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The night of an unfamiliar city is nothing short of oppressive. The shadows sharpen and elongate into constant threats, taunting passers by from where they pool on the ground, every single odd noise sounding something out to get you, every snap of a twig the only warning before a rabid fan charges from a hiding place to take you out.
It’s oppressive. It’s lonely.
But at least it’s fucking quiet.
The sound of footsteps approaching initially makes Mingyu jump out of his skin, startling so hard that he almost drops his cigarette and loses a fresh one to the horrors of this dirty ass smoking area, but a quick and terribly unsubtle look over his shoulder confirms the culprit as exactly who he anticipates it to be. There’s no settling, not really, not now. But even he has to admit that some of the tension in his shoulders bleed out as he turns to face forward once more, watching the palm trees sway in the breeze.
Seokmin saddles up next to him rather silently, the shiner he’s sporting somehow glinting in the low light. His skin looks puffier than before and a darker color, but his eye doesn’t seem to be swollen shut, at least not yet. Hopefully it means his vision isn’t impacted. Hopefully it means that he’s good to play with them tomorrow. Tonight, maybe. Mingyu can’t be certain if it’s past midnight, but he has an inkling it is.
“Choi Seungcheol saw you weren’t in the hotel,” Seokmin says softly in lieu of a greeting, his voice threatening to blend into the passing breeze, “and sent me to make sure you were okay.”
Mingyu makes a flabbergasted noise. “Motherfucker is multiple states away,” he grumbles, taking a drag from his cigarette so long he feels it burning in his lungs, “what the fuck is he doing knowing I’m not in my room.” He chews on the filter as the cherry burns, gnashing his teeth as if it’ll get him to settle. It doesn’t, but it’s a nice thought.
Seokmin just hums, something in the note making Mingyu pay attention. He’s asking for something, but Mingyu can’t figure out what. It takes Seokmin sticking out a hand and jabbing towards Mingyu’s pocket, a box of cigarettes clearly visible in his pants, for him to finally get the hint.
“Don’t get too excited,” he grumbles, flicking open the top of the box and holding it out to Seokmin, his lighter peaking out between his fingers and lighting him up before Seokmin can even think to ask for a light, “they’re fuckin’ herbals.”
Seokmin blinks at him once, twice, the swelling around his eye making him look younger and somehow vulnerable despite how Mingyu knows he’s anything but, before he’s bursting out in laughter. Seokmin always looks so vivid, a painting in technicolor, when he laughs like this. He is everything and more, his joy physically bursting from his lips in a desperate barrage there is no hope in hell of stopping. Mingyu loves it, maybe even loves more if he’s forced to admit it.
When Seokmin quiets down they’re left just standing there, existing together in the quiet of an unknown city. It’s an odd little place to be but Mingyu doesn’t mind. It feels like they’ve hollowed out this tiny part of the city, of the month, of this stupid fucking playoff run to just meerely exist together. It’s nice, Mingyu has to admit. It’s nice to just exist with Seokmin.
At least it is until Seokmin decides he’s done simply existing with Mingyu. Or maybe that’s not what happens. Maybe Seokmin’s just worried. Mingyu rips himself away from that line of thought before he can succumb to overthinking. Over hoping. Losing himself to his own mind, his own dreams, his own fantasies.
“Wanna tell me why we’re out smoking in the middle of the night?” Seokmin asks casually around his cigarette, his boyish grin no less charming even with the shiner. “Teenage rebellion?”
“We’re over thirty,” Mingyu deadpans. Seokmin shrugs, loose and giddy in a way that makes Mingyu ache for things he can never name. Ache for things he can never have, either. It just makes him ache, plain and simple.
“It’s never too late for good ol’ fashion teenage shenanigans.”
Mingyu scoffs before taking a heavy pull of smoke, taking comfort in the burning discomfort of his lungs. “Disagree.”
“What, and you’re not out here smoking to remind you of being back home? Thirteen and surrounded by smoke and smog and spending our last days in a city and a country with people like us and a language more people than just us actually know before the international circuit sunk its teeth in and refused to let go?”
That’s the thing about Seokmin, he’s so sweet and sunshiny you never expect the well placed dagger until you’re left bleeding out.
Seokmin blinks at him for a few moments before he shakes his head, taking a drag before he’s back to scanning the sky and charting the stars. The way they reflect back in his eyes, Mingyu could write sonnets, symphonies, to just that phenomenon alone.
“That’s what I’m doing.” Smoke curls around his nostrils, caresses the soft skin of his lips. Mingyu wants to taste it, curious if the smoke tastes the same after running through the supernova that is Seokmin’s lungs. “Thinking about home in the middle of the best playoff run of my career, and my thoughts are fucking stuck on Seoul. Stuck on you,” he breathes out, Mingyu’s ears barely catching the last part as it goes up in smoke.
Everything seems to pause between them, even the breeze holding its breath for this moment.
There’s always been something thrumming between them, a violin string tightened too far and ready to snap at a sudden note. It didn’t matter when they were kids and it didn’t matter when they were on different teams. It never mattered beyond them.
But maybe Mingyu is just being sentimental.
Maybe it all did matter, a build up with no breaks, a calamity with no way to abort it. It’s hard to care, with this between them. It’s hard to do more than just feel.
“I’m not something you want to be stuck on,” Mingyu eventually remarks, the sky cold and uncaring to his eyes. He wishes he could see the galaxies the way Seokmin could, wishes that the world for him was just as bright and beautiful.
Instead he makes his peace with just being in proximity of something that magical.
“You never did understand your worth.” Seokmin sounds calm, steady, even as he produces an ice pack from his pocket and presses it against his blackened eye. “Not to me, not to any team, not to anyone. It’s one of the parts of you that I,” Seokmin sighs, taking another long drag as he clearly searches for the right words, “I have never understood.”
Mingyu just ignores him. It’s the only thing that he can do. “I’m glad you’re icing that.”
Seokmin scoffs, his expression a little unbelievable as he tries to glare at Mingyu. He lets the subject change happen though, Seokmin’s kindness on full display. “Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off. I need this swelling gone now, before medical says I can’t see well enough to play.”
“They won’t.” They can’t, not if they want their team to have a chance in hell. It’s just a black eye.
But Mingyu isn’t really thinking about medical. Of course he isn’t. Instead his brain has snagged on the fresh bruises scattering his own knuckles, the swelling in his fists that he earned after dealing with the bastard that did that to Seokmin. Bloody teeth flash in his mind’s eye and he feels his shoulders settle back, relaxing into the feeling of a job well done. Even still, there’s something weighing on his chest, something itching. It’s a weight imbedded with tiny spikes, poking and poking and fucking poking until you finally give in and scratch the spot, for as little good as it will get you.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see them coming after you like that.”
Seokmin raises an eyebrow, the look far less impactful with the ice pack blocking a third of his face. “Literally no one did. Don’t kill yourself over it.”
Mingyu must make a face because Seokmin’s rolling his eye (eyes, presumably) as he takes a final drag off his cigarette, disposing it in the receptacle the moment he’s stamped out the cherry. He holds his free hand out expectantly, his stare flat as he halfheartedly glares at Mingyu. He doesn’t bother speaking until his new cigarette is in his fingers, lit, and the first pull of smoke is coiling in his lungs.
“I didn’t even see them coming after me until it fucking hit me in the face,” he huffs with a laugh and a cloud of smoke, his hair bouncing as he shakes his head. “You can’t blame yourself without blaming me, dumbo.”
“I thought we all agreed Cheol was the Dumbo between us.”
Seokmin snorts, his eye dancing as he shakes his head once more. “You’re awful Mingyu,” he teases. “Keep it up.”
Mingyu manages a smile, the muscles of his face falling into position far easier than he anticipated. “Just for you.”
“Oh now,” Seokmin starts, his eye flashing as his expression turns darker, “you can’t just be sayin’ things like that. Goes to a man’s head, you know,” he coos and Mingyu couldn’t stop his full belly laugh if he wanted to.
Mingyu’s pack is practically finished and Seokmin’s ice pack is too warm to matter by the time they call it night. The trek back to the hotel is long and starts quiet, the air of a different city suffocating them under its pressure. It’s what gets Mingyu to crack, that and the memories threatening to seep in at any given moment, clogging his pores and his throat and his ears until there’s nothing more to him than Seokmin Seokmin Seokmin.
“Is it weird to be like this?” Mingyu asks with no preamble, no lead up, a scramble of words that he decided to spew into the void sans any context. It’s the odd look that Seokmin shoots him that has him saying more, otherwise he was content to pretend he never opened his dumbass mouth. “Y’know,” he mumbles, rubbing the back of his neck, “here and now but, like, still with each other?”
Seokmin snorts and shakes his head, looking up to the stars with an odd sort of smile playing on his face. “Nah, we’re a bonded pair. Where you go, I follow.”
The eye contact between them feels heavier than anything Mingyu’s been asked to lift. It’s intoxicating in a way that Mingyu can’t explain, but he also can’t let go of.
“Stay with me tonight.”
The words hang between them like they’re tangible, a fog that they can taste, one that coats and covers the two of them in its presence. Mingyu refuses to regret them. He can’t, not with Seokmin saying all that he’s said today. Tonight even. Mingyu needs to press into this moment until it bruises, until the pain is there to remind him tomorrow that Seokmin, fucking Seokmin, will follow whereever Mingyu goes. That his thoughts wrap around Mingyu like tinfoil wrapped leftovers. It’s that thought, that they’ll always be wrapped in each other, whether it be in the shadows or standing in the middle of center stage, that has him slowing his pace. The hotel looms large over them, and they both still smell like smoke, but there’s something so real, so rotten, about this whole thing that Mingyu can’t bother to let go, makes him hope for something more for the first time in forever.
“It’s not like we’ll do anything,” Mingyu finally adds into the quiet between them, their footsteps having stopped in the middle of the sidewalk who knows how long ago. He feels himself flush but he ignores it. This is something he wants, Seokmin is something he wants, and he just, he just wants it this once. Needs it, even. “Leave before anyone notices. I just,” finally, finally, Mingyu looks away, his eyes catching on some palm trees swaying in the balmy ass breeze. It is not hockey weather, not remotely, but maybe it’s hopeful weather. Maybe it’s the weather for change.
Or maybe he’s just lost it. He can’t say for sure.
Mingyu huffs out a sigh and drags a hand through his hair, desperate for another cigarette just so he has something to do.
“I just can’t bear to be alone,” he whispers, his words getting caught in the wind. “Not tonight. Not like this.”
The wind is the only thing between them for longer than Mingyu cares to notice, longer than he cares to admit. He’s packing up his hopes, filing them away to be mourned about later, when he feels a tentative brush against his hand. Seokmin’s smile is shaky when he manages to look at him, but his fingers still intertwine with Mingyu’s like there’s nothing else they’d ever be doing.
It’s almost too much.
“Slow down, cowboy,” Seokmin teases, squeezing his hand like it's the most natural thing he’s ever done. “I thought this wasn’t a night for some teenage rebellion? And now you’re trying to sneak a boy into your room?”
There’s nothing else for him to do; Mingyu laughs. Mingyu laughs with his entire chest, squeezing Seokmin’s hand back before leading him towards the hotel. Tonight, tonight he will be brave. Tonight he cannot handle the reality where he, where he is alone, again, forevermore. Tonight, tonight he can be the Mingyu of his dreams. The Mingyu that has Seokmin beside him in the way that matters most.
“Someone told me we’re not too old for that,” he teases back, watching as Seokmin’s features soften.
“You’re more than just some teenage rebellion to me, Mingyu. You always will be.”
“I can only agree,” Mingyu manages to choke out with his eyes closed, ignoring the well placed dagger tearing through his chest. That’s the trouble with Seokmin. He can always hit you where it will hurt.
Mingyu wakes up alone, his bed rumpled but cold.
He knew this was coming, knew this had to happen.
It still manages to break his heart, just like he knew it would.
Mingyu does his best not to fall apart, his mind already replaying the feeling of falling asleep in Seokmin’s arms, Seokmin’s lips pressed into the crown of his head, as his palm presses into his empty mattress. Being wrapped up in Seokmin, so entirely cocooned despite everything, it makes Mingyu want to lose his mind a little. There’s a part of him that wants to rush out of this room and scream to the world that “I, Mingyu Kim, am in love with a man and a fellow teammate! I, Mingyu Kim, want nothing more than him! He is more important to me than any of this, than any of you!”
It’s a lovely idea, a fun little thought exercise.
But Mingyu Kim doesn’t get to do that. Mingyu Kim gets none of that. Mingyu Kim gets a hollow chest and to be haunted by the thoughts of what he could have if only everything were different.
Maybe a few years post retirement, Kim Mingyu will have a quieter version of that, but it won’t be Mingyu Kim. And he’s okay with that. He has to be okay with that.
A knock on his door drags him out of his moping, mourning of a future he never had. Though he grumbles to himself, Mingyu drags his ass out of bed and manages to get the door, more than a little sure that his hair is a mess and it’s obvious that he’s in his pajamas. He just can’t seem to care.
Maybe he should have.
Seokmin’s smile is more than a little amused, but Mingyu can see the pain in his eyes. It makes his chest hurt worse, somehow.
“Wanna get breakfast? Start the day off right? We’ve got that biiiig game tonight.”
Though he feels like it’s going to kill him, Mingyu manages his own smile. “Sure, Seok. We can do breakfast.”
Maybe that’s what matters, he thinks to himself as he makes sure he looks paparazzi presentable before stuffing his shoes on. Maybe it’s what they can do, rather than what he wishes they could do.
Mingyu can only hope that the reframing carries him through as long as he needs it to.
After all, he needs it to make it survivable, to make his sad little existence of orbiting a spectacle of a man bearable, to make his quiet life of just observing Seokmin through his heartsick eyes worth it all.