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Harua had put the bug in their ear, with that article.
I feel like he always maintains enough distance to treat us all equally, so I’d like to get under his skin.
It was true, they all saw immediately. It wasn’t immediately obvious, or obvious at all — they would have noticed obvious a long time ago — but it was clear in hindsight. Always just that slight cushion of cautious hesitance before deciding how much affection to bestow and how much to accept.
Most of them just mentioned it to him in passing, reaching out without pushing too hard, but Maki couldn’t seem to put it down. He was too honest, too straightforward, and too willing to say things to people’s faces that others might be more diplomatic about.
On the couch, he was slouched near the corner with his legs out across Euijoo’s lap, where Euijoo sat just on the other side of the corner. Pinning him down a little. Just enough that he couldn’t easily get up and run away without making a deliberate and obvious effort to escape.
“You know you’re not our boss, right?” he said.
Not quite out of nowhere, the conversation had given him an opening, but close enough to it that Euijoo flinched, startled.
“…Yes?” Euijoo said, guardedly.
“I just mean. Like. You’re our leader, sure, but… that’s just the kind of work you do for the team, y’know? We need a conduit to the company, and it’s easier and simpler to have one person make the calls, when someone has to make them, but it’s not like… how do I put this.”
Euijoo shifted uncomfortably, putting his phone down beside him and settling his hands on Maki’s shin, squeezing a little nervously. “Where is this coming from?” he asked.
“That thing Harua said in the article. It’s been bugging me ever since. You do keep your distance, just a little. You’re super close, because we’re all close, but you never let yourself get closer to any one of us than the others.”
Setting his jaw a little, Euijoo tightened his mouth. “Well, yes. I have to be fair.”
“Why?” Maki asked simply.
Euijoo blinked at him. “What do you mean, why? Isn’t it obvious?”
Maki nodded, pursing his lips. “It would be, if you were our boss. If you had actual power and could make things better or worse for us depending on how you feel when you get up in the morning. But you’re not. You make calls for us because we ask you to, and if we don’t want you to anymore, we can just say so and there won’t be much you can do about it. You’re being careful to avoid abusing power you don’t actually have.”
Though Euijoo opened his mouth to cut in a few times, Maki ploughed on relentlessly, right over him. Euijoo moved his hand up to grip Maki’s thigh urgently, but Maki ignored that, too.
He was actually kind of mad about this, he realized in the middle of what was perilously close to becoming a tirade. He’d thought it was just bugging him, mildly, but the more he talked about it the more heated he got.
“Like, what would even happen if you did play favourites?”
“I have to make sure we don’t form any cliques,” Euijoo finally managed to squeeze in.
Maki frowned at him. “Again, why?”
“It’s important that we don’t,” Euijoo said, confused. “Obviously?”
“Sure it is. But why does it have to be you?”
“Because I’m the leader…? It’s my job…?”
“Nah,” said Maki flatly, shaking his head with his lips pressed together. “That’s not in the description. That’s everyone’s job. We’re all responsible for making sure we keep the connections between us strong. It’s not just on you.”
“But I—”
“You’re not,” Maki interrupted to repeat, slowly and emphatically, “our boss, Juju.”
No answer.
He reached out and took Euijoo’s nearer hand from his thigh and held it between both of his, sweeping a thumb gently over the back.
“So you’re allowed to get closer, when you want to, okay?” he said. “In whatever ways you can. Play favourites for a while, even, if you feel like it. We’ll all make sure it doesn’t go too far, and so will you.”
Euijoo, somewhat to his surprise, looked miserable, and his legs were terribly tense under Maki’s calves.
He said nothing, just looked down, away from the hand Maki was holding.
“Hey,” Maki said, letting go to swing his legs off Euijoo’s and sit up properly, facing him knee to knee. He caught Euijoo’s loose hand, which hadn’t wandered far, and pulled it close again, pressing reassurance into the palm as best he could. “What’s going on in there? C’mon.”
It took Euijoo a while to put his words together, and in the end he did it in Korean, which was just fine with Maki. Better, actually. Euijoo’s Japanese was excellent, but thoughts came across more cleanly in the language they were thought in, most of the time.
“I’m… afraid,” he said, very quietly.
“Of what?”
“I don’t… know, exactly. I just feel like there’s something dangerous about it, somehow. Like I’ll just… I don’t know. Lose my balance? Something like that. Like I won’t be able to do my job anymore and it’ll be bad for the group and—”
Abruptly, Maki ran out of patience. He hadn’t realized the end of his rope was quite so close, but there was just something about watching Euijoo twist himself up into knots around absolutely nothing worth a damn that was driving him a little nuts.
“Stop,” he said. “Stop it. You think keeping your distance like this is good for the group? For you?”
A thought struck him then, and left him a little breathless.
“Juju,” he said, more gently, and brought Euijoo’s hand to his mouth to kiss the knuckles very tenderly. “I was going to say ‘you have to let us in’, but that’s not it, is it. You do let us in, but that’s only half of how it works, and it’s not enough. You have to let yourself out, too, and you do a lot less of that. You don’t let yourself want anything where any of us can hear you.”
Euijoo was watching his mouth, shoulders hunched, eyes a little hazy. This was not a revelation to him the way it was to Maki, clearly. “I don’t know how. Even if I wanted to. I don’t know how.”
“Well, start here, then,” said Maki, and turned his hand over to kiss Euijoo’s slender wrist, over the fragile subterranean blue-green veins. “Play favourites for the next five minutes. I won’t tell anyone. Come on out. Get a little closer to me.”
Euijoo hesitated.
“If you want, I mean,” Maki amended. “Doesn’t have to be me. Maybe Fuma-hyung—”
“Okay,” said Euijoo, and followed Maki’s grip on his hand over the space between them, coming to rest astride Maki’s lap.
He was so light. As if his bones were hollow as a bird’s. He hardly made an impression on Maki’s thighs, even with his full weight. Maki could wrap his arms around the whole circumference of Euijoo’s waist twice, if he had a couple more joints to bend.
He spread one hand out as wide as it would go over the middle of Euijoo’s back, over the spine, and curved the other around the back of Euijoo’s neck to pull him into the closest, fullest embrace he could manage, Euijoo’s cheek against his ear and Euijoo’s breath whispering over the inner expanse of shoulder not covered by his shirt.
Slowly, with palpable focus, Euijoo began to unwind his body and pour the tension down the drain, little by little. Maki helped as best he could, massaging it out and breathing slowly, deeply, to encourage Euijoo to match him.
“It’ll be fine,” he promised, softly but very sincerely, then amended: “It’ll be better.”
—