[infinite] towards the future
towards the future
infinite, sunggyu/hoya, side dongwoo/hoya
pg-13, 2883w
hoya has dated sunggyu four times: the first for two weeks, the second four hours, the third nearly seven months, and the last five days.
--a remix of deplore's the past and the present (night and day), written for kpop_ficmix 2013.
(one)
The first time Hoya kissed Sunggyu, he tells Dongwoo, it was like the moment when a plate shatters against a tile floor. Dongwoo asks what that means, so Hoya starts to explain, but he stops when he can’t decide which part he was: the plate, the floor, or the hands that dropped it.
It had been a shock, but not a surprise. They were sitting on the curb outside their dorm, stretching their curfew out as long as they could. They could still do that, then. It’s lonely, Sunggyu had said, curling his fingers between Hoya’s, and Hoya had nodded, his reply stuck somewhere between his stomach and his throat. It was lonely. Loneliness, now, is little more than a fact. But back then it was still new to them, and it chilled when it sank into their bones.
Sometimes, Sunggyu said, and he did not look at Hoya but straight ahead at the empty road, you just want to kiss someone. Do you ever feel that way?
Hoya knew Sunggyu, and Sunggyu knew Hoya. For the past year they had lived together, worked side by side, shared hopes and fears. From there, kissing was not a very far step at all.
Kissing, nerves flying like shards of porcelain, didn’t make the loneliness go away. A kiss on its own is not enough to do that. But it was enough to spark something, a warm and urgent feeling that Hoya hadn’t felt for some time, and even if it didn’t fix anything, it was a temporary distraction from lonely. It was intoxicating. Hoya had never thought about kissing Sunggyu before, but the moment Sunggyu leaned away and turned his face to the road again, he couldn’t think about anything else. Sunggyu pressed his palm against his mouth. Hoya wasn’t thinking about what that meant.
We don’t have to stop, he said.
And Sunggyu, studying Hoya’s fingers laced between his own, said: Not yet.
After that, there were rules and conditions. They only touched at certain times of day, and never when other people were watching. Hoya didn’t mind. The act of deceiving others made him feel clever, and the fluttery feeling when he looked across a room at Sunggyu and couldn’t touch him was almost better than when they were curled up next to each other on the shared mattress, Sunggyu’s hands quietly fluttering against his ribs, Hoya’s head tilted back on his shoulder.
Dongwoo accepts this without question. Of course possibility is more tantalizing than reality. So Hoya doesn’t bother telling him about the rest of it: the times that they touched and got drunk on touch and the way regret hollowed out their stomachs afterward; the nights when Sunggyu’s hands weren’t on Hoya’s body but settled against his chest in prayer instead, the heavy blanket of his guilt smothering both of them.
In the end, it was a temporary distraction. Two weeks after that first kiss, Yeondo packed his things together and left the dorm. Sunggyu was now the oldest member of the group - the leader. Hoya looked at Sunggyu from across the room and caught his eyes only briefly, but it was enough. Two hours later, Sunggyu would tell him, with his hands in his pockets, we have to stop; but it was only the sound of the plate shattering, when Hoya had already watched it fall.
(two)
The second time was an accident. There are many kinds of accidents, and this was not the kind that destroys china; it was the kind where something happens that shouldn’t happen at all. A small miracle. Infinite, the seven-member boy group, was to debut in one week, and once their show had finished airing and Jiae had vacated their dorm, there was no time for anything but practice, over and over again. There was barely enough time in the day for practice itself, let alone sleep or meals.
That day, the gap between their vocal training and the evening’s dance practice was exactly four hours. An oversight, most likely; neither Hoya nor Dongwoo can remember now. Dongwoo only remembers the feeling: finding himself standing at the edge of a void that he’d already forgotten how to fill. Hoya barely had time to feel it. The moment they were dismissed from the vocal studio, Sunggyu sidled up to him and said he wanted to go to Hongdae. When Hoya tries to remember it now, he hears it as an apology.
There was no real need to take the metro, but it created the illusion of distance from Mangwon-dong. When they stepped into the train and the doors closed behind them, it was like stepping into a gap in time. They surfaced at Sangsu station and wandered towards the university, trying to clear their heads by filling them with other people, with walls of sneakers and the noise of buskers and the forbidden taste of ddeokbokki and odeng broth, the heat of one burning off the salt of the other. Hoya’s head was buzzing, overwhelmed by the world and by the feeling of Sunggyu’s arm around his shoulders. He shouldn’t have been that close. It seemed fragile, like any moment Sunggyu would realize and pull away; but he didn’t.
Already it was hard for them to wander around in public, but not impossible. Now, the managers circulate mass texts reminding them not to accept any opened drinks, because every stranger is a potential threat. But then, only two girls stopped them, recognizing Sunggyu’s hair, and asked for photos. When the girls walked away, Sunggyu reached down and quietly put his arm around Hoya’s waist, and Hoya angled his body just a little, turning into his grip.
Hoya stayed caught in his grip as Sunggyu pulled him into a metro station bathroom, an hour and a half before they had to go back to the studio. It seemed inevitable that it would happen, as if by magnetic force. Inside a stall in the bathroom, it was quiet for the first time all day, for the first time in months, years. Years later, Hoya doesn’t know what he had expected; he was still new at this, with only the most rudimentary idea of what happens between a man and a man.
For a long time, they just held each other, Sunggyu resting his head on Hoya’s shoulder. Hoya could have stayed like that for the rest of the hour and a half. But then Sunggyu tilted his head up and moved, and for the first time in months, years, days, Hoya didn’t think about time. There was only Sunggyu’s jaw in his hands, Sunggyu’s hands on his waist, their clothes pushed out of the way where necessary. What Hoya remembers most - what he wishes he could share with Dongwoo, but can’t - is not the orgasm, which came and went, but the feeling of wanting to give someone else pleasure overriding his own desire for it.
In the space they had been given, time outside of time, Hoya wanted to talk about it. He wanted to interrogate Sunggyu, to scold him, make ultimatums. He wanted Sunggyu to talk to him as a friend, not a dongsaeng or a co-worker. He wanted to see the words painted out in the air, thick and dark.
But in the end, he couldn’t ruin the illusion. It was too important to the both of them. When they stepped through the door of the dorm, the impossible gap in time sealed behind them, and they each pretended their memories went with it. They didn’t touch for the rest of the day, and not for some time after that.
(three)
When he thinks about it now, Hoya’s not sure if he wanted it to end there. It would have made sense: it would become something they did as children, and now that they were idols, if not adults, it was no longer permitted.
Besides, debuting had given them new ways to fight off the loneliness: a constant intake of new information, new dances, new hairstyles, new faces. Woohyun took to calling the fans his girlfriends, and it was a joke at first, then became fact. Celebrities have to learn to subsist on admiration more than food.
But admiration is no substitute for intimacy. They all know this. They hate the shrieks when fans see them touch, but they do it anyway because they need the touch more. So one late night, when they were recording their second album, Hoya found Sunggyu outside the studio and told him he looked tired.
Thanks, said Sunggyu, with a humourless expression.
I miss you, Hoya said.
And he could see Sunggyu’s eyes grow dark for a moment, holes he’d forgotten how to fill, before he replied: I miss you too.
Hoya expected it to be like a romance movie, the joyous reunion of two separated lovers. He had once tried to fall in love with a girl who liked him for the same reason: a narrative of triumph, a chance to become part of something bigger than himself. It had failed then, and it failed with Sunggyu, too.
Instead, it became something stable, a pillar to return to as everything else in their lives was constantly exploded and remade. Sometimes they went whole days without talking to each other, but it didn’t matter. There were new hairstyles, new faces, new dances, but always the same hands, the same lips, the same soft shoulders and soft words.
Only once in almost seven months did Sunggyu roll onto his back, and frown, and say, Infinite is supposed to be the thing that keeps us together. His voice was all that implied, Not this.
In the same way Hoya could have gone without it forever, he thinks it could have gone on forever, too. But he was the one who chose to end it. He no longer craved stability, or he found something he valued more. Still, some part of him wanted the end to play out like a drama, too: for Sunggyu to say no, don’t leave me, for each of them to shout at each other and slap and cry and kiss.
But Sunggyu hadn’t cried when they got their first win, and he didn’t cry now, either. So that’s it, then, he said. So that’s it, Hoya agreed. They are both stubborn people, and neither wanted to say what they both thought instead: This has failed. We weren’t enough.
(four)
Sometimes, when loneliness presses in on him, Hoya thinks about how it might have gone with him and Sunggyu, in another situation, in another life. If he was a dancer with JYP, if Beat had struggled but pushed through that struggle instead of collapsing under it, if as a child he’d gone to live with his mother’s cousin in Jeonju instead of his grandmother in Seoul. There are infinite variables and infinite outcomes. Once, Hoya only thought about the ones that ended with them together.
For the first time since Hoya’s started talking, Dongwoo asks, hesitantly, if it was just physical. This would be something he could understand: an urge that couldn’t be controlled, fulfilled with the nearest willing person. But Hoya insists that it wasn’t like that. It was physical, he admits, but that wasn’t everything.
Dongwoo thinks of all the times Sunggyu has touched him, leaned on him when they were walking through the airport or held his hand waiting for an interview to start. It has never occurred to him how much he takes this skinship for granted, how much it might mean to someone else. He can’t remember a time that Sunggyu has touched Hoya that thoughtlessly, but then again, he had never paid attention.
Earlier that year, Hoya and Sunggyu had been asked to go on a date on national television. Hoya wanted to laugh at the irony of it, just as Dongwoo laughs at the irony now. At the time, it had been terrifying. Hoya could only think about the things that could have gone wrong: it could be too real, and not make for good television, and maybe everyone would find out what they had tried to hide for so long.
But the televised date was fine, and after filming they sat and watched the others play for the camera. Sunggyu, in his way of never quite saying aloud what he didn’t want to face as fact, said, It could still happen, right?
What could still happen? Hoya replied. He wanted to keep playing a game.
Sunggyu squinted in the late spring sun. He wasn’t handsome, Hoya thought. It didn’t matter. He had something else.
Months later, when he turned himself into Kang Junhee, Hoya hadn’t wanted to think about Sunggyu, but he couldn’t avoid it. He thought of Yoonjae as Sunggyu, to try and get his expression right; then he thought of Yoonjae as himself, and himself as Sunggyu. When he watched the episode later, he couldn’t tell which take they had used.
That night, after the day’s Ranking King filming, they locked themselves in Hoya’s bedroom - Sungjong slept with Woohyun instead - and spent the whole night kissing, long, slow kisses that both woke Hoya up and made him want to sleep forever, hands sliding over each other’s clothes. On the second night, they made love, too many times to count, or maybe only one time that rose and crested and fell and rose like a wave. On the third night they talked, like Hoya and Dongwoo talk now: about their dreams, their fears, the past and the future, about things the other could never repeat, things that they already knew anyway from the way the other kissed.
On the fourth night, out of words, they said nothing and held each other. Then, in the morning, Sunggyu woke up, pulled himself away from Hoya’s body, and gave the room back to Sungjong, and just like that it was over. It had been a test to see if it could still happen, and the answer had been yes, and then no. The experiment lasted all of five days.
Dongwoo thinks, then says, But the song had forty-one, and Hoya laughs, too stunned to try to deny it.
(five)
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Hoya says to Dongwoo, and he shakes his head as if to clear it all away. Dongwoo is quiet, has been quiet the whole time. When they speak to each other at night, there is a silent promise of no judgement, but it’s never a guarantee. Dongwoo doesn’t make those. He will promise to bring back cheese and eggs to make breakfast, but there may be pickled radish and dried seaweed when Hoya comes out of the shower, or there may be nothing at all.
Dongwoo has broken someone’s heart before, more than once. Hoya has too. They will always remember this about each other.
There is somebody that I like right now, Dongwoo says. His lips form the words, but Hoya sees something else in his eyes when he looks at him: I know why, they say, and I know that you know why, too.
Hoya smiles slightly. Is that so? he asks. He looks at Dongwoo’s fingers curled against the pillow by his head, and with his eyes, he asks something else.
(--)
In the morning, Hoya is the first to leave Dongwoo’s room. He’s surprised to find Sunggyu in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee machine. “Good morning,” he says.
Sunggyu tilts his head in bleary acknowledgement. “Did you work everything out, then?” he asks. His hair has been dyed brown, hastily covering up the red, a metaphor if there ever was one. Hoya and Dongwoo have a hair appointment in a week, and from there it will be finishing up recording, then a photoshoot. Everything is already set for their subgroup promotions. They have a name, they have a song. I think of you so much when you’re not here; I want to ask if you feel the same way. But the teamwork is up to them, and everyone knows that they’re different, no longer the We Got Married couple with the easy banter. Once, they might have patched over it with temporary fixes, a facsimile comforting enough that no one would pay attention to the rigidity of Dongwoo’s grin or the distance Hoya kept when sitting next to him. But Hoya doesn’t want this, anymore. He wants something that will work, and adapt, and thrive.
“I think so,” he says to Sunggyu. “We’re getting there.”
Sunggyu nods, and moves to put a plate away, but fumbles. Quickly, without thinking, Hoya rushes forward and catches it and hands it back to him. Sunggyu stares at the plate in his hands for a few beats, as if trying to comprehend that it is whole, unbroken, then places it on the shelf.
infinite, sunggyu/hoya, side dongwoo/hoya
pg-13, 2883w
hoya has dated sunggyu four times: the first for two weeks, the second four hours, the third nearly seven months, and the last five days.
--a remix of deplore's the past and the present (night and day), written for kpop_ficmix 2013.
(one)
The first time Hoya kissed Sunggyu, he tells Dongwoo, it was like the moment when a plate shatters against a tile floor. Dongwoo asks what that means, so Hoya starts to explain, but he stops when he can’t decide which part he was: the plate, the floor, or the hands that dropped it.
It had been a shock, but not a surprise. They were sitting on the curb outside their dorm, stretching their curfew out as long as they could. They could still do that, then. It’s lonely, Sunggyu had said, curling his fingers between Hoya’s, and Hoya had nodded, his reply stuck somewhere between his stomach and his throat. It was lonely. Loneliness, now, is little more than a fact. But back then it was still new to them, and it chilled when it sank into their bones.
Sometimes, Sunggyu said, and he did not look at Hoya but straight ahead at the empty road, you just want to kiss someone. Do you ever feel that way?
Hoya knew Sunggyu, and Sunggyu knew Hoya. For the past year they had lived together, worked side by side, shared hopes and fears. From there, kissing was not a very far step at all.
Kissing, nerves flying like shards of porcelain, didn’t make the loneliness go away. A kiss on its own is not enough to do that. But it was enough to spark something, a warm and urgent feeling that Hoya hadn’t felt for some time, and even if it didn’t fix anything, it was a temporary distraction from lonely. It was intoxicating. Hoya had never thought about kissing Sunggyu before, but the moment Sunggyu leaned away and turned his face to the road again, he couldn’t think about anything else. Sunggyu pressed his palm against his mouth. Hoya wasn’t thinking about what that meant.
We don’t have to stop, he said.
And Sunggyu, studying Hoya’s fingers laced between his own, said: Not yet.
After that, there were rules and conditions. They only touched at certain times of day, and never when other people were watching. Hoya didn’t mind. The act of deceiving others made him feel clever, and the fluttery feeling when he looked across a room at Sunggyu and couldn’t touch him was almost better than when they were curled up next to each other on the shared mattress, Sunggyu’s hands quietly fluttering against his ribs, Hoya’s head tilted back on his shoulder.
Dongwoo accepts this without question. Of course possibility is more tantalizing than reality. So Hoya doesn’t bother telling him about the rest of it: the times that they touched and got drunk on touch and the way regret hollowed out their stomachs afterward; the nights when Sunggyu’s hands weren’t on Hoya’s body but settled against his chest in prayer instead, the heavy blanket of his guilt smothering both of them.
In the end, it was a temporary distraction. Two weeks after that first kiss, Yeondo packed his things together and left the dorm. Sunggyu was now the oldest member of the group - the leader. Hoya looked at Sunggyu from across the room and caught his eyes only briefly, but it was enough. Two hours later, Sunggyu would tell him, with his hands in his pockets, we have to stop; but it was only the sound of the plate shattering, when Hoya had already watched it fall.
(two)
The second time was an accident. There are many kinds of accidents, and this was not the kind that destroys china; it was the kind where something happens that shouldn’t happen at all. A small miracle. Infinite, the seven-member boy group, was to debut in one week, and once their show had finished airing and Jiae had vacated their dorm, there was no time for anything but practice, over and over again. There was barely enough time in the day for practice itself, let alone sleep or meals.
That day, the gap between their vocal training and the evening’s dance practice was exactly four hours. An oversight, most likely; neither Hoya nor Dongwoo can remember now. Dongwoo only remembers the feeling: finding himself standing at the edge of a void that he’d already forgotten how to fill. Hoya barely had time to feel it. The moment they were dismissed from the vocal studio, Sunggyu sidled up to him and said he wanted to go to Hongdae. When Hoya tries to remember it now, he hears it as an apology.
There was no real need to take the metro, but it created the illusion of distance from Mangwon-dong. When they stepped into the train and the doors closed behind them, it was like stepping into a gap in time. They surfaced at Sangsu station and wandered towards the university, trying to clear their heads by filling them with other people, with walls of sneakers and the noise of buskers and the forbidden taste of ddeokbokki and odeng broth, the heat of one burning off the salt of the other. Hoya’s head was buzzing, overwhelmed by the world and by the feeling of Sunggyu’s arm around his shoulders. He shouldn’t have been that close. It seemed fragile, like any moment Sunggyu would realize and pull away; but he didn’t.
Already it was hard for them to wander around in public, but not impossible. Now, the managers circulate mass texts reminding them not to accept any opened drinks, because every stranger is a potential threat. But then, only two girls stopped them, recognizing Sunggyu’s hair, and asked for photos. When the girls walked away, Sunggyu reached down and quietly put his arm around Hoya’s waist, and Hoya angled his body just a little, turning into his grip.
Hoya stayed caught in his grip as Sunggyu pulled him into a metro station bathroom, an hour and a half before they had to go back to the studio. It seemed inevitable that it would happen, as if by magnetic force. Inside a stall in the bathroom, it was quiet for the first time all day, for the first time in months, years. Years later, Hoya doesn’t know what he had expected; he was still new at this, with only the most rudimentary idea of what happens between a man and a man.
For a long time, they just held each other, Sunggyu resting his head on Hoya’s shoulder. Hoya could have stayed like that for the rest of the hour and a half. But then Sunggyu tilted his head up and moved, and for the first time in months, years, days, Hoya didn’t think about time. There was only Sunggyu’s jaw in his hands, Sunggyu’s hands on his waist, their clothes pushed out of the way where necessary. What Hoya remembers most - what he wishes he could share with Dongwoo, but can’t - is not the orgasm, which came and went, but the feeling of wanting to give someone else pleasure overriding his own desire for it.
In the space they had been given, time outside of time, Hoya wanted to talk about it. He wanted to interrogate Sunggyu, to scold him, make ultimatums. He wanted Sunggyu to talk to him as a friend, not a dongsaeng or a co-worker. He wanted to see the words painted out in the air, thick and dark.
But in the end, he couldn’t ruin the illusion. It was too important to the both of them. When they stepped through the door of the dorm, the impossible gap in time sealed behind them, and they each pretended their memories went with it. They didn’t touch for the rest of the day, and not for some time after that.
(three)
When he thinks about it now, Hoya’s not sure if he wanted it to end there. It would have made sense: it would become something they did as children, and now that they were idols, if not adults, it was no longer permitted.
Besides, debuting had given them new ways to fight off the loneliness: a constant intake of new information, new dances, new hairstyles, new faces. Woohyun took to calling the fans his girlfriends, and it was a joke at first, then became fact. Celebrities have to learn to subsist on admiration more than food.
But admiration is no substitute for intimacy. They all know this. They hate the shrieks when fans see them touch, but they do it anyway because they need the touch more. So one late night, when they were recording their second album, Hoya found Sunggyu outside the studio and told him he looked tired.
Thanks, said Sunggyu, with a humourless expression.
I miss you, Hoya said.
And he could see Sunggyu’s eyes grow dark for a moment, holes he’d forgotten how to fill, before he replied: I miss you too.
Hoya expected it to be like a romance movie, the joyous reunion of two separated lovers. He had once tried to fall in love with a girl who liked him for the same reason: a narrative of triumph, a chance to become part of something bigger than himself. It had failed then, and it failed with Sunggyu, too.
Instead, it became something stable, a pillar to return to as everything else in their lives was constantly exploded and remade. Sometimes they went whole days without talking to each other, but it didn’t matter. There were new hairstyles, new faces, new dances, but always the same hands, the same lips, the same soft shoulders and soft words.
Only once in almost seven months did Sunggyu roll onto his back, and frown, and say, Infinite is supposed to be the thing that keeps us together. His voice was all that implied, Not this.
In the same way Hoya could have gone without it forever, he thinks it could have gone on forever, too. But he was the one who chose to end it. He no longer craved stability, or he found something he valued more. Still, some part of him wanted the end to play out like a drama, too: for Sunggyu to say no, don’t leave me, for each of them to shout at each other and slap and cry and kiss.
But Sunggyu hadn’t cried when they got their first win, and he didn’t cry now, either. So that’s it, then, he said. So that’s it, Hoya agreed. They are both stubborn people, and neither wanted to say what they both thought instead: This has failed. We weren’t enough.
(four)
Sometimes, when loneliness presses in on him, Hoya thinks about how it might have gone with him and Sunggyu, in another situation, in another life. If he was a dancer with JYP, if Beat had struggled but pushed through that struggle instead of collapsing under it, if as a child he’d gone to live with his mother’s cousin in Jeonju instead of his grandmother in Seoul. There are infinite variables and infinite outcomes. Once, Hoya only thought about the ones that ended with them together.
For the first time since Hoya’s started talking, Dongwoo asks, hesitantly, if it was just physical. This would be something he could understand: an urge that couldn’t be controlled, fulfilled with the nearest willing person. But Hoya insists that it wasn’t like that. It was physical, he admits, but that wasn’t everything.
Dongwoo thinks of all the times Sunggyu has touched him, leaned on him when they were walking through the airport or held his hand waiting for an interview to start. It has never occurred to him how much he takes this skinship for granted, how much it might mean to someone else. He can’t remember a time that Sunggyu has touched Hoya that thoughtlessly, but then again, he had never paid attention.
Earlier that year, Hoya and Sunggyu had been asked to go on a date on national television. Hoya wanted to laugh at the irony of it, just as Dongwoo laughs at the irony now. At the time, it had been terrifying. Hoya could only think about the things that could have gone wrong: it could be too real, and not make for good television, and maybe everyone would find out what they had tried to hide for so long.
But the televised date was fine, and after filming they sat and watched the others play for the camera. Sunggyu, in his way of never quite saying aloud what he didn’t want to face as fact, said, It could still happen, right?
What could still happen? Hoya replied. He wanted to keep playing a game.
Sunggyu squinted in the late spring sun. He wasn’t handsome, Hoya thought. It didn’t matter. He had something else.
Months later, when he turned himself into Kang Junhee, Hoya hadn’t wanted to think about Sunggyu, but he couldn’t avoid it. He thought of Yoonjae as Sunggyu, to try and get his expression right; then he thought of Yoonjae as himself, and himself as Sunggyu. When he watched the episode later, he couldn’t tell which take they had used.
That night, after the day’s Ranking King filming, they locked themselves in Hoya’s bedroom - Sungjong slept with Woohyun instead - and spent the whole night kissing, long, slow kisses that both woke Hoya up and made him want to sleep forever, hands sliding over each other’s clothes. On the second night, they made love, too many times to count, or maybe only one time that rose and crested and fell and rose like a wave. On the third night they talked, like Hoya and Dongwoo talk now: about their dreams, their fears, the past and the future, about things the other could never repeat, things that they already knew anyway from the way the other kissed.
On the fourth night, out of words, they said nothing and held each other. Then, in the morning, Sunggyu woke up, pulled himself away from Hoya’s body, and gave the room back to Sungjong, and just like that it was over. It had been a test to see if it could still happen, and the answer had been yes, and then no. The experiment lasted all of five days.
Dongwoo thinks, then says, But the song had forty-one, and Hoya laughs, too stunned to try to deny it.
(five)
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Hoya says to Dongwoo, and he shakes his head as if to clear it all away. Dongwoo is quiet, has been quiet the whole time. When they speak to each other at night, there is a silent promise of no judgement, but it’s never a guarantee. Dongwoo doesn’t make those. He will promise to bring back cheese and eggs to make breakfast, but there may be pickled radish and dried seaweed when Hoya comes out of the shower, or there may be nothing at all.
Dongwoo has broken someone’s heart before, more than once. Hoya has too. They will always remember this about each other.
There is somebody that I like right now, Dongwoo says. His lips form the words, but Hoya sees something else in his eyes when he looks at him: I know why, they say, and I know that you know why, too.
Hoya smiles slightly. Is that so? he asks. He looks at Dongwoo’s fingers curled against the pillow by his head, and with his eyes, he asks something else.
(--)
In the morning, Hoya is the first to leave Dongwoo’s room. He’s surprised to find Sunggyu in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee machine. “Good morning,” he says.
Sunggyu tilts his head in bleary acknowledgement. “Did you work everything out, then?” he asks. His hair has been dyed brown, hastily covering up the red, a metaphor if there ever was one. Hoya and Dongwoo have a hair appointment in a week, and from there it will be finishing up recording, then a photoshoot. Everything is already set for their subgroup promotions. They have a name, they have a song. I think of you so much when you’re not here; I want to ask if you feel the same way. But the teamwork is up to them, and everyone knows that they’re different, no longer the We Got Married couple with the easy banter. Once, they might have patched over it with temporary fixes, a facsimile comforting enough that no one would pay attention to the rigidity of Dongwoo’s grin or the distance Hoya kept when sitting next to him. But Hoya doesn’t want this, anymore. He wants something that will work, and adapt, and thrive.
“I think so,” he says to Sunggyu. “We’re getting there.”
Sunggyu nods, and moves to put a plate away, but fumbles. Quickly, without thinking, Hoya rushes forward and catches it and hands it back to him. Sunggyu stares at the plate in his hands for a few beats, as if trying to comprehend that it is whole, unbroken, then places it on the shelf.