Work Text:
It’s over.
The jovial beats of curtain call taper away. The less than rhythmic clapping of the audience, their cheers and whistles, the occasional scream of a name, all fizzle out into murmurs of post-show discourse. Bit by bit, from the peripheries of his vision, the curtain slides closed, turning the bright reflections of burning stage lights into melting shadows. One after another, once they confirm that the curtains have obscured them completely, they unlink their arms from each other and rise from the deep bow, stretching or sitting or chattering away. Chan’s one of the last ones to receive this luxury, in the middle of the back. He’s sure no one in the audience would care if he shook off whoever’s uncomfortably moist hand was grabbing his, but he doesn’t because he shouldn’t. Something about the principle. He remains as still as possible, staring at that marker on the ground until its bright red fades to bland maroon. The clammy hand of whoever’s beside him lets go first, sending a twinge of indignation through him. When he straightens himself, he’s the only one still in place.
Without the heat of the lights, the eyeshadow feels hardened and cakey, his foundation an oppressive mask, his hair a frozen solid mass, all of it making every step to the studio for debrief so, so heavy.
The teacher’s words pass in static, the seniors’ in noise. They pat each other on the back, stroke each others’ egos, and lament how much they’ll miss everyone. No one talks about how terribly they performed.
Chan wonders, absently, if they even know.
The conversations all around him weigh on his eyes. They pile onto the blues and glitter, pressing his eyelids down slowly until he falls asleep leaning on his backpack. For those few minutes, it’s a blissful silence. Then, something crashes into him. Someone, actually, because there’s an apologetic, “Oh, sorry! Didn’t see you there!” from above. By the time Chan groggily lifts his head up, whoever it is, whichever one of the two people standing, has turned back, posing for a picture. He looks back to the front, where the leaders talk among themselves, and everyone held hostage by them seems perfectly satisfied with scrolling on their phones or talking idly with each other. Chan blinks, bleary, and something in him has him grab his backpack, stand up, and slip out the back door of the studio. It should cause a scene, leaving before they’ve officially been let go, reflected 4 times over in the mirrors that surround them, an unceremonious, disrespectful gesture on the seniors’ last day, but it doesn’t, leaving Chan split between relief, disappointment, and more indignation; though the moment he’s out of the room it all dissolves into fatigue, settling like mud in a river, slipping down his legs until it comes to rest in his soles to be dredged with every step.
Slowly, he makes his way to the other end of the campus, detouring past the crowds of parents and friends, as long a walk it makes the journey to the gate.
“Hey.”
A tap on his shoulder, and Chan jolts, turning around.
It’s flowers. A big, big, bunch of them, bright butter-blonde blooms that seem to glow in the dark. A pair of arms barely wrap around the bouquet, and two round eyes, round as the bunches of puffy petals, peek out.
A voice, warm as the mere shade of yellow on a night cold and dark as this one, comes from behind the flowers.
“Congratulations on the show.”
“Hansol-hyung?” Chan asks, even though there’s no one else the boy before him can be.
Hansol stands in front of him, yes, but Hansol’s also now made his way into him, his mind, his mouth and is the only word he can repeat, once again.
“Hyung.” Chan answers himself.
Hansol chuckles.
“Take your flowers. You did well. And they’re making my nose itchy.”
Chan takes them into his trembling arms. They’re more sore than they’ve ever been, weighed down by the residual ache of consecutive weeks of practice and the fading adrenaline of today, but the bountiful bouquet doesn’t seem to weigh a single gram. In fact, it feels light as a balloon tied to him, pumped fit to burst with hope and happiness and other beautiful things that lift everything heavy off of Chan’s shoulders.
“Hyung,” Chan says, for the third time, intentional this time.
Hansol laughs, “What?”, and it takes everything in Chan to not let a fourth “Hyung” slip.
“You came.”
“Of course I came,” Hansol replies, tone sure, the hands that remain gripping his forearm surer.
“I was basically in the wings for most of it.”
“Does that mean you haven’t worked just as hard as the others? Or even harder?”
Chan knows he has. Hansol would know too, with all the plans together Chan’s missed, forsaken for practices and rehearsals kept this from everyone else; because how could he show them two hours of a shadow if he had worked this hard?
It’s because Hansol knows this so keenly that he speaks as if Chan had responded to him.
“I liked the part where you did the skip-jumps across the stage. It looked like it’d be hard to coordinate that to the music, but you did it perfectly.”
“Yeah!” Chan says, nodding emphatically, and the funny little name draws a giggle out of him. “Yeah, it was. I was hoping I’d have it down by today.”
The lull between them lasts less than a second, filled by a distant hubbub that grows louder, moves closer, and Chan eyes flick to the very corners of his vision unconsciously. Or, maybe he tightens his arms, tenses under Hansol’s touch.
Perhaps, none of these things happen, but Hansol knows what to do, regardless. He always does.
“Shall we go? I cycled here,” Hansol says, shifting his hand to turn Chan and guide them to the bicycle parking.
Hansol picks the flowers and hoists the duffel bag from Chan’s arms, putting the former into the front basket and pulling the latter over his shoulder before rolling the bike out of its lot. He slides into his seat; Chan follows behind him.
💐
Every push of the pedals brings a cool breeze that washes over them. It seems to scrub Chan clean of the makeup and strip him of the sweat-dried costume clinging to him. In front of Hansol, just Hansol, he’s always bare, anyways. An open book flipped through a hundred times over, spine broken, pages dog-eared, the dust jacket lost entirely, just Chan before he was anything more than his name and age; and without the weight of everything else, Chan thinks he just might fly away with the wind, dissolve into the dirt kicked up behind them, so he holds on tighter and locks his fingers around the steady warmth through Hansol's hoodie, because that might be the only way he can make it home.
