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There’s a breath-sized gap between his eyelids where light sneaks in through, the fragile cord sleep is walking on that calls for Mark to close his eyes shut in order to send her off into slumber. The quivering white noise of the tour bus’ engine and the tumble of it going over potholes have finally blended in enough for him to turn a deaf ear on them, and he’s about to push sleep off the eyelash tightrope it’s standing on when something catches him off guard out of the corner of his eye: an abrupt beam of light behind the drawn-closed curtain of his bunk, one that leaves no room for forethought with Mark instinctively dragging a drowsy hand up to his face and letting it collapse with a smack over the thin line the shine of an unlocked phone screen is seeping through.
"Markie," he hears, a second needed for the sound to sink in as a word. It barely fits the category of a whisper, the voice showing it’s had little to no interest in murmuring throughout its life, but that is well versed on prettying itself up to be easy enough on the ear that anything it’ll say will go—just as it’s doing right now, carrying on with another whisper-yell dressed in mellow vowels. “I have a confession to make.”
Mark’s eyes open midway, sleep knocked off her feet and plummeting down with no safety net awaiting her, and the same sleep addled hand that tried to save his doze grabs a fistful of the bunk’s curtain to draw it back, its metal rings ringing out in the quiet of the night as they travel down the rod and unveil the true brightness of Donghyuck’s phone screen lighting up his face, a ray of white from his chin up to the bridge of his nose that fades out at the edge of his cheeks. It’s unnecessary under the dim spotlights that remain on as long as the engine rumbles, which already let him see the faint line of his jaw, the tufts of hair curling under his ear, the red leather notebook he’s holding up to his face as he says in a hushed tone, “There’s no lyrics in this.”
Mind as fogged as it can be, Mark's crisis builds up with no sense of urgency. He watches Donghyuck flip through pages as his elbows come to rest on the thin mattress of the middle bunk, eyes cruising through words they aren’t fast enough to read, and hears him mumble almost solely to himself, “Unless they are actual lyrics. Then I feel like these are the type of rhymes Shakespeare would be spitting.”
A blink, and then the sight of Donghyuck flipping through pages of a red leather notebook with his eyes cruising its words sinks in, the steady build up placing the last brick of its peak for Mark to go from sleep-worn all the way to rigid down to his bones, not being able to look away from the car crash in front of him backdropped by the sound of paper turning.
He can only get his body to cooperate when Donghyuck finally stops at a page, rolling over onto his stomach to reach out and snatch the book out of his hands as clumsily as motor skills come. It slips out of their grip with no resistance, and as soon as Mark has it pressed against his chest with protective fingers splayed out over it, Donghyuck is hoisting himself up into the bunk, as if he was waiting for a reaction in order to make his way into the cramped space and force Mark’s back to meet the wall, curtain swishing back shut with no finesse.
With bony knees making themselves home on his thigh, Mark tries to track down how this notebook made its way from where he last left it on the drawer of his nightstand to this moving bus driving down an interstate highway closer to the opposite pole of the globe. He can’t.
"Where did you get this?" It’s as angry as a whisper allows him to sound, kicking up his thigh and only managing to dig the bone of Donghyuck’s knee deeper into the muscle of his leg, who retaliates by sinking a finger over Mark’s belly button. If they hadn’t woken up anyone yet, then the yelp Mark can’t hold in might have done the job.
The phone screen goes dark where it lands under the thin of the bedsheets, leaving Mark to find out Donghyuck has moved closer when his pillow dips and he feels louder than he hears him bite back, "You gave it to me, genius."
No way, don’t lie, I wouldn’t and when? all queue up to see which one is the first to come out of his mouth. His lips part, and the winner is surprisingly a nonplussed huh, because it turns out he can, actually, track down the moment he unknowingly lends it out to Donghyuck.
He's plucking his way through a melody on his guitar when he decides to finally give into Donghyuck's years-long begging to let him pick out his next verse to submit. He wants it only because it's the one thing Mark never lets him stick his nose into, and Mark concedes it this once only because it's an almost pointless task, with no song he needs to write for in sight. His eyes are down on the fretboard when he says it's the notebook in the drawer, and they remain there as Donghyuck pulls it open and makes a grab for the red leather instead of the black softcover, leaving the door to his room wide open behind him as he sneaks out before Mark can think about it twice. Now, Mark wishes he had thought about it at least once.
Nails scratching at the thin spine of the notebook, the start of a question dies on his tongue when Donghyuck presses the power button on the side of his phone, and right as the bright white comes back to reside on chin-nose-cheeks, he goes on.
"I kept reading trying to look for verses." A pause. "And then I read some more just because."
He looks softened by a long day and the drag of the incoming early morning, though there’s no pillow creases or reddened skin that show he’s made any sort of effort to sleep everything languid off. Mark thinks of him reading on his bunk up until a moment ago, laid belly down with his pillow tucked under his chin, like he tends to be when he’s endlessly scrolling down some app’s feed or has a joystick in between his fingers, and then he’s asking before he’s aware he’s doing it, "Did you like any?"
He rebuilds the Donghyuck from a moment ago, belly down, chin on pillow and mouthing along to Mark's words, the way he does when he's trying to make sense of written English.
Korean is what Mark speaks for recording microphones to pick up, to say thank you and please and it's my turn to choose what to order for dinner. His vocabulary is made up of formalities and set phrases as well as lingo and commonplaces, yet English turns things into shades of intimate and real that no other foreign words hold.
Most of his lyrics are in Korean, some poems too, but he sees both Donghyuck's lips and their shadow against the artificial light announce, “There’s a lot about the moon," and Mark hums aloud in acknowledgement, smiles inwards at the thought of Donghyuck, belly and chin in place, mouthing along to any verse about the night or a satellite, with the knowledge that every one of them is in English.
He's thinking of saying a half-truth (“I write at night, for the most part. When I look out the window she’s just—there”), wondering how much he got out of them ("What do you think they're about? Like, besides the moon"), but his one-second-too-long silence risks giving Donghyuck room to keep on talking, and when one turns to two, he does just that.
"I liked those," he goes over with a murmur, in case Mark hadn't caught on. There's a rustle of sheets from the bunk below, the bus dips to the left when a wheel goes over another cavity on the road and Mark’s tailbone decides to go flush against the wall. Donghyuck ignores it all, raising up into an elbow to smush a cheek against the heel of his palm, mouth going pouty with the motion as he demands, "Ask me about my favorite."
This time, Mark’s smile doesn’t bother being worn inside out. "What's your favorite?"
The moment the screen’s timer goes out for a second time and leaves them in a dim lighted dark is short lived, Donghyuck’s thumb already turning its digital hourglass over by forcing his lockscreen to show up once more, reaching out immediately after for the hardback anthology of Mark’s worst, best and just-there held tight against his breastbone. Mark’s hands are surprised to find they go peaceably with the pull of Donghyuck’s own prying fingers, turning metaphorical heads towards Mark’s mind in question, who can only shrug in a what-can-you-do way.
Squinting against the unwelcome current of cold air from Donghyuck flickering through paper, Mark sees through a narrow space gridded by eyelashes the one page where he decides to draw to a halt, seemingly in no need to read through it before announcing, "This one. Didn't understand all of it, but I think I got enough.”
And Mark finds it needless as well to open his eyes wider and avoid the quadrille of lashes to know what it is, because it’s the one Mark both feared and hoped he would land on, familiar enough with his own words to read I see the moon disappear behind a tide of grey clouds, and allow his mind to fill it in with stars playing hide and seek between lights of homes and bars, and I wonder if your moon has been shipwrecked as well, if your stars have, too, found a hiding place.
With Dream a sea-width away, someone calls him up after one of their shows. Mark can't recall if it was Jeno or Chenle, Kobe or Tokyo, but he remembers the phone being passed around, conversations ranging from casual hellos to full on you should be heres, all covering up fondness with banter or banter with fondness. Mark listens and laughs and fires back the weakest comebacks known to man from his place criss-cross by the living room couch, until the phone reaches Donghyuck's hands.
Last one in line, the night's wind lands harshly on the speaker and threatens to be louder than words. There's no chance for that, however, when it comes to Donghyuck’s whining, who is complaining over being ushered out of his room for a dinner out and not being lent any time to grab a scarf or a thicker coat. Now he's stuck with a shiver running laps down his spine and under the low-hanging awning outside the restaurant that was forced on him, the only thing sheltering them from the true bite of the cold as they wait for their cars to finally go around the block and pick them up at the door.
"I might actually freeze out here," Donghyuck groans, no lack of drama in sight as his voice turns awry, and if Mark didn't already know word for word each line and stage direction of Donghyuck’s theatrics, his tone damp to the touch could make him believe he's about to burst into tears.
"If I die, you get to keep—" The wobbly note to his words dies out on a whim, Mark hearing him mumble shit, what can I leave you?, and then it's back to his normal voice, the one with an edge that seems to be constantly tempting you to try and contradict it. "What do you want from me? This is your chance."
There's something short on rationale that crosses Mark’s mind then. His head roughs out a sketch in a fragmented second’s time of Donghyuck on the other end of the line, in a sweater and jeans on a full bloom winter night, imagining the hand that’s not holding the phone tucked under his armpit and hearing an occasional chatter of teeth he’s almost sure is only one part show and two parts genuine. Cue a clash, his head flipping over the page of his sketchbook and drafting a third person perspective of Mark’s three layers of cotton over his chest and underfloor heating under his folded legs, Johnny's blood-warm shin pressed to his side and the comforting droning of the microwave in the kitchen heating up their near midnight dinner.
No meeting point in sight. Just two parallel lines with journeys alike but never the same as.
Somewhere in between his mind hard at work in making silhouettes take shape, he’s excused himself with a pat to Johnny’s leg and a I’ll be right back said out of Donghyuck’s earshot, who is in a haste to get his will over and done with. Mark’s drawing gets more detailed, the line from abstraction to realism being crossed as he pictures him going up and down on the balls of his feet, pale lips hurrying him on.
"Come on, ask for anything. I'm already dying. I'll—” He interrupts himself with a brrr that tells of the wind picking up along with its audible whir, and he carries on leaning further onto the side of nasal with each word. “I’ll probably let you have it," he grants.
The tenth floor's apartment door shuts behind Mark with a silent click, and his feet carry him towards the far end of the hallway, the first step of the stairs to the rooftop already under his feet by the time he scrambles for an answer. "Your vinyls.”
Mark continues climbing up steps, draws in what has to be now photorealism Donghyuck’s eyebrows trying to reach his hairline, the apples of his cheeks turning a color appropriate to their name, too caught up on his fingers losing feeling or the thought of Mark laying novice hands on his Off the Wall copy to pay attention to the clack of Mark’s shoes against the metal staircase, the catch of his breath in his sudden sprint, the rustle of his jumper being shoved off his frame and left to lie over half a dozen steps.
"The MJ ones? No way in hell," Donghyuck is quick to turn him down with, and it was the amateur vinyl-handling that was heavy on his mind, Mark finds. "Those are coming with me to—Wait, no. The car is here,” he starts out with a remark and ends back on a whine at the sight of their ride coming into view, voice once more gone from fervor-filled to kidlike terror, dragging out every letter so that he’s almost spelling it out when he complains, "I don't wanna die."
Mark can’t remember whose phone it was that offered its screen for someone to press call on his contact, under the cold of which japanese city his friends were at the mercy of, what Johnny had to say to his excuse before he slipped out of the room or if the jumper strewn about the stairsteps was mint or olive. And yet, he recalls down to the centigrades how cutting the metal of the door knob had been under his palm for an inaugural second, how it had felt to have the words roll off his tongue as he instructed Donghyuck, "Make a run for it. At the count of three, alright?"
With the sound of everyone else slipping inside the car and someone crying out for Donghyuck to get in already, Mark chants at once a one, two, three that has Donghyuck giving out a war cry with quick feet bolting towards the room temperature warmth of the van, and Mark’s wrist turning the knob to push the door open and welcome with thinly dressed open arms the chill of the first hour of the morning.
The moment he has to halt on his way down the staircase to kneel and pick up his whatever-shade green jumper, he tries to pinpoint what he gained out of it, what was the point of doing something that now seems so mania-infused, and he’s not so sure he knows. He had taken one step away from the rooftop’s doorway—no scarf or thick coat on, just a sweater and jeans on a full bloom winter night—and had allowed the cold wave of air to gnaw him raw to its heart’s content.
Then, he’s not sure. Later, laying under the covers with a belly full of microwaved leftovers and a leather notebook over his pillow, he writes of taking his hands out of his pockets to let the cold bite at them, and feel that at least in that we coincide, that your fingers have also frozen numb, and the wind has made a tangle of your hair just as mine has, and thinks perhaps he knows without knowing.
Donghyuck’s screaming had died out soon after with the slam of a car door, the cried out complaints of whoever was riding gunshot and the laughter of the one sharing the backseat with him, and Mark had taken one step back and into the inside of the building, door pulled shut with the wind’s strength and leaving behind a slamming sound that Mark’s ears resent up until he’s back on even ground.
I want to know what your night is like, how your cold feels, if we live it out at the same time, or if my sun and your moon are destined to dance in circles.
“I like that picture, in my head. The sun and the moon dancing,” Donghyuck notes, finger tapping over the two os hand in hand in the middle of moon. "You should find a way to make that into a verse."
He's heard Donghyuck be called all sorts of things—a born star, a prodigy child, one-of-a-kind. Mark doesn't trust himself to be the judge of them—not without objectivity being thrown out the window, at least—but there's one he's always failed to agree with in the back of his mind, one that has been Donghyuck's earmark from day one and that he's claimed for himself since then: every variation of sunlight there is, Donghyuck has been called it. Bright like the sun, an article early on in their career calls him, a compliment to his timing and readiness to get a whole room laughing. A sunshine personality, says someone once, an euphemism for the energy flowing over his seams when everyone else’s conforms to simmering under their skin.
"I might," Mark whispers back, an empty promise through and through. He wouldn’t be able to translate this into different words, something a shade too bright of intimate and real for microphones to pick up through commonplaces and set phrases.
"You will, 'cause I said you should," Donghyuck yawns through the words, stretching out limbs that have nowhere to go except the soft of Mark’s stomach, every tumbling motion in the road and push of Donghyuck’s knees pressing him further between the back of a bunk and a hard place.
"I'll think about it." That earns him Donghyuck shoving him blindly through his yawn, hand coming down to the cranny of space where Mark’s neck and shoulder meet and squeezing thight, his fingers cold in their touch and face shining under a light that's not his own proving every sunlight metaphor is off.
"Do it now,” he insists, and Mark hadn’t doubted there would come the moment when Donghyuck would forget to keep his volume at bay, mindless as he rolls over and topples his way out of the bunk, socked feet making a rough landing on the carpeted floor. His chin rests on closed fists, elbows sinking deep into the bedding to lean into Mark's space, voice once more untamed when he suggests, "Do you need inspiration?"
It’s an invitation to who knows what, and Mark makes his way to the edge of the bed without a single questioning word.
The next morning, he’ll push the last scrapes of a brown paper bag packed breakfast aside to set a leather notebook over bent knees and write down how you’re not a star nor the sun, for your light isn't far away, lost in the distance, or blindingly bright, from dusk till dawn, but rather a source of comfort in the pitch black darkness, fading and fragile, vulnerable to the softest sigh, like a candle on its way to burning out.
A hand will try to sneak inside the abandoned bag without Mark taking notice of it to grab the left-over half of a chocolate chip scone, sugar sticking to the top of the thief's lip after the first bite, who’ll stop his mouth dead in its tracks when Mark looks up from the page and into his eyes. There’ll be a second of still air, and then a smile, a good morning with no hyung etched onto it but a Markie that’ll be said against his cheek as he tries and fails to kiss it in greeting, Mark’s hand on his chest barely putting up a fight and his sugar-covered mouth fairly close to giving into easy victory.
Even later, he’ll pick up his notebook from where it landed spine up on the floor after a non good morning kiss, half of a halved scone busy keeping his mouth entertained and the crown of a head resting against his shoulder with eyes fixed on a phone screen, and he’ll write, scratch out, and then rewrite but you make it work, you fight through the threatening wind, because you’re the moon, the guiding light I hold on to each and every night.
Tonight, he contents himself with pressing his face to the scant-sized glass of the bus’ door, chin-nose-cheeks that have been lit up by white all night making themselves one with the window right beside him. Donghyuck angles up his face to let his eyes search for the moon with inspiration as an excuse, and Mark follows suit, letting himself be led on by his one guide in the night.