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So Ryan's not always filled with the greatest ideas.
Look — sometimes, his brain flies out of his head, and he's giddy from the equally thrilling/terrifying lurch of the curtain call stage lights, and his mouth starts running on dumb shit; and before he knows it, it's three a.m. and the boundless streetlights of unfamiliar city lanes are burning holes in his eyes, and he's not entirely certain where he is. As of now, he's Asian-crouched on the (concerningly wet) bathroom floor of a murmuring backstreet bar, watching his best friend hurl his guts into the open toilet bowl like he's never seen a good day in his life, and feeling awfully like good days simply don't exist.
Or nights.
This is a night.
And for once, he's got company.
At least it isn't three a.m. this time, Ryan reflects glumly, reaching over to pat Min-Gi on the back as a particularly vicious noise emerges from the bowels of his stomach.
"There, there," Ryan tries. "You're, um. You're doing great, buddy."
There's a long moment of silence, where it feels vaguely like the other boy might be contemplating the utter evisceration of Ryan's ass for even suggesting such a claim. (Which, fair — there's really no positive side to spending the night vomiting in a mold-ridden shithole.)
"Why did you have to bring me to a bar?" Min-Gi finally groans, hands still locked on the (nasty) rim and undeniably, solidly drunk.
"In my defense, I didn't take into consideration the fact that you might be the lightest lightweight I've ever met," Ryan retorts pettily.
"Well, maybe you should've taken into consideration the fact that I've never had alcohol —"
… Wow, Ryan did not know that real human beings were capable of producing such abhorrent noises.
Min-Gi collapses to his knees and tilts his head backwards against the stall’s white-flecked walls, the flickering yellow light from the ceiling casting an eerie shadow across his jawline. "This is all your fault," he grumbles.
Yeah. Yeah, it kind of is.
Ryan puts his hands up peaceably, rocking back on his heels to allow a certain personal-distance between them. "Okay — you’re right. This is my fault. I should not have taken you to this garbage bin full of alcohol after that incredible show, because I forgot that you’re a complete wuss —"
“I’m not a wuss,” Min argues inefficaciously.
Ryan doesn’t even try arguing with the drunk kid, instead gently prying the puddle-boy off his knees and to sit on his butt. It’ll be gross to track into the van, but removing the pressure of kneecaps against cold floor might help relieve some of the nausea. Min’s oddly quiet as he gets manhandled into shifting his position, even though he’s usually protestant about anything regarding his physical existence.
"Wait, is this poison?" Min-Gi suddenly shoots up, as if a switch in his head has suddenly turned on the loopy-brain-effects, and turns around to grab the guitarist's shoulders. "Oh my god, Ryan, did you feed me liquified wisteria seeds?"
Sober Min-Gi could really aspire to be a little more like Drunk Min-Gi sometimes.
"No, Min." Ryan carefully extracts himself from the plastery grip, sighs heavily. "You're just drunk. Which is, indeed, my fault. C'mon, let's just… get out of here."
He stands behind Min as he staggers swayingly to his feet, pressing a hand against his back and determinedly ignoring the way it curves against his spine. The single leaky faucet on its highest pressure isn’t any more effective than a hose against an elephant, barely spewing a lame trickle beneath a faded soap-streaked mirror, and the soap-dispenser itself is entirely empty.
His reflection looks like it might be from a different dimension, dark eyes and frayed hair, exhaustion dripping off his shoulders.
Silently, he lets Min-Gi spit back into the clogged silver tin, rubbing his back lightly until it's too much an effort to try any harder.
This place is really the worst.
"Just three more steps, Min. You've got this, you asshole."
He says this under his breath as he physically hauls Min-Gi into the back seat, hissing in pain as he scrapes his nails against the handle’s battered surface in slamming it shut, and unsubtly wipes his palms against his slacks.
"Hey, Ryan," Min slurs, grinning dopily through the dark glass pane. "Come sit with me?"
And Ryan can't say no to that damned puppy-dog plead, because the bastard knows how to get his human person to do capital Things for him, and so he slides around the left hand side to slip into the other end beside his friend. Min-Gi lets out an absurdly cat-like noise of content that he'd be absolutely mortified to release at a state of sobriety, leaning over to drop his head atop Ryan's shoulder like his personal throw pillow and snuggling right into the patch between the curve of his neck.
Ryan freezes, before reminding himself that his bandmate is very, extremely drunk, and therefore not in his right mind. "I should really be driving us to the motel," he states aloud, though it sounds fuzzy and distant to his own ears.
"Nuh-uh," Min-Gi mumbles into muffled fabric, halfheartedly holding up his index finger to waggle. "You drank, too. No driving for you, sir."
"I'm not drunk ," Ryan protests indignantly.
"No driving," he insists. “For your best friend. You wouldn’t want to get us arrested, do you?”
For some reason, an uncomfortable pit settles in his stomach at ‘best friend’, but he smiles weakly and shrugs it off. “Don’t want to end up in bug-jail again,” he agrees amicably, and the glowing, pleased smile Min gives him is enough to wash the discomfort back like tidal waves over moonlight sand.
“Sometimes, I wonder if that whole train was, like, a lucid dream.” Min-Gi kicks his shoes up onto the shotgun’s headrest, probably leaving some disgusting shit from the bathroom floors on rubbery surface, hooks his fingers into the van’s wrapper-filled cupholder. “Like, a talking bell. Heh.” He actually giggles at that, the echoey sound sending streams of warm blow-bubbles straight to the depths of Ryan’s gut. “Picking up lingual habits from a creation of my own imagination. How — How stupid is that?”
“Kez actually happened,” Ryan assures his drunk friend. “And don’t worry about your speech habits; you’re drunk.”
“Stop telling me that I’m drunk, I already know,” Min complains, though not mean. "Now shut up and be nice to me."
"Wh —" Ryan sputters as a headful of dark hair shovels itself back into his neck. "Why do I have to be nice to you?"
He doesn't really ask it as a question, but Min-Gi detaches himself and looks over in the darkness, silent and considering like he doesn't really know himself. In the eye of an impending storm, Ryan's on the brink of frantically reassuring that he didn't mean it that way, a kind of panic worming itself up his spine, when a hoarse voice breaks into his deliberated construction of words, and every blueprint file flies out of his head in the split of a too-long second.
"I guess you don't," Min eventually admits. Looks away, fingers stilling against the plastic ring of the cupholder. "No one really has to be nice to me."
No one really has ever been nice to me, hovers in the air.
"Wait, no, dude —" Ryan scrambles into a more proper sitting position, flails out to grab Min’s hands. They’re soft and uncalloused and so, so warm, and somewhere in the back of his head, he subconsciously thinks he might want to hold them like this for forever. “Stop saying that shit about you. This is like, self-slander. Of course you deserve nice things.”
“But do I?” He still refuses to make eye-contact. “I left my parents behind. Just… straight up took my things, told them I’m dipping university after all the effort they put into getting me in, and flew off. What kind of son does that?”
Ryan wants to say something, but finds that he can’t really do anything other than gape.
“And — And I left you behind, when I let you go all alone —”
“That’s not how leaving people behind works,” Ryan cuts in tactlessly, but Min-Gi talks over him as if he hadn’t said a word, like he’s nothing more than a poltergeist witness to his drunken mindless ramblings.
“I just leave everyone behind, and I hurt people, and I don’t think sorry means much anymore. Sorry doesn’t fix things. What’s left for them: ash and dust?”
Min-Gi finally turns around, and his eyes are all red-rimmed like he’s already let out caskets of salty tears. Tilts his head back again, letting the background haze of city lights slant over the watery panes. “I don’t think the train really taught me anything, Ry. All I got out of it was — was this. ” He gestures around the empty van, sweeping hand nearly hitting Ryan in the face. “This, and a faceful of disappointment from my parents. What’s in store for you? I’m just gonna let you down, like I always let everyone else down. I’m — I'm not good enough for anyone.”
This is the kind of shit Min’s carrying around with him?
No wonder he’s so strung up all the time.
The sharp contrast between the teary unwinding of the boy’s limbs, voice, to his tight shoulders and perpetual case of anxiety — Ryan doesn’t know how to deal with it, but he’s afraid that if he doesn’t sort it out soon enough, he thinks he might never get the chance to again, and it might be too late to fix the failing stitches of rectitude.
“First off, there’s no way in hell you’re letting me down,” Ryan says firmly, heart suddenly pounding in his chest. “I want you to be here. With me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have dragged your sorry ass out of that town. And isn’t like, everything out here a significant upgrade from running a Humpty-Dumpty themed restaurant? Huh?” He waves out at the spinning city lights filtering through the tinted windows, presses his fingers into his palms deeper.
“I was a shift manager,” Min-Gi objects, but he still sounds an awful lot like he's on the verge of bursting into tears, and Ryan can't handle these horrid, awful feelings gushing out of his emotionally-constipated friend, so he plows on forward and wonders what the fuck he's saying.
"Shift manager, owner, whatever — same thing. That doesn't matter. What does is you."
Min lets out a wretched laugh, yanking his hands out and back into his lap. "Is that supposed to help the fact that I'm a complete let-down at everything?" he demands.
"I mean —" Ryan scrabbles for words. "I guess? Like, even if you let people down, your own happiness is what counts the most, I think. And making yourself happy is the first step to making other people happy, because they love you and want the best for you."
(They love you the way they don't love me, a pitiful, traitorous part of him that still lingers in the vestiges of a snowed-over Canadian town whispers bitterly.)
"But my parents don't care if I'm happy." Min draws his knees up to his chest, soles tracking dirt onto the plasticky seat, looking out the window at unlit bars and midnight closed-down shops. "I don't know how to make them happy." And then he starts giggling, almost hysterically, and now Ryan's really worried because this doesn't seem to be particularly healthy. "I don't know how to make Min-Gi happy, or how to make other real people happy, or — or how to make you happy."
Ryan's heart hurts so, so much.
"Okay," he concedes reluctantly, "maybe your parents aren't happy with your life choices, even though they really should be. Y'know — world-renowned rockstar. But me?" He reaches forward and turns Min-Gi's shoulder towards him, stares him in the eye until he looks up. "I'm glad you're here."
I missed you so much, he wants to say. I wouldn't have it any other way. I want you to be by my side, forever.
“I’m going to screw this up,” Min-Gi whispers, maybe to himself, because he won’t just let himself get showered in some of the nice things he deserves. “You’re just going to be disappointed, when you realize just how I am.”
“I know how you are,” Ryan insists. “I’ve known you my whole life, and I’ve never been disappointed in you.”
Min gazes at him, and Ryan gazes back, and then his shoulders start shaking and he opens his mouth but all that streams out is uncontrolled laughter. “I’ve never let you down?” he repeats incredulously, voice trembling an earthquake beneath its fragile, broken foundations. “Hilarious, Ryan. I’ve let you down a million times before, and of all the people, you know I’ll do it again.”
“Min, listen —”
“I don’t want to listen to you!” Min explodes. “When will you understand that it’s not you who’s the problem? It’s me, and it always has been, so just — just stop fucking trying.”
And then he starts sobbing at that, ugly and raw and loud, and the stifled sniffing noises are so unfamiliar to the boy's typically weighty facade that the oppressive silence of the van can't even subdue its volume. Ryan stares in sudden horror at the scene, frozen in place for what feels like an eternity but can only be seven universally drawn-out seconds, before he lurches forward and wraps Min desperately into his arms.
"I'm sorry," Min sniffles, babbling. "I'm sorry you have to put up with me like this."
Ryan doesn't mind, really. "It's okay," he says into Min's hair. "You're okay. I’ve got you."
The wordlessness goes on, and on, and on, as Min-Gi clings to Ryan like a lifeline and cries. Ryan holds him back, and holds his words back, and doesn’t let himself say the stupid things he wants to say as the sobs wrack down into a remniscent shivering and his limbs start to still.
Eventually, Min goes completely silent, and Ryan unravels himself to see he’s straight up passed out. Smiles to himself.
He quietly tucks the stray strand of dark hair spiraled over his face behind his ear, orange and yellow streetlights framing his motionless silhouette, resisting the urge to platonically press his lips against his forehead. Min-Gi breathes in, and out, a steady hum that feels like late nights on a train to no where, and Ryan shuffles around to climb into the front before something makes him turn back around.
Leaned against the seat, brushed by the soft glow of the city that never sleeps, eyes slid shut in a way that covers the betraying redness of crying well-past midnight.
Oh.
Oh.
Ryan stares at the sleeping boy, and wonders how he never noticed.
When Min-Gi wakes up, the first thing he notices is his eyelids fluttering like a bitch.
The second thing he notices is the pounding headache and vile taste in his mouth, and the third thing he notices is a warm presence against his shoulder.
Groaning, he rubs his uncomfortably lidded eyes open and squints through the faded sunlight blur.
Ugh.
Crying is the worst.
… And he’d almost forgotten about last night.
Abruptly, Min sits up, sending the warm presence jerking awake. “Wh — Oh, Min, you’re — heh, you’re awake!” comes Ryan’s rambling voice. The longer-haired boy shifts around into his vision, knocking his head against the low roof and letting out a violent sneeze.
“Oh my god,” Min blurts out, mortified. “Oh my god. That — I…” He buries his face in his hands, because why did he have to leak all his stupid insecurities out to his best friend in the dead of the night after getting wasted with him. Or rather, after being the only one actually drunk. “I’m so sorry.”
Ryan laughs, sounding forcefully cheery. “We’re good. Never happened,” he supplies, face oddly flushed. “That never happened.”
Min-Gi nods rapidly, which just makes his head hurt even more. “Never happened.”
(They’ll talk about it, later.)
He’s too caught up in his wish to redo life that he misses the way Ryan looks at him.