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'Do you think I'm good?'
Jeonghan asks Joshua one morning, when there’s already too much sunlight streaming into the bedroom hotel for him to fall back asleep.
Joshua stretches his arms, feeling the post-show soreness spread around underneath his skin, all his senses blunted. Clears his throat and asks back, 'At what?'
No reply comes. Joshua can’t remember what they talked about last night, if there’s something that could have prompted this. It’s a habit at this point, Jeonghan coming to his room only to talk about nothing. Jeonghan does that, even from the start, slipping into Joshua’s space and making himself a home there.
'You're a good idol,' Joshua decides as he gets up. 'But you're a terrible person,' he sings.
'Says you,' Jeonghan bites back. Not hostile, but not quite venomless.
Seungcheol always has something to say to the fans. Pieces of his days, words aimed to warm, to placate, or to receive the attention he steadily needs. Joshua is not indifferent to the attention, it’s great on a good day, but often it feels more like collateral damage rather than a benefit in and of itself. He’s learned too that if he cannot escape the spotlight, cannot divert all the eyes on him, then what he can do is rig the stage in his favour, engineer playacts grand and ridiculous enough that the audience thinks that this is all there is.
It’s not until Seungcheol looks back at him that Joshua realises he’s been staring the whole time.
‘You’re never online,’ Seungcheol asks as he shakes his phone in front of Joshua’s face. ‘Don’t you miss them?’
Joshua blinks and looks away, borrowing time. He knows honesty is expected.
‘I miss being on stage,’ answers Joshua.
The truth lives in that little middle space where it’s not true or false, just there. With the physical presence of an audience, it’s easier for him to remember what he’s supposed to be, even as he moves as though there are strings tugging on his limbs for him to walk forward, being both the puppet and puppeteer at once.
‘That’s not my question.’
‘That’s my answer.’
‘You’re so stubborn, Shua-ya,’ Seungcheol mumbles, halfway to sulking.
If Seungcheol could he would, stretching Seventeen beyond the edges of their lives. He never expects Joshua or anyone else to be anything other than who they are, but there exists this undercurrent of expectation, how if it were up to him they would uniformly feel what he feels towards this.
Joshua puts on a smile, pats the back of Seungcheol’s head. There's another truth that comes with a pang in his chest: no matter how up close, people still only see what they want to see.
Joshua was never sure what it was exactly that made Jeonghan choose Seungcheol. If it’s because he saw him as a perfect match or an easy prey.
Maybe it’s the former, because if Jeonghan wanted easy he would go for someone so readily adoring, edges round, but no less complicated, like Mingyu. The latter could still be true, because Seungcheol’s giving is easy, given before Jeonghan even thinks to ask. Earned, even when Jeonghan is not completely deserving. Constant and reliable, above all, even when Jeonghan is careless with it.
The understanding that it’s neither comes a bit later, once Joshua tries to do his own choosing. When so much of you belongs to an elsewhere, sometimes you just want something that’s just yours, someone to call your own.
Jeonghan likes making things difficult, for the fun of it. Joshua, not so much—wants things as easy as they come.
He goes through them one by one, measuring them against each other. Junhui is ideal, but Joshua would need him much later, if Jeonghan and Seungcheol fall apart and he would be the only oldest pillar left standing. Soonyoung is far too important to the group as a leader, and so is Jihoon, and it’s not like Joshua could make him budge anyway. Wonwoo is too smart. He removes the whole line from the equation; someone closer to their age would rock their foundation a bit too much in any case, and Joshua doesn’t want difficult. Mingyu will never adore Joshua like he does Jeonghan, Minghao is another immovable variable, and Seokmin—too sweet that it would only make Joshua feel ugly.
So Joshua makes his choice. Someone sincere and unquestioning, solid on his own. Someone unemotional who will never complicate things by falling in love with him.
‘I love you,’ Joshua says.
He no longer knows what he means when he says those words, most days. In the spotlight, or like this, in the dark and quiet. A sentence too much repeated it falls out of meaning.
‘I love you too,’ Vernon says back, without even half a breath of hesitation.
‘Really?’ Joshua asks, each time. Vernon never asks in return, not once.
There are things only Vernon ever understood about him, even when Joshua desperately didn’t want to. They both know it could be anyone lying next to Joshua and he would still say the same thing, for instance. And some things Joshua envies, like how casually he does this job, and leaves it at that.
‘Yeah,’ Vernon whispers, arm around Joshua’s waist, leaning in for another kiss. ‘Really.’
Joshua doesn’t feel real, sometimes. Some kind of twist of the Tinkerbell effect where he can only truly exist when the applause dies down. There’s this image he has in his head whenever he gets home and alone, one where he unzips his skin to reveal the person underneath and not the flesh modelled after whatever the audience believes him to be.
Among the three of them, Joshua feels the most removed from all of it. In the beginning, there’s so much at stake that he had no choice but to succeed. Had everything fallen apart before they yet even to know the golden bathe of the spotlight, Jeonghan and Seungcheol could just go home, continue their study or start a new job. But Joshua was hundreds of kilometres away from home, leaving a worried mother and a future not taken.
If he were a different person, the burden of it would have crystallised into fuel and fire and ambition, but all he had was patience and endurance until his destined future took root. Once it’s here, though, sometimes all he can see is the poison seeping into the soil.
Jeonghan calls him Joshuji.
There’s an explanation somewhere, between the closeness and the long years together, but Joshua’s first and worst instinct is that Jeonghan just wants to conflate Joshua and Jisoo. A name he doesn’t really use, but with that, something that belongs only to him, a person that hasn’t come up to the surface yet. And it’s as though Jeonghan doesn't want to see the difference, doesn't believe there's any, or just wants to claim that he knows Joshua best to conflate the two. Denies Joshua of that difference, all the same.
Joshua lets him.
Between the two of them, denying others access to themself is the practice only Joshua has perfected. Gentle and delicate but not vulnerable; willing to be messy and clever about it. Present, but not open. Never open. Jeonghan is uncrackable only to everyone else, uncrackable in the other direction, wills himself to be impossible to understand that he becomes it in the process, only by accident.
‘I love you,’ Joshua whispers.
Some things you need no practice to perfect, other things you can always practise and never perfect.
‘I love you too,’ Vernon replies, so clear it’s as though the words glow in the dark. Sincere, the only way he knows how to be.
‘Really?’
Even before the answer comes Joshua knows that he doesn’t need anything else now to feel like he’s returned to his body, his person that he keeps a secret anywhere else, not just now, not while there’s the two of them, here, warm and dry with the unspoken promise not to ruin one another. How it feels good, right enough.
‘Really.’
Joshua does both, sometimes. Being truthful and lying. Sometimes he just doesn’t care enough about the job to be truthful, other times he doesn’t care enough about the job to lie. This detachedness is not lying, Joshua thinks, in the way that it still speaks of something true about himself.
‘Seungcheollie is really…’ Jeonghan meant for a scoff, but ended up too fond.
He shows Joshua his screen: Seungcheol posted a picture of Kkuma he'd just taken on Weverse.
For their monthly meeting, Seungkwan asked everyone to bring their pets to the park and play around. Their meetings gradually become less centred on talking, just spending some time together and having fun with each other. It’s not too deep into the night yet, the moon hasn’t withdrawn into the clouds but the trees around the park have become an island of shadows.
Jeonghan and Joshua sit on the ground next to each other, out of hearing but in sight of everyone else. It’s just them here, being so loud it punctures the night, laughing until tears form, all for the sake of it. Not for the cameras, not for show. So rare it’s precious, so rare it hurts.
‘He’s so loyal to them. Like dogs,’ Joshua says. ‘Sometimes I wonder where all that love comes from.’
Jeonghan only hums in return.
‘He’s loyal to you too, Jeonghan.’
‘He’s loyal to all of us.’ Jeonghan shrugs. Joshua can always tell whenever he is trying to be protective of himself or of Seungcheol.
‘But you’re the only one giving him treats as a reward,’ Joshua says, his voice almost splintering towards the end.
The words hover above them, heavy and still. Joshua watches as Jeonghan’s face goes strangely soft.
‘Seungcheol is not a dog, Joshuji.’
Says you, Joshua wants to bite back. Doesn’t know how to make it venomless.
Even then, it’s still only Jeonghan who understands.
Night finds them in another city, another hotel that blurs along with many that have come before, a room that Joshua won’t be able to describe once he’s no longer in it. The bed, though, has the same sterile warmth anywhere.
‘I love you,’ Joshua says. A sentence too much repeated can fall out of meaning, or someone can think it true, and so it becomes.
‘Really?’ Vernon turns to lie on his side, facing Joshua, cloaked in the yellow glow of the room.
Joshua smiles weakly. ‘That’s my line.’ Practice, perfected.
Vernon is looking at him, easy to read for once, like he knows Joshua is more tired than anyone else about the things that come out of his mouth.
‘You don’t need to say it, you know.’
‘I know,’ says Joshua, a bit too defensive for what it is, in place for self-preservation.
‘I’m not…’ Vernon sighs that sigh he makes. ‘I’m not them. I don’t need it.’
Joshua never wants to do or show anything in any way that will leave him vulnerable. But Vernon is the only one, after all, who has access to the plain, real Joshua when he doesn’t have to think about every single motion his body needs to perform, every single expression his face has to fashion itself into. Just a person who can touch and be touched, hold and be held, no sleight of hand tricks.
‘But it’s part of the whole thing.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’ Vernon’s voice gets smaller, in his tone reserved for Joshua. ‘You don’t need to say it just because it’s part of it.’
It’s too honest a moment between them. More than Joshua ever knows what to do with, and probably ever will.
‘What if I want to say it?’ Joshua moves to press his body against Vernon.
Vernon welcomes him, loose and relaxed as he wraps his arms around Joshua. But the question sits plainly on his face. ‘Why?’
Joshua knows the perfect answer to this. It’s on the tip of his tongue.