by a mob of adoring nobodies, all jittering like junkies for a fix of the walking scandal. Caked in the flames of a song that barely sounded like music and more like cybernetic sinew, two girls, bare backs doused in the river of rainbow lights and shadowed beyond recognition, led Dongil into the sea of infinite, connected bodies, the amoebae of limbs and love and breathless eyes glossed over with something called life. It was so aggressively gentle, the way their lingering hands pulled him into the beating mass of flesh, a coaxing sincerity of wanting him to follow and it too became a sacrilege to think. Waves of pumping fire blew into his blood until it boiled over in bubbles of heated itches that poured through the pores of his skin and clogged his lungs from reaching the air. But it wasn’t half as terrifying as it was meant to be.

“I haven’t see you around in a while,” someone shot at him in a playful whisper and Dongil instantly recognized the voice.

Kwangsuk was the first person he met when he first started acting, nothing short of a million lifetimes ago. The older boy had taken him under his wing on a long running series and the second the show had ended, and Kwangsuk was on a chartered flight to Singapore for another project, Dongil had never felt so alone. They were friends, good friends. But the world likes to wedge people apart and Dongil hadn’t seen him the other in what felt like years. It probably was years. It was probably longer than he guessed.

“You always were impulsive.”

“I’m not impulsive,” Dongil grumbled back.

The elder shrugged back, silently conveying a retort that he didn’t have to speak for Dongil to immediately hear it resound in his head.

“You know I was the first person the police came to,” Kwangsuk confessed and Dongil’s head feel into a gentle hysteria at the admission. “Before Lune, before your parents… It was me. For whatever reason, they came to me.”

“I didn’t…” the younger tried to muster a response before relinquishing the conversation to a bout of fragile silence.

“Found yourself a little thief have you?” Kwangsuk continued, attempting to joke, always attempting to inject something other than painfully brutal reality into his head.

And that was the other thing. Dongil had, for the longest time and scantly remembering a time before, found a need to prove himself to the older boy in grand and confident statements and gestures he never felt the need to perform with anyone else. If the industry was a family, which god he hoped it wasn’t, Kwangsuk was the golden child, all shiny and perfect and unbreakable and he was the black sheep tucked away in the corner after falling from a very public grace in a very public manner. The whole thing was just so devastatingly public.

“Who says he’s mine?” Dongil blurted, a little more defensive than he had meant it to sound.

“I don’t know,” the boy shrugged, moving to slink around Dongil’s side and wind a thick arm around the other’s shoulders as the music shifted. “What would he say?”

Dongil froze at the movement and blinked at the question, his body momentarily projecting out of the thumping basement of the club and into a liminal chill. Clubs were always the right place to confront your shadowed past. They were dark and anonymous, filled with coping drinks and nameless friends. Clubs were the perfect place for forgetting and not much else.

“I don’t think he’d say anything,” the actor admitted, shrugging the other off.

“D1 gets his first taste of heartbreak?” Kwangsuk asked.

Dongil turned to look at the boy as they swayed back and forth together amidst the spinning crowd. “I thought you said it couldn’t happen to me?”

“I said I couldn’t give it to you,” Kwangsuk corrected. “That’s an entirely different story.”

Dongil hummed non-committedly, the sound emanating from deep in the back of his throat, a gentle reverb that vibrated in his chest as he did it.

“Look,” the older boy started again. “What they’re saying on the news. It’s not-”

“Does it really matter what it is…” Dongil stressed, “…if they already have a story?”

“Yeah,” Kwangsuk said. “I think it does.”

“Yeah, well,” the boy shrugged. “Look where I am.”

“It’s been a rough week for you, hasn’t it?” Kwangsuk asked like he wasn’t glaringly aware of just what the media was fixated on as of late. “You need to forget something?”

Sometimes people asked questions without really knowing what they meant. Sometimes people offered answer they weren’t aware could tear someone apart beyond repair. And it was nothing on those people. No, it was always, always, the fault of the person who knew better. Dongil looked over at the other boy finding something unnamable between mischief and empathy, something he needed.

“I need to forget a lot of things,” he said.

---

A phone blaring woke him up. He shifted in mangled, unfamiliar bedsheets wrapping around his legs in a straitjacket. It was quiet and cold, the night pouring through the open curtains dusting the windows looking out onto empty amber lights dotted through a city of horns and blares that should be sleeping. The phone continued, vibrating so harsh it felt like a bomb building up to a climactic explosion which rocked it around the wood of the side table, threatening to buzz itself right off and onto the floor. He slung an arm out, hand blindly and groggily slapping around the wood for the offensive object to quiet it.

Dongil wrestled himself out of the bed after slamming sore fingers down onto the buttons, a steady ache of immobility resting over them in a weight of heavy, fitful slumber that had yet to release its claws from his weary shoulders. His eyelids fell down in a blink at a car alarm faintly drifting up the side of the building and in through his slit window. The bled thumped as he slumped back into it, falling to the pillow from his propped angle and fanning his hair out across the stark white surface. In that moment, for a second and nothing more, he was just a boy in a bed alone. And then he saw the name on the phone and he wasn’t anymore.

A long exasperated huff emitted from his lungs, curling into the air like the long drag of a very bad thing between one’s teeth. It took longer than usual to gather enough conviction to slide from the mattress, phone clutched in hand - still ringing, still blaring – and shuffle to the bathroom across the carpeted expanse of the room. He slammed on the light switch inside the doorway, blinked into the harsh light of the mirror at eyes that were so dark they were almost concave, and slid his back down the wall until his butt hit the cold, flat tile of the floor beneath.

“Dongil…” Lune’s voice came through the phone and rammed cold water down his spine, sinking deep into his gut with a heavy plunge. “Where are you?”

His breathe came out in short spurts, puffing into the cold air of the bathroom, dissipating as it crawled out from his lips. The phone weighed down his hand, an unsettling weight gripped tight into his palm. He didn’t dare speak into it, taking in a worried tone he knew so well. At this point, he barely remembered Lune’s voice without it there, lurky in the murky undertones of his words like a creeping stalker set to remind them both of things they’d quite like to pretend were not there.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Lune continued. “But I… this isn’t what I meant when I said you had to stopping running.”

Dongil pulled his legs in closer, drawing them up to his chest as his arms tightened in an impossible vice around his knees. The bathroom was large, unfamiliar, and lonely: pristine marble and plush towels and nothingness.

“But I’m so good at it,” he whispered into the receiver.

“Dongil, I swear to god-” Lune grit out at him but there was a weariness there too that seemed to settle itself right alongside the disappointed chide.

“We always pick up right where we left off, huh?”

Lune’s sighed escaped through the receiver to tickle Dongil’s ear. “Just because they want to hate you doesn’t mean you need to give them a reason.”

“Might as well.”

“No,” Lune argued. “That’s stupid.”

“I love it when you compliment me.”

There was something about Lune, Dongil thought, where his silence was terrifying. There was something in the absence of his moving tongue, just calm washing nothing that came in his refusal to converse, that Dongil was utterly terrified of. He wasn’t sure why. He never had been sure, never even tried to produce a reason. It was a destructive resignation he had for things that drove him to discomfort, a learned habit from the necessity of perfection. A necessity for public things.

“Where are you?” Dongil jolted at Lune’s sudden question, his voice breaking the silence like a sledgehammer through a single pane of glass.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some hotel somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lune swore into the phone, biting on the words as acrid as they were.

Dongil closed his eyes at the sound, a tiny hum in the back of his throat as his head softly fell to the wall, neck awkwardly bent back in a contorted lean. The lights of the bathroom fell onto his face in a wash of unnatural light.

“Have I scared you off yet?” he murmured into the phone.

“Is that… is that what you’re trying to do?”

And maybe sometimes the worry in Lune’s tone sounded thicker. Dongil shrugged to himself in subconscious defense before he realized Lune couldn’t see him. “Maybe?”

“You need to stop doing this,” was all Lune said. “It’s going to catch up to you.”

“Hasn’t it already?”

“Is this about Chang-”

“No!” Dongil cut the other off immediately, but it was Lune and lying to him wasn’t half as easy as it was lying to everyone else. “Okay, yes,” he admitted. “I heard their song on the radio and then I started thinking and I fucking hate thinking so I made it stop.”

A beat. Lune’s breath. Dongil’s hand unconsciously flexing around the phone, his arm tightening around his folding legs.

“You love him,” Lune realized.

A lot of people had said a lot of things to Dongil in his life… in his career: a lot of people he didn’t remember spewing words he forgot the second they made their way to his ears. Very rarely did words ever stick with him, stick onto his skin with relentless violence, whispering maliciously sticky things into his skin and saying they would never leave. Half of those words were Changmin’s and half of those words were Lune’s.

“Dongil…”

“Not like I can do anything about it now,” the boy scoffed, rolling his head onto his shoulder in an exhausted sweep, willing himself to not slip into sleep right there on the bathroom floor. “Little late for that, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it is,” Lune agreed. “But what would you do if it wasn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

‘Come back when you have some answers.’

But some answers are dangerously hard to find, obscenely hidden and impossibly elusive, and Dongil had never been one to carry shovel.

Chapter Text

Five years ago -

There was a magical thing that happened, a really truly beautifully raw and magical thing that happened when the light of a weary moon strangled its way onto the rusted metal of a drum’s symbols and refracted itself toward his eyes until all he saw were stars that flitted across the sky as he played and the beats rang and the light danced right on the edge. It was one of Changmin’s favorite things in the world he had found. Maybe it just sounded a little more hollow and resonating at night because the dark shadows were right there waiting to swallow it and he hoped he could slap back the open jaws if he pounded just that bit harder. Maybe it was his own eyes slipping shut and letting the beat guide him into an empty blanket that filled and filled with the straining of her arms. Maybe it was…

“Are you still awake?”

Changmin looked up to find his friend, gently accusing smile alongside the words, leaning in the doorway to his own garage which he had lent Changmin for the time being. Not that Changmin had asked for the help and not that he ever would.

“Yeah,” the drummer laughed, rubbing his eyes for a second with the meat of his thumbs, sticks still grasped firmly in tired hands. “Hope I didn’t wake you up,” he added, nodding toward the other.

"Me?” the boy in the door laughed, a dusting sweep of hair whipping across his forehead at the jostle. “I just got back.”

And sure enough he stood there, in the dilapidated wooden frame of his garage door, with shiny black boots and an indecent amount of silver of chains around his neck, scoping in a soft curve at his collarbone and mimicking collar of the black shirt also resting there. His hair was tousled as always, a healthy glow on his cheeks speaking to the night’s chill, or maybe something else entirely.

“Have fun?” Changmin asked him.

The boy gave him a jokingly offended look, pinched eyes narrowing at the drummer melted into the kit like nothing more than a puddle of sweatshirt and frayed jeans. “I always have fun,” he said.

Changmin laughed, the reality of the hour finally seeping into him as he came down from it, an exhaustion grabbing thick hold of the muscles and coaxing them into heavy submission.

“You didn’t even move.”

Changmin looked up from his lap, eyes trailing their tired toward the other and settling on his gaze. “I did.”

The boy simply raised a quiet eyebrow in skepticism, readjusting his body against the door, the confident lean of his figure sinking into the frame.

“Who was there?” Changmin asked.

“A lot of the guys,” the other boy answered. “They missed you, dude.”

“I know, I just…”

“It was one of those days,” he smiled. “I noticed.”

Sometimes you knew a friend so long they seemed to have managed to crack open your ribcage and build a back door to your inner soliloquy. Changmin was sure the other boy had known how deep his dreams really ran because he had shown up one day with an extra key to his garage when Changmin’s parents kicked him out and handed the boy his first pair of 100% certified, legal, non-stolen drumsticks.

“Don’t stay up too late,” he said, smiling at Changmin and reaching over for the doorknob, awkwardly feeling around for the thing in the dark. “Can’t have you passing out on me tomorrow.”

Changmin smiled back, a soft and fleeting grin before rolling his eyes and waving off the other boy. “I’m older than you, brat.”

Before the door had actually managed to snake its way closed Changmin called out to the boy. The wooden portal swung and tapped against the edge of the other’s shoe, a slightly reverb bouncing it but a few centimeters out again before it came, creaking along its way, to rest snug against the side of the boy’s body stilled there in the threshold. There was something full of a nearly indescribable melancholy mourning that overtook Changmin as he watched the distant, soft moonlight filter in behind the kid, a sheath of chilled night breeze and a sparking glow of carefree youth that just seemed to douse the boy wherever he went. Changmin knew there were some people that were destined for big lives: terribly, impossibly, gloriously big lives.

“Hey, Heechan?” he threw into the air, waiting on the tip of the it as Heechan paused and met his eyes. “I’ll pay you back one day, you know?”

Heechan smiled back with a tiny scoff of amusement quacking his lips into a satisfied smirk. “Just don’t forget me when you’re all big and famous and we’ll call it even.”

---
Present day-

“He went right back to it!” Changmin groaned, on the verge of a scream but the betrayal he had stitched into his ribs took hold of the anger and slapped it down in second priority. “He told me he wasn’t ready and he left and then he shows up a week after that goddamn thing gets posted like nothing happened!”

“Changmin…”

“Why didn’t he trust me?” the boy breathed out, tightening the grip in his hair to the point of near gentle hysteria.

“Changmin, you really need to-”

“Would he really rather run himself into the ground than open up to me?” the boy shipped around to face him.

There was a tense beat, so tense from the frantic thump of the heart inside Changmin’s chest hacking its way out of his bones.

“That’s not what’s happening and you know it,” Teo tried to reason.

They stood before the stage, on the empty expanse of concrete theatre floor, spilled out like a bad oil spill of cracked and worn paint sitting still and open. It was early enough in the afternoon that they could crack the back door for light, letting the rustled air filter in with it, a breeze that whipped at the hair at the base of their necks in torrid tickles.

“It isn’t?!” Changmin argued, eyes wide and words biting. “Really?! Because when I see photos of him drunk off his mind on the news with some random dude that’s sure what it looks like!”

A lot can change in a week, so much so that life seemed to branch indescribably and irreconcilably from itself into tiny little splintered bits that lost themselves in your skin with nothing but an ache and a stinging itch to mark their place. A whole lot can change in a week and the past seven days had been a testament to just how much. Teo wasn’t quite sure how Changmin had been managing to take it all in stride until he found out, he wasn’t.

“It’s like I know I can’t make other people’s decisions for them but god do I wish I could,” the boy groaned, reaching out toward the stage and exacting to straight arms on its surface, wedging them between it and the full weight of his body as he dipped his head down between his biceps.

Teo said nothing. He sat and he listened to his oldest friend, his bandmate, his dream maker and his confident willingly unravel every miniscule stitch that held him together. Some people might do it earlier than others in life, decide to pull the loose thread and confront all the stuffing within. Some people never did it. Some people were scared or lazy or deceitful cowards choosing to ignore it. Changmin was brave to a fault, Teo thought. No, Teo knew. Brave and prideful and hopelessly idealistic.

“I told him…” Changmin slowed and whispered the words like he was trying to convince himself he hadn’t dreamed them. “I told him to come back and-”

“And he didn’t,” Teo finished for him.

“Would he really rather…”

“I don’t think he wants it that way, Changmin,” Teo cut him off: slow, calm, steady. “He seemed a lot happier when-”

“Yeah?” Changmin laughed, his eyes hard. “Then why did he leave?”

A car horn sounded from the alley, loud enough through the jarred door that it had Teo jolting at the sudden noise, Changmin noticeably tensing the muscles along his shoulder blades.

“Maybe he thinks he doesn’t deserves it?” Teo answered, reaching up his hands to clasp them in a tight lock of fingers behind his neck and pulling at it in frustration. “Shit, I don’t know. But is that really what you should be focused on right now?”

“I know,” Changmin said, straightening up from the stage, drawing his arms back from it. “Trust me. God. I know.”

“You realize they’re not going to-”

“I’ll fix it,” the drummer cut him off instantly.

Teo just stared at him. “How the hell do you plan fix it when his parents won’t even-”

“I said I’ll fix it!”

Teo took in the seconds of silence after Changmin’s outburst, the rush of frenzied agitation pouring over his friend’s spine like ice. He waited for the city to sound its ticking way forward outside, reminding him moments were as still as they felt, and he sought Changmin’s figure, hunched there small before a big open stage. The other boy had looked away as soon as the words had left his mouth, refusing to make eye contact.

“You know what would have fixed it?” Teo answered slowly, gaze boring into the other’s back. “If you had told me,” he said. :If you had trusted me. If you had let me help you then maybe you wouldn’t have had to start doing it in the first place.”

And then Changmin finally looked over at him with nothing but hurt in his eyes. “It’s not like you didn’t know.”

When Teo failed to think of any sort of response, because how the hell was he even supposed to respond to something like that, Changmin continued.

“Is it only a problem because I got caught?” he bit out. “Because Harry’s parents found out?” he questioned.

“Chang-”

“It’s not like you didn’t know, Teo,” he repeated.

“I wasn’t aware how bad it had gotten and I’m sorry.”

Changmin sighed and flexed his hand awkwardly before him before shoving it in the pocket of his pants. “You don’t have to apologize,” he said quietly after a moment. “I didn’t …”

“We need Harry back,” Teo said.

“I know,” Changmin murmured, the words barely making it over his shoulder to reach Teo’s ears. “I’ll fix it.”

“That isn’t the point!” Teo’s hands threw themselves into the air in frustration. “I’m saying let me help you!” he threw at the other. “I’m saying just let me help you for once.”

“I don’t…” Changmin paused, dipping his head into his chest like a scolded child, tucked chin and bit lip. “I don’t need this happening to the rest of you. So please,” Changmin stepped away, back towards the alley door. “Just let me fix this.”

Teo barely blinked before Changmin was gone from the room, flitted out like a dissipated apparition disappearing in the fog. It was too gratingly quiet then, after all the charged words. Too quiet that he couldn't think. Too quiet that it felt disarmingly wrong then, looking after an empty doorway and grasping for impossible answers on how to deal with impossible things. Life had been happy. Life had been good. Life had been simple. And then D1 happened.

Teo found GK in the lobby right where the boy had been an hour ago and Changmin had stormed downstairs and flown into the theater in a flurried rocket of frenetic vexation so palpable Teo could still taste it on his tongue.

“That’s what happens when you get famous, I guess,” the younger boy drawled when Teo had come to rest at his side.

Teo looked down at the bassist, clocking the damning article sprawled across the other’s phone. “One good reporter and then all this shit,” he mused.

GK shrugged, a passive lilt in his voice as he said, “At least his mugshot looks good.”

Teo didn’t laugh, eyes snaking their way over to the crowded doors instead, a tight jaw and disappointed eyes.

“Are you good?”

Teo whipped his head back to GK, a pressing worry in the boy’s gaze that he wasn’t used to, something much too serious for a boy like him. GK was meant to smile and laugh and joke along with all the words he ever spoke. So was Harry.

“Good?” Teo mimicked the word, tossing it around his mouth like he forgot what it even meant. “Am I good?” he asked himself, hand coming to rest along the back of GK’s chair. “Changmin is going off the deep-end,” he continued. “None of us can contact Harry and still have no way to pay back KDC. I don’t really know if that qualifies as good.”

“Changmin is fine,” GK said.

Teo remained silent, eyes passing back and forth along a pendulum between each flash outside the lobby doors, a moth drawn to the flares and glares.

“He will be fine,” the younger insisted. “And I have no idea what to do about Harry’s parents but…KDC didn’t bail Changmin out,” GK finished.

“What? Then wh-”

“Dongil did,” he said, pausing when Teo groaned deep in his chest. “Or D1?” the boy continued in a mumble, waving a hand ambiguously in the air. “Or whatever the hell I’m supposed to call him now.”

“You’re serious?”

GK simply nodded. “But don’t tell him,” he added. “I just-”

“Not right now,” Teo nodded back.

There were too many people outside, cameras and reports, prying and trying to catch a glimpse of the illicit little respite the world’s favorite actor had taken with the criminals and vagabonds and lowlifes inside.

“We’ve got a whole lot more to deal with,” Teo whispered out.

“Should I call Heechan?”

“Changmin would kill us but… yeah. I think we have to.”

Chapter Text

“Sir.”

The suit was uncomfortable, cripplingly agitating. Like an itch that wouldn’t go away until you scratched your skin raw. The sleeves seemed too tight, cropped around his wrist in a tight chaffing of stiffened cotton. The jacket bunched at his waist where it sat, just that slight bit of extra fabric around his middle pooling in his lap. He smoothed it down and watched as it crinkled right back up the second his palms had passed over.

“Sir…Excuse me, sir.”

Dongil whipped his head upright, reeling at the sudden bit of whiplash that clouded his vision in a spotty pool. His eyes met the driver through the empty space.

“We’re here,” the man told him.

“Oh, sorry.”

His gaze drifted over the throngs of glittering bodies clustered outside the house, chattering and chiming as they passed through the gates and began their way up the long, winding driveway which tucked the actual building into the hillside.

“Thank you.”

These types of things are always too bright, too bright and too loud, where a million prying eyes sat in wait, cold and harsh and unforgiving. He stepped out of the car to a chorus of clicks and shouts. He sometimes heard it chanting in the back of his head when it was quiet: the calling of his name and the flutter of a camera lens. He’d been raised on it after all.

The very second the tip of his shiny black shoe hit the darkened concrete of the driveway, he was met with his own brand of chaos: shoving paparazzi and a blinding cacophony of flashes, grabbing hands and clambering feet, a few short smiles from some of the other guests and a look of pity from his driver as he shoved the door closed.

“D1!”

“Are you back in talks with Alexander Wheckum or the Townsend Agency?”

“D1, over here!”

“What’s your relationship with Changmin of ACCOM?”

He stopped to breathe a little air into his chest and straightened his back at the sound, face slackening into an apathetic mask and answering none of them. Dongil’s steel eyes swept across the flashes and the clicks, running over them as quickly as he left in the next moment, making his way toward the house. He was met immediately with a sickeningly familiar face, one which drove a dizzying breathe of his old life straight into his lungs. And so Dongil did what Dongil did best and he ran.

He must have been diminishing in his skills because, by the time he made it to through the house - weaving through the crowds and furniture and around the gentle curve of the illuminated pool – and deposited a weary body onto the cliffside rail, Heechan was right there to meet him. Only a step behind. Always a step behind.

“Long time no see,” Heechan drawled.

Dongil shot the other a look and plucked a drink out of a wandering girl’s hand, downing the liquid in a single thrown back swig. “That was kind of the point,” he coughed out, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth the catch a drip on his lip.

Heechan teetered back on the heels of his shoes with an awkward tut, choosing to rub a hand along the back of his neck. “Oh yeah. I suppose it was, wasn’t it?”

Dongil gave him one last lingering look before settling his gaze on the tiny shining dots of the city on the horizon.

“It’s good to see you,” the younger boy offered, brilliantly white smile and wide eyes that had made him famous when one casting agent found him dancing in the street (and kept him famous long after that too).

“I’m serious,” Heechan continued into the silence. “It’s… it’s good to have you back.”

“I thought,” Dongil whispered into the air above the cliff, barely audible above the thumping music of the party. “…that you would be the last person to say that.”

“D1, come on.”

“What?”

Heechan huffed out a sigh and settled his elbows on the railway beside Dongil’s, elbows just a breath away from each other.

“You here with Lune?” he asked.

“Actually no,” Dongil replied tersely. “He’s in Milan right now.”

“Oh shit. Already?” the genuine excitement in his tone caught Dongil off-guard. “I seem to be losing days here and there, you know?”

Dongil glanced over at the younger boy, immaculate fitted navy suit and strategically tousled hair. “I seem to have a lot of lost time to make up for,” he said, retuning his eyes to the city beyond.

“Gotta start somewhere.”

A long silence reined where Dongil let the younger fester in the awkward ambiguity, readjusting himself against the railway.

“It’s been slow coming for me since you left,” Heechan added. “Thought that might make you happy.”

“How was the gig?” Dongil asked.

Heechan seemed taken aback, blinking at the question. “What gig?”

“Prague.”

“I didn’t…” the boy’s eyes lit up in some sort of realization mid-thought and left him gaping slightly at the other. “No one told you?”

“Told me what?”

Heechan broke into a smile. “Come on,” he pushed back from the rail and motioned for Dongil to follow him. “There’s someone I have to introduce you to.”

“No, Heechan. That’s not-”

“Come on,” the younger insisted with a familiar old smile. “I promise you’ll want to meet him.”

Dongil reeled back, on hand on the cold metal rail and the other extended forward in defense. “I don’t think that’s-”

He was cut off when Heechan wrapped a thick hand around his wrist, tugging the other along with exacted steps steady and strong. A couple people floating along the edge of the pool excitedly called out to them as they passed, gleefully distracted smiles lopsided on their soaked faces. Heechan, in a fashion befitting to his occupation, smiled back and greeted each one of them by name. There were others too, people that all adored him. People that all adored Heechan, the dazzlingly blinding mess that he was. The dazzlingly blinding mess that Dongil used to be.

The house which Dongil hadn’t given himself a chance to really look at before as he darted through it sat in a foreboding bastion of modern architecture on the hillside. It was strong and harsh and white in that clinical sort of fortress that seemed to be popular with people now-a-days, spacious and open with mingling crowds dotted beside the few pieces of furniture strewn across the grey slate floors. As soon as they passed inside the cracked glass sliding doors, a couple more placated party-goers passing by with short comments and waves, Dongil rooted in his heels and stopped cold.

“Heechan!” he hissed out, wearily eyeing the growing mass of people.

“Can you just trust me for one second,” the boy pleaded.

Dongil leveled him with an impassive glare. “Look, I don’t even know what you’re trying to do. I don’t want to-”

“Dongil,” Heechan said and he froze.

He couldn’t remember the last time Heechan had called him that. Lune barely even said it anymore, so familiar with the new personas they both had adopted. It was strange it to hear it again after all these years. Dongil was almost half convinced the other would have forgotten it by now.

“You’ll want to meet him,” he insisted, hand tightening around Dongil’s wrist.

When he finally started to follow Heechan and they had made into the next room – a dizzying expanse of floor length windows that shone their own reflections back on themselves against the hard paint of night. There was a throng of people, and in the center stood an impossibly bright boy with a sort of untarnished boundless joy about him that just seemed to radiate an innocent exuberance Dongil hadn’t seen in a long time. Not something that bright. Not anything quite like it really. He laughed and it made Dongil’s ear ring in the melody of a nostalgic song he couldn’t remember the words to. And then, with a wave of Heechan’s hand in the air, the boy’s eyes were on him all of sudden, growing wider, clear with excitement. He stepped through the group, slowly making his way towards the two actors.

“Oh my god, you’re here! Like really here!” the boy chocked out through a grand smile. “I- I- You inspired me to act!”

“Yuku here,” Heechan smiled back at the younger boy before them, clapping hand on the kid’s shoulder, “took over the Prague role when you left.”

Dongil just stood there stunned, looking at Heechan for clarification, blinking into the empty stretch of Heechan’s expectant eyes and Yuku’s bright smile. “But I thought that…”

“He’s doing a great job too,” Heechan tacked on, grinning at Yuku with an amount of ease that let Dongil know how close the two must have gotten.

“I was actually really nervous because you’re so amazing and I wasn’t sure I was going to fit in,” the small boy rambled. “I mean I came in after you and you’re like… you’re the best.”

“You’re an actor?” the idiotic words slipped out of Dongil’s mouth before he registered even mouthing them.

Yuku laughed. “Yeah, I am! Thanks to you!”

“Yuku is a fan favorite. They had to reshoot the whole first half of the movie but everyone liked him so much they didn’t really care,” Heechan added, looking fondly at the young boy, voice dripping with pride. “Kind of amazing, right?” he asked Dongil.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding along almost numbly. “Yeah that is amazing. Congratulations.”

“Thank you!” Yuku beamed back. “It’s honestly so wonderful to meet you. When I heard you came back I was so happy you were okay. You are okay, right?”

“…Yeah?” Dongil chuckled at the other’s endearing sincerity. “I’m okay.”

“Thank god!” Yuku yelled, slightly too loud that it caused himself to flinch. “I mean that’s awesome!” he corrected. “I mean you’re my role model.”

“Role model?” Heechan scoffed teasingly at the younger boy. “Hey, I thought I was your role model?”

“You’re cool and all that…” Yuku sheepishly answered, eyes fitting from Heechan’s face to Dongil’s. “But you’re no D1,” he smiled.

Heechan threw his hands in the air with a grin. “What use is raising these kids anymore? They don’t respect you!”

“Hey, wait,” Yuku interrupted. “I have the best idea. I mean only if you’re free and only if it isn’t rude of me to ask. Gosh I probably should have asked first.”

“Yuku,” Heechan stopped him, grabbing the kid by the shoulders to get his attention. “What’s the idea?”

“Oh,” the boy seemed to realize he hadn’t actually said anything. He turned to Dongil. “Will you come to set?” he asked. “Work with me? Work with me on set?”

It took a moment, and then it took two. Dongil breathed in the unbridled enthusiasm, tossed it around his head with the unfiltered adoration of a naïve boy, and then blew them back out into the room. “You want me there?”

“Of course I do!” Yuku said. “I’m sure everyone would love to see you and it’s like a dream of mine.”

Heechan nudged him, a gentle push into his shoulder that drew his eyes to the other’s “You should go sometime.”

“Okay, yeah,” he murmured and then glanced back at the young boy practically bouncing, the fluff of his long hair waving up and down at his excited tremble. “I’d love to come, Yuku.”

“Wow,” he breathed. “You… you’re really amazing, D1.”

For some reason, a very real and very human reason, compliments get harder as you hear them. They loose the luster and the sincerity. They lose any semblance of the words they carry, just speaking out things they don’t mean. But then, out of nowhere, someone that hasn’t been groveling comes along, a very real and very human person, and they make you feel special again.

“I-” Yuku reached out and shook Dongil’s hand awkwardly. “Thank you so much. Really.”

“Yuku!” someone called out from the group of people across the floor which he had previously been entertaining. “This dude doesn’t think you know how to b-boy!”

Heechan threw his head back and laughed at Yuku’s shocked and offended expression.

“That’s a bad bet!” Heechan yelled back. “Kid’s a legend!”

“Kid’s a legend.”

“Why does that sound so…” Dongil started to mumble to himself and then it hit him.

“D1?” he heard someone from his side murmur, but his eyes were unfocused and his brain muddled. “Hey, you alright? D1?”

He jolted as Heechan’s hand came to rest on his bicep, relaxing once he noticed the other’s concerned gaze.

“Where’s…” he asked looking around the room and finding Yuku very much indeed proving someone wrong on their assumptions about him.

“You alright?” Heechan pressed, hand still there to steadily hold him down to earth. “You kind of spaced out there for a second.”

“Sorry, I just… miss someone,” he admitted after a second. “He’s a really good kid,” Dongil whispered under his breath, eyes locked onto Yuku.

“He reminds me of you,” Heechan told him.

Dongil’s brow pinched inward confused.

“When you started out you had that same light in your eyes and everyone wanted to be you,” Heechan said, glanced over at Dongil as he watched the young actor. “I wanted to be you,” he admitted.

Dongil leaned back onto the wall. “I was naïve,” he said.

“You were like a god,” Heechan mumbled in some eerie sort of wistful nostalgia. “Still are,” he added. “Fallen from grace and all that but still...”

Dongil looked at the other for the first time without any rivalry or contempt, just looked at him and let him be. They didn’t have an easy acquaintanceship or whatever someone might call them: friends, rivals, something in between and something entirely different. Heechan was dangerously passionate and it just seemed to always rub Dongil the wrong way, stapling itself to his neck in a pricking irritant that bled when he tugged it and bled when he didn’t. But it was then that Dongil realized he didn’t hate Heechan. No, the younger was so similar that it scared him.

“They don’t want me anymore,” Dongil argued. “They won’t let me come back easily.”

“Everyone worships you,” Heechan laughed in response, gaze flitting over the party and the people. “They always will,” he tacked on the end more seriously.

“What if I don’t want that?”

Heechan shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone want that?”

Someone in the group called Heechan’s name, a boisterous laugh propelling the words across the space. Heechan waved back with a big smile and started to move toward the group before he paused, a few steps away, and turned back to Dongil.

“You know…” Heechan started. “I don’t really care if you hate me or we’re just… whatever it is. But…”

More laugher sounded in the distance in a resonant ring.

“I’m still going to help you,” Heechan told him and with an oddly placed smile gracing his face, he ran over to find Yuku, leaving Dongil alone with a sentence in his head.

Chapter Text

There were fingers on his bicep, ones that dug in their intention and then brushed away just as quickly to demand apology, not for speaking, not for stopping, but for waiting too long to do so. There's harsh hesitance in a bitten tongue, one that tastes even heavier somehow, even sharper than anything else. Not that it things had been anything but soft lately. Is that what happens when the world opens up? Does it always become sharper?

Changmin looked back, over his shoulder in a slow turn, propelled by the fact that he had been expecting it much sooner and surprised it had taken that long. He faced GK, the other boy shuffling back and forth between his two feet, his weight teetering side to side in a steady pendulum of frenzied movement.

"I don't think we should be here," the younger said as he flickered his gaze between Changmin and the next house over, his pupils zeroing in on the front door sat sill and waiting.

Changmin had thought of that. Of course, he had, mulled it over to death and back. And then he had realized sometimes terrible decisions were better than nothing, sometimes hard choices are the right ones, and sometimes being afraid is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to face it.

He wanted to laugh in bitter spurts of resigned impulse, wanting to laugh into the face of adversity with clenched fists and a tight jaw and saunter the other direction without a care because being happy was all he ever wanted. Dreaming hurts but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to run himself ragged with it. But he didn’t laugh and he didn’t run. Not in front of an unsure kid he had swept up with dreams and fancy words and a promise of fame. You don't do that to the dreamers. You don't hurt them.

"They don't mind you," he chose to drawl with a smile and shrug.

"I mean I don't think you should be here," GK repeated, insisting himself more than he normally would and perhaps that was what changed the other's mind because in the next second Changmin had decided to let a little doubt creep in himself.

"Well," the older boy huffed out, pausing to push a shaky hand through his hair from the base of his forehead where his palm pressed flat into the skin in a warm sweep, to top of his skull where carded fingers swam their way through hazardous knots. "How else are we going to get him back?"

GK bit his lip, eyes slipping to his shoes as they flexed against the pavement over uneasy toes. A puffed breath escaped his chest between a sigh and an exhaled of something else, frustration perhaps? Impatience?

"I dont know," he admitted, running a hand up one forearm from where it had clasped his wrist, calloused fingers smoothing their way up the skin. "We could wait?" he offered the other. "We could wait and see if Harry manages to talk them into it or we could-"

"No," Changmin cut him off, hands flinging out to grab the younger by the shoulders and holding him there in gentle confrontation. "There is no waiting," he said. "Not in this life. Not right now."

There was something so magnetic about the way the drummer spoke, which was shame considering he had never really be listened to until he started shouting on a stage. Changmin made people listen and he made people care. He was violently passionate, so forceful with his heart that the stains of his blood spilt obsession soaked the ground under his feet and stained everywhere he had ever been in red coated reminder of a crazed temper that he had shoved inside a drum kit, trying to hack out every time they played.

"We're on the edge of something... beautiful,” Changmin breathed out the word with a chest so full of sincerity it almost chocked him right then. “And all we need to do is be ready to jump."

Changmin was like a prophet, GK had always thought. A prophet without a god or an altar and so he had built worship on the back of music, breeding confessed followers of his crowd and demanding, so sweetly demanding, that they follow it too. And he hadn’t said no. No one could ever say no. It was just too mesmerizing to watch. He looked over at GK with a raised brow and just this look in his eyes that asked permission while knowing he’d be granted it.

"Okay," GK mumbled out in acceptance, motioning an arm out down the pavement for Changmin to continue. "Okay," he added, slightly loader and rolling his eyes at the other’s erupted smirk.

That gently disarming feeling of being in a perfect place, with clean streets and smiling neighbors, with of a conscious born from privilege and ease, washed over them in a tide of unbelonging. There were some places Changmin felt deeply at home, like the theatre or a stage or an alley under neon lights to fight the night. And then there were others had never and would never exactly know. And it wasn’t pity-mongering or acidic judgement, it was just the way things were. Harry was from a world where everything was shining and Changmin could see in the dark.
Harry’s mom opened the door before they could manage to knock, an equal air of hope and terror around her, immediately slumping to their presence and leaving a parted empty doorway before them as she walked back into the house and seated herself in a small wooden chair beside their landline.

“Did he send you?” she asked softly, back turned to them and it took a second for GK to figure out she was talking to them

The two boys exchanged a glance before stepping inside on unsure feet, loitering about the threshold as the women stared intently at the phone placed upon the table beside her, still and quiet. Her hands wrung in her lap, around and around in a tense ball, veins popping and muscles straining.

“No, we-”

“Please,” she said, cutting Changmin off and finally looking back at their faces. “Please just tell him to come home.”

“Ma’am,” the drummer tried again. “I’m so sorry to come here unannounced and I know you don’t want to see me, but we came to talk about Harry.”

Her face pinched and there was an exhaustion that rolled off her shoulders in an uncomfortable tumble that seemed to leech into the air as she stared at him. “Just tell me he’s safe.”

“I-” Changmin turned to look at GK and saw the other studying Harry’s mother fretfully biting her lip in the doorway, shaky eyes and an untamed chest. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Please,” she blurted. “I didn’t mean to drive him away. I was just… worried,” she murmured, tears beginning to gather in her eyes as a thick blanket shrouded her voice. “I’m so worried.”

“Ma’am,” GK spoke up, clearing his throat. “Where is Harry?”

Her shoulders seemed to tense, alarm passing over her in a cold rush. “But I-” she started, breathy and broken words spilling out. “He’s not with you?”

“No,” the boy continued, confused. “We came to talk to him,” he answered. “To talk to you about-”

“Then where is he?!” she yelled out, voice breaking, perhaps louder than she intended. “Where’s my little boy?”

Changmin walked over then and knelt beside her on the floor, crouched down to meet her at eye-level. “Are you saying you don’t know where Harry is?”

“He left,” she explained. “Last night. I went up to talk to him and his window was open and I thought… I just thought he had gone back to theatre. I thought he was safe. I thought he was-”

“Ma’am,” Changmin interrupted her ramble, the women pausing in return. “I don’t know what happened but I’m sure Harry is safe. He’s a smart kid. Way smarter than I could ever be and I know that wherever he is, he’s okay.”

“I don’t know where else he would have gone,” Harry’s mom replied, shaking her head lightly. “I- I can’t think of anyone else.”

“I’ll find him, okay?” Changmin said. “I’ll go find him and bring him home.”

She looked at him a second longer before drawing the young boy into her arms in the swaddling hug of a mother than Changmin had not felt in many years. He froze under the touch, under the gracious love squeezing him, before settling into it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away to wipe her face with the back of her hand. “If I had…” she scoffed at herself midsentence. “He ran away because I didn’t listen to him. I should have-”

“Everything we do,” GK cut in, stern and soft, making eye contact with the woman. “Every goddamn thing, is just to make Harry happy,” he insisted, the genuine sincerity of the statement taking her off guard. “Especially Changmin,” he added. “I promise.”

“We’ll let you know as soon as we find him,” Changmin said, standing up from his folded position and nodding to her.

“I…” she paused, looking up at the two. “Thank you,” she decided, smiling gently at them. “I just… thank you.”

The second they stepped outside the house, Changmin had a ringing phone to his ear, the trill echoing in his head with each step they took frantically down the pavement.

“Who are you-” GK began to ask but quieted at the elder’s outstretched hand as the phone line clicked open.

“Okay, you can tell him to come home.”

The voice on the other end paused. “What?”

“Harry,” Changmin told Junseo. “Put him on,” he added, glancing at GK in his peripheral.

A faint scuffling sound came through the phone, a body moving about the space alongside the rustle of fabric. “Harry isn’t here?” Junseo responded. “I haven’t seen him.”

“What do you mean Harry isn’t there? didn’t he come there last night?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Did he tell you he was coming over?”

“No, but we-”

“What’s going on?”

Changmin stopped mid-step in the middle of the street, GK gauging him with a skeptical eye as he too came to a halt beside him. Changmin sucked in an airful to his lungs and expelled it through gritted teeth, running a hand through his hair that pressed into his scalp as it made its way.

“Harry ran away from home last night,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Junseo, do you really not know where he is?”

“Harry ran away? Our Harry?” the younger boy questioned. “He ran away? I don’t…”

“His parents found out about,” Changmin answered, holding GK’s face in his vision as he spoke, the guilt remarkably absent from his words but not his eyes. “They decided it wasn’t safe for him to be hanging out with us and they took him out of the band,” he added. “I guess Harry didn’t like that.”

Junseo was quiet, not that it wasn’t his propensity to be so, to listen, but it was a sharp silence. And then the boy hummed slightly, almost quiet enough for someone to miss had they not been hanging on the absence of a sound and latched onto the faint noise.

“What?” Changmin asked.

“I mean…” Junseo attempted to explain before he gave up and started again. “Changmin, what did you think would happen?” he asked. “Did you think that they’d never find out?”

Not that Teo hadn’t asked him that question a million times before but he never had to answer it. Teo was easy, he’d let him hide, let him walk away from it. But maybe it had been too long and he was so far away now that coming back might make it easier.

“I was gonna burn that bridge when I got to it,” Changmin admitted. “I figured I’ve been living on borrowed time already.”

“So where is he?” Junseo asked him. “Where’s Harry?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Where else could he have gone? Who would he go to? I mean I don’t think he-”

“I thought he would be with you!” the older boy bellowed into the phone.

“Did you ask GK?”

“Yeah he’s fucking here with me.”

“And his mom really doesn’t…”

“Are you sure he didn’t call you or anything?” Changmin asked him again, the other’s incessant questions grating on him.

“I think I would have noticed if he-”

“No, you’re right,” the older acquired. “Of course,” he huffed. “I’m sorry. I just…”

“I’m sure he’s okay,” Junseo said. “Wherever he is.”

“Junseo…”

“Yeah?”

Changmin looked away from GK, the soft breeze rustling the shaggy hair against his forehead in faint fingertip tickles that seemed entirely too sweet a feeling to be gracing his face right then. A sunny day and a blue kiss and the wind’s kiss came to surround him as the pressure in his chest, of a consequence he made someone else face, someone younger and kinder and without all the knowing of living, pummeled his heart like a Gatling gun. He tucked his chin up toward the clouds, the back of his neck folding over on itself as he angled skyward with squinting eyes meeting the warm sun.

“I know you probably think this is my fault but-”

“I don’t.”

Changmin felt GK move at his side, studying him in the tense silence.

“I don’t think it’s your fault,” he said. “If harry trusts you, if he think you’re a good person, then I trust you. And I don’t blame the people that I trust for anything.”

The drummer closed his eyes and soaked in the words. “He’s like my little brother. I just want to protect him.”

“I know,” Junseo answered him sincerely. “He knows.”

“To be honest,” the elder sighed. “It’s kind of scary how much he believes in me.”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t think anybody would ever believe in me that much.”

Junseo laughed lightly and the fondness in his voice was almost visceral, like the hug of an old friend or the knowing smile of familiar nostalgia. “He does that to people.”

“I’m just worried I finally fucked up too badly to recover from it.”

“Hey look,” the younger boy cut in. “We’re gonna fix this. All of this. I’ll call his school friends and you guys should see if-”

“Oh my god,” Changmin whispered to himself when the words registered and he was dropping the phone down at his side limply and stumbling toward the curbside to hail a cab, GK startling at his back.

“Changmin?!” the bassist called out, barely managing to follow.

“Hello?”

The boy turned around from the oncoming whir of a car’s engine and faced GK with a frenzied look. “I think I know where he went.”

--

The seat creaked and twitched under him as he shifted, maybe it too feeling the restlessness seeping off his tightly wound figure. An hour and a half later Dongil had decided this was weird. He had known the second he entered the set that he couldn’t escape the questions and the stares and the whispering, in fact he was prepared for it. But now, sitting behind a camera went you spent your whole life in front of it, was unsettling in that sort of uncanny valley way. He felt the unwilling companion of the performative showmanship that was engrained into him since birth taking a fidgeting backseat and itching on the inside of his skin as he just sat there and watched something that had been made, for him, go on without him.

When he had met Yuku, he had fully expected to be forgotten. Well, forgotten or intentionally held at a distance like everyone did with the ones who couldn’t maintain the whole perfection façade. But he didn’t. The younger actually did invite him to set and hang on his words and look to him for validation in way that screamed so genuine he was caught off guard. It was always like that with the dreamers, the young ones who believed, with their whole hearts, that the future really was theirs. And maybe it was. Maybe it would be. At least for a while.

The director was a portly man with a receding hairline and teeth so white they reflected the LEDs in a blinding glare that almost upset the carefully calculating lighting design. He leaned over at the break call and grunted to get Dongil’s attention, smiling once the other nodded back politely and waited.

“So,” the man grunted out, settling deeper into his seat. “What do you think.”

“He’s good,” Dongil answered him. “Where’d you find him.”

“Oh you know,” the man breathed out, winding up his hand to latch together behind his head. “Around. He took right too it though.”

Dongil smiled back. “Seems like it.”

A young woman ran to the director’s side with a stack of paper and a rushed and hushed detailing of some problem or other, the man facing away from Dongil as he answered her. Dongil just sat, as he had been doing, and looked over to watch Yuku laughing with the co-lead through the brightest smile the human face was capable of doing. He jolted as his phone starting ringing in his pocket, fishing it out from his jacket and wrinkling his brow at the caller.

“Sorry,” he leaned over towards the director and the girl. “Can I-” he asked, gesturing the hand holding the phone toward the exit.

The director waved him off and he slipped though the dark light cameramen and stage hands and out the door to a harsh transition of bright sunlight.

“Heechan?” he asked into the phone.

A voice spoke in rapid fire on other end, nearly indescribable before he caught something he recognized.

“I’m sorry…what?”

Chapter Text

Do you know exhaustion? Really know the heart and the head and the soul of unintentional slumping into the floor like your life had decided on its own whilst you were occupied with moving one foot into the next step to bear its will against time and through the aching need to pause for a moment, to end here in a melted tedious tandem of a day lived through and through and through, had reached the point where you lay, and it lie, together in a liminal decision to take all it could muster to simply exist. Not in a wrong way, no. Not in a bad day. Had he had the energy to feel the satisfaction it might have drowned him. Had he had the energy to process what muscles felt like before they smiled, he might have known. But it was before, stuck before, in the simply existing bit. The moon agreed. The night agreed. The stars bade him rest and the city quieted for but the short while it might take him to drift off to sleep like a gentle pat on the head from a constantly moving thing that had stilled and paused to kiss you goodnight.

“No,” Heechan grumbled, dragging a battered pillow over his head with the clutching grip of barely awake hands grasping through stiff tendons as his doorbell erupted in his ears.

In the space between the rings, in the mere second or fraction thereof, it was peaceful again in that same way someone who was teetering on the edge of conscious decision was and then it wasn’t.

“No,” he grumbled at the continued ring of his doorbell.

His body turned in on itself, creeping itself closer to ward off the sound as his spine curved to arch its way around his back. He staved it off, the beckoning… for a little while

“No,” he repeated, lifting a limped figure from his mattress.

Heechan drew himself upwards to sat at the edge of his bed, running flat palms down his face and scrunching exhausted eyes into the glaring light of his phone screen.

“Why?” he mumbled to himself, righting his body out of bed and stumbling toward the ringing sound which seemed to viciously plague the apartment, bouncing off the walls, sticking to the inside of his ear in loud syncopation, relentless and blaringly there.

“Who the hell…”

He yanked open the door without checking to see his shrouded visitor and met with something that was perhaps so surprising it slapped him awake and all the same met with such a familiar need to guard that his body knew when it was needed.

“Harry?” he stood there, gaping at the young boy pulled tightly into a dark blue hoodie waiting at his threshold.

“Hi,” the boy said.

“It’s like 3 am,” Heechan reminded him, having himself only just learned of the hour and thinking in the space after that Harry seemed, visibly, more aware of the time than probably anyone else. “What are you doing here?”

The boy awkwardly shifted his eyes to the side, trailing down the corridor and then back to Heechan. “Can I come in?” he asked instead, small and soft.

Heechan seemed to shake his head at the words. “Always, kid,” he said motioning the other inside and flicking on the light. “Always.”

They passed inside silently, a shuffle of feet and blundering bodies sweeping into the space bathed under the harsh new light of Heechan’s lamp just inside the door, streams of dusted silver moonlight throwing themselves at the window like blind birds, thudding in hollow faint thuds and falling away from the glass and into the underbrush of the grass beneath.

Harry moved to sit down at the other’s counter, propping himself on a stool and dropping a backpack, which Heechan had only now noticed, at the floor by the foot of it. Heechan wandered around to the other side, the lower ledge of the kitchen’s surface and rubbing his eyes with the boney back of his hand, the knuckle of his thumb pumping awkwardly into his nose.

“No offense, kid,” Heechan started, the gravel in his voice giving him pause and necessitating a throat clearance before he continued. “No offence but… what are you doing here?”

Harry’s head was tucked into his chest, hand folded together in a tight clasp, resting on the beige marble. “I didn’t really know where to go.”

Heechan studied him, the slump of his neck and the tense rise in his shoulders.

“Home?” he offered, body pushed off the counter from two straight arms that wedged their way between his torso and where his tired hands met a cold surface.

Harry’s eyes flickered up to Heechan’s for a second. “I-” he blurted, caught off guard and dropping his gaze again. “Uh…”

The light in the kitchen was off, only the entirely too bright pool from the door crawling its way over like the slowed passage of an arrow and the filtered light from the night. It was quiet that Heechan’s own breathing filled his ears alongside that absent static that seemed to cling to the night, that fuzzy background of nothing that sounded soft and uncanny that always seemed to be there in the hours people weren’t meant to see.

“What happened?” he asked.

Harry seemed to breath in a bit of conviction which dropped his shoulders and rose his head, his gaze meeting Heechan full on for the first time since he had stepped foot in the apartment.

“Do you remember when you first became famous?” the boy asked.

“When I started acting?” Heechan clarified, receiving a wordless nod from Harry. “Well geesh,” he breathed out in thought. “That was a while ago, wasn’t it?” he laughed to himself.

“Do you remember though?” Harry pressed. “When you finally were told you could be all the things you wanted to be. When you realized it was okay to have dreams because they were there, in front of you,” the boy’s eyes training on his now open palms resting on the counter. “In your hands,” he added in a whisper.

“I do,” came Heechan’s sudden, soft answer. “Yeah,” he smiled at the warm feeling of nostalgia. “Of course, I do. I still feel that way sometimes,” he said. “Why?”

“My parents heard about Changmin on the news.”

The boy took in a beat of silence, moving away from the counter to roll a shoulder, the crack as it circled around pinching out like a snap. He straightened up, flexing his back and folding one arm over the other. He blow a whistle of air out of his lungs, not finding any words to answer the younger with.

“They took me out of the band,” Harry continued. “Said I shouldn’t hang out with a criminal, that he was a bad influence.”

It was quiet again for a minute as Heechan processed the other’s words. “It’s not like I don’t get why they did it, but…” he paused. “What are you guys gonna do?”

Harry looked at him, blank and scared, sitting so small in his stool at the counter and then it clicked. Heechan registered the boy in front of him, he registered time, and it clicked.

“Tell me you didn’t.”

Harry grappled with a response to defend himself, a silent plea overtaking his features before he even muttered a sound. “It’s not like-”

Heechan moved away from the counter, gripping sides of head in a light panic.

“Changmin is really rubbing off on you, huh?” he chuckled dryly, eyes adrift to a distant corner of the apartment before he stopped and once again found Harry shifting uncomfortably in his kitchen. “Oh god,” he realized. “I have to tell your parents.”

“No you can’t!” Harry thundered off the chair and moved toward Heechan.

The older boy was already walking to pick up his phone. He whipped around exasperated.

“Well, I have to tell someone!”

They stood there at a stalemate in the kitchen, just a few feet away from each other. Heechan reaching for his phone and Harry reaching for the other, just paused in their movement and waiting patiently for an answer to present itself. But that’s not how life works.

“What about Changmin?” Heechan asked. “Can I-”

“I don’t-”

Harry hadn’t known Heechan a long time, not really. Not half so long as anyone else in his life and definitely not well enough to know exactly what made him tick as a person. The older boy smiled through everything he said, lacing brash confidence and listless humour into everything he did. And it worked. People adored him for being so gone for life, so in love with living. But Harry had never seen Heechan look so serious as he did right now, stoic and uncertain and realizing, for the first time in his life, that he was responsible for someone other than himself.

“You’re a child for god’s sake,” he whispered.

Harry saw the boy begin to move back toward the phone and blurted out the first person hat came to his mind. Someone like Heechan. Someone that was good at secrets. Someone that wasn’t quite so invested.

“Can you call Dongil?”

Heechan halted, just utterly slack at the name and very visibly caught off guard at the suggestion.

“Dongil…? You want me to call… Dongil?”

“You’re friends, right? You used to be friends?” Harry asked. “Would he answer?”

It looked like Heechan was fumbling some sort of mental labyrinth in the next second, lost as he ran through shadowed passage finding dead end after dead in an attempt to come up with the right way to answer the younger.

“We…” the boy stopped, biting his lip and turning to rub a hand against the back of his neck as he eyes the clock along his back wall. “You know what? I’ll call him in the morning,” he decided. “You can crash for the night and then I’ll… I’ll just call him in the morning, okay?”

And after he did, it didn’t take long for Dongil to show up at Heechan’s door. Harry sat on the older boy’s sofa, curled into himself, resting against the arm with a pillow in his lap. He overheard Heechan in the next room, frantically whispering over the phone and noticed the elder barely had to get Harry’s name out of his mouth before the call was ended and Heechan was stumbling into the hall and peeking around the corner to make sure Harry was still there where he left him the night prior.

“Can I-” the older boy stepped toward him in an awkward footing. “Do you want breakfast?”

Harry looked up at him with a smile and answered ‘no’ before promptly leaving a confused Heechan to racket about the kitchen in search of caffeine. Somehow, it didn’t occur to Harry until Dongil was knocking on the door a short while later and stepping into the space with darting eyes that seemed to latch onto the smallest of details. It didn’t occur to him that this must be harder for them than anything else, that it must have been a long time since Dongil was inside this apartment last.

“Okay, I’ll…” Heechan mused, closing the door behind the other boy. “I guess I’ll leave you two for a second,” he said patting Dongil’s shoulder as he left.

Dongil walked over to the couch and threw his coat onto the other arm before sitting down next to Harry, flexing his hands before him before he turned to the younger.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry’s arms tightened around the pillow.

“How do you know Heechan?”

“He’s an old friend of Changmin’s,” was all Harry said, muffled into the fabric of the cushion where his chin rested.

Dongil hummed noncommittedly in response. “Small world.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Why’d you call me?” he asked again.

“Did we wake you?” Harry ignored the questions. “I know it’s kind of early, but-”

“Harry.”

He finally looked up, faltering at who he found waiting at the end. Yes it was Dongil like the one who he met in the theatre and the one who feel asleep on their couch in the back and the one who ruffled his hair and the one who made Changmin smile so wide and so bright but it was, well it was also D1. Maybe it shouldn’t really be that different, knowing who someone was and knowing who they were supposed to be. Here’s the thing, you don’t need to reconcile people. They don’t need it. You don’t need it. No one else sure as hell does. So why, Harry thought, did it seem so weird to ask the same person the same question and expect a different answer?

“Because I ran away,” he told Dongil, watching the older boy’s face for his reaction and seeing only the professional mask of a trained actor.

Or maybe he was just listening, maybe he was just… Dongil.

“And I didn’t-“ Harry tried to articular, hands flapping about the sides of the cushion and falling in defeat to his lap. “You’re the only person that I-”

Dongil stopped him with a gentle smile, the same smile, and Harry thought maybe it was the same after all.

“You should go home, Harry,” he said slowly, gaze locked on the carpet under his feet and the steady exhales of Harry beside him in ambient backing. “I don’t know what happened, but you… you should be at home.”

When the younger failed to answer, Dongil sought him out and found Harry still watching him.

“My parents never liked Changmin,” the boy explained to him. “They didn’t really have a reason or anything. Well, not until now but they barely even tolerated him in the first place and now…”

“Oh,” Dongil breathed out. But there something nagging, something that only someone raised in the same hellfire of self-preoccupation would notice and something only they would feel: the immediate necessity to take on the guilt as theirs. “Did I-”

“They would have found out eventually,” Harry said. “I know that. I know they would have.” The boy has shifted now, head knocked back on a tensed, bent neck as his eyes sought out the blank expanse of ceiling above.

There was a gentle trill in his tone, a slight waver that came out strained at his stretched neck and Dongil realized the welling in the younger boy’s eyes, the faint moistening, wouldn’t fall with his face like that. It would stay rooted and collected right there and it would not fall.

“But it’s so easy to ignore things you want to ignore,” he said slowly, choppy with the words like they had been there, he had been staring them down for a while now and they became too familiar that they distorted, too permanent and too present that they terrified him. “You know?”

“Harry…” Dongil reached over to tough the other’s shoulder, hand hesitating right above the boy’s figure and just falling back down without even a brush. “I-”

“They took me out of the band,” he admitted, gazing over at Dongil and just looking so young, “They told me I couldn’t- and I just-”

“I’m happy,” Dongil said suddenly, Harry confusedly blinking at him, a confused hurt in his features. “I’m happy you found something you care it so much that it hurts like this when you don’t have it,” he explained. “I’m happy you have a dream and that it’s already yours and because of that… because of that I just know it’s going work out for you.”

Mirrors can break. You wake up one morning and you look into it and you realize… that is entire time… you haven’t been looking at yourself. You’ve been looking and you’ve been seeing someone in there, reflected at you and cataloguing a vague shape and a vague semblance of being but then, one day, you see yourself. And its so raw and naked that it catches you off guard and you hate it. You’re uncomfortable because you’ve never seen this person before. And the more you see them, the more uncomfortable it gets because they’ve been there the whole time, and they aren’t going anywhere, and they’re watching, they’re there, but you barely even know their name. It happened to Dongil in a bathroom in Budapest or Prague or wherever. And he saw it again. He saw Harry for the first time since meeting him. He was a young kid, maybe younger than he should have been but then again who was fate to hold back the fated, and he was starry eyes looking into the blinding lights that were made for him.

“Somehow,” Dongil said, nearly blinking into the shine himself. “Somehow I know it’s going to work out for you.”

“Dongil?” Harry called out to him after a second. “What happened between you and Heechan?”

“I… it was a long time ago.”

“Not really.”

The older boy gave him an odd look, breathy laugh exhaling from his chest as he processed it. “Yeah,” he decided. “Yeah, I guess maybe it wasn’t that long in the scheme of things.”

“When I go home,” Harry said. “You have to promise me something.”

“Yes?”

“That you’ll go home too.”

“Harry, I-”

“I just mean you should stop running from people, okay?” Harry tole him. And maybe he wasn’t that young after all. “I just mean you should be happy.”

As he got older Dongil had come to the conclusion that he no longer had one before he ran away and realized there were probably more places than not he would have longed to run to. Heck, even Heechan had popped into his head at one point before he forcible shoved that idea back down.

“We miss you,” Harry told him.

Dongil faltered, eyes flickering away from the younger and shakily making their way across the flat.

“But I get why you didn’t come back,” Harry continued, coaxing voice drawing the older back to him. “I mean maybe I don’t exactly, but it’s been so long and I wasn’t ever mad at you for it.”

“I think I know who might be,” Dongil muttered.

“He’s…”

“Don’t tell him I’m here,” he rushed, a desperate plea in his eyes. “I just-”

“Hey,” the younger smiled. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

Dongil carefully wrung one hand over the other in his lap, a gentle pull on the skin as he rubbed them round each other in a vice, rough and pushing and grounding.

“We have an interview later this week,” Harry spoke up. “You should come,” he added with another soft smile.

“Yeah,” Dongil murmured back. “Maybe I will.”

Chapter Text

“Yeah, no, mom,” Harry kept trying to interrupt into the phone at his ear. “Mom, yes. Yes, I promise. Okay. We’re about to start,” he finally got out. “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell him. Okay, mom. Mom. I got to go. Bye.”

He pulled away from the wall with a deep sigh that just sounded like it came from his whole chest as he slumped onto the arm of GK’s chair, the boy reaching up to give him a pat on the arm. Harry sought out Changmin, finding his figure propped against the surface of the vanity beside Teo, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on their phone, playing some racing game.

“Mom says good luck,” he said.

Changmin looked up from his screen and simply smiled back, eyes crinkling into it.

“Do I get a good luck?” GK threw the question up at Harry with a mock offense. “Did you just forget to deliver it?”

“You don’t need it,” Harry replied which had GK beaming. “You’ll suck anyways,” he added with a snicker a second later and had GK lovingly shoving the young boy off the chair.

Harry stumbled upright with a laugh, catching himself on the vanity next to Teo. A knock sounded at the door and it swung open to the hall, an older man peeking in with a clipboard.

“You guys are on in 2 minutes,” he nodded to them, eyes trained on the paper and not looking up to meet them. “Three songs and then the drummer kid,” he glanced up and met Changmin’s face before nodding and looking down again, “goes on for ten minutes. Yeah?”

“We got it,” Teo called out. “Thanks.”

There was one more nod and the man was just as quickly gone, shutting the door behind him in a swift arch.

In the middle of the second song, as they four of them packed into the studio, the door to the mixing booth open and someone slipped inside. Of course, this was without their knowledge, the happenings of the other side of a pane of one-way glass looking in on them as they played. But there was someone new watching who slipped inside and sat down at the back without a word, hat pulled low over his face and denim jacket hugged tight around his chest. He was there when most of ACOMM filed out. He was there in the break when someone wandered in to speak to the sound editor. He was there when the radio personality brought Changmin a bottle of water before they started and awkwardly introduced themselves.

“Hey, it’s Nick,” the man now seated across from Changmin said. “I’m here in the studio today with the drummer of a very special group…” he paused and took a breath, clapping his hands together in a large smack. “ACOMM Eval! I know you guys have been requesting to have E’chan join us here. Hey, dude how you doing?”

Changmin shifted in his seat, switching out one propped leg for another as his weight shifted. “Oh, I’m good,” he answered. “Thanks for having me out.”

“You know it took me over a week of pestering to get you on here?”

“Really?” Changmin laughed. “Didn’t feel that long. I honestly can’t believe that.”

“You’re famous, man,” Nick told him. “No joke. So to start, I feel like I should ask you what ACOMM Eval means. Your fans have posted some theories on the interest but, correct me if im wrong, I don’t think you ever put out an official thing.”

“No, you’re right. We didn’t. It’s honestly just a fun moniker we threw together. Stuck the naval abbreviation for Acoustic Communications onto the old spelling of evil and were done with it.”

“No kidding, huh?”

Changmin laughed. “Nothing much.”

“So,” the man continued. “I’m sitting across from you and this big ass beautiful drum kit between us. Want to tell me about it?”

“I, uh-“ the boy stopped to nervously lick his lip, pulling it into his teeth for a fleeting pause. “I got a Mapex Mars,” Changmin started to explain. “It’s a real big, real loud. It’s got quite a fat sound with 22 inch base drum,” he added. “Thing’s a bit ancient.”

“Oh, Mars,” the interviewer nodded along. “That’s a nice kit. Real nice.”

“I had to start out playing with some of those dumpster kits for a while, you know? The ones you cobble together from torn apart pieces you find in the alley,” he smiled at the memory. “But this one- uh, It’s really nice to work with. It’s my first full set,” he finished.

“Looks like you got some fun mods on it,” Nick offered, gesturing to the drums.

Changmin agreed and then looked down at his kit in thought. “I got some pinstripe clears, love those,” he said tapping the top of his 16 inch absentmindedly and then pausing to study his set briefly again. “Harry uses an EVS cab that I think it goes well with and I also think it sounds nice with GK’s hollow. Give it some texture in the backing.”
Dongil watched Changmin shift around as the interview rattled off some comment and laughed politely as he rubbed his arm right over a tiny, upended triangle tattoo that hadn’t been there before. It looked new, a bit red and raised. A sudden feeling of longing crashed over him, desperate at the missing pieces of a person he had given up, desperately raving at the thought of that someone changing without him knowing.

“I actually really love this dream china right here,” Changmin said grabbing the end of one of the symbols. “It’s- I think- quite annoying,” he decided. “And obnoxious,” he tacked on with a smile. “Drilled some holes in to get it a little trashy.”

“You drill them yourself?” the man asked.

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Changmin smiled, getting visibly excited at the question. “I actually borrowed a power drill from a friend who owns a chop shop and went to town one night. Just decided I wanted a more coarseness to it, you know?”

“Love it,” Nick answered, hand rising into the air in a motion of obvious agreement. “Think we need more of that.”

Changmin laughed. He laughed with such sincerity Dongil would have stopped breathing right then and there had it interfered in any part of the sound.

“So your group’s first album,” the interviewer continued, “Versus Verses came out in 2016 and the following single Cellophane in 2017. They didn’t really pick up at first. Took until recently, right? How does that feel?”

“Yeah, it was one of those classic, ‘Wish I heard of them sooner’ kind of things. I didn’t mind. I still don’t. I don’t think the boys do either,” he added. “I know Teo maybe wished it had happened sooner but we’re all just happy to be here now.”

“And your second album, Like the Dawn, came out three weeks ago. I remember seeing it all over Twitter like a day after its official release…”

“Oh, god yeah. That was crazy.”

“It was real impressive,” Nick insisted. “You guys are all still pretty young. Your bassist, he’s 17. And you’re what? 24?”

“Yeah, Yeah. But I don’t think I could be doing what Harry’s doing at 17. There’s no way. I didn’t have my life together like that.”

Nick nodded in reply. “Now, E’chan,” the man drawled. “I have to ask. Can we talk about Lead Me to the Sun?”

Changmin’s eyes dipped for a moment, in an almost bashful manner, a timid air falling over him.

“It’s different,” the man continued, coaxing, prodding.

Changmin reached up a hand to awkwardly rub at the back of his neck. His eyes landed on the window, landed on the spot where Dongil was staring straight back at him and it stung. For whatever reason, Changmin stared into the space as he answered.

“It is different,” he started and then met the interviewer’s gaze once he had found the words. “It’s different because I am. And it’s really the only thing I ever truly wrote for myself to be honest” he admitted. “Which seems odd to say considering we have two albums and a single under our belt but…”

“It feels like a really personal song.”

“I mean yeah, it is personal. It’s just me,” he shrugged. “It’s just me talking to someone who I think really needs to hear it.”

“Some of these lyrics…” the interviewer said slowly and then waited to see Changmin’s silent nod before continuing. “It’s such a shame that we’re already broken,” the man repeated the words back to the drummer. “Looking for love that’ll never quiet reach here. Waiting for fame to come back and catch us.” The words sat in the room, spinning in the air. “Can you tell us a little more about those?” the man asked.

“Well,” Changmin blew out a whole lungful of air and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees where he sat behind the kit. “It’s about life. It’s about growing up and being disillusioned.”

There was a pause where he again unknowingly met Dongil’s eyes through the glass of the recording studio window. Where he sucked the life out of the other’s lungs without ever knowing it.

“But it’s also about not being afraid to dream,” he said as if just speaking to the other boy, as if no cameras or mics or anyone else was there. “It’s about the reassurance of failure and maybe accepting that things turn out different than you imagine them but still working to get back up again.”

“I just have to say, E’chan, I really love the song. The first time I heard it I thought it was like a lost Nirvana record or something.”

“Thanks, man. It means a lot.”

“Anyways,” the interviewer clapped. “Let’s talk about style. How would you describe Like the Dawn? Do you think your sound has changed at all since Versus Verses.”

“The early stuff is pretty gritty,” Changmin answered. “We started out with a lot of dirty beat, a lot of sloppy chords thrown together to make it rough. Didn’t want it to be polished. And I love it. I still do. I listen to Tell Me Why probably more than I should.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Nick mumbled.

“But definitely… I mean you can just tell listening to our shit that’s something’s changed. It’s… happier? I don’t exactly know what to say but I know try to give a little something different every time we go out.”

“It’s passion, man,” the man answered. “And I really think you can tell that you guys are passionate about what you do. I think you’re all putting a lot more of yourselves into the music now.”

“But there’s also something so intrinsically us about it at the same time,” Changmin added. “I don’t feel any different when I play.”

The man hummed. “I know what you mean. I feel like ACOMM has a color to it. And it’s so hard to stand out now-a-days but you really manage to do it.”

“I never thought we’d make it this far.”

“How so?”

“We started out, well… I started out hacking away at a shitty kit in my friend’s garage. Just needed something to get me through the day and then I didn’t want to do anything else. Teo came into my life about a year after I started, we were… 18? Messed around with some sounds for a bit before GK found us.”

“GK has quite a unique vocal tone. It’s kind of addictive,” Nick laughed. “I couldn’t name anyone with a voice like that.”

“Oh yeah,” Changmin smiled proudly. “He’s amazing. We couldn’t let him go.”

“And Harry?”

“Harry came a year later,” Changmin explained. “He was fifteen when we put out our first album. Kid’s a legend.”

Dongil smiled at the familiar line behind the glass. It might seem ridiculous and obscenely fated to have words follow someone around like that but they do. They do if you're listening for them. They do if you miss them.

“There’s also some hype around your roadie,” the man said and Changmin visibly flinched.

Dongil reacted too, but it wasn’t the awkward betrayal or anything. No, he seized. His whole goddamn body seized and tightened and boiled at the same time, a taught snap of muscle inside his heart he hadn’t known was still there was suddenly stinging as it singed back into him, the sound reverberating in his chest and the warm after that sizzled right there, right under his ribcage. It hurt. It hurt more than anything ever had before. It hurt more than falling off the roof of his friend’s garage drunk off their asses from cheap stolen beer. It hurt more than the first time he had thought he was in love and they left him with a small wave and a small laugh and just as many thoughts thereafter. It hurt excruciatingly, impossibly more than the morning he woke up after deciding to leave and not a single person that knew him really felt sorry. Maybe because he did it. Maybe because, for the first time, he actually accepted responsibility for it.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Changmin interrupted the man and Dongil’s eyes somehow made their way back to the glass, back to the room, back to the boy.

“I didn’t-” Nick started.

“It’s fine,” Changmin waved him off. “But I’m not here for that.”

“Of course,” the man jumped on the request. “ACOMM. You’re here to tell a story,” he said. “And what a story you guys make.”

“Hey, man,” Changmin breathed. “I’m just happy to be here now. None of us could have made it this far with each other and I love them, I really do,” he said. “I think Teo keeps us together. I think GK keeps us humble,” he smiled to himself in a gentle smirk of a chuckle. “And I think Harry keeps us dreaming.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m just along for the ride,” Changmin answered. “I’m just here to be happy.”

There were words after, conversation. They talked in the background but it faded to Dongil’s ears. It faded like the hollow echo in your ears once the sea was done deafening it, it faded on the backs of rain and songs and laughter. It faded until he was left in the space, forced deep inside his bones, and the only sound he heard kept ringing in his head: the sound of a drum kit, loud and obnoxious and rough, with he snarl of a jilted lover and the passion of a new one. And suddenly, before he was ready and after a lifetime’s worth of wit’s end, they were done. They were done and Changmin was left alone in the studio, gently packing away his things as they others greeted Nick outside. Changmin, in the empty expanse of a studio, surrounded by his own fame, was right there in front of him.

Dongil reached for the door, hand nearly to the metal of the knob before his phone rang trilling in his ear. He paused, taking a step back and eyeing Changmin as he slowly moved about the space, unknowing to the world beyond and just laying careful fingers on each piece of equipment in reverent patterns. The phone kept ringing and Dongil finally tore his eyes away, answering the thing without looking to see the number. And maybe he should have. Because it’s no use avoiding your past when it keeps rushing up to meet you.

--

There was a rustle next to him and Changmin’s eyes briefly flickered to the mirror in front of them, watching as Teo slowly sank himself down into the chair beside his with a lengthy exhale, melting his spine into the seat and stretching his legs out. They made eye contact in the mirror, Changmin blankly staring into the reflection of his friend’s face.
“I’m sorry they asked you about him,” Teo said.

Changmin’s gaze immediately shifted to the wall beside the other’s head, switching over without conscious hesitance and just grabbing the words right out of the air so he could stuff them into his pocket and forget about them. Forget until one day he threw them to the corner of the room in a fit of rushed exhaustion and one, maybe two, tumbled onto the floorboards all war weary and frayed, maybe sun-stained. And then maybe, maybe he would pick them up if he didn’t remember that they were, if he didn’t know any better. They could, however, could right back inside as many times as they fell out.

“I’m not mad,” he said, face stilled and taunt in all the places that showed he knew better.

And the look that Teo gave him, gauging it out of his peripheral, spoke exactly that sentiment because Teo had always known better.

“I wasn’t supposed to be mad,” he said. “I was supposed to let him find himself first because I’m not an asshole who thinks I should matter more but then he-”

Teo was silent, merely watching Changmin cycle through whatever the hell he was cycling through, the impassioned started of something on his tongue all formed before he swallowed them back and tried again, never actually making a sound. The agitated tense of his body, the meat on his shoulders twitched as he pitched forward in a frustrated caving of his stomach until he took a breath.

“He fucked up,” Teo said.

“Yeah” Changmin sighed, nodding softly into his chest. “He kinda did, didn’t he?” the boy let out a sad chuckle and brushed a lazy hand through his hair, pushing it all back before it cascaded into place. “Was it wrong of me to assume he’d want to come back?” he asked.

When Teo didn’t answer, Changmin looked over to the other. Someone with a face as young as his and yet with all the wisdom of the world he hadn’t figured out yet.

“When he found his old life again,” Changmin continued. “And he didn’t need me… do you think he ever wanted to come back?”

“I don’t know,” Teo honestly replied. “But what I do know…” he said, reaching a hand over to place it on his friend’s shoulder “Is that I’m really proud of you.”

“Do you think he heard it?”

“You’d have to ask him that.”

Lead Me to the Sun

I know you're scared.
But im here
And I know you're worried.
But I’m here
You’ve been gone.
You’ve been roaming.
And You’re tired of the lights.
But im not going anywhere.
I had wondered if you knew.
How to love and how to hurt and how to feel.
And now I know.
I knew none of them before I met you.
I know you wanna run away.
Every second, every day
Such a shame that we’re already broken.
Looking for love that’ll never quite reach here.
Waiting for fame to come back and catch us.

The world's a little timid when I’m with you,
And then it bears its teeth
Oh, you go running
when the sun is coming
to lead you back to me
It's a damn show
And it's blood soaked
And my little prayers
they got nothing on you
You needed something better
something more than what you had
to find your way back
to where the sun is leading you

Chapter Text

“Why am I here?” Dongil mumbled, eyes leaving the scene of twenty middle aged men in suits chugging etched crystal tumblers and laughing guttural rumbles into the air. “Why did I come here?”

He stood in a room with glitters and gold and the head-ache inducing shine that bumps off them when you light a room like that with megawatts so bright they could burn a whole right through the floor. He stood in yet another suit with his hair slicked back all low and tight with Lune at his side, and tipping his second drink of the night back. The windows on the far wall are draped heavily, fabric opened to an expanse of what should be night but instead just looks like the lights at a carnival show. The occasional camera flashes from outside make their way in, hazy and pounding against the glass in weak hits.

“Because we were supposed to,” Lune answered, visibly repressing the urge to roll his eyes. “And you would never make me do it alone.”

Dongil snorted out into his champagne glass at the other’s words, the liquid jumping in a tiny ripple from the movement.

“Well, that’s reassuring,” the younger added, swiveling away from Dongil and eyeing up the staircase tucked beside them as something echoed in the distance.

“You’d have…” Dongil paused, watching alongside Lune as a trio of heels clicked down the marble in loud succession.

“Well, Heechan is here. I saw him earlier with Yuku,” he added, gaze darting out to study the throng of people but coming back to Dongil’s face after a few seconds of hapless flitting. “But I don’t he’d want to talk to me.”

Dongil’s face fumbled and he looked back at the younger boy. “Why not?”

The look Lune gave him made Dongil aware he should not have needed to ask that question. “Because of Milan,” he said slowly.

Dongil leaned over, turning his back to the room. “What did he do?”

Lune laughed and pushed him away with a hand to the elder’s suited shoulder. A tiny squeak emitted as Dongil stepped back from the force, almost stumbling into one of the high bar tables dotted about the room, wrapped in white tablecloths and littered with empty glasses.

“Why do you always assume it’s his fault,” Lune frowned at him, pushing a hand through his hair. “I mean it’s not that big of a deal. It was just something kind of funny-”

“It’s usually his fault,” Dongil muttered under his breath.

Lune scoffed. “I really wish you didn’t do that?”

“What?”

Lune doesn’t answer him, he just looks over his shoulder and scans around the room, hands readjusting on the glass in his hand, tapping against the outside in a slow absent-minded pattern.

“Oh, that’s where you two are?!”

They both turn to see Kwangsuk making his way over, devilish smile that charmed too many and zeroes eyes that never once got them anything but trouble. It’s a company party. It’s a company parade of power so of course Kwangsuk was there. Of course the embodiment of Dongil’s well-worn impulse enabler would be there, smiling and laughing and slinging an arm around his shoulders. Lune uncomfortably eyed the older boy for a second, shifting his weight, before nodding to Dongil with an upturned lip and stalking off.

“What’s so fun over here?” Kwangsuk asked, looking over his shoulder and then back at Dongil firmly tucked under his arm. “It’s quiet.”

“That’s the point.”

“Come on. They’re not pariahs.”

“I thought that was me.”

Kwangsuk paused, smile diminishing like it’s melting off his face as he processes the younger’s words.

"I thought I was supposed to be the pariah,” Dongil said.

Kwangsuk laughed. “You never had enough teeth for that,” he stated like it’s a fact, squeezing his arm around Dongil. “Still don’t.”

They’ve been what someone on the outside might call friends for a while now, by stubborn convenience or by willfully ignored advice otherwise. Dongil has walked in on his first day, landed his eyes on Kwangsuk seated in the shadows with limp muscles laid to waste in the effects of being pleased, and still he should have known better. He still thinks he could know better, but familiarity is a deep, deep rut and he’s afraid of heights.

“By the way…” Kwangsuk added. “Why are you here?” the older boy asked, gently languid stretches of a contented smile dripping off his face, softening his bones and his jawline.

“Because I have to be,” Dongil shot back. “The director asked me to-”

“Because you missed me?” the older boy pressed.

“Do you honestly think you’re funny?” Dongil threw at the older boy, attempting to lace disparate authority into the words as he shrugged out of his hold.

“Yeah,” came Kwangsuk’s lazy answer, the words rolled around his mouth with a bored tongue slightly too loose from the liquor to not be dangerous anymore. “I really kind of do.”

Suddenly, his eyes are hard. Suddenly, Dongil really can’t take the glaring glint off the chandelier that’s hitting his eye in a sharp point and melodic clanking of the glasses in the background. Suddenly, he’s decided he doesn’t quite like familiar things.

“It’s getting annoying, you know?” he tells the other. “I’m over it.,” he started to move away, to go find Lune in the crowded room but there’s a hand on his forearm stopping him.

“Are you?” Kwangsuk says.

It’s phrased like a question but it doesn’t sound like one. Not by the tone, not by the hand gripping his arm, not by anything single thing about it. Kwangsuk isn’t a bad person and Dongil is not about to blame him for all his problems. It gets terribly exhausting resenting things like that.

“Or…” the older boy slightly unlatches his fingers, Dongil gently pulling his arm out. “Did you just stop being thick skinned?”

He swallowed, raking the words through his head like he was dragging spikes on the floor, scuffing up the wood. “Am I supposed to be?”

“How else do you think we all make it this far?”

Dongil was overcoming with all crippling desire to propel the boy through the window at the opposite end of the room. He can visualize himself shoving Kwangsuk back with hard hands and the boy’s hands haplessly palming around the air to grasp for purchase along the thick curtains, the fabric slipping out and his body falling back. But he can’t and he wouldn’t so he turns to leave. Lune is there, stepped into Dongil’s path with a jolting conviction. He’s there and he’s scared, holding out his phone to Dongil wordlessly.

“What are you-”

Lune shakes his hand before Dongil, insistent and waiting. He just pushes the phone closer to Dongil and it’s a video. It’s a video…

“…frontman of ACCOM Eval faces charges of plagiarism by fan-favourite Impulse Control. The rookie band worked as their opener last year before their exponential boom in popularity after a scandal surrounding D1 brought them into the limelight. Their most recent album Like the Dawn has started to receive backlash after the established senior singer Baron Cage alleged Changmin of ACCOM directly stole lyrics and instrumental from him while they were on tour. Yesterday, Baron…”

He doesn’t know when Kwangsuk had shuffled over and pressed himself against his side, leaning over to see the screen with a huffed laughed.

“The smaller they are, the sooner they’re forgotten.”

Dongil swivels to look at him and he finally understands what sincerity is supposed to feel like.

“Fuck you.”

Lune steps forward. “Don-”

“What?” Kwangsuk balks at the younger. “It’s not like you’re friendly with them anymore.” He said, a smirk erupting. “I mean… not the way you used to be,” he tacks on the end.

“You know it’s bullshit, right?”

“Do I?” Kwangsuk asks.

“Yeah. Changmin would never-”

The elder sighs deeply in response, eyes rolling to the side like he can’t physically bring himself to listen. “Do you even really know that guy?” he questions with his whole chest. “I swear to god you knew him for like 2 months. You don’t know what he would do.”

“It’s a fucking lie,” Dongil responds, voice rising.

Kwangsuk tuts his head to the side and drops a healthy pour of champagne down his throat. “Guess I’ll just have to that out for myself, won’t I?”

Dongil almost snaps, but Lune, the ever calm and ever present savior of a boy he is, gives him a look that reminds me he should know better. Kwangsuk leans into his ear and for a moment Dongil thinks it’s to apologize.

“I bet he doesn’t even remember your name,” the elder whispers under breath.

If he had taken a second to collect his thoughts, he still would have done it. He just would have apologized to Lune before he did. Dongil reels back his hand without care for consequences, propelled by them possibly, and slams his fist into Kwangsuk’s face, hitting the bone with an audible crack. The older boy yells out in surprise, eyes watering and hands flying up to the blood that’s leaking out of his nose. He shakes his hand out by his side, weary at all the new eyes turning to look at the three at them and the accompanying whispers which seems to snake across the floor.

“What the-”

Lune all but drags him out of the room, pulling Dongil through the service door on the other side of the stairs and into an empty stairwell. That’s the thing though. Kwangsuk is still on the line, laughing and precariously balanced, but he hasn’t ever left it. They’re taught – they’re trained – not to leave it. Dongil had never been good at that. Composure was a forte well learned and well earned and the second he was asked to preform when his heart wasn’t in it, he leapt off the edge of forever and forced everyone else to deal with the consequences.

“Not that I didn’t love that,” Lune said, reeling around to face the older boy with a frantic, scared look in his eyes. “But you really need to be careful right now.”

“How can anyone fucking believe that asshole?!”

Lune stood there a second, Dongil’s rapid pacing back and forth the small concrete landing filling the space in a melodic pattern of echoing steps.

“Which one?”

Dongil swiveled around at the base of the upward stairs, turning and placing a less-than-pleased glare back on the younger boy, hands balls at his sides, flexing and unflexing on the gentle fabric of his pant leg.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Lune acquiesced, slowly folding one arm over the other on his chest and tucking himself up against the wall beside the door in a leisure lean. “They’ve been around longer,” he reminded Dongil. “Baron’s a fuck-up but he’s loved.”

Dongil paused and released his muscles, the tension dripping off and pooling onto his feet where they rooted to the floor. “There’s a lot of pointless loyalty in this game.”

Lune, in all his infinite infinity, already come to terms with it while he was still learning and already reaching his dreams before he knew what they were, smiled softly back in the same way Dongil had needed every morning for a long time.

“You already knew that.”

“I had hoped-”

“Dongil,” Lune cut him off. “Why do you keep pretending like you can’t do anything about it?” he asked.

“What?”

“I just-” he stopped and pulled his lip through clenched teeth for a moment. “I’m not doing this to slight you. At all,” he tacked in on earnest promise. “I just want to know,” he threw out. “You’re mad and you’re angry. So do something about it.”

The wonderful thing, the terribly irreverent and optimistic thing, was that Dongil thinks Lune has never experienced failure. In a wonderful way, in a horrid way, Dongil thinks Lune has only ever been granted pretty things. He wouldn’t wish it any other way. Never, in all his power, would he wish anything but pretty things upon the younger. To give him beauty and grace and patience and hope and respect and admiration and awe… Dongil wishes all the beautiful things he never got upon Lune. He does because at least then he’ll know there’s someone like that in the world. And that’s enough. Lune is the person he wants to be. Although he would never tell him and although he would never say it, Lune is the version of him that was stronger earlier on and resisted, through fists and smiles, to let any part of him be taken away by the life they’ve chosen.

So maybe it’s part Lune and maybe it’s part Dongil that has the latter standing outside his CEO’s office with rapping knuckles and an impatient tapping of his foot on the carpet. He feels like Lune is at his back, hand on his shoulder, and smoothing out the doubt with soft hands. Because Lune as only ever had dreams and because Lune has only ever wished him luck, he’s there.

And maybe moonlight should be the first sign you’re making bad decisions, the first sign that you’re not in the right frame of mind to be making good ones. Maybe, in a better world, it should be. Or, if you’re Dongil, it’s the only time you ever do. Good ones or bad ones, it’s the only time he can.

A loud ‘Come in!’ erupts after he knocked on the door and suddenly Dongil was standing in the middle of an office he loathes and facing down a man he detests even more so. But he was doing it because running is an easy choice and he’d decided, if he was not exactly fighting for himself, then there’s something he’d to face down the world for, someone. Someone who loves more than they’re supposed to and without waver, someone who is the light and airy whistle that accompanies a sad and hopeful piano key echoing in an empty theater, someone who stands with brandished fists at his side and the conviction to never use them, some who’s brave enough to care and love and be everything he ever wanted despite conspiracies against him.

“The prodigal son returns,” the man behind the desk said, drawing out the jest with a smooth arrogance.

Dongil flinched at the words and wished, with itching skin and twitching feet, that he was anywhere else. And then he remembered why he was there and decided, for the very first time, that no he didn’t. He didn’t want to run anymore.

“I came to talk to you about something.”

“Is it to pay financial recompense?” the man tutted. “Because you still owe quite a great deal with that contract breach, son. Had to reshoot near the whole fucking thing.”

Dongil shifted on his feet, waiting for the man’s facial muscle to slacken from the defensive posture that’s taken them over, knowing from years of experience that he won’t listen until the older man had decided it’s time for him to listen.

“I’m willing,” the man started, leaning forward and folding his clasped hands upon his desk. “to let bygones be bygones if you do me a little favor.”

“Sir, I’m-” Dongil tried to start explaining but the man’s hand was in the air and his eyes hardened.

“I need a favor, kid. And you need good graces.”

“But I came to talk to you about-”

“Let me make this quite clear, D1,” he spat the boy’s stage name out like an insult. “You are in exactly the wrong position to be negotiating. I need you to corroborate Baron Cage on account of I owe their manager.”

Dongil balked at him, pupils flitting around his eyes in an effort to understand, the breath tight and flying around his chest.

“What the fuck do I have to do with this?”

His old boss sat back in his chair, the gentle screaming creak of the seat under his weight rolling out as his back reconnected with the cushion.

“The public would lap up the disgraced prince crawling back and throwing the rising star under the bus,” he explained. “Especially after your little stint with the frontman.”

Dongil didn’t answer.

“Who knows?” he shrugged flippantly. “Maybe it’ll be good for your image.”

“You can’t seriously think I’d be willing to… “ Dongil choked on the thought. “I mean, come on. Who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re a scared little boy,” he said. “And you only ever had your reputation. So do you really want this getting leaked?” he asked, sliding forward a picture of Dongil’s fist connected to a defenseless Kwangsuk’s face, the blood dribbling out beside his thumb where it presses into the other’s nose.

“Are you really prepared to throw your whole career away a second time?”

Dongil looked down at the photo, gaze slung to it so suddenly and violently like a magnet and stared. He mapped the curves of his own hand and the bulges of his own veins. And then he took it the slipping river of red next to it and realized he had done this to himself. He had made a mess of his own life and there were no more right choices. Sometimes, he realized, you just can’t win. Sometimes, you have to loose things.

Chapter Text

Six years ago –

One drop hits his nose and suddenly Changmin is gazing toward the sky, leaning on one foot out from underneath the black brick overhang of the doorway and staring with fixed eyes into the dark clouds of the night. The rain on his nose slides down as his head tips back, slowly snaking down to greet his philtrum and then his upper lip where he absently licks it away. And then it starts raining, a spitting current dropping down from the sky and he’s tugging his hands out from the pockets of his jacket and rushing everyone inside the building.

A wash of neon from inside, lights at home in a city at war, comes through alongside his body as Changmin steps inside the metal door, the thing’s ancient creek grating his eardrums. An encroaching night shrivels back as the door opens a beating of colour. Everything’s loud. Everything is always loud, full of people rolling on and on about whatever they damn well please, insisting to the heavens and the back of the bar that they’re the second messiah, strapped down in the middle of an uncaring city and still washing glitter out of their scalps long after New Year’s. It’s just like that. Always has been and always will be. That’s just how cities work.

Tonight Changmin is a victim to the other's pent up energy. The bar Heechan drags them all into is, to be blunt, something that used to be nice. It’s nostalgic like a space well since loved should be, luxurious in memory with black and white tiled floors and a copper plated ceiling above head, higher than a normal dive bar would have. And the bar is made of thick and solid dark wood, standing proud along the wall and sectioning off the space into a cozy keep of liquor and laughter and leather. It’s something that used to be nice in the sense that it’s still pretty from afar, but when you’re Changmin, and when you watch, it isn’t as pristine anymore.

The tile is cracked along the floor, making some of the more inebriated patrons stumble on the uneven surface as they pass over it, gentle fissures in the ceramic tripping up ladies heels and drawing all their eyes down in confused consideration to the floor. Plus the cooper at the ceiling is dingy, Changmin barely making out the outline of their figures as they move towards a booth, all dingy and marred. It’s so hazy that when the lights behind the bar counter shine up into it a reflection with a fuzzy edge comes back down. Not that he would mind. It’s something lived.
Heechan wrestles their oldest friend toward the desired seating, arm around his neck with a playful smirk that does little to dissipate the gesture from Teo’s perspective judging from the older boy’s unsubtle jabs into the other’s torso. GK laughs at them with a half-hearted rumble, nodding Changmin along to follow them as he moves toward the counter. Changmin’s eyes land on the bar, littered in deep crevasses of pressed existence, scrawled names and numbers and an assortment of lewd commentary to string them all together like jingle bells on twine at Christmas time. He imagines, for one second in the middle of the room, running his hand over it and finding his fingers falling against their will into grooved ruts and lead astray by a particularly, confidently punctured scribble. It’s all the memory of something that used to be beautiful until he hears a laughs and looks up at the bar and sees something perfectly sincere.

God bless Heechan, he thinks blinking at the boy. But someone rams into his shoulder from behind and he remembers he’s standing, pointlessly lost, in the middle of a bar he doesn’t know, and staring at the bartender like… well, he doesn’t even know. He’s staring at him like he’s got nothing better to do, like there couldn’t ever conceivably be anything better to do.

The perfect thing, he’s stuffed into a deceptively small black button down, tight across his chest, buttons slightly straining. By the way it seems to drum up business, attracting flitting gazes from too many other bodies, it’s definitely purposeful. People linger about something pretty like that and when they linger here, well they’ll take whatever he has to suggest through glossy peach lips and hooded smoky eyes. Changmin would too. He’s ready to rip his heart out right then and there… if this boy asked. Even if he didn’t, maybe. Who knows?

He makes it over to Heechan and Teo, the both of them cheering as GK arrives behind him with their first round. There’s old rock music playing in the background: the kind that’s as gritty as it is sultry, all smooth and rough, singing sweet words through smoke damaged lungs. It’s kind of perfect because, while the others are all fervently discussing whatever the hell it is they are, Changmin is leaning back, humming to them occasionally in acknowledgment, and watching the bartender. He registers Teo leaving briefly and returning with more drinks. He throws in some anecdotes here and there, remembering to listen just a little more when Heechan is talking because the younger has realized his dreams, because he has big dreams and a big heart and they’re finally paying off.

Changmin didn’t gauge anything other than the bartender’s face the first time, not that that’s a pity. But now he’s watching and he sees long fingers roping around thick cut glasses and bottle necks, hands working efficient and elegant, lips moving fast as he purrs patrons away with his pretty tongue. The boy sweeps his hair back a couple times, like the gentle sweep of it falling over his face bothers him. Changmin knows it isn’t. He sees the boy’s lips tug upward when his eyes fall back down at the men in front of him and catches them watching. GK asks him a question as the boy behind the counter wraps his delicate hand around a shot glass, raises it and, in one swift motion, swallows it all down with a masked face, slamming it back down on the counter. A drifting thought of the impressive ease with which the bartender slung the shot back is almost gone the second a smile appears in the aftermath, blinding and crooked and devastatingly sincere. Changmin turns to GK, aware none of the words manage to make it into his head.

“Yeah?”

GK laughs at him. “I said who’s getting me another drink!”

“I’d say it’s his turn,” Heechan throws out, teetering as he smiles at Changmin. He then turns to GK, nudging into the younger's shoulder. “What do you want?”

“Well if he’s offering…” GK drawls back and he rolls off something Changmin catalogues as bullshit in the same moment he’s resigned himself to just repeating the same as every other drink the kid has drowned in the past hour.

Changmin snorts as he makes his way out of the booth. “This is only because I’m ridiculously proud of you,” he says, reaching over to ruffle Heechan’s long hair as he stands.

He might even decide not to complain based on the beaming face that meets him in return. It’s earned: the celebration, the pride.

“As you should be,” Heechan taunts at him, slipping the words out as he leans back into the booth beside GK.

A scoff draws him away and Changmin finds Teo smirking at him.

“What?” he asks.

“Sentimental,” is all the other tells him.

Somehow the bar is fuller now, maybe the rain pulled them in, maybe it’s just the right hour. Maybe, Changmin thinks as he makes it over to the bar to order, it’s the pretty bartender. The boy’s back is to him, a broad expanse of black, and it’s for the better because if those smoked pointed eyes had met his, Changmin doubts he would have made it over there in one piece. The boy turns from placing something back on the walled shelves when Changmin reaches the counter, and pauses when his eyes find the boy waiting right there looking him up and down. Changmin makes sure to take note of his nametag. Dongil, the now named boy, plants two hands on the counter. They’re in a wide angel, stretched apart so he can lean over the space of the bar toward Changmin with a smile that he’s sure tastes just like honey.

Their eyes meet and Changmin swears the wind is knocked out of him.

“And what are you having?” Dongil asks.

Before he can answer, a man at his side fumbles into him with a maliciously pushy intent. “Hey, I was here first.”

Changmin sighs and places his forearms on the counter, prepared to wait, and motions Dongil toward the man, earning a small nod of gratitude from the bartender. The other man says something under his breath as he orders which has Dongil throwing back his head to laugh. It’s sincere. Everything about the boy is so sincere it catches him off guard. But then the pushy guy is reaching over to counter to places his hand on Dongil’s wrist the second the drink is placed on the surface and Dongil is awkwardly pulling back his arm with a slight pinch in his brow, tucking himself behind the bar.

Changmin steps back over and nudges the man.

“Hey, aren’t you in that movie?” he asks, because they’re in L.A. and he probably is in a movie.

The man is immediately pulling away from Dongil with a palpably conceited excited written all over his face. Changmin winks to Dongil over his shoulder as the man’s attention drifts away, not waiting to see the other’s reaction as he tacitly entertains the man for the rest of whatever song is playing. Changmin meets Heechan’s gaze as the man shuffles away back to his friend and the other smiles which he interrupts as ‘Hurry up’.

“Hey,” a soft voice calls out and he realizes it’s the bartender. “What can I get you?”

With a tray full of foaming and spilled over pints resting between them, Changmin goes to reach for the wallet snug in the back pocket of his jeans only to find the bartender laying a hand right in his line of sight on the counter with a soft slap.

“It’s on me,” Dongil says. “As a thank you.”

Changmin straightens and huffs out a small laugh. “A thank you for being decent?”

Dongil laughs again, hair falling around his face in a curtain as his stomach contracts him forward slightly. “Maybe it’s because my friend is supposed to show up and I’m just in a good mood,” the boy shrugs, pushing the tray closer to Changmin. “Take it.”

He’s still thinking about it, the boy’s smile, when Teo has to half-carry GK from the bar at last call. He’s still muddled with the laugh in his head when Heechan thanks him and turns to catch the three of them a cab. And it just sort of sits there in earnest, ticking along with the minutes like it doesn’t have anywhere else to go. So he lets them go, sliding GK into the taxi after Teo and patting Heechan’s head again as the other goes to hug him goodbye. Heechan mumbles something in his ear that’s unintelligible from his loose tongue but he’s smiling so Changmin smiles back.

He takes up position right inside the entrance of the alley next door, leaned against the side beside his bike for a moment to smoke, to watch it as it lingers in the air a moment. The alley is caked in graffiti, brick stained and painted beyond recognition. Chaos oozes right off it, coming to him in a haphazard mess of colour and line that feels like a blanket in the early morning. It’s long since stopped raining but it still feels heavy with wet, all the asphalt soaked and dark.

Changmin stuffs the dwindling pack into his jacket pocket, regrettably more aware than he would like of the slight coat of nicotine on his tongue. By the time he’s almost through it, contented down to the butt, the door to the bar squeaks open to reveal Dongil and a larger gentlemen right behind him swaying into his space, visibly older, visibly drunk. Changmin hums around the last puff and flicks the cigarette into the pooled rainwater of the alley, smashing it down with his shoe. He reached to the helmet atop his motorcycle as Dongil rounds the corner and makes eye contact, the bartender’s body clearly distanced from the nameless man who followed him out.

“Oh, there you are,” Dongil purrs at him, casting scared eyes across the space as he waltzes away from the patron. “So sweet of you to wait,” he adds, hooking a hand around Changmin’s forearm.

Changmin raised an eye, hidden in the space between them from the man at the end of the alley, paused and staring on.

“You know, it’d be waiting, baby,” he smiles back, impulsively brushing a strand of Dongil’s hair from his face and dropping his hand quickly when he realizes what he did.

Dongil doesn’t look mad, just stares back up at him watching, blinking slowly into his face. There’s a sound behind them, a disgruntled rumble, and the man is gone. Dongil pulls away with a shy smile and drops Changmin’s arm.

“Thank you.”

“What was that about?”

Dongil shrugs, gaze locked on the street where the man had been. “I don’t know him.”

“You don’t know me,” Changmin reminds him.

“You seem sincere,” he tells Changmin and the younger is almost laughing at the irony of it.

“I’m kidding,” he assures the other boy, moving to straddle his bike. Changmin turns over his shoulder and motions Dongil on. “Let me take you home.”

“Haven’t you been drinking?” Dongil asks.

“Haven’t you been serving me?” Changmin winks back.

Dongil stops and crosses his arms.

“I didn’t have too much,” Changmin says, shaking the helmet in his hand that he’s extended to Dongil. “Promise.”

Dongil pouts a little in response but grabs the helmet from Changmin, unhooking the strap at the bottom and sweeping it over his head. Changmin leans over and reaches out to fasten it back together under Dongil’s chin.

“What a gentleman,” Dongil shoots at him but his cheeks are bright red.

Dongil’s never been on a motorcycle before, never had an engine humming between his thighs or a strong back to plaster himself against, wrapping tight arms around safety. There’s an occasional flex in the other’s back as he turns and revs, a gentle motions that reaches to Dongil’s skin and has him smiling wickedly to himself. It’s empty so early in the morning, just a melody of engine and splashing puddles and his own breath reaches his ears. Changmin takes him home, roping them through the bare shadows streets like one would rock a baby to sleep, and Dongil’s just utterly, irrevocably content.

Dongil swings a leg over to stand, reluctantly parting his arms from the other’s waist, fingers staying a second longer than necessary on the fabric of the other’s jacket, knuckles almost clamping down on it but knowing better. He stands and hands the helmet back once its off his head, shaking his hair out in a wave of messy luxury that has Changmin transfixed.

“Thank you,” he says again.

“No problem,” Changmin tells him. “Sleep tight, beautiful,” he adds so easily Dongil is pooling on the concrete.

He steps inside the roar of the other’s engine as he speeds away and pauses just inside the doorway, the flickering light of the entry casting a shadow on the reflection of his face he sees in the antiqued mirror there. He blinks into it, a little bleary eyes in the morning, and realizes it’s dark. It’s so dark outside and he isn’t really sure what the other boy looks like. He doesn’t even know his name. It’s fleeting, but for a second – for one glorious second – he thinks he’ll remember him anyways.

Chapter Text

Yuku never got used to press conferences. He was thrown, a bare faced new toy, into a pool of well weathered peers with so many years under their belts they could hardly differentiate them anymore and expected to preform for the sharks, trust into quite literally one of the world’s most publicized events in the past five years and then left alone to his own way around it. Which – remarkably – he did. But that didn’t mean he had grown accustomed to them. Not the least bit. They flooded the young boy, threatening to waver his smile, throwing bureaucratic questions they didn’t really need to ask because they had all already made up their own answers.

“The accusations…” one woman stood, hand raised high in the air. “What of their validity?” she asked, but her eyes, it was her eyes that told Yuku she didn’t care what he had to say.

Images of newspapers flooded his head, streams of endless pictures and pictures and damnations, distortions and broadcasts, and all the hungry tongued public licking up whatever came their way.

“They’re wrong,” Yuku answered, casting a glance to Heechan who sat beside him and then Lune on the other side. “They’re just not…”

He felt the ghost of an invisible hand wrap itself around the stale words, exhausted at having needed to repeat the same thing over and over again against a battle of contrived storytelling spewed by Impulse and totted up high on the shoulders of companies with much too much money and much too much media coverage.

“I don’t even think-”

“They’re baseless,’ Heechan cut in, leaning forward in his seat to address the crowd of reports through the microphone placed in front of him on the table. “It’s ridiculous someone would even assert as much.”

“My lawyers are looking into the copyright claim,” Lune added, calm, collected. “They have so far only unearthed evidence to the contrary of Cage’s claims.”

Another frenzy of questions broke out at the model’s statement. Heechan cut them off with a waved hand in the air and a dangerous seriousness that Yuku had never seen on his face before.

“I’d like to remind the public to stop asking how high we someone says jump,” he said, nearly gritting out the last word.

“What about Changmin’s previous dealings with the law?” another reporter asked. “How are we supposed to trust someone with-”

“Trust?” Heechan laughed into the mic. “You’re seriously asking me about trust?”

Yuku reached over to touch the elder’s elbows where it rested on the table but the other boy was already standing from his chair, the thing scraping back against the floorboards, and pointing at the man who asked the question.

“Lee Changmin is the single most honorable man I have ever met in my life,” Heechan told them. “I trust him with my life.”

There were whispered muffled behind cuffed hands and whispers barely worthy of the name, pointed in their delivery and joined by sharp pupils casting judgment around the room in easy flits, too easy for the words they bore behind them. There were smiles and scribbles and sneers and it was a frenzied zoo of hungry dogs thrown only half-chewed bones. They circled, the reporters, they circled around themselves like vultures seeking meat from the clean picked statements of the boys on the panels, waiting to pounce when a wound showed itself, when a tiny drop of blood fell to the floor.

“Then why hasn’t D1 come forward yet?” a woman asked, her voice a bit louder than the others.

When the crowd heard her, they quieted, tight pressed to hear a response, any response.

“His company issued a statement saying he was attending,” she added into the silence of the panel. “Where is he?”

Lune’s gaze, against his will or maybe because of it, shots to the side of the stage, peering into the wings and locks onto Dongil’s frozen figure there. Heechan leaned forward again, Yuku desperately gazing to the older boy with wide eyes and a wordlessly parted mouth.

“I would please ask that you-” he started before his words were swallowed by the shouts of reporters and the clicks of cameras and the steady footfalls of Dongil walking onto the stage.

The reporters clamored over each other toward the stage, stunned and obsessed. Dongil slowed as he approached the long table of the others, right beside Lune, and stood for a moment drowned in the chorused echoes of shouted questions blending into an oblivion of indistinguishable deafening human voices. He waited for them to quiet and leaned over Lune’s mic, hand on the back of the younger’s chair as he lumbered over the table.

“My name is Jang Dongil,” the boy stated. “You may know me as D1 but what I am about to say today…” his eyes drifted over to Lune, catching the other’s soft smile of confidence before returning to the crowd. “What I say today I would prefer to say as myself.”

It was silent, dreadfully, terrifyingly, expectantly silent.

“I loved my job,” he continued, eyes flying back and forth untethered over their blank idolizing faces. “I started at a young age – too young some might say – but I loved it. And then it became hard, a little too hard, and I decided the easy thing to do was to pretend I didn’t exist for a while,” he admitted. “I realize now it was selfish, and cowardly, and it only meant the thing I couldn’t face was myself.”

Lune’s hand came up beneath the table to softly touch the side of Dongil’s knee, a tiny feather of his knuckles’ touching and the elder breathed in a little more deeply from the sensation.

“And I know my word means less than it used to,” he continued. “And I know I’ve disappointed a lot of people…”

He couldn’t help but swallow something oddly thick down his throat, his peripheral twitching out to the right to see Yuku and Heechan sat, staring at him with rapt attention and gingerly clasped hands.

“But I want to state for the record, as Jang Dongil, that Lee Changmin is incapable of anything but the most sincere devotion to his music, his bandmates, and his friends.”

He saw Heechan smile at the last words and felt Lune’s hand beside his knee dart out a thumb to slowly give a single swipe up and down.

“There are some repercussions to what I say here today,” Dongil continued, blinking into flashing cameras and scrawling notepads. “And it is only because I speak the truth. So, with the utmost conviction that ACOMM Eval is not responsible or admissible to any of Baron Cage’s accusations, I say thank you for your time.”

And, for the very last time, Lee Dongil, D1, the world’s most cursed and favorite son, walked offstage.

---

It was cliché.

It was so cliché and it hurt so much and Changmin couldn’t think of anything else to call it but a broken sunset.

That untraceable thing that happened when he thought of Dongil. And he thinks of the younger, he does, all the goddamn time. But only ever when he didn’t want to deal with himself and only even we he didn’t want to think about life and Dongil became a fantasy of different choices he made. Changmin thought about him when the moon bore down upon him and he felt its weight like a vice on his neck and it reminded him, in some fucked up way, it reminded him of Dongil. Dongil who has never and will never hold him like that. And he’ll never tell him. Changmin will never tell Dongil because then, when he felt it and when he needed it, Dongil won’t answer. He hasn’t for a while now. And maybe it was because it was so cliché that it hurt, so cliché that Changmin was validated and eviscerated in the same passing thought.

He was writing another song, except this one was one that he was utterly terrified for anyone to see. He was terrified and paralyzed and –

“Hey, what are you still doing out here?” a soft voice called from the doorway. “It’s too late.”

Changmin looked up from the notepad in his lap, nestled into his thighs and scrawled with an increasingly light pencil. Dongil leaned against the wooden frame with a smile, sleepily melted onto his face and crinkling his drowsy eyes, already heavy with the hour. His pants hung low around his hips having, presumably, slipped down with restless contortions of sleep.

“I’m stuck,” Changmin told him. “I wanted to finish this tonight, but…” he stopped, dropping the pencil down to the paper and moving stiff fingers to push their way up his exhausted face, skin giving way beneath their journey, forced upwards and taught at the touch. “I’m stuck,” he finished, hands falling away and eyes connecting with Dongil’s.

“Will you show me?” Dongil asked, that same unintentional coax in his tone and his face that Changmin knew Dongil wasn’t aware of and that he’ll never able to ignore. “I can help, maybe?”

Dongil is a very humble man, Changmin thinks. Humble because he doesn’t realize every single fucking song Changmin has ever written has been a love letter to him.

So yeah, when Dongil came forward, invited by Changmin’s silent nod, and placed an alarmingly tender hand on his back and a disarmingly sweet kiss on his forehead and asked him what he’s thinking about Changmin said, ‘a broken sunset’.

The younger hummed, sitting down on the floor next to the sofa Changmin has limpened into, leaned over to make a tiny space between the two of them, neck craned down and back curved over.

“A broken sunset…” Dongil rolled the thought around.

Changmin hated the idea when it was just his own voice in his own head full of his own regrets but when Dongil said it, it became something beautiful. And there it was again, that lofty cliché that stung nonetheless, no matter what he called it.

“What do you have so far?” Dongil asked, attempting to peek onto the paper still latched to the bottom of Changmin’s stomach for safe keeping.

“I- it’s…” but Dongil was already peeling the notebook away, letting the pencil tumble off and onto the couch next to Changmin’s body where it slips into the gentle dip of his figure on the cushion like it was trying to hide.

He huffed out a long breath as Dongil’s eyes scanned the page, reading and ever occasionally flitting back up the words to reread.

“It’s kind of sad,” Dongil said eventually with a subconscious pout that jutted out a glistened blush lip Changmin wished he didn’t dream about sometimes.

“Is it?”

Dongil looked up slowly, gaze drawn up in a succession of seconds met with the ticks of the clock on the wall. Changmin didn’t know what he looked like to the other in that moment, but Dongil’s eyes softened and his pout grew more prominent and his hand reached out to pet along Changmin’s thigh so he’s sure it was something along the lines of vulnerable.

Maybe that’s what he looked like: a broken sunset.

“Are you-” Dongil started to ask, stumbling on his own tongue. “Do you-”

“It’s nothing,” Changmin cut him off, the younger’s eyes snapping inward like a wince at the intrusion.

Changmin quieted his own thumping heart when Dongil came down from the falter in his face, placing his own hand on the older boy’s, watching him smile back, and then gently lifting it off his leg so he can stand.

“You know…” he breathed out, clutching the notebook and attempting to lift himself off the sofa. “I think I should go to bed after all,” he mumbled, nearly upright before Dongil grabbed his wrist and pulled back down again.

Changmin slumped back onto the cushion and looked over at the other: Dongil’s pressed brows, his opened mouth, his open chest glinting off the lamplight. He looked at Dongil, full of love and worry and so obviously, visibly too tired to be there and refusing to leave.

“Dongil, I think we should-”

“It’s sad,” Dongil repeated, pinning the older boy down with his gaze, raw and sincere. “Why is it so sad?” he couldn’t help but press on in a concerned flood. “Changmin?”

“No, it’s not-“ Changmin insisted pulling away, trying to shrink back. “I’m just…”

“You’re stuck?” Dongil finished for him.

Changmin paused, slightly reeling at the question because Dongil didn’t really know what the question he was asking meant. Not what it meant to Changmin. Changmin sat, against his will facing Judgement Day, battered in the cracks of a broken sunset so bright the fractures seem like great big fissures. It was so beautiful and so strong and so large that he couldn’t escape the dazzling light, blended into a gradation of pretty thing after pretty thing and ending up at Dongil.

“With the song…” Dongil added, clarifying.

Changmin startled from his thoughts. “Yeah,” he started to agree without meaning it. “I’m just a bit stuck is all,” he admitted.

“Is there… can I do anything to help you?” Dongil asked him. “Would you tell me if there was?”

“Of course,” Changmin responded, too lightly and too soon.

Dongil’s face dropped down into a frown because he knew Changmin too well and he knew better. Changmin saw the decision pass over the other’s face, the shift from his need to swaddle the elder in his arms to the one where he realized Changmin was older, older and capable of licking his own wounds no matter how much Dongil wanted to. He gave Changmin one last look, the younger shifting on the couch, the light flickering, the gentle scrape of Dongil’s pants along the floor as he rose. It was quiet except for his own breath and lonely except for Changmin below him.

And this time, when Dongil took his first step to leave, Changmin’s hand was the one darting out to stop him, gripping feverishly and childlike to his arm in desperate fruition.

“Dongil?”

The younger turned back to him, urging a heavy smile onto his face. “Yeah?”

“I’m stuck,” he said.

“I know,” the older boy softened, edging his forearm out from Changmin’s hand so he could thread his own fingers inside Changmin’s. “It’s okay you don’t have to finish it tonight.”

“That’s not-” Changmin stopped and adjusted himself to plant his feet on the floor, slowly swinging their joined hands back and forth in the air between them. “I’m stuck because I don’t know what to do.”

Dongil found himself moving toward the other, sitting down beside him on the couch, their clasped hands back to rest on his thigh. He looped an arm around the broad shoulders at his side to swirl dusting fingers in circles on Changmin’s back, the muscle tense and roped beneath.

“About what?” Dongil asked, the words slow and cobbled together.

Changmin sat still, looking desperately intently into his lap. “About you.”

Dongil didn’t answer. He knew not to in that moment because he knew Changmin.

“Because I don’t know how you feel,” Changmin eventually continued.

“About what?”

“About me.”

And then Changmin looked up and knew this time it was only vulnerability that Dongil saw. But he couldn’t shrink away now because Dongil was curled around him, head atop the elder’s shoulder, half holding the boy to his chest.

“What do you want me to think about you?” Dongil’s breath hit his neck in a soft exhale.

“I want you to feel the way I do.”

Dongil’s hand untethered itself from Changmin and the older boy was sure Dongil was going to leave: leave him alone, leave him to wallow, leave him to face whatever his head dreamed up alone. But then there was a hand on his cheek, achingly sweet as it slide up to cup his cheek.

“What way is that?”

“Dongil,” he breathed out. “I am desperately in love with you even when I know you don’t love me…”

Suddenly his eyes were closed, instinctually slipped closed, because Dongil was kissing him with nothing but love, moving his lips against Changmin’s and tightening his arm around him, squeezing the elder into him. It was so cliché. It was so fucking cliché that Changmin didn’t have to answer because Dongil already knew. It was so cliché that Changmin thought he’d reached Nirvana and that he didn’t ever want to breathe again should it mean he’d have to part his tongue from Dongil’s. It was so cliché that-

Changmin abruptly flung awake, finding himself on the sofa in an empty room with a half written song, tingling lips, and a head full of unfulfilled clichés. The T.V. is blaring in the corner, a familiar face plastered to the screen and a voice seeping right out his head like a leak and pulled into the speaker of the thing where it belongs. He must be going insane, going utterly and irrevocably insane, because he had already finished this song and he hadn’t seen Dongil in months.

Changmin, laid limp on a crinkled and cracked leather sofa in the back of a venue in a big city that he somehow knows like the back of his hand, a million miles away, finds himself flashing through images of Dongil in his head. Wrapping his arms around the younger’s back and the taste of the sound that Dongil made when he kissed him, always like the breath is ripped from his chest in innocent surprise. He sees Dongil’s chest, naked before his eyes, as they rolled around messy sheets ignoring ringing phone calls. He sees, when he looks down now at the brim of his black jeans resting against his stomach, a phantom arm wrapped tight around him caressing the skin that peeks out from under his shirt.

Changmin’s head can’t seem to forget Dongil even if he wants to, even if he tries a million more times in a million more cities a million more miles away, he will always think of Dongil. Life won’t let him. Not when all the things he thinks and feels and sings seem to lead back to a heart he broke too long ago to apologize. He’s on stage, swinging sweaty plastered hair from his eyeline and belting his breath out until all the air is gone. He’s singing about a boy that only ever meets him in his dreams. A boy that’s become his 12th belief.

Chapter Text

You don’t really know what it feels like to hide from someone, not really, not until you’re hiding from everyone. Eyes rake up your spine like a delirious frazzled live wire all hazy and itching and hot as it springs up, untethers your nerves, and jolts into you when heads turn around. The whispers, they shiver at your shoulders, on your neck, nestling into collarbones. And the shutter, the deafening shutter of camera clicks, a sounds that used to wash and crash and roll as familiar as the ocean, as dangerous as a rip current, just becomes avoided thunder.

The theatre was swarmed at the front, certainly more than the thin strip of sidewalk could accommodate: patrons, reports, paparazzi, spilling into the street between parked cars and holding up traffic. Dongil smiled at the scene, at the deserved recognition, and at the bright excited faces of the fans. He snuck around into the alley, mask pulled up on his face and shuffling on the far end of the crowd, until he reached the stage door, gripped it tight, and prayed GK forgot to lock it again. There must have been some power, some divine intervention god-sent or hell-bent, because it swung open under his pull and Dongil was able to slip into the backstage of the Stella Moon Theatre surrounding by the trembling echo of a tuning guitar and excited chatter.

He found his way through the space, knowing every recess by heart and watched, for the first time, as ACOMM played a show to a hungry, adoring world much bigger than they were used to. They played and Dongil saw the fuzzy picture of moving bodies, amorously in love and coloured in distorted leaks akin to paint spilling in a pool of water.

If Dongil could call Changmin one thing, it’d be art. Changmin makes art, he breathes art, he is art. He’s a slave to it in that awe-inspiring, fully devoted genius kind of way. Dongil could picture him humming in his sleep, tapping fingers and nodding foot, just utterly doused in art. There’s paint on the older boy’s hands, red and yellow blending into a sharp orange that swirls up from his wrist to grace his forearm in ropes of colour. It comes out when he slams hard hands down on his kit, wrenching the thumping bassline up from the floorboard by sinking teeth sewn under a flexing jaw. There’s blue on his cheek, swept across in an artful thick line that fades as it reaches from his nose to the end of his cheekbone under the drummer’s eye. It ripples like a sound wave, like its humming across his face and kissing his cheek with frenzied passion. Dongil imagines a splotch of green peeking out along Changmin’s collarbone and only distantly, as he continues to stare at him playing, does Dongil see it pass under the boy’s open shirt to his chest, glistened with sweat that drips the bright saturation of colour right off his skin. It’s art and it’s beauty. He loves it and he hates it and he’s scared to tell him why.

There are songs ACOMM plays that make Dongil smile because he now knows them by heart and songs that make him want to cry because Changmin sang them on sleep laden breathes only to Dongil in the recesses of the night. Sometimes they’re the same song. Sometimes he finds himself in a superstition, frightened like a damned thing, and warding off the sounds with shaky hands full of ambient melancholy. And it’s all just because Changmin is art.

He started singing, singing the exact song Dongil had, misleadingly, hoped he wouldn’t hear because it meant too much. And then Dongil felt snow softly falling and he nearly closed his eyes at the feeling of it dripping onto his skin. But then the song was over and Dongil was tucked into the back of the theatre, and everything was untethered again. He stepped back, uncomfortable where his feet rested and reached for the back door.

“Dongil?” a voice called out, right in the last second before he passed outside unnoticed.

He only turned because he knew the voice and he only turned because the other deserved it. Heechan stood behind him, head tilted to the side, confused smacked on his face.

“I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” Dongil said.

Heechan hummed.

“I didn’t tell you yesterday…” the younger started, casting a glance off to the side before returning his eyes to the other. “But I thought what you did was sort of amazing. Even if it hurt you.”

“Thanks.”

“As long as we’re clearing the air-”

Dongil raised an eyebrow and Heechan’s face faltered, holding out his hands in defense.

“I mean if as long as we’re…”

“It’s okay,” Dongil laughed at him. “What?”

“I didn’t do it,” Heechan said.

“You…?” Dongil mumbled at a loss.

“It wasn’t me. The San Marino thing,” he clarified. “I know you always thought it was me that told them to fire you, but…” Heechan trailed off into a shrug.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“You had already made up your mind, hadn’t you?” the younger said, not a trace of anything but acceptance in it.

“For what it’s worth,” Dongil started, foreign shapes around his tongue giving him pause until his heart decided to speak them. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need it,” Heechan smiled back. “I already forgave you a long time ago.”

“We don’t deserve you.”

Heechan lost all the mature resonance that had been pinned up on him and pinched his brows. “Who?”

“Everyone,” Dongil answered.

“Yeah,” the boy murmured. “You’re goddamn right.”

Dongil turned back to the door, only stopped from finally leaving by Heechan clearing his throat in the back. The boy rocked back on his heels in an awkward motion and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“There’s someone waiting for you, know you…” Heechan offered, eyeing him like he was afraid the words would physically push Dongil into the alley.

“Yeah?”

The worry melted off the younger’s face and it broke into a grin.

“On the roof,” he added, nodding his chin toward the other direction.

Dongil let the door swing shut, the thing aching as it closed and stepped forward to place a hand on the younger’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said before snaking around to find his way up.

“He’s my best friend you know?!’ Heechan called after him. “Don’t break his heart!”

---

The sky came into his view, Dongil blinking into the open air, and found a broad back facing toward the street, stood on the edge of the roof, softly surrounded by neon lights. Maybe he shouldn’t have but he looks, Dongil stops and stares at the boy, soft and lean as he shakes a hand through sweat soaked hair.

Suddenly, the door slammed shut, gravity finally pulling it closed and the moment is ruined. Changmin whipped around so fast Dongil thought the elder might get whiplash. He flinched when his eyes landed on Dongil standing there and then his face relaxed, the weary tense he was holding in his cheekbones falling off.

“I didn’t know you were here.”

Dongil stepped forward. “Changmin…”

“We don’t lock it anymore,” the drummer laughed out a tiny exhale through the faint quirk of his lip, nodding to the door.

“No?” Dongil smiled back.

Changmin glanced back at the road for a second, toward the faint patter of spotted cars, their red lights glaring our like artificial stars. His foot jutted out in a small kick, scuffing against the roof as he turned back to Dongil.

“You came?”

“Your first big show after the interview…” Dongil said.

There was something standing between them, more than hollow expanse of tarred concrete that surfaced the roof where all their old memories stuck down to it like faded sun spots, more than the charged small talk and bruised compliments, more than litters of pretend Dongil had swept up in trembling arms and offered out to the elder.

“Of course I came,” the younger finished. .

When you find yourself clinging to reality like a vicious child, you realize life is full of something much different. And when you do, like Dongil had, you start to grip your hands so tight when you go to sleep that the nails draw blood so when you awake in the morning you can find it cacked and dried there in your palms and it’s grounding. It’s grounding to know somethings going to be there waiting for you, every time, without fail. But life isn’t like that. Life is made up of a whole lot of tangled uncertainties. They’re beautiful and terrifying and it scared Dongil how much we need them now.

“I wanted to-”

“Please don’t tell me what you wanted to do,” Changmin cut him off with a slight shake of his head. “Because you didn’t do it and I need to stop holding on to regrets.”

“There isn’t anything you should regret,” Dongil answered softly, the beep of a distant car echoing out faintly and bouncing off the walls of the bricked alley below. “Except for me…” he added, sending that well-trained martyred smile of destructive admission towards the other.

“I-” Changmin huffed out at the words, turning to the side with the scoff and fumbling his hands about his side, gripping at the air. “I don’t really know how to respond to that,” he decided.

“Because you do?”

“Because I never did!” Changmin’s voice rose, brows knitting together in offended frustration. “Because I wouldn’t,” he said. “And you just can’t seem to get that.”

In that second Dongil felt like there was a hand around his lungs that squeezed with violent intent even if the palms were soft and even if the fingers are long and lithe and even if it whispered its own intention as innocent. He realized, drowning the way Changmin looked at him, that it was his own hands. Dongil realized Changmin’s were too busy trying to pry the younger’s away, trying to kiss his knuckles and smooth his palms, trying to trace, trying to commit, trying to cradle them into a tender embrace. He realized it, in a cold sudden rush, standing a world away from the drummer on the rooftop of an old theatre listening to a gentle thunder of camera clicks and whispered shouts from the street below.

“I had hoped…” Changmin paused, running a hand through his hair.

Dongil watched as the tuft of hair sprung out from under the older boy’s fingers and resettled itself in a torrid mess atop his head.

“Well, I had hoped a lot of things that I honestly need to stop thinking about.”

“Why?” Dongil asked, taking a tentative step forward.

“Why what?”

“Why do you need to stop?”

Changmin blew out a low whistle.

“Oh you know…” he drawled. “They keep running away,” he said, eyes snapping onto Dongil’s in a direct stare. “They have a habit of it actually.”

He fidgeted, under the heavy implication of Changmin’s words and, breath catching and heart thumping, he let them stick. Dongil stood his ground and let them stick to him because he deserved it, Changmin deserved for Dongil to stop running. He looked into Changmin’s eyes but the anxious tense in the bottom of his gut didn’t go away. It tightened.

“I don’t really think you’re a coward,” the drummer continued. “I never did. I just… didn’t like seeing you scared.”

“Changmin-”

“I never said you had to do it alone, you know?”

Dongil thought about the morning. He was always fall asleep, always waking, always dreaming about the thought of morning. Morning because it was bright and loud and fast. Morning because it beat off the day in victorious battle like some gold gilded champion. Morning because it reminded him of Changmin.

“What?” he faltered.

“I would have helped,” the elder told him. “I would have gone with you.”

“Changmin-”

“Did you ever hear it?” the boy cut him off. “Lead Me to the Sun?” he clarified. “Have you heard it” Changmin asked, the breath caught in his chest.

“It’s a really beautiful song.”

Changmin smiled back at him, all soft and small, melted into sincerity.

“Look, I-”

“I wrote it for you,” he told Dongil.

“I know.”

Changmin took in the younger’s words with a dry swallow, hands balling and unbaling at his sides, eyes shaken and flitting around Dongil’s face.

“Does it change anything?” he asked.

“No,” Dongil whispered, the words volatile tearing themselves out against the volition of his throat.

“No?”

“So that’s it,” he shrugged. “It’s just… no,” he added into what felt to be the space between the sad melancholic notes of a piano.

If Dongil said it, said it loud enough, maybe people will scream it, scream it back at him like a curse and then he’d know… well, he would know exactly one thing and it would terrify him.

“It doesn’t have to be no because that’s the only thing you can think of,” Changmin’s voice interrupted him. “It doesn’t have to be no because that’s what it’s always been.”

He flickers. Dongil flickers through people and faces and places and lives like they’re itching to be worn by him, like he’s just there to hold them. And sometimes, Dongil just wants to lay there, bare and bloodied, in peace. But Changmin has a cloth, dusting across the younger and he cradling it in his calloused hands as gentle as he can. It doesn’t look like it belongs there.

“Will you let me?” Changmin asked him.

And it’s just… it’s so disgustingly sweet that Dongil doesn’t know what to do.

“Will you let me be the thing you run back to,” the drummer whispered out, voice getting thicker with emotion.

“I don’t-” Dongil drew in a breath, his eyes welled up with uncertainty and he had to bit down on his lower lip to stop the trembling. “It doesn’t seem fair to you.”

“I don’t care if its fair,” Changmin said. “I want to do it.”

“What if I-”

“I don’t care,” Changmin told him, moving closer. “You can keep running if you want,” he said. “You just have to promise you’ll come home.”

Sometimes when Changmin looks at him, Dongil thinks the sun is leading him on. He thinks some great big, shining thing too bright to tuck into his head is drawing gentle coaxing whispers to him and tugging him without a promise of forever. That it’ll burn him if he holds on long enough. That he’s burning already.

“I think life gets in the way of promises,” Dongil admitted.

Changmin was still for a second, his face softening as he stared at the younger.

“Only if you never intended to keep them in the first place,” he whispered. “You’re going to be okay,” Changmin said as if he needed to remind Dongil what the younger dreamed of everyday.

“How?” the younger pressed. “How do you know that?”

Changmin reached forward to cup his face, tracing the boy’s cheek with the languid wipe of his thumb. “Because I will do everything in my power to make sure.”

Dongil’s cheek grew warm at the other’s touch, a smear of gold paint, faint and gilded like the sun, shining off Changmin’s hand as he pulled it away. The older boy smiled and tucked a stray hair behind Dongil’s ear.

“You don’t know,” Changmin whispered to him. “You just don’t know,” he repeated like a mantra.

Dongil didn’t fight it when Changmin drew him into his arms, thick ropes of steadfast loyalty clutching to the younger in feverish sincerity. Changmin’s hand snaked up to cradle the back of Dongil’s neck, light enough that he could leave, light enough that he could really run if he wanted but still there.

“You could break my heart, baby,” he started, letting his hands fall from the younger’s fingers to hook his fingers around the denim loops of Dongil’s jeans, tugging the other forward. “And I wouldn’t even mind.”

Dongil fell flat to the elder's chest, sidled up in his hold.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Changmin leaned in to his ear and whispered, hand still firmly caught around the younger’s jeans.

Dongil nodded silently, slowly placing his hands at Changmin’s hips, hands light and thumbs brushing over the fabric.

“I am desperately in love with you.”

The admission had Dongil seizing. His hands tightened around Changmin’s hips and he surged forward to swallow the words himself. He lapped into the older’s mouth, hands grasping around blindly at the drummer’s middle, fingers sinking into a sweat soaked shirt. Changmin’s firm hand grabs the nape of his nape and holds them together, exchanging heated breaths and loose tongues, and nipping teeth that clack in heavy kisses.

Dongil didn’t need to know what it felt like being ripped through by a Gatling gun or to face No Man’s Land, legless and headless. But he was sure it must feel a lot like Changmin, plain and simple. It was his hips, it was his hands, it was his teeth.

The hand in Dongil’s hair readjusted, drawing him back until their eyes met and Changmin was looking at him with dilated pupils, the irises sliced clean through with tender assurance.

“Ew!” Harry’s voice yelled out from the rooftop door.

Dongil and Changmin froze and turned toward the voice just in time to see Heechan gaping and slamming a hand over Yuku’s eyes. GK was wrestling a smiling Junseo, attempting to block the younger’s view but failing to maneuver himself around the taller in any way that would have actually done it.

“Can you stop making out in front the children?” GK balked at them, smirk light and teasing.

“This is really very unnecessary,” Lune added, tutting his brow.

“Teo make them stop,” Harry whined, turning to the elder.

Teo stood, leaned against the side of the doorframe, simply letting the chaos unfold around him. “Nah,” he decided. “They deserve it.”

It was all so devastatingly sincere. Sincere in a world that had been anything but to him. But sometimes, Dongil decided, sometimes sincerity is like praying in a war.