Work Text:
the birds have disappeared into trees, a troubling quiet.
you feel the loose mirrors around you, a forest of water. lakes sway in your chest.
will you starve in such drench and coldness, be choked with distaste? you could stand here
for hours and then turn to storm-sheer refusal and will. you could collapse into fear and draw back into foam.
these sheets of rain are
fences and crops, deeds, statues, ponds.
they are things you can't change. things you can't say.
— joanna klink, from “night sky”, the nightfields
When did it start? He doesn't know.
Hyunjin’s scared. He's scared, more than anything. It's a monster, plain and simple, a monster that could eat him whole in one bite. He doesn't remember when he first realized it existed, only that it could consume him, and if he doesn't pick up his feet and run from it it'll ingest him, body and mind. But, for some godforsaken reason, he can't run— this is a dream, or a nightmare, or both and neither, and his feet are glued to the ground. Why can't he run? he wonders. Why can't he run? He doesn't have an answer.
There was a time when Hyunjin hadn't been like this; twitchy, paranoid, exact. There was a time where he couldn't possibly have cared less about the number of calories in toothpaste. What had happened to that man? What had happened to that selfish, so, so selfish indifference?
(Indifference is— for lack of a better term, really. The wrong word for the opposite of his condition, but Hyunjin doesn't want to believe it's anything else. Maybe one day he’ll be able to hold his chin up, and call it by its real name: the truth is, Hyunjin has been a horribly selfish person his entire life— he’s just been enabled, now.)
──
He doesn’t mean to, but— he falters, leaves gaps in his story, stretches his lies too–tight like a thin tapestry and expects it to cover.
It goes something like this:
“Hyunjinnie, here, try this tteokbokki,” Changbin, at the kitchen island after getting home from the gym, sweaty but grinning, beaming ear to ear. Hyunjin, stomach eating itself from the inside out, waving it away, lying, “It's okay, hyung, I'll be too puffy, you know I have that music show.”
“Hyunjinnie, what do you want to order? Binnie’s paying, don't worry about price.” Chan, at a late dinner after an hours–long practice, glancing his way and ignoring Changbin’s exaggerated shouts over the members’ yells. Hyunjin, headache pounding, saying some dish he instantly forgets the name of and then spending the entire time pushing it around on his plate, stacking everyone else’s plates over his at the end so that no one notices the amount of food left.
“Hyunjin-ah, come with me to the convenience store after this, okay? I’ll even buy you that jelly you love so much.” Minho, chin on his shoulder before practice, absentmindedly typing out something on Bubble. Hyunjin, trying and failing to not think about how the older’s arm’s slung so casually around his waist, gripping his black coffee so hard his knuckles white. “Maybe another time, Minho hyung, sorry. I want to finish this drama I've been binging, is that okay?”
And Minho lets him go, and Chan doesn't spare a second glance at their plates, and Changbin faux–pouts but ultimately gives in. And every, every single time, that pit in Hyunjin's stomach opens up even more.
Because he knows, he knows they trust him, which only makes it so much worse when they don't say anything and accept his utter insouciance without question so utterly easily. He feels like a leech, perfidy: betraying their trust, looking them straight in their eyes and lying, nails digging into his palms so hard they leave half–crescent imprints.
Sure, members have gone on temporary diets before: pre–album promotions, special releases, fan events. Park Jinyoung, as full of shit as he is (Hyunjin will never forgive him for looking at Minho and Yongbok and thinking not good enough to debut) actually cares about his idols’ intake, which is more than the average company can say, but he knows even his boss wouldn’t approve of this.. lifestyle, of sorts, that he’s accustomed into.
It’s selfish, really, of him. Hyunjin isn’t healthy. He’s—convinced everyone, somehow, manipulated them into thinking he’s functioning, but if anyone were to approach him and raise an eyebrow and say I don’t think so, I don’t think you are, he would have to bow his head in shame and concede. Hollow, carved out. Hyunjin can’t take it.
Gum cases shoved in his sweatpant pockets. Feverish Naver searches of calorie numbers.
This is all that he is. This is all he’ll ever be.
──
The first time Hwang Hyunjin had spoken to Lee Minho, they’d both been at a convenience store. Ironic enough, he knows.
(Back then, Hyunjin, freshly eighteen, hadn't quite grown out of his teenage prepubescent phase. Hadn't saved up enough to get on a contacts plan just yet, either, so the tinny black frames of his glasses were something that he had bemoaned to any trainee who had happened to have the misfortune of pairing up with him for stretches; wore oversized sweaters and baggier–than–baggy jeans under the guise of being cold, even in the sweltering Korea summers that would pound against his skull like the 미국사람 hip-hop, popular with boys older than him, ultra–cool hyungs.
Lee Minho was an enigma. Hyunjin would look at him and think of the main love interests from his dramas, always pristine, perfect, put–together. Minho didn’t seem human, Hyunjin would muse to himself, because how was it possible to just not care about what anyone thought of you? How was it possible to be so beautiful, gaze unreadable and skin glass, yet just not care about fitting in?
Everything about Minho wasn't possible. Everything about Minho was a paradox— the way he could be so utterly inhuman with visuals straight out of manhwas, how he could communicate essays with just a single raised brow, how he could show up to practice for days, weeks and still not say a single word to anyone else.
(The way he wouldn't spare more than a glance in Hyunjin's direction on the best of days, and Hyunjin, despite it, wanted to know him so badly it felt like his heart would break and shatter from pounding so hard against his ribs.)
“Hyunjin–ah,” someone had called. Hyunjin had glanced around the store. The only one there other than the immensely bored attendant was Lee Minho, which couldn't be possible, because Lee Minho couldn't be talking to him of all people. So he'd shrugged and turned back to the fridge of Monsters he’d been eyeing up.
“Yah,” Minho called out from the other side of the store. “That's your name. Hwang Hyunjin, right?”
Oh, god. Lee Minho was talking to him out of all people.
──
He accepts Minho’s offer over text to practice choreo with him sometime into the hours of the early morning without thinking. Looking back, that was the first mistake he had made.
The second was giving up his sleep in exchange for the gym— Minho walks in and immediately notices Hyunjin leaning against the mirror, looking like death. He shoots up as soon as Minho walks in, which his head protests at very loudly, but all he gets in return from Minho is a raised eyebrow, which he’ll gladly take over worse things any day.
Minho asks what's up with him and Hyunjin makes up some bullshit about not getting enough sleep and dramas and a cliffhanger. He's going on and on without a care, talking about how he woke up way too late and had to fumble to get ready because the last episode was just too good, and he couldn't just go to sleep without the ending, hyung, you know how it is─
“And did you?” Minho cuts him off.
Hyunjin frowns, not understanding. “What?”
“Did you finish the drama?” Minho's cutting eyes pierce through his soul. “The one that you said you were going to start two weeks ago. Have you watched an episode yet?”
All of the air leaves his lungs in one fell swoop. Oxygen sticks in Hyunjin’s trachea like solid wax. The shame from earlier coils in his gut like a snake, a dreadful thing; he struggles to breathe. “Hyung. Hyung, I—”
He knows, his mind won't shut up. He knows, he knows, he knows, a mantra pounding in every crevice of his skull. There are a million excuses he could make up, twist his actions, make himself into some sort of martyr.
He says nothing.
Minho, very quietly, walks over to the couch. He opens Hyunjin’s bag. Hyunjin doesn’t have to look in order to know Minho’s looking straight at the energy drinks in place of where there should be practice snacks instead.
“We’re not going to do practice.”
Hyunjin’s head snaps up. “What?”
Minho isn’t looking at him. “We’re going to a restaurant instead. That new one, the one with the generous portions. Changbinnie recommended it last week. We’re going, and you’re going to order something, and you’re going to eat all of it.”
“Or what?” Hyunjin snarls, feeling suddenly— angry. Angry. How dare Minho believe he knows what’s good for Hyunjin? He’s a grown adult, he can take care of himself. His fists ball up in rage. “What are you going to do if I don’t want to go, Minho? Drag me there?”
Minho still isn't looking at him. His shoulders— his shoulders are shaking, Hyunjin realizes.
His shoulders are shaking. He’s angled his face away from Hyunjin on purpose, so Hyunjin wouldn’t see the tears dripping down his face.
Hyunjin goes to the restaurant.
──
“Oh,” Hyunjin had fumbled, mortification and clumsiness and all-present anxiety manifesting and collapsing together in the face of one Lee Minho staring him down, “Yeah, I— yeah. Yes, I am. That’s me.” He can feel his cheeks red. “Hyung,” he tacks on, and then immediately regrets it.
All Minho did was quirk a single brow. A moment passes in stark silence where Hyunjin seriously contemplates the pros and cons of moving back to his hometown for a few seconds before Minho waves him over. He follows, not exactly sure what else to do.
“Help me pick something for practice tomorrow,” Minho says to him. “You’re always tired after Hellevator, and I know you get eight hours of sleep. So pick something.”
Hyunjin just blinks at him for a second before the statement sets in. "Me?" he says, and then, "why me? Why - I don't know, literally anyone else?"
He glances over at Minho’s cart. There’s all sorts of assorted snacks haphazardly shoved in there, but also— sushi that Jisung had bemoaned all practice yesterday about being out of stock. A bulk pack of turtle chips that Hyunjin’s never seen Seungmin and Jeongin without in the JYP halls. A popular ramyeon brand, the normal flavor, because Chan can't deal with the spicy one. Several others.
"I did already. You're the only one I'm missing out on."
Hyunjin stares at the cart.
"If you don't want anything," Minho says, "I don't have to get anything for you. But then at practice you're going to be sweaty and mad that you don't have anything good to eat."
It startles him out of his reverie, and he grabs for something—anything—on the shelves, just to get those piercing eyes off of him. He throws it in the cart haphazardly and crosses his arms over his chest, suddenly— he doesn't even know. Embarrassed? Embarrassed, that he did something Minho asked of him? "Are these fine?"
Minho doesn't even spare a glance. "Yes. Now help me find this protein shake brand for Changbinnie, I'm struggling. Why do they all look the exact same?"
Hyunjin follows him down the aisles.
(He feels, inexplicably, lighter.)
──
Minho’s attention can be staggering when it’s focused solely on you. He can’t slip under the radar anymore, half-assed excuses taken at granted— Minho’s there, everywhere he looks. The smallest, smallest things.
(How could he notice if he wasn’t looking for them?)
If he’s stumbling out of his bedroom, half–asleep, there’s a warm coffee waiting for him on the kitchen island. If the eight of them are piling blearily into the company van, there’s his favorite jellies being shoved unceremoniously into his hands, explicitly untouched by Jisung and Changbin. If he’s staying up late, fallen into a rabbit hole of video essays, there’s Minho calling, suddenly, and asking him about his day.
“You’re on the same floor as me,” Hyunjin says. “You could walk across the hallway and be at my door. Why are you calling me.”
“Oh,” Minho says, “so you want me to wake up Changbinnie? So cruel, Hyunjin–ah. You know how he needs his beauty sleep.”
“That’s not—” he starts and then sighs because it’s useless trying to reason with Minho in the earliest hours of the morning. “Hyung.”
“Hyunjin-ah.”
He remembers: his former self, young, embarrassingly awkward. Too-long limbs crowding the cramped space in practice rooms he’d taken up, still so stupid more than anything, going without eating for days and then gorging in the company cafeterias after hours like a pig.
Minho, unreadable and perfect as ever, even as a fresh trainee. Who had rolled his eyes at Hyunjin’s hesitance but had smacked his hands away when he had tried to pay. Minho, and his version of close. Minho, and his idea of trying.
(Is it enough? And will it ever be?)
(A shell of his younger self. What would he do, if he could go back?)
“You don’t need to do this.”
Several moments of silence. Hyunjin gnaws on his fingernail and throws it into the trash.
“Hyunjinnie,” Minho finally murmurs. The fan whirring is the only noise other than his voice. “I don’t— I mean, you know I’m not good at this. Tell me how I can help you—”
“I told you you don’t need to, hyung.” He snips out the honorific, keeping his tone clipped and emotionless— suddenly angry, not at Minho, but at himself. “I’m helping myself. You don’t know anything about me, okay? You don’t know anything about how to help. JYP doesn’t want a cow on music stages with the other members. He’d probably be proud of me for doing this, you know. The only thing I’m good for.” With that he hangs up.
Curls up, tears staining his cheeks, and tries more than anything not to call back.
──
He’s at a new grocery store with Minho and Changbin. He’s here because he usually helps Minho with grocery shopping; Changbin’s here because he had pulled his third all–nighter in a row, a new record even for a member of 3RACHA, so Minho had forcibly dragged him out of the studio. He’s even blinking at the shelves, now, bleary–eyed and half–there. After Minho waves a bag of chips in his face for the third time and Changbin doesn't track it, seeing right through the bag, Minho sighs.
“I’ll call a manager to pick him up,” he tells Hyunjin. “Finish the list, okay? If you want anything else, just put it in the cart. I’ll be back in ten.” He glances at Changbin, who sways so dangerously it looks like he’s going to fall over. He actually might. “Make that fifteen.” Then he hustles Changbin to the store’s exit, huffing and grumbling under his breath all the way about workaholic dongsaengs; Hyunjin can’t help but smile a little, though, about how even with all of his dramatics Minho’s hand rests firmly on Changbin’s back the whole way down the aisle.
He turns back to the list, but not without his eyes snagging on a new display, and then— Oh my god. Oh my god.
They’d finally restocked his favorite jellies! Hyunjin can’t help his beaming ear to ear as he pulls the cart over , grabbing a few packages. God, they haven’t had these in a few months, something about a supply chain block from overseas or whatever.
But. Well.
What if they make him fat?
The very barest residue of logical thought in the corners of his brain screams at him that it doesn’t work like that, but it’s like everything else doesn’t exist in the world except Hyunjin and the jellies that he holds. What if he gets fat from eating them? What if he gives in, and all of his workouts and his OMADs and his restraint will all be for nothing and he’ll have to start over from the beginning? Is he really so selfish as to do that to himself?
Except— Hyunjin can’t, suddenly. He can’t. He wants them.
He stares at the package in his hands. Everything blurs in his vision except the jellies as he turns it around to stare at the nutrition label. Sixty calories a piece. Multiply that by thirty, since there's thirty in the package, so one thousand eight hundred calories in the whole bag. If he splits the bag with one of his members, his serving will be nine hundred calories, which is worth a chicken Buldak and two soy milk cafeteria mochas. Jisung had invited him for ramen that night, so, really, the logical thing to do here is to put the jellies back on the shelf and finish getting the rest of Minho’s grocery list.
Eighteen hundred calories in the jellies. Two hundred forty calories in a mocha. Six hundred seconds since he picked the jellies off of the shelf. Zero calories in the black coffee he had this morning.
Why can’t he stop shaking?
“Hyunjinnie?” someone calls. “Do you want those?” Hands still shaking around the bag, he turns to see Minho. His hyung’s brow is furrowed in concern and something more that Hyunjin can’t process, and he hates himself, suddenly, for being so selfish he’s got his hyung worrying about him.
“No,” he lies. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he says. He spends ten minutes on the dingy tiled floor, head against the door, thinking how better Minho would be off without him.
When he steps outside, Minho’s waiting. He’d gone through the rest of their grocery list and checked out by himself, groceries bagged up, and it’s like another stab to Hyunjin’s heart. This is how useless you are, you couldn’t even suck it up and help him?
Minho had bought it for him, he realizes. They rest in the cart, a little collapsed but overall fine.
“Hyuniin–ah,” Minho says, distantly, far away. He doesn't look up.
He throws them in the trash the second they walk out. Minho, so careful at saving money, watches him fiercely but doesn’t say a single word.
──
What they really do not tell you about not eating is that it makes you kind of want to kill yourself a little bit.
It’s a weekend with nothing planned except a PT session in the early evening. Eleven hours into the day Hyunjin’s still lying in his bed, not understanding who he is, not understanding why he’s alive. His head pounds and it’s like the sound invertebrates through his eardrums, off–white ceiling paint all he can see; it feels like his brain’s given up on attempting to function, tiredness in his bones weighing him down. How many pounds is a bone? He wonders, thoughts lagging more than they should. How many pounds are all of my bones? If you took me apart and pulled out each bone, would my BMI be less, would it go down?
His brain chugs on like an engine, combusting its chambers and pushing along and all of a sudden, defunct, unable to cope with the demand. He can’t make sense of the world, of his job, of his life the way he used to.
Changbin’s gone for the morning. He doesn’t know how he knows that.
Twenty–five hours and eighteen minutes. Minho lets himself in somewhere along those twenty–five hours and eighteen minutes, Hyunjin realizes; he can hear him distantly if he closes his eyes and focuses: puttering about in the kitchen, the kettle bubbling away, cupboards being opened and closed, something being poured, but he doesn’t move.
He hasn’t eaten in twenty–five hours and nineteen minutes.
Why does he ever move? It’s hard for him to remember.
The door creaks open, light beaming into his room. A warm mug – his mug – is pushed into his hands.
“It’s lemon ginger. Drink slowly; wait for it to cool.”
Hyunjin blinks up at Minho’s face once, twice, four—five times before he processes the statement, taking it in his hands and sipping tentatively. It warms him, a little: selfishlessly, inanely, the greedy thought of Minho making the tea only for him thawing the ice hard as rock in his chest.
He’d bought this flavor because someone online, skinnier, more lithe and with a lower BMI than his had recommended it under a thread, praising lemon’s Messianic tendencies of higher metabolism. Hyunjin had liked and bookmarked the tweet.
The very next day, he’d gone out and bought a whole box.
He slumps, strings cut, into Minho’s waiting hold. “I’m sorry,” he says— whimpers, more like. “I’m being so horrible to you. I’m a horrible person.”
Minho strokes his hand up and down Hyunjin’s back, a soothing metronome of movement. With nothing but a thin muscle top and heater on the fritz, goosebumps riddle Hyunjin’s arm. His blanket, slipping down to his lap, keeps his legs warm and nothing else.
“Hyunjinnie. You’re trying your best.”
“It’s not good enough.” It’s brutal in its truthfulness. “My best isn’t good enough,” he laughs, without any sort of levity. “I’ll never be enough.”
“You don’t need to be anything. We’d be here for you even if you weren’t.”
Hyunjin is the worst sort of person and he asks for what he can’t give. A desperate plea, a void that prays to be filled.
“Do you love me?”
Minho doesn’t answer right away. He lifts the mug up to Hyunjin’s lips, and Hyunjin sips the ginger and lemon. He pulls the blanket up to Hyunjin’s shoulders, and Hyunjin leans into his touch. “Of course, Hyunjin–ah.”
He’s lying, his brain tells him. He doesn’t love you.
“I hope you know that.”
Hyunjin doesn’t answer him. He leans against Minho’s chest and thinks about his bones again for a while.
──
Another day passes before Minho talks again to him.
"You're eating dinner tonight."
"What?" He looks up at Minho hovering in the doorway of the practice room’s doorway. Both of them know he’s not asking for the question to be repeated.
“At my dorm,” Minho says, face infuriatingly unreadable. “Hyunjin—”
“Fine,” he spits, suddenly furious but possessing enough common sense to not blow up at Minho. There's so much anger in him, threatening to spill out in an ugly mess if he doesn't do something about it. “Fine! Fine, whatever. I’ll come.”
Minho stares at him. “Don’t be late,” is all he says, then leaves the way he came.
Hyunjin stares at the empty doorway. He thinks about being so late that he never shows up.
──
Maybe it’s a good thing. Hyunjin knows that their relationship can't stay the same, not anymore, not with what Minho knows about him now. It can only end badly for everyone, but— he can’t help but want to be selfish, really. How sickeningly disgusting of him.
He knows that they’re supposed to talk about it, so he’s more than a little caught off-guard when he finds— dinner, of all things waiting when he makes it to Jisung and Minho’s apartment. Dinner, and nothing—no one— else.
(Objectively, Hyunjin knew that Minho's not like that. He wouldn't— hold an intervention, or something, and tell all of their members the second he found out about Hyunjin’s disorder. Minho wouldn't.
Still, his heartbeat slows just the miniscule, tiniest bit. )
“Jisungie’s out at the studio with Changbinnie and Channie hyung,” Minho says behind him, toeing off his shoes in favor of slippers. “Swear they’ve been in there more than usual, you think I should start bringing meals to them?”
Even with all of the anxiety brewing inside Hyunjin’s heart, it still makes him crack a tentative smile.
They can’t go back; he knows that now. Rough unease pricks at him while they eat, growing with every question Minho asks about his day, with every move Minho automatically makes to lift a bite of food he knows Hyunjin will like onto his plate, with every eye roll and raised brow and sip of water. Minho’s fingers around his chopsticks, Minho’s food on Hyunjin’s plate. It’s too natural, too normal.
He’s too used to it.
There’s still something horribly, dreadfully selfish, he thinks, something innate within him that wants and wants and wants in which he isn’t supposed to. Minho picks up a big piece of sushi and puts it on Hyunjin’s own plate; he tugs his knees to his chest, feeling, suddenly, strange. Small. Not hungry anymore.
His plate is empty, he realizes. It’s been empty for a while now, though.
“Do you want more?” Minho asks blandly. His expression is a carefully crafted mask of nonchalance, but Hyunjin’s eyes can’t help but fall on the slightest, smallest tremor of his hands, of his knuckles gripping the table’s wood so hard they white.
He must’ve planned it, Hyunjin realizes belatedly. Must’ve thought about how to help.
His heart is heavy with a million things he doesn’t know how to say.
“There’s more sushi in the fridge. They were low in stock of the seafood flavor you like the most, but I bought all of what they still had plus the spicy tuna ones. If you don’t want those, it’s fine, we can order from another place. Or I can cook something—”
Hyunjin doesn’t even realize that he’s crying until he watches the tears drop and stain the wood. “God,” he says. “Shit, sorry.” His chopsticks clatter to the floor.
“Hyunjinnie,” Minho says. “Hyunjin-ah.”
“Sorry,” he repeats, distantly. He doesn't move. “I'm sorry. I’m—”
“Hyunjin-ah,” Minho says, again. His chair screeches against the floor as he stands up. “This isn't your fault.”
“It is,” his voice cracks, and suddenly it all comes spilling out. “All of it is. Everything. You’ve been running yourself ragged trying to get me fed, keep me alive, and you shouldn't have to do this, all of this. I'm so, so sorry, I've been so horribly selfish and I've put this on you because I want your attention, I want your concern because it proves to me that what I'm doing is doing something. I'm so selfish to you and I don't mean it, I love you, I love you so much. I'm so, so, so sorry hyung, but it's so hard to stop, and I'm scared I'll ruin myself so far that it'll ruin you too, and—"
Minho takes his face in his hands and presses their foreheads together.
Somehow it feels even more intimate then a kiss, and Hyunjin leans into it, still sniffling.
"Hyunjinnie," Minho tells him. "Listen to me. Okay?"
Hyunjin nods, watery.
"You are not selfish. You're the least selfish person I've ever had the fortune of knowing," Minho tells him. "You're kind, and creative, and loving, and the fact that you're worrying about me while going through a life-threatening disorder is the most selfless thing I've ever seen anyone do. I know it's scary, and it's hard, but no matter what you do or what you say I will be by your side. We'll get through this together, OK, Hyunjinnie? Hyung promises you, hyung will make it all better, alright?"
Hyunjin's too choked up to answer verbally, still sniffling, but he grips Minho's hand tighter and hopes that gets his message across.
──
hyunracha rip (4 members)
07:05 jisungie does anyone know where tf minho hyung has gone
07:06 dwaekki he slept over at ours
07:06 dwaekki this morning when i walked out
hyung had walked out of hyunes at the same time
07:07 and then he gave me a death glare
07:08 so i had to let him go before me to the bathroom
07:08 channie hyung ㅋㅋㅋ
07:09 dwaekki probably sweating for a place to hide the body