Work Text:
Sangwon lets Leo check in on him only twenty times while they’re getting their hair touched up until he seriously considers slapping a hand over his mouth to smother the incoming but, really, are you okay before it can poison the air again.
Sudden movements will draw too much attention in the crowded waiting room, lure unnecessarily expectant eyes. So he contains himself with a nod each time instead, suppressing a grimace. It was all for pleasantries, anyway. Him and Leo both knew he had to be okay—there was no other option. Or there was no point in any of it, that entire treacherous trail he’d barely scaled on his hands and knees.
He doesn’t waste the precious countdown before filming on extraneous thoughts. He runs catalogue down his body, shifting focus from the tightness in his shoulders, to the slight hunger in his stomach, down to his sore calves.
His—shoelace. Even routine messes up in his hands, his knuckles knocking together gracelessly as he fumbles to tie up his shoes. His body doesn’t run like the well-oiled machine it used to be, back when that’s all it was. For a long time, he thought that would be a good thing, to shake off that stiff second skin. Except crawling back into the spotlight meant relearning everything, from the very first lesson of taking a breath underwater.
“—so tall and handsome.”
“Hyung is more handsome, don’t worry.”
“You’re forgetting something—”
Sangwon slants his gaze sideways. The waiting room is bustling with fresh faces, contestants who haven’t trained long enough for the dust to settle in their childhood bedrooms. Their faces are eager and unassuming. He can only wonder how many of them will get it off the cuff on the first try.
It’s a bitter relief that he’s better off than some of the guys who’d already run the debut gauntlet. They’ve sunken in their chairs with all the relaxed, confident air of professionals, but they must know what it means to be here. Debut hadn't been their endpoint. They’d invested years just to have the false sense of security swept away from under their feet.
Suddenly, his eyes catch on something. No aberration, but the smooth back of someone’s neck, a makeup artist fussing between their stretched out “manner” legs.
For no reason at all, an invisible tremor builds at the top of his spine, where it still aches from redoing choreography over, over, over. It trickles down, curls into the lines of his palm, and he has to subdue them between his thighs.
Anyone’s back could look like that. Tall, lanky, chivalrous guys were a dime a dozen in the trainee world, nothing special. His fingers claw into his jeans.
It was a pipe dream, to believe certain things could ever lose their significance.
Leo, sniffing out his anxiety like a loyal dog, has to intervene. He jostles his shoulder, and Sangwon snaps out of his stupor, swinging alarmed eyes toward him. “Talk to me, Sangwon-ah.”
“It’s nothing.” He hardly hears himself say it. “Hyung, should we practice our greeting again?”
“Hey, why are you being so—”
Sangwon’s already escaping the couch and darting to a farther corner of the waiting room. Eyes follow as he goes, accompanied with the ever-present whispers of is that the…? I heard he…. Maybe he needs to get out of the room entirely. Leo’s worry makes sense: it’s unbecoming for a trainee of his caliber to be this lost and scattered before a performance.
It’s just that—he realizes as he creeps his hand up to gauge his racing heartbeat—he feels like he’s seen a ghost.
In Sapporo, Geonwoo sleeps on his back, soft underbelly bared to the world. His face is unbearably weak in its slack, nose a fragile point in the near darkness.
Sangwon wants to look away. It feels like an intrusion of privacy somehow, staring from his pillow when he should be sleeping, too. Witnessing his edges grown soft and palatable. There was so much he didn’t know, about the Geonwoo that’d existed before he’d been chewed up and spat back out in a pulp. Had he also attended a dance workshop and found that his body grew out of his skin in the mirror? Had he belted songs at karaoke before his voice became a point on a list of criteria? The image of him, young and unfettered, rolls around in his mind even after he turns to face the wall.
Their bodies feel too big in the inn, and in the morning, he has to bow underneath the doorway to use the bathroom. He steals some of Geonwoo’s toothpaste, because he’d forgotten to bring his own in his haphazard last-minute packing.
When the company had told Geonwoo he could bring one other person on his trip, Sangwon really hadn’t expected it to be him. They’d been talking for a few weeks, but what about his parents? His possible future members?
Why not you? He’d thrown back, so casually, and Sangwon had to act like it didn’t sear to the bone. He spits and rinses the sink. Why not me. As if it were so easy to always be the first choice.
Their legs tangle under the kotatsu, and Sangwon lazily scrolls through Naver reviews for dinner options with an elbow propped up. Geonwoo fiddles with his other hand, pressing on his joints like he’s playing a piano.
“This sushi restaurant looks good. Guess what they have.” He pauses. Geonwoo raises an eyebrow. “Cod milt. It’s fish ballsack.”
His jaw drops. “Wow, Sangwon-ie, that’s literally your favorite. When’s the earliest reservation?”
“7 PM. I’m gonna have twenty servings.” Sangwon rubs his stomach. “I’m gonna clear out all the fish testicles in Japan.”
“Can’t they just castrate more fish in the back?”
They glance at each other wearily, and then burst out in giggles. Thirty minutes later, they still haven’t decided where to eat, much less an actual agenda, because Geonwoo keeps finding new places he laments would be a waste to not visit, and Sangwon can’t figure out a bus route that connects them all.
“You have to choose! Zoo or the beer museum.” Sangwon wags his phone in Geonwoo’s face. “I don’t even know why you want to go to either, but I suppose you earned this trip, so I’ll abide by your foolish whims.”
“It’s not foolish—they have those Japanese monkeys with the red faces!” He whines, shoving the screen away. “Okay, okay, zoo. Take me to the zoo, Sangwon-ie.”
Despite all that planning, they get sidetracked on their way to the first bus stop.
“What’s this line for?” Sangwon asks. A ribbon of people are traced up a small hill leading to a torii.
Geonwoo mimes prayer hands in his gloves. “It’s a Shinto shrine. You make a wish, and the energy here is especially potent or something, so it’s more likely to come true.”
“Okay, you have no choice.” He snags Geonwoo’s elbow and sidles up behind a pair of older women in line. “Start thinking of what you want.”
They go through the ritual of pouring water over their hands and mouths. Geonwoo digs yen out of his wallet for them to throw into the offering box. They bow twice, clap twice, and Sangwon prays that this will always mean something to him.
He slides his gaze over to Geonwoo, whose eyes are still closed, head lowered.
Once they’re leaving the shrine to catch the next bus, he jumps on the opportunity. “What did you wish for?” He squeezes his mask up higher on his nose, though he sincerely doubts anyone would be able to recognize him out here. They still pass off as two friends on vacation—he’s not worried about that.
“Hey, isn’t it supposed to be a secret? Don’t break my good luck when I just got it.” Geonwoo retorts.
Sangwon can usually flutter his eyelashes and wheedle any information he wants out of him, but Geonwoo only mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key.
When he thinks back on this day, it’ll be a montage shot in warm Kodak film. They go ice skating at a large outdoor rink, and Sangwon falls on his ass. Geonwoo almost busts his own because he can’t stop laughing. They stock up on convenience store snacks they’ll only get to try here, and Sangwon picks out souvenirs for his family. Geonwoo sees his monkeys and likens them to Sangwon’s fur hat. On the bus rides, they play word games to take up the time, but they never really follow the rules. Mountains stretch their comforting arms around the horizon, and the air tinges with a purple hue from all the light scattering off the snow.
“It’s because the different wavelengths—the spectrum—they’re all bouncing off each other. And the snow.” Geonwoo makes a weird see-saw gesture, then drops his hands in defeat. “Okay. I give up.”
Sangwon narrows his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
They don’t make it to the sushi restaurant. Fish semen is a delicacy far out of their price range.
But, they do end up huddled over the bar of a ramen place for dinner, blowing over their tonkotsu noodles. Because Sangwon is greedy, insatiable, he slips his eyes shut over his bowl one more time. It’s no shrine, but who’s to say the smell of pork belly can’t rouse some deeper spirituality in him? He wishes for a future with Geonwoo in it, and then he picks up his chopsticks.
He wraps that long belt of longing around himself and finds that it’s a perfect fit. Maybe it’s because the staff have been whispering about the debut team, maybe it’s because there’s promise of relieving that four-year ache. Maybe it’s because Sapporo is an unparalleled vision of winter, iridescent wind, boughs of cedar weighed down with the softest feather-white plumes of snow.
At the end of the day, Sangwon’s grateful to be warm and cuddled up under the blanket. The mouth of the window holds the flurry of snow outside. He watches them dance against the dark backdrop in every direction, and it resonates in his chest.
Maybe that was the theme of the day: some sort of kinesis that made him feel like a possibility instead of directionless. Anything he wished for could drop into his open palm, as easily as snowflakes landing to melt on his tongue.
Geonwoo leans in first. When their lips touch, it seals the deal. He angles his head to the side, and the slide of their mouths is perfect, even if Geonwoo’s lips are chapped enough to be abrasive. It’s okay. He’ll buy him lip balm in a flavor he likes. He’ll tease him to put it on so he can reward him with a kiss each time. A bubbly feeling zips up through his lungs, and when Geonwoo settles a hand on the back of his neck to deepen the kiss, he’s buoyant, out of his body.
Their mouths separate with a champagne-pop. Geonwoo’s big hand is still anchored behind his head, drawing warmth. He scrunches his face when their cold noses bump into each other, unearthing all the whisker-y lines on his face. Sangwon licks his teeth and tucks this moment behind his molars. Geonwoo brushes a piece of hair behind his ear, and rubs the cartilage at its thinnest, flushed red.
“Do you ever get that feeling, that everything is falling into its right place?”
Sangwon doesn’t respond for a second, to test if it's rhetorical. Geonwoo’s lips are curving up without an answer, and then his mouth is back on his, hands pressing his shoulders down to lay flat on the couch.
Sangwon sighs around the feeling of Geonwoo’s thigh slotting between his legs. Pushing him open. They’re only in Sapporo for half a week—they’ll make the most of every day, every night.
It’s that time of year where the illusion breaks. Last night’s snowfall is a disgusting, discolored slush as he trudges through it.
He blows vapor in the air, fiddles with his music queue, twists his long sleeves in his fists, anything to silence his grating thoughts. They drag him down by the ankles, anyway, ball-and-chain.
Geonwoo’s been quick to agitate lately, unbearably restless. He gets why, but it still doesn’t seem fair to him. Sangwon hadn’t canceled his debut.
His tongue had been the texture of sandpaper as he’d chided Sangwon for always leaving his clothes behind at his dorm and taking his in exchange. Complaining just to complain. Sometimes, it was how he spent his days outside of seeing Geonwoo. Don’t you think you should be doing something more?
Sangwon liked to lob his cringy flirtations and jokes in the air, trusting Geonwoo to catch it with his quick wit. That same playfulness had sharpened into something more abrasive and destructive. It wasn’t a game he was sure he wanted to play anymore.
What do you mean? I’m happy with what I do.
DJing? Modeling for your friends’ brands? It wouldn’t be different than if you’d just stayed at that cafe. Sangwon-ah, you were in BTS sunbaenim’s company—you were born for something bigger. I know that. Everyone knows that. How can you—he’d made a frustrated gesture, clawing at the air—just let that go?
Sangwon was sure it was an outburst that could be patched over later under the guise of misplaced care, but in that moment, he’d never wished more that he was on his knees scrubbing a spilled drink off the floor of that damn cafe than ever embarked on the series of events that led him to Geonwoo. Maybe that made him a coward. It sure as hell hadn’t made him feel brave. They’d stood in the silence together, until the soup bubbled over and splattered kimchi juice on the stove. After dinner, Geonwoo apologized over sex, but Sangwon had already decided for the both of them that it wouldn’t do him any good to stay over this time.
He’s only going back this soon because he left his scarf there: silky smooth, interlacing patterns. He could buy a similar one, but he wants this one back.
The route to Geonwoo’s dorm is far too familiar, even transformed with all the ice and frozen-over signs. He lets himself in with the spare key Geonwoo was definitely not allowed to give him and finds him in the kitchen.
None of the lights are on. It’s a strange scene: a rough chiaroscuro of Geonwoo’s pale skin stark among the barely intelligible shadows of appliances. He’s motionless, hunched over the sink in a way that suggests he’s been that way for a while now. The sparse light from the hallway catches on the prominent vertebrae above his shirt collar.
Sangwon’s been tossing and turning his name in his brain the entire walk here, so when it finally comes out his mouth, it’s unexpectedly brusque. “Geonwoo.”
There’s a crack, the sound of glass splintering, and Sangwon’s fingers blindly feel for the light switch before he rushes to Geonwoo.
“Oh, fuck. Don’t touch that.” Geonwoo’s hand jerks out to wrench his wrist away from a piece of glass. “Fuck. Sorry. You scared me.”
Sangwon cradles his wrist in his other hand, standing back up. “It’s okay. Did you hurt yourself?” He wonders if he can ask what Geonwoo was doing, all alone in that darkness with an empty plate. Wound up tight enough to drop it at the slightest noise.
The fluorescent lights spill over the upper planes of Geonwoo’s face in irregular shapes as he looks up from the floor. They twist with his expression. “I–I think I cut myself.” He uncurls his index finger, and it trembles by his chest, red streaming thinly down the digit and smearing into his palm lines.
“Oh, baby, let me get you…” Sangwon flutters around the kitchen in search of the first aid kit.
“Dont, just get the broom and dust pan.”
Shit, hadn’t he used it last time to bandage a paper cut? “You’re bleeding, dummy. Did your head hit the ground with the plate?” He opens and shuts random drawers, waiting for that red cross to show up.
“Sangwon-ie. I’m fine.” It sounds final. It’s also as plainly untrue as if he’d told him the sky was on fire, but Sangwon figures he can’t push anymore on this one. Another loss in a fight he didn’t know he was keeping score for.
He shuts the cabinet under the sink and grounds himself with the exertion in his thighs as he pushes back up. A cold draft seeps in through the leaky window the company had promised to get fixed. Sangwon’s gaze drifts. There’s a Monstera plant tucked in the corner of the living room, half obscured by a curtain, brown and bitten at the edges. He’d gotten it for Geonwoo back when they thought debut was an arms-length away, a dream tumbling to his doorstep. It’ll grow with you.
Sangwon was prone to that sort of meaningless symbolism, anchors he relied on to keep his life on track—stickers on his journal fading with each entry, traffic lights dictating the swell of life around him.
Maybe Geonwoo’s T was finally rubbing off on him. Suddenly, he wanted to see things for what they were. Just a dead plant. Just a broken plate.
Sangwon slams the door shut when he leaves. He hadn’t meant to—the door had slipped out of his hands far too quickly, and he startled at the loud noise. He has to turn back to stare at the plain wood for a second, bewildered. Well. It’s a reckoning if there was any.
The sun is a white pinprick in the gray sky, and there’s an oily film over the clouds. Ice nips at his heels as he kicks up sleet with each step. His neck is distinctly cold. The smell of exhaust from the street makes him nauseous, even though there’s nothing in his stomach to bring up.
He gets some breakfast to try and shake off the morning, but the details get caught in his teeth with each bite of his flaky pastry.
Geonwoo had been about to start cooking. For some reason, he’d grabbed a plate, forgone the lights, and started thinking, instead. About the empty plate, or the seize of his own hunger, or the cold floor tiles underneath his bare feet—Sangwon could only infer these things. He resumed pulling out ingredients the moment they’d finished cleaning up and Sangwon had started talking.
In an attempt to fill out the shoulders on his coat of bravery, he’d ripped his eyes off the stupid plant and cleared his throat. “There’s something I wanted to bring up. I.” He swallowed. “I don’t want you to talk to me anymore, how you did.”
“How did I talk to you?” Two eggs weighed in one hand, a carrot in the other. Leftover pork belly rolls from hotpot. He wasn’t sure if Geonwoo knew what dish he was making either.
Sangwon could recall how his hands had shook at his sides. “You can’t decide for me how my life should go, and you can’t tell me I’m doing it wrong, Geonwoo–”
“It’s just a push in the right direction, for God’s sake, I’m trying to encourage you to do something with purpose in your life again.” Picking out the knife. A well-worn cutting board.
“Don’t push me. Don’t rush me.” It’s not my fault you didn’t debut. You’re not allowed to make it my burden. The words rushed up his throat, but he’d bite his tongue to a bloody scrap before he could ever let them out.
“You act like I’m forcing you to do these things for my own benefit. I do it for you.” The carrot top flew off with a sturdy chop, tumbling onto the counter. “It’s something you do for the people you love.”
He’d stared, incredulous. Geonwoo was chopping vegetables like this conversation was just a second thought. Like he hadn’t just admitted that—
“You have the completely wrong idea.”
Geonwoo lowered the knife onto its side on the cutting board. “About what, Sangwon-ah,” he said. His voice had become uncharacteristically quiet, and it pierced through the silk silence of the kitchen. The quiet fall, before the body hit the ground. “What am I misunderstanding?”
You don’t love me, he thought pitifully, and closed his eyes before impact.
If he had to pinpoint the exact beginning of the end, it might’ve been the night Geonwoo got the news.
Sangwon had paced his room with bated breath for the results, anxious to know what kind of meeting it had been, until Geonwoo had bursted into his apartment with the brightness of a small star spilling out of him.
When they’d kissed, it was to the cadence of debut debut debut, teeth clashing. Geonwoo was drunk with it—Sangwon had no choice but to drink it in secondhand. Inspired, he’d leaned over to reveal a handle of vodka from underneath his bed, a gift from something that didn’t matter anymore, and then they really were. Liquid warmth had them jostling each other to stumble out the door into the snow.
Carried over from the idyllic bliss of Sapporo, all that radiance was ten times the spark. It was that unbelievable lightning-shock of joy that had adrenaline pumping through him like they were marathon finishers, an infectious glow that lit up the streets despite the 5 PM darkness. A meteor could’ve hit Korea, a semi-truck run them over into cardboard cut-outs, but at least they had this—this chrysalis of happiness, diluted to its purest syrupy-smooth naïvety.
Geonwoo threw his arm around him, and, unbalanced, they tumbled into the snow. Sangwon closed his eyes as he sank into the cold.
“Sangwon-ah. This is what I wished for.” He bit at his ear, a habit he was starting to build, hot breath wafting cherry Smirnoff. “I’ve made it, fuck.” He laughed hysterically, turning back up to the sky. “I did it.”
It wasn’t until Geonwoo was curled up over his back in bed did Sangwon break down into tears. Careful not to wake him, he sniffled into the pillow and tried to control his trembling breaths. His jaw ached from clenching down the noises. The arms around his stomach hadn’t budged, once.
The brightness that had flooded every dark corner had only illuminated everything he’d pushed back in the recesses of his mind. All the nasty, all the ugly. He was scared of being left behind. Geonwoo was leaving him behind. He thought of the long text chains in the Trainee A group chat. Even splintered off, they were still running toward that shared dream. Why couldn’t Sangwon even get himself to the start line?
Two weeks later, plans are cancelled, Geonwoo drops a plate, and Sangwon slams a door once he realizes he is deadweight to him, to the world. Two months later, Leo asks him to meet up.
They end up at the cat cafe they frequented as trainees, and Sangwon’s still rolling the news of this Boy’s Two Planet over in his head when his phone vibrates with a call from Do Not Respond.
It’s unexpected. Geonwoo had called a month ago to check in on things, and it’d been stiflingly awkward because Sangwon had refused to let the conversation drift normally. He kind of wished he’d gone back to his barista job just so he could tell Geonwoo something to piss him off, but the truth is—he’d started practicing choreography with Leo again.
Sangwon ignores the constant stream of pspsps as Leo coaxes a cat from underneath a chair to deliver his line with as much resolution as he can possibly muster. Even if, childishly, he wants nothing more than for his throat to close up in that moment. To simperingly call upon the good moments, on Sapporo, on a dream once fulfilled, as if the longing of what had passed could sustain them forever.
He accepts the call, gives only one second of reprieve. “Geonwoo-ya. I don’t think you should call me again.”
Sangwon pulls his lips in between his teeth. Static crumbles for a second before his phone beeps in absolution. When he pulls it down to a black screen, he’s forced to look right into himself.
“Meow,” the cat curled up in his lap offers, “mrre-ow.”
“I know,” he whispers, pocketing his phone. He scratches between its ears with a blunt nail. “That was brave, right?”
People stronger than Sangwon have lost hope earlier. It’s only inevitable.
He can’t put his finger, then, on what’s possessed him to accept dinner to talk things through with another unknown company. Except that out of the handful of trainees he’d been introduced to, one of them had that certain look in his eyes, grit between his teeth. Sangwon could sense these things, because he’d grown up with kids like Yeonjun, James, Heeseung. Hunger will make itself known.
On his first try, an intestine slides out of this guy’s chopsticks. Sangwon tries not to smile, because he isn’t sure how he’ll react to it. When he’d followed him to their reserved table, he’d noticed how his hair curled under his ears, tickling the nape of his neck. Rugged, untamed. His face had all the features to be kind: perpetually smiling lips, sweet dimples, curved eyes. A thick, stately voice reminiscent of his middle school class president. Yet, the main impression Sangwon had gotten was a sort of—bite. Teeth-first tendencies to the world. He seemed jaded beyond his meager 20 years, even though that was already considered quite old for the industry.
“Ah, same age. What a coincidence.”
They exchange sharp smiles, then, and Sangwon realizes all that sanding down hadn’t softened any of his edges. He wonders how, heel-to-heel, the height of their failures would measure up to each other.
On his second try, he sets it onto Sangwon’s bed of rice. “I hope you can consider our company. It’d be a pleasure to train with you.”
He flicks his eyes up at him—Kim Geonwoo—in surprise.
“Okay. How about you give me your KaTalk?”
He doesn’t consider the company. But he does get something out of it.
Sangwon expects the heavy hand on his shoulder. He’s carefully measured the distance between them to make sure the tail-end of him would be visible turning the corner.
He turns around. “Oh, Geonwoo-ssi?” What a nostalgic turn of syllables. He tips his head, keeps his eyes coy under that veneer of nonchalance he’s put up to safeguard against any more incidents like the waiting room. “The K-center deigns to speak to little old me? What an honor.”
Geonwoo scoffs. His arm drops, and Sangwon’s eyes follow with the excuse to drag up his body as he looks back up. There’s no intent beyond curiosity in what a year-long gap can do. Still, no one’s ever quite worn a blank white shirt how Geonwoo does. “Be quiet, please, first place. It’s pretty obvious you could’ve had it if you wanted it. Everybody here idolizes you.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Are you including yourself in that?”
The minutiae of movement in Geonwoo’s expression is all Sangwon needs. He’s been chasing that cat-like curl out of his head for the better half of a year, and it makes his teeth ache, pressure bloom at the top of his spine. All these vestigial emotions fluttering in the wind like a dog tag.
“I think you can trust me to see you eye-to-eye, if no one else does.” The dorms are warm enough for shorts and tank tops, but Geonwoo carries last winter’s perpetual chill. “Doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re incredibly talented.”
Sangwon snorts, because he’s hearing the implied like I told you in his head. “Thanks, but I’m not the same Sangwon you knew. I’m here, after all, aren’t I?” Geonwoo’s mouth falls open for a second, contemplating. “We could probably talk circles around the past forever, but for the sake of the competition, I think we should put everything to the side for now.”
Geonwoo swallows, nods. Seemingly, whatever bravado he’d come in with has taken a heel.
“But, maybe in the future...” Sangwon trails off. He doesn’t want to jinx it.
Geonwoo’s face is a little red, like those Japanese snow monkeys.
“Actually, I have one of your scarves you left with me… I don’t know when. I gave it to my mom for a while because I didn’t know what to do with it, but she was polishing the baby photos with it. And I think she threw it in my luggage, so it doesn’t look like I wear the same clothes everyday, or whatever. ”
Sangwon barks out a laugh, and it surprises him. So does the pang in his chest. “Asshole. Making your mom take care of you.”
He rolls his eyes and passes Sangwon to start toward his room. Sangwon trails behind him with the same calculated distance he’d imposed for Geonwoo, now for himself.
“Here.” He rifles through his suitcase and tosses the scarf to Sangwon. It floats through the air, nowhere near its target.
When Sangwon reaches out, the silk slips through his fingers. It was never going to be the same, was it?
One day, Sangwon will unblock his contact when Kangmin is insistent on the need for a same-age group chat. Summer, in its slow humid crawl, doesn’t summon the same sharp atmosphere, the crystal clear confessions that had once pitched out of his mouth. His memories of last year are all fogged up, and Sapporo has gone through a new cycle of snow since they last sought warmth in that tiny inn. What melts has given way to new life.