Chapter Text
They say grief is just love with nowhere to go. But no one warns you about the second death: the fading.
When Mark left, he didn't leave a trail of breadcrumbs. He didn't keep a private Instagram account for the members. He didn't send polite holiday texts. He changed his number the moment he boarded a flight to Vancouver, deleted his KakaoTalk, and effectively erased his existence from the digital world. He went from being the most documented boy in South Korea to a complete and utter ghost.
At first, Donghyuck was fueled by pure, white-hot rage. Fine, he had thought, standing in the center of the dorm living room as the managers packed up the last of Mark's discarded belongings. If he wants to play the no-contact game, I will win it.
Donghyuck purged his own phone. He deleted the thousands of photos, the voice memos of late-night songwriting sessions, the blurry videos of Mark falling asleep in the makeup chair. He threw out the hoodies Mark had left behind. He scrubbed his environment clean of the boy who had broken him.
He thought he was being strong. He didn't realize he was destroying the only evidence he had left.
The first year was about survival. Donghyuck threw himself into the grueling schedule of a fractured NCT with a vengeance. He learned to sing Mark’s parts, he learned to cover the empty space in the choreography, and he learned to smile at the interviewers who carefully avoided asking about the former leader.
But by the second year, the adrenaline wore off, and the terrifying reality of human biology set in.
Memory is not a hard drive. It is a Polaroid picture left sitting in the sun. The more time passes, the more the colors bleach, the edges blur, and the details dissolve into white noise.
It started with small things. One night in a hotel room in Bangkok, Donghyuck couldn't sleep. He lay in the dark and tried to picture the exact shape of Mark’s hands. He remembered they were large, and he remembered the veins on the back of them when Mark held a microphone. But the exact shape of his knuckles? The way his thumb curved? It was gone. Replaced by a generic, blurry placeholder in his mind.
Panic seized his chest. He tried to hear Mark’s voice. Not the stylized, heavy tone he used for rapping on tracks, but his real voice. The soft, sleepy, heavily-accented Korean he used at 3:00 AM when he was asking Donghyuck to turn off the light.
Donghyuck closed his eyes and strained his mind. Say my name, he begged the ghost in his head. Just say 'Hyuck'.
His brain offered him a voice, but it was slightly off-pitch. It sounded a little bit like Johnny, a little bit like Jeno. It wasn't Mark.
Donghyuck sat up in bed, his heart hammering against his ribs, struggling to breathe. He reached for his phone, desperate to pull up an old NCT vlog on YouTube just to hear him, just to anchor the memory before it floated away completely. But his pride, jagged and bruised, stopped his thumb over the search bar.
He left you, his pride whispered. He doesn't want to be remembered.
So, Donghyuck locked the phone and let the memory slip through his fingers.
By the third year, the forgetting had become a form of dark mercy.
Donghyuck was twenty-five. He was sharper, colder, and impeccably professional. The fans had largely moved on to the new era of the group. The name "Mark Lee" was an unspoken taboo, an artifact of a bygone era.
Donghyuck had successfully forgotten the exact cadence of Mark's laugh. He knew it was loud, he knew it involved clapping, but the actual sound of it—the breathless, chaotic music of it—had vanished from his mental library. When he tried to picture Mark's face, he could only see the heavily edited promotional photos from the Resonance era. The real Mark—the one with faint acne scars, the one whose eyes crinkled in a very specific, asymmetrical way when he smiled—was completely gone.
Donghyuck convinced himself that he was healed. You cannot mourn someone you can no longer picture. The wound had scarred over, thick and numb.
...And One Day
November. Year Four.
NCT 127 was on the North American leg of their latest world tour. They had a rare, two-day break in Toronto before their arena shows. The city was bitterly cold, the sky a heavy, bruised gray, threatening snow.
Donghyuck had slipped away from the managers and the younger members. Bundled in a heavy black coat, a beanie pulled low over his forehead, and a thick scarf covering the lower half of his face, he was just another anonymous shadow on the bustling streets of downtown Toronto.
He was cold, his legs ached from yesterday's rehearsal, and he just wanted a decent cup of coffee. He ducked out of the biting wind and into a small, dimly lit independent bookstore that smelled of old paper, roasting espresso, and wet wool.
It was quiet. A jazz record played softly over unseen speakers. Donghyuck ordered an Americano at the small counter in the back and leaned against a wooden bookshelf to wait, idly skimming the spines of the poetry section.
Then, it happened.
From the front of the store, near the cash register, someone dropped a stack of heavy art books. They hit the floor with a loud thud.
A voice, speaking English, floated over the quiet jazz music. "Oh, man. My bad, I'm so sorry. I totally lost my grip."
Donghyuck’s breath stopped. Completely, violently stopped in his lungs.
He didn't turn around yet. His mind was scrambling, frantically searching through the dusty, boarded-up archives of his memory. That voice. It was deeper than he remembered. A little rougher around the edges. But the cadence...
And then, the person laughed.
It was an apologetic, embarrassed laugh. A breathless, slightly frantic sound that ended in a soft sigh.
It was the laugh. The exact, unmistakable, chaotic music that Donghyuck had spent three years trying to reconstruct in the dark. It hit him with the force of a physical blow. The numb scar tissue over his heart ripped open in a single, agonizing second.
His blood ran cold, and then rushed to his ears, deafening him. Slowly, as if moving underwater, Donghyuck turned his head.
Through the narrow gap between the towering bookshelves, he saw him.
He wasn't wearing stage makeup. His hair wasn't dyed a vibrant, unnatural color; it was its natural, dark shade, grown out a bit longer, curling slightly at the nape of his neck. He was wearing a faded, oversized vintage sweater and thick, wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down the bridge of his nose. He was bending down to help the cashier pick up the books.
He looked incredibly normal. He looked healthy. He looked beautiful.
Donghyuck’s hands began to shake so violently he had to stuff them deep into the pockets of his coat. Every single thing he thought he had forgotten came rushing back in a torrential, overwhelming flood.
The exact shape of his knuckles. Check. The asymmetrical crinkle of his eyes. Check. The way his bottom lip caught between his teeth when he was flustered. Check. The vault hadn't been emptied. Donghyuck realized with a sickening wave of clarity that the memories had never faded. He had just buried them alive, and now, they were clawing their way out of the dirt, screaming.
Mark stood up, brushing the dust off his jeans. He handed the last book to the cashier, offering that small, warm smile that used to make stadiums of people lose their minds.
Donghyuck couldn't move. He couldn't speak. The instinct to run collided with the desperate, starving urge to cross the room and grab him by the collar, just to prove he was real and not a cruel hallucination brought on by exhaustion.
As if feeling the heavy, suffocating weight of someone staring at him, Mark turned his head.
His gaze swept lazily across the bookstore. Past the window, past the magazine rack, until it locked onto the figure standing in the shadows of the poetry aisle.
Mark froze.
The polite smile melted off his face instantly. The casual posture went rigid. Even from twenty feet away, across a crowded, dusty room, Donghyuck saw the exact moment the oxygen left Mark’s body.
For three years, they had lived in absolute silence. They had crossed oceans, severed ties, and actively tried to erase each other from the narrative of their lives. But looking into Mark's wide, dark eyes, Donghyuck knew the terrifying truth.
You can delete the photos. You can change your number. You can walk away from the stage.
But you cannot outrun a ghost when the ghost is the only thing keeping you tethered to the earth.
Mark took a single, hesitant step forward. And Donghyuck, finally, let out the breath he had been holding for three years.