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The Nexus cracks open in a burst of purple light and the crowd screams, the sound vibrating through Sanghyeok’s bones made worse by the lack of headphones.
The summer air is hot, almost unbearable with everyone packed into the room and the buzzing lights, and Sanghyeok can hear the muffled sounds of cheering from NaJin’s side of the stage, but their booth is silent, cold.
Behind him, the door swings open as Byounghoon and Jeonggyun step inside, but they’re quiet too, their disappointed air suffocating.
Sanghyeok stares at the end of game statistics, at the fourteen-to-three kill score.
Beside him, Gwangjin takes his own headphones off, running his hands through his hair, face ducked down and away from the circling cameras glaring at them through the glass.
Byounghoon seems to notice, stepping quickly away from Eonyoung, also still focused on his screen. And after a brief pause, he puts a hand on Gwangjin’s shoulder. “Let’s pack up,” he says softly.
He doesn’t say “nice try,” or “we’ll do better next time” and Sanghyeok, just a little, is grateful for it because he wouldn’t have believed him away.
Jeonggyun stays silent, but he puts his hands on the back of Seongwoong’s neck. Seongwoong lets out a near inaudible sigh, leaning back into the touch, gold fitting in perfectly against violet.
Sanghyeok is the last one to move, and it’s Jeonghyeon who nudges him. “Come on,” he says, quiet and tired and suddenly Sanghyeok can feel the heat, humid summer air suffocating. He sits up and starts packing up his peripherals.
They’re all still quiet when they bundle into the car. Eonyoung puts his earbuds in, face blank, and Jeonghyeon sits in his seat, shoulders slumped just a little, enough so that he looks smaller than he should. Gwangjin curls up by the window, eyes rimmed red though he hasn’t cried yet, and Seongwoong shrinks down in his place between Gwangjin and Sanghyeok.
He’s idly running his knuckle along the underside of his jaw, eyes distant, and Sanghyeok honestly doesn’t think he realizes he’s doing it.
The red hasn’t faded, still the same violent and eye-catching shade it’d been the day Sanghyeok had left it, and it still makes him the picture of a dying man. Fitting, this time, Sanghyeok thinks, looking away.
They’ve been slowly bleeding out all year.
He glances down at his hand and Seongwoong’s gold glitters up at him even in the variable light of passing street lamps. He hadn’t bothered putting his jacket back on so it sits in his lap and when his eyes trail up his wrist from Seongwoong’s mark, he’s met with the sunset colors of the rest of his team.
And he doesn’t think the warm yellow of those street lamps should really be doing this, but the colors look pale, dull, and something in Sanghyeok’s stomach twists. He puts his hand over the colors, looking away.
Somehow, he finds himself looking at his own red again. The splotch across Seongwoong’s neck, the line slashed across the inside of Jeonghyeon’s arm that he only spots when Jeonghyeon shifts, phone in hand. The matching streak on Gwangjin’s peeks out, the edge wrapped around his wrist.
They stand out starkly and again, Sanghyeok finds himself thinking about wounds.
It’s Seongwoong that suddenly breaks him out of his daze.
“Sorry,” he whispers, hand dropping from his neck. He doesn’t meet Sanghyeok’s eyes.
Sanghyeok doesn’t know what to say about that. Something bitter fills his mouth.
He just nods.
VOD review is the same as it has been all year. A unanimous we could have done better.
Eonyoung and Sanghyeok could have carried more, Gwangjin could have died less, and Seongwoong and Jeonghyeon could have just been better.
Sanghyeok doesn’t think they’re done, not by any means, but Jeonggyun looks at them when they’re halfway through reviewing the first game for the second time, and he sighs. His notebook snaps shut with a sharp sound.
“You guys can go. We’re done for today. Get some sleep.”
Sanghyeok jerks, looking away from the PC and spinning around in his seat. “What?”
Jeonggyun gives him a firm look. “We’ve gone over pretty much everything,” he says patiently, the red on his palm flashing when he puts his pen down on top of his notebook, trapping it there with his other thumb.
“We’re all tired and disappointed from the results,” Byounghoon adds from his place in the corner, eyes flickering over the five of them, sitting slumped in their chairs, “so go get some rest.”
“We’re not done though,” Sanghyeok protests, gesturing at his screen, paused on the moment Seongwoong’s Kha’Zix had jumped onto Watch and GorillA to try and kill them. “I—”
“Sanghyeok,” Jeonggyun says firmly, and he stops. He finally takes a look at the rest of his team, arranged in a rough semicircle around him.
Seongwoong quickly averts his gaze, away from Sanghyeok and the screen frozen on his mistake. Gwangjin looks almost angry, brows furrowed and he’s twisting his ring on his finger while Jeonghyeon, beside him, just looks tired.
The only one who’s still focused on the screen with anything close to Sanghyeok’s intensity is Eonyoung, and even then, he looks tired too—worn down and defeated.
“Get some rest,” Byonghoon says again, gently. Sanghyeok feels himself deflate.
And that’s it. Gwangjin is the first to get up, disappearing quickly. Jeonghyeon follows, slower, and Eonyoung gets up when Byonghoon passes by.
“You did your best,” Jeonggyun says to Seongwoong when the three of them are the only ones left, his hand ghosting over the back of his neck, purple on gold. Sanghyeok thinks of the long nights spent grinding away at solo queue and the constant VOD review and he thinks maybe.
Maybe they did do their best. But then wasn’t that even worse? Knowing that even if they did wear their fingers down to the bone, they weren’t good enough?
Just a few months ago, not even a full year, they were on top of the world. Champions and a perfect winter run. And now?
Sanghyeok meets Jeonggyun’s eyes, and Jeonggyun smiles a little. “There’s always next year,” he promises.
Seongwoong trails Sanghyeok into their shared room, Junsik immediately sitting up. He seems to pick up on the awkward atmosphere, or maybe he just watched their match, because he gets up out of his bed. “I’ll…go bother Jaewan or something,” he says, hurrying out.
They don’t talk, hopping up onto their own respective bunks and pulling out their phones, but Sanghyeok just stares at his lockscreen, miming scrolling by tapping whenever the screen darkened.
Then, “Next year.”
Seongwoong startles a little. “What?”
“There’s always next year,” Sanghyeok says again, and he can’t tell if he’s just saying it to see how the words fit in his mouth or if he’s trying to convince himself.
“I…” Seongwoong hesitates, and Sanghyeok thinks it might be the latter.
Sanghyeok finally opens his phone. It’s easy enough to find Inven’s commentary on the series, even if it can hardly be called commentary—it’s mostly flame. He idly scrolls through it for a few moments and he’s not surprised when the large majority of it is directed towards Jeonghyeon and Seongwoong, Gwangjin bearing his own share. He looks up. Something ugly, like a seed of anger, starts to grow around his ribcage. “Is there a next year?” It’s casual, cutting, and there’s this sharp feeling in his chest when Seongwoong flinches at it.
He doesn’t meet Sanghyeok’s eyes, drawing his legs up to his chest, and the shadows hide his throat from view, red melting away into shadow.
Neither of them speak to each other again after that.
Seongwoong falls asleep sometime, but Sanghyeok can’t, an uncomfortable feeling crawling in between the gaps of his ribs, coiling up in the space between his lungs and heart so that it buzzes whenever he breathes.
So he ends up rolling out of bed and shuffling out. Junsik’s still at the table, a bowl of leftover noodles in front of him, and the glow of his phone screen illuminates the splotch of Jaewan’s honey yellow on his cheek when he glances up at Sanghyeok.
“Are you going to sleep?”
“Maybe,” Sanghyeok replies noncommittally. In the darkness, Junsik’s mark, painted boldly across his right palm, is black too. He hesitates. “What do you do when people leave?”
Junsik puts down his phone, frowning. “Huh? What do you mean?”
Sanghyeok flips his hand over, eyes now adjusted enough to the darkness to be able to see the faintest spark of gold. “What do you do when people leave? When you have friends…” he pauses for a second. “Friends and soulmates who are going to leave you? What do you do?”
He turns his hand back over and looks up in time to see Junsik stiffen a little. He straightens in his seat, pulling his hands off the table and beneath it, sleeves falling down to cover his wrists. “I don’t know. Haven’t you ever had people leave before? And besides, I didn’t stay on NaJin long and I left Xenics first.”
Sanghyeok ignores the first bit. “You were always the one leaving.”
Junsik winces. “Well, I mean, you don’t have to say it like that,” he mumbles.
Sanghyeok falls silent. He knew Jeonghyeon was leaving after this year. Had known it since he announced his intent to sit on the bench in January. That didn’t make it easier.
What do I do then?
He traps the words behind his teeth, swallowing them and ignoring the way they prickle, all the way down. Instead, he just says, “Someone’s leaving this year.”
Junsik looks away. “I know.”
He nearly asks, out of the blue, are you?
But he swallows that too, turning around, and closing the door behind him. Junsik doesn’t call out after him, just keeps looking down at the table.
The atmosphere is a little better in the morning, Gwangjin’s eyes holding a bit more of his usual fire compared to yesterday and Eonyoung’s smiling again.
But Sanghyeok can’t feel it. He looks down at his arm, the sleeve of his hoodie pushed up enough that he can see the sunrise—or sunset, on his arm—and he just feels sick.
He barricades himself in his bunk, blankets bunched up around him like a cocoon and steadfastly ignores everything and everyone aside from his phone and calls for food.
He does it the next day.
And the next.
But not the next. Three is enough—there is only so much he can take of sitting on his bed and alternating between scrolling on his phone and staring at the wall, at the ceiling, at the floor, before he loses his mind.
It feels a little bit like drifting, and it feels a little cruel, but he sees the colors and just feels this deep bitterness about…
Well. Everything.
The first few days, he blames them. It’s unfair, he knows, but Worlds had been so close and he could have been the one to break the quote-unquote curse, and he’s angry. He could have made it. If only he had better teammates—teammates who he hadn’t had to stick around with after it’d been clear that Jeonghyeon and Seongwoong weren’t improving and that Gwangjin wasn’t going to stay consistent just because they were soulmates and cosmically bound together.
The next few days, he finds that he can’t stand the way that anger festers in his bones and rots in his chest. The next few days, he doesn’t…blame anyone, really.
And after that, he doesn’t bother to think about the loss at all. Instead, he thinks about nothing. Brain a blank slate, wiped clean and white and wholly clear of any color at all—yes, he carefully thinks of absolutely nothing at all.
He’s probably doing it wrong—acting appropriately to the idea of being left behind, he means.
Or, he’s definitely doing it wrong. That much is obvious when Jeonghyeon and Gwangjin’s departures are finalized. Sanghyeok knows he’s doing it wrong because all of a sudden, he feels like screaming. He wants to claw the fiery orange and bright coral on his arms off and throw those fucking colors back in their faces.
The only thing that stops him is the memory of Junsik, sitting by the table, night dark enough that all of his colors looked like black stains.
Haven’t you ever had people leave before?
And Sanghyeok is young, but he’s not a child. He’s not going to throw a—a tantrum just because his soulmates were supposed to be people he loved and now they’re leaving him—
He clamps down hard on his anger, tells them goodbye, wishes them luck, and lets that horrible ugly thing claw its way back into his heart.
Eonyoung’s leaving too. Sanghyeok can tell from the way Eonyoung spends a good chunk of his time looking at places in America, at the LCS, and the way he talks about it.
It’s not fair.
Sanghyeok would rather lose Gyeonghwan to the sister team merge.
That doesn’t stop Eonyoung from looking across the sea and at Gwangjin's footsteps, his fingertips wrapped only loosely around the metaphorical railing that Sanghyeok seems trapped behind.
The only one left is Seongwoong.
Seongwoong, who refuses to meet his eyes.
Seongwoong, who’d gotten lapped, over and over, all year by Dandy and Mata.
Seongwoong, the first to let Sanghyeok’s red bleed onto his skin.
Seongwoong, his right hand.
Just him.
Sanghyeok manages to corner him eventually. Junsik’s already asleep, snoring softly, but there’s movement from where Seongwoong is, as though restlessly trying to find some position that’ll let him sleep. Silently, Sanghyeok slips out of his own bed, padding quietly over until he can tap at the misshapen lump under the sheets.
Seongwoong startles, but doesn’t make a noise, and pokes his head up, eyes bleary. “Sanghyeok? What?”
It’s late. Usually, Sanghyeok’s asleep too, and maybe that’s why the words manage to force themselves out of his mouth. “Don’t leave.” Anger comes out like water, fast and sharp and cutting, overflowing up and out of his mouth—and really, that’s how everything comes out of his mouth, once he lets the dam crack, even if just a little.
Seongwoong stares, sits up, and Sanghyeok supposes it’s late for him too if it takes him just a little too long to respond. “What?”
“Don’t leave me.” It’s only him that knows it’s a plea of some sort, because he’s eighteen and everyone he loves is leaving him and he’s starting to wonder if he really is a little bit cursed. Red means loss too, doesn’t it?
He hopes that Seongwoong knows what he means, at least. He should, shouldn’t he? That’s how the two of them are supposed to work. Bengi-and-Faker, Faker-and-Bengi. A mid and his jungle. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?
If he does leave, Sanghyeok doesn’t know how he’s supposed to play, if that gold is going to haunt him, taunting and bright. He’s already taken to covering up gradient on his arm—a sunset now, he knows it’s a sunset—hiding in long sleeves and layers and never turning his eyes down at his forearm, but he doesn’t know what to do about Seongwoong.
His hand is moving before he realizes, the gold splayed over his hand still catching the tiniest bit of spare light in the room with the movement, and he’s saying, commanding, “Stay,” before he can stop himself.
Seongwoong’s eyes seem to soften at the edges, even as he looks up at Sanghyeok, looming above. “Okay,” he agrees.
“You’re not leaving me?” The mark on Seongwoong’s throat is startling dark against his skin. Sanghyeok’s hand hovers, just above it, and Seongwoong lets him, throat tilted up and bare, the willing lamb to slaughter.
“Oh, Sanghyeokie,” Seongwoong whispers softly, his hand gentle when it takes Sanghyeok’s, placing it against his throat and Sanghyeok’s soulmark.
“Wrong side,” he wants to say, Seongwoong’s pulse thrumming beneath his palm, because Seongwoong’s mark is on the back of his hand. It’s Junsik’s mark that’s touching, bitter red on vibrant red.
But Seongwoong doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps Sanghyeok’s hand pressed to his jugular. “I’ll always be with you.”
And the gold on the back of Sanghyeok’s hand keeps on glittering, a kind of wealth spilling from a wound.