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Music was always there for him, even in the darkest hour.
Today he feels that more than ever.
As soon as the beat from the speakers fades, Minho slowly descends on the floor of the practice room, limp and powerless, as if his body lost all of its bones. Minho smiles, echoing San’s wide grin, and hides his face under his cap.
He’s so tired.
It’s more than just fatigue. He’s exhausted to the verge of unconsciousness. Kingdom could kill them all if they weren’t sharpened by this industry like blades of damask steel, cradling within enough rage to push through. Day after day. From one performance to another.
To be honest, he has no idea how Ateez managed to survive through the shootings of the first episodes, combining them with comeback promotion. Or maybe, he actually knows — and always has known. That’s why he sits here, in an awkward position on the floor of the KQ practice room — unusually bright and uncomfortably hot.
“Who wants to grab something to eat?”
The discordant sea of voices merges into a single roar of approval, but Minho doesn’t join them. He shifts to a more comfortable position, clasping his right ankle gently as if it hurts. Minho dodges Felix’s attentive gaze with a half-smile and shakes his head at Jeongin’s uneasy, silent question as he leans down to peer into his face under the cap.
“Everything’s fine,” Minho tries to say wordlessly and squeezes the ankle between his fingers harder as an alibi for why he doesn’t get up and follow everyone.
When Wooyoung hurries everyone out and the door slams shut behind them, Minho finally exhales. He doesn’t know what Felix said to Wooyoung, which made him decide to leave Minho alone so quickly, but he remembers to thank him.
There will be a few more hours of practice after a break, till the sunrise, besides the individual parts of the stage, which they will rehearse separately. Somewhen in between, he’ll probably write Chan a half-joking “Did you know that Felix is jumping on hot Saggitarius now?” just to shake him up a little from the coma of continuous music production.
It wouldn’t help him, though.
Sometimes he feels himself trapped, endlessly running in circles between Kingdom stages and Dekira. If he doesn’t have to hold his face up for the camera, all his strength leaves his body as soon as the music stops. In the silence, he is barely alive, drained of blood and disembodied — only a shadow of himself.
Minho falls like a starfish on the hard floor and relaxes. It’s pretty ironic that his ankle really does ache with sprained ligaments as if he’s just jinxed it himself —
if he really believed it.
In a couple of minutes, he begins to drift off, only to be jolted out of it as soon as he hears the discreet click of the front door. Minho picks himself up from the floor at once, sitting up abruptly to dizziness, and turns around, putting himself in a defensive position with some excuse on his tongue. Felix must have come back for him, and he has no intention to talk —
But he sees Seonghwa and forgets what he wanted to say.
He bleeds with exhaustion too. It sits in him as deep as in Minho, caught in dried tears from the bright white light of the practice room, shackling his smooth movements into the sharpness of a wounded animal. When Seonghwa smiles at him cautiously, Minho has no choice but to smile back.
“I noticed you left behind, so I decided to come back.”
“It’s okay, hyung!” Minho ugly giggles and squints in embarrassment. He’ll probably get used to behaving appropriately under Seonghwa’s direct, attentive gaze, but definitely not today. “I’m not hungry. I’ll wait for the others here, it’s alright. Go with them.”
“If I’m bothering you, just tell me, I’ll —”
“No! Of course not,” Minho interrupts hurriedly and turns his entire body to face him, slapping the floor with his outstretched palm. “Make yourself comfortable. After all, this is your practice room, not mine.”
“It’s ours now. At least for a few nights,” Seonghwa says softly, still smiling, and sits next to him. “Mayfly’s.”
“Yep, we are the occupants of your private pirate territory.”
“Oh, c’mon. Hongjoon probably already got the best seat on the couch in Chan’s studio. Consider us even.”
“I’d like to see how he tries to handle Binsung’s double strength. I’ll bet a thousand won that they would’ve kicked Minhyuk-sunbaenim to the floor, too.”
Seonghwa’s laugh is sparkling and sincere — Minho absorbs the sound of it with his disembodied shell.
“I’ll bet two thousand that they’ll be mesmerized by Hongjoong’s two-hour monologue about the impending existential crisis.”
“Three, that they’re currently chilling in the JYP’s coffee shop right now.”
“Are we really taking bets?”
“As you wish, hyung,” Minho smiles slyly, cocking his head to one side. Exhaustion still hangs over him like a hungry beast, but Seonghwa’s warm aura seems to soothe it. Like Seonghwa firmly holds it by the collar, pushing it out of the practice room away — somewhere on the edge of the blue horizon of the approaching dawn.
“Please, don’t call me hyung. Seonghwa is fine. We’re the same age, remember?”
“Yet still —”
“Do you want me to call you Minho-sunbae?”
Minho shakes his head.
Silence falls after, but it doesn’t suffocate Minho, wrapping them both in a protective, lulling cocoon of calm. He drifts through a half-dream every time he closes his eyes. As soon as Minho forces himself to focus on the room around him, he finds Seonghwa staring at him. He looks at him intently, a little anxiously and with such tender care that Minho feels too small for his skin. Seonghwa looks at him in a way he doesn’t deserve. They’re just barely familiar colleagues, moreover, the rivals — although Mnet does a terrible job of breaking them up. They’re training together now, but only for a few unit performances so that they can separate again later, running along through the charts. A pirate ship and a pack of werewolves, tirelessly following it along the shore. Always close, but always apart. They will see each other later at awards and music shows, exchanging greetings — Minho went through this.
So this genuine and aching care stabs him like a sharp knife.
Opens him up.
He tries to look at Seonghwa with the same boldness but loses immediately as he hears Seonghwa’s soft voice.
“Is something wrong?” Seonghwa asks carefully as if testing invisible boundaries that will throw him away as soon as he missteps them. For a few seconds, Minho was going to do exactly that — laugh it off, say something sarcastic and almost rude, as he used to protect himself.
But unexpectedly, he doesn’t have the strength to force Seonghwa to leave. There’s something disarming about his aura — something that Minho still tries to unfold.
“I’m tired,” he says simply as if that’s the answer to everything. To some extent, it is, if you do not allow yourself to dive down — but when he instinctively reaches for the pendant hanging around his neck, Seonghwa notices the movement of his palm.
“We miss Hyunjin too,” Seonghwa says, shifting slightly like he was going to touch Minho’s palm in a reassuring gesture, stopping at the last moment. “Too much pressure, huh?”
“Yeah,” Minho nods. “How did you know?”
“About the pendant? Felix told Wooyoung, and Wooyoung would burst if he contains the information for more than two seconds.”
“These ungrateful little brats...”
“They are not so little. Jeongin, though, looks older than both of them.”
“He’s a tiny sweet baby. Although also, of course, an ungrateful brat.”
“If one day he befriends Jongho, we’ll find nothing but ashes from our agencies.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Minho laughs. “Anyway, I don’t feel so dead anymore. If you want to eat with the others, you’ll still have time to catch up.”
“Oh, about that.” Seonghwa purses his lips, and a subtle flicker of embarrassment covers his eyes. “I was going to suggest we eat together. If you don’t mind, of course. I swear, it’s alright if you don’t want to —”
“That would be great,” Minho interrupts. “Any ideas?”
Seonghwa’s lips bloom with a smile.
“Are you riding, Minho?”
Minho can’t remember the last time he did something so adventurous. Seonghwa writes to the Mayfly chat that they will be back in half an hour (without specifying who “they” exactly, and Wooyoung sends a bunch of winking emojis). They came out from the KQ building, packed in hoodies and masks, grabbed two electric rental scooters, and rode through the young night to the river Han. They stopped only once to grab a snack at a 24-hour cafe, and Seonghwa secretly pays for both while Minho absently stares at the cookies on the window.
River exhales at them with a cool moisture wind. They sit on the tiny blanket spreading on the wet grass, their legs crossed and their knees touching. Minho runs his hand over the dew on the tip of the grass blades, collecting water at his fingertips.
Most of the time, they just eat in silence, looking at the sleepy city around them, flickering across the river with tiny white lamps sparkling in the wind-shivering water. The only light around them is the hazy glow reflected from the overcast sky and the intermittent light from Seonghwa’s phone as he quickly checks the time.
“Are we running late?”
“Not yet,” Seonghwa shrugs, picking up the tokpokki from the colorful box. “One ungrateful brat tried to give me out to Hongjoong, but he’s probably too busy to read our group chat.”
“Wooyoung?”
“Who else? He literally threatened me from the beginning of Kingdom that he would barge at you to tell you about my fancam preferences if I didn’t come to meet you on my own will.”
“Oh,” Minho whispers, not sure how to react. That stupid interview at the very beginning of the unit round still seems like a delusional dream to him. “I thought you were joking.”
“What do you mean, joking?” Seonghwa frowns, and Minho feels uncomfortable under his gaze.
“I don’t know. I had a feeling that it was a challenge to throw me off balance. I remember laughing at Chan when he was shy like a teenager, and I ended up doing no better than he did.”
“That’s not true!”
“Come on, I was giggling like a schoolboy.”
“I like to hear you laugh,” Seonghwa says carefully, in soft contrast to Minho’s loud voice, and Minho can’t find the right words. Again. It’s not like him at all.
“Thank you, I guess?”
“Are you always so embarrassed when someone compliments you?”
“Only if it’s you.”
Seonghwa turns away to the river with a soft laugh, and Minho takes it for an answer.
The journey back to the agency seems twice as short — perhaps because the route is now familiar to him. He keeps staring at the road in front of him half-blindly, replaying in his head over and over again the vivid vision of Seonghwa, gently interlacing their hands before they leave the river bank. Minho feels himself bleeding from this silent tenderness that stabs him like a rusty old knife right between the ribcage. The touch of soft Seonghwa’s fingers exposes the ugliest part of Minho, pushing him forward to the blind meaningless frankness —
He wants to tell Seonghwa everything. Absolutely everything that goes on in his stupid, small, and noisy head. He wants to tell him how Hyunjin had been with them all this time — and make him promise to keep quiet. He wants to tell him how grateful he is to everyone who took Jeongin under their protection as their own son — after what he’s been put through by Mnet.
There’s so much he wants to say — so he doesn’t say anything at all.
Minho’s not allowed to break into Seonghwa’s private space, but he does it anyway, unable to contain all this fragile tenderness inside him. He hugs him tightly in the elevator, safe and sound from the unwelcome eyes, and imprints in memory how small and delicate Seonghwa’s body is under his crushing arms as he holds him impossible close.
He catches Seonghwa’s gaze in the practice room later and smiles at him softly like they both share the same secret now. Minho feels more alive than an hour ago. Seonghwa’s presence is enough to fill his ghostly shadow with the celestial light— cold and gentle, like the glow of a full moon.
But then again, the beats of music go on —
and Minho’s heart trembles in unison.