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Yeonjun looks in the mirror and begins the tedious process of stripping away his makeup. The wipes are rough on his skin. If someone else were to do this for him, he's sure they would be gentle, wiping methodically but with care, and his face wouldn't be turning scarlet like it is now. He just wants to be clean immediately.
The showcase had made him so happy. He's still giddy with it, nervous energy sparking off his skin.
But he's scared for the aftermath. After the high always comes a low.
The wipes come away covered in foundation and he drops them in the waste basket. Then he removes his clothes one by one, and with each layer that comes off, his breath comes a little easier.
The ring is the last thing to come off. He carefully places it beside the bathroom sink and then steps into the shower.
The shampoo works to break apart his hair where it has solidified into a crunchy mop of hairspray. The conditioner brings some life back into his struggling strands, and then the soap gets lathered all over his skin, cutting through the sweat and grease, proof of a day well spent at work. Yeonjun watches the suds circle the drain in a spiral motion, lets the warm water hug his spent muscles. This has always been one of his favourite parts of the day. The short reprieve between the day—a maelstrom of people and cameras and lights, so busy that he doesn't have any time to think; and the night, when there's nothingness, and he's finally forced to listen to all the thoughts that have accumulated in his brain over the day, like hair clogging up a shower drain.
Yeonjun is the type of person who's always restless. It just gets worse at night.
In the shower, though, he relaxes.
The air is thick with warm vapour when he gets out. The mirror is all foggy so he can't see himself as he roughly dries himself, slides the ring back onto his fourth finger, and dons a pair of pyjama pants.
He'd already eaten with Kai and Taehyun in the living room earlier and let them use the shower first. They must be asleep now. Yeonjun wouldn't want to bother them. Even though he's starting to realise the last thing he wants right now is to be alone.
Down the hallway, Kai's door is shut. But Taehyun's is slightly ajar, light spilling out from behind the door. Yeonjun pauses for a moment, his hand hesitating on the doorknob. This is so unlike him. He usually goes straight to his room to drown in his own thoughts, but he wants things to be different now. It's a new chapter, he tells himself. Not only for the group, but for Choi Yeonjun too.
He opens the door.
"Taehyun-ah? You awake?"
Taehyun looks up from where he's lying in bed, phone in hand.
"Yeah, hyung?"
"Can hyung lie down with you for a bit?"
Taehyun stares at him for a moment, disbelieving. Yeonjun feels a pang in his chest. Has he really been so closed off for all these years?
And then Taehyun is smiling with delight and tapping the empty mattress space beside him.
"Wait, let me get my phone—"
Yeonjun runs back to his room and carefully steps over the clothes strewn haphazardly all over the floor. Grabs his phone, then slips back into Taehyun's room. He doesn't know why he closes the door behind him.
Taehyun smells fresh and clean as Yeonjun crawls onto the bed beside him. He's wearing a black tank top, and maybe Yeonjun should have thought to put a top on as well, but it's too late now.
He feels awkward. Taehyun looks perfectly comfortable, and Yeonjun feels so out of place in his room, with its clean and orderly furniture, its lack of any mess, so different from Yeonjun's. They say your room is a reflection of your mind. Yeonjun's looks like a burglar came in and wreaked havoc in the night. Taehyun's looks like something straight out of an IKEA showroom.
He tries to settle in and get comfortable. The mattress is pleasantly firm, supporting his tired body. He's barely ever in Taehyun's room, so he takes the time to look around from his position on the bed. The decor is a little lacking, but there are a few pictures of Taehyun's family, pictures of the members, of his friends. A spark of delight when he notices a picture of just the two of them, from when they'd driven to the beach a little while back.
Taehyun is listening to music, a Dean song flowing quietly through the tinny speakers.
"The reactions are really good, hyung. People like the album," Taehyun says, eyes glued to his phone.
Yeonjun hums, finds that he doesn't care as much as he used to. He used to go crazy, obsessively refreshing hashtags, YouTube comments, Melon charts. If he saw one negative review, he had to see a hundred positive ones before his heart started to beat normally again.
Still, he unlocks his phone out of habit, opens Twitter. They're charting—that's nice.
He'd already checked Weverse in the downtime before the fan showcase. The fans seemed to like it. He wants to think that even if they had hated the final product, it would be okay. Maybe it doesn't matter whether their art is "good", maybe the simple fact that they created anything at all is what matters.
It took him seven years to learn that there is no end to ambition. It threatened to swallow him whole. Why be satisfied with performing in front of twenty thousand people, when they could perform in front of a hundred thousand instead? Why be happy with a week at number one when they could stay there for months instead? All he ever wanted to do was go higher, reach for the stars. There was no end goal. There was only more, more, more, and one day he looked back and realised he'd left the Earth behind. No one understood him. Even his own members felt alien to him.
It's the company's fault, mostly. Even in his trainee days, he was at the top. Each moment since has been a grueling fight to cling to the summit of the mountain, despite his ripped and bleeding fingers. They told him he needed to do better. They told him everyone was watching. They told him he needed to tear his body apart and complete more schedules than should be humanly possible. They told him he needed to make money because the shareholders were counting on him and they were short of the revenue target for this quarter and you want your staff to get paid well don't you?
He'd internalised it all. Convinced himself he needed to be superhuman, and when the burnout inevitably came, no one was supposed to see him break. So he pushed everyone away.
Yeonjun almost threw up when the creative team proposed Thorn Tree for the prelude to this latest album. It was like they had looked right into his brain, taken fistfuls of grey matter out and examined it under a microscope.
There's a darkness I can't clear out. There's too much me inside of me. There's no space left for you.
Why couldn't he be more like Taehyun, or Soobin? Nothing ever seemed to faze them. They were like two willow trees on a river bank, leaves swaying effortlessly with the breeze and the current. Yeonjun was more like a tectonic plate, pushing and pushing until the tension gave way with a great snap and cities came crumbling down.
Yeonjun opens KakaoTalk—an app he tends to avoid, the flood of messages overwhelming. Words of congratulations have poured in from everyone: higher-ups from SBS, his friends, HYBE staff, endless sunbaes and hoobaes. He scrolls past it all, clicks on his chat with his mother and smiles at her sweet message, then squeezes his eyes shut as the tears suddenly well up.
She's prefaced the message with "Our Healingie~~", and it feels like there's a thorn stuck in his throat.
Healing. Is that what he is? Is he not a destructive force, moving through the world like a tornado, sucking everyone and everything into its merciless tempest? He nearly ruined the team, fuelled by hollow ambition. He hasn't healed anyone for a long time.
He types out a quick "thank you eomma, I love you," and locks his phone, lets it fall on the mattress. Blinks away the tears. Tries to ground himself, feel the cool sheets underneath him and Taehyun's warmth beside him.
That night out with Soobin a month ago had changed everything. He'd spent a lot of time thinking about his purpose and his place in the world. In the end, he concluded that human life didn't have an inherent purpose, but if you did have to pick a purpose, the pursuit of happiness was a good one.
What, then, made Yeonjun happy? Recording a best-selling album? Going on a sold-out world tour?
It was the simpler things, he realised. He liked to dance. He liked to listen to music. He liked having friends. He missed his members dearly, needed them like oxygen.
Hence the rings.
Another Dean song starts to play. Taehyun hums along absent-mindedly. Sleep just isn't coming to me, so I'm on Instagram, Instagram…
"Can you put the ring on?" Yeonjun hears himself ask.
Taehyun doesn't say anything, just sets his phone down and reaches over to where his ring is sitting on his bedside table. He puts it on his left ring finger, and they watch the silver glint against his slim, tan hand.
"We'll have to get ours resized," Yeonjun says. He holds up his own hand, paler and larger, beside Taehyun's.
"Nah," Taehyun says with a glint in his eyes. "It has to be fate that it fits my ring finger perfectly."
"You don't believe in fate," Yeonjun points out.
"A happy coincidence, then. I like it. It looks like I'm engaged."
Something swoops low in Yeonjun's stomach. Surely Taehyun was talking about the team, not Yeonjun specifically.
Never mind that Yeonjun was the only other member wearing his on his ring finger. Never mind that Yeonjun had considered copying Taehyun and putting it on his left ring finger instead of his right, but had worried it would be too telling. Too honest.
Taehyun, on the other hand, has never been shy about expressing himself. Some people look at him and see a cold robot full of circuitry instead of a warm, bleeding human. That's only because they're outside of Taehyun's circle. Those inside his circle can read him like an open book—see the warmth in his eyes, the compliments he generously showers over his favourite people.
Taehyun is mostly direct, but sometimes he likes to go a little off-course, make you work for it. There was one time, years ago, when Yeonjun performed Boy With Luv on Inkigayo with his co-hosts. In the car, on the way back to the dorm, he saw Taehyun's latest Weverse post—a shot of Yeonjun in his pink suit, and the words "I want to be with you through everything" smack bang in the middle.
They were just lyrics from the song. It didn't have to mean anything in particular. Taehyun was a big BTS fan after all, perhaps he'd just wanted to highlight their artistry. Surely, if Taehyun wanted to say something like that to him, surely he'd just text him, not put it on blast for millions of their fans to see.
Yeonjun had pulled at his hair the entire car ride home. How could Taehyun post something like that so simply, no fanfare, no embarrassment, no explanations nor excuses? Yeonjun came home blushing, and Taehyun just winked as he bid him good night.
Now, Yeonjun intertwines his fingers with Taehyun's, rings bumping against each other soundlessly, and gently lowers their hands to rest on the bedsheets. Maybe he's too afraid to put the ring on his left ring finger, but he's brave enough at least to do this. Taehyun's hand is warm in his palm.
"We're practically married, anyway," Yeonjun croaks out.
What is marriage, if not a promise to stay with one person in sickness and in health?
Taehyun has been sick. Yeonjun has been sick. Is sick. His back still hurts sometimes, when he forgets to treat it gently. His brain doesn't work quite right either. He lashes out, implodes, pushes people away. Taehyun has stayed for a decade now, despite everything.
Taehyun grins, sharp canines on display, and Yeonjun burns, knows Taehyun can see right through him.
"Yeah. We live together. Do everything together," Taehyun says.
"Mhm."
"We love each other."
"Yeah. Love you." The words spill out before he can shape them into something less obvious, more palatable.
Taehyun's eyebrows raise ever so slightly. Yeonjun swallows.
The truth is that Taehyun is a constant, a non-negotiable part of Yeonjun's life. Like a binary star system, locked in orbit around each other. If he were to add up all the hours he's spent over his lifetime with his members and his family, Taehyun would come out at the number one spot, he's sure. So, yeah, maybe Taehyun is extra special to him.
God. Yeonjun feels so vulnerable, like Taehyun is performing open-heart surgery on him—even though Taehyun is just sitting there, unbothered.
There's probably an alternate universe exactly like that. Taehyun would be a wealthy cardiothoracic surgeon at one of the top hospitals in Seoul. Yeonjun would be—well. He can't even imagine it, a life without the stage, without his team. Maybe he'd be in some dead-end restaurant job, barely scraping up enough funds to hire out a dance studio on weekends. Then his heart would give out and Taehyun would loom over him on the operating table. He would gently gather the bloody pieces of Yeonjun's heart in his calloused hands and put him back together again, give him life.
Taehyun would know about alternate universes. Yeonjun almost considers asking him what he thinks, when Taehyun speaks again.
"Too bad it's not legal. For us to get married."
Yeonjun's chest goes red.
They're still holding hands. Yeonjun is still topless, not that Taehyun would care, or should care. They've seen each other naked too many times for something like that to matter. Neverthless, Yeonjun feels embarrassed, exposed.
He tries to sink into the feeling, instead of running away from it. Like when they'd gone swimming in LA together as trainees, and for some reason that day the ocean had been unbearably cold, but the longer he stood in the icy waves, the more tolerable it became. He'd tolerate anything if it meant he got to watch Taehyun laugh in delight as he splashed around in the saltwater, brown hair shining like pure gold in the morning sun.
"I love the design," Taehyun says, when it's clear Yeonjun isn't going to say anything. "The star."
The five-pointed star. Yeonjun had wanted to talk about it, when he'd given them the rings, but shyness won over. The main meaning is obvious enough, anyway. Five points, meeting in the middle. But there's also something poetic about the way there are no straight lines from one point to another.
Sometimes Yeonjun feels like the odd one out. Soobin has Beomgyu, and Taehyun has Kai. If it were just the four of them, no Yeonjun, they would wear a four-point cross, straight lines pointing directly across to each other. But with the five of them, there's a little more to be considerate of. Tracing a journey from one point to the other always requires pivoting slightly, changing angle. Just as Yeonjun's presence means that they can't wear a cross with perfect ninety-degree angles, Yeonjun wants to embrace being an inconvenience. He loves that they are five. He hopes that the others love that they are five.
"I'm glad you like it," Yeonjun says earnestly, locking eyes with Taehyun.
Taehyun squeezes Yeonjun's hand. "Wanna sleep here tonight, hyung?"
Yeonjun nods. Taehyun pauses the music and switches off the bedside lamp. They get under the blanket and lie on their backs. The distance between their bodies makes Yeonjun ache, so he reaches out for Taehyun's hand again, and they intertwine their fingers.
With the room now silent, the echoes of the showcase begin to ring through his eardrums like tinnitus. Stick With You is an earworm even now, months after he'd first heard the demo. It plays in his mind, the melody clear as day.
Is this a dream?
Taehyun's breathing begins to even out beside him. He's always been jealous of Taehyun's ability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. He's jealous of a lot of things about Taehyun, actually.
Maybe when he wakes up tomorrow they'll have swapped bodies and he'll get to experience first-hand what it's like to be as intelligent, confident and calm as Kang Taehyun. What it's like to move gently with the wind, instead of having his branches just snap off like brittle, fragile thorns.
Is this a dream?
Tomorrow, they don't have to start work till late. Maybe he'll go to the gym. He wants to remember how to appreciate little pleasures like pushing weights around.
Tomorrow, they'll continue their comeback activities, and Taehyun will be by his side. And so will Soobin and Beomgyu and Kai. The five of them, together for at least a little longer. The realisation hits him gently, and all at once: he's so incredibly grateful for every single day he gets with them.
Is this a dream?
Sleep takes him.