Work Text:
something is wrong. something is wrong and sunwoo can’t tell what and that bothers him to no fucking end. there shouldn’t be something wrong. they have a week of almost nothing but downtime, he should be using it to chill out and relax, or to be writing new songs, making beats, something, something, but it’s hot and overcast and he’s lying in his bed feeling like his head is full of cotton and his stomach is full of snakes, twisting and writhing and gnawing at his insides.
he’s alone in the dorm, everyone else is either at the other dorm or shopping or visiting family, and it should be nice. no one to nag at him, no one to tell him off for his used clothes scattered across the floor, his shoes dirty and askew in the rack at the door, the takeout containers stacked by his bedside table. he looks over at the stack, the effort it takes to turn his head feeling herculean, and he sighs, body sagging into the mattress. kevin used to try to get him to clean those up, but it’s not his fault that he forgets them, at least he thinks it isn’t. he means to take them and throw them away, he really does, but he gets easily distracted by whatever he’s watching on his phone and the takeout boxes fall to the wayside.
after a while, maybe a year or so, kevin stopped trying. he used to take them with him whenever he left, hoping it would make sunwoo notice and start doing it himself, but he stopped that after a while too. sunwoo’s biggest stack so far has been twenty-one containers, spread over about two weeks. the other members bring it up sometimes in conversation, having a little giggle about how messy sunwoo is, how boyish and gross, like he’s still a teenager and not a grown man. sometimes it feels passive aggressive. sometimes sunwoo can’t tell if he’s being laughed with or laughed at.
whatever. that’s depressing, and sunwoo already feels like shit. he doesn’t wanna fall into whatever trap his brain is laying out by making him think about that right now. he turns his head back to face up again, finding shapes in the popcorn ceiling. he finds a sailboat, a mangled cat, a house, and a few almost flowers before his stomach grumbles pointedly, and he realizes he hasn’t moved since he woke up at noon. he checks his phone, sees that it’s been a couple of hours, and groans. he doesn’t want to get food, to expend the effort. he pushes himself to sitting, opening one of his delivery apps, but that stack of containers is ever present in the corner of his eye, making something uncomfortable settle at the base of his skull.
sighing, he drops his phone and gets up, scratching his stomach as he shuffles down the hall to the kitchen. he skips the bathroom, no point in brushing his teeth since he’s just gonna eat and go back to bed anyway. he glances at the thermostat, finding the temperature in the house far hotter than is comfortable, and lo and behold, the a/c is off. rolling his eyes, he turns it on, and ignores the tiny voice in his head saying that they only turn the a/c off when the dorm is empty and everyone’s gone for the day, begging him to think about the implications.
he finishes his trek to the kitchen and starts the coffee machine. he can’t make drinks like the ones he likes to order, but he can make his milk-with-a-splash-of-coffee and add some caramel syrup and it tastes just as good. he opens the fridge while the coffee starts to percolate, hunting for leftovers in the sea of raw ingredients - for people who can actually stand to cook - and just closes his eyes when he doesn’t find anything. he doesn’t even have the motivation to boil water for one of their ramyun bowls, how is he gonna eat?
he thinks again of ordering food, and again is met with the image of his takeout boxes, then starts grabbing random things out of the fridge. eggs, a box of pre-cut bell peppers, some sandwich meat. this is fine, he can just - just turn on autopilot or something, he can get through this. it’s fine. he starts his arduous cooking adventure by cracking the eggs into a bowl, dropping the shells in the sink because the trash can is a few feet too far away today. he throws in some of the bell peppers and rips up some of the meat, mixing everything until the eggs have started to froth a little with how much he’s beaten them.
it’s then he notices, oh, he forgot to turn on a pan to pre-heat. shit, he didn’t even get a pan. he leaves the eggs where they are and opens the oven, sorting through the precarious stacks of pots and pans they keep in there until he finds one, but when he brings it up and turns the stove on, he realizes he doesn’t have a spatula. does he even know where those are? does he need a spatula? probably. the pan is non-stick, so he can’t just use a big spoon like his mom would in their older steel pans back home. he gets lost in reminiscing for a little while before coming back to reality. his eggs, he needs to cook them, yeah. he pours them in the pan, pushing the last bits of pepper and meat that get stuck out of the bowl with his fingers, and he freezes after he wipes them on his shirt. the golden shine of egg on his black tee makes him want to crawl out of his skin, for some ungodly reason.
leaving the eggs on what he thinks is a low enough heat (“the middle of the knob, that’s where chanhee cooks dinner at, right?”) he walks back to his room, tugging his shirt off. as he’s rifling through his side of the closet for a new one, he debates whether he wants a shirt or a hoodie. the softness of a hoodie sounds nice, but he’s only just starting to cool down from the house being so warm earlier, and cooking would probably make it worse. whatever, he can roll up the sleeves. he digs a hoodie out from where it had fallen off its hanger and pulls it back on, cringing at the way the static from the fleece makes his hair puff up. he forgets briefly why he’s in here, where he came from before this, and then he smells his eggs, just on this side of starting to burn.
he rushes back out to the kitchen - how long was he in his room? - and finds that he never did get a spatula, but the eggs are smoking a little and there’s a spoon right there on the counter. grabbing it and hoping he doesn’t scrape the pan, he mixes the eggs up, the bottom cooked through, making it one big piece of egg. gross. he turns the stove down a little and lets them cook, going for his phone in his pocket, but he 1.) doesn’t have pockets and 2.) doesn’t have his phone, which is back in his room on the bed. with a grumbly sigh, he stomps back to his room to grab it, snatching it from the blankets and walking back out. the eggs are about done when he gets there, so he scoops them into a bowl and puts the pan in the sink to wash after, taking his bowl to the dining table.
he sits, annoyed and despondent, shoveling overcooked eggs into his mouth, eyes unfocused. he can’t even look at his phone, even though he wants to, needing something to distract himself from the uncomfortable pulse of his heartbeat in his throat. the eggs, while sating his hunger, have only made whatever weird discomfort he’s experiencing get worse, the buzzing in his brain drowning out all other thought and feeling. eventually, he abandons his food, barely half done, and can’t bring himself to take the bowl to the kitchen, so he leaves it on the table and walks back to his room. he pauses by the thermostat, thinking again about how it was off when he got up, but knows he’ll absolutely start to cry if he dwells on it for too long.
he shuffles into the room and closes the door behind him, hoping kevin is going to be able to take the hint when he comes home and not come in. sunwoo falls back into bed and crawls under the covers, dozing off as soon as his head hits the pillow. he doesn’t dream, though he hears crying from somewhere in the dark of his mind as he sleeps. he wants to find it and soothe it, make it stop, anything, but he can’t. he can’t.
———
sunwoo wakes up later, hearing the bustle of people coming into the dorm one by one, pair by pair. he closes his eyes, tries valiantly to sleep again, but it’s useless. he sighs, staring up at the ceiling as he listens to the idle chatter outside, absolutely not wanting to participate, but he has to pee and is going to have to fight to get to the bathroom. sighing again, he sits up and pushes his blankets away, not noticing them falling to the floor with a soft noise. he gets up and shuffles to the door, fighting down the weird feeling of almost heartburn in his chest at the idea of leaving before he does, leaving the door open. it’s right as he gets to the bathroom, one step over the threshold, that he hears a shrill “kim sunwoo!” from the kitchen. closing his eyes, he takes a deep breath and ignores how his stomach lurches, walking to the end of the hall.
standing at the kitchen counter, holding his bowl from earlier in one hand and his pan with burnt egg stuck to it in the other, is chanhee, looking more upset than sunwoo has the capacity to deal with. sunwoo sticks his hands in the pocket of his hoodie and leans against the wall, trying to look impassive.
“mm?” he responds, regretting it as soon as he says it. chanhee narrows his eyes, turning away to scrape the remnants of sunwoo’s food into the trash can before pointedly opening the dishwasher and sticking the bowl inside, perhaps a little harder than necessary. god, sunwoo just wants this to be over. when it looks like chanhee isn’t going to say anything, sunwoo has to speak up again.
“if you have something to tell me, say it, hyung,” he says, jumping slightly at how fast chanhee looks up.
“if i have something to say? what do you have to say for yourself?” chanhee asks, and sunwoo wants the ground to open up and swallow him whole. he had expected annoyance, anger, something like that, but all he hears from chanhee is exasperation. disappointment, looming over him like some horrible titan.
“you’re 22 years old and you never fail to leave a dish or pan or empty container behind when you eat. oh, where’s sunwoo? follow the trail of takeout dishes,” chanhee continues, and sunwoo shuts down. by now, everyone who’d come home is watching the exchange, and it makes something awful turn in sunwoo’s stomach. fuck, fuck, they’re all looking at him or chanhee, like it’s some kind of fucking spectacle; a tennis match, except sunwoo doesn’t have a racket, and he can’t see the ball or the net, just chanhee in startlingly high definition.
“something has to change sometime, sunwoo. doesn’t it make you feel something to know you leave stuff all over the dorm? some kind of regret, anything? do you feel bad about any of it? we can all laugh at how you leave shit around,” i’m not laughing. “but it’s got to stop at some point. it’s not sustainable, it’s rude to everyone else, and quite frankly, i know i'm getting fed up.”
everyone is silent, waiting to see how sunwoo will respond. sunwoo just stands there until chanhee twists up his face and turns to the sink, starting to scrub the pan. everyone else starts to look away and go back to their business right as sunwoo finally finds his voice.
“the a/c was off when i got up,” he says softly, weakly, and chanhee looks over at him, confused.
“what?”
“the a/c was off when i got up.” repeated louder. “we only turn off the a/c when everyone is gone. everyone. even if only one of us is left, we leave it so the last person can turn it off if they want.” sunwoo doesn’t recognize that he’s shaking as he speaks, but he feels the lump in his throat starting to grow, threatening to burst and steal his voice with wracking sobs if he doesn’t talk fast enough.
“sunwoo, i —” chanhee starts, but sunwoo cuts him off, hot tears already tracking down his cheeks.
“you forgot about me,” sunwoo says, voice strained as he tries to keep it together, and it’s directed to everyone this time. he looks around, and they’re all shocked enough that they meet his eyes. they look like this had never occurred to them, like sunwoo expressing himself this way is something they had never expected to happen.
“you f-forgot about me. and you were all — a-all staring like i’m - like this is some kind of fucking carnival attraction. everyone laugh at sunwoo!” he claps as he says it, letting out a bitter, waterlogged laugh that chokes off at the end. chanhee’s left the sink by now, coming around the kitchen table to try to touch sunwoo’s arm, but sunwoo flinches hard enough away that he bumps into someone else, almost falling over.
“n-no,” he all but gurgles, hands clenched hard enough that his nails are going to leave marks in his palms. chanhee looks sad now, regretful, but oh well, he should have fucking thought before he spoke. sunwoo stumbles away, not looking back as he goes to the bathroom finally and slams the door shut, sinking to the floor in front of it, arms resting against the wood. he trembles as he lets out silent sobs, hands knocking into the door from the force of it. he can’t hear a thing over the rushing in his ears, and he’s grateful for it. can’t hear the soft calls outside the door from chanhee, asking to be let in so he can apologize, or the attempts from eric to get in after chanhee leaves. and through it, sunwoo keeps crying. he cries until his head hurts, ugly tears, his face scrunched up in pain and hurt.
he finally gets up when it appears he’s run out of tears and he paws at his face with his hands, looking at the wetness on them. unbidden, a line from some movie springs forward in his mind: there’s water coming out of your eyes, spoken in a little girl’s voice, and it makes him want to crumple all over again. water, anger, sadness, bitterly hateful rage, all came out of him, and more than anything, he wants to put it back. he never meant for anyone to see him that transparently, but something in him snapped and he couldn’t help it. sniffling, he pulls off his hoodie and uses it to wipe his face, tossing it into the hamper. point one for sunwoo the adult. doing adult things. he undresses the rest of the way and gets into the shower, sighing once the hot water hits his aching body. he stays until the water runs cold, and steps out with his face puffy to an absurd degree, eyes tired, and wraps himself in a towel to walk to his room. no one says anything as he walks out, much to his relief. the last thing he wants right now are empty comforting platitudes and apologies he's not ready to accept.
he closes the door behind him and falls into bed, just barely remembering to tug on a pair of shorts in case someone comes in. he’s so worn out he can’t even turn on his bedside lamp, nor can he put up any kind of fuss when the door creaks open and a shadow blocks the hall light.
“sunwoo?” jacob’s soft voice calls, and sunwoo wants to cry all over again. “can we come in?” sunwoo doesn’t even know who the second person in that we is, but he gives a noncommittal grunt, which is enough for jacob and his mystery partner. they walk in, shutting the door behind them, and the bed dips on either side of sunwoo. a hand settles on his back between his shoulder, and then another, lower, both rubbing softly, lovingly. sunwoo shifts, pressing his face into his pillow, arms tucked underneath it and hands clutching it tightly.
“hey,” jacob says, and sunwoo wants to burrow deeper into his bed. “you don’t have to say anything back. just letting you know we’re here.”
“yeah,” comes a second voice, eric’s, and sunwoo swallows down a sob. had it been anyone other than the two of them, sunwoo thinks he might have been okay. he curls up into a tighter ball, not doing anything to show that he heard. the hands on his back still rub soft over his skin, and the feeling makes him want to dissolve.
“i —” sunwoo starts, then closes his mouth with an audible clack of teeth. eric and jacob are content to sit and wait, and it makes it worse.
“am i — dirty?” he eventually asks, and is met with silence initially. he works to keep his breathing even, knowing they’re nor ignoring him. they never would.
“no, baby, you’re not dirty,” jacob says after a moment, moving so he can lie on his side next to sunwoo. “you’re not. you’ve never been dirty. you’re struggling and that doesn’t make you dirty.”
sunwoo does tear up at that, shoving his face into his pillow and fisting the blanket in his hands. jacob presses a kiss to the back of his head, sighing softly.
“chanhee’s sorry,” eric adds in, playing with sunwoo’s hair. “i know you probably don’t wanna hear about him, but he’s sorry. he cried about hurting you when you were in the shower.”
sunwoo takes his time to process that, slowly letting his hands relax. if he were more vindictive, he would have said good. let him be sad. but sunwoo’s not, and he’s able to see chanhee crying for what it is: not an act of manipulation, but remorse. sadness and pain over hurting someone he loves. sunwoo peeks up out of the pillow, puffy eyes looking over to jacob. when he sees that sweet smile, the love meeting his gaze, sunwoo crumbles, an ugly sob wracking his chest as jacob pulls him in. sunwoo tucks his face into jacob’s shoulder and lets his body shake, tears staining jacob’s shirt.
eric moves in closer behind sunwoo, lying down to hold him as well. the warmth eventually helps calm sunwoo, and eventually he stops shaking, sniffling loudly. eric hands him some tissues to clean himself up with, and sunwoo tosses them to his wastebasket when he’s done.
once his face is clean, he lies there completely limp in jacob’s arms, eyes closed, letting himself drift and float.
“you feel better now?” jacob asks, and sunwoo nods lethargically. he’s not magically cured of his problems for the evening; he’s exhausted now, still hungry and a little anxious, but jacob and eric being there for him helped.
“can we get food?” sunwoo asks in return, voice small and weak. jacob kisses his on the nose and eric rubs a hand over his tummy.
“i’ll buy you whatever you want,” eric says, nuzzling at sunwoo’s jaw. “just ask.”
sunwoo feels safe and loved, leagues better than he did this morning. despite how the day has gone, he smiles.