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Doyoung puts the seashell up to his ear, closes his eyes, and listens to the hollow echoes of the sea.
His other hand comes up to cover his other ear, plunging him further into the peaceful sound. His thumb moves over the shell’s smooth surface, even the lightest scratch of his fingernail making its impression into the wispy drone of air sounding out in his ears. His fingertips graze over the seashell’s fine grooves, and the phantom sound ebbs and flows with the soft movements, the air contorting itself to fit around the shell’s bends and curves where the eyes can’t see.
It was a gift from Taeyong, placed nonchalantly into Doyoung’s hand on one of his short visits, no room for small talk and pleasantries when he doesn’t have the luxury of spending even half a vacation day with just one person. It sits on Doyoung’s bedside table, the seashell, forgotten on most days until he falls into bed with half-lidded eyes and remembers it’s there before falling asleep, a faded blur of an object as his eyelids fall shut.
It’s only on days like this that he picks it up, acknowledging its existence beyond whispers of good night that no one actually hears. It’s easier that way. Doyoung is lying in bed because tonight, he’s waiting for Taeyong’s phone call to come through—and his stomach is in knots after having spent the past two hours doing menial tasks around the house trying to forget that it was coming. It didn’t work. And now he’s on his second-to-last lifeline holding this seashell to his ear, drawing on the childish belief that it holds the sound of the ocean it had come from. Perhaps even the hands that had dug it out of the sand—but Doyoung doesn’t ever remember Taeyong’s hands being this cold.
The phone rings.
Doyoung doesn’t startle when he hears it; in fact, he lets out a sigh of relief, opens his eyes back to the ambient light of his room. His empty hand comes off of his ear, but he doesn’t even really rush. It takes five rings before Doyoung is able to actually reach his phone on the bed, dropped somewhere next to his knee when he came in, and then two more while he just stares at the contact name and photo—a picture of the two of them from a few days before Taeyong left, Doyoung’s arm around Taeyong’s shoulders and Taeyong looking at Doyoung like there were stars and northern lights in his eyes—before he swipes on the screen to actually pick up. He brings the phone to his ear, and takes the seashell away in the same movement.
“Hello.”
There’s a laugh on the other end of the line. Taeyong is clearly mocking him, but these days, even that feels different. Doyoung is more comforted than annoyed.
“Hyung.”
“Hi, Doie,” comes Taeyong’s singsong voice, raspy and still tinged with soft laughter. “Why are you still up?”
“Now you’re just fishing for it,” Doyoung rolls his eyes, sitting up a little straighter in his bed. “Thought you fell asleep. I was about to go and get the beer from the fridge.”
“That’s not good for your voice,” Taeyong clicks his tongue, the pout in his voice visible in fuzzy pictures in Doyoung’s mind. “I got the flowers, by the way.”
“Did you?” Doyoung perks up, the corners of his lips finally fighting against gravity as he imagines Taeyong’s reddening, the matching smile he must have had on his face when took the small bouquet, peach roses and half-bloomed camellias. “I asked your mom to pass them on to you as a favor, so they’d get to you faster.”
“You don’t need to ask for things like that as favors. You are family, after all.” Taeyong laughs so nonchalantly, and Doyoung swallows down a lump forming in his throat. “Although, the people around here might start thinking I have some kind of secret wife.”
“That would be quite the spectacle, Taeyong-ah,” Doyoung rolls his eyes, formalities falling away naturally. “You’d better like those flowers. I picked them out myself.”
On the other side of the line, again, Taeyong laughs. Doyoung closes his eyes to savor the muffled melody of it—one of the many things about Taeyong that he’s never able to replicate by pressing a seashell to his ear.
It’s been this way since Taeyong left, the enlistment just another mere fact of their lives that Doyoung thought he’d fully accepted until it actually happened. To be fair, it’s not like Taeyong ever asked Doyoung to take all of his responsibilities and hold them on his shoulders the way he’s been doing until now—the way he’ll probably be doing until he has to go, too—and to say that it’s been hard is an understatement, but there’s no other word that Doyoung thinks sums it up the best. It’s been hard, and it’s always going to be from this point on, and Doyoung thought that he understood what his support meant to Taeyong before—but the depth of the other’s gratitude only really sinks in now, now that Taeyong is miles away and Doyoung wishes every day and every night that he had his own pillar to lean on, too.
“Hyung.”
It’s a small, quiet utterance, almost just a breath into the phone. Taeyong hears it anyway. “Yeah?”
Doyoung doesn’t say I miss you. Taeyong knows that already. It would be such a fucking waste of time. “I listened to that song you sent me.”
It means the same thing.
It’s been hard, having to relearn how to live his life without the person who’s lived it beside him for so many years. It had taken months after Taeyong left for Doyoung to be able to stomach the idea of doing the most mundane things alone that normally Taeyong would share in, their wordless agreement to experience life together, as different as their approaches may be. Taeyong had to tell him at the beginning that it was okay for Doyoung to burn through their list of dramas they wanted to watch together, that nothing in their lives has to be on pause just because they’re apart. He’d congratulated Doyoung when he released his solo album, sent him messages of encouragement before and after every concert, and Doyoung never told him how much he wished Taeyong was there instead, in the front row of all his shows or on the other end of their dorm’s couch or under the warm blankets in Doyoung’s bed, singing the words back to him and sharing in the pride that the music gives him that he would never give up for anything in the world.
“Yeah? What did you think of it?” Taeyong asks after a second, and it takes Doyoung a few more to remember what he’s even talking about.
“It’s very… you,” Doyoung answers with a fond smile, the honesty in his tone giving him away. “I barely remember it, honestly. But your song played after.”
It’s always like this with them; they’ve never exactly had the same taste in art or music or just, you know, life in general—but each of their lives is big enough to fit the two of them, it’s always been, and so they make room. Doyoung doesn’t always love the things that Taeyong loves, but he loves Taeyong. He loves him enough to want to know him—and that only makes it harder to go on each day that he doesn’t see him, each day that they grow into who they’ll be tomorrow, after tomorrow, after tomorrow—until the next time that they see each other and realize that they’d grown, inevitably, apart.
“What song?” Taeyong asks, tone rising the way it always does when he’s curious.
“Moon Tour,” Doyoung answers, the melody of it already playing in his head. “You know it’s more my style.”
Taeyong scoffs. “I thought you liked all my songs.”
“I do,” Doyoung declares, sinking into the sheets below him. “And you like all of mine.”
“Yeah,” Taeyong breathes, muffled through the static. “Yeah, of course I do.”
The next breath that Doyoung lets out is shaky, though he tries to keep it quiet as he’s overtaken by a dull ache in his heart. His entire body feels like jelly all of a sudden, all of the words he wants to say suspended thickly inside his throat. Doyoung loves music and performing and all the good people he’s met over the years, but on lonely nights like this he remembers so viscerally that it’s exhausting, that it’s a labor of love and hate that he and Taeyong had crawled on their bare hands and knees to get through up to this point, never stopping, always chasing a new horizon.
“Doyoung?”
Doyoung takes a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” Taeyong asks, voice in that tone he always uses when he already knows the answer. “I know you’re doing well, Doie. Even when I’m not there, I’m watching you guys all the time.”
“That’s creepy,” Doyoung jokes halfheartedly, though he knows the sincerity comes through anyway. “I know. I know, but…”
But there are times when Doyoung wishes he could let Taeyong back in closer, not feel like outsiders to each other’s lives, looking in. Taeyong has never not thought that Doyoung was doing well—but Doyoung wants Taeyong’s affection in a way that’s maybe too intense to tell him over the phone, wants Taeyong to tell him he loves him beyond his music and his achievements and how he has his hands full with the kids from WISH all at the same time. He wants them to just be two people in a room again—the same way they’ve always been when falling into bed together after a long, tiring day, when the cameras are off and the screams of crowds fade out into the background and the people they’re responsible for are not what define who they are—but then again, so much of how they care for each other is wrapped up in how they care for other people, together. Doyoung and Taeyong have always been the ones to give, and it’s only from each other that they first started learning how to take.
“I love you, you know?” Taeyong says directly, filling the silence with his conviction after Doyoung trails off. “You’re still my best friend. My Dori.”
Doyoung huffs out a laugh. “Your secret wife.”
“Sure. That, too.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything,” Taeyong says, like it’s simple. “You worry about things. I tell you not to, but you’re stubborn.”
Doyoung shrugs his shoulders, petulance on his face even if Taeyong can’t see. “It’s hard not to worry when there’s always something to worry about.”
“Well, we’re not something you need to worry about,” Taeyong declares, his voice soothing and slow, like Doyoung will crumble if he says them any faster. “I can hear it in your voice, Doyoung-ah. Us being apart doesn’t mean I think about you any less. I still love you when I wake up every single day. I’m going to, whether I’m beside you or not.”
Doyoung sinks further into his sheets, exhaling a shaky breath. It’s always been jarring for him how easily Taeyong can just say things like that so easily, as if he’d taken messy thoughts straight out of Doyoung’s brain and untangled each of them with careful hands, one by one. Doyoung knows, by and large, what the two of them are—best friends, lovers, partners—but with the lives they live, they’ve always had to come face to face with defining and redefining what they are to each other over the years as circumstances shift and change around them. Regardless of them. If there’s anything Doyoung has learned, it’s that anything that can change, will; it can change overnight, any of them could wake up to a new decision made for them and it’s hard to know where that line is sometimes, easy to let all of these things disappear into the noise. Sometimes Doyoung is afraid that he’ll wake up one day and Taeyong isn’t his anymore, and he’ll have gotten so used to this life that he just accepts it, doesn’t even speak to or fight for Taeyong before he starts going on with his life like they’re over.
And then, with that thought in his head, Doyoung decides to just say it: “...I miss you.”
Because if there’s a part of Doyoung that still isn’t sure sometimes if Taeyong loves him—even if he knows that for Taeyong, loving Doyoung is basically the same as breathing—then maybe Taeyong deserves to hear what Doyoung lives and breathes everyday, too.
“I miss you, Taeyong,” Doyoung says again, his voice more firm as he sounds out the syllables of Taeyong’s name on his tongue. “And I love you. And people lied when they said that this would get easier with time.”
There’s silence on the other end for a while, not unlike the echoes in a seashell pressed to Doyoung’s ear. Doyoung would give anything to see the expression on Taeyong’s face right now—but he supposes he’ll have to just imagine it for the time being. He’ll picture Taeyong’s expression, sound it out in sea breeze while a seashell is all he has of Taeyong that he can still hold in his hands. It’s hard to have to say all of these things in so short a time and over static on the phone; Doyoung doesn’t like saying I love you without also saying all the words he wants to say after, and he thinks that maybe, in the silence, Taeyong is listening for them anyway—taking the unspoken sentiments softly from Doyoung’s heart, and tucking them safely away in his own.
“Listen to it again.”
Doyoung opens his eyes slowly when Taeyong’s voice breaks through the static. “What?”
“Moon Tour,” Taeyong laughs, though his voice seems to get smaller after every breath. “It’s okay for you to miss me, Doyoung. I’ve always been your person. I know that because you’ve always been mine, too.”
Doyoung chuckles, nodding into the emptiness, his hand letting go of the seashell to shield his eyes from the room’s burning light. “Come home.”
“I can’t.”
“I know.”
“Keep asking anyway,” Taeyong whispers. “I’ll sing for you next time I’m back. For now… close your eyes. It’ll be like I’m there.”
Doyoung just sighs, takes his hand away from his face, and slowly lets his eyes flutter shut again. “Okay.”
“You and I… go on a moon tour…”
Doyoung’s hand finds the seashell, fingers closing around its smooth surface. He mouths along to Taeyong’s every word, lets himself crumple into that familiar embrace. They’re on their own little moon together, and it’s enough for now.
Because for Doyoung, Taeyong will always be home—and Doyoung will listen for Taeyong in every seashell, the same way that Taeyong looks for Doyoung in every star.