Chapter Text
Donghyuck ditches Haechan for the weekend and glosses through an airport. He smiles for the endless cameras and smiles for all he’s worth, dipping into a taxi.
He twirls and blossoms and shows all his teeth in their pearly glory. He fizzles lightly in the backseat of a taxi, staring put the window at dead winter trees. He wraps his puffer around him, feeling suddenly very stupid in it. Pompous bird. He had forgotten how short December days are here, when the sun turns in his cap at 4pm sharp and waves jauntily to the sleepy moon, who wearily carries everyone home till dawn. There’s a layer of frost over everything that there’d never be in LA. Except for shop windows and music video sets. He thinks about prosecco stained breath, Wintery parties with influencers. Everything he’s had for the last six years. The warm, empty walk back to his apartment.
There are these lovely pale drifts of ice draped over bushes and briars surrounding the winding countryside rows, fields with sheep like clouds who dream of wandering back up to the sky.
He finally cries then, as his mom embraces him in their front yard. Breaking in her arms, becoming small again. He shatters into a million pieces, unfurling like a butterfly. The particles of Donghyuck become messy and undone, he’s all loose wires and sparks today. He sees the pair of them from above, mother and son, how old she has become since he left home. Hold me. He thinks, thinks it so hard it nearly forms its own colour.
He’s so sorry for never running to return and he despises himself for breaking her heart.
Theres something about going home that feels like being knocked off a ladder, the rungs gleefully torn out from beneath his feet.
They say nothing about any of it, she smiles and helps him with his suitcase. “It’s okay mom, I can do it myself.” She’s so frail, his heart is heavy. She looks at him like he’s the world. “Let me do this for you.”
“Okay.” He whispers.
He’s spiraling now, alone now, feet anxious in his childhood bed, feeling weird about being here. He shuffles one of his feet, a toe peeking out of a sock he hasn’t worn since he was eighteen.
It feels like living in a different person’s body. Haechan sparkles, he’s so vibrant and luminescent and social, Donghyuck to him is a stranger. A cranky, nervous stranger.
He hates that he has to learn how to be himself again around his mom. He hadn’t realised how much he’d actually lost that part of him until he was opening his mouth to speak to her.
Blank mind, dry mouth. What would Donghyuck do right now? A question he never thought he’d ask himself. Why would he ever need an answer to that? He feels like an idiot now.
He glances at the mostly bare walls. They’d been covered in everyhing when this room was still his; posters, paintings, ticket stubs, photographs. A couple months before he left for LA he’d torn the majority of it down, stuffed it away in a box he’d thrown into the back of his wardrobe.
This room isn’t really Donghyuck’s anymore, but it’s definitely not Haechan’s by any degree.
It’s a guest room.
He wonders briefly then if it’s still here, all that teenage anger and excitement and lust and intensity. Like the smell of smoke in drywalls, all that energy had to go somewhere. He’d always wondered if it had stained the old place, as though his inner monologue became a tangible thing and simply resumed his position after he discarded it. He contemplates cracking it open, flying through it all and then shudders. Some stones are better left unturned. He’s here for Christmas. It’ll be seven lonely days at his mom’s house dreaming of a life that could’ve been and then a lonely cab ride, a lonely light, a lonely little life in a hollow chamber of dance and synths.
He isn’t sure what to do with himself
He doesn’t mean to seek Mark out, but like the night falls and the sun disappears, it happens. He’s home and then he’s walking around town to stretch his legs and then he’s outside the diner. He does none of this deliberately, works the way he always has, instinct and wilful blindness.
He knows Mark’s mom is dead.
The second thing he knows is that he’s a piece of shit.
There's no easy way around it, they say that the longer you leave somewhere, the harder it gets to come home. They're right. But it never would have been easy at all.
There is no pretty way to say it, there are no lovely spins Donghyuck can put on his words. All his usual charm washed away in the flood of ugliness that his hometown was built upon. “ Your mother is dead and now you’ve been left without a life.” “Your mother is dead and you did everything to prevent that from happening.” “Your mom is dead and I’m sorry.” “Would it be weird to say that I miss her too?” “Your mom is dead and I’m sorry for bringing it up because that was a year and a half ago and You're probably over it.” “Your mom is dead and that was probably a fucked up thing to say because thats not the kind of thing a person gets over.” “Your mom is dead and she's not coming back for you. Dead dead dead dead.” “After everything you gave up, the worst still happened.”
Mark is still so beautiful and it hurts so much.
Momentarily stunned, he looks through the window, frozen like a statue, Wildes very own happy prince. He says all the prayers he still remembers. Mark’s jaw and its boyish jut. In Donghyucks mind they're still seventeen, and he now has to reconfigure his image of mark to align with the person wiping tables in front of him. The Mark in front of him tugs on his memory, twisting it into new shapes. Donghyuck feels a pang of grief then, for the past Mark he clung to whenever shit hit the fan. He has an older Mark in his head now; Broader neck, broader shoulders.
He looks tired. That bone deep kind Donghyuck sees when he looks at himself after the curtain’s closed and all his shiny makeup has been wiped. There’s hunger that comes from not wanting food, but from being starved of life.
He’s not sure what the protocol for this kind of thing is, and he’s never been subtle so when he enters, he walks over to the table Mark’s wiping. Confidence never has to be real. Feathers cocked, he wonders how he manages to do this in spite of his deep shame. He’s a marvel.
There were so many times when they were kids, that Donghyuck teased Mark for being a worrywart.
That was always Mark, the first one to suggest that they talk to an adult, the first kid to realise whenever he and Donghyuck were in too deep, the one who stayed up chatting with the rest of the grown-ups after Donghyuck had succumbed to sleep.
While Donghyuck sat on the counter, humming, legs swinging, Mark was the one who helped his mom peel the potatoes, chop up the carrots.
It used to piss him off to no end.
That was the word. Worrywart . In hindsight, Donghyuck during the time they were supposed to be children, in some ways, Mark was light years ahead in ways Donghyuck didn’t and still can’t fully comprehend. He remembers shit that never would have ever even crossed his mind used to steal Mark away. Worries like how he was going to feed himself and Jisung? What would he cook them? Everyday for Mark had to be careful, not a minute wasted dreaming.
Mark was a cautious person, who allocated very specific rules for how he dreamt, when he allowed himself, how far he went in it. He always began by promising to never actually indulge on any of his aspirations. Mark was drawn up with lines and reality.
Yet another diverging road between them.
He'd hated that far away look Mark used to get whenever he was troubled, hated even more that he felt he couldn't talk about it with Donghyuck. Very few secrets were kept between them, although it was never really a secret, more so something unshared in a time where they were practically symbiotic.
It scared him really. The ambiguity.
In those moments of his adult worry, that uncharacteristic maturity; a mask was cast over Mark's face and he became a stranger, so completely unthethered from Donghyuck, from himsef even, with his dorky laugh and earnest expressions. Everything about Mark was a beautiful confession of honesty and Donghyuck hated when that quality was confiscated from him by circumstance. Life’s harsh policies.
There were so many things Donghyuck could never have understood, there were so many things Mark would never have been able to explain.
So why bother?
Mark’s pre-teen hunched shoulders and furrowed eyebrows, and the exhaustion deep under his eyes. All this and more. If those things became too heavy for the air to carry, to the point where Donghyuck could nearly reach out and twirl the solemnity between his fingers. Mark was a different person, he was stumped. Mark had the potential to be someone he could never connect with, somebody unknowable .
Everytime it happened it went the same way, Donghyuck, having no idea what to do or say to possibly make it better, to carry Mark safely back into the moment. Only that wild uncertainty and his stupid wisecracks. He'd say something dumb as hell and for a split second, he felt that deep fear, that Mark would brush it off, retreat further inwards.
Always, everytime the Mask splintered, sliding away as Mark threw back his head in laughter, or his shoulders cracked, the anxiety ebbing away for now, yet always at bay.
Their fears both subsided.
This here? This now?
It's that prolonged spit second again. The fear that Mark has become some different unknowable version of himself that Donghyuck will never reach again.
Mark's eyes meet his own.
He reaches out, throws a stone into the calm waters just to watch it ripple.
It sinks without movement, as though never there in the first place.
He's just somebody else now.
He feels every part of him die.
Then Mark’s eyebrows go up, then down into a grimace.
‘ Like clockwork,’ Donghyuck thinks.
“You look really tired.” He says
Mark lifts an eyebrow. “You aint a prize.”
He smiles.
The diner is empty, of course it is. Mark’s uniform makes his heart beat in strange ways. Donghyuck had a music video set in a diner, maybe two years into his career.
He thinks about the fake milkshakes made from plastic and styrofoam, the girls in their 50s style dresses, Haechan twirling his new record on the jukebox.
This feels so unglamorous. Donghyuck fucking hates reality.
“What can I get you?”
I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry I’m here.
“Water’s fine.” He exhales, fiddling with a ketchup packet.
Mark leans against the counter Donghyuck’s seated at. Donghyck fiddles with the seams of his seat, tapping his feet nervously. He wonders if there’s too much to say, if there’s anything to say at all. He’s not sure which is worse.
Michael Buble croons from a janky speaker
“I fucking hate this song.” Mumbles Mark, reaching over to unplug the radio.
The silence is worse. Donghyuck wonders if Mark ever hears him on that radio.
As if reading his thoughts Mark replies. “‘Sung insists on keeping it on, but he’s not here today. Place is loud enough as it is.”
His accent is so homely, so jarring when paired with the fried valley accents he’s used to being buzzed with. Donghyuck doesn’t think the place is particularly loud, but he doesn’t say this.
What would Mark say? Say something normal. He fills the ugly space.
“How is he? Jisung?”
Mark smiles his small smile, drifting off towards the left side of his face.
“He’ll be thrilled to know you strolled on in here and asked about him first.”
Donghyuck snorts. “Did I hurt your feelings?”
Mark shakes his head.
Donghyuck shrugs. “I figured I’d start with something easy, ‘How are you?’ is a complicated one.”
Mark slides a glass of water towards him. Tap. No ice. He can feel his tongue cry. He takes a sip. “So considerate.”
Donghyuck smiles, his TV smile, batting his eyelashes.
Mark fakes a shudder. “Don’t do that shit around me,” He raises an eyebrow, “It’s so unsettling.”
Donghyuck smiles harder and Mark wafts a hand over his face, before leaning onto the counter.
He laughs, delighted with himself.
“Back to your inital question,” Mark’s voice sounds like a prayer. “He’s good.”
“How old is he now?”
He sees Mark’s shoulders stiffen in pride. Sips his water. “He just graduated highschool.”
“Holy shit.”
“I know.”
“I feel ancient.”
“We are, ancient.”
“What’s he gonna do now?”
“He’s be going between here and teaching at the Dance Studio or the forseeable future.”
“That’s.. that’s really great.”
Mark nods. “I’m really proud of him.”
“I cant believe he’s an adult now.” He says and Mark shakes his head, laughing.
“Feels like yesterday he was small, like so small, frolicking round the living room.”
“Frolicking’s a good way to describe it.”
Donghyuck raises his arms stiffly, zig zagging them and waving them around. “I can hear Usher on the Ben 10 CD Player now.”
“Oh my God.”
He does a really shit wave, like a really shit one, pops his chest and starts moving round his head. Mark twists his hands, miming a six-year old Jisung’s so-called Invention.
He can recall that day so well, the warmth of the fireplace, Jisung passed out in front of the Wii , the leftover mulled wine from Mark’s sleeping mom’s half-empty glass that they stole. They drank it cold, then got scared in case a police officer would show up. He remembers the hushed exchange, over whether Mark was to blame or not, him being older.
He knows Mark’s thinking about it too.
“We were so scared that evening.”
“Never drank underage again.” Mark smiles. His teeth would look great on camera.
“If only I’d learned my lesson too.”
“Some of us are lucky.”
“Or just wise.”
More people are coming in, Donghyuck can feel their eyes on his back, can feel Mark slipping away. All through their teen years, Mark’s attention stolen by labour.
“Tell you what,” he says, focusing back on Donghyuck. “I get off work tonight at nine. I’ve a bottle of wine. We can try again as real adults.”
Donghyuck shakes his head. “If you’re too tired.”
Mark shakes his head. “If we leave it ‘till tomorrow I won’t be able to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“You still remember my address?”
He scoffs. “Like my own name.”
Mark shrugs. “You haven’t used your name in years.”
Ow.
He slides the empty glass back to him. “Touché.”
Donghyuck's friends message him. He reads the notification , thinks up answers. He never sends them.
He doesn’t really know what to say, he really doesn’t want to be Haechan.
He just feels lonelier.
His Dad asks “Where’d you get to?”
“I met Mark.”
“How was it?”
“Weirdly easy.”
“That’s just how you guys are.”
He looks at the tree they’ve put up, the dancing golden lights. “Maybe.”