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The dorm is quiet save for the soft snores of the sleeping boys and the soft plink of water dripping into the kitchen sink. Jiung prefers it this way. He’s never lied all the time he said he’s a solitary person.
(Even solitary people need someone to love them, though.)
From where he sits in the living room, curled up on his side with his knees pressed to his chest, he can’t see the kitchen sink. His gaze is on the balcony, where Seoul glitters under the black-velvet sky. Glitters so brightly it puts to the stars to misery.
Jiung has been thinking about how an idol like him is supposed to outshine everyone lately. Of course, he couldn’t do that against his bandmates, or his seniors, but against the rest of the world—
A strangled sound escapes his throat. He shuts his eyes against the burn of hot tears, swallows against the painful lump in his throat. The plink-plink-plink of the kitchen sink irritates him so much, but he can’t find the will in him to go and turn off the tap. Three years of this relentless grind and one strange thought process is enough to make his body shut down. Refuse to listen to him.
Footsteps echo through the quiet dorm.
Jiung shoots up into a sitting position, not prepared for the questions, the worry, the—
He’s rubbing his eyes free of the tears when a soft voice calls, “Jiung? Is that you?” and his blood freezes to ice. Of all the people—he could handle Shota better than this, hell, even Keeho—
“Taeyang,” he clears his throat. “Yes, it’s me. Why are you awake?”
The oldest (if only by bare months) of them steps fully into the dim light of the living room. The only light come from the kitchen light that Jiung had switched on before collapsing onto the couch, not wanting to be in the dark. Not wanting to find that succumbing to thoughts can be easier in the pitch-dark of the space he finds so stifling yet liberating.
The dim light shines onto Taeyang’s profile. He’s grown so much since back then—they all have, but other than the maknaes, Jiung the change is the most visible in Taeyang, if more subtly. The slant of his cheekbones are sharper, his face more angular, his jaw more prominent. Changes you could really only notice if you’ve been watching closely for years—
But then, it’s not Taeyang that Jiung watches so closely. He just happens to be stuck to the one Jiung does actually watch. The black hair suits him in ways hard to describe. Makes him look sharper.
“Better question is why are you awake?” he responds, squinting through the semi-darkness at Jiung. When Jiung frowns at him, he says, “I wanted to get some water and I thought I heard the sound of crying. Are you alright?”
He has no doubt he looks like a mess, eyes red, nose red, face stained with dry tear tracks. He would be embarrassed, but he’s been caught in worse states over the years. Not usually by Taeyang, but still.
“Just—couldn’t sleep,” he fumbles through the half-lie, half-answer. Jiung is so tired, tired enough that he could drop and sleep for a day straight right now if his brain would just shut up. If he could stop thinking about all the ways that he is inadequate and not enough, never enough, not for—
“Couldn’t sleep,” Taeyang repeats, looking at Jiung like he doesn’t quite believe him. His dark eyes could cut through stone. Those sharp eyes of him only add to his beauty. A beauty he envies so badly some days that he can’t bear to look at Taeyang, afraid of saying something that would hurt his friend.
“Just…bad thoughts,” is all Jiung allows himself to say.
Taeyang raises an eyebrow, but he refrains from questioning further. Jiung realizes that as much as he doesn’t want to see his other best friend right now, Taeyang is probably the most suitable person for his little three a.m. meltdown.
The maknaes would worry too much, unused to seeing their Jiung-hyung so fragile (though Jongseob would likely just give up and let Jiung work it out on his own). Intak would be basically the same, except he would refuse to leave Jiung’s side, much like Keeho, who would needle and needle and needle until Jiung is forced to shout at him to leave him alone.
But Taeyang won’t question further than he has to. All he really wants to know is if Jiung is okay, and he can usually tell that just by looking at him. Taeyang has always been scarily perceptive of all their moods, even if he doesn’t exactly handle it the best way. He tries, is the point.
Taeyang is the best person to accompany him right now, is the point.
Ironically.
He moves to sit beside Jiung, giving him space, but the space itself is small enough that only a bare movement from Jiung would close the gap. His way of offering Jiung physical support. Taeyang doesn’t talk a lot and he keeps everything short and blunt—is as serious as he has a dry sense of humor, often funny enough that Jiung goes to find him when he feels down.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly,” he says, hesitates, and then, “not right now.”
Taeyang doesn’t press any further, like Jiung had known he wouldn’t. He just murmurs a quiet assent and sits there in silence, and then his hand snakes out and takes Jiung’s. He squeezes and doesn’t say anything, and Jiung closes his eyes against a fresh rush of tears, swallows against the cries that want to wrench themselves free of his throat. He clings to Taeyang’s hand so hard that he’s sure it might bruise, and the stylist noonas will scold them in the morning, but Taeyang doesn’t say a word.
Clinging to Taeyang’s hand doesn’t do anything to stop the cry that lurches free of his throat the moment he dares to breathe properly. Taeyang’s head shoots up from where he had been staring at the pattern on his sleep shirts, and turns towards him, alarmed at the force of the sound.
“Jiung?” he asks tentatively.
“Sorry, sorry, just—give me a minute,” he stumbles out, sucking in breath after breath the way he was taught to do when he felt panicked, but that’s the thing. He is far from panicked. He is scared and tired and impossibly lonely.
It’s ridiculous how that word springs to his mind when he is anything but—he has Keeho, his best friend above all, Taeyang to be that emotional support rock when Jiung just needs someone to be there and no more, the maknaes to love him for being their smart and silly and ridiculous Jiung-hyung. Intak to accompany him whenever Jiung asks.
“You can cry,” Taeyang says, “it’s okay to.”
“Do you ever feel like you can’t be enough?” the question rips itself free of him, latching onto Taeyang who stills. Clearly, he hadn’t expected that of all things. “Do you ever—ever—”
“Breathe, Jiung,” Taeyang instructs softly, “you’re going to make yourself sick if you keep going like this.” He hesitates to say his next words, and Jiung remembers that Taeyang struggles to say things sometimes, afraid his blunt nature might really hurt someone, but he says it nonetheless. “You’re going to wake someone up, Jiung. I don’t think you want anyone to see you like this.”
Jiung obeys. He tries to breathe. He realizes that he’s grasping Taeyang’s other hand, too, his head bent forward and tucked into his chest almost as if to hide—fruitlessly—from Taeyang. As if he could ever hide anything from Taeyang. He wonders if Taeyang knows the secret he’s been desperately hiding—first because he couldn’t know how anyone would react, then because it would kill him to burden anyone with that knowing how things are. An unspoken-on agreement that this is how things are.
It would kill the others—it would kill Keeho to know that he’s unwillingly broken Jiung’s heart. Jiung can never let him know. Never.
“I do know.” Taeyang’s voice is quiet but strong, and he squeezes back harder, trying to offer him something, anything to hang on to. “I think about how I’m not enough every day.”
A burst of hysterical laughter escapes Jiung. “Who doesn’t have this issue, anyway? It’s kind of pathetic of me to be crying about this, don’t you think?”
“Hey, none of that,” Taeyang shakes his head. “You’re allowed to feel. You’re allowed to cry.”
Logically, Jiung knows that. He knows that fact so well—he repeats it to everyone on their bad days—but it doesn’t stop him from feeling less pathetic.
“Why do you think you’re not enough, Taeyang-ah?” Jiung shoots the question.
Taeyang seems so perfect and untouchable, sometimes, but he isn’t, and yet he never complains. Just silently gets his shit together and runs after them all in an attempt to keep up, and when he breaks, he does it as silently as he can. Jiung doubts he’s ever really talked about everything that bothers him to anyone but Keeho. Obviously.
Which is not to say Taeyang doesn’t trust him—of course, he does. Jiung knows that Taeyang’s temper is, surprisingly, not as short as one would expect. Taeyang’s patience, though, wears thin quick. He has always been a little jealous of their maknae for being so young and talented in all areas the way he was not at that age, though he will never say to Jongseob’s face. That he likes messing around as often as he can, using that stupid aegyo voice to annoy them but just comes off as cute and endearing, which he won’t admit he likes. And that he looks at Keeho like he is his sun, his star, his universe.
Funny, Jiung feels about the same, except looking at Keeho hurts sometimes.
“I’m not a natural dancer like most of you guys,” Taeyang speaks after a few seconds of deliberation. “I’m not good with people the way you are. I get awkward with the fans, too, sometimes. I’ve gotten in trouble more than once for saying things I shouldn’t.”
He deliberates over his next words. “I worry that I’m too much trouble for Keeho sometimes. He already has enough to deal with what with his every word being turned against him—” Jiung winces, knowing how true that is. Ever since three years ago when their careers had almost been finished, nothing has quite been the same for Keeho, for any of them. And he blames himself for it every day.
He remembers Taeyang’s stoic expression with his dark eyes simmering had defended Keeho to the world. He’s always taught us things we don’t know, in that calm, measured voice laced with steel and a protectiveness that dared them to hurt Keeho.
“—and I’m scared that I can’t be enough to keep him together when he can’t be our anchor.”
The way he had held them all together when Keeho couldn’t, so soon after their debut. Comforting the scared maknaes, putting on a brave front for Intak who worried harder than anyone else.
Giving Jiung, too scared to look through social media, the blunt truth and demanding that he stop acting like he could hold it together in the face of that storm.
Like it or not, Taeyang is one person Keeho absolutely depends on no matter what—and vice versa. Like it or not, Taeyang stirs something in Keeho that Jiung couldn’t. That he can never.
Jiung thinks those are the days when they got together. When everything went to shit and they were almost ready to kiss their newfound careers goodbye had it not been for the higher-ups who insisted they could patch things together. That they had a chance. That P1HARMONY was not finished.
And that Keeho needed to keep his mouth shut.
Jiung had been angry that day, but nobody had been angrier than Taeyang, who simmered with fury.
They’d all witnessed the way he had punched the wall almost hard enough to crack the plaster when they got back home, then apologized in a tight voice and gone to find Keeho, who had immediately shut himself in the bedroom. Shota had cried that day and the rest weren’t far behind.
Difficult times that he shudders to remember, especially when the public decides they don’t like Keeho again. And he has to be reprimanded and apologize for something he never did or meant to do, told harshly that he might as well as not be leader if this is the example he sets.
Jiung loves that about Keeho—the way he stubbornly remains himself, if a bit more careful, despite all the warnings he receives. He chooses to focus on those who love him—the members, their fans—instead of those who have an agenda against him. For some people, he will never be enough, and Keeho has accepted that. He cares, he hurts. But he accepts it.
Isn’t that why Jiung is currently angry at himself? For all that he admires Keeho, he can’t ever seem to be someone on par with him. Someone like Taeyang, who takes the hits the public throws at him without so much as a flinch. He hurts, they all hurt. But Jiung envies them nonetheless.
He envies Taeyang. For being the one Keeho reaches out to in his darkest days, the first person he seeks in a room, the one who has taken up residence in his heart like a wildfire that stubbornly burns through the forest.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” he says, so fiercely that Taeyang flinches back, round eyes wide. The dark is no longer sharp but something soft and confused, something that struggles to reach out for Jiung. “Who is it who held us together back then? Who was it who tucked Shota and Jongseob into bed even though they were too old for it, made sure Intak and I had eaten, made sure everything was in order, when Keeho couldn’t? Who was there for me when my best friend was fighting against demons he almost lost to?” he doesn’t wait for a reply. “You, you idiot. Why do you think Keeho loves you so?”
He watches his friend—Keeho’s love—flinch back, because they don’t address this out loud. They have dating bans they never speak of in public and whatever the hell was going on at first was toeing the line. It’s been a long time since they leaped right over that line, choosing to love each other.
The four of them watched it happen, slowly, gradually. And because they love their two oldest, because they care so much for each other and no matter what, their careers are a priority in their lives, they don’t speak on it outside of little jabs here and there.
It is a fundamental rule of being in their group: accept that Keeho and Taeyang are in love and dating, but don’t talk about it unless you want to fall into a habit, unless you want to become used to speaking about it and say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Never fucking mind that your heart is shattered.
Beyond the core rule of dating bans being violated, there is no way to tell how they can survive if it is revealed that two of their members don’t fit the heteronormativity of society. Between them, the six of them, they all know that not one of them fit that box.
But they pretend to. They voice their support when they can but never, never let even the inkling that they themselves might be just who they support. Korea doesn’t like homosexuality. That is the bare truth of it.
And as idols who just stepped out of the ‘rookie’ label, they have to be careful.
Taeyang’s dark, dark eyes search Jiung’s. “I was so close to breaking that entire time,” his voice cracks a little. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was fumbling for strings all the time, looking for some way, any way to not fall apart. Because—I’m the oldest, just by months. But the oldest, nonetheless. And my incapacity slapped me in the face full force.”
“Not everyone has to be a natural leader,” Jiung says quietly. He realizes that he has stopped crying, but his chest still heaves with unsteady breaths. “You did what you had to do and we’re all grateful for it. Keeho, most of all.”
“Logically, I know that,” Taeyang wears a wan smile. “But the anxiety never goes away.”
Jiung almost laughs at how familiar that sounds. That is the truth of it. What is logic in the face of an anxious brain constantly working against you?
“I’ve always been jealous of you,” Jiung admits. They’re breaking rules here. They don’t care that they’re breaking rules here. “For being that someone to Keeho. For being a person that I could never be. For being—” his voice catches. He can’t find the words to continue that sentence.
“Jiung,” Taeyang breathes, “you—you’re—”
“I’ve always been in love with him,” Jiung says quietly. His voice sounds unusually steady now. “And I’m so, so jealous. I envy you so badly. But I can never hate you,” he says with a thin smile, “because you’re my best friend, too, and how could I ever hate someone I love?”
Taeyang has his eyes closed, breathing measured breaths. When he opens them, they shine with something like guilt. “Keeho once told me he thinks you look differently at him than you used to,” he whispers. “He said you look at him differently from the days you guys first met as trainees.”
“And?”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” he confesses. “I mean—why would I? You’re you. You were Keeho’s best friend before he was my anything. Maybe it was because our relationship back then was so fragile, hanging on tenterhooks, that I didn’t want to believe it.” He swallows. “It was around those times, too. I don’t think he meant to say it—he was worn out from crying so much and sleep-deprived.”
Jiung imagines the way Keeho would say it, tucked into Taeyang’s arms. Jiung looks differently at me, I think. I think he likes—
He cuts off the train of thought before it can go further. It has no place in his brain or heart right now. Because what is he supposed to do with the knowledge that Keeho knows, at least to some extent, that Jiung’s been in love with him for over three years now?
“I don’t think I could ever compare to what you mean to him,” Jiung says. He refuses to comment on the knowledge that Keeho knows, that he knows, and Taeyang accepts his refusal. “We’ve all seen the way he looks at you. You act so serious but you’re an idiot, really.”
Taeyang’s lips quirk. “I don’t act serious.”
“No, you’re just yourself,” Jiung sighs. He feels even more tired than before. He wonders if Taeyang will let him curl up in his bed and sleep for the next…two hours, or something. “Keeho adores that about you. Between all six of us, you two are the least afraid of being authentically yourselves. I’ve seen few idols who just—say shit the way you two say shit.” He laughs dryly, without any echo of humor. “Most of all him.”
“I’m sorry,” Taeyang says, sounding so guilty and sad that it tugs at Jiung’s heart. “I’m sorry he doesn’t love you back. I’m sorry you have to feel like this.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for him to love you or for you to love him.”
He either chooses not to respond or doesn’t know what to say. Instead, he says, “but no matter what, we’re your best friends first and foremost. Okay? We’re here, if you want to talk about anything—” his voice cracks again. “And if you don’t want to tell us…we’re here anyway. I know you don’t like talking about the things that bother you all the time, and, well. There’s three more of us left, yeah? None of us have to suffer alone. Even Shota and Jongseob aren’t quite kids anymore. They’re not as young.”
Jiung raises an eyebrow. “Keeho fed you all that?”
He shrugs. “Someone had to knock some sense into me,” he says simply. There is a long pause, and then Taeyang says, “we should head back to bed. Keeho won’t be happy if we’re sleep-deprived zombies in the morning.”
Jiung almost asks if he can sleep in Taeyang’s bed with him, but he bites his tongue. No, not tonight, not when he’s still tired and exhausted and struggling to comprehend what it means that Keeho has noticed his affection. What it means that his secret was never really a secret to begin with.
His heart bleeds and his brain pulses against his skull, but he lets go of Taeyang’s reddened hands and stumbles to his bed a little unsteadily. He curls up in his bed and more tears soak the pillow, but come morning, he rises, and he faces the day. He never had any other choice to begin with.