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There’s a threshold, Donghyuck learns.
There’s the weariness from sleeping for a number of hours that can fit into the fingers of a hand, a bag-full-of-rocks headache to pull and drag behind him for the day and jumping from this headspace to the nearest one out when conversation tunes out almost on its own, and there’s the exhaustion that crash lands straight into blurry vision and black spots, leg cramps the moment he stretches awake in bed and kneeling over at his mind’s beck and call.
And then the in-between, sour-fitting sweet spot to tiredness: Go long enough without listening to your body, and it’ll give you the silent treatment. You’ll be hungry for food and the chance to close your eyes, for a room without limelight-bright white lights and for a room that isn’t a room but a wall-less somewhere, made of grass or gravel or sand or moondust—you wouldn’t be picky. Famished for warm bed sheets that don’t smell fresh out of a hotel washer and haven't just been ironed, and for a mattress too big for you but just right for two matching pairs of open-fire limbs twisting in weeks-old, reeking sheets.
But it’ll be a silent sort of craving. Your stomach can only rumble for so long before it figures out it’s holding a show for an audience of none. Your head will withdraw the ache just as it was given to you, but it’ll take away width and height from your attention’s span and sum up seconds to your stimuli-response reaction time. It’s bravado fizzling out of your limbs, leaving you with the aftermath to deal with at your own slowed-down, out-of-focus time.
Donghyuck learns just that when he first steps into it, and a second after arrival comes a second lesson: You can't stay in it for long.
A limbo is meant to be a hallway between states. It’s a tightrope to stand in, a two-tray scale he keeps adding and taking from to keep it leveled: one day off, a week in the practice room; a holiday away from work and near his family, a birthday where the clock strikes twelve with him far from home and even further from a break; two more hours of sleep, two more days worth of time spent inside the metal walls of something four-wheeled or two-winged to take him from point A to point B, cities blending into each other as alphabet pit stops.
Donghyuck has learned, and he knows that if he lets himself doze off now, he won’t be able to gear back up once the wheels touch the ground.
He feels a blink go on for too long at the eyelids-shut bit, once cloud watching out of the plane’s window starts to look like it isn’t working well enough at keeping his eyes wide open, lashes sticking together in place, and goes quick about getting his eyelids to jump up and down, sight appearing in flashes of black and light to draw himself out of it.
His elbow bumping into Mark’s side on the seat next to his when he brings a hand to rub down his face is what gets Mark to turn his head and look back at him, and Donghyuck tries to box one apology and whatever amount of reassurance can fit in the space that's left inside a wobbly smile, coming through the gaps of spread out fingers running down his face.
He can see Mark take in the wonky, corner-up-mouthed decoy Donghyuck has set out for a moment, taking an earbud off after it to speak up. “Not sleeping?”
“Not tired,” Donghyuck assures, and then ensures Mark will buy it with a more practiced, softened turn to the look on his face.
If the purple under Donghyuck’s eyes and the off-beat blinking manages to do a better job at persuading Mark into not taking his word for it, he doesn’t say. What he does do is stretch out the hand holding his left earbud for Donghyuck to take, who battles through unhelpfully monotone skies and Mark’s playlist going back and forth between acoustics and R&B that try to draw him under heavy eyelids.
He keeps on all throughout their ride home from the airport, against the industrial lullaby of the engine’s white noise, the turn signal’s tick-tocking and the radio murmuring at its lowest, and then their ride up to their home doors, against elevator music and the only handful of seconds of one-on-one he gets with Mark that day, which range from the doors closing at ground floor all the way up to the fifth. It’s enough time for Donghyuck to take a step closer and vine a hand around Mark’s waist, in front of the only camera he knows that doesn’t care for how close Donghyuck’s mouth comes to Mark’s skin, for the lazy kiss he presses to Mark’s cheek or the frown that takes over his face when he can smell nothing but foundation on him.
“A hot shower and then straight to bed, yeah?” he feels Mark’s jaw work through the mumbled instructions.
“Call me?” he asks in response, before the doors ding open with his step back, and puts a foot out of the metal box only after he sees the promise of a goodnight call on the set of Mark’s face, already gone into lax and tired out shades.
It’s always somewhere to be. It’s alphabet cities and green rooms and shiny black vans, always a space—like hallways or elevators or limbos—but never a place—one to sink into, to fall off the tightrope and plummet towards. Like his bedroom, maybe.
Except he looks around it in the dark, criss-cross on his bed with Johnny’s stuffy nose breathing noisily through the late night from his side of the room, and all he sees is his fresh-off-the-washer duvet, the hill of dirty clothes he took off something short of an hour ago, a desk and a box of tissues and empty branded shopping bags, his socked feet and the phone he dropped by them twenty minutes ago after hanging up on Mark, who had been cozy under the covers and drifting off by then. A space with a bed and stuff he bought and more stuff he owns, but no matter how low or high he looks, he can’t find the whole of himself in it, only bits and pieces—criss-cross legs and socked feet and hands still soiled with melting-off foundation, which are making a grab for his phone and fingerprinting it unlocked before he can think twice about it.
Mark's chat. u up?. Send.
A moment goes by, followed along by Donghyuck’s bloodshot eyes fixed on the blinding white screen that shows no three-dot-typing sign of life, and as he starts to think of calling it a night, the already lit up phone buzzes with a call.
He picks up to the sound of sheets moving around, rustling of a second kind, and then quiet.
"Yeah?" he prompts in a whisper when he doesn’t get anything else.
He hears Mark groan on the other side, sound stuck between reality and slumber, and he can picture a matching blinding white screen as the only source of light in the whole room, laying over Mark’s pillow and right beside his face, Donghyuck’s voice in speaker mode when he murmurs as low as he can go while still getting Mark to pick up on it, "Can I come up?"
Another groan, sound more muffled than before but meaning the same. Yes.
Donghyuck lets the line go dead, phone pocketed and slippers on as he tiptoes his way out of doors and up stairs, draws his shoulders in late-setting shame at the mechanic beep of the door’s code being punched in right, and tiptoes some more until he’s knee-deep in Mark’s mattress.
The only clue he comes across that lets him know Mark’s awake is the second-long movement he makes to worm up the bed and leave room for Donghyuck to settle in, who's slipping under the sheets behind him, the front of his body’s everything fitting close behind the back of Mark’s, shins to bent knees to his hips and Mark’s waist, his belly and Mark’s low back.
An arm sneaks between the mattress and the dip of Mark’s torso, its lazybones counterpart settling for throwing itself over the side of Mark’s ribs, and he roughens up his nose on buzzed hair to take a breath right against Mark's nape. He smells nothing but shampoo and day-old dye, the closest to stripped down and chemical-free Mark can get, and feels some of the tension he had hauled through customs and flown in across the border seep out of him, the closest to relaxed he can get when his every other muscle stays live-wire taut just as it’s been programmed to.
"Hey,” Mark croaks out when he quits wiggling about, voice sluggish and language kept dialed down to one-word status.
Donghyuck hums.
"Good?"
Donghyuck hums, more muffled but meaning the same.
"Yeah?"
"My knee hurts,” he pretends to budge, touching up his whine with the usual reluctance he’s known to carry when having to raise his hand pathetically high at the who doesn’t feel fine? call.
"It does?" Mark wonders, frown morphing into a sound Donghyuck hears crystal clear, and feels one of Mark’s hands reach back for his leg, squeezing at the place where his thigh’s born. "I didn't see you limp today."
"Hurts like a bitch,” he insists.
Mark's hand slides down his leg, rubs over his knee cap, and then gives it a quick-fire light squeeze.
Donghyuck blinks. Oh. Right.
"Ow," he says a second too late, pained sound unconvincing to it’s last wave.
Mark breathes out against the pillow in a dozy version of a sigh, disappointment curling into Donghyuck along with Mark's fingers now going around the back of his knee, leg being hiked higher up Mark’s hip with a tug.
"You gonna talk to me? Or can I go back to sleep?" Mark forewarns, but he sounds more awake than he did a minute ago, and Donghyuck knows he won’t get out of it without giving Mark something to work with.
"I can't,” he confesses, with his eyes on the place where he guesses nothing but Mark’s nape to be through the dark, what’s no more than inches of skin probably looking like miles this up close.
"Can't what?" the dark asks back, Mark’s words sleep-crack free at last, yet a different sort of fracture showing through the sound of him when he adds on, “Can’t talk to me?”
Donghyuck stays still, breathing heavier against Mark, and tries to drown in the miles of bubblegum and familiarly unfamiliar shampoo before he lets his arm twist.
"Sleep," he caves in, looking for the right words to match the feeling, if only to patch up the tear in Mark’s fabric he ripped himself. "It feels like I can't switch off. Like I can but I shouldn't. Like if I do I won’t be able to—start back up. Or something,” he tries to make it lighter, the only way he knows how to end any admission of emotion, as well as to put a stop to the stream of likes that keep on coming.
Like the minute he gets a good night’s sleep he’ll remember what that feels like, and he won’t be able to do with scraps of minutes and hours here and there, head rests and wood benches and thighs in place of actual pillows, no gross bed sheets or body to try to blend into, known failed outcome regardless. Like he’ll go back to the start or jump ahead to the end of the worn-down spectrum, either option still meaning he’s lost his perfectly numb place in that in-between, sour-spot limbo. Like he’ll fall behind and leave Mark to bear with the burden of dragging him around. Him and his bag-of-rocks headache and his brick-heavy letdown.
Mark takes Donghyuck’s hand in his and slips it under the hemline of his shirt, bringing the mindmade like-chain to a close. Donghyuck is about to let him know this isn't what he came up for, but then Mark is placing his hand right over his sternum, skin warm as if the heat of it was radiating off the bone, and asking, "Feel that?"
Donghyuck’s inside voice goes quiet at the question, every sense watchful in the wait for something, but he only feels bone heat and the chewing gum smell of blue dye.
"Feel what?"
His hand is moved a bit down to the left, Mark’s palm splaying itself out over the five of Donghyuck's fingers.
"There?"
It’s a faint thing, probably imaginary going by how he feels it only after he realizes what it is Mark’s looking for, but he can make out the feeling of Mark’s heartbeat under his palm, drowsy-paced and right where he would picture it to be—a little more to the left than the spot you’d think to mark down with a telling X, hidden away and only traceable with Mark’s will and help.
It doesn’t thump, doesn’t pound. It just beats, a rhythm to it like a slow song’s, one of those acoustic or R&B ones Mark’s playlists are plagued with, or maybe like a morning alarm’s. Morning. Daybreak, only three hours away. They need to be up for practice in the morning, which will more than likely bleed into the afternoon, and if they’re lucky, maybe the night too.
"Did you set your alarm?" he asks, foregoing Mark’s heart hunt the second his mind journeys back to life beyond Mark’s bedroom door.
Mark shushes him the moment words go into the realm of wide-awake-tomorrow. The only answer he gives is his body shimmying further back into his, his free hand that isn't keeping Donghyuck’s palm in a heartbeat timeout settling down over the back of Donghyuck's other pair, right where it rests on Mark’s hip.
"Mark,” he pushes, but gets cut off right after.
"You really okay?" Mark wonders, and Donghyuck goes about riffling through every word that's been said in the last five minutes that might tell him what Mark could be on about, before he feels a thumb rub back over his knee, rumble tone rambling on, “You didn’t shower. Wasn’t ‘cause it hurt, right?”
"My knee’s fine. Promise.” He’s quick to seal the promise with a kiss to the back of Mark’s neck, nuzzling the shell of his ear as a detriment to any biting answer he could get from pressing on with, "The alarm, hyung."
Mark's chest fills with a breath, holds it there for a count of one, two, three, and then goes down with the air that leaves him. Donghyuck gets lost in the motion as it carries on in a breath in, one-two-three, breath out loop, only coming out of it at Mark’s soft call an unknown measure of time later. "Better?"
He buries what he can of himself into Mark—nose in his neck and hands in his chest and under his ribs and the knee that hadn’t climbed over him now on the gap between the inside of his thighs—until coming any closer turns impossible, and even then it's somehow not enough.
“Mark,” he echoes again, insistence trudging inside pitiful depths, what started as a demand now weakeaning into a plea, and Mark finally puts him at ease.
"Don't worry. We'll be up." A hand reaches back once more, only this time to run through Donghyuck’s hair in what can’t be a comfortable turn and bend of his arm. "You gotta fall asleep for that first, though.”
It takes some time for Donghyuck to work out it’s in-the-flesh Mark the one that’s begun to hum a melody, acoustic-R&B-soft something he can recognize in everything but name, and somewhere along the line Donghyuck’s eyes blink open to hours having gone by, a phone screen reading out a time that should have them already up and ready inside a car.
"I told you to set an alarm," he complains at Mark’s back, facing him as he fishes around his wardrobe for a hoodie, the spring to his shoulders tell-tale of Donghyuck’s rousing having flown under his radar.
"We’re okay," Mark looks over his shoulder to say, voice going muted afterwards as his head disappears inside the hoodie he’s slipping over it. "They said they can manage without us for a bit."
He lands stomach down beside Donghyuck’s sprawled out limbs, one of his still naked legs thrown and twisting over Donghyuck’s sheet-dressed ones, chin digging into Donghyuck’s shoulder as if not to miss any flicker or tweak to his face when he asks, "How are you feeling?"
When Donghyuck turns his head to the side to look at him, he gets a cloud of hair up his nostrils and brushing over his dry drool, and the second chance he gets to put a name to what was familiar and yet not at all about Mark last night doesn’t go to waste then. "You changed your shampoo.”
It seems to be just the right thing to say to make Mark forget about his question mark left unanswered, his eyebrows raising with a dumb look to him in turn.
"You noticed?" He says it almost like a brag, as if there’s anything to be proud about having gotten Donghyuck to shelve him by taste, season and scent.
There’s definitely something to feel sink-your-face-into-the-pillow embarrassed, however, about what Donghyuck’s got for an answer, doing just that before letting Mark and the clutter-made room hear him grieve, "You don't smell like you anymore."
"Of course I smell like me. I'm me,” Mark tells him like it’s obvious, the point flying right over his head, and Donghyuck’s head shakes with his face red and sinking in memory foam.
"No. It smells like Jeno's. Now you smell like Jeno."
"Is that so bad? I don’t know what Jeno smells like but it’s probably, like, super nic—Ow, ow, wait, stop."
Donghyuck's hand blindly shoots out to slap at what he can reach of Mark, the sound of skin smacking on skin coming to an abrupt end when Mark manages to slide away and roll off the bed.
"I need you to smell like you, shithead," he wails over his hand now striking down on the empty side of the mattress, stopping only when he hears the shuffle of bare feet over carpet, a drawer opening, and then the well-known sound of the one and only perfume bottle Mark owns being sprayed.
Mark's back on the bed the next moment, crawling up until he’s on his hands and knees over Donghyuck’s belly-down frame. "Is this more me?"
Donghyuck takes his time to pivot back to laying on his back, bending his arms at the elbow to lean up on them and then forward, just far enough to sink his nose in the space under Mark’s Adam’s apple, the one breadth of him that had been saved from his perfume bath. All he feels is lukewarm skin and Mark's heartbeat when he noses at the vein running along the side of his neck, and thinks he doesn’t really need him to smell of anything he can pinpoint as long as he’s like this, all skin and heartbeat against him.
"That's all you,” Donghyuck tells him as much, and feels Mark break away at an instant’s time, pushing Donghyuck back down with a hand to his chest.
"Great. 'Cause I could only buy us, like, fifteen minutes. You only get a shower or breakfast. Your pick.” The smile he’s wearing dims down when seconds roll by in quiet, his palm coming down to Donghyuck’s forehead as if going through the motions of a senseless fever check. "You sure you're feeling better? 'Cause I can talk to hyung if you want me to. Buy us the day."
Donghyuck keeps on blinking up at him as he feels a sorry come in through his mind’s door, go down nerve-made stairs and take a seat inside his mouth. For the trouble and the bittersweet look on Mark’s face that knows a day would be both too much and never enough, for the sleepless hours and everything in between that. A used-to-be rare occurrence that slowly morphed into a feeling feasible of dropping by for a visit every now and then, as he grew older and more apologetic towards Mark over the years.
It’s just his luck that the version of Mark that would gladly take those apologies and pocket them for future face-shoving—a younger one, one Donghyuck was louder about his love for, when it used to feel like too big of an emotion that keeping it hushed inside himself wasn’t an option—had grown into one that would push away any of Donghyuck’s regrets when the fault couldn’t be pinned on him by any stretch.
"I'm good if you're good,” he settles for, and Mark moves a little higher up, so that when he smiles at him it settles right over the axis of Donghyuck’s own curved up lips.
"I’m good,” Mark says back.
It earns him Donghyuck’s arms reaching up for him, forearms crossing behind his neck as he pulls him down to his elbows and inches his face closer, chin tilting up as he announces, "Then I pick kisses and half a breakfast."
"Kisses would leave us with—” Mark’s eyes go up and to the right, as if working through the math, “—a quarter of a breakfast and half your teeth brushed."
Donghyuck’s lips pout out in play-along deliberation. "Not hungry and I only need my front teeth for pictures. Deal."
Mark gives him nothing more than a peck, a filthy end to it when he licks across Donghyuck's mouth just to gross him out. Donghyuck cries out, if only for show, and tries to get back at him while they brush their teeth shoulder to shoulder, when he keeps toothpaste foam inside squirrel cheeks and cages Mark against the sink to try to kiss him with an unrinsed mouth.
It backfires into two hands cupping Donghyuck’s face in place and a tongue trying to get the last of the mint and bubbles off the back of his teeth with no shame to their name, dooming Donghyuck to a day of practice where he can’t meet Mark’s eye without his face growing warmer—warm like dirty sheets in a need of change that’s nothing but dire, like the morning sun in his face coming in through the car’s window when he gets a chance to lean back and close his eyes, or like the rushed lunch mid-practice that scalds his tongue and dribbles down his chin at his laugh over someone else choking on their drink.
And there’s not a doubt in his mind he’ll circle back to food-bed-Mark hunger at some point not that far ahead, but Donghyuck has learned there’s in-betweens and that they’re there only for gaps of time, so long he can run from his feelings for. Maybe that’s for the best.