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scene i. monday
“you don’t like me,” says hyunjin dubiously. jisung allows himself for one glorious moment to indulge in the fantasy of grabbing hyunjin by his giraffe neck and throttling him to death.
“no,” he says, instead of doing that. “i don’t.”
“we’ve tried this before,” hyunjin adds, undoubtedly recalling the previous pact, which, despite their best efforts, had built into a scene so atrocious that their dance teacher had banned them from ever being in the same practice room again.
leave it to chan to break that rule, too.
“we have,” jisung agrees, instead of the far more obvious—and admittedly much ruder— response he’d savored on his tongue for about half a second, consisting of the words no, shit, and idiot, in no particular order.
“why would you want to try again?” hyunjin asks. every time hyunjin asks a question, it sounds rhetorical, at least as far as jisung has figured out which questions are generally supposed to be rhetorical. every question out of hyunjin’s mouth uses that tone of voice, the one meant for rhetorical, perhaps even sarcastic questions. jisung isn’t sure that’s correct, except inasmuch as hyunjin probably doesn’t want jisung to even speak to him, much less answer his questions for him.
“i don’t like you,” jisung says, lest that critical point get lost in translation. “you’re obnoxious and pretentious, and the only reason i tolerate your existence is because chan has asked me to.”
“that’s a lot of big words for someone like you,” hyunjin mutters.
“but,” jisung plows on. “for whatever reason, chan sees value in you, and he wants you on this team, and in a week we’re supposed to stand on that stage as friends. whatever the future holds, i want to be part of it. if you’re willing to jeopardize this for all of us, then i can’t stop you, but i don’t want you to ruin this.”
hyunjin chews on that for so long that jisung has to fidget. as if hyunjin needs to take the time to savor the taste of every word, while jisung rocks onto the balls of his feet and picks anxiously at his cuticles.
“fine,” hyunjin says only once jisung tastes rust on his tongue. “truce. but while we’re airing our grievances, i wouldn’t hate you half so much if you could at least admit to the world what you are.” jisung must give away his confusion too loudly, because hyunjin adds, “everything about you is fake, han jisung-ssi. and the worst part is that you’re not fooling anyone.”
the worst part of it is that jisung actually loses sleep over it. it’s a nightmare in itself: losing sleep over hwang hyunjin. jisung stares at the ceiling for hours, laying in the dark, looking up at water stains he can’t see for lack of light, but he knows they’re there all the same. the shape of them amorphous, lines of gray traced through the night.
significantly less amorphous, much to jisung’s dismay, are hyunjin’s words rattling around in his skull: what you are. because—what is jisung, really? an artist, on the best days. on the worst, a clumsy creature doing its best approximation of a human being.
jisung was a lonely child. he didn’t mean to be, exactly; he had friends, or at least other children who filled the role he best understood friends were meant to fill. they went to school with him, let him sit at the lunch table with them, sometimes even invited him to hang out with them after school. somewhere between the traded snacks and the mall visits and the struggle of keeping up with conversation—an already insurmountable task to jisung, on some days, never mind when the conversation was english wrapped up in the varying accents of his classmates—along the way, jisung worked out that he was not, in fact, like the other children, all of whom seemed to wear their human bodies like, well—bodies. jisung’s body, by comparison, had always seemed like it intended to be something else, and got mistakenly tangled up in humanity somehow.
on a day-to-day basis, jisung fakes a lot of things. contentment, confidence, probably several other emotions beginning with the letter ‘c’. the problem, which hyunjin has burrowed to the heart of in so few words, is that everything about jisung is fake, because what jisung is is an amalgamation of human-seeming traits, all layered atop one another to approximate a human-seeming shape. not that jisung has ever lied, exactly. he’s too clumsy and too transparent for that. but at the center of every human being is—something human, something core and central to the species. something jisung has never had and never been able to copy. instead, at jisung’s center, he has only fear, a strangling terror that he will be found out, and all of his papier-mâché layers are only a response to that fear. survival at its basest.
“han-ah,” changbin grumbles, a nickname that hasn’t taken long to catch on, and quiet enough that changbin wouldn’t be accused of having gone insane if jisung didn’t reply. “i can feel you thinking too hard.”
“shut up,” jisung hisses back. this time when he blinks, the blobs of grey go wobbly across his vision, water stains appearing to pack up and move across their ceiling tiles. jisung knows that’s not what has happened, so the next best explanation is this: the spell is broken. jisung groans, just quiet enough for changbin to know that he’s annoyed, and to wake no one else. he rolls onto the side and burrows into his blankets and groans again, for emphasis.
“sleep well, jisungie,” changbin murmurs. smug bastard.
***
scene ii. tuesday.
“i wish you’d give him a chance,” says yang jeongin, certified brat. hyunjin’s fingers itch for revenge, but jeongin is almost an entire year younger, and far less experienced with the world at large, and he’s treasured. even hyunjin’s worst impulses would never lash out at jeongin.
“who fucking raised you,” hyunjin mutters, smoothing a hand up jeongin’s spine. jeongin doesn’t like skinship, but sometimes it’s necessary—like when hyunjin is trying to make sure everyone is stretching adequately for their ridiculously difficult choreography, and jeongin’s form somehow sucks even when all he has to do is curve his spine over his outstretched legs until he can hold onto his own ankles. “breathe.”
jeongin breathes. the slow rock of it, body shifting under hyunjin’s hand, is a comfort. that everything moves the way it’s supposed to move.
“we’re friends, you know,” hyunjin adds, as if he can defend himself. or protect himself from where he knows jeongin is going with this conversation. but jeongin snorts. “surely you’ve noticed.”
“i’ve noticed a refreshing lack of fighting,” jeongin says, which is not an agreement. he somehow manages to grimace in a way that shows off his dimples. “he’s my best friend.”
“i find it difficult to believe he has any friends,” hyunjin says, too derisive. jeongin is never put off by hyunjin’s sharp edges, even though hyunjin thinks he probably should be.
“he’s my best friend,” jeongin repeats. “i know that you two just called one of your weird little truces again. but i really think you would like him if you let yourself.”
“there’s nothing to like,” hyunjin says, lowering his voice as the boy in question bursts into the room, trailed closely by chan and changbin and their sickeningly fond smiles. “he projects his stupid fake persona, and there’s nothing of substance underneath. i know people like that, jeongin-ah. it’s not worth it.”
“you know that’s not true,” jeongin says, trailing off into a sigh as hyunjin stops applying pressure to his vertebrae, letting jeongin sit up at last. “he wouldn’t be on this team if it were. i wouldn’t be friends with him if it were.”
this, hyunjin is forced to admit, is true. jeongin, like hyunjin, is not the type of person to tolerate falsehoods and lies, which certainly seems to imply, with how attached at the hip they are, that jisung must have something of value worth retaining beyond his ability to rap quickly and hit notes that should be beyond his capabilities. it’s a fact that does not make hyunjin any happier. “what would i even say to him?”
“whatever you want,” jeongin says, standing up, brushing invisible dust off his pants. minho notices, of course, and swoops in to drag jeongin into the rest of the group; but hyunjin isn’t in the mood for that, so he stays seated, and no one bothers him. it’s good. he likes that they understand him, or at the very least they’re trying to. the hardest part of maintaining his school friendships is the way they all seem to feel the need to always be doing something, when sometimes all hyunjin wants is to sit here, back to the wall, and let the rush and noise swell around him.
the thing about giving han jisung a chance, as jeongin so mildly put it, is this: it’s been two years since they met, and in that time they’ve oscillated so violently between casual acquaintances, bitter enemies, and people who could ostensibly befriend each other that there is no erasing it. no undoing their history, no forgetting the damage they’ve done to each other. it’s been a two way street, always; the things that jisung has said, off-putting and insulting and strange—hyunjin can admit that he’s given back to jisung just as cruelly. still, to have to be the one to make that first step is humiliating, even if it’s for jeongin’s sake. no, hyunjin won’t do it. he can’t, no matter how nicely jeongin asks.
resolute in this, if nothing else, hyunjin stands to join the group’s practice.
still—jeongin has planted the seed of doubt. hyunjin worries over it, metaphorically tonguing at the place where this troubling awareness is caught between his teeth. minho serves a frankly alarming portion of ramen directly into hyunjin’s bowl.
“you’re still growing,” minho says, a little defensive, though hyunjin hasn’t asked and had, in fact, planned on keeping his mouth shut about it. minho is snappish and reactive at the best of times, never mind when a practice has gone this badly. hyunjin’s knees ache, bruises forming where he’d dropped to the floor repeatedly, minho relentless in drilling the same four bars over and over until their timing was flawless.
less obvious is the tender wound hyunjin is nursing, the bruise to his heart in the shape of felix’s voice, snapping, leave him alone. felix, who has never chosen a side despite the fact that he’s never known a version of them that could be friends. hyunjin doesn’t even remember what he said to warrant it, only that it was another of his barbs, the kind that normally jisung would flare to defend himself against, severely and without restraint. instead it was yongbok, sharp and uncharacteristically serious. hyunjin hasn’t actually spoken a word since, and he isn’t sure whether to be alarmed that no one seems to have noticed.
it’s like this: minho hard-boiled and sliced in half four eggs, and the eight halves started off the meal arranged neatly atop the ramen. most are already claimed. hyunjin has one bobbing face down in his broth. the pot still holds two halves destined to go unclaimed, because chan is self-sacrificial and minho is, as far as hyunjin is beginning to understand, much the same, albeit more secretive about it. these unclaimed halves go, most often, to changbin (the most likely to ask for it) or to jeongin (the spoiled, well-loved baby). hyunjin would never begrudge either of them this, but it still stings. somehow hyunjin is too stupid to get it into his head that he is not the kind of person that others dedicate extra food to. he should be capable of eating in silence, and he mostly does, only—he can’t help watching, tracking the trajectory of the spoon as chan reaches across the table, one half into changbin’s bowl and the other into jeongin’s. exactly as predicted.
the scrape of plastic on wood barely registers to hyunjin’s conscious brain, yet he finds himself looking down anyway, directly at—han jisung’s bowl, just—sitting there by hyunjin’s elbow, little yellow circle staring up at him from amidst the noodles.
hyunjin swallows.
“i’m not that hungry,” jisung says, soft. chan is just on his other side—distracted for now, but hyunjin would have to be brain-dead to not notice jisung’s complex relationship to food and the way said relationship frustrates chan to no end.
hyunjin almost asks if he’s sure, but jisung does not look at him, and without jisung’s full attention there is no way to ask him quietly enough, so hyunjin—takes it.
no one comments, or even, as far as hyunjin is aware, notices. it’s not as if he or jisung is the loudest personality at the table tonight, so it makes sense. jisung takes his bowl back, and says nothing else to hyunjin the entire night, but he goes back to the pot for seconds and thirds so clearly he was hungry, and hyunjin can’t make sense of that. is it pity that put a whole egg in hyunjin’s bowl tonight, or—something else? hyunjin realizes abruptly that he has no idea what emotions jisung is actually capable of. the full spectrum is out of the question, but surely he can feel some things.
if it’s pity, hyunjin might strangle him.
***
scene iii. wednesday.
when jisung tips his head to rest on the back of the couch, it’s hyunjin standing behind him, carding fingers through his hair.
“you should leave it like this more often,” he murmurs, ever the accurate portrayal of an obsessed boyfriend. “it’s nice.”
“i’ll just let the stylists know, shall i?” jisung replies. hyunjin snorts, flicks his nose. “did you want something?”
“just wondering what you were doing for break,” hyunjin says, only mildly evasive. jisung will take whatever form of progress he can get his hands on. “chan and felix’s flight leaves tomorrow.”
“and you hate to think of me all alone in the big empty dorm,” jisung says, fluttering his eyelashes in a way that earns him another flick from hyunjin. “i’ll be fine.”
“you don’t have to be,” hyunjin says. half-shrug. “i mean, not the whole time, anyway.”
“hwang hyunjin,” jisung gasps, doing—he hopes—a pretty good job of pretending to be scandalized. “are you inviting me to meet your parents?”
“not anymore,” hyunjin declares, sailing away in that pretty, graceful way of his. jisung watches him go, upside-down, completely confident in the knowledge that hyunjin meant it when he asked and couldn’t have been less insincere in his retraction if he’d tried.
the thing about hyunjin is that, as much as jisung makes fun of him, the obsession is mutual. sometimes jisung finds himself touching his own lips, still feels that rush from the first time hyunjin kissed him. it’s a rush that always comes with the tangle of emotions he’d felt at the time, but it’s a rush nonetheless. and he watches himself in the mirror, getting ready in the morning, during dance practice, knowing hyunjin’s left the kinds of bruises jisung’s always dreamed about, and they’re just under a thin layer of cotton. his, and his alone.
the thing about hyunjin is that jisung is head over heels in love with him.
the thought had been terrifying, the first time—when jisung was younger and terrified of just about everything, and at a time when he and hyunjin were not kind to each other. he remembers alternately crying and trying-not-to-cry in jeongin’s bed, and the endless hours of practice because—if he could do nothing else, he could be perfect. if he was perfect, then hyunjin could say nothing to him that might shatter his delicate heart. it was a kind of relentlessness that had nearly broken him, and hyunjin had seen right through it in the end, anyway.
“hey,” jisung says, just before hyunjin turns the corner. hyunjin pauses, and looks back at him, and jisung burns the same way he always burns when he has hyunjin’s full attention.
“what’s up?” hyunjin asks, almost shy.
“i want to,” jisung says. hyunjin’s eyebrow quirks. “i want to come home with you.”
“i’m always home with you,” hyunjin says. “get with the program, baby.”
jisung laughs and laughs and laughs.
***
scene iv. thursday.
“i hated you,” jisung admits, resting his chin on his knees. in the moon-lit gray of their hotel room, hyunjin grimaces.
“you don’t anymore, though?”
jisung’s own fault, for giving himself away in his use of verb tenses. but he’s a terrible liar, and he thinks jeongin’s spirit might actually materialize here and now, in their room, if jisung lied about this. jisung hates thinking about that, though. thinks that first night might be a contender for ‘most pathetic jisung has ever been in his life’, and jeongin probably deserves a reward of some kind for putting up with it.
“i don’t,” he says. his voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t tremble or shake or give him away. hyunjin still blinks, owlish in the dark, like he doesn’t quite believe it. “i thought i could. but i just—don’t. i don’t know where it went.”
hyunjin inches closer, a task made easier by the fact that they’re both on the floor near the window, absorbing moonlight, beds untouched. mostly untouched. the bed by the door, jisung’s, is slightly wrinkled from jeongin’s brief stay before he’d finally gotten brave enough to face chan. whatever the fuck that was about, jisung doesn’t want to know. hyunjin, here and now, tips a little closer to him and says, “it doesn’t have to go anywhere. it can just—be gone.”
“is it—?” jisung starts, and stops. always starting things, when it comes to hyunjin, and always stopping them before he can follow through. but hyunjin only waits, expectantly, where before jisung would have once expected him to barrel past it as if jisung hadn’t spoken, so jisung tries again: “is it gone for you?”
“yeah,” hyunjin says, soft. gentle. moonlit. “yeah, i think it is.”
***
scene v. friday.
check youtube, reads the text from jeongin.
what are you talking about, hyunjin texts back, but he needn’t have bothered. the video is the first thing on his home page when hyunjin opens the app and finds han jisung’s face staring back at him, name in all capital letters because—well, hyunjin knows that’s how the company spells their stage names, but in this moment it feels like it’s because jisung wants hyunjin to look nowhere else.
hyunjin does not want to cry. crying would be stupid. he loves jisung dearly, but this—this is temporary. no matter how much he hates the company-mandated, groundhog-day endless loop of bed, painting, the convenience store down the street because it’s the only place he’s allowed to go, the looks of pity from his hyungs—it’s all temporary. it can’t last forever. either the company will decide he’s innocent, and he’ll be free, or they’ll remove him from the group, which would be heart-shattering, but would still at least break the cycle.
and yet, listening to jisung’s pure, raw talent—his voice crooning out i wish you back with a kind of anger hyunjin assumes is normally reserved for the recently divorced—knowing that jisung had said, all hushed secret—
it’s not entirely about you, he’d whispered. hyunjin had known that, of course. he knows by now that when jisung writes songs, he rarely writes from just one source of inspiration. but for hyunjin to even be considered one of them is—transcendental, even. hyunjin is a supernova of love, a champagne fountain of honor—to be chosen, by someone as elusive and unknowable as han jisung.
he chose hyunjin.
and he keeps choosing hyunjin, over and over and over again, when so-called fans say he shouldn’t, when the company says he shouldn’t. it’s just them. jisung and hyunjin. hyunjin-and-jisung. sometimes it makes hyunjin dizzy, just how much jisung actually likes him. underneath the silly flirting that makes up about sixty percent of jisung’s personality, there’s a well of love that overflows from him at all times, and hyunjin is a little stunned every time he remembers just how much he likes drowning in it.
it’s a really good song, he texts jisung, and jisung texts back a smiley-face. hyunjin sucks in air like he’s forgotten how to breathe, and he loves.
***
scene vi. saturday.
the most infuriating thing on the planet is not, as hyunjin had thought four years ago, chan’s perfectionism. chan’s perfectionism is a character flaw that hyunjin can cope with, because it at least has the common decency to come with strict, detailed instructions that hyunjin can follow. hyunjin likes instructions. when chan is directing, hyunjin gets a very narrow framework within which he can work.
the problem, put most kindly, is han jisung.
“that’s not quite right,” jisung says, for probably the ninth take in a row, and hyunjin nearly rips off his headphones to throw them at jisung. given that jisung’s on the other side of an unfortunately durable window, this is more likely to hurt hyunjin than jisung, so hyunjin refrains. barely.
“give me something to go on here,” he says instead, frustration pinching his throat tight. jisung, a little fuzzy, distorted by the window, shrugs. exasperated, hyunjin appeals to chan: “hyung!”
after a brief scuffle, chan wrenches control of the mic away from jisung, leaning close to say, “it’s jisung’s song, hyunjin-ah.”
“it’s a re-recording,” hyunjin points out, perfectly reasonably. “surely if it was good then, it’s good now, since i’m doing it, i cannot stress this enough, the same way.”
jisung shrugs again. hyunjin might actually kill him. “you’re better now than you were.”
“dickhead.”
instead of an answer from jisung, hyunjin hears chan’s warning: “jisung.”
jisung’s jaw clenches. “it has to be perfect, hyung.”
chan sighs. “hyunjin-ah? can i talk to you in the hall for a second?”
hyunjin grimaces, steps out into the hall, finds chan mirroring him at the other door. chan comes to him, though, as if to put as much distance as possible between them and jisung.
“hyung, i…” hyunjin trails off, suddenly uncertain. what is he going to do, apologize? he loves jisung, really—a strange enough thought to have, when once hyunjin had sworn that was impossible—but he knows he’s not wrong this time.
“i know,” says chan, “that it’s… cruel and unusual punishment to ask you to tolerate him right now.”
“and yet.”
“and yet,” chan agrees. “it’s—he’s under a lot of pressure right now, and—i know—we all are, but he’s—worse. if i had an easy solution, i swear i’d give it to you, but i really think he needs to just—work through it, whatever it is. and you know he’s harder on himself than any of the rest of us.”
jisung’s voice is still recovering from the absolute hell he’s been putting himself through in the last week, so hyunjin can’t pretend not to know what chan means. and hyunjin’s thankful for the effort, because jisung’s range of talent means that whenever they sit down to record, it’s jisung’s vocals they use for the guide rather than having to record over the old tracks. hyunjin just isn’t quite sure that justifies the last half-hour he’s spent in the recording booth trying to conquer jisung’s warped sense of perfection.
chan sighs again. “i’m gonna take a walk,” he says. “maybe you should talk to him.”
whatever. hyunjin can manage that much, and if it makes his job easier later, even better. he cracks open the door chan had come out of, finds jisung slumped onto the table and doodling on his own hand.
“hyunjin,” he says, abruptly sitting up. “i thought—”
“chan’s taking a walk,” hyunjin says. “getting some air. he thought maybe i’d have something to say to you.”
several long moments stretch out, jisung waiting and hyunjin with nothing to say. finally jisung squints and says, “do you?”
“not really,” hyunjin admits, picking at a chipped nail. “you insist on being an idiot, so who am i to change your mind?”
“it’s not stupid to want it to be good,” jisung protests loudly.
“it was good before,” hyunjin shoots back, volume rising to match. “what changed?”
“everything changed! you can’t pretend you don’t want it to be perfect—”
“perfection is unattainable,” hyunjin interrupts.
“it has to be perfect.”
hyunjin blinks. jisung’s face is so close, so suddenly. jisung shrinks back into his chair, but he’s not the problem. the problem is hyunjin, bent almost ninety degrees to stare at jisung, too close too close too close, frozen in place, soles growing roots into the floor, palms sweaty on the arm rests.
“give me one good reason why,” he breathes, and jisung’s eyes slip shut, years melting off of him. he looks half a child again.
“it’s me,” he whispers back, shaky and awful. a version of jisung devoid of confidence is—not really jisung at all, and yet… “it’s—i have to prove—that it’s worth it.”
“that you’re worth it,” hyunjin specifies, and kisses him.
***
scene vii. sunday.
the stage lights plunge them into darkness. the countdown begins.
whatever the future holds.
they find each other’s hands at the exact same time, and smile.