Work Text:
Mark once looked straight into a rolling camera and said that he didn’t think of himself as a nice guy.
He might have been right.
—
Ask Donghyuck to describe Mark Lee in three words and the answer will change depending on the day, on the year, on his mood. On the way Mark looks at him in the morning, when he’s just waking up, hasn’t had the time to pretty up his face to cover up the bad feelings.
Sometimes, Donghyuck might not be able to give you a single nice word.
Greedy, self-centered asshole. That’s what Donghyuck learned about Mark as a teenager.
Mark has always been a wonder guy—back when he used to wear thick-rimmed glasses bigger than his head and had crooked teeth lined by braces, and now that his body fills up as much space as his greed does. He can get you spinning around him like the moon does the earth just to decide he doesn’t want you because you want him a little bit too much. And then shoves you into the vastness of the universe because he needs you no more. Not now.
So, after a lifelong confession that left him nothing but a stingy throat and a half-broken friendship, Donghyuck took his feelings and his pride and turned himself into the sun. Blame him.
—
It goes like this: Donghyuck gets dumped before he’s ever gotten loved, fakes that he’s over it, kisses someone new for the hell of it, and repeats. No one ever sticks around for longer than a month because he gets bored way too fast.
Fake it ‘till you make it, they say. But they never tell you what to do when you’re only good at the first part.
All the while, Mark is still there. Hovering, half-touching, laughing with his mouth wide open at everything that rolls past Donghyuck’s lips. Friendship, they call it. You can’t fake that one, even if it’s never felt like enough.
—
But then she comes into the picture, and she’s lovely. Lovely enough to go past the second month mark and still stick around.
Greedy, self-centered asshole Mark Lee wasn’t counting on her.
—
Mark decides he does want Donghyuck when he’s already kissed her twice.
“You’re an asshole,” Donghyuck tells him, straight-up and unfiltered because that’s what friends do, isn’t it? “You’re a fucking asshole. I’m not doing this to her.”
“I didn’t ask you to do anything. I just wanted to let you know.”
The burst of laughter that bubbles out of Donghyuck scratches his throat like tears did the day he confessed. Tables turned, yet he’s still the one with the hoarse voice and the stingy eyes.
“I know you, Mark,” he snaps, index finger digging into Mark’s chest. “You wouldn’t say shit if you didn’t want shit.”
They are locked in the bathroom. The bathrobes hanging from the door pillow Donghyuck’s back when he leans against the wood, afraid his knees will give out at any second. He keeps his finger into Mark’s chest, nail sinking in so Mark won’t walk near enough to make him lose judgment.
And Mark looks as big as he always does, doesn’t even have the decency to shrink his board shoulders a little in shame.
“Of course I want something.” He tilts his chin up, chest swelling against Donghyuck’s finger. “I want you. That’s why I’m telling you.”
Donghyuck’s finger gives out when Mark pushes again. He ends up with his knuckles pressed to Mark’s chest, closed fisted against Mark’s racing heart.
“You’re years too late.”
Mark keeps crowding in.
He cages Donghyuck inside of the arch of his arms as he presses both hands to the door. He leans over Donghyuck with his huge, shameless I’ll-get-you eyes. And Donghyuck has never wanted to prove anyone wrong so bad in his life.
“Am I?” Mark whispers, close and selfish. “I know you like me. I know you haven’t gotten over it. I know—”
Donghyuck gets both hands on Mark’s chest and shoves hard enough to make him stubble backward. Mark groans, hunched forward when his lower back hits the edge of the sink.
“She’s lovely,” Donghyuck says, pulling himself straight. “Fuck off, Mark. She’s nice. She doesn’t deserve this.”
Mark has shrunk now. He looks at Donghyuck with frowny eyes and a ducked head.
He’s gripping his sore waist with white knuckles. Donghyuck has to claw at the bathrobes behind him to stop himself from surging in to check, turn Mark around and lift his shirt in search of a bruise. Stop himself from giving out to an apology that would surely lead to a mistake.
“What about what you want, huh?” Mark insists, voice strained for once. “Forget about her. What about you?”
“You’re only doing this now because she’s lasting more than the others. You only ever want what you don’t have.”
Donghyuck already has his back turned to Mark and a hand on the knob when Mark gives him a quiet, half-assed, “That’s not true.”
“I’m not doing this to her. You’re years late.”
Donghyuck slams the door and keeps on faking it.
—
And she’s lovely. She is nice. Laughs with her mouth covered because she’s self-conscious of her teeth, and blushes sweet when Donghyuck tells her she’s got a pretty smile even though he’s never seen it, because she keeps hiding.
She doesn’t put much effort into it, makes time for him only twice a week. But never does he, so it works.
—
Friendship, you can’t fake that one. You can’t risk it, either, when half of your job comprises flaunting it on screen for fans to gawk at it.
So she stays, but so does Mark.
He hovers, full-touches, laughs with his mouth wide open at everything that rolls past Donghyuck’s lips, just Donghyuck’s girl never does.
“We’re still friends, aren’t we?” Donghyuck asks late some night, quiet in the back of a full van.
Mark punches him on the leg first. He grips his thigh second, four fingers kneading at the soft flesh of the inside. “The best ones. I swear.”
They don’t talk about it again.
—
Mark Lee is a freak, too.
He is a wonder boy that has been spoiled by life, isn’t used to not getting whatever he wants. So when he can’t have something, he needs to learn all the details to torture himself over it.
This time around, Mark didn’t get what he wants because he didn’t want it when he should have. So Donghyuck will give in to his sick curiosity if that’ll make it feel better.
Friendship, they call it, even if it’s never felt like it.
“How did you two start dating?”
Donghyuck’s cheeks burn when he rubs the sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt. He lets go of the damp thread, opens his eyes to come face to face with Mark’s low gaze, trained on the space that runs from Donghyuck’s navel down to the waistband of his boxers, always hanging higher than his pants.
He turns to the side, half-bending to pick up the water bottle he’s got propped on the seat of the chest press machine. Mark’s eyes are still down low when Donghyuck twirls the bottle open and offers him a gulp.
“It kind of just happened,” Donghyuck tells with a shrug when Mark doesn’t take the drink. “We hung out once, got along well. Next thing I knew, it just kept happening.”
He fills up his cheeks with water, swallows slow and with his neck craned to the side to give Mark a perfect view of the bounce of his Adam’s apple. And Mark stares, obvious as he has always been, licking his lips like he’s thirsty but not of water.
An unapologetic, shameless freak. Those are the three words Donghyuck would pick today.
“Who kissed who first?”
Mark’s eyes are on Donghyuck’s mouth now. A drop of water slides down Donghyuck’s chin after he swallows. Mark’s gaze free-falls with it.
Donghyuck rubs his lips dry with the back of his hand. “I did.”
“Why?”
Because it felt like I had to, Donghyuck thinks.
“Because I wanted to? What kinda question is that?”
“Right.”
Donghyuck is about to drop the water bottle on the floor and go back to the press machine, but Mark steps in before he can move.
Mark grips the bottle hard, his sweaty hand engulfing Donghyuck’s. He tugs at it, pulling Donghyuck closer with the motion. They end up standing chest to chest, Mark’s eyes finally on Donghyuck’s.
It is Donghyuck who fucks up the friendship play this time around. He hasn’t had Mark this close in too long, he can’t help it, a man can only be so strong.
His gaze flickers, sliding off of Mark’s round eyes to the half-open curve of his lips. He gets trapped in the gray shadow of Mark’s upper lip.
What a shame. Donghyuck’s mouth has never gotten the chance to know how good Mark’s stubble can burn. All it knows is that his girl will never come close to the fantasy of the sting.
“Have you already slept with her?”
Donghyuck’s eyes jump back up to Mark’s. He scoffs dry, and his breath hits Mark straight in the face, makes him go all fluttery eyed.
“You’re a freak,” Donghyuck tells him, straight-up and unfiltered because that’s what friends do. “You’re getting fucking gross now. What the hell.”
He pulls away, and he takes the bottle with him.
—
Mark will never get to know, but the answer is no.
She’s never asked for it. Donghyuck has never offered. It’s not like he wants it, anyway.
—
Renjun pops the question over beer one night she isn’t around. She rarely is.
“Why are you even with her?” he asks, voice dulled down by the background rumble of poorly sang karaoke songs.
Donghyuck shrugs, lips suckling into the mouth of his bottle. “She’s nice.”
“Doesn’t sound like enough.”
“I don’t get bored when she kisses me.”
Renjun laughs at the words like it’s a joke, just to say afterward, “That’s so shitty. You realize how shitty that sounds, don’t you?”
Tongue dipped past the rim of his bottle, Donghyuck shrugs again.
“Best I’ve ever had, anyway.”
—
Mark Lee laughs like he lives: big, loud, and shameless.
Once, he looked straight into a rolling camera and said that he owed that laugh to Donghyuck. Since then, he’s never gotten tired of using it whenever Donghyuck is around.
Now go and blame Donghyuck for getting his hopes up as a teen if you dare. Go and blame him for faking it and faking it and faking it, but never making it.
A guy can’t wait forever, but he sure can want forever, even if he shouldn’t. Mostly when he shouldn’t
—
Friendship, you can’t fake that one.
And what is friendship if not quality time well-spent together? If not help-me-out’s and I’m-here-for-you’s and anything-you-need’s?
One day for me, the next for you.
You could argue that Donghyuck shouldn’t have asked Mark for help with this one. He’s got countless of other friends he could’ve gone to. But they swore to keep the friendship despite everything, and a friend can’t be the best one if you start drawing lines.
So Donghyuck barges into Mark’s room without knocking first, keys out and jiggling in his hand, and asks, “Hey, my girlfriend’s birthday is next week. I need help with the gift. You in?”
Mark says yes.
Of course he does. He hasn’t denied anything to Donghyuck since he denied him everything—that lifelong confession all those years ago.
So, yeah, it is not premeditated murder. At least not on Donghyuck’s end. He swears he couldn’t have seen it coming.
It is half-past five in the afternoon of an April 29th when it happens, or so it says the big clock and calendar hanging from the opposite wall of the mall where Donghyuck is leaning against. He could be getting it wrong, though. He can’t see the numbers that well with the way Mark is crowding up on him, a mirror of that day he locked Donghyuck guard-down in the bathroom.
The place is small and restricting—this sheltered shop window at the back of the jewelry store they’ve just walked out.
Clean glass surrounds Donghyuck, both at his back and on his sides. There are countless shiny jewels displayed on the shop window, most of them he was just looking at with Mark. Pressed together shoulder to shoulder in the warmth of the store, heads ducked near each other to get a proper look as the shop assistant offered them piece after piece of tiny, pretty gold, silver, and bronze.
Clueless when it comes both to jewels and gifts, Donghyuck traded money for the most expensive pair of earrings and walked out with them safely tucked in a paper bag, Mark trailing after him.
Now, all the tiny, fragile-looking jewels are the ones watching them, glinting curiously behind glass as Mark takes yet another step closer to Donghyuck.
It would be difficult for anyone to see them like this. Donghyuck is well hidden between the shop windows. Not even those inside of the store could get a good look at him because of the decorative panels behind the jewels. And if those walking past the store paid attention, all they would catch would be a front view of Mark’s broad back, wide enough to hide Donghyuck’s entire frame.
Donghyuck couldn’t have seen it coming, he swears.
He blinks once and Mark is already all up in his space, sneaker-clad feet bracketing Donghyuck’s, and his hand pinching the front of Donghyuck’s mask with two fingers to pull it down and off his face.
The elastic of the mask tightens around Donghyuck’s ears when Mark tucks it under his chin softly. He is so close now that all Donghyuck can do is lean further back into the shop window, eyes dancing between Mark’s round gaze and the gray shadow on his upper lip.
Couldn’t have seen it coming. Could have stopped it, though. But try to say no twice to a lifelong desire.
When Mark kisses him, it is nothing more than a soft press of closed lips to Donghyuck’s shocked, half-parted mouth.
Mark pushes in, his hand curled around one of Donghyuck’s sore ears, the heel of it cradling Donghyuck’s chin to tilt his head up to make it easier. He pecks him soft and short and sighs through his nose, eyes closed when Donghyuck’s stay open, trained in the small mole on Mark’s eyelid that he rarely gets to see.
The paper bag slips from Donghyuck’s loose grip and down to the floor when Mark pulls away.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” Donghyuck says as soon as he’s able to find his words, short on breath.
Mark ducks his head like he’s ashamed. “I know.”
“You’re a greedy, self-centered prick,” Donghyuck keeps going. “A fucking jerk.”
“I know. I know.”
The insults keep rolling off Donghyuck’s tongue in an endless string, and Mark keeps nodding along with his head down.
Insult after insult after insult, whispered in the small space between them in half-breath, and yet Mark doesn’t walk away. Insult after insult after insult, and yet Donghyuck can’t keep his hands to himself, fingers coming up to twist the fabric of Mark’s jacket between his hands, pulling him in instead of out.
They are so close. When Donghyuck tugs him closer, all Mark can give him is a short, stumbly step, knees knocking together as he gets close enough to bump hips. Donghyuck chokes a gasp when Mark’s body collides with his, and his own body keeps betraying him as his back arches against the shop window, wanting closer.
Somewhere in the middle of their desperate tug and pull, Mark’s sneakers step on the paper bag. Donghyuck can hear the rumble of it perfectly, the groan of the jewel box under the weight of Mark’s foot.
He sneaks his hands around Mark’s waist, gets two fistfuls of his jacket, knuckles digging into his ribcage from behind so Mark can’t walk away now.
“You’re an asshole,” he repeats, chin tilted up to make it easier without Mark having to cradle his face. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”
Mark means to reply that he knows. Donghyuck knows because Mark’s lips are pursed in the shape of the words when he traces them with his tongue.
—
“What’s up with you?” Johnny asks, same day, different scenery.
Donghyuck is at the dorms now, in the kitchen, pushing soggy cereal around with a straw as his heels bounce on the footrest of his stool. The clock on the microwave flashes past-midnight numbers, but the wooden cube calendar on the counter is still says April 29th.
“I’m a shit person, hyung.”
Johnny coos when he walks past Donghyuck, stealing half a second of the clock to ruffle his hair on the way to the fridge. “Don’t talk like that about yourself, man. What happened?”
The cereal has been floating around in cold milk for so long that it dissolves into it when Donghyuck pushes it around with his straw again.
He sniffles once. Coughs twice. Tries to look at Johnny’s face trice and fails every single one before he admits, face burning with shame that shouldn’t be his, “I’m a cheater.”
The refrigerator door bangs closed.
“Dude, you cheated on your girl? Donghyuck-ah, that’s not cool.”
It’s always been your girl.
Your girl, your girlfriend, her. She’s stuck around longer than anyone else, yet she’s been around so little, Donghyuck wonders if anyone knows her name.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says, and it sounds nothing more than like a soggy, sorry excuse. “Tried not to. I didn’t want to.”
“Have you told her?”
Donghyuck shakes his head now. He hasn’t even seen her yet since. He hasn’t even talked to her since.
Johnny’s slippers slap the kitchen tiles as he walks toward Donghyuck again. He ruffles his head one more time, in consolation, as if he deserves the pity.
“Beat yourself over it, but not too much, yeah?” he says, leaving Donghyuck with a soft slap on the nape. “Humans, man. We are, like, huge walking mistakes. Life is just fuck up after fuck up after fuck up. Now you gotta learn and do better.”
When Donghyuck finally looks up from his mug, Johnny’s back is turned to him, already walking past the door frame.
“Have you ever cheated on someone, hyung?”
“No,” Johnny tells him, voice fading down the hall. “But I’ve wanted to. Still not cool.”
—
Turns out she also hides behind her hands when she cries.
“I’m sorry,” Donghyuck tells her, looking right at her even though his cheeks burn with shame, because that’s the least he can do. “I know it doesn’t mean much, nor does it make anything better. But I truly am sorry.”
She speaks muffles against her palms, snotty and pitched high. The only part of his face visible are her teary eyes.
“I always knew you didn’t love me enough,” she says, sniffling in the middle. “We had something nice, didn’t we? But nice isn’t enough.”
“I’m really fucking sorry.”
Her hands come off her face and she smiles, small and free for the first time since Donghyuck met her. “It’s okay. I didn’t love you enough, either.”
It doesn’t make it any better, but at least it doesn’t make it worse.
—
Donghyuck is not a nice guy. But he’s never claimed to be one.
The front door bangs closed after her, and the next second Donghyuck’s on a run to Mark’s room, still flushed with bad feelings and worse intentions.
He barges in without knocking first.
Mark doesn’t ask. Donghyuck doesn’t offer. They do it anyway.
—
“I never told you to break up with her.”
Donghyuck laughs from where he’s standing by the ajar door of Mark’s bathroom.
“As if you would’ve stopped if I didn’t,” he snaps. “As if you’ve ever been any good at sharing. Greedy fucker.”
He has just gotten out of the shower, stands there in his underwear and bare chest, hair still wet, a damp towel hanging from his shoulders. The room reeks of sex more now than it did when Donghyuck was still tangled between used, sweated sheets, nose clean and prickly after the shower.
Mark is still lying down, naked from head to toe. He’s watching Donghyuck with his head pillowed on his forearm, obviously checking him out because if he didn’t have shame before, why would be now?
Donghyuck tugs at the ends of the towel, covering his perky nipples with it. Mark licks his lips, eyes falling to Donghyuck’s navel instead, climbing up and down the happy trail that gets lost underneath his boxers.
“I feel like shit,” Donghyuck confesses. “She didn’t deserve that. I feel like pure shit.”
Pushing himself up on his elbows, Mark blinks up at Donghyuck’s face. His voice doesn’t waver one bit when he says, “I love you.”
Donghyuck laughs through his nose, every hair on his arms spiked up just by three short words. “Yeah, you fucking better.”
Mark licks his lips again. His hips shift on the bed, legs parting wider, neck bent backward when he rests his head against the headboard.
“Now’s when you say it back.”
“No.”
Swiping his tongue over his teeth, Mark smirks up at him. “C’mon, Donghyuck.”
Donghyuck untangles the pillow from his shoulders to throw it to the floor.
“No,” he says, shaking his head, but his bare feet are already padding closer. “I’ve done enough.”
Mark is still smiling when Donghyuck crawls over him. He falls into the pillows with a soft thud, gripping Donghyuck by the shoulders as soon as he’s at a hand’s reach.
“C’mon,” he whispers, words pressed to Donghyuck’s temple. “Say it.”
Donghyuck lets himself fall on top of Mark, his clean body melting into Mark’s warm, sticky skin.
“You smell like shit,” he mumbles into the column of Mark’s throat.
When Mark laughs, Donghyuck feels it in his mouth.
“You’re gonna kiss me, anyway. ‘Cause you love me.”
Donghyuck never says it back, he’s too busy dipping his tongue past the rim of Mark’s lips.
Honest. Here. His.
—
Mark once looked straight into a rolling camera and said that he didn’t think of himself as a nice guy.
And he might have been right, but it’s fine. Donghyuck wants him anyway. It’s not like he’s any good himself.