Chapter Text
Nearing his last summer before joining SM, Donghyuck is made to go on a school camping trip. He’s sure there was a number of items that got ticked off an average camping activities list that day—a scavenger hunt, setting up a bonfire, a game of Capture The Flag in the woods or some mindless I Spy during lunch—but the only bit of it he remembers is the tug of war. One moment he's making a grab for a discarded jumping rope at the same time one of his friends holds onto the other end, and the next he's digging his feet on patches of grass and mud as he tugs to one side and his friend the other, a line of four or so other boys that had joined their impromptu game queued up behind both of them, pulling their weight as they tug in favor of their randomly picked teams. There's a teacher telling them off, a camping counsellor saying that's enough, a chorus of kids egging them on, but all Donghyuck could focus on was the burn of the rope sliding off his hands and the scrunch of his friend's face putting his all on dragging him through the soil.
When it's all over and done with, grown ups telling them off and chanting crowd dispersed about, they help each other up to their feet. Donghyuck even dusts his friend's pants off with a back and forth slap to his ass, which has him howling with laughter and seizing hold of Donghyuck's wrists to shove him down to the mud, giving teachers and counsellors a second reason to try to pull them apart as they laugh their hearts out.
Fighting a fight against someone he’d like to see conquer everything they set their eyes on and more, except for this one thing he wants for himself and, unwilling to admit it even inside his own head, no one else. Competition that holds no room for benevolence or playfulness until after it’s over, only then remembering who the person lending him a hand to pull him up or waiting for him to offer out his own is, everything else in between a blur of tug-push-pull.
That's how he feels through most of his years as a trainee.
Both luck and talent on his side, he works and charms his way through auditions and interviews and into a signed contract, one that legally binds him to afternoons spent learning how to breathe through a melody and hours of Chinese lessons, to hardwood flooring forever numbing on bruised knees and refreshing when it meets the drips of sweat going down his forehead. And, by force of circumstance, to other strangers committed to melodies and Chinese and damp skin laid on practice rooms as well.
Some remain a copy-paste version of themselves any time Donghyuck crosses paths with them, feeling like he’s putting a face to the name rather than a name to the face whenever they nod at each other while walking past on hallways or getting grouped up for the sake of practice. Some, however, end up being far more than an addition of a name to a head that nods up and down in a conjoined hello and goodbye. They sweat just as much as he does, have enough sets of yellow and purple on their shins and ribs to match Donghyuck’s, butcher foreign words with his same amount of fervor. They also make him laugh until he drops to the cold hardwood, with skin damp from Koeun spraying him with her water bottle, adding swollen red to his sides not from tripping over his own feet but thanks to the sight of Jisung choking on a Melona bar.
Donghyuck knows, however, that there isn't room for every one of them to stand on stage no matter how vast it looks, not enough dotted lines on enough record deals for them all to sign. He knows someone will end up being the one that is one too many, and in the face of its inevitability, all he can do is show every adult with a pen and a scoresheet why that shouldn't be him, that he's not the plus one that makes two into a crowd. So regardless of how hard they try and how much he likes them, he tugs on his end of the rope, aware there’s always going to be someone else at the other tail end yanking it their way, trusting they’ll want to take his hand when he goes to pull them up after he's wrestled the rope out of their grip and brought their knees to cold hardwood mud—because it’s not betrayal if they were pulling just as hard as he was.
The scissors have to make the cut somewhere. During monthly evaluations, Donghyuck nods encouragingly at anyone he meets eyes with who forgets a step or has their voice tremble through a note. He claps friends on the shoulder harder than a cheerful pat calls for when they sing to a T the same song Donghyuck had thought of preparing and then had to drop once his range failed him. He's undoubtedly condescending and occasionally jealous, even though the scissors never seem to nip anywhere near him to begin with, but he’s never actively wished for them to cut someone in half and out of the system.
In comes Mark Lee.
Infuriatingly older than him by a number of months barely reaching the double digits, Mark's been around for a while by the time SM's doors open up for Donghyuck to walk through. Mark’s a round face and square frame glasses, fighting tooth and nail his way through sentences foreign to his mouth and offering his best smile to make up for any grammatical casualties. He’s wide eyes as if he’s always being taken by surprise and a laugh constantly making itself known thanks to a nervous disposition and an easy-to-trigger sense of humor, and Donghyuck is certain there’s something deceptive about him, the innocence he gives off perhaps coming from naiveness but surely not from immunity to immorality.
Because if there's something Mark isn't already the best at, then trust he'll still find a way to one up anyone else who is already decent at it. And Donghyuck may be a firm believer that, if you got it, you’re entitled to flaunt it—the very reason why he’ll belt out random verses in hallways, and why his blood may boil at extrinsic perfect pitch yet he would never hold it against whoever owns it—but it’s not so much the fact Mark parades around practice rooms the way his body and mouth know exactly how they need to move, but more so that he never holds back. He got it not as an acquired skill but as a born right, and he’s entitled to flaunt it but god does Donghyuck hate that he does.
Golden boy, he hears a dance instructor call him once. Show off, Donghyuck thinks to himself, seeing as Mark is just as bad as he is when given a rope and a friendly face to rip it away from, and he’s still bold enough to have a pretty face and a nice attitude to show for it.
He doesn’t have to try hard, and Donghyuck doesn’t like him. Correlation implies causation.
Before Donghyuck gets the chance to put all those bits and pieces of the golden-boy-turned-show-off together, he’s met with a guy that looks about his age that turns around at the sound of Donghyuck’s voice. It’s not until he sees the face that peeks out from under a bright red snapback that he realizes this isn’t Jeno, and he’s just asked a stranger in line at the cafeteria if he wanted to share a Fanta. A minute bow and a small apology from Donghyuck put an end to a moment that might as well have never happened, if not for Mark being able to recall it years later. Donghyuck takes his retelling at face value, being that he’s the only of the two that can still avow for that being the first time they met. Regardless, Donghyuck has always been far more practical than Mark, and so he’d like to claim he holds onto the real important memories: Mark can testify for the first time their eyes meet, but Donghyuck can recite word for word the first time they actually get to know each other.
There’s two key factors tipping the scale that reveals the weight of the moment. On the one hand, Mark’s Korean is tricky at the best of times, his words wobbly on their feet though unfortunately coherent, a frequent disconnection between his intentions and their outcome. On the other hand, Donghyuck is fresh out of being twelve and still has one remaining milk tooth. He had thought he was done shedding them all, and then one morning he runs his tongue behind his teeth and feels one of his molars give under the force. By now, it’s hanging by a tendril, and he’s been pushing at it with his tongue for a couple of days. It all adds up to Mark being prone to misuse words through a friendly tone, and Donghyuck having a tooth that should come loose any time soon.
In the calm before the storm, Mark is rocking up and down on the balls of his feet with lips sucked in and mouth wordless, and Donghyuck's got it so he's flaunting it, singing a BoA song he can't remember the name of and depriving his tongue the chance to prod at his remaining baby tooth. They're both staring at the glowing white numbers going down beside the closed elevator doors, their shoulders dropping in unison when it pauses at ground floor before it starts going back up and away from the underground where they're at.
Donghyuck presses down on the B2 button a couple of times as he sings louder, attempting to get the elevator to hurry up with the sheer force of his insistence. There’s a car waiting for them in the parking lot with the ignition switched on and a shower at the dorms calling Donghyuck’s name in smoke signals made up of hot steam. After-hours practice is only allowed if someone else stays behind with you, and though there’s something about Mark that rubs him the wrong way, he’s two months into training and willing to put up with the squeak of sneakers on the other side of the room thanks to the piles of eager energy stacked up inside him, one that is going to have nowhere to go but down in the following weeks and will have him cursing Mark’s name when his late practicing deprives him of calling it a night. For now, he takes on the chorus of a nameless song, leaving his pointer finger over the elevator button as it pushes down on it long and hard.
“Donghyuck?” Mark’s voice, rough from being quiet for too long, manages to make his name sound alien even to Donghyuck himself, as if that's the first time he's ever said those syllables in that very order, and Donghyuck realizes it might as well be.
Turning to Mark, he lets his finger leave its place on the panel but continues to sing his way through the bridge, watching him rub at one eye with a relentless knuckle, the other squinting at Donghyuck with eyelids hiding thin red lines. “Could you quiet down? You’re giving me a headache,” he croaks out, and Donghyuck's singing suddenly dies out with a vinyl scratch, Mark's request lifting the needle off the record on Donghyuck’s turntable.
It’s all in the choice of words. Poor vocabulary from someone who lived most of his life overseas makes it unfortunate wording, but Donghyuck's judgement decides it's a deliberate slip of the tongue.
“Sorry some of us can actually hit a note,” Donghyuck frowns, mocking pity inappropriate on every possible level. Mark is older, he's been training longer, he's SM's golden boy according to what he overhears an instructor call him once when he walks by a practice room's ajar door, and Donghyuck is on his way to pick a fight with him on what must be the third time they've given each other the time of the day.
With eyes puzzled on top of being bloodshot, Mark’s hand comes up to fiddle with the brim of his cap, a scratching sound against the jean of the hat giving Donghyuck the first of many chances to figure out that’s Mark’s go-to nervous habit, only coming up second to senseless laughter. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. What is my singing giving you a headache supposed to mean?” Donghyuck shrugs, head tilted to the side, every movement untruthfully innocent.
Assuming Mark’s playing the same game he is, he buys none of it when he sees his mouth part before he gives a firm shake of the head from one side to the other, the scratch of nails on his cap spacing out but becoming louder and every stroke getting longer. “Sorry. Swear I didn’t mean it like that,” he says through a rasp, mean it going unheard thanks to a voice break.
(“It sounds like he was just tired,” Jeno says when Donghyuck complains about it to him the next day on their way to school, and Donghyuck is plenty aware it didn’t just sound like it, because Mark looked the part as well. According to Jeno, that makes him a poor guy who had to deal with you at ass o’clock. According to Donghyuck, that makes him an asshole who thinks seniority is a free pass, since he knows better than anyone that nothing makes spite come out quite like being tired does.)
There’s a single number of seconds where silence reigns after Mark’s apology, and the small sigh of relief Donghyuck hears leave him is let out too early too soon, given that the moment the elevator’s numbers go from three down to two, Donghyuck starts humming. Ground floor, and he’s back to singing at the top of his voice.
“Don’t be mean,” Mark begs, the crestfallen tone of his voice not allowing it to be labeled as anything other than a plea. It’s just his luck Donghyuck isn’t big on mercy.
He takes a step closer, sings louder, ties the final words of the last chorus to the starting lines of the first verse as he loops the same song right in Mark’s face. He watches Mark’s cheeks grow red, a swollen eye twitch, and that’s when he gets what he deems the earliest good glimpse at who Mark really is: just as bad as Donghyuck, a rope-tugger who is only kind for show. He has to be, because if not, then Donghyuck finds it hard to explain how the worst moment of his thirteen year old life coincidentally takes place right there and then.
It all goes by in the same fraction of a second. Mark’s lips part in a motion that anticipates he’s about to speak, along with Donghyuck’s own mouth that is going for a high note, when the elevator doors ding open and the last milk tooth Donghyuck owns flies out of his mouth. It bounces off Mark's shirt and lands on the floor, both their heads suddenly angling down to follow its journey all the way down to the space between Mark’s shoes.
It’s dead quiet for a second time, neither of them able to move an inch up until Mark snaps out of the staring contest with the tooth by his feet and, to Donghyuck’s horror, kneels down only to pick it up and hold it for Donghyuck to grab.
Every muscle and survival instinct refuses to let him straighten up and look Mark in the eye, gaze fixed on the ground granting him the sight of wooden flooring and Mark’s thin arm from his elbow down to his fingers, two of them pinching the sides of his shedded mollar held out towards him. The taste of metal from the brand new gap is beginning to spread across his tongue, and it's already reached the roof of his mouth by the time he feels his hand move on its own accord to take the tooth from Mark’s hold. His ears burn hot with shame and his shoulder aches all the way into the back of their manager’s car and under the steam of hot water in the dorm’s shower from shoving it between the closing elevator doors when he makes a quick retreat from Mark’s side and into the metal box.
Donghyuck loses a tooth and his pride, and it’s then that he decides Mark loses the right to a second chance. Correlation, causation.
What came first, the egg or the chicken?
“The egg, for sure,” Mark says. The piece of meat between his chopsticks slips out of their hold, his mouth closing around air as it tries to catch it midst fall. It lands with a wet splat outside of his food tray, and he busies himself with picking it up as he goes on. “You need the little chicken for the big chicken.”
Jeno could do with one or two manners less, Donghyuck thinks. His friend doesn’t point out the choppy wording nor tells Mark anything close to what goes through Donghyuck’s head then (you mean a chick, genius?), but instead laughs it off and nods in agreement.
Donghyuck keeps listening in on them from the other side of the one long table at the cafeteria, eyes fixed on Koeun’s hand dumping into his tray her leftover dumpling. She has this weird thing with eating only even numbered servings of the same type of food, passing on her residue cherry tomato or fish cake to whoever’s closest and has a plate at hand, and Donghyuck fears the day she’ll begin counting her rice grains.
“Obviously the chicken came first.” Her voice makes him blink hard in surprise, not having expected another set of ears to be eavesdropping on Jeno and Mark of all people. “Pair of airheads, those two,” she jokes, a smile on her face when he looks up at her, and Donghyuck doppelgangers Jeno for a moment as he laughs and nods as well.
Of course the chicken came first.
The last notes of something classical and long ring out in the room, and only then do his hands relax and lay flat against the keys. Even now, the lack of a music rack in front of him propping up a familiar stack of sheets is odd, eyes itching to brisk through what he considers to be his second language, one made up of notes and silences.
It feels a lot like asking to have it all and in exchange giving up nothing at all, but when everything else in his life seems to be moving forwards, this is the one thing that goes backwards. He downgraded from his teacher’s shiny black grand piano back at Jeju to what is one step away from being a children’s toy keyboard, one that lives propped up against his bedroom wall collecting dust in favor of Donghyuck spending his days trying to better himself. School and friends making a hasty retreat out of his life’s limelight, he puts his all into training his voice, his feet, his appeal, and most recently, his ability to get along with what looks like is going to become his team.
It’s all the years of learning how to sit on top of his hands and hold himself back that allow him to get close to everyone. The degrees of intimacy take up different shades from one to the next, but they all find their designated spot somewhere, Donghyuck being able to place them just like all eighty-eight keys that used to lay before him when he would sit beside his piano teacher. D2 for Jaemin, Donghyuck’s polar opposite on every possible aspect though almost always willing to humor him. Johnny’s taken a leap away from him in age, and yet no language barrier can stop him from complying to whatever Donghyuck asks for through a pout—that’s an F5. Yuta is as much of a stranger as they come, but he’ll treat Donghyuck to Chinese nearly every other day for no reason at all: B1.
But, once again, when it’s all smooth sailing, there’s always that one thing that refuses to keep itself from going downhill, because Mark barges in with a slide from the first to the final octave, leaving the grand piano out of tune and making him resort to the beaten up mini keyboard his mom got him on sale before they moved to Seoul.
It would still be laying by the corner of his shared room covered with a fine layer of dirt, if it weren’t for his stuffy nose and no sound coming out of his mouth no matter how hard he tries. Laryngitis has rewarded him with a second off day in a row, and he’s somehow already reached the point where laying down all day playing games on his laptop with a cluster of empty energy drinks by the bed has gotten old. He brings a hand up to wipe his nose on its side, while the one still laid atop the keys presses its palm down on them to make a racket of sharps, flats and naturals. It’s freeing like few things are these days, to be discordant just because; to be able to be harmonious and still choose not to. He drags his hand slowly down to the opposite end, all the while thinking that maybe that is why, in his heart of hearts, he likes the fact Mark barges in with a slide across black and white keys that, contrariwise, makes Donghyuck dislike him. A clash against the monotony brought by a life of constantly preparing for something yet to come, which now arrives at his door in the shape of a knock, a rapping pattern he’s unfortunately picked up on with time, apart from it being the one Mark thing he’s been able to place—middle C if he’s ever heard it.
There’s a handful of seconds of quiet, and Donghyuck waits for the realization to hit. Oh, right, you can’t talk, comes from behind the door not long after, and then Mark’s head peaks in.
“That was some great Mozart,” he jokes as he steps in, and Donghyuck hopes the warm light from the bedroom’s lamp isn’t bright enough to show how the corners of his mouth turn up.
Donghyuck has him up against the wall one day, an argument over Mark putting the empty orange juice bottle back inside the dorm’s fridge going off the rails and morphing into a fight that gets Donghyuck to close in on him against a kitchen cabinet, and then Mark shouts. It’s sudden enough to make Donghyuck stumble back, the right amount of brand new for him to fall dead silent at the shut up from Mark’s mouth that attempted to work as a brash armistice. It’s the first time he hears Mark raise his voice, and even then his face crumbles at the very next second. Donghyuck would like to say his pretty face and nice attitude have no effect on him, but Mark has this gullible charm to him—the kind that doesn’t make Donghyuck doubt his lack of morality just yet, but that’s plenty naive to make him want to promise him he’ll teach him all the right things just to see wide eyes blink up at him in curiosity—and, well. Donghyuck’s only human after all.
With fate and corporate decisions doing what they do best, they both keep getting paired up and split up only to be put back together in projects and teams and what they’re now starting to call units, and it turns out it’s not Mark that is the problem. It’s the fact that he's still Mark, SM’s golden boy and up-and-coming ace. He dislikes Mark, an asshole with a seniority complex, for being Mark, a poor guy who has to put up with Donghyuck. Or was it the other way around?
Whatever. His pants are on fire. Big fucking deal.
“Yuta got us food.” A white plastic bag is raised by Mark’s head, who shuts the door behind him with a light kick to it and a click of the lock. “We saved you some.”
Donghyuck had dinner hours ago, but once he makes out the familiar cardboard takeout box through the transparency of the bag, he feels his stomach churn in joy as it empties out to make room for his favorite.
You could confuse them as friends, with the way Mark ducks his head down to crawl onto the bottom bunk and sit against the wall besides Donghyuck, passing over the bag as he runs his mouth (You like this one, right? I know you like the yaki-something but I couldn’t remember if it was the rice or the noodles. Yuta almost ordered the rice one, but I—) It all falls on deaf ears, Donghyuck having blocked out the sense in its entirety in order to pull out the box of what he’s hoping is yakisoba, a rustle of plastic drowning out whatever Mark’s still going on about. (They got him the noodles. Mark guessed right. Even if he could say it aloud, he wouldn’t.)
A new cacophony peals out of the keyboard at the weight of the cardboard packed with stir-fry that Donghyuck sets down on top of it. Disposable chopsticks hastily broken apart, he tugs at the noodles until he can bring them up to his mouth, spice and salt immediately sneaking its way in along with his mouthful, sauce almost caramelized sweet blending perfectly with the bitterness of the… sweat?
"What? Are they off?" Mark tries to guess what’s behind the scrunch of Donghyuck’s nose, only to get a shake of the head and a finger pointed at him as an answer, before it travels up to the tip of Donghyuck’s nose and pinches it tight. He goes from looking like he’s trying to divide fractions through mental calc to reminding himself two plus two equals four. "Oh, do I smell?"
No part of Mark bringing the damp spot of his shirt underneath his armpit to his face and sniffing it should be endearing. There’s one too many lines on his forehead uglying his pretty act, expression all twisted up and unabashed, a boyish look in the one way that’s not camera friendly. There’s a drop of sauce that lands on the bridge of his nose from Donghyuck’s slurping of his second dinner helping. Pursed lips that show some lone hairs growing around its corners in what, in a few years, could be considered a two-day old stubble, but for now is just an immature version of it. He watches Mark turn his head to the side in a brash move, lowering his arm as he coughs at the reek of hours spent dancing, and he waits for him to look back at him before he mouths shower, word risking coming out nasal through the pinch of his nose if he had his voice, and Mark shrugs as if his stench can’t be helped after nine p.m.
Through another mouthful, he wonders if Mark’s future two-day old stubble version will keep up with the same soap adversity and water allergy as this immature version, and then wonders why does he even care to start with?
"It was really quiet today," Mark breaks the silence, having sat beside Donghyuck long enough to make it known he’s sticking around for a while longer, whether that is to see the last noodle be chewed into nonexistence or as a volunteer for Donghyuck to have someone to keep spraying with soy sauce. Eyes fixated on the vacant corner where Donghyuck’s keyboard could usually be found resting against, the corners of Mark’s mouth downturn in a gesture that lets Donghyuck in on nothing of substance. "It was weird. All that peace and quiet during breaks."
Donghyuck ends up stabbing his way through another bite-sized portion as he realizes where this is going, wrapping his head around the fact Mark would actually try and stir up trouble with Donghyuck unable to get a word in, and he hopes Mark knows he’s not above roughhousing for the sake of keeping his pride intact and coaching him through a thing or two of loose lips and sunk ships.
"I never realized before how noisy you keep things. Good noise, I mean,” Mark is quick to add, making a U-turn on Donghyuck’s assumptions, a hand’s fingers spread out and raised up in innocence along with his eyebrows, though yet to dare himself to stare at anything that’s not the baby blue wall. “Distract me from my own head kind of noise. The kind that makes me laugh.”
Mark’s eyes flit towards him, taking in Donghyuck’s empty chopsticks held midair and his gaze unmoving from where it’s settled on something guillably charming and an immature prototype, and he clears his throat before looking away, before he’s back to looking back at him, before—God, Mark, would you keep still? “You’re good at that," he nods as his eyes’ journey finds its final destination on Donghyuck’s face, swallowing hard but not backing down.
In the odd moment that follows, Donghyuck unintentionally licks his lips clean, unsuccessful if the look Mark sports is anything to go by. Before he can do much else, Mark says he has something there, and instead of pointing it out for Donghyuck’s own thumb to wipe off, he runs the length of his palm across Donghyuck’s mouth, rubbing it across his shorts to get his hand clean and in return leave a black sauce stain on white cotton that someone else will have to scrub off. Donghyuck can’t remember whether he’s contagious or not, doesn’t know what to do with the thought of their manager catching sight of Mark’s runny nose and sore throat and turning to him, the one who made the golden boy sick, or with Mark’s unwavering presence around him if he were to get stuck with a few days of bedrest as well.
For the time being, Mark doesn’t sneeze or cough, but instead opens his mouth wide and yawns, every other gleaming white tooth putting on a show for a one man audience. As Mark’s lips go back to resting one on top of the other, Donghyuck lifts the half-empty box from where it lays over keys and slowly pushes down one after another. Mark merely blinks at him before Donghyuck’s attempt to talk through his keyboard sinks in, a B followed by an E and then a D, the three notes spelling out a word in English that’s enough to rip a hearty laugh out of Mark, who throws his head back against the wall and lets his body shake to the beat of his howling with the tip of his nose brushing the underside of the top bunk.
Mark puts the grand piano out of service and forces him into a secondhand smaller version of it, before Donghyuck runs out of keys to splay his hands across in a slide. Mark’s booming laugh and his own bitten back smile feel like sneaking into someone’s studio to play their wall piano on borrowed time. Donghyuck plays it loud, plays it noisy in hopes it’ll wear Mark out, and yet it only seems to spur him on. Donghyuck hates it. He can’t get enough of it.
“Yeah, bed,” Mark says through a giggle that’s born mid-word. Lifting up one hand from where it’s resting over his belly, his finger stomps down on the key before last, allowing it to ring out loud and clear in the bedroom before he smiles and tilts his head in prelude to a request. "Play something for me first?"
Just this once, Donghyuck assures himself it’s fine not to hold back from grinning in reply, and thinks that if he’s not careful, he might start confusing them for friends as well.
Donghyuck's lost his voice, but when he presses down on a key, and then another one, he finds there's still a way for him to keep it noisy.
“Don’t be stupid. It’s the chicken. A hundred percent.”
Donghyuck bites down on a wing, sauce tinting his hand down to his wrist a warmer shade. Someone passes him a paper towel (thanks, hyung) and tells him to be careful or he’s going to stain everything red. He’s afraid he might just do that, if Mark keeps looking at him the way he is from the other side of the circle they’ve sat in, in order to dig into the cups of chicken wings their choreographer gets them as a reward for pushing through these last particularly long weeks (thanks, hyung—you got hot sauce too, right?). Mark opens his mouth to counterargue, and Donghyuck feels tempted to press his wide open hand smack in the middle of his face, staining everything red without a doubt.
“But where did it come from?” Mark offers him a sardonic smile, challenging him to go against what he surely thinks is cast-iron logic. “It has to have hatched from somewhere.”
“It wasn’t a chicken egg, then,” Donghyuck shrugs, petulant all over. He nibbles at the bone, pulling off the bits and pieces of meat that insist on sticking to it. “Maybe a pigeon and an ostrich had sex and—”
“Language,” Johnny calls.
Donghyuck turns to him with eyebrows raised and a laugh at the ready. “Sex is a bad word?” he wonders, and watches Mark out of the corner of his eye set his shoulders back and chest up, posture suddenly straight as a ruler. His brain comes up with a fun idea that involves cupping Mark’s ear and saying a number of colorful words just to see what happens. Definitely a better way to stain him red.
“It is when your preschooler mouth says it.”
Rolling his eyes, Donghyuck moves on and shoulders his way into the newer, far more risqué argument Johnny gifts him with. Mark’s eyes don’t leave him until whoever sits at degree number one hundred and eighty uncrosses his criss-cross legs to get on his feet and break the circle.
Frodo dies. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
He gets the news on a Tuesday, one during the times where he’s a narrow breadth away from becoming an idol, and he’s just beginning to learn that filming content in showbiz involves a lot of standing around with a face full of makeup, ready at all times for your cue to come through.
With his purposely unkempt outfit perfectly styled out of place and the first in line to get his hair and face done, he finds himself alone in a shoot’s two-by-two waiting room, spread out on a couch with his head a safe inch away from the wall so as not to mess up his gelled-down nape. In the privacy he isn’t granted on the daily and what he’s suspecting will be the most laid back seconds of his day, he allows himself to take the call when his phone lights up with a picture of his mom, ready to catch up on what his family had for dinner last night and delve into mindless small talk.
Her starting off a phone call with are you busy?, however, is in no way routinary nor a good sign. He’s proved right only a moment later when he hears her mention Frodo not waking up from nap time, the confusion from thinking why she’s telling him about their neighbors ringing the bell that morning turning into a daze at the words he passed away by their apple tree. Donghyuck stays on the line for as long as he can manage, and when he feels something in his eyes that’s dangerously close to a sting, he tells her has to go, hangs up and walks out into a busy set even though he knows his cue won’t come for a long while.
Through the day, it all goes by fast or drags itself out: one moment he’s instructed to look into the lens and then immediately told it’s the perfect shot, director and cameraman swiftly moving on; the next, he is made to mouth along to the same line over and over again, each time being shot from an angle that’s slightly lower or just a bit more to the right, a reshoot after his makeup is retouched, another bunch of re-somethings he has to redo under blinding cool white spotlights. Either at full speed or stretched out in time, the one thing on his mind is Frodo jumping over his neighbours’ fence when Donghyuck was over at their house to play with their son, sleeping the afternoon away under the shade of what then was barely a meter tall tree. No one ever told him he kept doing it even after Donghyuck moved out.
They're constantly rushed off their feet with schedules and work, Donghyuck gearing up for a debut followed by yet another one. A mature concept where he’s the most childlike one of the bunch, a stage made up of red lightning and constantly lifting each other up in the air, and then its youthful counterpart, light-hearted to the ear but a strain to Donghyuck’s legs as he tries to master his balance atop a moving board. There's no part of him that thinks he can't do it, but there's something about being pulled up to your feet with a firm tug every time you kneel down to take the weight off your soles at the shout of go-go-go that makes Donghyuck fold in half. Pressure could never break him, but it can surely try to bend him over backwards until he’s curved himself out of shape.
He stands around with foundation two shades too light and smudged eyeliner under his eyes for what remains of the afternoon and well after the sun’s gone down, nodding off as the cold bites at his fingers. Someone drapes an oversized parka over his frame that soon enough begins to slip down, and with his eyes attempting to fall shut, there’s this delirious feeling that convinces him for a second that he’s been shrunken down and he’s currently pocket-sized. Anyone could come up and grab him by the hood of his jacket with a pinch of a thumb and a forefinger, a feverish sensation of being lifted up in the air that’s gone a blink later. His eyes open, and he’s on the back of a car, his head jolted up into the air and away from Jaehyun’s shoulder with every bump in the road. One flicker of eyelids more, and he’s creaking Mark and Doyoung’s room door open, blindly tiptoeing his way to the bed on the right and sneaking into the left side of Mark’s mattress. Keeping the tossing and turning around to a minimum, he’s sure he’s managed to worm his way under the bedspread without waking either of them up, his head about to land on the free side of the pillow when there’s a hand grabbing at his forearm, climbing its way up through pats to his shoulder and then lightly nudging him away.
"No," Mark whines, oh sound dragged out and efforts to push him off the bed doubled. His voice is gruff from trying to catch up on missed sleep hours, and for reasons unknown Donghyuck feels his face go red at the rumbling of Mark’s complaint. "You can't sleep in here. Go hog someone else’s blankets."
Not pitch black outside anymore yet no sign of the sun breaking through, it’s a quarter moonlight and three fourths the streetlight right outside the window and at the perfect height to cast its light in that lit up what he gets of Mark, one eye only half-open and hair greasy with unwashed gel. For a moment Donghyuck forgets why he’s crawled into his bed, and begins to think up ways in which he can trick him into a shower. He could hide his phone and threaten to only give it back once he smells of that awful three-in-one shampoo half their dorm insists on using, or maybe leave a trail of those butter chips he loves that lead into the bathroom, and once he’s in there he could lock it from the outside and—
Donghyuck’s shoulder gives under Mark’s push, making him land on his back and forcing one of his legs to dangle off the mattress. Inertia has Mark rolling into his stomach in turn, allowing the streetlamp with half a cup of moon to shed light onto what he’s long ago christened as Mark’s Nerd Corner.
Doyoung, clean cut as they come, has made use of the one wall he has rights to for a small painting to hang and a shelf no one’s entirely sure he was allowed to put up. Mark, doing a good job at depicting the second part of golden boy and the first of gullible charm, decides to scotch-tape to the baby blue that runs across all trainee bedrooms a couple of posters he brought from abroad, with their white lines from creasing and folding them over the years. They barely cover a scrap of the drywall, one’s corners over the other’s in fake modesty that there’s not enough room inside Donghyuck’s skull for him to roll his eyes at the way it deserves. Despite that, all he can focus on right then and there is the bottom half of his Lord of the Rings poster.
"Hyung," he starts, and then ends with it as well, once he realizes he won’t be able to get another word out without something embarrassing coming out of his mouth. Another tooth?, he taunts himself with, childish mind of a childish half-grown up half-kid.
Pressing his lips tight to keep himself together, he hopes Mark is either sensible enough to let it go and allow his midway up eyelid to fall back shut, or careless enough to give the final push Donghyuck needs to topple off the bed and take it as his cue to make his way out. Mark’s neither, it seems, because his eye not pressed against the pillow swallowing up one side of his face opens up all the way, a gesture that shows he’s got his attention in the one way he didn’t intend to. "Something wrong?"
Donghyuck’s eight, there’s a movie playing unsubtitled on the living room TV, and he can’t understand a single word. All he can get is that one of the characters is named Frodo, and there’s something about his face that makes laughter bubble up and come out in unwilling bursts. He’s reminded of it the following week when his parents get him and his siblings a dog, and pulling the longest Pepero out of his mom’s fist in a kid-friendly version of drawing straws grants him the chance to name him. The dog barks, and it comes out high-pitched and squeaky. It’s funny, and through a giggle he says he’s a Frodo.
Donghyuck is sixteen, and he shakes his head in answer to Mark, who is fine with pretending his tone hasn’t gone quieter, or that Donghyuck isn’t pressing a hand under his nose to disguise a sniffle.
"Alright. Nothing's wrong, then," Donghyuck hears as he lets himself stare at the back of his eyelids for a second or two. In that speck of time, the pocket-sized feeling from that night returns, his limbs dwindling and the twin bed becoming a sea of memory foam. He can’t get himself to even spell out Frodo, but he knows if he doesn’t say anything at all, doesn’t try to build up with words at least one scattered about emotion that’s all feeling and no text, he’s gonna drown in Mark’s bedroom.
He won’t allow himself to die like this, with one barefoot leg that was pressured into leaving the bedding and is dressing itself up in goosebumps. He can’t die now, with Mark staring at him through one red eye (a permanent fixture of his face, the dilated blood vessels in them—how an ace can be tired of getting it all right all the time, Donghyuck has no clue). He can’t without knowing first if he doesn’t want to go out because Mark feels too close or too far, so he scrambles for something to break the silence that isn’t Frodo’s name.
"I messed up today. During the shoot," he mumbles, looking back at Mark after his long blink is over with. It’s not a lie, because he had, but he’d usually be able to bury it down even through his constant need to—what, prove himself? To whom? He’s about to make it. That can’t be it.
"Did you? I didn't notice,” Mark murmurs back, and Donghyuck is suddenly reminded he’s the worst liar he’s ever met. There was no way for him not to notice, with the music having to be stopped twice and making them start from the top many more times.
The sound of Doyoung turning around in his bed has them waiting in silence to find out whether they’ve woken him up, one saucer-sized eye making its way across Donghyuck’s face, and how is this the most scrutinized he’s ever felt, when he’s had many more pairs of eyes on him at far riskier times?
When he’s sure Doyoung has settled back down and all he can hear is deep breathing verging on snoring, he deems it safe enough to shift closer and whisper, “I really don’t wanna lose this.”
Not for lack of talent, but because life’s funny like that. One day you’re singing someone’s face into an angry shade of red and the next your voice is a poor imitation of itself. One moment you kneel down by your house’s front door to hug your bear-sized dog to your chest and the next he’s gone.
“Lose what?” Mark wonders, raising himself up onto an elbow when half of Donghyuck’s butt suddenly slides off the side of the bed, his hand catching onto his shirt to hold him still at the same time Donghyuck’s foot meets the floor with a smack to steady him. The plain white fabric is stretched out as Mark pulls him in and away from the edge.
“You mean this?” he says, and Donghyuck is now the one who doesn’t know what he’s referring to. He nods anyway, because whatever path Mark decides to take, he’ll probably still somehow get his bearings right, no possibility being too far off.
“They wouldn’t. Debut’s too close.” The grip he has on Donghyuck’s shirt slackens and leaves, letting his own belly flop back on the mattress, this time his head fully turned to the side so he’s not outnumbered in eyes when holding Donghyuck’s gaze. “And you’re kinda too good. That would be dumb.” He frowns, voice all over the place until it finds a spot to come down to, X marking the spot in heartfeltness. It’s such an abrupt landing, Mark nosediving into it so out of the blue Donghyuck finds it hard to believe, the sleep deprivation and his nice act surely talking in place of Mark’s honest will. None of that takes away the fact that Mark still opens his mouth and says, “If they ever did, I would walk out with you.”
It sounds like a pinky promise, the type that was fabricated to be broken the moment you step out of childhood. Right then and there, Mark looks like the type that would keep it anyway.
“That would be dumb,” Donghyuck points out, because picturing himself giving this up, even with the long nights and the makeup forever on and the starting again from the top, seems impossible. When he tries, all he gets is a blurry image of a camping trip and a rope to tug on. End of tape.
Some members he has rarely crossed words with, but there’s never been any lack of willingness to lend each other out a water bottle or an encouraging smile. Others he can only engage in what's-the-weather-like type of talk or laugh himself silly with senseless joking around. He won’t deny he’s begun to find a home away from home in some, but even then, he wouldn’t trade places with them if one of their necks was on the line. There’s nothing that comes before this, the stages and the songs booming through speakers on streets and shops and homes—all things he’s only been able to imagine so far, but that he can feel are only a graze of fingertips away now.
However, this is where Mark takes on a different path and does, for once, completely lose Donghyuck, smiling as he says, “Very dumb.”
Looking wide awake by now, Donghyuck begins to doubt anything close to insomnia is the one directing his words. The more likely hypothesis is that Donghyuck was thirteen, he met a kid he secretly deemed double as talented as him and refused to believe someone could be golden and immune to jealousy at the same time. Thinking of Mark as who he wanted him to be, and realizing that person was Donghyuck himself—just a hypothesis, but still.
He blinks at him, and inside his head he repeats dumb just as Mark’s hand reaches over him to lift the covers, waiting until Donghyuck’s leg dangling off the edge sneaks its way back inside the sheets.
Half-grown half-kid, he asks himself, is there anything more important?, and for the first time he answers, maybe.
He loses Frodo and a chance to say goodbye. He wakes up with Mark’s bedspread entirely tangled in between his legs, rolled over onto his side and with Mark’s hand trapped underneath his ribcage. Where’s the correlation now?
“You still think it’s the egg?”
Cue a chorus of groans. They aren’t enough to make Donghyuck’s gaze move from where it attempts to keep Mark pinned to his seat in the car across the walk-in space separating them.
“How many times are you gonna have the same argument?” Yuta says, eyes down on his phone. To no one’s surprise, it falls on deaf ears.
“Of course it’s the egg,” Mark scoffs. Donghyuck rests both elbows on top of the armrest and leans towards him, ignoring the tut that comes from the front seat. He catches sight of a razor burn patch on the underside of Mark’s jaw, and has a hunch they’re getting too old for this. “Do you think a chicken was born and then decided it wanted to lay eggs?”
“I’m saying it was born from a non-chicken egg, and then—”
“That’s still an egg!”
“Not a chicken egg! You think I think chickens were the first animal to ever lay eggs?”
The moment the car doors open, the members on the backseat scurry out in a the-floor-is-lava fashion. Donghyuck turns his back to Mark to hop out too, and even then Mark’s eyes don’t leave him, glued to where the collar of his shirt sits askew around his nape.
In time, Donghyuck figures it out.
There’s a pace to everything they do. Comebacks, promotions, tours, down time, redo. One unit, the next, the next one after that, all of them at once, then repeat. Donghyuck watches the nuts and bolts and learns what makes them work, where to stick his finger in to stop the gears from turning, and so much sitting and staring at the inner workings leaves him well-versed on the rhythm they set up. It’s one made up of doses, just a few drops here and there for you to taste it, but never giving you the chance to bite down on it. A full album, three radio shows and a double digit number of music shows, two dates in the same arena in Seoul—but wait, now have some of this, same group but a different group. A single, no radio appearances, music shows Tuesday through Friday for a month, and now etcetera.
It’s so much and so little all at once, but Donghyuck pinpoints that’s what makes most of their ingroup dynamics work. They get each other in doses, presences and absences sporadic, always some schedule coming up where they get mixed up and allowed to take a breath from Subject A while getting to see Subject B after a good number of weeks.
Now, here’s what Donghyuck puzzles out, the answer to why his relationship with Mark has been plagued from day one with clashes and arguments, all raging from petty to rocky.
Mark comes and goes not in doses but in droughts and surpluses: he’s constantly there, glued to Donghyuck’s side whether they want it or not, as they jump from van to broadcast to another country’s airport to dorms, same group but a different group but still Mark-and-Haechan. And then Donghyuck stays countless nights out of their dorm in the name of a group that’s still the same even if it isn’t, but it’s no longer Mark-and-Haechan. And then Mark is up on a plane and gone for weeks on end, a different group on an entirely different group with no hyphen between their names to begin with.
It grants them heaps of time to get sick of the way the other breathes, and then puts enough space between them to make Donghyuck feel the empty lined out shape besides him, even when he’s pressed shoulder to shoulder to someone else.
Because that’s a thing Donghyuck has come to do with time, apparently. Miss Mark.
He never knew there could be weight to air, sensing it heavy around him after a phantom feeling of a hand unwarrantedly squeezing his thigh or slapping his shoulder during a belly laugh. He has to make himself home in Jeno’s bedroom for a week, and his personal bubble is lukewarm to the touch, as if someone had left that space the same way one does when waking up and rolling out of bed, remnants of body heat that bring about a palpable warmth. Mark is out in the early morning and back late at night thanks to a project they could only trust their golden boy with (that’s another thing he’s come to do with time—adding reasons of a different nature to resent Mark’s unofficial title), and then there’s a twinge right over his ribs, a thrumming under his skin that has him picking at his cuticles and peeling off his fingernails.
The thing about being able to take a breath is that, at one point, all you’re doing is exhaling. A call goes to voicemail, they’re split into different cars for a one hour ride, Mark can’t make it to practice because of a schedule clash, and the air slowly begins to run out. That’s all the explanation he can find as to why the moment he gets Mark up in his space again with hyphens back in place, instead of breathing in, he continues to puff it all out.
He has his eyes set on a styrofoam box of what has to be kimchi stew, placed down atop the kitchen bar where Donghyuck sits, a paused game on his phone forgotten about in favor of being all ears to Mark once he walks into the room. Donghyuck’s sure he had said something about talking to Johnny on the phone and not having had lunch yet, right?, along with getting him his favorite, before he puts down a single takeout box on the table. Just the one. Mark stopped on his way back to get food just for him, ordered the elevator to go up five floors further up from where a bed calling his name for a well-deserved nap is, and he's not even trying to hide it.
In his head, he lets the steam of the dish come out with a lift of the lid and says the magic words, tells Mark to take a seat as he pulls out the rice cooker. In there, he allows himself to say thank you, doesn’t shy away from a glance or a hand coming up to his chin to rub away a grain of rice.
In the past, Mark had brought him the japanese variation of what his favorite entails. He had run his palm across Donghyuck’s mouth with anything but care, and to this day Donghyuck recalls the feeling of a pinky brushing against his front teeth with the swipe of Mark’s fingers.
Now, Donghyuck presses play once more in his game, and keeps his gaze on the new customers coming through the virtual door of his Cat Spa as he tells him, "I had kimchi last night. You could have asked before getting it."
From there—who would have guessed it—the whole thing escalates. Mark says something along the lines of learning how to be more thankful. I didn’t ask you to get me anything, and that's not the point, and—
“Just saying, it doesn’t take that much to say thank you,” Mark says under his breath, pushing himself off from where he’s leaning against the bar. He doesn’t get to put some more distance between them fast enough, because the next second a phone is dropping on its side on the tabletop. Donghyuck raises up on his hands with his palms down on the marble and stands up on the footrest of the stool, attempting to gain an inch or five of advantage on Mark and stop him from walking out on him thinking he’s left Donghyuck with his tail between his legs.
"What do you know about making an effort?” It comes out as a snarl, his hands sliding down the bartop and upper thighs digging into its side to edge nearer and loom up on Mark. “You get everything served to you on a silver fucking plater and you think you get to tell other people how they should be thanking you?”
It’s unfair, and he’s aware. He still wants Mark to be like him, or maybe him to be like Mark—he probably just wants Mark point blank. It’s not like it matters anyway, since Mark is no longer the same kid who needed to scratch at a hat’s cap to get the courage to in turn get a word out. Donghyuck has taken good care through the years to roughen him up and sharpen his tongue, which is why instead of leaning away he moves back in as well, a drop of spit landing on Donghyuck’s cheek as he mouths a silver platter to himself in one fluid, bitter move of lips.
“You know that’s not true. Where is this coming from?” Mark’s face settles down on a frown. Donghyuck feels the heat from the takeout box travel out its bag and warm up the skin over the mouth of his stomach, matching in Celcius Mark's hot breath that is coming straight for Donghyuck's chin and lower lip. “Why are you always like this?”
“Like what?” Donghyuck is quick to bait him on, because deep down inside he's thirteen and thinking I knew it, he's just an asshole with a seniority complex who thinks I'm less than him.
“Like a—a nightmare to be around," Mark claims, voice turning into a squeak towards the end. "I do one nice thing for you and you can’t even—”
Donghyuck snorts, standing up straight and finally allowing the space Mark was looking for to make its way between them. “Right. No one does nice shit just because.”
That seems to shock Mark out of something to say, eyes wide and mouth struggling to quit moving without purpose or sound coming out.
“But they do,” he ends up being able to get out, words sounding like they’ve been torn up by the roots. “People that care about you do. I don’t know why you’re obsessed with the idea that everyone’s out to get you, but—” His arms spread wide and wave up and down in the air, a frantic gesture at the empty space, as if the everyone in question were there in a way other than evocative. “No one’s out to get you!”
Mark's palms smack against his legs the moment they go down with a sudden swing, gravity's pull the only one to make a sound in the room. Donghyuck has never needed to use the word resound before, but there's a first time for everything, it appears, as the smack echoes inside his head in the lull of Mark's voice.
“Maybe you would see that if you didn’t love yourself so much that you can’t be bothered to care about anyone else," Mark bites. Donghyuck isn't expecting his teeth to sink that far in, and yet they do. All he can get himself to do, then, is grit his own.
“Are you done?” he forces out, flopping back down on his seat. The puff of it resounds—useless piece of lexicon, he had thought at Year 7 Korean, but look at it go now—along with the far too quiet thunk of the front door once Mark makes his way out.
Donghyuck’s lost temper boomerangs back to him, but even after he’s regained it, he feels like there’s something that remains missing. He opens up the styrofoam lid and lets the kimchi steam tread through eyelashes, pokes at the food with his chopsticks and awaits for whatever it is to return. Nothing does.
Donghyuck loses the camping trip tug of war. His friend drags him through puddles and pebbles, and he's the one to lend Donghyuck out a hand to help him back up.
He hates the feeling of losing, and once he's up on his feet, he makes up his mind that his knees are never going back to the mud.
“You got me my favorite. Let me get you yours?”
Donghyuck’s mouth morphs into a pout and his voice takes on a tone that’s perched on the brink of baby talk, pressing his phone closer to his cheek as he waits. A second, then two, and a familiar laugh finally meets his eardrum.
He speedials Mark, and after the first ring, Donghyuck thinks he won’t pick up before the fourth. He picks up on the fifth. He’s not going to say a word before I do, and he doesn’t. He won’t be able to turn down dinner, and Mark can’t. It’s all to be expected, and Donghyuck absently wonders if it’s too late by now to back out of all this knowledge.
Mark laughs in hiccups, more air than sound. The sound that does actually come out always seems to be dizzy, as if it loses its footing anytime it tries to stand up. Donghyuck has been roommates with this sound, has heard it in cupboard-sized rooms and vast all-white studios, has seen it grow up from a trigger reaction in nerve-wracking scenarios coming out of a mouth with braces, into a noise that bursts out of him anytime, anywhere, and always unapologetically. That's the laugh he hears on the other side of the line now, along with a just as expected, giggly-said, “Dude, I got the creeps. Fuck you.”
Donghyuck waits for the chuckling to simmer down, and his cheeks force the phone slightly away from his ear when they rise with his smile when he hears Mark tell him, “Okay, sure.”
"This is all your treat, right?" Mark asks the moment the waitress leaves after placing down their second serving of fried drumsticks, and Donghyuck sets his lips in a mocking straight line.
“Now it’s not, if you’re gonna go all stingy on me.”
Mark lets out a quiet chuckle through the second minute sip he’s taken of his pint so far that night, and once the tall glass is set back down, Donghyuck leans closer to him until his chest bumps against the table. “Tell you what. Ask for the fruity cocktail we both know you want and it’ll go back to being my treat,” he says, voice going hush as if he’s laying down the terms of a bribe.
“I’m okay with beer,” Mark shrugs, apparently headstrong enough not to humor Donghyuck this once, who scrunches his nose up at him in complaint of their banter dying out so soon.
Not a single thank you or sorry has been offered so far. After they had picked a table, Donghyuck had hidden behind his wide open menu and said the kimchi was great. He hadn’t pointed out it was too salty, and Mark had lowered his own menu to smile at him in reply. No apologies had come out of his mouth, and Donghyuck hadn’t cared for them to do so. Mark bites, he bites back, they’re even. If Mark thinks Donghyuck owns too much self-love and too little good will with too much pride, then he’s entitled to do so. If Donghyuck can’t stop thinking about it, then that’s on him.
Mark dumps half of his piece of chicken on barbeque sauce, and Donghyuck hears a voice yet to go through puberty and ignorant to the hour piles of arguing it’ll be used for asking what came first? Donghyuck says chicken, Mark says egg. Who comes first? he’d like to ask now, voice trained along with his skin and bones to tread through waters it would have drowned in at thirteen, in front of an elevator and eavesdropping on the other side of a long table. Donghyuck would rather his answer went unsaid, afraid to riddle out Mark’s own.
“Hey.” He’s not sure if he’s interrupted Mark mid-phrase or if he’s been quiet since the last word Donghyuck remembers was said, but he still looks up with his full attention on him, eyes expectant as he presses a paper towel to his mouth. “You’d still walk out with me, right? You’re still dumb enough to do that?”
It’s easy to know where it comes from, hard to let Mark know the why here and now, so he’s only glad when Mark is quick to nod and save him from having to dig up memories aloud. Remember this random moment in time? No? Well, turns out I think about it all the time. The sole thought makes him queasy. Or maybe that’s just the beer.
Mark refuses to get fruit juice with his alcohol in public. Donghyuck asks for IPA when he knows it’s too bitter for him. He looks to one side and then the other. Who are they even putting on a show for?
"Yeah," Mark says once his mouth is free of chewing and he has rolled the dirty towel up into a ball by his glass. "Why'd you ask? Anything on your mind I should know about?"
Picking up a drumstick of his own and dipping it in mushed up red pepper, he shrugs, a smile coming through the seams of his mouth. "Anything on my mind you don't know about?"
"I doubt I know the half of it," Mark answers, looking just as amused.
Donghyuck hides his grin-turned-beam behind a bite of chicken, and the moment their waitress walks by their table he raises a hand to draw her attention. “Excuse me, could I have a peach daiquiri? And a Corona. Thank you.”
When they step up to the front counter on their way out to pay and Donghyuck begins to pat his pockets with a frown, Mark’s laugh sounds far beyond dizzy with the rum in his system, and Donghyuck’s calf gets kicked with laughter-appropriate brute force until he gives up the pretence and pulls out his wallet.
Donghyuck has gone from living with three siblings to trainee dorms with constantly coming-and-going friends and what he’s then too young to consider colleagues, nameless faces in the midst swapping places with some of them. However that may be, whether it’s family, acquaintances or strangers, the point is he’s been stuck with roommates ever since he can remember. Which is why, when they move dorms and there’s only one single room on the lower floor, he is all eyes for it.
In his defense, so is everyone else. It’s naturally the first room they decide on, a game of rock-paper-scissors with nine players and high stakes. After a couple of rounds, out of the five remaining hands three show scissors and two rock.
Donghyuck looks up from his fist in search of whoever else is holding their fingers closed tight, only to meet Mark’s wide eyes behind thick-framed glasses. It’s between the babies, someone says, and the words have Donghyuck going a tint of pink he won’t admit to and calling out a rapid-fire rockpaperscissors.
Donghyuck sticks to his guns, something about being a man and rock going through his mind before he throws out another fist as his final move. There’s a cheer, and Mark is lifted up in the air by Jaehyun’s hand snaked around his waist as he holds out an open palm.
Paper beats rock. Another thing he loses to Mark Lee. Shocker.
There’s no place for any bit of that bitterness in the present, Donghyuck only being able to be thankful it at least went to one of them as he presses down the ten on the elevator’s panel. Mark’s forefinger becomes stock still mid-way towards the button for the fifth floor, and then he’s turning to Donghyuck, who stands behind him with his chin dug into his shoulder.
“Don’t wanna wake up Johnny,” he lies. He doubts Johnny’s asleep already, nor that he would be able to wake him up with the closing of a bedroom door and some rustling sheets. Mark either ignores or pretends not to know Johnny’s usual sleeping schedule or how heavy of a sleeper he is, because all he does is draw his eyebrows together and say, “Your breath smells.”
Donghyuck can taste the oil on the roof of his mouth, bits of chicken stuck between his canines and that awful first beer coating every other part of the inside of his cheeks. It’s probably one of those smells you hum at when you walk into a kitchen, but frown upon when you bring your shirt up to your nose and realize it’s gotten on your clothes. Would Mark mind Donghyuck’s breath sneaking its way into something his? He blows it on Mark’s face only for research purposes, and watches him turn his head back to the front with a whine, yet not make a move to back away from where Donghyuck is pressed up behind him from hip to shoulder, hard at work trying to refill Mark’s previously empty lined out shape. This being a different type of warmth than the one he usually leaves behind, Donghyuck closes his eyes and soaks in it for a second, wanting to slip some inside his pocket and keep some other in a jar, to add to the artificial heat the next drought will bring or save it for rainy days.
Eyes back open, he watches the elevator go up the second to last floor and pictures what it would be like to hear the ding of the doors parting and meeting their younger selves, a milk tooth on the floor and anger forewarning it might boil down their bones—and that’s definitely the beer thinking up castles in the air. It is also definitely her that makes him move until his nose is pressed against Mark’s nape, as they step out of the elevator and make their way to Mark’s front door.
Donghyuck breathes in deep once he thinks of making a belated comeback to Mark’s insult to his breath, only to instantly find he has no jest material there. All he comes across is shampoo, body lotion, perfume, and yet another new feeling of warmth that burns against the tip of his nose and his Cupid’s bow.
"I love that you shower now," he comments over the jingle of the door keys, mouth brushing the hairs on the back of Mark’s neck that are calling for a razor to cut them loose.
The lock clicks, and Mark holds back from replying until they’ve slipped out of their shoes and made their way inside his room, Donghyuck’s arms around his middle all the while. After his bedroom door shuts behind them, he huffs, and Donghyuck feels the air leaving his belly under his hands, his hold imitating it and letting go. "What do you mean now?”
Neither bother to get the lights or a toothbrush. Donghyuck pads his way to the bed, guided by the pink salt lamp Mark always leaves on—a waste of electricity, but one that comes in handy after make-up dinners, when all one needs is something bright and warm-toned to tell where the dresser is to avoid bumping into it and where the edge of the mattress starts so you can plop down on it.
Bed still bouncing under his weight, he sits with his back hunched and glassy eyes, a malleable feeling taking over his body and traveling all the way down to his toes, relaxed just how a full stomach and a drink can achieve to, content the way only watching Mark grab the end of his hoodie to pull it off can make him.
“You used to stink when we were kids,” Donghyuck says, a lazy blink taking place between sentences. “You’re all, like, coconutty now. Like sunscreen.”
Mark laughs with his face covered by black polyester, hoodie still halfway on with one of his elbows finding it difficult to spot an arm hole to slip out through, and his words are muffled by the fabric when he asks, “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
Donghyuck means to hmm reply, and then gets carried away until he forgets he’s supposed to make the sound. Loose-limbed as he is, he splays his already outspread legs even further apart while he takes in the sight of Mark hopping on one leg as he tugs and pulls, his back blindly meeting a wall when he staggers back. With his huffing and puffing as the backdrop, Donghyuck hears him curse in English and sees him bend in half in order to try to shimmy the piece of clothing off, and he knows exactly what to answer to his half-grown half-kid self, asking himself if there is anything more important. Who comes first? Of course he knows, and of course he does.
"Mark?" he calls, and witnesses him stop flailing around almost instantly at the sound of his name. He turns to where Donghyuck’s voice came from, with his arms over his head and his head swallowed up by his hoodie from the chin up, a hmm like the one Donghyuck meant to make coming out of him in the shape of a question.
Getting back on his feet and stepping up, Donghyuck’s fingers slip under the inside-out collar, right in the place where it is tight against his cheeks, and talks as he begins to tug up. "There's something on my mind, actually. That you should know about." Mark’s mouth and nose pop out, the upper half of his arm finding its rightful escape route with Donghyuck’s help, and before they are back to being eye to eye, he rushes in to add, "Wanna know the other half of it?"
The hoodie ends up a bundle cradled in Donghyuck’s arms. Mark’s hair stands up straight in unity before some tufts decide to fall back in place against his scalp, and he frowns while echoing the other half? aloud. A moment later, his lips oh in shape as the memory of dinner crawls back to the limelight of his mind, and it’s a mistake on Donghyuck’s part to look at them, pink and bitten on until exhaustion, because then he doesn’t look away.
For how much of his sweet time Donghyuck has taken to give into this, he sure is in a rush now, egging Mark on with a, “Do you wanna?”
Mark blinks once, and Donghyuck’s done classifying warmth by sizes, types and time periods, tired of dipping his toes in it and letting only his legs move through it with soft back and forth kicks, and thinks of taking the plunge, just like he’s done with everything else in life except for this one thing.
It’s as easy as taking the extra step forward and stretching up the needed inch to press his mouth to his, and then it’s as hard as thinking every variation of I screwed up and do I pull away? right up until Mark presses closer and hums—and why didn’t Donghyuck make that sound when he meant to earlier? He should have, if it’s as nice a feeling inside his own chest as it is when it’s made against his mouth.
Donghyuck jumps in at the deep end, parts his lips and takes a gulp. It scalds his tongue, burns its way down his throat, and coming up for air means raising his chin to part from Mark, and drawing in a breath that makes for a whiny sound he can’t get himself to be embarrassed of. Mark must see the chance and take it, because his mouth opens up as well with a mute wet sound and a sigh, and it doesn’t waste time making its way down to meet Donghyuck’s once again.
He pulls away when Mark's tongue tries to make its way past his lips, and perhaps both the IPA and her prettier sister have done more damage than he gives them credit for, because he inexplicably feels the need to warn Mark, “Don’t—my teeth come off when you’re around, and if you—”
No, he shouldn’t have hummed. He should have laughed, the sound of Mark’s giggle both being born and dying out on top of his lips something he knows he could get hooked on if he’s not careful, and before he can think it through, his hands are holding onto the edge of Mark’s shirt just like they did with the collar of his hoodie, hoping this one won’t get stuck and it’ll be quick to join his black polyester partner on the floor by their feet.
Donghyuck loses control. He doesn’t end up telling Mark the other half that night, nor the one after that, when he creeps inside his bed and puts his mouth to his instead of to words. Also not the one after that, or the one after that one. Ad infinitum or however that goes.
Renjun joins in on their argument years later, history being made while in line for a security check at the airport.
“Maybe you’re missing a lurking variable,” he butts in the midst of another chicken-egg-plain-egg debate. Two heads turn towards him, Mark looking curious, Donghyuck on the verge of rolling his eyes off their sockets.
“Why did one have to come before the other?” Renjun reasons with a shrug. “Maybe, on one side of the world, a chicken was born out of—what was it?”
“A pigeon and an ostrich.”
“—a pigeon and an ostrich, while on the other side some weird ass animal laid a chicken egg. And then, you know, evolution and all that.”
Mark looks mindblown, Donghyuck on the edge of a laugh that is threatening not to stop after it’s begun its course.
“You’re saying the egg and the chicken had a survival of the fittest situation?” The first notes of a chuckle come out of Donghyuck and trudge their way through his words. Someone makes a gesture for him to step up to the checkpoint, and he rearranges his handbag as he takes a step forward, turning back the next second to look at both of them and say, “A Chinese egg and a Canadian chicken walk into a bar—”
Mark’s shove to his shoulder has Donghyuck stumbling towards the metal scanner, laugh ongoing just as it promised. He turns towards the x-ray belt to put his bag down on, and tries not to wonder if Mark’s eyes have already left him.
No, but seriously. Have they?
As he closes Mark’s bedroom door behind his back at five in the morning sharp, he makes his way across the apartment’s hallway with eyes fixed on his phone, squinting against the brightness of his screen as he clicks on the link Renjun messaged him last night after a mindless chicken-or-egg thread of texts. see if you get it now, reads before the blue words that open the doors to a Wikipedia article.
The third-cause fallacy (also known as ignoring a common cause [¹⁴] or questionable cause [¹⁴]) is a logical fallacy where a spurious relationship is confused for causation. It asserts that X causes Y when, in reality, X and Y are both caused by Z.
Translation: He's back to kneeling down, mud up to his kneecaps and time being wasted waiting for a golden hand to reach out and lift him up.