Archive of Our Own

act i.

Lee Minho was eight when he attended his first funeral.

He had been a background character gone wrong. An auditioning extra suddenly sought out for male lead.

As family members he didn’t know the names of crowded him in his own home just to get a glimpse of the easel with a face — of what he can now only assume was his deceased great grandfather — atop it, Minho remembers feeling trapped. It wasn’t that he had been specifically overwhelmed with the crowd or the strangers, but rather, he had been overwhelmed with the vehemence of his own lack of understanding.

They had all been weeping, consoling each other. Minho couldn’t understand why they were crying over someone they no longer knew.

He planned to ask, to attempt to clear the air. A small fist tugging at the hem of his mother’s shirt as she spoke with a sister? Mother? Aunt.

“What is it, bubba?” and although he was only seeking her gaze, she instead spoke before he had even had the chance to request it. Her voice was like the honey he would have expected to find just outside a field of flowers in a state of constant bloom. “Doing okay?”

Why wouldn’t Minho have been doing okay that day? He had never met the man before. All he knew was that the person in the picture frame had left everyone behind, and yet for some reason, no one appeared to be mad at him for it.

“Mommy.”

“Minho,” she mimicked. It trickled in warmth, not cruelty.

He wanted to ask her who they were all crying for, but the words got stuck to his tongue. They were raw words until his saliva adorned them with a coat, and then he suddenly worried they’d slide backwards down his throat, causing him to choke on the things he knew he would just as suddenly be too embarrassed to say. With the words flat against his tongue, he pushed them up into the roof of his mouth. Hard. Only to promptly forget where he had left them. To this day, that embarrasses him. It embarrasses him because he still doesn’t know who did this to him, and it’s far too late to ask.

“Everyone's crying, mommy. Why is everyone crying?” His fingers curled inwards and he yanked down on her blouse again. She reached lower to put a hand over his own. “You said he went to heaven with Jesus, so you should be happy.”

His parents — no, mother — had been quick to shove their sense of faith down his throat, employed from the moment he could crawl. It wasn’t something he necessarily understood, just as he didn’t understand the crying, but, nevertheless, he had always followed what he was told. Minho grew up with an innate drive fueled only towards learning about the world around him.

He remembers how after asking, his mother had tried to explain who the man in the picture was. Of course, Minho hadn’t been listening, eyes fixated on the large picture taking up most of the space in his living room the entire time.

The man seemed like a nice person, but eight-year-old Minho lacked a sense of proper judgement. Everyone he had ever met seemed like a nice person. At eight, he didn’t yet know the concept of what made someone look like a bad person and then consequently, be a bad person. He had never met anyone with warm eyes who didn’t offer warm conversation.

Minho remembers nodding to his mother, letting go of her shirt and wandering off as if he had understood fuck all. He remembers sitting before the fireplace with his back to it, just so he could get a better view of all of the people who didn’t belong there.

And then abruptly, Minho proceeded to ruin everything. he cried. He cried hot tears that rolled down his rosy cheeks in mimic of all of the cries that surrounded him. His mother had rushed to him immediately, taking him to the couch to sit him in her lap. He was enveloped in a hug. A hug that he didn’t understand.

He now feels those cries set into motion the worst years of his life, his eventual teenage years. At the ripe age of eight, Lee Minho had known how to hurt himself.

Publicity. And then that publicity created ten years worth of expectations he hadn’t ever planned nor wanted to have for himself.

He had been plastered all over the family facebook as the “sweet boy who could do no wrong.” The “sweet boy who felt empathy for those who cried and would then cry with them.” The “sweet boy who turned to find solace in God as soon as his great grandfather had passed away.”

That sweet boy hadn’t been sweet, he had just been confused. That sweet boy hadn’t been religious either, he had just been taught. Minho understands now that the longer you keep something around for its sweetness, the more rotten it becomes.

He had been shown off to the family that day as if the man upon the easel no longer mattered. It suddenly felt like Minho was being berated for being casted as an extra when he deserved to be a star.

Ten years later at the age of eighteen, staring down into the open casket of “great grandfather” number five, he cannot help but wonder if the man in the easel felt sad that day an eight-year-old boy garnered more significance than his corpse.

Granted, all of this is assuming there’s an afterlife at all. Minho just wants to make it clear that he no longer believes in God.

God is a cock sucker. He used to be more of a “cunt” and a “bastard,” but those were around funerals numbered two and three. It’s officially past the point of throwing around the overused, easy-to-take-back names. Minho doesn’t know how much more creative he can get, but at the rate his life is going, he’s sure this won’t be the last time he'll have to pull something out of his ass to use.

“Tch,” as the air trapped in his throat comes out in a breath. He stares, eyes traveling from the pale face down to the parts of the body he won’t ever again be able to see. “I don’t want to steal the show.”

He wonders if this mindset is why he had refused to even walk up to the casket this time until everyone else had already left the room. With his luck, he’d have just stolen all of the attention away from someone he actually felt he had loved this time.

This is what you get, Lee Minho, he thinks, This is the curse of signing a binding contract as a child for a never-ending star role. Because hell, at eight years old he could barely even read.

Staring so deeply like this, he feels like he’s speaking, and yet the logical part of him is aware that all of the things he wants to say — no, the things he thinks he’s saying — are just screaming back and forth at one another within his head. Doing so from the complete opposite sides, no less. It’s as if the things he thinks he’s saying and the things he thinks he’s thinking have been trying to communicate this whole time, their voices just barely out of reach from one another. They must have gotten bored with the repetition of failing, though, replacing it with the not-so fun idea of playing this messy game of telephone. If they’re his thoughts, why can’t he control the volume of them? If this so-called telephone is for the man in the casket, why won’t he ever pick up? Minho's thoughts are screaming, and this man’s phone is endlessly ringing. The screams that mean nothing. Dear nobody, love no one.

Funeral number one was for the man in the easel, someone Minho had never gotten to know.

Funeral number two was for the first, and possibly only person to have ever seemed like they actually cared about Minho, his grandmother.

She always invited him over to stay at her house for a week at a time, saying that she missed him. Minho loved to be missed. It never felt like he ever was considering he was not his two siblings: the youngest child or the only daughter. Where they were coddled for their individual qualities, Minho was not. With his grandmother, she never invited his siblings to stay over at her apartment. She never even asked his parents if she could see them. It sounds selfish, but Minho deserved what she gave him. He was given the fleeting chance to feel special and genuinely adored.

When she was slowly dying in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines and unable to say a word, he choked over the words “I love you.” He wanted her to know, the way everyone that had come with him was letting her know. His siblings wished for her good health and expressed their love, but Minho never said a word. Perhaps there was no room to speak with old words already stored in that special place at the roof of his mouth, threatening to fall like teeth. Loose, but not fallen. He was a child.

“She was bitter and she was old. She could have lived and she made the choice to stop fighting to” were the words of his mother after his grandmother had passed a few days later. Ah, so that was when he had first started living with the guilt of a murderer. She had held out long enough to see him, someone she had treated as if her own son, and yet at the very end, that son in question stared into her eyes and said nothing.

Funeral number three was for the person who pulled him out of his depression just long enough to get him back on track for middle school graduation.

He had gained insomnia, aggression, irritability — all from funeral two alone. He was hanging around a pedophilic older high schooler just to feel something and then additionally, failing almost all of his classes. So poorly, might he add, that his mother finally hit her breaking point. He was going to be forced into going to the shitty afternoon tutoring sessions his school offered, and for the love of god, weekly. He had originally been planning to skip, but he reconsidered after meeting a girl a year below him who sat across from him before lessons and tried to start conversation. It felt like there was someone who actually cared about him again.

She had unique earrings that he liked. They were both identical, shaped like Captain America's shield. Minho wasn’t a fan of Captain America (and still isn’t), but her smile when she spoke about her earrings was contagious. After the first two conversations, they settled into a routine where they would try and play a quick phone game together before and after sessions. Then, Minho stopped showing up. “When we play next time, I'll win,” she had said to him the last time he was ever there. He still regrets that.

Two years later, she was killed alongside a bunch of other people he didn’t know the names of. It’s still weird that she had done so much for him, only to have him not bother to remember her name. Maybe names are just not that impactful. Faces, though. Faces can be. He only recognized her the second the news flashed big, a picture of her smile.

Funeral number four was for the person that wasn’t a person. A cat.

First and foremost, Minho hates cats. Starting from before even the day he was born, he has never been able to escape the chains of living among a household full of them; there was a time Minho didn’t hate cats. He loved the fluffy fur and the nuzzling of a seven-year-old face in it. He loved the fact that they never seemed to care. He wanted to grow up like that — capable of giving love without having to put any thought or work into doing so. It would just happen. The unfortunate thing about a joy like that is that it is fleeting. Every year that Minho grew older, his ability to feel love grew less. The older he was, the less he felt.

When he originally decided that he hated cats, it was out of fear. He was bit. In front of the fireplace and tucked behind one of the living room chairs, no less. Everything about Minho feels rooted in that fireplace. So much shit always seems to go wrong when people feel their environment is warm.

Minho never bled when he was bit that day, and quite frankly, he doesn’t remember if he had felt any pain to begin with that extended to the places outside of just his pride. The pain of understanding that the things he loved might not love him back was numbing. It felt like a betrayal. The things he loved wanted to hurt him. If cats hated Minho, Minho would hate cats.

Nine years later (and only a few months prior to now), his sister managed to persuade their mother into allowing them to foster cats. As a family or whatnot. Seven kittens had been let loose in his bedroom, terrified out of their minds. They squeezed their way beneath his dresser via the gap in the wall. Just another thing Lee Minho would never be able to reach. It promptly sent him into a fit of rage, causing him to connect his phone to a speaker and blast loud the music of his native tongue. He’s sure now that he had probably made the situation worse back then, but it hurt to know the things he had been excited to meet wanted nothing to do with him. They were supposed to. They were meant to.

When his mom got home that day and helped him pull the dresser from the wall — if he had damaged something so expensive through sheer muscle power alone, he was sure he’d never live it down — Minho was sent on a journey through the depths of hell. With naked arms outstretched and guided by a blinded eye, he managed to pull the kittens out one-by-one. It was with luck alone that he managed to continuously make it out without a scratch until the final descent, and boy did she hiss at him all the while.

While the rest of his family cooed at the six kittens huddled together in the corner of his room, Minho sat down by the newly bought cat tree he had managed to shove the straggler into. They stared at each other.

“It's okay if you think no one loves you, ‘cause I do,” he had said as he reached in to pet her, claws sinking into flesh. “I promise to be with you until the end. I won't leave you, too.”

Nothing ever seems to happen the way it’s supposed to for Minho, though, and for some reason the culprit is always the same. Enamorment, adoration, and God forbid there were a four letter word to start the same as his last name.

The cats were supposed to be given away and put up for adoption in the coming months, but his mother fell in love. She wanted to adopt two. One for herself, and then one for Minho. There were two reasons why this wasn’t meant to happen, and they drove Minho mad.

One, he and his mother were the only members in his family of five to hate cats (and he means genuinely, truly loathe them).

Two, he was being asked to choose. The orange cat that garnered the attention of the friends he knew didn’t actually like him. The tabby who cried whenever Minho left the room because he had manifested a sort of separation anxiety in the two months they had spent together. The cat his mom named Lino, not realizing it was a nickname he had always been called by his friends. He was a wreck having to make a choice like that, and yet no matter which way he looked at it — or more literally, how much he clinically and obsessively ruminated over the things he may or may not regret — Minho always came back to cat number seven, the straggler. After all, he made a promise.

She didn’t trust anyone aside from him, never leaving his room despite the door being left open. The act reminded him of his funeral numbered two. In death, maybe everyone ends up being connected.

His cat taught him to be better again, pulling him out of the ruts the previous funerals had left him in. Suddenly, he liked cats again — scratch that. He loved cats. She always knew where he was hurting.

He never understood the whole “seeing your pet as your child” spiel his friends would go on whenever they spoke about their animals. He never saw his cat as his cat. She wasn’t above him or beneath him. They were, for once, soulmates on an equivalent plane. She was his best friend, not his daughter. This was someone who loved him. This was someone he was capable of loving back.

And then after spending all but a summer with him, she died.

It was random. She was healthy one day, curled into his shoulder as he watched Korean survival shows, speaking to her as if she cared who was going to be eliminated or not. And then a termite spooked Minho from sleeping in his room for an entire week the next, him opting to find solace in the couch. He never spent enough time in his room to be there for her anymore aside from the proper care he’d provide daily. When he did finally find the courage to move back in, he realized she was sick. And sick. And sick. And sicker. The vet gave her fluids weekly, but no one knew what was wrong with her.

He remembers the one day he needed to travel out of the vicinity to look at a college, there was this feeling in his gut screaming that this was going to be the last time he would ever see her. Crouched down before her corral in the hall (she had to be quarantined), they had stared at each other. It was nice to have a moment with her like that. A moment where she wasn’t running around in a frenzy, bashing her head into the soft corners of the pen as if she was trying to kill something living inside her there. He didn’t know what to say. The feeling was what he currently imagines dying feels like. His stomach doing flips and with each somersault, his insides get just a little bit colder. It felt like putting his heart on ice whilst it was still attached to the working arteries that kept it beating. It was pain without being in pain, and he still didn’t know what to say. He knew this feeling because it always came in the moments he was going, but would never be returning.

The posts about how you never know when your last day with someone will be are bullshit. Minho hates them. He knew he’d never rematch the girl from tutoring again the same way he knew if he walked out of that one hospital room, he’d never get to reenter it. There’s always a feeling, it just sometimes gets misconstrued as heartbreak rather than longing. After all, how can you long for something that hasn’t yet left?

The one day he wasn’t there, his cat wasn’t there for him to come back to either. And just his luck, the cause of death was a rare, unlabeled brain disease. Coming home from the college, father on the opposite line, the vet asked his mother on the phone what they wanted to do. His cat was in an unimaginable amount of pain. They wanted to do something. His mother didn’t give a fuck about his cat in the way he did, and yet she cried for him. He didn’t understand why. He doesn’t understand why. At 12:54 in the afternoon, Minho was the murderer behind funeral number four.

To this day, he doesn’t know what’s worse. The fact that he chose to kill her or the fact that she chose to leave him first, passing before they even had the chance to euthanize her. In love, maybe everyone ends up being disconnected. It is sickening to know that out of seven cats, six remain happy in the homes they were given. Minho must have done something wrong to be the only one left alone again.

Minho fucking hates cats.

Here. Now. This. This is funeral number five. Husband to funeral number two — both of which are coincidentally the only physical funerals he has ever been to. His grandfather had been a victim of Alzheimer's, and Minho had always been terrified of visiting him or spending too long with him and having him not remember anything. He distanced himself until he passed, stuck in a constant state of working up the courage to see his grandfather, make sure he was not alone in the way Minho felt he was. It’s a shame it took a funeral for Minho to suddenly realize that at least he would have remembered the things that they did, whether his grandfather did or not.

“I,” is all he manages to get out as he stares down. He had convinced himself that he didn’t need to come up here. That preserving him as he was would be a better memory for him. He had been prepared to leave it at that, and then he realized that nobody who had ever loved him deserved to die. They died because they loved him, and then he offered the audacity of never letting any of them know he had loved them back.

“I love...” he tries again, but he can already feel the tears welling up in his eyes and the air catching in his throat. Death is always blurry. He fucking hates being vulnerable. He hates crying and remembering that it makes him that sweet boy with empathy for every single thing around him. He isn’t that, and he’s never wanted to be that.

His phone buzzes in the back pocket of his jeans. His hand reaches to his ass to grab for it, but then he stops. He shifts on his feet. Stares some more. His phone buzzes a second time with another incoming text. He glances around the room to make sure that everyone’s really gone. His mom is exiting into the waiting room and the Jewish priest is packing up his things in the corner.

His eyes fall back on the second corpse he’s ever seen. Why does he still cry over the people he no longer knows?

His grandfather’s skin doesn’t look warm here. He remembers the way his larger hands would feel when he was younger during the times he’d let Minho sit on his lap, hand coming to rest over his stomach. He remembers how his hands felt when Minho would play with his fingers, eyes honed in on their differences rather than the history channel playing at the front of the room.

He should touch them. No, he has to touch them. Every reasonable part of him knows he doesn’t want that, and yet there’s this shrill, off-key part that’s in hysterics somewhere inside of him telling him that he has to. Minho does.

He reaches out to ghost their hands atop one another while no one is looking and it feels the way a dead person looks. It’s cold and it’s lifeless. Minho really didn’t need to know how lifelessness felt, but now he does. And it’s familiar.

“Iloveyou,” he rushes out, and suddenly he’s running without actually moving his feet from the floor. He feels his heart pounding in his ears, throat closing as the seconds tick past. He looks to the side. “There. Did it.”

And then he really does leave, hand already reaching into his back pocket, fingers grasping almost desperately for his phone.

from: ji <3

hey

u good?

miss u

Right. His boyfriend. For some reason, he forgot there was still someone left who did love him. Well, his mother loves him. He thinks.

Minho has never been with anyone who wasn’t Jisung. Jisung is ultimately his first and last. His first because he was the first person he had ever been with, and his last because they’ve already predetermined that they are soulmates. If they weren’t soulmates, this wouldn’t be the tenth time Minho has started seeing someone — no, tenth time seeing Jisung.

They break up a lot. They have broken up a lot. Minho doesn’t see anything wrong with it because Jisung doesn’t see anything wrong with it, and Jisung doesn’t see anything wrong with it because Minho doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

Things just get bad sometimes. Minho would never blame it on Jisung. He thinks it’s both of their faults. Every time. And it is.

Jisung is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder among other things (more physical things) and Minho has been learning all about how living with those things feel from him and him alone. How those things work, how those things make him respond. Minho doesn’t yell at him during his episodes or for having his episodes, but he does yell at him for his drug problems, and he does yell at him for trying to justify being a shitty person with mental illness rather than using it as a tool to explain.

Minho thinks they have a pretty symbiotic relationship. Toxic (as their shared friends have mentioned), maybe, but symbiotic nonetheless. Minho feels things he’s never felt before with Jisung, and Jisung always has someone to fall back on when his love runs out with everyone to come before, and everyone who will come after.

to: ji <3

could be better

im at the funeral

from: ji <3

right

i knew that

Minho laughs. It’s wet and there’s still tears freezing over like icicles in his eyes, but he laughs. He knows Jisung forgot. At this point, he doesn’t take stuff like this to heart. Maybe. He does still look a bit psychotic now, though. Laughing at the ending of a funeral and all.

He reaches a hand up and swipes the back of it over his eyes. “Goddamn,” he breathes, albeit shaky in the recovery.

to: ji <3

i love you

from: ji <3

i love you too

act ii.

“It's sad. I think.”

Minho’s eyes are trained on his boyfriend, elbow propped atop the kitchen island, cheek pushed into his palm. He can feel the callouses from all of the times he’s made shitty attempts at learning to play the guitar. Admittedly, he’s not very good.

The open door of the refrigerator obscures Jisung from his vision, the smaller of the two busy rummaging through it. He had claimed to know how to make sandwiches now. Jisung can’t cook for the life of him, let it be known, and so obviously Minho wanted to see.

There's an incredulous laugh that sets fireworks off at the base of Minho’s stomach — one of them manages to burst against the center of his chest, behind and slightly to the left of his breastbone — and then there’s a face peeking out from behind the door, a hand on it. “What's sad?”

“You know,” Minho urges, though he doesn’t look away, “what we were just talking about.”

“Chan?” Jisung asks.

“‘Lix.”

“Chan and ‘Lix?” Jisung asks again.

“Mhm.”

Jisung rolls his shoulders as he goes to shut the fridge door. He drops a package of meat down on the tabletop along with a few condiments. He doesn’t look at Minho, not even to steal a glance, but it’s not to be rude or dismissive. Jisung was normally just like that when he was busy. “It's not that serious, baby.”

“I know, I know. But, I thought they were in love.” Minho lets out a small sigh and he shifts hands. He doesn’t expect Jisung and him to exchange any glances. Regardless, Minho can’t help but stay fixated on his face rather than his hands.

Whenever Minho looks away from something, he can’t remember how it looks. If he was told to draw a salt shaker, he’d end up drawing a scientific flask. His fatal flaw (and to which he blames God, if there is one) is the inability to remember those he surprisingly still has. In his personal purgatory of incessant and inevitable loss, he has one job: to remember.

“They were in love,” the response is almost careless, and Jisung is laying out the bread across the plates, “and now they aren’t. Ham, right?”

“Yes.”

“People don’t just fall out of love overnight.” Jisung slaps a few slices of ham atop the bread.

“I mean, obviously not. Which means Chan had to have been thinking “Oh I’m really not as in love with him as I was before” for a while. And that's like, really shitty. He could’ve said something sooner and—“

He’s interrupted by a sonorous clapping of hands together. “Done!”

“What?” Minho feels bad.

Jisung had caught him off guard.

“Just done with our sandwiches, stupid. Keep talking. I like when you do,” he assures him as he comes over to set the plate down in front of him.

He doesn’t look upset. Really, he never is over things that actually matter, and yet Minho’s so used to upsetting him, he can’t help it when he feels sorry like this. It's instinctive.

Minho looks down, and then he’s staring hard at the ham sandwich set before him. It's leaking mayo and it does not look edible. Forgive him for smirking. He drops his hand from his cheek as he looks up at him. Jisung is oozing with pride. It's cute, but alas. “You’re eighteen, dumbass.”

“And?” The blond slams his palms down on the marble top, careful to avoid the sandwich and the other’s hands.

“You can’t be serious…” and yet Minho’s smile never wavers.

Jisung pushes into the island, propelling his face forward until their noses touch. He narrows his eyes at him, but it makes Minho laugh when he notices Jisung’s eyebrows pulling together, too.

“Serious? I'm more than serious! I've never been more serious. Tell me. Say it like a man.”

“Puppy,” and it’s an endearing term as he briefly shuts his eyes and nuzzles his nose against Jisung’s. Even with his eyes closed, Minho can see him.

Knowing someone for three years and then proceeding to date them on and off during that time did that to a person. Loving them without an off during that time did that to a person.

He fixates on the air, anticipating the content breath of a sigh usually exhaled whenever Minho gets close to him like this.

He hears it. He feels it on his face. He can see cheeks getting warm, despite eyes being closed. He draws Jisung’s smile against his eyelids.

The thing about loving Han Jisung is that although it is often overwhelming, it is never hard. Minho does his best to black out the darker moments of their relationship by constructing colorful art, and then storing it in the private museum of his mind catering to only one muse. It's not often Minho actually remembers the way things look, let alone how people do, and yet he’s drawn this look out from his boyfriend occasion after occasion. He had always wanted it ingrained. It is.

Minho opens his eyes and it feels like the Han Jisung standing before him is traced. Without art, you are not an artist. Without Jisung, Minho couldn’t be either.

He starts to lift his hand to reach out and caress Jisung’s face, but the back of it hits against the plate with a small clang. Right, fuck. That… thing. He glances down at the sandwich for a moment and then back up at the boy currently melting into him from over the countertop. Minho laughs. “You’re lucky we’re dating is all I'm saying.”

Jisung’s eyes snap open, but he’s not embarrassed. He wouldn’t be. He has no reason to be.

“You’re an ass,” he scoffs, pushing back from Minho’s face. Back from across the counter. Back away from Minho. He points towards Minho’s sandwich. “That sandwich was eighteen years of my life. Wasted, might I add, given the audience’s picky fuckin’ attitude today. Eat that shit. Gordon Ramsay would weep.”

“He really would…”

“Grr, you— you know, I don't have to listen to this.” Jisung’s pouting now, and he turns his face away from him. “Eat your food.”

“You’re not really mad at me.” Rolling his eyes, he keeps one on the other’s moue as he lifts the sandwich to his mouth and takes a bite.

His arms are crossed over his chest where he stands. Jisung isn’t mad at him, though, and yet why does a part of him still fear that he is?

There’s a goofy smile present when Jisung side-eyes him. Minho feels his body relax, but he can’t remember it being tense in the first place.

“Never,” Jisung reassures, and then he clicks his tongue, “but next time I might. You’ll never know if you keep slandering my good nam— no, my skills like that.”

“Oh please,” Minho huffs.

With arms dropping down from his chest to his sides, Jisung turns back around to face him. He wiggles his eyebrows and points at him. “You’re eating it, though. No complaints, babe?”

Minho rolls his eyes again. “Yeah, yeah, so it tastes like a regular sandwich, whoop-dee-doo! Seriously, though, Ji, you should’ve known how to do this already. It’s embarrassing.”

“Hey,” he starts. “In my defense, I did get your mind off your sadness.”

“Oh.” Minho raises an eyebrow at him. “I guess you did.”

And just as that god awful, shit-eating grin that screams “I told you so” inches across Jisung’s face, Minho speaks up again, “But now I'm thinking about it again, so I raise you. I mean, literally, imagine realizing you’re no longer in love with somebody the same as you were yesterday and just not discussing it with them? Relationships are all about communication an—”

Jisung throws his head back with a loud groan. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Min. C’mon!”

Minho laughs.

act iii.

The first five times Jisung broke up with Minho, he cried so hard he threw up. Each time. Without fail.

In regards to the four times that came after, Minho had managed to conjure up at least some dignity; he no longer cried in front of Jisung. He had realized that when Jisung got like that, the sadness Minho experienced made him happy. Maybe? It still feels that way to Minho, at least.

When Minho isn’t crying, he feels they both take the situation better. You know, if there’s even a “better” for that. Minho would cry if he was home and the breakup was over text (as it more often than not tends to be due to Jisung’s impulsivity and all), but if it was in person Minho waited until the day was over, when he could be alone.

Breaking up was always somehow expected, yet unexpected.

Expected in the way that there seemed to be days that would lead up to it. Worse moods, so to speak. Other times, the air just felt different the day Jisung was going to break up with Minho. He’d wake up, open his eyes, and go “Strange, waking up feels easy today” and then abruptly, the rest of his day would not be.

Minho tends to always be ready for the ball to drop now, and yet he’s still not sure if it’s because he officially fears Jisung will break up with him over anything, or if it’s genuinely because Minho can tell when something is wrong with him.

Minho wants to think he knows when something is wrong with the person that he loves. Maybe he doesn’t. No, he’s sure that he doesn’t because now arriving at current breakup number ten, Minho decides that the expected breakups are always unexpected, too.

Minho can feel them coming, but he can’t really be prepared for the way they’ll happen.

The first four breakups in which he cried were the same situation written out in different fonts. Artistic choice, perhaps.

Breakup number one had been over text. They had been laughing and talking about the things that they normally do, and then Jisung randomly got angry. He told him that he didn’t think they belonged together. They needed a break.

Breakup number two had been in person at Jisung’s house. Jisung had been high.

Breakup number three had been in person, too. They were at school when Jisung decided he was wasting his time on Minho and that Minho didn’t actually love him.

Breakup number four had been over text. They were in two separate classrooms when Jisung told him that he needed a break from him. He swore that Minho was just trying to find a way to break up with him, too, and that he wasn’t going to let him do it first. Minho cried in class.

They were always like this. New reason for breaking up, new harsh words, and new setting. Virtually, at their core they were all the same, except the more that they happened, the less Minho cried. He believes this means he’s getting over the honeymoon phase. They’re in love. After all, you don’t pick fights with the people who mean nothing to you. Minho must officially mean everything.

They've broken up nine times. Jisung broke up with him nine, and Minho broke up with him zero.

No.

They’re breaking up ten times. Jisung broke up with him ten, and Minho broke up with him zero.

“You’re high,” Minho says, hand clenching into a fist at his side.

The school locker rooms. It’s a new one, but it’s not entirely surprising. Not to Minho. Jisung tends to come back here after classes, or sometimes even in between, just to get high with a bunch of underclassmen.

According to Jisung, it’s the underclassmen who have the “good stuff,” nowadays.

Jisung stares back at him. His eyes don’t hold anything for Minho, but if not love, should they not at least hold empathy?

“You are. You're high, literally high, and I fucking told you to stop doing weed. You already have a bad heart. This isn’t gonna do you any favors, and now you’re going to say the same out of pocket shit you say to me every time you’re like this,” Minho continues. Rushes, more like. He's rambling and he feels like he’s screaming over the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears.

Jisung and him had been making out, and then they had been talking. Maybe there had been a small disagreement over something, Minho can't remember. All he knows is Jisung wanted a break again.

“High?” Jisung finally says — no, asks — and then he laughs, tossing his head back like it’s the funniest conversation in the world.

Minho can’t take his eyes off him. Why’s Jisung still pretty like this? How can he throw his head back and laugh the way he always does, and yet somehow make the room feel different? Feel wrong?

He supposes it did feel a little too easy waking up today.

“I'm not high,” he clarifies. It's monotonous. He lacks inflection. It’s empty. He's empty.

Minho clenches and unclenches his fist. Jisung had stopped laughing, but his face stays tilted towards the ceiling, eyes fixated on something Minho cannot see.

“What are you even looking at?” Minho’s fist opens, but it doesn’t close again.

Why can’t he ever be angry? He wants to blame this time on the fact that he can recall not being able to smell a trace of weed on the blond while they had been making out. Minho still doesn’t have an excuse for every time that has come before this, though.

“The ceiling,” Jisung intones, “can’t you tell?”

“No.” Minho’s honest, brutally so. He always tries to be when he feels Jisung is having some sort of episode. “You could be looking at anything like, you know, there could be a bug on the ceiling I'm just not seeing right now. My eyesight’s always been pretty poor, you’re the one to tease me for that, remember? Maybe you sprained your neck and can’t move it comfortably anymore ‘cause, you know, that also happens. You could be disassociating. You’re mentally ill, Ji, it’s not like it’s a reach on my part. Maybe you’ve been trying to tune back in, but you got lost in the c—”

Jisung drops his head back down. His gaze is piercing. “And that’s why you can’t tell when someone’s no longer in love with you.”

There’s this sound then, that makes his ears feel like they’re filling with liquid. It's like a cat being dragged down a chalkboard but multiple cats and multiple chalkboards. He can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that he wishes it would stop. No matter which part of the room he moves towards, it becomes louder, which means that the only thing he can do is stand there, eyes lock with Jisung’s.

His ears fill with something colder, thicker. It dances like the ocean and fuck, it’s like drowning at sea. Jisung’s mouth is moving, but the more it does, the less Minho hears.

The sound stops. Something crashes and it’s loud. Less like waves and more like the floor giving way beneath them. Minho feels like he’s falling, but he can’t move.

He just wants to know what crashed. What fell. What broke.

act iv.

Lee Felix speaks as if he carries the weight of a million other people’s traumas with him. Minho doesn’t know how he continues to carry it all, let alone where. Atop his shoulders seems the most thematic, but there’s always space there for Minho’s hands.

He finds that Felix is similar to the pack mule in minecraft Minho once lost, and then promptly cried about for four hours straight. There’s an unspoken, invisible desert there that Minho isn’t sure Felix is done traveling yet. Like the mule, he waits until everyone’s back is turned before choosing to wander off alone. Minho used to wonder if Felix enjoyed that, all of it — the burden and the journey. Minho’s not a very empathetic person, so he had assumed it could be an empathetic person thing: to bear the things you should not.

But, then Minho watched the brighter boy fall apart one day in his arms, crying about how he didn’t deserve to feel so empty all the fucking time and how he didn’t know how to stop letting people walk all over him in response to his never ending kindness. He was right. He didn’t and doesn’t deserve that. Minho had held him close, rubbing circles into his back and wishing he knew all the right sweet nothings to whisper in his ear. Reassurance is not his strong suit. Hell, emotional vulnerability is not either. Fortunately, Felix hadn’t seemed to mind the lips ghosted against the shell of his ear, air hot against his skin, spoken words suppositional, and yet with his hand pushed into the small of his back, Minho remembers briefly thinking he had finally felt where Felix carries it all.

Minho lost his mule by accident. He had wanted to chop down a cactus. The world lost Felix intentionally, leading him out across the hot sand as if they had a collaborative destination, and then when his back was finally turned, they ran. They call letting him wander kindness, as if it is in his nature to thrive in a place he does not belong.

Lee Felix is Minho’s best friend, and that best friend in question hates a motherfucker named Han Jisung. Though, maybe Minho’s projecting now. Hate’s a strong word, after all, and Felix has never been known to hate anybody. It’s not in his nature to hate other people. He should. Minho does the hating for him.

“I do not really understand him,” Felix confesses as they languish across opposite ends of the couch, legs tangled up together, “but he treats you like shit.”

“Not really,” Minho responds with a shrug, and he moves his arms behind his head. Something he tends to do when he’s uncomfortable. “He’s a good person.”

“A good p— Minho.”

“Felix.”

Felix squints from across the couch. He's disappointed, it’s obvious, but there’s something about a defined lour spread thin atop a kind face that makes Minho choke to stifle a laugh.

“What? Why are you laughing at me?” Felix whines, face contorting into more of a moue (a pout, stupid Lee Minho, stop thinking in extravagant words).

“Nothing, nothing.” Minho sighs then and waves him off with a hand, tilting his head back. He narrows his eyes at the popcorn ceiling above, the taste of butter on his tongue. “Seriously, I swear. The fact that you looked almost upset with me, it was just funny. That’s all.”

“Well, that is because I am upset with you, Min—”

Minho laughs. He laughs so hard tears spring to his eyes and he’s forced to double over into their entanglement of legs. He laughs so hard and cries so long he doesn’t even register Felix kicking him in the groin or leaning over to push at him repeatedly. The last push is so hard it’s like what knocks Minho to the ground isn’t Felix, but everything he stands for. Everything he bears.

The weight of a million other people’s traumas is heavy. It's really heavy.

Fuck.

The laughs that come from him start to subside as soon as his ass hits the wood floor; his eyes move to fixate on the wall across the room as they settle. Ah, he doesn’t feel anything. again.

Felix is still sitting on the couch, concern obvious as he perches on his knees to lean over. “Minho? I am so sorry. Seriously, you know I would never…”

Minho lifts a hand and waves him off again, gaze never shifting. “It's alright, ‘Lix. I'm not upset. It didn’t hurt.”

Felix looks like he wants to cry, eyes big. And doe-like. Maybe. Fuck did Minho know about deers? “You are crying.”

“Huh?” and his eyes break from the chipping grey of the wall to meet with Felix’s own. Perhaps it’s second nature to search him as if he holds all the answers to Minho’s questions. Stupid, he chastises almost instinctively, Just because Felix often feels like it, he’s not the mirror you think he is.

He lifts a hand and wipes at his cheek with the back of it. Felix was right; the tears are flowing, yeah, but he’s no longer laughing. “Oh,” he confirms.

“I am really sorry, Minho. like — no, really, really. Minho. Please do not cry. Come here.” He stretches out his arms, hands reaching for him as he opens and closes two fists.

Minho stares at his hands. There's a flute amid a chorus of harps, a cherub behind dark eyes coaxing him to take them despite his reservations about the vulnerable intimacy of physical touch. Damn. Who would deny the experience of touching a lost song? And so he does. They’re as light as the sounds they emit. Comparatively, Minho finds that his own feel so heavy in them.

They shift into a new position on the couch once their fingers intertwine, Felix moving to sit cross-legged and Minho outstretched with his head in the other’s lap. When Minho turns his face to press into the fabric of his shirt, Felix lifts it from the hem instead. Wet eyes meet warm skin.

Felix does so often, even when no one is crying.

“Why do you do that?” Minho had laughed once. “Is it not a little weird, dude?”

“Pressing against a shirt when you asked to be cared for by a human body is impersonal. I wash this shirt every week; it is an obstruction in the way of the warmth you really need. It is like I am not even here if you cry into an object. Unless I am… wrong?”

Minho hadn’t known what to say that time he had done it, just wordlessly pressed himself harder against his stomach. He wondered if this was how Felix soaked in the pain of everybody around him without them ever taking any of his in return.

Now, with closed eyes and tears flowing against hot skin, he wonders if he presses into him hard enough, he’ll once again finally feel where Felix has been keeping it all. Minho doesn’t. In the end, he decides he doesn’t want to know. It’s better that way.

How can Minho even be crying if he doesn’t feel anything? It doesn’t make sense. How can he be empty, but sad? Sad, but empty.

Within five minutes, the situation turns dry.

“Sorry,” Minho apologizes, nose pressed against the skin beneath Felix’s loose tee.

“Do not be.”

“It wasn't because of you.”

“I know.”

“I don't know why I was crying,” Minho rambles more.

“And that is okay.”

It's silent for a while.

“Felix,” Minho speaks up again. He wants to pull out from beneath his shirt and face him. Look him in the eyes for this one, and yet he curls in on himself instead.

“Yes?” Felix invites. Easily.

“I had a question.”

Felix laughs then, too, a lighthearted giggle that ghosts through his lips like wind against chime. “So much build up, Min... what is your question?”

“When you pushed me off the couch,” and Felix tenses like he’s nervous, so Minho quickly rephrases. “Okay, wait. I promise this isn’t really about you. Not the way it’s starting to sound, okay?”

“Okay.”

“When you pushed me off the couch, I feel like maybe I cried because I felt the weight of the sadness that you carry. Not your sadness, but the sadness of the others. Is that bad?”

There's a small exhale of relief Minho can feel against his tummy. “Bad? Why would that be bad? It is okay to feel for other people. I feel for other people. Being a good person does not mean you will always be rewarded for it, Minho.”

Minho sighs, nuzzles his nose near his waist, and then nods against him like he understands. He doesn’t. That’s not what Minho meant, but he’ll accept the answer, regardless. Not many people listen to him — the things he thinks nor the things he says. But, Felix does. Always. Sometimes it feels like Minho’s taking advantage of him for it, or like he’s always making their conversations about himself somehow. It feels wrong.

The room falls silent again.

“That is not what you meant, was it?”

Minho bites his lip. “No.”

“You can tell me. I am always here to listen.”

“It’s just.” Minho balls one of his hands into a fist and then releases it, moving his head out from beneath the younger’s shirt. He sits up and meets his eyes. They are so warm. Felix is so warm. The kind of warm Minho thinks should be dead. It’s customary to love him like this and then die.

“Go on.”

“It’s hard to explain. I didn't feel anything. Like, I felt the weight that you carry, but I didn't cry for the other people… or even you. I cried for myself.”

“Yourself?”

“How does the combined sadness of so many people make you feel so empty? It's emotion, right? Shouldn’t you just feel a lot more than you used to? Is that combined sadness what causes your insurmountable emptiness? Love? Empathy? Why do I feel that same profound emptiness without being an empathetic person? All of this sadness I carry is my own.”

Felix stares at him and Minho stares back. He looks contemplative, upset. “That is sad.”

The response seems dry, but it isn’t. Not really. Felix has done more for Minho than he will ever be able to repay him for. Somehow, Felix always claims Minho has done the same for him.

There is a conversational understanding between them that Minho doesn’t think he will find in another, the same way he doesn’t think he will find another with the emotional understanding that exists between him and Han Jisung.

Some questions don’t have answers, and Minho hadn’t really been expecting one. Sometimes he just wants to know that he is not crazy. It’s not much to ask for, and there’s no reason for Minho to shell out a bunch of his mother’s funds on some sort of therapist. God. The thought in itself makes him want to scream. Or laugh. Or cry. He's just one of the few mentally healthy people out there whose purpose is to endure quite a few unfortunate losses. Felix has never made him feel crazy before, and it’s the reason Minho plans to keep going to him for things like this, despite the guilt it is sometimes accompanied with.

The revelation had been sudden, yeah, but Minho had felt free enough to immediately turn to consolation in Felix for it. That's love to Minho. Love. Fuck, why is Felix alive?

“You should be dead,” Minho blurts out.

Felix smiles softly. It’s as if Minho doesn’t have to clarify anything for him to understand. “And yet, I am not.”

“You’re going to be number six.” Funeral number six. Number six. Six. Fuck. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. S—

“What are we counting?”

“You’re going to be number six,” Minho repeats.

“What are we counting?” Felix repeats back.

“Funerals. The five times people actually loved me and the fives times I consequently killed them. All of them. Why do you want to die?”

“I am not going to die.”

“You are. You will,” he rushes, heart hammering in his chest. “Only one person can be alive and love me at a time and it’s you. Shit, you’re the only person I love right now who actually loves me back, so you’re going to die. There’s never going to stop being funerals. I don't know when funeral six is, but it’s you. It’s—“

With his whole chest, Felix cuts him off, “I will not be.”

Minho stops. Stops talking, stops moving. Stops everything. He stares hard at Felix. Squints, even. Felix is dead serious, it’s etched into his face. Minho shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, Felix is wise. The ways in which he always knew things would happen almost seemed psychic. Every. Single. Time. Intuition and wisdom meet at the base of Felix’s tongue when he speaks, drip from his words and leak into a puddle of confidence that freezes midair. Minho can’t touch what he can’t see, but he knows it’s there, hanging between them. He felt it. It makes him want to believe him.

But, who will die if not Felix? It can only be Felix. Felix loves him, and Minho loves him back. Stories get published and you read them for their themes. Those themes never change. Why would they now?

“I will not be,” Felix repeats. “Number six, I meant. There may be funerals, but they will not be mine.”

Minho can’t look away, but he can’t see either. Everything blurs. Maybe Felix is right. If he calls his mom right now, perhaps she’ll tell him that somewhere in her bible it says a person only has to experience five trials by fire before they can be considered Abel and not Cain. Victim and not killer. Felix is always right. Yeah. Always. The room feels calm, but the look on Felix’s face seems sad.

Minho doesn’t ask why.

“... so, a good person, huh?” Felix asks, face contorted into something closest to agony.

Minho opts to smirk to hold in a laugh. No need for any more random waterworks, especially when they’re finally moving on again. “Come on, he’s not that bad.”

“That bad? Is this not breakup number nine—“

“Ten.”

Felix raises an eyebrow.

“...” Embarrassing. “Look.”

“I have been looking at you for the past hour.”

“That is not what I meant,” Minho pouts. “And do you have any room to judge me? Let’s not forget how we met.”

“...”

Yeah, that's right. Think about it.

“I do not recall suddenly.”

“Felix.”

“Minho.”

Minho grins. “So now you don’t want to talk about the fact that before you were best friends with me, you were best friends with him? The Han Jisung?”

“This is so embarrassing.”

A snort leaves through his nostrils, and he pushes the air in front of his outstretched hand to the side like it weighs something. “Figures. You guys seemed inseparable. And you can’t completely hate the guy. He's how you and I met. Kind of. It feels like I met you both at the same time.”

“Well, maybe if you had not ignored my advances at friendship the month prior, we would not be having this conversation.”

“Look.”

“Looking.”

Minho groans, but he’s smiling wide. “Come on. Give me a break, dude. We just got paired up in chem for the first time and you asked me — no seriously, and listen close. You asked me if I liked black cats.”

“It was friendship!” Felix exclaims, lurching towards him on the couch to try and grab at him. Minho sits back just out of his reach.

“Was it, my beloved Felix? Was it? Who fuckin’ asks that? Let's be real, you could've asked for my name. My age. How this year was going so far for me. But, no. Out of all things, you chose to give me a lecture on lady luck.”

Felix grows red, starts to bury his face in his hands the longer Minho stares. “I just think that it is unfair black cats get such an unnecessary rep!”

Minho’s eyes flicker down to Felix’s shirt, then back up to the top of his hair. There's no mirror around (and with how terrible he is at smiling, he sure needs one), but he hopes his smile looks as warm as it feels. “You’re precious, Felix.”

Felix peeks out from behind his hands.

“Buttttt, that still wasn’t screaming friendship to me, an innocent sophomore.”

Felix groans and slams his face back into them.

There’s the threat of an amicable silence again, preparing to overtake the room like an empty glass. Minho knows what he wants to say, but the idea of receiving an answer he knows will refrain from pulling any punches feels like it has the potential to be head numbing.

“Felix,” he starts anyways, eyes shifting to the left when Felix lifts his head to attempt to meet them. “Do you regret it?”

“Regret what?”

“Meeting Jisung?”

Felix replies easily, “Sometimes. Why?”

“Do you regret introducing me to him?”

Felix replies easiest, “Always.”

Minho sighs, turns so that he can fall back into the worn out cushions, let them try to envelope him and swallow him whole. “Can I ask you a hard question?”

“There is harder?”

Minho laughs soft and sweet, mostly through his nose, and then it falls short at the gravity behind what he wants to say.

“Yeah. Chan. Do you regret that— I mean, him. You know, loving him.”

Felix moves his hands into his lap, but he doesn’t fiddle with them. The rise and fall of his chest slows to something imperceptible.

Minho’s fingers curl inwards, nails breaking the skin of his right palm. He shouldn’t have been so callous. No, he shouldn’t have spoken at all.

“Minho.” Saccharine voice, gentle hands. There’s a hand on top of his own, pulling his fingers from his palm with such care, as if loosening a knot. “It is alright to ask.”

“But, I shouldn't have.” His gaze shoots back towards Felix like a bullet attempting to pierce. It's only upon mutual eye contact that he realizes he must’ve grazed.

“Why not? I am not leaving you over something so silly. Is that what you think, Minho? You can tell me or ask me anything. You know that. You are the only person in the world I will share my everything with.”

Minho’s heart pounds. He is so tired of experiencing running guised as catatonia.

“Chan was… no, Chan is. Chan is my soulmate. I have just come to terms with the fact that I am not his.”

Minho knows it’s been a few days and all, but he can’t understand why Felix hasn’t broken the way all glass does. He had expected to touch him and experience a sharp intrusion through the center of his palm and all five of his fingers, but it is just a shoulder. Just a waist. Just a hand. Just a face. He narrows his eyes and searches his best friend thoroughly. It is easy to skip pages when the book is brand new.

“You,” is all he can manage.

“Me?”

“Ha… I guess it’s true. The stronger a person is, the more weight they can carry.”

Felix opens his mouth and then closes it. Nothing comes out.

“You’re the strongest person I know, Felix. I know you’re sad because you’ve told me so. Woken my stupid self up at four in the morning to sob over how unfair it was that Chan didn’t love you anymore, when he had so long to decide that he wasn’t. That's why I came over today, remember? Now? To stay the night? Because you don’t want to be alone, and I don't blame you. I won’t let you make stupid mistakes, you’re not alone. You’re sad, but you let me talk about Chan. Your heart probably breaks just a little bit more every time I say his name, but you respond just as easily as you would have yesterday, or four days ago, or three months before that. How do you do it?”

Felix exhales and it’s heavy. “I love you.” That's something that doesn’t come easy to him in the same ways it doesn’t come easy to Minho. “But, it is because I do not regret meeting him or loving him, despite it all.”

“Why not? You regret me meeting Jisung.”

“But you do not regret meeting Jisung.”

Minho grimaces. “Right.”

“There is something very blinding about love that I do not yet understand. When Jeongin and I broke up, I thought that I would never be more broken than that. That I would never love like that. He was never around for me and it took me two years to get over. Chan… I practically lived with Chan. This will take much longer, but I do not want to erase the memories that I have made with him. I do not want the pain, but I do want the moments. I am still hoping this is not real.”

“Well, at least I know your stance on the assignment in Mrs. K’s class.” A dramatic sigh as he leans further into the couch, tipping his head up towards the ceiling. “I feel worlds away from you right now, Felix. Drowning, suffocating. My own best friend? Choosing the optimistic side of the— hey!” He’s cut off by a thwack to his leg.

Felix grins when Minho lifts his head to look at him again, so at least there’s that. Minho smiles in return.

“So, you do not agree with Tennyson?”

“Mister Lord Alfred Tennyson? The Lord Alfred Tennyson? Already such a pretentious name, did you really expect me, broke Lee Minho, to side with someone that sounds like they believe in capitalism?”

“It is Alfred Lord Tennyson,” Felix corrects with the remnants of a smile that feels permanent, “actually.”

Minho scoffs in return. “Well, excuse me. My bad. Alfred Lord Tennyson. Doesn’t make a lick of difference, though. The hell kind of a guy says with his whole chest ‘Oh, ‘tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all,’ be honest.”

“So you would rather have never met me… than meet me to lose me?”

“Yeah,” Minho’s steadfast, “so don’t get lost.”

“Never.”

act v.

“Just disgusting.” The brunet boy shakes his head, the look on his face even more transparent than the words rolling off the tongue. “Look at the guy— wait, no. Minho, close your eyes! I say a lot of shit, we don’t listen to me and you know that.”

Hands come shooting out like a spring from Minho’s side, coiling down, around, and over his eyes. He can still see through the large gaps between clumsily placed fingers, so he doesn’t really get what the point of doing that was. He's only annoyed now.

“Gross, Hyunjin. Fuck off, seriously, you’re sweating.” and he reaches up, prying the sweaty palms off him. Minho even goes so far as pushing hard at them, hoping to send them so hard into his chest he goes flying backwards.

Not like Hyunjin hasn’t fallen hard on his ass in the middle of the school hallways before. In fact, he’d fallen backwards off the cafeteria bench once. It drew a lot of attention to say the least.

Hyunjin’s just odd. An oddball. Unique. He falls and fails often; he laughs about it in turn. He laughs so loud and so funny, it never fails to cause a cacophony of laughter from others that fills a room like a choir.

Minho doesn’t know his heart the way he knows Felix’s. He has most certainly never gone out of his way to make better friends with him and get to know it either. Becoming friends with Hwang Hyunjin was an accident. A fortunate one, he supposes (a fickle opinion, read: on days like today, Minho can’t help but wonder if it has been misfortune the entire time).

“Have you not any friends?” Hyunjin had asked him, plopping down beside him in the sixth grade lunch room. He unceremoniously dumped his tray of food down on the table, blocking Minho’s view.

“Have you not any manners?” he bit back, seething as he reached forwards to knock the tray across the table to the left, closer to where it should have been placed down.

It had been an innocent question, one of placated curiosity. The kind that gets asked while trying to read the room and control it, only to read it wrong and lose it. The only issue back then with the interaction was that Hyunjin hadn’t read it wrong at all. Minho was just (and is) unpacifiable. A raring double-edged sword, one end sunk deep into his chest, and other end gripped tight in his own shaking hand.

Luckily (debatable), a young Hyunjin grinned wild, teeth and all. “I like you. Let’s be friends for a long time.”

Thus, they were.

But, Minho wishes they weren't. Especially, in moments like these. He's not good at trying to handle emotions head-on to begin with, and so to have someone else try and throw a cloak over his eyes in a fit of giggles at the same time begets anger.

Minho is often foolish, using a few jests to hide from oncoming vulnerability, and yet he can’t stand when someone else tries to play that role for him.

There was Jisung, across the aisle and down the hall, shoulder dug into a locker he doesn’t own, eyes laser-focused on some obnoxious (presumably) twink Minho knows he met as soon as they weren’t together anymore.

“Stop looking!” Hyunjin cries out louder, hands suddenly reappearing in front of Minho’s face. Rather than touching him — as Hyunjin is surprisingly always good with personal space requests — the palms go flapping wildly up and down, attempting to obscure his vision.

“Tch,” Minho breathes, reaching out to swat at him. Bat the hands away from him with the back of his own. He digs his other hand low into the pocket of his jeans. “I can look all I want. It’s my ex, is it not?”

“Well, yeah, but—“

“But?” Minho cuts in, finally turning around to look the other in the eyes.

Hyunjin frowns, sporting a pout that doesn’t actually reach his cheshire-laced eyes. “I'm just trying to look out for you for once.” And then after the short pause he takes to roll his eyes, “Whatever, can’t say I didn’t try. Back to regularly scheduled programming, then? Want the deets?”

He’s smiling again as wide and wild as when they were only around thirteen. Hyunjin loves to encourage the things he should not. Minho’s not even surprised he got assigned lead writer for the school paper, he just thinks the decision was unwise.

Felix knows everything because he is wise and because people feel comfortable enough to come to him.

In stark contrast, Hyunjin knows everything because he is scum. He weasels his way into the lives of people who know things about other people, and then he goes to those other people to learn the things about the people from before.

It sounds twisted, but Minho doesn’t care how Hyunjin comes to know the things that he does. It’s none of his business. Minho only wants to gain.

Minho finally scoffs, but he feels somewhat fond given the routine the pair have, if that’s the right word. He's never been the greatest at denotation, but he knows he enjoys the fact that there are things he can still trust to remain. To stay. To not abandon him when he feels that is all he has ever been. Abandoned.

“‘Course I want the details, ‘Jin.”

“Alright! Thatta boy!” Instant hands on Minho’s waist, turning him back around to face the situation. “Pay attention, ‘cause I don't wanna repeat myself later.”

Minho hums to show he’s listening as fingers disappear from his clothed skin, lanky arms getting thrown over his shoulders from behind instead. A hand comes up to grip Minho hard beneath the chin, tilting his face towards the stranger down the hall.

“That’s Jisung Han.”

Minho narrows his eyes, reaching up to smack him hard in the wrist. “Idiot.”

The giggle from behind him comes out hard, breath fanning over the back of his neck. “Oh, fine! Fine! Was just messing with you, don’t think I've earned the right?”

Minho almost doesn’t respond. “Your hands are soft. They lack callousness. You know too much for someone that’s never actually worked a day in his life for any of it. That answer your question? Come on, ‘Jinnie.”

“Sheesh, remind me to catch you on a good day—”

“This is a good day.”

“This is a good day,” Hyunjin mocks, sifting through an entire octave before the sentence is even finished. “Hmph. Remind me not to catch you on a worse day then. Forgot you’re like this sometimes.”

Minho rolls his eyes, waits for more.

“Alright, alright. Anyway, that’s Seungmin Kim. Super cute, might I add— uh, uh. Don’t speak. Let me finish. So, right, yeah. That's Seungmin. I heard he’s pretty good when it comes to the English clubs and classes, but proper shit when it’s anything else. Never seen him before, though, I'll be honest.”

“Transfer?” Minho asks, eyes practically glued to seungmin’s backside. For some reason, despite the distance, he can tell he’s pretty. Dark curls, delicate mannerisms. It's as relieving as it is sickening.

Relieving in the way some things don’t change. There's a pattern hidden somewhere amid all of the people Jisung chooses to get with when he breaks up with him, even if Minho can’t quite pinpoint what that pattern is yet.

Relieving in the way Minho doesn’t see Seungmin lasting a full week before Jisung is having a typical “change of heart” and ringing his phone or grabbing his wrist when they narrowly bump into each other in the halls.

Nothing changes, not really, and Minho’s comfortable with that. Seriously. There’s nothing more comfortable than a predictable routine. Jisung’s just going through something again.

Minho wishes he could feel bad for Seungmin, though. Wants to scream at him and tell him to watch out. Minho is nothing more than the ghost of a fly, desperately trying to warn the others of the teeth the plant they’re trying to land on bears. In the end, despite the struggle, he must be the honeysuckle smell that lingers on Jisung, disguising a venus fly trap as something said to be everlasting.

Seungmin is going to get his heart broken, and Minho’s going to let him.

Delicate people aren’t fit to take care of Han Jisung, anyways. Minho’s not sure how long it would take someone like Seungmin to learn how to stop crying over the loss of someone who hasn’t yet died.

Watching him turn around to hide his laugh from the insatiable blond against the locker now, own eyes raking down his face and then his body — Seungmin would never survive. He looks like he sleeps well. Eats well, too. Those kinds of people don’t mix well with instability. Minho thinks Seungmin needs to deal with a few permanent losses before he can learn to spend years dealing with the dog of a boy who takes forever to finish one game of fetch.

“Nah, not a transfer,” Hyunjin replies swiftly, as if to hide the fact that he had gotten caught up in the staring, too. “He's been going to school with us since middle school. I guess he’s just not that noticeable.”

“Well, he is now.”

Sickening in the way he smiles like it’s his first life, eyes matching the upturns and downturns of his mouth. Minho thinks he’s beautiful. Maybe this time he should have started dating someone like Kim Seungmin first.

Sickening in the way Jisung was picking another person to be with again. Flirt with. Destroy. Minho isn’t even sure which fact bothers him most: the fact that Jisung had carelessly ruined so many lives, the fact that Jisung had carelessly ruined more lives than just Minho’s, or the fact that he’s not sure Jisung even realizes he’s ruined anyone at all.

Minho cocks his head to the side. Surely being ruined without realizing you were being ruined is worse than destroying without realizing you were destroying, right? He turns his attention back towards Hyunjin, grabbing his hands and pulling them off of him.

“Well, anyways, thanks for the crash course. It did fuck all, but it was entertaining. You going to pick up the pieces when Jisung breaks his heart?”

Upturn at the corner of his lips. Hyunjin smirks, eyes searching his face, and then laughs. Following, there’s a noise when he presses his tongue to the back of his two front teeth.

“Confident Minho. Mr. Know-it-all Lee Know. Cocky, are we?” There's a quick jab to Minho’s shoulder, but he doesn’t feel it. Should he have?

“Mm,” Minho hums, glancing back over his shoulder at the space down the hall that used to hold two familiar bodies. One he used to know and one he was getting to.

“You’re literally crazy, man. Dunno how you keep going back to him. Couldn’t be me.”

Loving Han Jisung is easy.

“And it’s not.”

“Sheesh.”

“You gotta stop saying that,” Minho groans, tipping his head back and stuffing both hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Nahh, you love me how I am.”

He does.

act vi.

A few weeks into the sequel of “worst months of my life,” there’s a buzz that sounds from Minho’s nightstand, phone vibrating violently against the brittle wood. Termite infestation. Old, but nothing he can do about it now, and he doesn’t have the money (read: bravery to ask his mother) to fix it.

He lays with his back flat against the bed, back of his head buried in the double pillows. The noise gives him enough of a jab to the temple for him to at least give it the time of day, lolling his head to the side to squint in the direction of the dimly lit screen. 11:00 pm. Yeah, that’s all he wanted to know. He shifts back into the position he had been in.

Now and here, lazily laid out in the dead center of entrapping darkness, Minho feels at ease. It's like being encased in it, the 2500K lighting from the hallway that feeds itself through and under the cracks of his bedroom door like a tease. A hole at the top of a box. He can’t leave through it, but he can breathe. And if he tries hard enough, he could probably see.

He lifts an arm, outstretches it before his eyes. “Jungkook gets it, I guess,” he verbalizes, the youtube 8D version of some song the artist wrote for a Japanese film humming low in his ears.

Slowly and in succession, he closes his fingers into his palm. Reopens them only to repeat the process. This doesn’t feel like his hand, let alone something outside of a simulation. Is this even his body? He doesn't feel like turning on the lights to find out the answer to that.

Words looping around his head like song — it’s nice to finally feel in control of that. Laying there in the dark, there was, for a brief moment, a point in which Minho no longer had to choose. It had slipped through his fingers with a chilling peace that only lasted a millisecond before it was gone again, phone having buzzed a second time from the nightstand.

He should have extended his arm further, reached out and closed his fingers around the feeling with a tighter grasp.

Minho sighs, drops his arm and lets it thud against his stomach. He then pushes himself up into a cross-legged sitting position, hand moving upwards to delicately pull an airpod from his ear.

Back to making choices. Back to making the adult choices he has been making since adolescence merely because he has never been allowed the right to a childhood. Contracts are so binding, and he finds that his tightens like a noose with every decision made. Maybe children should stop being signed as actors.

He grabs at his phone, dropping the left airpod on the nightstand as he does. Law of equivalent exchange or whatever, and that thought makes him snicker to himself.

from: felix

please. minho sos!

online

sorry i am double messaging

i wish he would stop messaging

jisung will not stop messaging

and he is having an episode again

And what is Minho supposed to do about that?

to: felix

is he

should i send him a funny meme

yk, the “it’s time to stop” one

lmao

Stupid. The idea is stupid. Leave it to Minho to come up with a plan almost instantaneously, yet have it come adorned with a label opposite of foolproof. There's a frenzied succession of texts that appear at the top of his phone screen as he exits out of the ones with Felix, but his brain processes none of it, too busy helping him search for his abandoned texts with Jisung.

This is the first time he and Jisung had ever broken up and stopped speaking completely. It’s only weird because normally, they remained close-knit best friends. Jisung would even add Minho into group chats with his new flings — Minho always befriended them.

Originally, their friendship had been out of desperation. Minho figured they were best friends, both before and while they were lovers; there wasn’t a reason they couldn’t continue being so thereafter. Honestly, he found that Jisung sometimes became kinder to him when they were on hiatuses from their relationship. It’s not that he was never kind, but towards the end of it, right before Jisung would create a mantra out of the “let’s take a break” line that always worked so well, Jisung was not kind. It often felt like an eternal pessimism. A raging flame of hatred. Becoming friends rather than leaving Jisung all alone — that, that always felt like something extinguishing.

Their relationship goes up in smoke, not unbridled flames.

Now, their friendship is out of confidence. Minho doesn’t believe anyone could tie Jisung down because no one aside from him ever successfully has. He befriends flings because they’re flings. The only person tied to Jisung that Minho will ever need to know permanently blinks back at him in the bathroom mirror every morning, and then consequently, every night.

“Toxic Minho, Mr. Poison Ivy Lee Know,” Hyunjin would chide in his ear if he were ever made aware of what Minho’s intentions had become. What they are.

It's not often Minho feels much, but regardless, he doesn’t plan to tell anyone about the alabaster impurities that stirred so deep and so long in his gut they were all but churned into raven molasses. Minho doesn’t want to feel like a bad person. Doesn’t want to look it. As much as he loves Han Jisung, his home-grown sickness is more of an idolization. Jisung isn’t entirely good, but he could be worse, and Minho thinks he’s strong for holding onto the parts of him that don’t want to be that worse. As much as he loves Han Jisung, he wants nothing more than to never be compared to him.

Loving Han Jisung is easy, but being him must be hard.

Opening their conversation, Minho realizes that the last time they had ever texted had been an entire month ago. He wants to laugh, but the part of him that’s in control of his motor functions must not want the same things because he doesn’t end up laughing. Though, he releases an airy exhale through his nose in its stead.

“We were talking about soulmates?” His voice feels like a stray echo as it bounces off the four walls. “Huh.”

His thumb ghosts across the phone screen. A part of him wishes he could wipe the texts away like dirt, and yet he’s never deleted them. Doesn’t plan to either.

He doesn’t understand how you can go from discussing soulmates with your soulmate to having a new one the very next day. It’s kind of like preparing the victim for the soulmate to come after, Minho supposes. The one they want more. The one they were meant to find before they met you. You, who was obscuring the view. Similarly (and because of this), he doesn’t understand how Chan woke up one day and no longer loved Felix either.

There's a lot of things Minho doesn’t understand when it comes to love. Once again, he’s not that good at loving.

to: jisung

[ view attachment ]

Minho presses send fast in a stupor, not wanting to back out on something he knows is funny. He hates making a joke and then not following through with it. Having or not having emotions, it doesn’t matter. Minho’s going to die one day the funniest motherfucker alive.

Well, maybe today. Maybe now. Maybe right now.

The read receipt comes through almost instantaneously. Completely and totally not in relation, Minho’s heart starts pounding in his ears at the anticipated attention. I suppose you meant it when you said he was online now, Minho thinks.

He squeezes his eyes shut as soon as the typing bubbles stop. As confident as he is, he still finds it nerve-racking to speak to Jisung like this. Jisung is scary. He shouldn’t be. He's never physically hurt Minho or anything. It must be because Minho’s still in love.

No. Stop. Pause. That's not right. Just yesterday, Minho was telling Felix he wasn’t in love with Jisung anymore. Swearing on it, that there was not even a twinge of fondness left. There was nothing, and yet there is everything when he opens his eyes.

Just hearing from him, hatred and all, it’s — god fucking damn it.

from: jisung

??

to: jisung

stop acting like a dick, han

thats the point of the meme

just stop

jisung is typing

to: jisung

are you okay

is something wrong

The typing bubbles disappear. No, no, no, no, no. Fuck. Minho. Stupid Minho. Why'd you go and ask that, and suddenly his thoughts are advocating for self-violence.

He was supposed to be protecting and defending his best friend.

Remember Felix, toxic Minho? Mr. Poison Ivy Lee Know?

It feels like this always happens. Why do pulls always end up feeling so much stronger than pushes?

from: jisung

call me

Oh. Oh. The phone nearly slips from his hands as he scrambles upwards ramrod straight, fingers clammy with sweat. I should ignore it, he thinks as he swipes out of their texts and then out of the messaging app completely. I should ignore him now. Like, seriously this time, he thinks again, finger hovering over the contacts app. I should go delete his contact though, he’s convincing as he presses down, scrolling until he reaches the other’s name. He’s probably going to yell at me, so I should check that out at least, you know? Laugh about it with Felix later, and suddenly the line is ringing.

He’s frozen, staring down at the light he holds in his hands as it struggles to keep up in the darkness. The line picks up before the phone is even to his ear (read: he had no plans to lift it at all), but when the call time shifts from 00:00:00 to 00:00:04, he panics.

He springs to action so hard the phone almost flies past his ear to a touchdown goal somewhere unbeknown to him. He grips it a little tighter.

“Hello?” He hates that he sounds timid.

It’s not his fault, Minho wants to clarify if his demons are listening in. He just doesn’t know what to expect. Cats. Surprises. Minho hates both. Well, Minho hates a lot of things, but those things he hates the most.

“You wanted to say somethin’?”

Minho grips it even tighter, lips curling into a grimace. He didn't. He's not even the one who had asked to call.

“Seriously? You asked to call—”

“I miss you,” Jisung cuts in like he hadn’t been on a completely different wavelength just moments before. He slurs over his words, but he’s not drunk. Not high.

Oh. Oh.

“I miss you, too.” It escapes before Minho can stop it.

When the line is silent for a few extra seconds too long, he involuntarily holds his breath.

“I was being stupid again, Minho. I told you we didn’t work and that I wasn’t in love with you. I tried to be in love with other people, but it isn’t the same. And when you text me or call me, I fucking hate you, but I want you. I’m obsessed with you. Havin’ kids and shit, that don’t matter to me. I think it’s you. It’s always been you. I love you and I miss you. I always miss you.”

“Okay,” Minho breathes out.

“I don’t know what that means for us,” a small chuckle interrupts him, “but fuck, I never do.”

“I don't either.”

The room looks darker when he glances up from his previous fixated point on the wall. Perhaps his parents had gone to bed; the light that used to filter in from between the cracks of the door had been suffocated by shadows and swallowed in darkness.

It's weird. He had assumed that during moments like these, the world would look just a little bit brighter. But then again, he always forgets the world has never offered him anything for free, nor will it ever. Minho reaches over towards his nightstand and flips on the lamp. There we go, he thinks. Always the self-starter, albeit not of his own volition.

“You wanna get back together?” Jisung asks. His whisper flits through the receiver and dances around Minho’s head like yellow birds. Like a familiar looping song.

Minho wonders why, despite their relationship’s notoriety, it always feels like loving each other has to be a secret. The fights were always loud, the endearments always sleepy. Sleepy in the way they were always hazy, sleepy in the way they were always hushed. He wonders if Jisung would repeat himself, yelling the question if he prompted him to.

“Yes,” Minho whispers back. Because maybe it’s his fault, too. His fault they’re never loud. His fault their love is never violent.

“We should probably wait, though. Talk comfortably as friends for a while. It’s been too long to jump into something we aren’t entirely sure about.”

It’s only been a month, and then, We aren’t or just you?

Minho smiles regardless of the situation. It takes a minimum of eighteen days to fall into a habit. Unfortunately, he’s known Jisung for much longer. It’s about time something stuck around, he decides, despite such a habit only having become practiced for the public eye.

“I understand. I agree,” he replies easily.

Minho doesn’t understand; moreover, he doesn’t agree.

act vii.

Hot air fans over the back of his neck like the warmth of domestication. There’s a trail of adornments down his nape in the familiar shape of kisses. Familiar because they’re kisses, foreign because they don’t come from heart-shaped lips.

“This is okay, right?”

Familiar voice, foreign words. Familiar words, a foreign voice.

“We’re friends,” Minho says casually, teeth gnawing on the metaphorical knife in his gut, twisting it with his tongue, and spitting it out as copper-tainted words. “Can’t be wrong if we’re friends.”

The breathing stops. The hands that were gripping Minho’s waist from behind slowly lose their place. Fingers fail to find their footing, and then those hands drag down his sides so low they eventually completely fall from him.

It's silent. Minho doesn’t want to repeat himself, doesn’t want to turn around. The last thing he wanted to do was ruin the symbolism behind someone’s bedroom. He knows what it’s like to bring things into your safe space, and then consequently have them die there. Where it was safe. Where nothing was supposed to go wrong.

“What?” The words finally come out hoarse.

Minho wants to apologize, but he doesn’t know how. He never knows how. He only has a few close friends, obviously he’d never want to hurt them, and yet somehow he always does. Here he is, jaw clenched tight like something predatory. The apology won’t come out because he’s not sorry. He should be. He wants to be.

He thinks this kind of implosion is justified. Has to be. Every time someone Minho loved died, he always learned about it in his own bedroom. His own safe place. Sometimes it was even the place he first infected them and damned them for the rest of their short-lived lives. His room is suffocating and his room is burning. Whenever Minho stands there now, he sees the blazing that lines the wooden furniture.

“You need to sleep in your room again. There's nothing wrong with it. Get off the couch,” his mother had scolded him.

“Get off the floor and vacuum. Mop, while you’re at it. Constantly wearing your shoes in your room and not being dutiful with the upkeep — Lee Minho, that’s just unsanitary. Go sit in your bed, at least,” she chastised him another time.

Could no one else see the smoke that clouded the room starting five inches off the wood of the floor? Laying low there, sometimes it felt like it was the only place in the room he could breathe. Breathe, but he still burned. He always burns whenever he touches the wood of his room, flames licking the tips of his fingers.

“We are friends, Hyunjin. You know that,” Minho continues, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

You’re not angry with him. You’re being an ass, actually. Don’t get an attitude.

He wonders if Hyunjin’s room will start burning, too, after he leaves today. Soon, probably, from the looks of it.

Maybe a rat like Hwang Hyunjin will come to find comfort in the fact that if he places his palms flat against the bedroom floor long enough, eventually it’ll burn off the tips of his fingers and erase who he is. To be untraceable and unidentifiable seems like something he’d be interested in. Maybe Minho’s just doing him a favor, showing him how it feels like this.

He’ll leave you for this, his thoughts are screaming.

The other half of his brain is screaming back, Maybe he should.

“I— well, yeah, I suppose,” Hyunjin replies fast, and for once, he almost seems serious about something. “You know, I just thought…”

“Thought what?” Minho bites in with ferocity.

He feels like his eyes are flaring a different shade. It’s not possible, of course, but the lens he looks through feels like it’s darkened. No, it feels like it’s been glossed over in a steam. Smoke? Smoke.

He spins around on his heel to face the taller boy, eyes raking his features. Taking him in. Swallowing that of which is suffocating.

Objectively, Hyunjin is beautiful. Non-objectively, he is, too.

That always ends up being the issue with Minho. It’s still the issue, clearly. Minho understands everything and nothing at the same time. For God’s sake, he likes Hyunjin. He’s pretty sure he’s had a crush on him for at least a month or so. It comes and goes.

He holds his hand when Minho asks for it, plays with his hair during lunch whenever he feels like taking a nap, stretched out on the bench or the ground with his head in his lap. He’s known Hyunjin longer than anyone he’s friends with, and yet the destruction he carries with him — no, the damage he inflicts on those he loves — never gets harder. If anything, it only gets easier.

He calls Hyunjin a good-for-nothing rat, yeah, but it’s out of love. Hyunjin’s prideful when it comes to his more negatively charged traits and qualities. It’s not like it’s slander. If Minho started complimenting him now, Hyunjin might actually get a bit concerned. Offended even, probably.

“I just thought you might like me, too. I've had a crush on you for a long time. It's cool if you just wanna be friends, though. You have to tell me, though, Mr. Know-it-all Lee Know,” Hyunjin responds like he doesn’t care, but Minho’s been there. Done that. He knows he cares. “You might know everything, but not me. There's a lot I don't know. If there’s even the teeniest chance you could see yourself liking me, to—”

“There’s not.” It comes out so fast Minho needs a moment to register that the words came from him. Steadfast, cold. Liar.

“Okay,” Hyunjin almost chokes over the word, but he continues like he wasn’t interrupted, “but if you think you could anyway. If there was even the smallest sliver. You know I'd give you the world, right? I'll give it to you anyways, even if you’re not mine. Just as I have been.”

“I know,” Minho intones. He lacks inflection. It’s empty. He's empty.

It feels so familiar, has Minho done this before?

“You know?”

Minho wants to stop it, but the laugh rips itself from the back of his throat before he can stop it. Loud, boisterous. Venomous. “Know? Of course I know, Hyunjin. You’re obsessed with me, have been since day one. You think I didn't see right through that? I'm sick of your text messages asking me if I got home okay, I'm sick of you bothering me about Jisung. You’re obsessed with me and I'm just not into you. Never have been, never will be.”

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

He liked Hyunjin. He likes Hyunjin. But, this emotional vulnerability cannot be split up into three bodies. He can’t share his heart with another person, not when people always fail to return it after it’s served its use.

“You don’t mean that,” Hyunjin snaps back suddenly, something Minho wishes he was able to do whenever he had arguments with Jisung.

Jisung?

Why was he thinking about Jisung?

Minho has so many questions, but he knows Hyunjin will provide answers regardless of what he chooses or doesn’t choose to ask. He's good about things like that.

Minho answers flat, “Why not?”

“I think you’re just upset and going through a lot. Jisung dumped you. Again. Despite me thinking you deserve better and by that, yes I mean me, I think you’re still into Jisung. You’re still into Jisung, but it’s fucking embarrassing to you. You think I'll leave you because you don’t like me back and it’s making you say things you don’t mean.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“It's fine that you don’t like me back, Minho, seriously. If I thought you did, I woulda told you before. Saying it, telling you. This was for me. I still want to be your friend.”

“I don't want to be yours.”

“Alright, whatever. Say what you want. I'm not going to believe it. You’re not the only one who wants to graduate this year and take a psychology course or two, Minho. Just ‘cause I'm not you doesn’t mean I don’t understand wanting to be abandoned as a villain rather than a hero.”

Minho stares hard and Hyunjin stares back harder. His eyes gaze back like flint; Minho wonders if his own mirror the steel.

Hyunjin looks composed, sock-clad feet planted firmly in the floor. Minho can tell he isn’t, not inside where the implosion is taking place right beneath their noses.

Honestly, knowing Hyunjin well wouldn’t have even mattered. Minho doesn’t believe that knowing someone well will always mean you can tell what they’re hiding. People choose what they want others to see. This is what Hyunjin has chosen: aggressive determination, vigorous passion, unwavering firmness.

Minho nearly startles at the lone ‘tsk’ that leaves his own lips. Squinting at the floor beneath them, watching metaphorical cement dry beneath heavy feet — basically, he couldn’t help it. He can't help a lot of things. “Are you sinking, Hyunjin?”

“What are you going on about now, Minho?”

“Sinking. Are you sinking? I thought you’d burn, too, but it appears your faux hardness— your vulnerability, it’s going to swallow you before the smoke even has the chance to.”

Hyunjin’s hands clench at his sides.

Minho leans forwards, opens his mouth, then closes it. Leans back. Don’t say it. Nothing more. He knows he’s being out of character and he knows that words are violent. It's almost pathetic that he can’t seem to address love properly anymore. Once again, he just can’t seem to help it.

“It’s not me.” It’s someone else. Someone else is controlling me. I'm just watching. I'm trapped somewhere within me. “It's just you. It’s always been you, Hyunjin.”

“I know you don’t mean that, but get out.”

A corner of Minho’s mouth twitches, but he takes a step back. He lifts a hand and waves it dismissively out into the air as he turns his back to him, front towards the door. “Yeah, yeah. About time you said it.”

“I'm not dropping you, Minho,” Hyunjin calls out to him when a foot connects with the hallway. He sounds genuine. No one is genuine, though. “Sort yourself out before it plagues you. Then let’s talk again like before. Nothing has to change.”

“Doesn’t it?” he verbalizes, pausing in the doorway.

“No. You’re one of my best friends, are you stupid? Stop letting brats educate you on this sorta thing. When you come back to your senses, you can help me figure out how I'm gonna pursue this pretty boy Seungmin situation. Heard he got dumped. Ahh, to swoop in and be his prince charming, make him dependent on me before he realizes what I’m doing, or to wait until he’s emotionally available…”

Minho’s fingers curl inwards at his sides. He just rejected Hyunjin — in the worst way possible to boot — it shouldn’t bother him, hearing him talk about somebody else, but it does. Hyunjin’s going to love someone more than him soon? Even though Hyunjin isn’t his priority either?

The room feels hot. The house feels hot. He needs to leave and so he does.

He keeps his gaze cast downwards as he passes Hyunjin’s mother in the kitchen area near the front door, mumbles something intentionally unintelligible in response to her warm “Going so soon, sweetie? Thought Hyunjin said something about you staying for dinner.” It was too warm and the house was already so fucking hot.

Minho’s tearing his jacket off as soon as his sneakers hit the grass, tossing it to the ground and just about collapsing where he stands. His knees hit the ground before the jacket does.

“God fucking damn it,” he nearly roars, biting back on the volume when he reaches the last word. Hanging his head, he can’t breathe.

He stares at the grass. Dirty grass. He lifts his gaze up slightly to stare at the jacket. Dirty jacket. His mother wouldn’t care, though, and wouldn't chastise him on the transgressions of throwing his valuables around. It isn’t something she had bought him; ergo, it truly isn’t something that is important to her.

It’s not that Minho had bought it either — he got it for free — but it’s still valuable. He always manages to garner the reception of free things from other people. It's the thing about dying. Once you’re dead, you lose the concept of ownership. Slowly and then more slowly.

Decidedly, corpses lose their breaths first, their heartbeats, their mobility, and then their lives. Corpses lose their brain, their memories, their colors, and then their light. When corpses finally lose the entirety of their possessions, you can tell. The last possession a corpse ever loses is its love.

Minho collects these possessions as a nonverbal apology, and then he hoards all of the words left unspoken. At age eight, he stole the love. He stole the love of a person he didn’t know and made everyone who was meant to mourn him forget him. Realistically, he knows it’s not true. The people who knew him must miss him every day, even now; the issue is that if there’s a chance the afterlife actually exists, did the man from funeral number one watch? What happens if when people die, the last thing they’re allowed before they move on is the ability to watch their own funerals? The receptions that come afterward?

Minho rubs at his forehead and reaches out towards the jacket with his other hand. If he continues to collect, the love others possess won’t ever have to leave. Not until Minho dies, anyway. There’s a Playstation and all of its games sitting at home atop his bedroom dresser. There’s an unused app wasting storage on his phone because the game is meant for two. There’s a worn collar that sits at the entry of his closet. There's a jacket he wears like a heart when he tugs his arms through the sleeves.

Through Minho, their owners will never truly die.

It all collects in his bedroom the way the memories do. The corpses pile like a weight a gym rat would swear could be lifted to make you stronger. Though, he can’t curl the weight (he’s tried), it only makes him fold.

His room has amassed so much smoke, sometimes it’s hard to see.

He stumbles when his fingers latch onto the sleeve of the jacket and suddenly he’s falling forwards. His chest hits the ground with a smack. It knocks the wind out of him while he’s still suffocating, and he releases a pitiful groan.

There's no one to catch him when he falls. He closes his eyes tight, pushes up with his palms so that he can roll over onto his back in the middle of the front yard. Tugging the grass-stained jacket over his chest and staring up at the sky, he realizes it’s hard to decipher if there’s any clouds when there’s so much smoke that always starts five feet off the ground.

“Damn it.” It's quieter.

He tilts his head to the side, ear pressed flat against excess dew. He doesn’t remember Hyunjin lighting the fireplace, but he swears he sees smoke billowing out from the chimney. He can't help but smile.

People were the same. Amid all the faux confidence his friend had exuded, this must be the aftermath of firestarter Minho, Mr. Burn It All Down Lee Know.

He raises an arm above his head and points towards the chimney to obscure its view with a carefully positioned finger. Two fingers. He squeezes the smoke between them. “Guess you wanted to burn, too.”

Some people sink, yeah, but in everyone’s final act, they burn.

act viii.

Felix is good-hearted and well intentioned, but sometimes those traits become overbearing.

Minho doesn’t necessarily enjoy being psycho-analyzed. After all, who does? He finds that it somehow comes across even worse when the other person didn’t mean to be analyzing. It’s like when they instigate a thought, but then suddenly that thought gets ravaged by personal oversight and it sends his head spinning.

An example, since he has his phone on him now.

from: felix

hey i was doing some thinking

do you think you are jisung’s favorite person?

it is a thing. diagnosed

it comes with bpd

i do not talk to him

but i think you are

to be honest

Minho never responded. He knows he should have — that’s his best friend, but he still doesn’t know how to. He had never heard of favorite people before, and currently he wishes it had stayed that way. It was one text thread — written the way he imagines writing an afterthought — but instead of brushing it off, Minho had been stupid enough to want to know what Felix was talking about. Three hours of being on google later, Minho found there to be nothing worse. He still can’t find an upside and it has been five days.

It’s not that being someone’s favorite person is necessarily a bad thing (it has its cons), but in Minho’s case, it may as well have the word “derogatory” written over it in bold font. Maybe a font that’s easy to read, too, since he’s somehow spent all of high school normalizing misreading red flags.

“but I think you are.” Well, that’s great. Jisung couldn’t control how after every breakup, he kept coming back to Minho. What was Minho’s excuse then, and why did he feel like he needed one?

“You’re obsessed with me,” Jisung croons. With his body practically flattening Minho to the bed, face buried in the crook of his neck, it comes out muffled.

“Oh?” Minho dares to ask, raising a brow. “Is that so?”

There’s an unintelligible noise against his skin followed by a small shift. The arm Minho has around the blond’s back adjusts with him, giving Jisung room to situate himself how he wants. His other arm, raised high above his back, phone in hand and open to Felix’s texts, falls down to his own side. He forces himself to release the grip he has on it, set it face down.

He chooses to return that hand where it belongs, tangled in the back of Jisung’s hair.

“Louder, puppy. Couldn’t hear you,” Minho teases when nothing else follows.

“I said,” and he’s louder as requested, untangling himself from Minho as he practically does a push up to lift himself from laying flush against his body, “for real. I mean, look at you. You love me.”

“I adore you.”

Jisung looks disappointed, like he’s about to frown. Minho thinks he must be imagining things. He hadn’t said anything wrong.

“I love you,” Jisung says instead.

“And I adore you,” Minho repeats.

Jisung’s eyebrows pull together. They stare at each for a moment or two before Jisung finally heaves out a sigh and removes himself from hovering over Minho. He falls backwards onto the bed beside him instead.

Minho’s waiting with an outstretched arm to catch him when he does. “You’re dramatic today,” he muses.

“Just today?” Jisung nearly coughs. He sounds bewildered. “Try every day, Minho. It's all a part of the Jisung Han charm, and don’t you forget it.”

“Hm,” and the hum that leaves him is followed by a chuckle. “Will keep it in mind, Ji.”

The silence that follows — it’s comfortable. For Jisung, love comes strongest in actions. For Minho, the same holds true. It’s one of the first things they ever agreed upon the first day they met.

Jisung plays with Minho’s fingers, traces a thumb along the side of his hand. In return, Minho threads a hand through the front of Jisung’s hair and pushes it back, kisses his nose.

It only takes five minutes (or so he assumes) for Minho to get sick and tired of dancing around what he wants, pulling his arm out from beneath the back of his head. He shifts so that he takes the position Jisung had been in earlier, palms pressed flat into the bed on either side of Jisung’s head, stomachs ghosting, but not touching. Minho leans down to brush his nose against his.

“We haven’t kissed in a while,” he utters and then as an afterthought, “soulmate.”

Jisung breaks out into a gummy grin that stretches across his face like a rising sun. “It's been a day. It’s not like we’re broken up.”

There. Right there. That's the difference between the supernova of a boy and the burning moon that hovers above him. Jisung always dates him and chooses to forget they had ever broken up before. Minho cannot ever forget. He's memorized the quotes of departure like scripture.

“Right, but we were. For a while,” Minho responds carefully. He doesn’t want to ruin everything again. God, this paranoia is so stupid.

“And?”

“I just wanted you to know,” Minho clarifies. He feels like he’s rushing to get everything out in time to stop the plane from leaving, but in reality he's actually speaking slower than he ever has before. Enunciation suddenly feels important.

Jisung searches his face, eyes drifting back and forth as he reads him downward like a book. “You’re scared?”

Minho shrugs. He doesn’t know how to respond to that. Should he? He's so tired of making decisions where he ends up choosing the wrong answer.

As Jisung pushes himself up into a sitting position, he causes Minho to move in the opposite direction and fall back on his ass. Jisung and him lock gazes again.

There's a flap of charcoal wings against the inside of his stomach. He knows Jisung knows why. He also knows that he won’t address it. For whose sake? No idea. Minho hates that Jisung can read him like this. It's like no matter who they’re with or where they are, they always know what the other is thinking. It's terrifying and wrong, but it sounds like a Minho issue. Isn’t a complete understanding of your partner something everyone wants to achieve? Eh. Minho thinks some things deserve to be kept private.

“I think we’re soulmates, Minho, you know that. ‘Member what I said about soulmates?”

Minho sighs and rolls his eyes despite the heat he can feel rushing to his cheeks, or the smile that acts as a temptress to his lips. “No idea,” he lies.

Jisung’s more of an author than a reader, but he takes the time to read Minho avidly anyway. At least, that’s the conclusion Minho comes to when he has to break the eye contact, a grin breaking out across Jisung’s face again.

“You do, you do,” he teases — whines, almost — and he leans in close with his body to poke into Minho’s stomach with both hands, a finger uncurled on each. “Tell me, baby.”

Minho heaves out a sigh that breaks off into a small laugh, willing himself to finally breathe. He figured the minute that he breathed, his face would betray him and end up mirroring Jisung’s. It does.

“Oh, fine. Soulmates always come back to each other. If they break up, it’s just the wrong time.”

“Mhm, so every time we break up, it doesn’t matter. No matter who I get with. We’re still soulmates, Minho. You believe that, too, right?”

“Sure.”

Jisung narrows his eyes. Minho swats at him.

“Stop it, don’t look at me like that. You know I believe you— I mean, it. I believe it. If we weren’t soulmates, why would I keep getting back together with you, silly pup? Wouldn’t make sense. If I was getting back together with you and we weren’t soulmates, this whole charade would be for nothing. We just keep mistaking the wrong times for the right ones, and that’s okay.”

Jisung’s glowing. “That’s true, I guess. If we weren’t soulmates, we’d probably stop.”

Minho was hoping he wouldn’t agree. This doesn’t feel right. It feels like a conditioned lie. Is that really the reason I cannot stay away from you? How is that fair if the reason you cannot stay away from me is because you’re genetically wired to?

“We’d still be friends, though, right?” Jisung suddenly asks.

“Huh?”

“If we weren’t soulmates. Like, we obviously are, but if we weren’t. In another universe. Or something. You know? Would you still be my friend? I’d still be yours, like always, but—”

“Yeah,” Minho confirms before he can finish, leaning in to kiss him hard. There was a fire he could smell brewing. The only way to stop a fire is to take away the surrounding air. “I'll know you for the rest of my life.”

There's smoke that fills his nose and then his lungs when they pull away. Not again. Not here, not now. They’re not even in his bedroom. They’re not even in Hyunjin’s.

Did you think you were safe?

Did you think it was over?

Minho grits his teeth behind his lips, watches Jisung slowly reopen his eyes in a daze, a dopey smile worn a mile wide across his face. He needs to kiss him again, trap the fire before it starts. He thought Jisung’s bedroom was safe, but maybe it never was.

He moves in again like a flash, briefly aware of the way Jisung’s eyes widen like he’s snapping out of a haze. There's a hand that hooks through the back of his hair hard, tugs him backwards before their lips can even connect. It keeps him there.

“I'd tease you for being eager, but what’s wrong? Are you okay? Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Minho searches his face, tries to read him like a book, but it’s not working. He should stick to working on his penmanship. “Do you actually love me?”

“I told you I do.” The hand falls from his hair, but Minho doesn’t rush forward again.

“I know, but. Are you sick? Diseases? Dying?”

“Sick of you, maybe,” but he jumps to clarify when Minho frowns, “I'm playing. Why would I be dying? I’m in perfect health, peak performance!”

“You have a bad heart.”

Jisung hums. “That’s true. It’s working fine, though. I'm not dying, I just can’t play sports no more.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ask him. Tell him. “Everyone who loves me dies, though. I thought Felix would be funeral number six, but maybe it’s you? Your room’s coated in the same ash today.”

Jisung stares like he can’t seem to figure out what the hell Minho’s going on about. Hell, what even is Minho going on about?

He ends up shrugging in response instead. “Dunno what you mean, but I'm not dying, and I do love you.”

“Ah, nevermind.” Minho pushes him back down into the pillows, hovers over him once more. He kisses his forehead, his nose, his cheeks, and down his chest.

Maybe Felix lied.

Well, the bottom line is that someone had lied to him. To be honest, Minho’s not sure which lie would end up burning worse: “There may be funerals, but they will not be mine” or “I do love you.”

It's like a war between death and the eventual loss of possessions.

act ix.

Neither. There isn’t going to be a victor because the answer is neither. A stalemate war.

Three months later at 4:51 in the afternoon, the wind stops blowing. The sounds of the low-hanging trees and their overgrown foliage tapping against the window panes become so soft they end up imperceptible. It's like a ceasefire was called to effect as soon as mother nature’s children realized a young boy had gotten caught up in the middle of it all.

Standing in the middle of Han Jisung’s bedroom, Minho can’t move. His phone buzzes like a never-ending melody, dangling at his side and clutched tight in an otherwise limp hand. It fills the harmony the trees forgot to provide, too busy bearing the weight of a silent storm.

He thought Jisung’s bedroom was safe, but maybe it never was.

Damn it. There was a reason Minho was able to walk across the room so effortlessly three months ago, despite the smoke that threatened to consume him. Minho had been too caught up in his own paranoia; he forgot to pay attention. An author, not a reader. Dramatic. Okay, an actor, not an author.

As always when the world comes crashing down around him, there was smoke. Unlike always when the world comes crashing down around him, there was no fire. The floorboards had him dancing across them like low-level water, not bouncing atop hot coals. No matter where he looked that day, there was nothing but the aftertaste of Hell that licked against the entrance of his nose and then slid down the back of his throat.

He had tasted a warning, not an anticipated threat.

Can smoke really travel like that, though? Can it tear open a hole between space and time, and escape as excess heat into the past? Minho feels his own eyebrows twitch with the need to furrow. Can a murder really be split up like that, though — killing in the future, evidence in the present, aftermath in the past?

If he had known that, he’s sure he still wouldn’t have picked up on the signs. He sent past him the worst kind of warning, and it came in the form of smoke. Smoke is blinding. Minho couldn’t breathe and yet on top of that, he was expected to see?

“Time is the fire in which we burn,” Jisung hums aloud, and it makes Minho shoot his head upright, attention laser-focused. The blond — if he can even be called one, hair faded and untamed, a mirror of his late mentality — is laid back against his headboard, phone open and in his face.

Minho wants to scream, say hurtful words. He wants to have the same faux confidence Hyunjin exuded as he burned in the Hell Minho had placed over him, just to secure a sense of Heaven within himself.

He should be able to, heaven knows they didn’t survive three months without a few hiatuses and more than a few heated arguments. Minho isn’t the same person he was the first time the pair had broken up, and he isn’t even the same person he was the few times that came after.

There's something about the situation that feels exhausting, like Minho needs a nap. There's a sadness that resnaps his sternum in half, but he’s unable to cry. He's sad (as always), and yet he can’t find anything to cry about.

“What?” he ends up asking, vanquishing the screams trapped at the back of his throat; they dig into his weakened lungs. He can hear himself distantly, but it sounds flat. Monotonous. It lacks inflection, it—

“Are you burning?”

Minho can’t fucking move.

“Am I what?”

“Burning, Minho. Are you burning? You can see the smoke, too, yeah? Feel the fire, too, yeah? All we ever do is burn. Aren’t you tired?” He breaks off into a sigh, almost as if he’s bored.

Why is it always like this?

“No,” and it comes out honest. Always honest. Minho’s lungs are blackened, sure, but there’s no smoke to be found in a room he watched burn months ago. The fire he thought would travel up his legs from the floor the longer he stood there, the signature component in serial murder — it’s not there. His feet are littered in old scars, not open wounds.

What was the smoke for, if not a warning? Had the room really burned as he kissed him? Minho’s never been involved in an ethanol fire.

“Alright,” Jisung responds. He sets his phone down on his chest, and then he squints from across the room. “I don't know why we got back together.”

Minho grouses, fast, “Because you said you loved me. Again.”

“Love—” Jisung’s eyes fly wide, and then he breaks off into a laugh. The kind more appropriate when standing up to a bully rather than conversing with a soon-to-be-ex. “Love? Minho, why would I ever love you? That's honestly rich if you think I'd love someone before they loved me.”

The accusation that points towards Minho never having loved Jisung feels twisted. He concentrates on willing his free hand to not shake at his side, but he feels it do so in non-consensual shivers anyway. Within the violent melody of a breakup, the distant buzzing of his phone at his side — Felix still checking in on him, most likely — fades in again like dissonant harmony.

Minho can’t help narrowing his eyes, despite the fact that he’s never done anything but take shit from Jisung before now. “Fuck are you on about?” This was what Hyunjin had chosen: aggressive determination, vigorous passion, unwavering firmness. “Of course I love you, Jisung. You’re a stupid idiot for thinking otherwise. Was it not clear in the gifts, the kisses, the coming over at two in the morning because you were sad, the accompanying you to the pharmacist when you were scared to go alone? I have tried to understand your personality, your illnesses, your needs. What more could I have—”

“If you actually loved me, you wouldn’t make me so fucking mad.”

He’s suffocating, but there’s no smoke. He opens his mouth, waits for whatever’s trapped inside of him to billow out like the chimney attached to the roof of Hwang Hyunjin’s house, but nothing does. Well, aside from the choked sound that embarrasses Minho so wholly and completely it causes him to snap it closed.

“You’re just not good at this,” Jisung continues, picking his phone up from his chest again.

Minho’s hand clenches rock solid where it had once been shaking as he watches him scroll through it like before. He’s disinterested.

“Good at what?” Minho dares to ask anyway.

“This, me. Every time you try to understand, the less I love you.”

Before, he stood there because he chose to. He stood there because he wanted to, but now the floor moves like quicksand, trapping him in place. Minho almost doesn’t know what to say. Almost. It’s not that he’s unsure of the question — it only stirs inside of him, churns thicker with every self-started forest fire — but Minho’s not entirely certain he wants to know the answer.

Although not everything can burn, everything can break.

Minho lifts a numb foot from the floor in an attempt to prove to himself it’s not stuck there. He could leave; moreover, he can. He turns his back to the bedroom, front towards the door.

He used to think it would be scary, to have all the doors in his life close on him. As he's learned, it is actually more formidable to have them all be left open when you were born with the inability to know how to shut them.

Silent storm my ass, he thinks then, as a lone branch breaks off from somewhere, flying out and hitting the bedroom window hard. Jisung’s phone slips when he jolts, but Minho stands unflinching.

It startles the question out of him instead, “Has getting involved with me made your life difficult?”

Jisung doesn’t respond. A second silent storm.

The words he kept pressed up into the roof of his mouth suddenly knock loose with the wind. There’s so many he kept there, hidden away behind his front teeth. He goes to expel them, let them all free — but, slicked up with years worth of salivation tends to make words slippery, and suddenly they’re tumbling down his throat like a stampede. He's choking and once again, he is eight years old.

This feels like the first funeral wherein someone will be buried, not burned.

Minho had spent months ruminating over the upcoming death, the funeral he was meant to attend. He thought he was going to lose Felix, and then he thought he was going to lose Jisung. He thought that at the end of it all, he was going to become an unrecognizable burn victim counting down until funeral number seven, but most certainly he was going to survive it all (God wouldn’t have it any other way).

Was… and he scrunches up his nose at the thought, loosening his tense body and tugging both legs up from the waterlogged sand, Was this funeral for me?

What was that quote? The one about dancing and dying, something about a dancer dying twice, but the one in which they stop dancing is the more painful.

The hallway is a blur and the exit out the front door is easy (read: Jisung’s parents are never home), but something about the ability to focus and change is hard. His feet tend to carry him further places than his mind, no matter how imaginative he can be. They know their way home, and it’s only unfortunate because when Minho is fighting to fucking breathe? They take him to the one place he knows he will never be able to. When does the body come to understand that some places are just no longer safe to be?

Dancing and dying. The quote (exact wording consigned to oblivion) spins like a washer cycle as he tries fruitlessly to stop cogitating over it and put it to dry. This funeral really is his own, isn’t it? The first one, the more painful one?

This had been the slow death, not the fast one. The one that crept up on him like a malignant wound personated by empty promises of a cure, only to burn him over and over again like torture. Come to think of it, Minho hadn’t been burned in a while. Ah, so this was the true price of immunity.

He wonders if in the second death, it will come as a burial, too.

Minho’s in the front yard when he starts questioning what he did wrong, why all of this has happened to him. “Funeral number six,” he breathes out, glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see another chimney that billows out the aftermath of his murder-suicide. There is not one.

He had caused everything. He is a serial murderer, and only now is he finally dragging himself down with the victims.

His phone buzzes in his pocket — where he stored it the second he had come outside; it was raining, after all — and Minho pats at it with a dangling hand.

Funeral four. At 12:54 in the afternoon, Minho killed someone.

Funeral six. At 4:52 in the afternoon, Minho died.

It's weird. The reason Minho’s aware this is his first death isn’t because of all the red flags, or even the quote about dancers. When you become a corpse, you lose your possessions. The corpse of a “sweet boy” just lost its love.

How rotten, Minho never noticed.

act x.

Six years later, Minho is diagnosed with heartbreak.

It isn’t called that, but it’s heartbreaking to know that he will never escape the guilt of no longer loving Han Jisung, or escape the memory that was him, despite the fact that they never spoke again.

Every breakup screamed permanence, and yet they would eventually get back together like clockwork despite that. That’s what soulmates do, so that’s what Jisung and him had done. Nothing had been different, and yet Minho woke up the next morning and no longer loved him. Similarly, he watched Jisung get with a girl and then promptly move on with her after graduation.

Minho’s diagnosed with heartbreak as of today. No, separation from a soulmate. No, more like deviation from a destined fate. Get on with it, liar Minho, Mr. Beat Around The Bush Lee Know. Okay, borderline. It’s borderline. It's Jisung. He’s Jisung.

They had officially been diagnosed with the same illness, and now Minho would spend the rest of his life with a piece of Jisung living inside of him, and the knowledge that if they really were the same, Jisung may have fallen out of love first all those years ago, and Minho would forever not know.

His phone screen shines bright, blinding as he places it down face up on the bathroom counter.

to: jisung

how could you give me an abandonment disease

and then abandon me?

seen

That’s it then. Jisung will not message him, and Minho cannot message anything more without looking as desperate as he once felt. They really will never speak again.

When he reaches for his phone next, planning to delete the texts and be done with it, he’s startled into letting out a disbelieving laugh. There’s a familiar flame that licks up against the pads of his fingers.

Some people sink, yeah, but in everyone’s final act, they burn.

Perhaps this is closure.

The person in the mirror looks familiar when he lifts his gaze from the phone, and yet he doesn’t know what to call them. Maybe it’s the him from nine acts and six funerals ago, but the smoke that clouds the room and steams the mirror obscures the view.

Should he call out a name three times and prepare for the last act, the final death? Should he ask a question? He stares hard at the fogged over face before walking to the side of the glass nearest the far wall. He reaches out and presses a finger against it, drawing out the phrase “what did I do” across the expanse of it.

Neither. There isn’t going to be a victor because the answer is neither. A stalemate war.

Felix is good-hearted and well intentioned, but sometimes those traits become overbearing.

Hot air fans over the back of his neck like the warmth of domestication. There’s a trail of adornments down his nape in the familiar shape of kisses. Familiar because they’re kisses, foreign because they don’t come from heart-shaped lips.

A few weeks into the sequel of “worst months of my life,” there’s a buzz that sounds from Minho’s nightstand, phone vibrating violently against the brittle wood.

“Just disgusting.”

Lee Felix speaks as if he carries the weight of a million other people’s traumas with him.

The first five times Jisung broke up with Minho, he cried so hard he threw up.

“It's sad. I think.”

Lee Minho was eight when he attended his first funeral.

Lee Minho was eight when he attended his first funeral.

So many different metaphors, so many different analogies. None of them made sense, only there to serve the purpose of enshrouding the actual plot. So many different metaphors, so many different analogies; they all distract from the underlying theme of being a daytime star.

Did you forget? Get lost memorizing all of the scripts?

Have you read them forwards? Have you tried reading them backwards?

In each act, you’re a protagonist. In each act, is there an antagonist, too?

The steam starts dissipating, face slowly fading back into view. Minho pushes forwards on his hands, pressing the tip of his nose against the glass. Is it Felix, is it Hyunjin, is it the old him, is it the new? Is the antagonist Han Jisung? It has to be, right? His whole story was about him.

Looking in the mirror, he finds he no longer knows how to love something he already woke up one day and unlearned how to.

And holy shit, Minho’s once again the star.