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Donghyuck's heard of it. He's sat through every complaint in the book about the sway of a moving truck crushing anything crystal and badly packed, about far too bureaucratic billing address changes or old furniture not fitting through new doors. Too many movie scenes where the frame of the screen gets filled up by cardboard boxes, and gossip where the phrase they just got a place in Blank can be found somewhere in it, too. In every one of them, in some nook or cranny between words, he finds it: moving in together as a run on the rocks to every relationship's smooth sailing.
Something about the do we keep yours or mine? when faced with two of the same thing—from bed sheets all the way down to welcome mats—slowly turning from a harmless question into a loyalty test, giving up on grandmother’s passed down fine china for the cute rimmed plates one of them made eyes at in a retail store, all just so they can settle for keeping an ours.
Sometimes it takes a bit more time, further down the line, with drawers clothes-filled and boxes unpacked but tension still bubble wrapped. Finding out personal space can only be picked out one's shelf in its downsized pocket edition now, tucked snugly in between someone else's everything in the thirty square meters they share. Resentment walking down hallways until it finds an empty room to grow in, even later, and arguments adding up by the sum of doors shutting too quietly or too loud at its worst peak.
A shame, really. Sucks to suck. That could never be Donghyuck, though.
For Mark and him, house hunting is less of a hunt and more of a walk in the park, apartment options kept on a tight leash by their side. Their pick comes down to the second place they step in, everywhere else that they stand under doorways and stick their faces out of window frames afterwards all part of a mere precaution just to tell themselves they hadn't jumped the real state gun. They make their way through them as if thumbing through an interior design magazine in a waiting room, unhurried in pace and knowing that every peek of every room they’ve just taken is only meant to make time and be out of mind at soon as the door closes behind them, magazine put down at the click of a lock.
It’s not as if they’re finding anything that will tick all their boxes the way Second Place did. A balcony, parquet flooring, front view windows, a built-in closet, within walking distance of Donghyuck’s job and only a train stop away from the city center—check. Their furniture is a clean fit through every door it’s pushed past and not a single fragile-labeled box comes with any shattered glass surprises once they’re sliced back open, late December move leaving them to settle in right in time to blend their housewarming with New Year’s Eve.
It's ten to eleven, one last hour to be crossed out before they get to raise the cheapest champagne man can afford in glasses a price Donghyuck kept his eyes as far away as he could from once it flashed on the supermarket’s cash register screen, and everything is just: Their living room is crowded with just enough people to have their couch flooding at the armrests; music and chatter is just the level of quiet needed not to take up the first spot on their brand new tennant’s watch list; their coffee table is brimming with just the right amount of drained glass bottles and dented cans to have Mark get up from his seat and hug as many of them to his chest as he can before beelining for the kitchen; everyone is entertained just enough not to notice when Donghyuck slips out of the room, filling in Mark’s footsteps just a minute behind in time to hip bump the kitchen door open.
He’s got the cabinet doors open in one, two strides across the room. The only hint he gets of Mark being there too is the sound of the lone drip of alcohol left inside a bottle pouring out its neck and hitting the sink’s walls, Mark going through the motions to leave it recycle-ready. Donghyuck's tunnel vision doesn't let him get a glimpse, too busy searching for something past stacked up cans and nonperishables.
"Do you remember where I put the other kitchen roll? Chenle just spilled a drink on himself." He goes up on his tiptoes as he waits on Mark, a hand blindly feeling around the shelf he can't see past the edge of. “My drink, actually. On his arm cast, too. I don’t know about an infection but that shit’s gonna stink of beer forever."
The doors closing leave him with the sight of Mark quietly putting away the rinsed bottle and making a grab for the next can in line, taking his time before answering, "We ran out."
"Thought we got some last time,” Donghyuck frowns in thought. “Are you sure?"
Donghyuck’s fingers itch to pat the side of Mark’s leg until he scoots over enough for him to duck down and check the cabinet under the sink. But Mark’s eyes don’t seem to want to leave his pour-rinse-repeat hands, staying quiet as if there was someone else in the room that was meant to answer Donghyuck.
Which, okay, weird, but it’s five to eleven on New Year's Eve, only an hour to go until they can clink dubious champagne on brand new glasses that Donghyuck got that same afternoon, and he’s not about to let Mark stow away in their two by two kitchen taking lids off cans in the light of the range hood’s grimy bulb, no matter how moody he’s been all night.
"Guess Chenle can make do with toilet paper,” he gives a performance of a shrug with a step taken Mark’s way. He covers the distance with his chest bumping into the side of Mark's bent arm, his elbow to Donghyuck's sternum and Donghyuck's jaw to his shoulder. “You coming back out with me or what?”
Nothing. Donghyuck reaches around him to squeeze at a hip, keeping his voice tone looking pink and tasting sweet when he insists.
“Your precious color coded bins will still be here in the morning. Come on."
Mark’s chin becomes a maze of wrinkles, skin crumpled under the lip he pulls inside his mouth to be kneaded thin and white, and Donghyuck doesn’t need to leaf through his mind for long to know what that face is for.
Definitely not just moody. Great.
"Okay, what is it? Are you gonna make me guess?” he leans back to ask, words going bland and eyes meeting no more than the side of Mark’s face still staring down.
The can in Mark’s hand goes crush. "So you need to guess? No ideas why I’m upset?"
Upset. The one word Mark will ever use when his face decides to go down in hard lines, temper seemingly too good for lowlife feelings like anger or rage, and Donghyuck is thrown back to the last time he remembers seeing that same maze of a frown.
Hours ago, when they’re going about putting Donghyuck’s last minute groceries away and Mark’s face goes into his reverse pout, crinkly chin and lips sucked in at the sight inside Donghyuck’s shopping bag, eyes down on the box right beside the champagne bottle.
“Is it the glasses?” Donghyuck rests his weight with a hand on the counter to tilt his head and catch sight of Mark, tension nosediving off his face when he reads the answer across the just-upset, hard lines Mark laid out for him. “Oh my god. It’s the glasses.”
Because—Fine. Maybe house hunting had been a walk-in-the-park, magazine-flip just for Donghyuck, who stood under doorways to look into rooms and judge their owners’ choice of bed covers, or took up nosy excuses to look inside their walk-in closets and check out if their set of hangers matched.
Mark was the one actually glancing up at ceilings to check for water spots and asking about figures and deadlines, leaving Donghyuck's duty to be everything moving-box related—sorting through stuff, holding up two replicates of the same up to the light and going this or that, writing down what’s left to get and getting it for them.
Which is just what he did today. They had no champagne glasses, so Donghyuck got them and now they do.
Two weeks too late. Whatever. Not like it’s a must-have or they even drink that much. Mark overlooked a bathroom leak before they signed the lease, and Donghyuck’s not on his ass about it.
"Is that why you’ve been all sulky for hours? They’re just glasses," Donghyuck repeats, his mouth moving along mocking and stretched out to make it look as ridiculous as it sounds. "I even got the ones you liked,” he adds, because last he checked, Mark did.
He had eyed them the week before when they had shopped together, saying those are nice, even, as their cart rolled past their aisle on the grocery store.
Apparently, though, he’s missing a detail, because that’s what gets Mark to finally let the can in his hold go, quietly groaning up to the ceiling as metal clatters into the sink. "Exactly."
Donghyuck blinks. He’s definitely missing something.
"So you're mad that I pay attention to you?" he narrows an eye at him, as if squinting to find what he couldn't before.
No luck.
"You pay attention,” Mark echoes back, Donghyuck hearing the scoff between the lines.
"I do," he keeps at it, brow mirroring Mark's face in crinkles. "How do you think I know you liked them?"
And how isn’t Donghyuck being thanked right now, honestly? As if getting Mark to point at something and ask for it wasn’t a sweat and tears task on its own. Like Mark won’t veer conversation off its road and change the topic’s gears in a blink the moment it reaches the what do you want for Christmas? question. As if he won’t sit down at any table and leave his plate squeaky clean no matter what he’s got to dig his fork and knife into, never any complaints and always an everything was great on the tip of his tongue.
Because Mark will get by with anything—except the stuff he’s picky about.
His side of the bed, for one. (The right one, by the way. Donghyuck’s usual side and one they’d switch around when sleeping over up until their first night here, a do we keep yours or mine? that had been settled with Mark's puppy eyes as he claimed you can have it that led into Donghyuck not, indeed, having it). The scent of the fabric softener (coconut or vanilla and nothing else, and Donghyuck never really paid attention to what his clothes smelled like, but since they’ve ruled out all flowery scents he’s been craving lavender on his shirts) and how he’ll be whiny all throughout folding clothes if he finds a detergent pod's empty vessel stuck to a sock (because it’s somehow Donghyuck’s fault it decided to hold onto life with tooth and nail and refused to dissolve in Mark’s nose-clogging coconut smelling water) and the fact he asks Donghyuck to wash his yogurt cups after he’s done with them so he can do his stupid recycling. Seriously? As if that’s gonna save the world? And, well. Maybe moving in might have left a pebble or two in their way. Big deal.
Thing is, it had been half past five when Donghyuck stood at the checkout line, bearing the stink eye earned by anyone doing a supermarket run on New Year's Eve evening just to get this for Mark. Which was obviously bad and the wrong thing to do. Somehow.
"What did I say right after saying I liked them, then?" Mark asks back, chin out as if pointing Donghyuck out in a cue to speak out.
Donghyuck scrambles for words for a chunky, minute-sized second, replaying the memory in his head as he goes. Weekday, late afternoon, a cart with a faulty wheel. Mark answering eggs first every time Donghyuck asked what else they had to get even after they had a dozen already sitting in the cart, as if following through a memory aid. Said cart and its good three wheels rolling by when Mark looks at the row of clear glass and says—
"I really like them?” he tries, test answer scoring him a low mark when all he gets is eyebrows raising up at him. “What? Do you want me to quote you? Sorry I don’t remember every single thing you say.”
“How much were they?” Mark doesn’t cut him off, but just almost. And then, like he knows the answer already, “Did you even check?”
They had no champagne glasses, so Donghyuck got them and now they do. Two weeks too late. The very same ones Mark looked at, said those are nice (or I like them, or I really like them, or whatever) and then, pricey though, because they were the most expensive out of the whole line of them, and they’re supposed to be saving up to pay Mark’s parents back on their loan.
Right. The missing detail.
“It’s literally one thing. One," Donghyuck lifts up a finger between them as he says it.
Mark’s eyes go crossed for a moment when he follows the mimic, only to turn wide the second they focus back on the sour look standing behind it. “Are you kidding?”
“Relax.” Donghyuck's same finger pokes at Mark's shoulder, who gives under the light touch the way he’d to a push. “It’s not like I maxed out my credit card over this.”
“It’s not about that," Mark starts, and Donghyuck's for sure gonna follow in stride.
"Then what is it?"
A knock syncs up with Mark's mouth parting open, and when they turn to the door the first thing to peek through is the white of an arm cast, Chenle’s smile coming in next. “Hey, sorry.”
The hush of their voices and Donghyuck’s hand on Mark’s shoulder, palm having laid itself flat over the bone when the knock caught him off guard, cover up for them well enough that the corners of Chenle’s lips never threaten to come down at the feeling of room-temperature tension. All he does is turn every one of his five senses Donghyuck’s way to push with, “You got the napkins?”
A sigh, and then Donghyuck is pushing off Mark like he would from a pool's deep end, head start from his hand coming off Mark driving him up to the surface in one, two steps to the door.
“Lost your napkin privilege when you left me without a drink," he deadpans, hands now coming up to Chenle's forearms as he turns him to face the other way. “Come on. To the bathroom."
“I already said I'm sorry.”
“Is Sorry gonna pour me a new somaek?”
“Dude—”
“Is he?”
As he gets pushed out the room, Chenle's neck bends and his face zigzags over Donghyuck's shoulder to meet Mark's eye, calling for him with just the right amount of dramatics when he asks, “Is this what you signed up for?”
If Mark’s got something to say to that, Donghyuck doesn’t hear it.
He doesn’t get to feel much of Mark at all, really, until their midnight countdown comes to a close with half a dozen glasses clinking together out in their balcony. Only then an arm wraps around his waist, a kiss getting printed with spit and bubbly wine to the side of his neck, and Donghyuck puts his hand over Mark’s without turning back, doing not a lot more than lean into him and let Mark’s laugh beat on his eardrum. A truce.
“Sorry,” Donghyuck hears after everyone had gotten burned out of making conversation and bored of looking out for the right spot in the sky where the next firework would come out of hiding from, one by one trickling out of the open air until there were two left.
Inside, the startup sound of Donghyuck’s Wii heard through the ajar balcony doors. Outside, Mark’s chin settled down on Donghyuck’s shoulder and both his arms looped around his waist, comfortable in their nosebleed seats for the city’s sporadic firework show. By his ear, Mark’s voice in a quiet apology.
“You finally unclenched?” Donghyuck fake gasps, reaching back to pat Mark’s cheek. "Welcome back, baby."
It's all for show, except for the way he melts a little easier into the mesh of limbs holding him to Mark's front.
Mark only leans the side of his head against Donghyuck's in response, softer than expected to be then when he speaks. "I didn't mean to ruin your night.”
Mark is difficult about laundry and bed sides and color wheel bins and calling himself anything but upset when mad. But he’ll house thank yous and sorrys inside himself, warm them up in emotion and feed them with reasons, treat them right enough they never wobble on their feet to come out when he gives them the ever gentle push. A list of shortcomings—whiny, easily swayed, forgiving to a fault—that Donghyuck has been set to feel as nothing but homecomings—Mark's overripe concentration put to trying to pick the empty detergent pod off the shirt it stuck to, holding back on the need to ew at the sticky blue getting under his fingernails; his eyes left lid-less when Donghyuck voices out an idea that’s just solid enough to stand its ground, and immediately, without thought, slapping at Donghyuck's shoulder in a feverish feeling with a wait, you’re right; regret sloshing over the curve of his mouth over having been worked up for a couple hours and thinking that had ruined anything much, all while being just a breadth away from trying to back hug Donghyuck into the mold of his body until he reshapes to fit just right.
“You didn't. You call that ruining a night? The bar is in hell," Donghyuck rolls his eyes, knowing Mark won't get to see it but that he'll feel it. In his tone, maybe, or in the thumb from the hand still over Mark's cheek that rubs a formless shape over the cold skin. “You know who actually ruined it for me? Chenle and his fucking cast knocking drinks down all night. We’re never getting that soju stain off the carpet.”
Donghyuck's hand drops after, and he thinks about how he wouldn't be doing this a year ago, comforting Mark and touching him tender after he tried and failed to give Donghyuck the silent treatment over a couple glasses.
A year ago he wasn't here, though: In a house that's not new but a home that is, with these many bags over his shoulder filled with the weight of Mark, as heavy as a penny and worth more than that. Exactly why he etches on, “And I do listen to you, you know?"
I didn't mean you didn't, Mark begins to say, another intention gone wrong.
Not the point. Exactly why Donghyuck keeps on talking over him.
"I know you get itchy to pay someone back the second you owe them a cent." Mark makes a sound at the back of his throat, not an objection but not an agreement. Still not the point. "And I’m fine with not eating out and living off rice for the next year. I’d do it for a lifetime if it meant getting to live here, or in a shithole in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. I don’t care. I just also think that—”
A firework goes off, the nearest to them yet, and the bang of it goes in tandem with Donghyuck rolling the inside of his cheek between his teeth and staring up at a tar black sky—suddenly blue, purple, gold—as Mark webs his fingers on the loops of his jeans.
“You’ve lived off hand me downs from Johnny," he starts with, sounding as if he's plucking the words out of himself one by one, slowly picking up in pace as he goes. "And then went from living with your mom to living with a roommate to me now, and… Already just the kitchen alone, just in there all our cutlery is my parents’ old stuff, and our pans and bowls and everything else is also from your old place or gifts from your family. We don’t even have a matching set of plates. Every piece of steel in that kitchen is scratched. All of it.”
Donghyuck takes a detour when he feels he's going into Nonsense territory, thoughts he knows are stringed together in theory showing up tangled up in their same thread in practice. His breath goes velcro and sticks to his stomach for a moment, and then Mark's hand splays open over his belly button and peels the air off him for Donghyuck to sigh it out of his nose.
“So it’s just… You know. I don’t mind the plain rice for dinner or paying your parents back forever." He swallows down the spit in his mouth, somehow buzzier under his skin than when he kissed Mark for the first time, blood fizzy from the booze in its stream and the subway moving under their feet, or when their front door key was handed out to him and it first colded up his palm weeks ago, blue veins freezing over from a feeling too tall for Donghyuck to see its face and give it a name. "I just wanted to get something for you. Something new and nice and that you actually liked. That you picked for yourself.”
Mark keeps him company in the not-quiet, not quite silence of jumpscare fireworks and Mario Kart sounds, and then he's nosing the back of Donghyuck's ear light as featherweight, voice small in a way that's no shyness and all tentativeness. “You’d eat shitty food to live in a shitty place for a lifetime?”
Donghyuck's eyebrows disappear under his fringe. “That’s what you got out of it?”
He turns in his hold just to meet Mark eye-on, and gets introduced to a smile. Small, not shy, plenty tentative.
“Why would you eat shit to live in shit? It just sounds like a lot of shit. Shit squared.”
And Mark's teasing, but he's gentle about it, tone soft as if it might bruise too easily, and Donghyuck knows what he wants him to say.
“‘Cause it’s our shithole," he answers like it pains him, his groan believable only to the untrained ear.
“Right. Ours,” Mark emphasizes. “Might not be new, but it’s nice, and I picked it for myself, and I love it.”
For all his bravado, Donghyuck has to look somewhere that's not Mark’s eye, only to find that staring into a crew of moles or the pink of a scar is just as hard to hold as open pupils, everything about Mark studying him, sizing him up, going in for the kill when making Donghyuck's heartbeat skip, trip, buzz, barf, trip again.
"I don't care about having a magazine kinda place," Mark adds on when Donghyuck changes mole for eye once more. "Like, I love that our stuff is so ours it's all fucked up looking, you know? Carpet stains and everything. It's, like, a scrapbook place. I like that better."
With Mark's hands on his hips and his words cloying the roof of Donghyuck's mouth, Donghyuck's heartbeat follows along and travels all the way to right under his tongue, covering every space Mark left uncoated. He tests it out with a swipe of the tongue (warm, honeyed, melting to the touch), and just when he decides maybe Mark has earned himself a new taste of it—
"That was sweet, though," Mark says suddenly. "The whole you not minding going broke just for me bit."
Donghyuck's eyes squeeze shut. “Shut the fuck up.”
"Can you say that again?" The smile on Mark's face goes on to be anything but small and careful, so many teeth it blinds Donghyuck even with eyes closed. "The thing about wanting to pamper me 'cause you're crazy in love with me?"
"I'll throw you over the edge. Fucking try me," Donghyuck challenges.
He ends up butting his head to Mark's chest when he tries to go on (I can't believe all this time you had a crush on me, like, this changes everything), making him walk backwards until the low of Mark's back is pressed against the railing and his laughter is booming louder than any video game or work of fire.
On January 3rd, they’ll get into a why don’t you put things back where you found them? argument, and Donghyuck will throw away an empty strawberry yogurt cup still pink and dirty inside in their miscellaneous, recycling-these-is-too-tricky garbage bag just to have the last word.
January 14th they won’t talk all day, and January 15th all they’ll do is talk.
January 20th, Donghyuck will lay in bed and mumble with sleep between his gums and Mark’s skin against his mouth that the Downy they’re using is making their sheets smell like sunscreen; January 22nd, Mark will get home with lavender incense sticks in his bag and a foreign linen spray they'll never figure out what it’s scented after, but that will make them give up coconut and flowers alike just to go on a lifelong hunt for it.
For now, it’s a quarter to one on New Year’s Day, and they stand chest to chest and temple to crook of the neck in a balcony that barely fit their six-way cheers. In a place with parquet flooring scuffed up by owning families past and front view windows looking out onto a construction site and a bathroom leak they both overlooked, a thirty minute jogging distance from Donghyuck’s job and a train stop away from the city center they first have to get a bus to get to.
The best they could get on borrowed money and in their own time. Donghyuck makes the most of it by pinning Mark's waist to the balcony railing and tilting him over the edge until his laughing turns into squealing.