Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In all fairness, most things in Mark’s life already aren’t a matter of choice by the time he meets Donghyuck. 

There’s a plan already laid out for them, all born in a protocol-made, two-party system of a household to grow up in. His name has been chosen and set for him since his parents had first talked about the possibility of a family. His family tree with branches bending under the heavy weight of med school degrees has already freed up a bough for him to sit on with his future bio-something PhD. Even his first steps are bureaucratized, his mom setting out a date as soon as the biological window to go from crawling to walking opens up for Mark’s baby-self—as in an actual fixed date, like Mark’s growth milestones could be arranged and penciled in, with a non-metaphorical red circle drawn around his ninth-month birthday on the kitchen calendar to vouch for it. Camera batteries are left to charge the day before so it can roll for however long it takes for Mark to stand on his own two feet and take a baby-sized leap, everything structured down to the detail. 

The two parties to meddle in between all the papers already signed in Mark’s chosen name are a mere illusion: it’s med school (wink wink) or engineering (still proud of you, sweetie); it’s befriending the kids they’d picked out for him on his own or getting closer to them at play dates arranged for him and them; it’s getting a girlfriend or staying six feet under stacked-up coats inside the closet; a glass half-full or a cup half-empty. 

But the plan was also for him to be named Marc with a C, gone down the drain when the hospital misspelled it in an understaffed-driven rush. 

The plan said May 9th would be the day he took his first ever step, and it technically was, only that it takes place once the camera runs out of battery, when his mom gets up from the floor looking downturned to put it away, and Mark’s feet take him in stumbles to wherever she’s headed right behind her back. 

Mark’s life plan involved making friends with the neighborhood upper class kids, and not the boy a grade below who lives all the way across the city on a two-bedroom rental, and who tag-you’re-its him with a slap to the back so hard Mark ends up in the nurse’s office, with an ice pack to the bruise on his forehead from not breaking his own fall in time. 

The kid comes with him without any teachers' orders to, stays through all of Mark's grimaces when the nurse presses too close to the tender skin, and is the one to hand Mark the pack of ice he had been holding onto since the nurse had pointed to it, hand left a cold-blood white Mark doubts any of the boys from his block would know in feeling.

“Sorry," is the first word he offers Mark when the nurse pokes her head out of the door to answer a knock. He goes up on his tiptoes and then drops back down, an anxious single second gone by before he adds, “You forgive me, right?”

Boys your age usually don’t know their own strength yet, Mark had heard his mom say once, after he had meant to shake someone’s hand and accidentally smacked it red. 

What his mom misses entirely is that boys his age will always be that, no matter how old Mark gets, forever dooming them to self-ignorance in her stance. What Mark himself misses is that some boys seem to be aware of that loophole to puberty, an excuse for growing but never quite in the up sense. What they both don't know then is Donghyuck, both a boy star-crossed to share Mark's age and already well versed on escape clauses. 

“Yeah, we're cool," Mark throws together his best attempt at a smile, and what Donghyuck doesn't know at the time is not just how far his strength goes, but that Mark’s already used to not having a vote.

Then, a nameless almost-teen, he smiles back, crushing Mark under the weight of loose milk teeth and boyish force, gullible enough to believe he's got Mark under his thumb right then. (Which he does, actually. That one takes a week for one of them to learn, a decade and then some for the other one to even notice.)

On his tiptoes and with his neck craned, Donghyuck peeks through the window of the office to the playground where recess is still going on.

"I think they're going to play football," he relays without turning back, before the last ten minutes of apology seeking and nurse role-playing wipe themselves clean from Donghyuck's mind and he asks, "Are you coming?"

Mark's bruise answers for him with a pang, whining loud enough for his brow to scrunch up at the thought of running anywhere until his body quits complaining over scraped hands and the red bump sitting on his eyebrow.

“Next time,” he promises, and prides himself on having sounded convincing enough for Donghyuck to run off without insistence. 

Next time comes regardless a week later, when a hand that doesn’t know just how hard its grip around Mark’s forearm is pulls him away from his friends and towards the corner where a hopscotch court has been reformed by two clumsy football goals drawn on each end.

Boys his age are rough, callous, brutal with matters that aren't to be taken into their own hands but are instead of the heart. He sees girls sit in a circle and reach for each other's hands when confessing something far too embarrassing far too loud, and the next time he's tagged it, Mark chases Donghyuck to the bounds of the playground to tackle him rough, heart-brutal into the ground, and the callous on his hand goes numb under the cold of the ice Donghyuck guilt-trips him into holding up to his battered knee inside the soon to be familiar four walls of the nurse's office. It’s not like Mark has a choice, anyway.

Mark grows up following plans and rules along, and if his word had ever had the chance to be the last, that would have been both the beginning and the end to it. But he also grows up following Donghyuck’s steps, fitting his own footprints to the marks he leaves behind, and where that leads him is—well, not a med degree and a straight white picket fence, for one. 

He takes one step, then the next, and somehow he manages to sidestep all of his life’s pre-arranged schemes until he’s thirteen, shoe landing toe-first on a seventh grade Friday night plan that goes crack under his foot. Before the crush, it used to go Donghyuck can stay over tonight if his parents agree and as long as Johnny is there to fix dinner up for them while we're out. Mark's hearing tin-can-telephones it perfectly to his brain, and yet somehow what it understands is Donghyuck can stay the night as long as they let Donghyuck’s parents know and have every slice of pizza his brother overheats for them before he leaves for the night, his misstep leaving a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, tentative change in semantics to it. 

On his behalf, Donghyuck doesn't seem to care much for plans. At least not Mark's parents', with the way he keeps the landline phone pressed to his ear with his shoulder and pinches his nose into a nasal tone that tries to pass up for Mark's mom's, not getting past the third word before he's telling his own mom on the other side he's kidding, he's kidding, Mark's mom really doesn't have a problem with him sleeping over, she practically insisted, Mark can tell you… Mark, a kick to the leg, tell her. 

Apparently, though, he doesn't care for Mark's either, which try to draw the line at what he knows he could get away with without too much hassle. It got too late and Donghyuck's mom couldn't drive over to pick him up, so I offered him to sleep over in the guest room, and Johnny totally kept an eye on us for the entire night. Dubious, a little far fetched, but it could work.

Cue Donghyuck walking into the bathroom, Mark turning to him after spitting out his mouthwash in the sink to find him holding his for-the-night brand new toothbrush in one hand, and in the other—

"What's with the pillow?" 

Guest room pillow tucked under his chin, Donghyuck bumps his hip into Mark’s to get him to scoot over and leave room for him to drown his brush in toothpaste and hold it under the open faucet. "That room is freezing. I'm sleeping in yours."

Mark isn't sure what part of Donghyuck is freezing. If it's the one that has his skin goosebumpless, the only thing it's showing being a faint summer tan that tells of the warm night weather outside, or the one that rolled the cuffs of the long sleeve shirt Mark had lent him up to his elbows. The one that most likely realized only minutes ago the guest room shares a wall with the supply closet, too, or maybe the one that is straight up bald-face lying. 

“You scared?” Mark jokes.

Donghyuck's response is an immediate pfft that gets toothpaste flying out with it. “Why would I be?”

If the giveaway of Donghyuck's lie is not in the way he won't meet Mark's eye in the mirror, then it's definitely in the offsetting red his otherwise blank canvas of a face gets when Mark says, “Johnny’s story.” 

Donghyuck had made the mistake of looking up at the ceiling that night at the sound of something falling to the ground on the top floor, pizza crust poking out of his mouth when he’d stopped chewing at the thud. With Johnny waiting for his friends to pick him up and seemingly nothing better to do than sit on the other side of the kitchen table and annoy Mark to death, Donghyuck had been made to look back down at the sound of a voice asking, “Wanna know a secret?”

Mark’s eyes had managed to reach the back of his head and come back out in a roll in the time it had taken his brother to make up a drama-filled lie about their house being haunted by the first owner’s housekeeper, sweet old Miss Yebin, who had died in there when the family had left for the holidays and accidentally left her locked inside the house, and now passed the time knocking things over in the supply closet that sat over their heads, where the falling thud had come from. 

Mark had bitten back every childish retort he had been tempted to grant Johnny, like couldn’t she have sneaked out the window instead of, like, dying or did her job bound her to only ever be able to knock down clothes baskets and fabric softener in the afterlife, knowing all it would do would be fueling the fire. 

From his end of the table, Donghyuck had smiled all the while, laughing under Johnny’s hand messing up his hair goodbye at the call of a car’s horn, looking undisturbed by the mock-scary tale with cheeks full of pizza dough and a spike of ruffled hair standing proud on the crown of his head. 

Now, though, Mark takes his chance and bumps Donghyuck’s hip back, wiping his mouth clean with the back of his hand at Donghyuck’s silence before he tries again. “You know, the one about Crying Yebin—“

“Don’t,” Donghyuck starts, brush immediately taken out of his mouth to get pointed at Mark in a warning, and as soon as he realizes how his voice sprung up in something too far along the lines of fear, he turns back to the mirror, downsizing his tone back to a hush, “say her name in front of the mirror.” 

Johnny had taken it as far as time had allowed him to, but he hadn’t said anything about mirrors and the magic of three-timed names said in front of them, Donghyuck applying all known spirit principles on his own. 

“It’s okay if you’re scared,” Mark teases, because he’s found he can do that, and exactly because he's learnt Donghyuck hates it when he pokes him right back. 

“But I’m not.” Donghyuck doesn’t look away from his mouth’s foamy reflection, predictable when it comes to knowing how long it’ll take for him to give in. 

“But you’re not,” Mark nods, fiddling with his family’s toothbrushes inside their cup, rearranging them in fake casualness. “‘Cause Crying Yebin is totally made up.” He gives a lazy one shoulder shrug, going for one more push. “If there had been a Crying Yebin, we—"

“Oh my god, fine. Stop,” Donghyuck cuts him off with his mouth hidden behind a palm, toothbrush stuck between his teeth and words muffled by it, and shoves Mark back until his ass lands on the toilet lid when he laughs loud enough for Yebin and the rest of the empty house to hear. 

Mark stays sat and watches Donghyuck stick his tongue out of his mouth to mercissesly brush it clean. He catches his eye in the mirror, sees Donghyuck's nose scrunched in pretend distaste at holding Mark's attention and the pillow clutched to his chest being rained on with toothpaste foam, and for the first time since Mark waved his parents goodbye from the kitchen window, every thing—not everything, but every-thing, from his mom’s just-checking-up-on-you tenth missed call and his wounded pride at having to lie his way around getting Donghyuck to stick around, down to last week’s failed Chemistry test and even, like, pollution and the world's slow descent into something less green and more unbeloved—seems not to be put back together, but as if it counted with every piece it needed to be screwed and fixed back into place. 

Everything isn't alright, because Mark will still have to spend tomorrow morning trying to get out of the telling off that’ll surely come at the sight of his friend taking a seat at the breakfast table, but then Donghyuck chokes on his gargle of mouthwash and slaps at Mark's arm like he's somehow to blame, and for once every-thing feels like it could be okay. As if he could wake up tomorrow, sneak his way out of a grounding, have a bowl of cereal and then reverse climate change and that whole greenhouse effect thing—or at least this time get the concept of it right in his next Chemistry makeup exam. Like life can suck a little less if he tries, kinda.

Does Donghyuck see him ever—or now, sat criss-cross on top of a closed toilet, zoned out and pulling at the sleeves of a sleep shirt that's hanging by a thread—and think hey, I could probably beat global warming too? 

“Are you taking the bed?” is what Mark asks him instead.

Donghyuck comes up from where he bent down to rinse his mouth, holding Mark's stare this once for a second before his eyes are back to ping-ponging amongst the toothbrushes now arranged in rainbow order inside their holder. "I mean, duh.” 

Donghyuck ends up aggressively patting the free side of the bed when Mark makes to take the floor, leaving them no choice but to knock knees when they face each other's way and to share a pillow after they find out Donghyuck’s has been left sticky with toothpaste. 

In the closeness and the lampshade-dimmed light, Mark finds out the same summer that tanned Donghyuck in places has sunburnt him in others, when what Mark thought was just red skin from Donghyuck spending his time going from feeling too warm to too embarrassed meets the rough of the pillowcase, and his face contorts as if someone had crinkled it up like a paper sheet. 

It's late, and Mark's sleepy and high on the thrill of semantic rule breaking, so the hand that worms and slips between Donghyuck's tender-ridden cheek and the pillow does so easy and nowhere near shy, offering the cool feeling of his palm still cold from having just been under the bathroom faucet. 

“You’re a good hyung,” Donghyuck breaks the silence with, eyes closed and cheek bunching up against Mark’s hand. 

And he is, isn’t he? Mark’s a great friend. He can recall times where he didn’t want to go with Donghyuck’s pull, but he can’t remember ever not giving in anyway. He never questions him—not when he comes out to Mark through a written note only a line away from counting as a letter that he slips inside his backpack at the end of a school day, not when Mark finally gets it out of him that he’s been pushing him away because he doesn’t want it to be weird, ‘cause, hands waved around, you know. All Mark does, then, is wrap an arm around Donghyuck’s neck to anchor him down when he echoes weird how, dude?, like he’s using the word for the first time. 

Sleepovers with friends from his same grade are a constant pivot between have you guys also gotten your dick stuck inside a Gatorade? conversations and one more round of Call of Duty they no longer promise to be the last. Cupping any of their cheeks then—that would be totally super weird. 

Weird would also be not to climb into his own bed at Donghyuck’s call and take note of whether he’s blushing or sunburnt, because there is only one way Mark has known Donghyuck, anyway, and that's this: videogames and dick-stuck-in-places talks, too, but also cat-like affection when he stretches out across Mark's bed and leans into his palm, warm to the touch, a tabby that laid belly up in the sun for too long. 

“My favorite, too,” Donghyuck adds, and Mark finds that there’s nowhere in Donghyuck’s face for him to stare at anymore that’s in any way brand new, and yet he wants to keep going.

He’d never be able to live it down if he pulled something like this with any of his other friends, but he doesn’t think he would ever come close to risk doing so, because none of them look the way Donghyuck does, or have ever made him think he could undo climate change, or, you know, whatever.

Damn. Maybe this is a little weird after all. 

“Say something,” Donghyuck whines when the quiet keeps stretching out, frowning with eyes still shut, tone tinted in embarrassment that falls short enough to still let him beg for Mark’s indulgence. 

“I’m your favorite?" 

“Mhmm.”

“‘Cause I won’t let Yebin get you?” 

Donghyuck turns on his side and stays put with his back to Mark the whole night after that, no matter how hard Mark tries to hold in his laugh or shakes Donghyuck’s shoulder at the call of sorryyyyy. He still curls his fingers around Mark's wrist to keep his palm to his cheek until the early morning, no chance for Mark to choose whether he feels like waking up to a cramp.

And so, Mark grows up having to come up with semantic rearrangements, as well as new ways to avoid his mom's eyes when Donghyuck climbs down the stairs the next morning even after Mark had been told to make sure he got back home the night before. He had been too distracted by the sheets Donghyuck had pulled over their heads then, joysticks having slid somewhere between the mattress and the wall or the foot of Mark's bed, with the Street Fighter menu song playing as the background to Donghyuck admitting a crush on Jaemin—no, really, Jaemin? Na Jaemin? 

"What other Jaemin do we know?" Donghyuck whispers back under the blanket.

Out of all the eighteen years worth of time Donghyuck has had to get himself a crush and for the amount of them Mark has been his friend for, he can't think of a single time he's heard that same name come out of Donghyuck's mouth, telling him just as much when he says, "I don't think I've ever seen you even look at the guy."

Donghyuck doesn’t call him an idiot by word, but the way he groans like the point has jumped right over Mark’s head gets the job done just as well. 

"Exactly. I would probably shit my pants a little if he looked me in the eye." One of Donghyuck’s knees blindly digs into Mark's stomach when he tries to curl into himself, voice going smaller with his mouth smush against the mattress. "Not even like I’m so nervous I need to shit. You know how you can shit yourself when you die? I mean that. Post mortem poop."

Mark's mind gathers what it can about Jaemin from seeing him in hallways and overhearing conversations. A junior just like Donghyuck, quiet most of the time and nonsensical whatever of it there's left, bold and low profile and not really what Mark would have thought Donghyuck's type to be like. Does Donghyuck have a type? Huh. 

"You would shit your pants over Jaemin," Mark sounds out the name, shrugging the words on like a coat to see how well they fit. The answer is not the way he thought they would—definitely oversized over the frame of Donghyuck's personality, which might be slimmer than Jaemin's but undeniably taller, towering over everyone else’s. Very much foreign on Mark's tongue, and a fashion statement to make when worn anyway. “Are you sure you mean Jaemin?"

The dark stares daggers back at him, straight-faced when Donghyuck answers back with his spare patience. “Yeah, I mean Jaemin.”

“Jaemin Jaemin," Mark tries again, and it still doesn't manage to sound quite right. 

“Yeah, Jaemin-Jaemin Jaemin.” Donghyuck makes his way from under the sheets with a grunt, Mark following suit as Donghyuck pushes them down to his hips before his arms flop down by his sides, looking all parts like the poster kid of defeat as he stares up at Mark's bedroom ceiling. “What’s so bad about him? I don't sit around and shit on your taste in girls." 

Mark's taste in girls? Well, he likes them nice. Like Mina, who has mastered how to hold her test answers up to the light for Mark to see from the seat behind hers. Oh, and the fact they always have snacks on them? That’s pretty sweet. At least Mina and her friends do. Boys carry either empty wrappers or a singular squashed Dorito bag at the bottom of their backpacks, and Mark has saved a good chunk of crumpled bills over the years by nicking from her endless supply of rice cakes, so that’s cool. 

They make great friends, too. Girls don’t have him tripping over his own words, don't force him to look at an imaginary point over their eyebrows or his gaze to sit past their shoulders so he won’t have to make eye contact, not quite at the would-shit-myself Donghyuck state of affairs but embarrassingly close to it anyway.

"I'm not judging. Promise." Donghyuck makes a sound Mark doesn't have a word for but can clearly shelve under sarcasm. He crosses his hands over his chest and fixes his eyes on the ceiling where the game’s world map menu plays out in fun-sized shadows, before he has a change of heart and fully crosses his arms from elbow to wrist, swallowing with a sound that Donghyuck can probably hear spelling out nerves. "Uh, but, like… What do you like in guys? Like what do you look for, you know?" 

Mark’s favorite thing about girls might be that they actually know how to keep a secret. Like Mina, who knows exactly what Mark likes and looks for, all kept under the secure lock of pinkies linked together at thirteen.

On the flip side, when he finds a letter in his best friend's handwriting—words floating over the lines and As and Os so round Mark himself could fall inside them—that's been slipped inside his backpack not that long after, Mark feels something bitter at the back of his throat. It's the same thing he feels when he brings Donghyuck in with an arm around his neck and promises him things could never be weird between them. The taste of guilt from knowing he can’t pay back the favor with his own share of honesty, coming up to coat the roof of his mouth and settle between his gums. 

Because girls can keep secrets, but boys? They don’t even know their own strength. They have no clue how little of it it takes to have Mark stumble in place, to break his dam or push his buttons. All they need is a brush of a hand for Mark to come down, and Donghyuck is the prime example of it—a couple years away from becoming of age and yet still a boy through and through, elbow shoved into Mark’s gut when he rolls onto his side with hands palm-to-palm under his cheek before giving a dreamy sigh. “I like blondes.” 

Mark pictures the artificial almost white of Jaemin’s hair, not bothering to look Donghyuck in the eye to give his two cents. “There's no way Jaemin is a natural blonde, dude. That has to be—" 

“Did I say beach blonde? I meant bleach,” he instantly patches up, smiling under the hand Mark splays open over his face to turn it away from him. He’s still grinning at the popcorn ceiling when he picks his answer back up from where he left off. “I don't know. Uhm. Ideally? Smart, but not more than me. Funny. Also not more than me. Someone who won’t back away when I’m all clingy and in their face.” A shrug that plays with the sheet’s wrinkled-up fabric like sand ripples. "I like a bit of push and pull, too. It's boring when it's too easy." 

Mark can't imagine Jaemin bothering to either pull or push at anyone, too comfortable on his own skin to bother with anyone else's. Getting him to look twice at you does seem like it would take some teeth-gritting work, though.

"Also a good stubble," Donghyuck tacks on, scratching at his cheeks with smooth skin rid both of razor burn or shadows. "No babyface, but also no creepy mustache. A solid five o'clock." 

The guys in Donghyuck's class that could come anywhere close to a beard that moves the clock's hands past midday can be counted on the fingers of a hand, and none of them are Jaemin. Seriously, is Donghyuck sure he's got the right dude? 

"You like beards on guys?" Mark frowns along with the words, because Donghyuck must be lying, with nothing more he could have come close to besides teenaged patchy cheeks and barely there peach fuzz. 

He tends to do that—lie for no reason, make up random facts and anecdotes and watch the journey of Mark's eyes going wide before they fall into a scowl once he realizes. But then Donghyuck tilts his neck back to Mark’s side to raise his eyebrows at him, and when he says, "I like the burn," it doesn't sound like a lie.

Then again, Mark wouldn't know. He's never been with patchy, fuzzy boys that could scratch his skin with a kiss, never played with fire long enough to find out whether he could get burnt too, and suddenly he's jealous. Of Donghyuck, for knowing what that's like. Of Jaemin and every blonde guy who hasn't shaved in a week, who knows why even for. And there it is—bitter, climbing up, on the roof of his mouth and between his gums, and suddenly he's guilty. At feeling green over Donghyuck getting to be ordinarily eighteen. At having a pinky promise secret he doesn't know about. 

“You know, one of Jaemin's friends is my lab partner," he ends up letting Donghyuck on, who he can feel squinting at him when he goes quiet right after. 

“Good for you?”

Lips licked, pressed together and then pouted back out, Mark runs out of ways to stall, breaking his speech's lull a word at a time. “And he’s friends with that guy who always makes his birthday parties themed? The one with—Like, you know the guy who looks like—Well, that one. I think it’s this Friday? Or maybe the next one, but this year it’s punk themed, I think, and I'm invited, and Jaemin is gonna be there—I mean, I'm guessing, ‘cause they’re all friends? So if you wanna you could, like, come with? Try your luck?"

“Mark," Donghyuck cuts him off before he can keep rambling, voice slow like he's warning him to take measure of what he'll say next. "I want you to think very carefully. Is it this weekend or next weekend?” 

Mark hums in thought, nowhere near sure when he finally settles on, "Maybe this one?"

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Donghyuck put up a hand and count up the days from Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. 

"I have three days to figure out what I'm gonna wear," he announces, tone not unlike the one fit to announce a death sentence. Mark feels himself be swallowed up in the dark, Donghyuck having thrown the sheets right back over them with a quick tug. "What am I gonna wear?" he says again, this time a question and a whisper.

The rapid-fire picture Mark sees the next moment has someone inside his head—because that surely can't be Mark himself—answer immediately for him. "The ripped jeans with the fishnets underneath?"

The burning-fast image is a mesh of stacked-together prints he's taken over the years of Donghyuck's go-to outfit, nights out usually finding him in something that is far more ripped than jeans, with fishnets peeking through the gaps that leave his skin a gridded red pattern when he twists his legs too far. It's a little too clear in his mind, a bit too detailed of a memory, too zoomed into the bits that make up the denim threads and net-shaped indentations, and Mark is not entirely sure he had to scramble too far down his mind to build that memory back up. 

Mark's second-long silence is carried by Donghyuck breathing in in a noisy fashion that could be anything: a stuffy nose, a nervous hitch, a sneeze that won't come out, an answer to Mark making it known that someone inside his head has been fucking staring at Donghyuck, apparently. 

"It makes your legs look long," he blurts out, only after the fact realizing that's not the best patch to lay over the tear he has poked in their friendship's fabric. “I mean, that’s what you always say, right?" 

He has a wreckeage-like flashback to kneeling by Donghyuck's leg to hold onto the cuff of his jeans so they won't slip out when he tries to tuck them inside his shoes, slipping a finger in between the fishnets' holes so it'll land back on his skin with a slap, and remembers the yelp Donghyuck gives as he finishes tying up his sneakers, the injured patterns and the loose threads, and it's been Mark himself that's been doing the apparent fucking staring, one hundred percent.

Mark swallows hard, same noisy style that could mean anything, with eyes now staring at nothing but darkened shapes that don't look like they make up Donghyuck, even though there's no other logical job for them to be doing then under the sheets, and watches the one shape he had guessed to be Donghyuck’s parted mouth go up at the corner and split up wider into a beam. It’s easy to guess even with the lack of light, because this is the only way Mark knows him: an affectionate, sun-warmed tabby always preening under Mark's attention, a stray cat licking up the milk at his door, however little or spoiled, awwing at Mark’s mess of mouth-to-speech filter with a hand squeezing his cheeks into a pout and a victorious, “You do listen to me. I knew it.” 

Mark’s semantic amends quit being enough, methodology rolled into a ball and basketball-thrown inside a mental bin, and the moment Donghyuck turns around from where he's been ransacking Mark's dresser with a hand-me-down leather jacket that makes him look as if he's wearing shoulder pads, spinning in place and talking about how this would look so good with a sheer top, Mark starts to craft out his own plan under wraps. 

Here it is. Simple, to the point, and a happy ending story for everyone involved: get good enough at what he likes so his parents won’t be able to deny a full ride offer for Computer Science (still high-paying, still stable and with enough numbers to stand far away from arts and unstability) and drown in hoods’ faux fur at the back of the closet he's made himself home in until he’s old enough to not have to text boys ill go get u every time just so they won’t drop by his front door.  

And here's how that one goes really, extremely, and ridiculously poorly: a little before Mark realizes he's been staring at Donghyuck for years and not that long after he's made known he's a good hyung—and someone's favorite at that—with Donghyuck roughly rubbing his palm back and forth over his mouth before asking, "How do I look?"

Mark looks him over, shirt askew over his shoulder and hair standing on ends.

"Like you've been run over," he announces, even with a hand reaching out to roll a tuft of hair between his fingers to make sure it'll stay upright, and Donghyuck beams as if there wasn’t a higher form of compliment Mark could have picked.

Whenever there was a bottle spinning at middle school party games, it somehow managed to never land on Mark, except the one time it did—five minutes ago, to be precise—with Donghyuck sitting right at the other end of it. He had grinned louder than the rush of blood that had sky-rocketed to Mark's face and whatever vowel variation of oooh or ohhh the rest of the seventh grade kids sat in the circle decided to go for when he'd slid on his knees across the room to get to Mark, pulling him up to his feet right after him. 

Five of their seven minutes into their dared Heaven stay, Donghyuck breaks into laughter at the sight Mark must make, hair artificially mussed up at the back like there's been hands running through and a red blob high on his neck from Donghyuck trying to pinch the skin into a hickey.

“No one's gonna buy it," he says, and two minutes later he ends up being right. 

When they leave Jeno's wardrobe and walk back into the room, they are called on the show they try to put on by rolled eyes, a boo with a balled up wrapper that almost lands bull's eye on Mark's eye, and their friends talking so loud over each other they never find out what exactly gave them away, and Mark can’t say he’s a little disappointed no one takes their word for it (I totally kissed Mark’s stupid face. I so did, shut up. Yeah, but Mark’s only gay for me. Dude, I’m telling you—Fine. Mark, a kick to the leg, tell them.)

Their word meaning Donghyuck’s, with Mark’s adlib of uh, I—yeah. Mhmm.

He wishes he could be at least half as disappointed as he was then now, though, when he gets pushed into a bathroom door by his senior year lab partner that asked him to come, Renjun's mouth against his ratifying Mark didn't make up all the side-eyeing in between beakers and Bunsen burners. His own hand is blindly feeling for the door handle, and when it finally finds cold metal under its touch, it takes a couple twists before the wood behind him is moving with his body's push and their joint walk backwards inside the bathroom. He has half a mind to feel around just as blind-sighted for the lightswitch, when he realizes the dark behind his eyelids has been shunned by white, and then someone is calling Renjun's name in a baby-like voice that's only half familiar to Mark.

"You did it. I'm so proud of you," it says, and Renjun pulling away lets him turn around to find two pairs of eyes staring back at him from inside a bathtub. The first of them take a lazy lift down and then back up all of Mark, grin almost shameless on a face he recognizes to be Jaemin’s, telling Renjun with eyes still on Mark, "Okay, I get it now. He's cute." 

A boot from the other person sitting at the opposite end of the bathtub playfully pokes Jaemin's side. "I think your friend called dibs first.” A voice Mark knows like it's his own, and a world-coming-down brand of white noise all he can hear after it turns on him.

A shin showing fishnet skin under the rip of his jeans and thrown over the side of the tub, a lent leather jacket hanging off one shoulder, and a black sheer shirt that looks just as good as promised it would that Tuesday night in Mark’s bedroom—all belonging to Donghyuck, who sits smug in the space Jaemin’s legs have left for him to Teatris-fit himself in. With his head leaning back on the tiles, he’s slightly less idle about it when he looks Mark over, who still has a hand on Renjun’s hips and lips that must look as bruised as they’ve begun to feel, this time no seven minutes spent getting ready to pretend any of it. 

"You,” Donghyuck points a finger his way, eyes going narrow, but Mark’s body has already gone way past haywire to be able to read the comical effect laid all over Donghyuck’s face. Not having been left enough of a time gap for Mark to do all panic had scheduled for him, he’s rushing to get every box off his timetable ticked all at once: heartbeat going ham, thought avalanche the second after, brain cogs already turning to figure out how he can lie his way out of it. 

The accusation quickly turns into a whine, with Donghyuck’s index being replaced with a pout, and a grabby hand already reaching out to bunch up at what it can get of the fabric of Mark’s pants, tugging to get him to stumble closer to him. “You bailed on me over a pretty boy? Shame on you.” 

Through the mind fog still clogging his every thought, Mark’s mind can still argue on his behalf that if anyone had been bailed over a boy, it had been him, with Donghyuck leaving a wet kiss goodbye on his cheek the moment he had found the back of Jaemin’s head making its way to the house’s kitchen. He never gets to say it aloud, because Donghyuck is quicker, patting his lap in rapid come-here motions with a lip jutted out in drunken exaggeration. The sight of it turns the whole of Jaemin’s face somehow even more wicked, imitating Donghyuck when he makes a grab for Renjun’s hand and pulls him forward. "You have years of cute boy bailing to make up for. Get in."

Mark is the one to end up with a lapful of Donghyuck, after he spends all of ten seconds sat atop Donghyuck’s thighs, seemingly too long for the places where his bones poke Donghyuck to be bearable without complaint and the need to switch places. Donghyuck lets his head loll over Mark’s shoulder, legs splayed open and right shin twisted around Mark’s to leave room for the bundle of limbs Renjun and Jaemin make up on the other side, which don’t leave enough space for Mark’s arms to go anywhere else but around Donghyuck’s middle. His heart reels out of place when it beats with boy-unknown strength at the feeling of the elastic from Donghyuck’s thights under Mark’s palm through his shirt, pulse jumping up once more when Donghyuck throws his head back with a laugh at something Renjun says and hits the white ceramic with a thunk. 

Somewhere between the oh my god are you okay that surprise gets out of Mark in one breath and Donghyuck trying to push his hand away from feeling around for a bump on the back of his head, Jaemin and Renjun begin to make their leave, only one of the two left in the room when either of them take notice of the spare room their legs suddenly find to spread out however much they deem enough.  

“Wait,” Donghyuck calls for Renjun before he’s out the door, the hand he extended out in a stop sign moving back to slap Mark’s bicep in little hurrying gestures. “Your number, hyungie. Give him your number.” 

Mark blinks in the effort to understand what exactly Donghyuck wants him to do, and when he’s grabbed by the collar to be shaken into alert, the jerk of it has the first crowd of numbers he can remember rattle out of his mouth, Donghyuck hitting his arm all the while in what’s now either a sign of support or the teasing of Mark’s life, mental fingers crossed in hopes he got it right along with Donghyuck calling after the closing door for Renjun to text him! 

The second it clicks shut behind him, Mark feels the mood begin to turn on its axis until it’s facing away from him, a one eighty turn with every thump of the music’s muffled beat coming from outside the bathroom turning Donghyuck’s muscles a little more rigid than before, now feeling the taut skin of Donghyuck's stomach under the palm where all Mark had been able to focus on up until then was tabby warmth and mesh fabric. 

“I don’t get why you would hide it from me,” Donghyuck tells the shampoo bottle he’s zeroed on, avoiding Mark’s eye only a turn of a head away, still close from where he keeps kneading at an invisible head bump. Panicked scheduled chores have left him with a good handful of excuses (he’s drunk, it was a dare, he’s only trying to figure stuff out, ad infinitum), but Donghyuck goes on before he can narrow it down to one. “I get your parents and your friends and stuff, ‘cause they’re all judgy and shit, but you should have told me.” 

“I wasn't hiding.” It’s out of Mark’s mouth when he’s only begun considering thinking about it twice, both a truth and a lie wrapped up in one, the line telling them apart being the same that divides what parts of it are shame and which plain fear. He buries it all deep under a defensive tone, reflex letting him forget he’s got Donghyuck laid over him and leading him to try and cross his arms over his chest, ending up pressing up Donghyuck’s stomach between vined forearms in a trap-like hug. “And this isn’t about you,” he tacks on, unaware of how he’s managed to get more than a word out at a time so far with the feeling of every one of his brain’s working cells having gone on a strike, and how is his thumb still running circles over the crown of Donghyuck’s head?

“Obviously it isn’t,” Donghyuck huffs, sliding his way out of Mark’s grip, who has his own share of ten seconds of bones digging into him as Donghyuck crawls to the opposite end, letting Mark get a proper look of the frown downturning his face into upset wrinkles and hard lines. “I’m making it about me ‘cause that’s the only way you’ll actually tell me anything. 'Cause you don’t talk to me,” he repeats, shrugging right after as if he can make as little sense of it as the next guy. “Not really. I see you all the time and I tell you everything and you just sit and listen and never share anything with me." He rubs a hand under his nose with a sniff, dry cheeks and brow furrowed no longer tricking Mark into believing his put-together act after these many years. It's already showing in the way his body slumps down, hair musing up with the slide and defeat filling up the tub when he looks into Mark's graphic tee with vacant eyes and admits, "I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” 

Mark's been hiding, Donghyuck has got that right from the get-go, but what of him is there to show, anyway? His life is a folklore tale, already known by everyone else around him and just waiting to be passed down to Mark himself. And that’s that. Nothing left to say on his end.

How is he supposed to speak up when Donghyuck is telling him he decided last night he's not going into the art program he'd had his eye on since freshman year, when Mark took an entire childhood and then some to even begin to tell himself he could, maybe, perhaps, not get the exact same degree he's been non-discreetly encouraged to go for since he learnt how to spell university? How could Mark ever bring up who he's got his eye on when Donghyuck is screaming into a pillow, shameless and loud, how he feels like a scrap of himself around someone else? How is Mark going to tell him he knows Donghyuck’s hurt right then, and still all he can think is those jeans really do make his legs look like they go for miles?

The short version is he couldn't, he's not going to, Mark's not ruining a friendship he can't remember his life before of over the brand new revelation that he likes the way Donghyuck looks when he dresses to impress. The longer version is that he's starting to think he may like more than just that.

“You sound like a girl,” Mark grunts, regret creeping in right after. He stomps on the feeling, ignores his cheeks protesting red in shame and bites on a fingernail as he keeps on in that same non-budging low tone. “Of course you know me. Like, what, you wanna talk about our feelings? Get pedis and—and French braid our hair while we're at it?”

“Like you wouldn't love that,” Donghyuck bites back, and the sight of him then—still fixed on the print running across Mark’s chest, frown far too serious for the inside of a waterless bathtub, messy hair and askew clothes, still looking like a car crash aftermath in the dire, chaotic and going up in smoke sense, in the can't-look-away-from-it kind of meaning—has Mark unexpectedly feeling laughter bubble up in his chest and slowly boil over his mouth, high pitched and silly sounding when he gives into it. 

He notices the need to break into a laugh mirror itself on Donghyuck's cheeks giving into the force of his smile, going away as soon as Mark’s laughter dies down, and then keeps on watching him stay silent, his finger now playing with the net under his jean’s ripped knee. 

Mark doesn’t realize his nail has found its way back between his teeth before he’s speaking around it. "Are you actually mad?" 

Donghyuck gives a single head shake, expression unmoved, and Mark bites down harder until he’s gnawing on skin. "Does your face, like… not know that?" 

Mark looks pathetic. Probably red from a blush that’s going into fever-like shades, showing spit around his mouth from his nervous nail biting and wide-eyed in a way that can do nothing but incite pity. Or at least he assumes he does, given how Donghyuck’s face slackens and softens when he finally glances up at him, a miserable little thing about to lose a fingernail, and after a moment of his sight roaming over Mark he puffs out a tired sigh. 

"I'm not,” he reassures, just pliable enough, and slips his finger under the black mesh to pull up the same way Mark would at his nail. "My gaydar just took a hard hit today. Turns out I couldn't even tell Jaemin's straight as a ruler, so I put myself out there for nothing, and now you..." Donghyuck shrugs as he trails off, and Mark’s nail breaks between his incisors while he tries to come up with something to say, not as good or as quick when dealing with something other than excuses, but there’s already a stiff smile Donghyuck’s eyes take no part in. “Not about me, though, right?" 

A clap to Mark's knee, and then he’s using it to prop himself up and get to his feet, adding one more dirty footprint to the white floor of the bath. "Come on. Let's go."

"Where? Wait, Hyuck, where? Don't just leave—Okay, I'm coming, I'm coming."

"The guy from Atlantis, with the glasses and the—"

"Milo." 

Mark ooohs, a black fingernail pointed at Donghyuck with eyes fully open. “That one.”

Donghyuck had led them out of the house, and then let Google Maps escort them the rest of the way to the nail salon closest and earliest to open, which meant ten blocks on foot and making time to be the first walk-in appointment at a minute past seven, with no way to conceal the smell of beer and stockpiled teens on them nor the look in their eye saying they would kill for a cup of coffee or an unmade bed. 

There’s little to be done about undercuts and middle parts being too short for French braiding, but Mark had to open his big fat mouth to make fun of Donghyuck as if he didn’t know any better, and now there’s no getting out of talking feelings over a pedicure. 

The mani is just because—Look. Donghyuck promised the taste of polish could help him stop biting his nails, and they were already there. Might as well, you know?

Donghyuck sinks a little lower on the cushioned pedicure chair, looking over the nail tech’s work before he turns back to Mark with the loosest grin he has seen on him since they walked into what’s-his-name’s house, eyebrows raised in a gesture ready to tease. “No flesh and blood boys, though? Don’t you like anyone?” 

Something about the way Donghyuck looks at him then, curiosity and eagerness appropriate for a piece of gossip or the last of celebrity drama, has Mark rearranging himself on his seat, as if to prove himself a stare can’t actually pin him down in place even when fixed on him.

“Yeah. It’s just…” His eyes jump around the clear glitter polish on Dongyuck’s hand, the stretch of fishnets that ripped sometime overnight and left a clear gap of skin over his thigh, the way he’s smiling like he means to and not like he just happened to stumble past the chance to raise the his lips, and Mark settles for telling him a half-truth, half-cowardice. “You know him.” 

Donghyuck merely blinks at the words, waiting for a name to drop on his lap just because he asked for it, and Mark only stops himself from kicking his legs out in a tantrum and having to smile tentatively and apologetic to the nail tech at his feet at the very last second.

“Come on,” he cries out the words to drag their consonants out as long as he can afford to, head thrown back against the headrest. “Why do you have to know everything?” 

And there he goes, a feral cat in need of a shower, a couple vaccines, some love, all of that in that order and then more, always baring his claws when Donghyuck—warm, loyal, a craver for Mark’s attention—tries to give him any of it. 

“I don't have to, but it would be nice if you, like, trusted me with stuff.” Donghyuck leans his head back against the headrest, not shying away from Mark’s eyes, which seem to be slowly getting used to housing apologies in them. “Or is that too girly for you?”

Trust Donghyuck. Okay, sure, that’s an easy one. 

Maybe he can trust him with the insignificant, embarrassing detail of Renjun having been his first kiss. Not the one against the door, but the one way before, when the party had started dying down and Mark had been sure the few people left around and capable of looking were no one that mattered enough or was anywhere near sober, and had taken the first chance he'd gotten to lean forward and crash mouth to mouth, a collision of teeth for a second before Renjun had laughed, pulling away and giving Mark a second shot at finesse. Renjun had made it easy, made him feel like he had done nothing wrong even when he had left his amateur signature all over his every attempt, what with his hands pivoting between roaming across the air over Renjun's cheeks and settling over his hip bones in an awkward plier-like grip. 

The intrusive, foulest part of him wonders what it would have been like to have someone complain the second he had knocked his teeth into theirs, someone who had put themselves first and worked Mark's mouth open instead of waiting for him to open up at his own time, someone who had looked like Donghyuck, or maybe who had been him. 

Not someone, but Donghyuck. Donghyuck complaining, Donghyuck working him open, Donghyuck sighing out of his nose at Mark's hands fumbling around and guiding them without breaking away to wherever he'd think fittest—His shoulders? The back of his neck? The pockets of his jeans? Mark's gonna go dizzy.

“I’ll tell you if you can guess it,” he settles for, and Donghyuck’s whole face lights up, his slouch going extinct when he straightens up to lean forward and focus on Mark. (His hips? Low on his back? Oh god.) “Three chances. Not one more."

Donghyuck is ruthless with games, never too good at accepting defeat and with his eye nowhere else but on the prize when there’s one, sometimes even when there isn’t. Right now, he’s risking permanent wrinkles with the way he’s scrunching his face up, every effort put into getting it right. 

“What was that guy you were—Oh! Renjun.” His face turns one way and then the other to look around right after, volume having climbed up loud enough for him to go bashful, and then inches as close to Mark as he can afford to in his seat, repeating now hushed, “Renjun?”

“Not Renjun,” Mark is fast to deny, no polish on the inside of his cheek to stop him from biting at it when Donghyuck stares up at the ceiling like he’s doing mental calc, names being run through his mind’s filter.

“Is it Jaemin?” he wonders through a squint. “Is that why you were so weird about me—?”

“No, man. Like seriously, no.” Mark takes up a glum look at breakneck speed, genuine at considering the thought of ridiculous. When Donghyuck laughs at the chance of pace, though, he dials his indignation all the way up, hoping the happy sound Mark’s getting in return for it keeps climbing up higher, with no restraint to make him come back down. “I promise you you’re the only person that would ever shit his pants over Jaemin. Get help.” 

His mom is waiting up for him when he gets home, having bathed on Donghyuck’s cologne to drown out the beer, forcing his eyes to stay open not to show he’s dying for caffeine and a mattress, and with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets to keep away shiny black nails. What he doesn’t account for is the string of texts showing on her phone screen somehow calling Mark by name, and then he remembers hyungie, your number, give him your number and him spitting out the first memorized string of numbers he came across in his head—evidently not his. 

“I got it," Donghyuck smiles with forty minutes to go until then with a jackpot look to him, always the cat to get the cream. "Trick question. You actually don’t have a crush.” 

Donghyuck isn’t just not that good at admitting defeat. He’s the actual worst, and Mark likes it. Likes the way he looks when he loses and when he wins, the way he dresses to impress and the way he dresses to blend in, definitely likes way, way more than just that. Mark likes him enough to let him have this, enough to remain choiceless. 

He doesn’t say anything back, but he smiles like he’s been caught red-handed, and Donghyuck reads it on his face native-language-quick. 

“Guess you were right. I know you too well,” he declares, sighing like it can't be helped. “It’s a curse.” 

Mark's projected twenty year stay in the closet goes to shit, and yet, somehow, the world doesn't end after that. See? Told you so.

Mhmm. Sure. Anyway. If anyone cares to know, he does at least get the Computer Science bit done. So he isn’t a complete failure. Just half of one.

"Ha ha. Very funny,” Mark deadpans, voice not needing to raise too high to be heard across the one bedroom apartment, and sets down on the floor the last box he had left to haul up, a shabby cardboard thing keeping half of his kitchenware’s worth by the power of endless magic tape. Through the small sea of other just as tattered, taped-together boxes filling up the already small space, he looks up to where Donghyuck’s voice had come from, only to meet the sight of two white socks sticking out from the space between the bed and the wall. “Are you even gonna help?” 

On his own, Mark could have probably fit these boxes in the back of a taxi, few enough to have gotten the trip upstairs over and done with in a couple minutes and with a nice enough tip for holding the driver back. Unboxing might take him an afternoon and half a night, tops. All that said, Jeno offering up his car is more than welcome, driving him from his family house to his new place quicker and cheaper than any potentially overtipped taxi driver could have, a room-sized living space closer to the university he’s weeks away from walking into Monday through Friday, and all his to decorate with reheated leftovers splatter stains and clog with the smell of deodorant and seven-day-old sheets. 

Donghyuck joining in is more than expected, as wanted as Jeno’s self-invitation, and pretty much useless when put to work, his input being carrying up the one flight of stairs Mark’s bedside lamp and plugging it on before dropping star-fish shaped onto the carpeted floor, the one he’s calling Mark over from right then. 

“Come here.” A hand peeks up meerkat style from behind the bare mattress, waved in the air a motion prompting Mark closer, before soundlessly clicking its fingers together in a less human-meant come over gesture. “Pspspsps. Here, Markie Markie.”

Mark looks over at the front door, left wide open for Jeno to come through with the last of Mark’s things after making sure it’s really the last of them and locking up his car, and pads over at no other better prospect of passing the time than indulging Donghyuck. 

Rounding the bed, Mark stops when his shoes bump with a shoulder, bending at the waist until his fringe flops out of his range of vision from how far he’s leaning over Donghyuck. "What?" 

"Huh." Donghyuck tilts his head, furrowed brows like he’s found something out of place in Mark’s face. "Thought you'd have gotten rid of it by now."

Mark blinks. “Of what?”

“The stick up your ass.” Donghyuck’s smile only has Mark's face fall even harder than it meant to, and at the look of it Donghyuck pulls on his sleeve until he gives in, Mark making himself fit between the wall and Donghyuck's side as he gets told to lighten up, hyungie. 

Mark makes his most honest, best attempt at it: It’s his first day officially living on his own. He saved up like five thousand won on taxi tipping. In between plugging on the lamp and lying down on the floor, Donghyuck zipped open one of the bags holding Mark’s winter clothes hostage and shrugged on a Save The Bees hoodie he’s not sure he’ll get to ask back for, sleeves stretched out and smelling like week-old bedsheets and spray deodorant. The world didn't end, kind of. It got a whole lot more awkward and a bit harder to navigate through, but he still gets that day’s dinner ready for him on a Tupperware and the ghost feeling of dried spit from a goodbye cheek kiss that was a little too loving, as if Mark wouldn’t probably be dropping by in a couple days’ time. 

“How aren’t you losing your mind right now? If I were you you wouldn't be able to get me to shut up," Donghyuck swears. The most he gets in answer to it is Mark shimmying in place to make himself comfortable, who tries to say back I already can't get you to shut up, too caught up to get it out with thinking that, facts and logic-wise, the world is very much still spinning on its axis no doubt—but then why doesn't it feel like it?

Silence never being enough of a reaction to Donghyuck’s taste, he takes hold of Mark’s shoulder after a second to shake him around. "Come on, aren’t you excited?" 

Of course I am, he thinks. 

"I didn't think I'd make it,” he confesses in place, words unprompted and tone self-assured, as if he couldn't mean just about anything by making it. 

He only catches on when Donghyuck’s hands cut off mid-shake, neck stretching up Mark's way to be eye to eye, gaze curious in its concern and waiting in breath-held quiet, like exhaling too hard could set off the moment.

"Not like that,” Mark mends up, a hand shooing whatever’s made the air thicker away, and now he’s rushing through an explanation, as if afraid Donghyuck might hold his breath until he goes red all over. "I just didn't think I would get to this part of life, you know? Like I would never be able to, like, level up or whatever, and I would be stuck living on a loop, sort of, and all I would get to know was high school and my family house and the five blocks between them. Does that make sense? I mean, yeah, I don't know," he tries to downplay it at the end, conviction fizzling out the longer he holds Donghyuck’s stare.

The world used to be ticking all the boxes in the premade list of Things You Should Achieve In Life he’d been handed down, bureaucratic and protocolized. Kids can be given the benefit of leaving a square or two unchecked, like giving a tweak to the semantics of their parents’ rules to get them technical permissions for sleepovers, all bearable as long as the important ones—the ones in fountain pen and rounded cursive at the end of the list—were still there for their coming-of-age’s self to tick them off one by one. 

Mark feels like he had uncapped his pen, put the tip of it down to the page, and then been elbowed into having the point skid off the page and leave a blotch of ink in its wake, coming home at eighteen with glossy nails and the image of his best friends’ skin through mesh and jean to give explanations no one ever buys. Overtime, Mark gets used to words like phase and you’ll figure it out, and is allowed to write his own to-do list for his own life under begrudging eyes. 

But, well—Mark actually didn't mind the way of things, choiceless and all. He kinda liked it, even, having every expectation read out to him and knowing he was building up someone else’s pride brick by brick with every thing he did right. Of course I’m doing med, mom, and I just haven’t met anyone yet, dad, and what's his excuse now? 

Donghyuck’s hand slides over his then, drawing Mark’s eye down to them just in time to see Donghyuck’s palm fitting itself to Mark’s and vining its fingers wherever they can find the place to make their way round: some the circle of Mark’s wrist, others the spaces between his fingers that don’t clamp shut at the sudden feeling of something warm that grips at his knuckles with more strength than probably known.

"Whatever. You did it. Fourteen year old you can go fuck himself," he says with a squeeze, the certainty in it leaving no room for doubt, and Mark hopes Donghyuck can’t feel the pick up of his heartbeat through the fingers he’s got pressed to the vein on Mark’s wrist.

"You leveled up. Welcome to paying rent and working part time and never having anything in your fridge,” Donghyuck lists on and on, as if he had ever lived through any of it, and Mark thinks he could, maybe. Live through it, he means, right there with him. 

All he’d have to do is ask, he thinks, reasoning going naive at the thought of Donghyuck giving in—even when a year younger and on a gap year and probably cities away from where Mark’s mind is at right then, completely unaware he’s part of every other bullet point in Mark’s Things To Achieve. Of Donghyuck’s own boxed kitchenware sitting besides Mark’s, and going through their duplicates in arguments over whose to keep that Mark would uphold even while knowing his would always be the ones to go back to the box. All Donghyuck would need to do is open a drawer to shrug Mark’s sweaters on and brand them with crinkles from always shoving the sleeves up to his elbows and wearing it to sleep in autumn naps and winter nights, and how is Mark supposed to hold himself back from thinking the world could come down any moment now when he’s stuck on a loop of Donghyuck getting him like this—unreasonable and naive, gone enough to zone out from front doors left wide open and steps coming up the stairs and Donghyuck's own voice drawing words on and on? 

“—and you still get to listen to me talk all the time—"

It can be as simple as that, Mark thinks. Press the movie-like red button that would blow the entire world up just like that. Level up. Tick off the box reading tell him right now. 

“—but now over very serious grown up stuff.”

Donghyuck’s hand is still wrapped up in his, and Mark remembers lying like this, under sheets and for years, face to face with Donghyuck letting him in on everyone that reduced him from all-teeth grinning confidence to a curled up, timid version of himself. Mark could finally pay him back in honesty, give him three new attempts at guessing it right. 

“Serious grown up stuff,” Mark echoes instead. His free hand goes for his jeans’ back pocket to get his phone, holding it up to his ear before he turns his face back up to the ceiling and tries to get his voice Donghyuck-pitched, nailing the higher part but failing at going sweeter. "Hey, I just sent you a pic. Open it. Okay, can you see my ass in those shorts? You can? Good." 

Mark's worm’s-eye view of the apartment's ceiling is interrupted by a face popping into his field of vision, with Donghyuck letting go of his hold on Mark to trap his wrists over his head, climbing over him and pushing him back onto the floor boyish-rough and heart-brutal, strength entirely unknown and at the threat of, “I will literally cut you.” 

He doesn’t get to make good on it thanks to Jeno’s timing, door shutting behind him and the last of the bags put down by the entrance before he decides to indulge Mark’s squeals asking for help, getting Donghyuck off him with some effort. 

In Jeno’s hold, he grins toothy and confident and nothing like last year’s Jaemin-induced shame, but when he finds Mark’s eye and turns into a close lipped thing that gets sweetness just right, Mark allows himself to think for the first time maybe there’s a chance.  

Maybe not.

“It’s not that bad. It's just a little… Brief.” 

"What’s brief and not that bad?" Mark interrupts, voice coming along with the sound of a coffee cup being set down and the chair next to Donghyuck’s being pulled out. 

Crossed arms draped over a coffeeshop's table and face tucked on the inside of his elbows, Donghyuck doesn't bother shaking off the miserable line to his shoulders to at least act startled, or even greet him back, like Renjun's bare-minimum hey talked inside his cup or Jaemin's smile from the other side of the table. 

What he does is whine, high and a little too loud for a rush-hour crowded public place, scrambling to lift his face up from where it was trying to blend into one with the table. Mark can only make out Donghyuck's cheeks looking misleadingly sleepy-red, before he's ducking behind Mark's back the second his friend's butt meets the wooden seat.

"Sex," Jaemin answers, and now that Mark has known him past hallway glances and secondhand gossip for some time, he can’t say he doesn’t get why Donghyuck used to go tounge-tied around him, what with the forever-there grin and the impression that he somehow, someway knows everything. 

"Not in general. Just Hyuck's," he clarifies, showing Exhibit A of how far his smile can stretch out when he sees Donghyuck double up even further at the word, with hands blindly gripping at Mark's shoulders to push him forward in his seat and closer to the enemy line, because he's obviously being put to use as a makeshift shield to take Jaemin's next snitching shot. "The guy he's seeing comes in record time, apparently." 

Renjun stops shaking the leftover ice in his plastic cup to point a finger to what's left of Donghyuck that can't fit between Mark's back and the seatrest. "Hey, he's right. At least you're fucking a world champion."

Donghyuck's fingers tense up around bunched up fistfuls of Mark's jacket, their friends' mouths moving too quick for Mark to do much else other than open his own and move his jaw along to words that don't get to make it out.

"Wait, what happens if you ask for a quickie?" Jaemin's face takes on a frown, genuine curiosity offset by Renjun having to press his mouth to his shoulder in order to white out the evidence of the laugh he’s holding back. "Does it change anything? I mean, how long—" 

"I’m getting a refill. Does anyone want a refill?" Donghyuck talks over him with a scratch of metal over commercial tile, coming out of his hiding place with his feet sliding him away from the table one moment and getting him up on them the next, body and mind in a hurry.

He has snatched his cup off the table when Renjun's arm stretches out towards him to offer up his own. "Please.”

Donghyuck’s eyes keep themselves low on the black pen scribble of Renjun’s name across the transparent cup, intention clear on making the grab for it bandaid-rip quick, but Renjun’s hold around it tightens just when Donghyuck’s fingers curl over his own, holding him back to bat his eyelashes at him in fake curiosity. “You’re getting instant, right? Heard it's quicker.”

A third set of fingers get hold of the coffee cup around its rim, Mark sliding it off both Donghyuck's and Renjun's grip with a tug up. 

“I’ll go with you," he offers, trying to stand in the way of whatever Donghyuck had probably planned to fire back with, a needless intervention going by the way he has already turned on his heel, Mark falling into step after he flips off Jaemin's highly mature kissy noises.

They stand by the counter as they wait for their drinks in quiet, Mark sparing a look Donghyuck's way for every time he goes up on his tiptoes and drops back down with a swing, and every time finding him with his chin tucked to his chest and face deep in hiding inside his coat’s hood. Up, down one more time, and by the fourth time Mark's soles hit the ground, he clears his throat before he can help himself. 

"So a world champion?”

No ice breaking from that hit to silence, he looks away from the worker getting Renjun's sugar-coma of a drink started and bends his knees to look for Donghyuck’s eye, made near impossible with all the spandex cotton in between them. Still halfway crouching in the air, he hooks a finger inside Donghyuck's hood and moves it out of the way, and there he is, in all his grumpy, blushing glory.

"I'm not teasing," Mark promises with voice edges softened, smiling big against the weary look Donghyuck gives him.

"You are," he narrows his eyes at him, calling Mark out, who only tries to keep up the act for one selfish second. 

"A little," Mark grants him afterwards, nose scrunched as if he couldn't help it. He watches some of the tension seep out of Donghyuck, then, stance falling into something slightly less guarded, almost like he's only now realizing it's just Mark and him (and Employee of the Month Chaewon, and the two other customers in the queue, and maybe the couple from the closest table if they have good, healthy hearing—just no one that could both judge him and have it matter at the same time). 

"He's nice. Like actually super nice?" It comes out as if Donghyuck had found a way to pronounce question marks out loud, the disbelief on it fitting almost awkwardly on his mouth. “You of all people know I usually don’t like them nice. So this is definitely, uhm, a first,” he admits against his will, rubbing a hand down his cheek in an effort not to shy away now that he's dug himself this far in.

He's right, anyway. Donghyuck has liked I-had-a-though-childhood guys and I-promise-I'll-break-up-with-my-girlfriend assholes and whatever the hell Jaemin is, but never anyone reasonably nice. Mark is only seventy percent doubtful of how high his bar is this time around.

"I think I like him and everything," Donghyuck sighs, like the thought of it alone is a burden, and brings his other hand up to keep both of his palms pressed over his eyes. "But—I don't know," he shrugs. "It sucks."

Seventy percent doubt implies there’s thirty percent of Mark who trusts that this dude may actually fit in some shape or form into the plain nice category. It may not be the best he can get, but it's the least Donghyuck deserves. 

"You gotta see the positive, you know?” Mark bumps Donghyuck’s hip with his, getting him to turn Mark’s way. “Maybe you're just so hot he can't handle it and—"

Donghyuck shoves his arm hard enough for Mark’s balance to get lost, but when he stumbles back to his side, Donghyuck is brushing his fingers through his hair to finally slide the hood off from over his face at once, a smile showing up uninvited on his mouth and trying to be kept under tight-lipped control.

Mark stands the quiet for the next while, going up on his tiptoes again while Donghyuck purposelessly scans through the coffee menu over their heads.

"Would it be too mean to ghost him over a shitty first time?" he speaks up with his eyes on the list of iced drinks. 

Mark drops back on his heels. "You like him and everything?" 

He goes back up, sees Donghyuck’s confidence bar go from full to half-empty in his opening and closing mouth, and hears him settle for, "Kinda.”

His shoes make a squeaky, attention-drawing sound the last time he comes down, the drop hard and heavy on his bones. Menu options run out of, Donghyuck has moved onto the display of baked goods, lip caught between his teeth and fingers webbing through a loose thread of his cuff, and the minute Mark can get a full name out of Donghyuck he’s stalking this dude’s Instagram to hell and back. 

"You’ll figure it out," he assures him, brushing the hair Donghyuck’s hood left standing up back to their middle-part assigned sides.

Donghyuck’s fringe falls down his forehead and past his eyebrows, clashing with lashes when he tries to blink it out of sight, and Mark stares the only way he’s ever known how to: pretending it’s someone else doing all the work, a stranger inside his mind zeroing in on the line of Donghyuck’s neck when he throws his head back and to the side in a pretend complaint of, "But I'm just so attractive.”

"You are though," Mark agrees easily, and the lack of a fight being put up has Donghyuck resorting back to a red face and a chin screwed to his chest.  

Mark has to go up to the counter when their coffees are called out and Donghyuck’s face won’t lift itself up from its place. He lets Donghyuck’s blush keep on being blamed on his sex life being turned into gossip when they’re back at the table, and when he tilts his phone screen mid conversation for Mark to proofread a text asking Shitty First Time when they can see each other again. 

The thing about chances: You take them or you leave them. Mark takes the phone from his hand, words something in a cuter way, adds a kissy face at the end, and hits send before Donghyuck can back out—a chance taken and one left behind. 

Artificial lighting has been tricking Mark into thinking there’s still hours to go until bedtime, it turns out, his lock screen reading out loud and clear a 02:13 a.m back to him that does nothing to stop his eyelids from growing heavier. A long blink turns into his eyes staying closed for a second, then two, and only by number six do they open back up, the weak sound of a slap drawing him out from falling asleep sitting up.

Criss-cross in front of him, Donghyuck is talking low, voice sped down by sleep. “Come on,” are the first words Mark understands, murmurs beginning to make sense just when Donghyuck pats his cheeks one more time. “Sexy lawyer who smells like Coco Chanel.”  

The bed dips under his weight when Mark leans back against the wall, forcing his eyes to stay open with reality going from hazy figures to sharp lines, worth the burn in every white space where his eyelids can’t reach if only for this. 

“Sexy lawyer who smells like Chanel and vacays in Dubai,” Donghyuck tells himself, self-encouragement not to give up on his late night cramming backed up by his knuckles rubbing over the lowlands of his eyes. His legs uncurl and spread out over his first-year copies and the rainbow of highlighters scattered over Mark’s duvet with toes at Mark’s knee level, pen caps poking into his thigh and making a book pile come undone with the motion. “Sexy lawyer who wears animal print blazers to court,” is his next mantra, looking like its mismatched counterpart dressed in overworn sportswear everything, Nike’s swoosh on his knee-high socks and stretched-out shorts a fantasy away from Donghyuck’s Legally Blonde handcrafted future. 

Mark’s hearing abandons him for a second when his mouth decides to open wide and his eyes to screw shut, welcoming him back the second it sorts itself out with Donghyuck scolding him for daring to show signs of life.

“No no no no. No yawning. Wake up.” Donghyuck’s fingers click together in front of his face, going for literal in their attempt to snap Mark awake. His face is closer than Mark remembered it being when his eyes are coerced open a second time, Donghyuck's hand propping him forward as it sinks into the mattress. 

Heat wave sweat has Donghyuck's shirt stuck to his back in Dalmatian spots, overheated skin looking as if anything that could come in contact with it might stick to it like a post-it, and Donghyuck takes Mark's eyes going half-lidded to trace the flush across Donghyuck's face as him falling back asleep instead. It earns Mark a loud, single clap right by the tip of his nose, working perectly as a clapperboard for Mark's daydreaming. 

“Hey. Hey, think sexy web developer," Donghyuck tries, and it takes Mark a moment for the words to go through his sense mechanics, snorting the next second at the desparate attempt to keep him alert.

“Sexy web developer who doesn't have to use someone else’s Disney Plus," he nods along, the way you do when encouraging a little kid or a pet to do something on their own the moment they turn back your way for guidance. A hand goes to his knee, giving it a small shake as he adds, “Sexy web nerd who can buy all the weird collectible guitar picks he wants.” 

Donghyuck protests all through Mark's next yawn, who's got a hand still covering his open mouth when he admits, “I don’t wanna be sexy.”

His other hand coming down to the mattress, Donghyuck hogs the remaining curves of Mark's personal bubble that were left to pop, leaning forward with legs open warm-up-like and upper body all up in Mark's space.

“What do you want to be then?” he wonders, and it's Mark's drowsy mistake to think Donghyuck is actually curious right there and then.

Donghyuck is shiny and sticky to the eye this late and in this heat, split ends clinging to his forehead and a little blue under the eyes, surrounded by books Mark finds out for the first time at Donghyuck's 1:37 a.m, day-before-exam breakdown that he deems he's too dumb for, that he thinks he should have stuck to piano, taken that stupid art program he was already stupid perfect for and probably would have been stupidly successful at.

Mark bites his tongue, then, and hears Donghyuck slap himself into focus, come on, think Chanel, think Dubai, as he chews back down the need to tell him these are all just sewed-together sets of pages on rights and pledges, and he's been made for things taller in size than a library's Con Law shelf and wider in purpose than piling dust on hardcovers, that he can smell as expensive as he wants or fly to whatever island he wishes for, that he was made to be—

“Happy,” Mark answers, head curving up against the wall, dry eyes drinking up the sight of Donghyuck scrunching up his nose in cringe in one draining swig. 

“Lame." Donghyuck falls on his side, shirt riding up over his waist at the awkward bend of his body.

Mark shrugs, tilting his head so he'll be able to hold Donghyuck's eye through the change in angle. “It’s my fantasy.” 

Cheek to the covers of Mark's bed, Donghyuck's stare grips Mark's back with a squeeze, only looking at him in a quiet that wasn't made pliant enough to be stretched out this long. Long enough for Mark to notice Donghyuck’s eyes are a little wobbly on their trail over his face, lingering at lands prone to shake and tremble—Mark's chin, his cheeks, his mouth and the roundabout between them—and slopes you can risk slipping off—the drop of sweat running a race down the side of his face and the clammy skin of his Cupid's bow. For Donghyuck to wet dry lips and track if Mark's gaze is just as rocky on its feet as his. Enough to be reading Mark's mind at this point, most likely, and reaching the lines in Mark's head that tell of him wanting to crawl on all fours over Donghyuck, twist all the wrong ways over the senseless side-bend of his body and fit his face to the crook of his neck, sticky skin to sticky skin and all. 

“Sexy lame web developer who can come to Dubai with me?” Donghyuck asks, this time a question like a proposition, gentle as if letting him in on a secret, before he makes a reluctant face he isn't good enough of an actor to hide his smile for, adding on, “And be happy.”

And Mark takes long enough to be back to thinking maybe. 

The thing about chances: You can get second ones. 

“Sexy constitutional articles first," he taps a book's cover with a finger, and the he moment is cut through, a new one in the works with Donghyuck groaning and tugging Mark's bed cover off to hide under them, blanket-burritoing himself to escape Mark's laugh asking him to go over them one more time, for Coco. 

At some point, Mark starts losing track of them. 

He’s never been good with names, but the trail of one-offs and technical-heartbreak Donghyuck starts leaving behind manages to make it worse. Physical traits or time frames as personal coordinates—e.g. Yangyang, the one from Donghyuck’s Torts class he manifested into being part of his group project, went out with two whole months, smelled super nice—can only work for so long, Mark’s pea-sized memory not holding up to the challenge when Donghyuck brings them up in conversation and Mark has to be quick on his feet. 

It turns out to be easier to scrape their names and faces all together, and instead file them down next to Mark’s Donghyuck-fitting Pick Me Ups. Everything's better when you turn it into a list. 

#1. Shitty First Time's name? No clue. All Mark remembers of him is the grocery store ice cream tub Donghyuck is too upset to wait for them to break open at Mark's place, after being stood up on the same date the text with Mark's bold, dumb kissy face at the end had earned him back then.

Baskin Robbins container taken out of its plastic bag, Donghyuck angles the chocolate ice cream closer to the sun coming from the bus seat's window, frowning down at it as if it being freezing cold wasn't how it's supposed to be. 

"Fuck him. He's missing out," Mark attempts to offer Donghyuck the same brand of sympathy he tends to offer him, which Mark likes to think of as fuck the world comfort. Somehow, it always works without fail.

The plastic spoon he's blowing his hot breath on to help it break the surface quicker takes one, two more breaths out of him, and then Mark tries to have it shove its way inside the ice cream. "I'm sure you gave your everything for every single one of those twenty seconds, anyway." 

The teasing is forgiven by the spoonful pressed to his lips right after, Donghyuck looking back in wordless quiet before Mark taps his lip again with the white plastic.

"Yeah, fuck him," Donghyuck slowly gains on conviction, hands going around Mark's wrist to keep it still on the moving bus before closing his lips around the spoon he's still holding. Mark definitely isn't going to be kept up that night by the sheer image, and when he ews at Donghyuck licking off a trail of melting ice cream from the side of Mark's hand without letting go of his hold on him, he totally means it.

"I'm smart. I'm hot." His tongue goes up and under his mouth to check for leftover stains. "I can make a mean rice cake soup, too." Mark nods. He would know. "And I can have sex longer than a fart."

Mark laughs loud and unrestrained, the way he would usually have gotten shushed for a second into it, but Donghyuck smiles at him with every tooth he has, and indulges him when he stretches the joke on and on. Mark feels thirteen-year-old stupid and carries a bellyache home from the nth variation of a fart sex joke Donghyuck makes through a brainfreezing bite of ice cream. 

#3. Mark can pinpoint Torts Class guy (See? He’s already forgotten the name) thanks to the movie tickets Donghyuck got for the two of them before things fell through, which means an impromptu popcorn flick Mark’s roped into that same morning. 

“You got salty.” Donghyuck’s jaw pauses midway through his first bite, looking away from the pre-movie trailer, down at the bag of popcorn on his lap and up at Mark’s side profile, still fixed on the Pixar movie bits and pieces playing on the wide screen. “You know I like sweet popcorn. Not salty.”

“Sorry. Forgot,” Mark lies with his own mouthful tucked on his cheek, chewing noisily through Donghyuck’s complains of how he only had to do one thing and why do you sound like you’re eating rocks.

“Better?” he asks a minute later, Donghyuck’s monologue reaching its end as the lights go down, and doesn’t wait for the yes he knows isn’t coming before he’s switching the popcorn bag on his own hands for Donghyuck’s, never breaking away from the queue of company logos playing out big and bright. 

There’s silence for the moment it probably takes Donghyuck’s eyes to adjust to the dark and see the caramel tint inside the bag, a tentative sniff, an even more tentative munch, and finally a threat of, “Do that to me one more time and I’ll actually end you.” 

Ten minutes in he’s got his head on Mark’s shoulder, though, so Mark takes that one with a grain of unwanted salt. 

#6. Some bartender dude. An entire month where every time they go out and someone orders an Old Fashioned, Donghyuck, without fail, gets teary eyed. Mark doesn't get to go to a bar for all of July. 

#8. Famous Idol Look-Alike = the amusement park where Mark runs out of kid-tame rides they can go on to successfully avoid roller coasters. 

#9. You’re Never Gonna Believe This guy. Mark remembers him from—Well. Not actually believing it. 

“You’re never gonna believe this,” Donghyuck’s voice greets him through his earphones, then, with Mark’s feet over the yellow line of the subway station, leaning out into the tracks to take a peek, instead of checking the screens behind him that read out 0 min left for the next train. 

Mark’s eyes narrow until they find two headlights breaking through the dark, stepping back in time. “What?”

“First thing. Jeno asked me out. Last night, when we—”

Mark can’t be entirely sure if he stops hearing Donghyuck when the subway zooms by, every mechanic clack and electric white noise leaving his ears numb to Donghyuck’s suddenly lovesick tone, or if he the one to cut him short, when whatever muscle or bone that got cold feet gets over its stage fright and lets him ask, “Wait. Jeno Jeno?"

Donghyuck laughs. Not the mocking, about-to-call-him-dumb sort, but the one that’s too lost in the feeling to bother with Mark being obtuse, flowing out and over when he humors him, no unwarranted namecalling attached. "Yeah. Our Jeno.” 

Mark’s mouth opens to make the least dignifying, hesitating noise. “And what—So what did you—?” is all it allows him to get out, brain too busy wondering how he never saw it coming. 

Jeno, as in the one mutual friend they’ve both kept from middle school, whose house had seen them fake a Seven Minutes In Heaven worth of making out, and whose car had housed both Donghyuck and Mark on its backseat even with a free gunshot ride and Mark’s couple dozen moving-out bags and boxes in between them. 

“We’re going out, I think?” Donghyuck fills in the blanks for him. Mark can hear the smile in it, like the idea is just as out of the box for him as it is for Mark, who is biting his tongue not to wonder are you sure you mean Jeno?

The car stops as if math-driven to land right by Mark’s feet, unblinking throughout the doors opening, a string of people getting down, a shoulder bumping into his. “Never knew you were into him.” 

“Oh, yeah, no,” Donghyuck is quick to admit, the sound of his phone being tucked between cheek and shoulder coming through before he goes on, tone matter-of-fact through it all. “But I mean, why not? He’s cute, and I already know he’s gonna laugh at all my jokes and it’s just, like, Jeno, you know?” 

There’s nothing left of the push and pull, it's boring when it's easy Donghyuck in those words, the same one who had seemed to revel in not being able to hold someone’s eye, now looking for someone he knows down to a T would laugh themselves silly no matter what he said. 

“Don’t lead him on, yeah?” Mark asks, question standing at the edge of erasing it’s mark and turning into a plea, because it’s Jeno, not the closest but still their friend, one of the small handful of people to buy it when Mark and Donghyuck walked out his closet with made up hickeys and artificially puffy lips and first in line to clap Mark in the back, I’ll help you move out and I’ll give you a lift Jeno.

“Donghyuck. Seriously,” he insists when all he gets is a tired sigh, Mark’s still selectively deaf ears leaving out the warning beep of the subway train doors closing and unwatching eyes missing his cue to slip through them. 

“Yeah, yeah, relax. Now, wanna hear the other thing?” 

The thing about second chances: Maybe you get them (like a second-chance train, 8 min left for Mark to wait till then), but maybe you don’t. 

(“Sure, fine. What’s, uh—What’s the other thing?”

“Remember Themed Birthday Party guy? Jaem’s friend from high school? Motherfucker still does them. This year it’s childhood crushes.”

“And we’re… going? We don’t even remember his name.”  

“Did you hear me? I said childhood crushes. I don’t give a shit about his name. I have four weeks to get you the best Atlantis Milo costume to ever grace the Earth.”)