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There are certain things about sovereignty that Renjun knows he could only ever have learned from Lee Jeno and Na Jaemin.
Jeno’s smile, his laugh, the way it’s always Jaemin who can bring it out of him. They are supercharged, bolts of lighting and fire in modest packages, clad in all-black, cheeks a cooler-toned red than the shiny, candy scarlet of Jeno’s dad’s old race car. Jeno’s thirst for danger, Jaemin’s need for it—the former’s dangerous hobby, the latter’s off-the-books job. They become the shadows that they move in, but know not to fear the light. Renjun is their Northern Star, and yet he is the one who feels like he is being guided home.
The nonsensical nature of it all has been thrown straight out the window a long time ago. Renjun goes to private boarding school because his family can afford it, because politics is the family business and he’s expected to play the game, to keep his sights set on the bounties of the country which he is to serve. But even rich kids in high school have a way of finding trouble, and Renjun doesn’t stop Yangyang the first time he sneaks them off school grounds to see a street race—optics and family name be damned. Renjun is dutiful but he is human, after all, and these are meant to be the best days of his life. And in the grand scheme of it all, he’s always had an eye for the corners of free society that his disillusioned counterparts refuse to see.
Renjun is a nephew of the prime minister, the son of his chief of staff. His mother works in the justice system, his sister trains under her. His uncle’s been twice-elected and is halfway through his second term, so for all intents and purposes it’s the only life Renjun has ever known. As far as he is from a true position of power, he’s been proficient at proper behavior as a child and basic diplomacy at eighteen, not a stranger to shaking hands and attending soirées and having the privilege of ballet lessons and art class in the royal courts. There are days that it feels more and more as though there is no one in his life that he really knows beyond the people he sees waving at the cameras on TV, talking to news anchors or sharing pleasantries with the King and Queen. It’s easy to float away into the clouds when one grows up in a family of fantasy-people, Renjun thinks. They never acknowledge the relationship that they have beyond government programs and election campaigns because it’s hard to acknowledge something that barely exists. He’s jaded by the time he starts even trying to discover who he is beyond the clutches of his family name.
The first time he met Jeno was in the stands of a street race, black-haired and stoic and barely even noticing Renjun’s presence beside him. He only ever smiled when he turned to talk to brunette and happy Lee Haechan on the other side of him, and then his expression returned to the default stone-cold as if anything other was nothing more than a programmed response. Renjun had wondered what kind of life could lie behind a face like that, felt a surge of unknown energy that pushed him past the glaring, hard line between them despite how close they’d been pushed together by everyone else in the crowd. Jeno had put an arm around him to give him more space, silent as if he wasn’t sure if he was allowed, but confident as if he’d decided he was going to do it anyway.
Renjun kept sneaking out with Yangyang, going to see Jeno and using the races as an excuse. They barely really spoke, only glanced and touched lightly and if someone chatted Renjun up, it was Haechan—smiley, softhearted Haechan who grew up in the same neighborhood as Jeno but was a bright, sunny contrast to the calm before Jeno’s silent storm. But Renjun learned that Haechan sold flowers with his mother and sisters and Jeno spends his days mowing lawns and babysitting the neighborhood’s kids and when the two of them aren’t dreaming of driving in the races one day, they aren’t such bad boys after all. Renjun’s stomach turns whenever he’s in another tone-deaf social studies class, because night after night he goes out and learns that the people in the deepest badlands of the city aren’t faceless, and the silver-spoon, out of touch trust fund babies that Renjun’s meant to have in his circle cannot even bother to take more than a one-second look, to get to know them beyond their rank in the rest of the 99%. And whenever they do bother to learn their names, they lack the decency to keep them out of their filthy mouths, and Renjun has to shut off the news sometimes because the system is sick and he’s poached the benefits of it his whole life.
Meeting Jaemin was just another side of the same story.
It was one of the rare nights that Jeno came to see a race alone, no Haechan to mediate or lighten the air. Renjun didn’t have the guidebook yet for getting that pretty eyesmile out of Jeno, only feeble attempts at conversation over the noise of roaring engines trying to break through the barrier of the sharpness of Jeno’s gaze and the rest of his features. He seemed to take pity on Renjun when he offered to drive him and Yangyang back to their school or wherever else they wanted to be, but Yangyang so graciously offered Renjun the chance to get him alone and get on the back of Jeno’s definitely too-dangerous motorcycle.
(Renjun told Jeno he wanted to see the city. To really see it, to really know. Arms wrapped around Jeno’s waist, Renjun did. He felt the wind in his face and inhaled all sorts of pollution that have been erased from the history books that romanticize the beauty of their beloved nation. The streets were not so pretty, but they belonged to the people all the same. The same ones who were never faceless, not even invisible—only unseen.)
Jeno took him to a bar they couldn’t even go inside of because they were underage, walked him to the alley in the back and for a second, Renjun actually wondered if it would be the end of his life—but there was no such demise at the darkest corner of the dead end, just this lanky strawberry-blond with a cheshire cat smile. And if Jeno was the devil, it still didn’t make Jaemin an angel—Jeno’s best friend was just the same sharp features in a different form; the way he spoke, the way he laughed, it was sovereign, inviolate, widowy red and dead in the most alive way. All of this, somehow, Renjun could tell just from the look Jaemin gave him while he was taking out some damn trash in the back-alley of the bar, doing his due diligence washing dishes and running errands while he still wasn't eighteen and just being at a bar wasn’t exactly legal. He makes a mean cocktail, Jeno had told Renjun, and Renjun had never felt smaller in his life than when the statement alone made him double over metaphorically in his mind, dazed on just a word and a smirk, drinking his first sip of gin at seventeen that night with two of the most fascinating anomalies he’s ever encountered in his whole life. Jaemin held his hand and stared too dreamily into Renjun’s dilated pupils, like Medusa if she could set skin on fire instead of turning everything to stone, and Jeno went the extra mile to make sure he got home safe, no stumbling home alone and drunk and Renjun thinks it’s borderline black magic how he got from model son and student and everything else to breaking every rule he’s ever known in his life.
It’s difficult to retell every moment of how they fell in love. Of how Renjun fell in love with the two of them. He knows that the first time he ever kissed someone was after a night that he saw Doyoung at a street race—their kingdom’s youngest prince seemingly unabashed and with no care for the fact that he was part of the literal royal family—kissing one of the racers out in the open after a win, looking the happiest Renjun’s ever seen him, worlds away from the stiff, controlled awkwardness they both embody when they make small talk at dinner parties at the royal palace. It was one of the good racers, too, Lee Taeyong with the tight-knit race crew and neon green car who Renjun knows that Jeno (and Haechan) look up to, and it was so strange, almost out-of-this-world, to speak to Doyoung about bigger things in one of these smaller worlds. Because Doyoung, though timid, had always undeniably been more resolute—surer than Renjun of who he was, whether or not it fit the mold he was born into.
If you love someone, then you love them, Renjun. Other things can matter, but they only come after.
(Renjun had no choice but to believe him. Doyoung had that look in his eyes that unmistakably said that he loved Taeyong more than anything in this world. It’s one of those things so obscure, star-crossed and likely born to die, but too indelible and strong for anyone to refute.)
Renjun knew in that moment that he’d want nothing more than for Jeno and Jaemin to see that same intensity when he looks at them, too. It was Jaemin first—kissing Renjun lazily on a street corner, slow and careful and hating the taste of his lip balm but smiling into it anyway. Jeno had kissed them both on another night, in the dimly-lit stairwell of Jaemin’s old apartment building, and the rest was a history better remembered than written.
It was never perfect. Renjun doesn’t remember it to be. But all he knows is this: Jeno and Jaemin bring him things and feelings he’s never known, show him the beauty of all the places that are downtrodden, the vastness of all the intricacies of the world he used to think could fit under the tip of his finger. Loving them, being loved by them, it’s a new level of living that helps Renjun understand who he is just as much as who he isn’t. Jeno and Jaemin are his anchors, keeping Renjun from floating too high up into the clouds because they know they’re made of fragile water and not plush cotton, telling him over and over again that they’d catch him from any height of the heavens but it’s better if he never has to jump or fall. Their words are real, fleshed-out raw, honey dipped and sugar-glazed but sweet still all throughout, laced with affection and love like Renjun’s never known and understood until they showed him. The two of them have steady hands, firm and calloused and mirroring the fact that they are the roughness around the edges of Renjun’s life. They hold him with certainty and care whether they’re walking in the park, spoiling him with greasy but delicious meals at the locally-owned restaurants, or making love to him in some cheap motel or quietly in Jaemin’s bedroom. It’s a dangerous game in hindsight, but now maybe Renjun understands a little bit of what Doyoung feels when he steps into Taeyong’s home territory like it’s his own. Jeno and Jaemin hold the biggest, truest part of his heart, and it’s only with them who can protect it—because they chose to, because they chose him. And choosing to love them was the first in a line of times in Renjun’s life when he finally, finally, starts choosing himself.
Renjun still lives in the closed-off bubble everyone wished he’d stay in. But his school friends are terrible influences and he loves them for it, his heart and his loyalties lie in scattered places that make up the city’s beating heart but are too raw and brash for TV. His boyfriends become less and less of a separate thing, now just lost in what’s theirs like their own sovereign rule. Jeno starts racing with Haechan and stops holding in his laughter when (he thinks) no one’s watching, Jaemin starts tending the bar and stops getting paid under the table for his troubles. Jaemin still loves Renjun and Jeno the loudest, in all his unique ways. Jeno gives all of himself to them both, whether it’s in pieces or fully intact.
And Renjun—regardless of every run-in with uncertainty, sand falling in an infinite but countable hourglass, star-crossed and likely born to die—he had decided long ago that this was his ground zero, the only land for which he’d go to war. There are certain things about sovereignty that Renjun knows he could only ever have learned from Lee Jeno and Na Jaemin—like the infinite, ebony warmth that emanates from people who are more darkness than light and yet somehow still more soul than body, the weight of every word and promise that makes them his, that makes all of this theirs. They are borderless and infinite, and yet impervious to the earthquakes of the outside world.
Jeno and Jaemin love him, love each other. They touch Renjun’s skin like it’s worship and not just nerve endings picking up every miniscule signal. These days, Renjun’s hands shake from holding on instead of holding back, and there is nothing he’d rather be than the stars in each of their colored skies.
Their devotion finds its ways into complete, loving surrender—yet it is a show of sovereignty, an act of power—to love and refuse to know how to lose.