BLACK DAY 9: paying my heart's outstanding bills (the long division remix)
Title: paying my heart's outstanding bills (the long division remix)
Written by: colorfunk
A remix of " a liminal (dis)solution" by one_if_by_land
Pairing: Kris/Lay/Lu Han
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Lu Han needs a clean break and not an open fracture.
1
Lu Han has this memory he keeps going back to. It's more of a composite, and he remembers Yixing's underwear being purple but in reality it could've been black. Yixing was searching for his jeans at the side of the bed. Lu Han just finished saying, "He has the biggest martyr complex I've ever seen."
"It's massive," Yixing agreed. "You could say it's engorged."
Kris had drooled all over Lu Han's shoulder overnight. Lu Han tried to wipe some of it off in Kris' hair. "It's just this huge, throbbing-"
Kris rolled on top of him in a fluid motion. "Shut up for five more minutes," he said. He was still half asleep, or he could've been faking, but nobody could fake looking that relaxed. Lu Han felt his bones flattening under Kris'. He turned and mouthed, Help. Yixing was eating this up, and mouthed back, With what, a crowbar? He left his jeans unbuttoned as he hunted around for a shirt, and the skin above the waistband of his briefs looked warm even in the artificial lamplight. This is the part Lu Han gets stuck on, playing it over and over like an old vinyl until it skips: it was a half hour to dawn. His trapped arm was going numb, but if he rationed his time right, he'd have the whole of five minutes to just lie there, not belonging to one day or the other, before Kris finished waking up.
Now, Lu Han tears at his thumbnail as he studies Yixing's unconscious form on the hospital bed, the metronomic rise and fall of his chest. To keep himself from getting restless, he lists off all the places he'd rather be than here. Mars. The center of a volcano. At his parents' house.
"How long do you plan on shutting me out?" Kris finally asks from the opposite corner of the room.
"Do you really want to do this right now," Lu Han says.
"It doesn't help anyone for you to stop talking to me."
"It helps you, right? It's better for you if we just stop?"
Kris comes up beside Yixing's bed, out of focus. Lu Han doesn't look up. His anger has always been a flash storm, brief and unlikely, powerful while it's in town. "Are you kidding me?" Kris says. "If you honestly think that's what I meant-"
"I know what you meant," Lu Han bites out. He isn't stupid. There's too much at stake, Kris had said. Public expectation surrounds them like an ocean of sharks. Each time one of Zitao's old selcas gets leaked, Lu Han's reminded of how easy it is to hack a mobile. He has pictures on his phone that he told Kris he'd deleted, a video of them drinking beer and jamming to old school Faye Wong as Yixing flubs half the words. At the 1:21 minute mark, Lu Han grins and leans towards the camera, then past it to get at Kris' laughing mouth.
"It shouldn't have been your decision to make for all three of us," he says. "And it shouldn't have been that easy for you to make it."
"You know it wasn't," Kris says, sounding depleted. Lu Han's chest tightens in abrupt sympathy. "But we need to be smart about this thing now if we want the chance to try again later."
Lu Han bites his lip in muted surprise. Once he's sure Kris isn't looking back, he lifts his eyes. Wishes he hadn't. Throw Kris into a line-up of chronic insomniacs and no one can tell the difference. He's been awake for centuries, dragging his cross around. For a bad second, Lu Han wants to pull him down and kiss it out of him under the unforgiving hospital lighting.
"You're saying you want us to wait," he says. Kris nods. Afterwards Lu Han wonders if Kris realizes it's one of the most unfair things he could've said.
2
Lu Han's understanding of break ups includes a tenet about not continuing to hang around your exes twelve hours out of every twenty four, but there's no way around it, they're kind of in the same band. For him, that's the worst part of adjusting. Having knowledge of a loss, feeling it like a rock in your stomach, but not seeing the proof.
With the latest back injury, Yixing sits out of dance practices for the next week, spending that time imprisoned in the dorm. Whenever he's exhausted and sick of the choreography, Lu Han likes to imagine Yixing at home just as unhappy, printing out page after page of All play and no work makes Yixing a dull boy. On Friday, though, he's dropped off after another visit to the doctor.
"Look who made parole," Lu Han greets.
"Who are you?" Jongdae asks in Mandarin, peering up at Yixing as he stretches out his calves. He's been practicing for this day. "Are you lost?"
"Your Chinese is getting better," Yixing says with sincerity. He should be taking it easy today, so Kris shifts into babysitter mode through warm-ups, which Yixing endures with as much grace as can be expected. "Whoa," he says, "is that a gray hair?" and Kris half buys into it, saying, "What? Don't mess with me. Where?" until Lu Han reaches up and pulls out a strand.
"There," he says, and dodges Kris' elbow. All three of them are perfectly capable of making eye contact. This week is better than last week when Lu Han felt like he'd just recovered from being shot by something hard and kinetic, breaking upon impact. He walked around spitting up the metal fragments and even after that some days he can still find them everywhere, embedded in tissue and bone. The bathtub isn't the bathtub, it's the bathtub Lu Han squeezed Kris into with them under duress and subsequently flooded. His room isn't his room, his bed isn't his bed. His mp3 player houses seven playlists from Yixing with instructions for titles: Are You Feeling Sad? Listen To This! Food, inside jokes, shampoo brands, that S.H.E. song. Nothing belongs to him anymore. Part of Lu Han hoards them anyway, the worst kind of pack rat, as if he's been promised years later they'll regain their value.
Work is the best outlet. Wears his body out, strips his mind clean. When practice ends, Lu Han slumps playfully against Zitao as they're preparing to head home and says, "I'm tired."
"You're sweaty," Zitao says as he pushes off his dead weight. He returns a moment later to wrap his arms under Lu Han's thighs without warning, hoisting him up into a piggyback. Lu Han pitches backwards, then steadies against Zitao's strong back.
"Is it my birthday?" he laughs.
"I was raised to be kind to the elderly," Zitao says. He adjusts his grip. "You feel lighter. Did you lose weight?"
"I dunno." Lu Han rests his chin on the crown of Zitao's head. He hasn't had much of an appetite. "It happens."
"You should eat more," Yixing comments, wiping down the sheen of sweat on his neck before he stuffs the towel back into his dufflebag. The bridge of his spine is visible through his shirt when he bends down. Lu Han catches himself looking so he stops. Diverts away towards the dance mirror, where Kris is looking too.
The other tenet of break ups is that you fake it until you make it. Kris tenses up, just a little, from being discovered. He runs a hand through his damp hair, believably casual. From over Zitao's shoulder, Lu Han watches him turn away. By 11pm most good days become bad days. Lu Han had an old teacher who, as an experiment, told her class to sit in silence and think about anything but elephants. On cue, a safari opened up inside him. Lu Han tells himself, Don't think about it, but the infection spreads anyway, the acute condition of human memory.
Honestly it isn't as if Lu Han's unhappier or less social or worse off most of the time. But once in a while, at the end of the day when they leave the building and the world settles quiet and dark around him, he thinks he could raze the city to the ground with what he has bottled inside him. He isn't like Yixing, he can't turn it into pure fuel and motive. He isn't even like Kris, who locks it down out of necessity. Lu Han understands himself well enough to know what comes out on top when he plays head versus heart. Head versus the ticking bomb inside his chest.
3
Everyone on the cusp of becoming an idol had a day when someone sat them down and said, "Is there anything you think I should know?" as if they were your new best friend. For two weeks they were pulled away one by one, the rest of them witnessing each ambush with growing trepidation. Some came back no worse for wear (Joonmyun) and others came back looking like they'd been presented to a firing squad and left for dead (Chanyeol).
When it was Lu Han's turn, the manager told him, "I need you to be honest with me. Especially when it comes to romantic history." This was a while before Lu Han had anything to do with Kris-and-Yixing. The worst charges on his short record were a Taiwanese girl with beauty school aspirations and a lot of weed, and the older brother of a friend's boyfriend who'd cast Lu Han in the role of dirty little secret. "I am being honest," Lu Han said, feeling protective. Neither of them was for sale.
"Do you remember that thing we all had to do?" he asks two years later. "Before we debuted?"
"You mean the icebreakers?" Yixing says from the kitchen. That'd been an entire other thing. Card games, basketball matches, the Talking Doraemon. Whoever held the stuffed Doraemon talked and everyone else listened. But around early January, Kris ran out of team bonding exercises. From there the only way to explore greater frontiers was to introduce alcohol and nudity. Yixing and Lu Han dominated drunken strip-charades, a winning streak that began when Lu Han did something with his hands that made Minseok lose his shit and Zitao lean forward and start to guess out of turn, Prostitu- before Yixing called out, his face completely neutral, Milking a cow.
Lu Han hangs off the arm of the couch, upside down, and feels the blood rush dizzily to his face. "No, the preemptive PR stuff."
"Oh, yeah," Yixing says. Lu Han can picture him twisting his mouth to the side. "I heard Chanyeol got decimated. They went easy on me, though."
"All your dirt was already in the public domain," Lu Han teases.
Yixing's sweatpants reappear in Lu Han's line of vision, approaching the couch. "That's not dirt, it's character. Incoming."
Lu Han says, "ah," and receives a well-aimed piece of mango. Yixing sits across from him with the rest of it, knees up, his socked feet stretching forward onto the middle cushion. Lu Han sits back up to swallow, flattening his hair into place. "They told me I was a live one. Isn't that what people say about fish?"
"They told me I was an angel. They said, thank god you're not like that Lu Han."
"You're full of shit." Lu Han grins, kicking out. Yixing grabs Lu Han's foot with one hand and takes it captive, grinning back.
"Live one means someone who stands out," he says, after a moment. His palm wraps around Lu Han's ankle, under the hem of his jeans. "Can't be predicted. Kind of a wild card."
The wild card part comes out fondly. It climbs under Lu Han's skin, reactivating systems in his brain. That's the problem with leaving a relationship open-ended. You keep looking for signs. Yixing slips the next mango slice into his mouth and Lu Han licks the back of his own teeth, automatically mirroring.
"Sounds like an asshole," he says, just as Minseok pops out from the hallway and says, "Give me five more minutes."
"I'd wait forever for you," Lu Han lilts, while Minseok flicks him off. They're going to go kick a ball around, grab food, and bring some back to share with everyone else. Lu Han's itching to get out of the dorms. He turns back to Yixing and adds, "Can I buy you anything?"
"I'm set," Yixing says. "You want the last piece?"
He offers up the mango, his skin sticky with juice. Lu Han can smell the citrus. Can taste it in his mouth, rich and sweet, Yixing's fingertips pressed up against his tongue. Desire is its own neural pathway, strengthened through repetition and practice. He holds out his palm to accept it instead. This feels like an act of self-defense.
Lu Han's face gives him away, too expressive as usual. Yixing opens his mouth, then shuts it. "Hey," he says, more subdued. "Are we okay?"
He's really trying. They're all trying. Lu Han wants to say, My head's been kind of a mess lately, and then Yixing could say, Do you wanna talk about it, or do you wanna watch Jet Li kill people? and then Lu Han could choose whatever and feel better afterwards. The words don't come out. They're stuck inside with all the Yixings that are in there too, the co-worker, the friend, the hook-up, the guy who he can't kiss without wanting to slip him a little tongue, the guy who he can't kiss. The Yixing next to him right now, occupying Lu Han's head like a ghost, unidentified.
Lu Han goes with: "Yeah, we're always okay." He owes it to Yixing to make it okay. They're supposed to pull out the best in each other, right? While Kris was the one to call it quits, the two of them came out intact. They came out so intact that Lu Han goes to bed, forgets, wakes up, and has to come to terms with the facts all over again.
The meetings predated Kris-and-Yixing by months but Lu Han thinks in some way, by then, they had already sold the possibility. Be honest was practically the same as saying, What have you signed away? Lu Han had sat in that office and couldn't help picturing two days earlier, drunken strip-charades revenge round four, Zitao insisting that the dream team had to be separated. Kris and Yixing paired up and by the first fifteen minutes were both down to their underwear and socks. "An Adonis walks among us," Jongdae said, fanning himself, and Lu Han laughed. Kris didn't hear. He was saying something to Yixing, his body twisted a negligible angle away from the rest of the group. Yixing said something back that made Kris smile, gummy and private. Lu Han didn't mean to watch, but there wasn't anything to see. They were younger then, but not that much stupider. When Kris leaned in, all he did was brush an eyelash off Yixing's cheek, and Yixing, who'd started tilting his face up, nodded and sat back, distance restored, like the two of them were already playing their own game, acting out the word sacrifice.
4
By the third week after the break up, Yixing and Kris are back to normal. Not 'sleeping together' normal, but a renegotiated status quo. When they walk next to each other, the gap has been adjusted to a painless full meter. Yixing's a professional; he knows the big picture, plays the long game. He has this kind of belief in himself that inspires trust by osmosis. So when Yixing says something like, In a few years, I think we could pull this off, how the hell is Lu Han going to say, That's a long time to keep tearing at a scab.
As for Lu Han and Kris:
Lu Han discovers Kris out of commission, spread out on the wrong side of the covers and fully dressed. He's going to hate himself if he sleeps through the night this way, so Lu Han sits on the bed, pushing Kris' legs aside to grant himself room. He observes the slope of Kris' shoulders, like an inverted hammock, the type of shape designed to cradle and hold. Shaking doesn't work well; the best method is simply to rub his arm, warm him up to the idea of being awake.
Kris comes around within a minute. His lashes stick together as he opens his eyes. "What time is it?"
Lu Han has already pulled back. So far Kris has been clear about requiring space. "Past one. I thought you'd want to wash your face."
Kris rubs the back of his neck as he sits up. "At the minimum. When'd you get back?"
"Just now. Vocal coach kept us late."
The small talk falls apart after that. Lu Han tries to find something to fill the empty air. Kris is still in the process of waking up, taking the time to work out a few kinks. The lamp highlights the length of his neck, muscles straining. Lu Han hears himself say, "Look, I hate walking on eggshells around you."
"Me too," Kris says. Some of the tension drains out of his shoulders, as if he's been hoping Lu Han'd make the first move. "It's been a weird month."
"So let's make a deal to stop being weird."
Kris cracks a smile. "I'm sorry for forcing the situation."
"You're looking out for everyone," Lu Han says. "I know it's a tough position."
It feels good, to be talking again. Not that they'd ever been in the business of heart to hearts, but they used to be able to just hang out, shoot the shit, help each other detox. A handful of times pre-debut, they'd go out after a rough week, buy a pack of cigarettes, smoke two each and toss the rest. Weakness was more tolerable shared. And it'd felt like a privilege, sharing with Kris, who seemed ten times less well-trained and untouchable with smoke in his black hair.
Kris has a similar look now, like he could really use a high apartment rooftop and a drag of nicotine. "Yixing told me you're losing weight," he says.
"Yixing's a narc," Lu Han says, but Kris doesn't bite. He breathes out heavily. "It's nothing. I just need to sleep for a week. I'm being self-absorbed."
"That doesn't sound like you."
"It's like-part of yourself really wants to be able to do something, and another part's there thinking, you can't follow through, it'll suck you dry. Does that even make sense?"
"Yeah," Kris says softly.
"But if I can figure out how to be better, like how to be the best version of myself-"
"Don't talk shit about yourself," Kris cuts in. Lu Han huffs a laugh. Kris is a good person. That's what he and Yixing always joked around about, when they weren't joking around about the size of his cock. Kris was a real life Clark Kent. Kris would swerve to avoid hitting a squirrel and end up crashing into a tree instead. Kris would personally serve up his brains during a zombie apocalypse and then ask if it tastes fine. No, wait, Yixing said, that'd be you. You're like that too. Kindness without practicality.
Lu Han doesn't know how to respond. Thankfully, Kris pulls him into a noogie, a combination of his discomfort with bona fide sentiment and his sadistic streak kicking in. Lu Han struggles for show, engulfed by Kris' sleepy body heat, merino wool, the noose of Kris' arm around his neck. It's a return to familiarity. He goes pliant as Kris rubs his knuckles against his skull. "Go wash your face, you fucking giant."
"Not if that's how you're gonna talk to me," Kris says.
"Pretty please get off me," Lu Han amends. A nervousness begins to kindle in his stomach. "Cherry on top."
It's one in the morning, between days. Recreated from memory. Kris shows mercy and stops rubbing but his hand cards through Lu Han's hair, unconsciously. His sweater smells of his woody cologne, the one that used to end up all over Lu Han's pillow. His thigh shifts under Lu Han's hand braced against it for balance. Lu Han's heart pounds dully between his ribs, and the force of it makes the inside of his chest hotter than a desert. The tenderness is really fucking with him. "Kris," he says.
Kris' thumb brushes the shell of his ear, a false sense of security, as if Lu Han could actually have this. "What?"
"You should get off."
Kris pulls back, burnt. Lu Han thinks, That was the right thing to do. But he finishes slipping out of Kris' hold and he just, he doesn't know, maybe this is his boiling point, he was never going to get away from this moment. Like he's tugging on the rope from the bottom of a well, hoping for reciprocity, that someone's still holding the other end. On instinct, or self-sabotage, he leans up and presses his mouth against the line of Kris' jaw. He isn't surprised when Kris flinches back. Isn't surprised either when a second later Kris pulls him closer by the arm and fits their mouths together.
It's such textbook backsliding, it's almost funny. When it comes down to it, Lu Han's bad at letting things go. He's proven this to himself over and over. Chasing the same girl all through high school. Going after pipe dreams with the inevitability of a targeted missile. Know your limits, his mother used to tell him. Being a teenager, prone to misconception and exaggeration, he never understood what she was trying to say. All he heard was I don't believe in you. But to her, everything was cyclical. Loss and recovery, looped into each other. You couldn't push too hard. Lu Han pushed her until she was driving him to the airport when he was 18, looking ahead at every red light, waiting there as he disappeared through security, as strong-willed as he was. He pushes himself to give more, and try harder, and hold on, and hold on, and burn himself down holding on.
He pushes Kris, twisting fingers through his hair, biting his bottom lip for the hurt little noise Kris breathes out. Kris' hand comes up to cup his cheek as he kisses back, hard but not angry. They kiss like that until Lu Han's mouth feels stung and the guilt goes away and leaves him numb enough for what's coming after.
When he breaks away, Kris' lips are shiny with spit and his expression is torn. He doesn't move yet, allowing Lu Han to decide how he want this to play out. If everything's cyclical, Lu Han is always going to end up right here. The realization sears through his throat. He can't pretend he doesn't have a limit. He recognizes it. He has to get out.
"It's okay," Kris starts, then stops himself.
"You can't ask me to wait. 'Cause I'll wait around with my hopes up for fucking ages." Lu Han looks down, leaning his forehead against Kris', and looks back up again. "I don't want to do that," he says.
It had to be Kris. There's no way Lu Han could start with Yixing, meet his gaze and say, I'm out. Tell him that wistful payoff isn't enough to live on. But Kris cut his losses first, weeks ago. He isn't in the position to feel betrayed. The acceptance is already dimly there behind his eyes, almost too charitable for Lu Han to handle. But it isn't selfish to want to learn self-preservation. It doesn't mean any of them asked for too much, for him to admit he's had enough.
"Then what now?" Kris says.
In response, Lu Han reaches for Kris' hand, still adhered to his cheek, and pulls it off.
5
The song is Faye Wong's Red Bean. Three beers in and Yixing has a cute alcohol flush going. Each chord he plays is a little out of tune, but the camera on Lu Han's phone isn't that critical. "-300 RMB that those are the wrong words," Lu Han is saying at the beginning of the video. "Can we look this up? Faye is somewhere in Hong Kong, crying-"
Yixing powers onward, continues singing utter bullshit. It's a sad older ballad that, channeled through him, sounds Top 40. Lu Han only sings along with the last few words of every other line, wound and awake and alone. The camera focuses on the arch of Yixing's fingers over the fretboard, then up to his fringe falling into his eyes, then over to Lu Han's Adam's apple, the bedroom wallpaper indistinct behind his throat. When he's buzzed, Kris fancies himself an arthouse director.
"I'm selling this to the tabloids," Kris says in the background, "and retiring to an island with all the money I make."
Yixing looks up, not into the camera but just above it, where Kris' eyes are. "You'd make more money with a dick pic."
Lu Han's pixelated face visibly lights up. "Hey-"
"Fuck you," Kris laughs, the sound of it fizzling through the audio, "don't start-"
"We could buy an archipelago with that sort of cash," Lu Han says. He tucks his cheek onto Yixing's shoulder, glancing up the slope of Yixing's neck through his lashes. "Spend the rest of our lives getting sunburnt."
"Getting all old and wrinkly." Yixing dimples at Lu Han, and the tilt of his head reveals the lamp behind him, throwing off the camera's white balance and making everyone brighter. He changes songs, singing, "Will you still love me when I'm sixty four?"
Lu Han bites Yixing's shoulder, lightly, then says, "Enough stalling, take off your pants."
"Come over here and make me," Kris says.
Lu Han finishes off the rest of his beer, wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist, and leans forward. The camera gets a view of his shirt, a world of heather gray, then drops. The next twenty seconds are of the bedroom ceiling. The distant, intimate sound of kissing. Yixing's face shows up again, a shaky close up on his ear, the locked door, his voice saying, "How do I turn it off-" Then the video ends.
Lu Han finally gets around to deleting it. He sits there in the SM building lobby, waiting for a car to come take him home, and goes through the rest of his phone too. Call it spring cleaning. It's starting to grow warmer these days, so even past midnight, he can live without a jacket. It's survivable. For now he thinks about the new choreography, his voice lessons, his parents, old friends, elephants. Not: the first bars of sunlight through the bedroom window as Kris opened his eyes and the real day began. How to face talking to Yixing. How to clear out his closet, buy new sheets, and move forward. How to be good to himself.
Their manager comes through the main door around twelve thirty, letting in a blast of crisp air. He looks around, sees Lu Han and beckons him over. "Ready to go?" he says.
"Yeah," Lu Han says, getting up. "I'm ready."
Written by: colorfunk
A remix of " a liminal (dis)solution" by one_if_by_land
Pairing: Kris/Lay/Lu Han
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Lu Han needs a clean break and not an open fracture.
1
Lu Han has this memory he keeps going back to. It's more of a composite, and he remembers Yixing's underwear being purple but in reality it could've been black. Yixing was searching for his jeans at the side of the bed. Lu Han just finished saying, "He has the biggest martyr complex I've ever seen."
"It's massive," Yixing agreed. "You could say it's engorged."
Kris had drooled all over Lu Han's shoulder overnight. Lu Han tried to wipe some of it off in Kris' hair. "It's just this huge, throbbing-"
Kris rolled on top of him in a fluid motion. "Shut up for five more minutes," he said. He was still half asleep, or he could've been faking, but nobody could fake looking that relaxed. Lu Han felt his bones flattening under Kris'. He turned and mouthed, Help. Yixing was eating this up, and mouthed back, With what, a crowbar? He left his jeans unbuttoned as he hunted around for a shirt, and the skin above the waistband of his briefs looked warm even in the artificial lamplight. This is the part Lu Han gets stuck on, playing it over and over like an old vinyl until it skips: it was a half hour to dawn. His trapped arm was going numb, but if he rationed his time right, he'd have the whole of five minutes to just lie there, not belonging to one day or the other, before Kris finished waking up.
Now, Lu Han tears at his thumbnail as he studies Yixing's unconscious form on the hospital bed, the metronomic rise and fall of his chest. To keep himself from getting restless, he lists off all the places he'd rather be than here. Mars. The center of a volcano. At his parents' house.
"How long do you plan on shutting me out?" Kris finally asks from the opposite corner of the room.
"Do you really want to do this right now," Lu Han says.
"It doesn't help anyone for you to stop talking to me."
"It helps you, right? It's better for you if we just stop?"
Kris comes up beside Yixing's bed, out of focus. Lu Han doesn't look up. His anger has always been a flash storm, brief and unlikely, powerful while it's in town. "Are you kidding me?" Kris says. "If you honestly think that's what I meant-"
"I know what you meant," Lu Han bites out. He isn't stupid. There's too much at stake, Kris had said. Public expectation surrounds them like an ocean of sharks. Each time one of Zitao's old selcas gets leaked, Lu Han's reminded of how easy it is to hack a mobile. He has pictures on his phone that he told Kris he'd deleted, a video of them drinking beer and jamming to old school Faye Wong as Yixing flubs half the words. At the 1:21 minute mark, Lu Han grins and leans towards the camera, then past it to get at Kris' laughing mouth.
"It shouldn't have been your decision to make for all three of us," he says. "And it shouldn't have been that easy for you to make it."
"You know it wasn't," Kris says, sounding depleted. Lu Han's chest tightens in abrupt sympathy. "But we need to be smart about this thing now if we want the chance to try again later."
Lu Han bites his lip in muted surprise. Once he's sure Kris isn't looking back, he lifts his eyes. Wishes he hadn't. Throw Kris into a line-up of chronic insomniacs and no one can tell the difference. He's been awake for centuries, dragging his cross around. For a bad second, Lu Han wants to pull him down and kiss it out of him under the unforgiving hospital lighting.
"You're saying you want us to wait," he says. Kris nods. Afterwards Lu Han wonders if Kris realizes it's one of the most unfair things he could've said.
2
Lu Han's understanding of break ups includes a tenet about not continuing to hang around your exes twelve hours out of every twenty four, but there's no way around it, they're kind of in the same band. For him, that's the worst part of adjusting. Having knowledge of a loss, feeling it like a rock in your stomach, but not seeing the proof.
With the latest back injury, Yixing sits out of dance practices for the next week, spending that time imprisoned in the dorm. Whenever he's exhausted and sick of the choreography, Lu Han likes to imagine Yixing at home just as unhappy, printing out page after page of All play and no work makes Yixing a dull boy. On Friday, though, he's dropped off after another visit to the doctor.
"Look who made parole," Lu Han greets.
"Who are you?" Jongdae asks in Mandarin, peering up at Yixing as he stretches out his calves. He's been practicing for this day. "Are you lost?"
"Your Chinese is getting better," Yixing says with sincerity. He should be taking it easy today, so Kris shifts into babysitter mode through warm-ups, which Yixing endures with as much grace as can be expected. "Whoa," he says, "is that a gray hair?" and Kris half buys into it, saying, "What? Don't mess with me. Where?" until Lu Han reaches up and pulls out a strand.
"There," he says, and dodges Kris' elbow. All three of them are perfectly capable of making eye contact. This week is better than last week when Lu Han felt like he'd just recovered from being shot by something hard and kinetic, breaking upon impact. He walked around spitting up the metal fragments and even after that some days he can still find them everywhere, embedded in tissue and bone. The bathtub isn't the bathtub, it's the bathtub Lu Han squeezed Kris into with them under duress and subsequently flooded. His room isn't his room, his bed isn't his bed. His mp3 player houses seven playlists from Yixing with instructions for titles: Are You Feeling Sad? Listen To This! Food, inside jokes, shampoo brands, that S.H.E. song. Nothing belongs to him anymore. Part of Lu Han hoards them anyway, the worst kind of pack rat, as if he's been promised years later they'll regain their value.
Work is the best outlet. Wears his body out, strips his mind clean. When practice ends, Lu Han slumps playfully against Zitao as they're preparing to head home and says, "I'm tired."
"You're sweaty," Zitao says as he pushes off his dead weight. He returns a moment later to wrap his arms under Lu Han's thighs without warning, hoisting him up into a piggyback. Lu Han pitches backwards, then steadies against Zitao's strong back.
"Is it my birthday?" he laughs.
"I was raised to be kind to the elderly," Zitao says. He adjusts his grip. "You feel lighter. Did you lose weight?"
"I dunno." Lu Han rests his chin on the crown of Zitao's head. He hasn't had much of an appetite. "It happens."
"You should eat more," Yixing comments, wiping down the sheen of sweat on his neck before he stuffs the towel back into his dufflebag. The bridge of his spine is visible through his shirt when he bends down. Lu Han catches himself looking so he stops. Diverts away towards the dance mirror, where Kris is looking too.
The other tenet of break ups is that you fake it until you make it. Kris tenses up, just a little, from being discovered. He runs a hand through his damp hair, believably casual. From over Zitao's shoulder, Lu Han watches him turn away. By 11pm most good days become bad days. Lu Han had an old teacher who, as an experiment, told her class to sit in silence and think about anything but elephants. On cue, a safari opened up inside him. Lu Han tells himself, Don't think about it, but the infection spreads anyway, the acute condition of human memory.
Honestly it isn't as if Lu Han's unhappier or less social or worse off most of the time. But once in a while, at the end of the day when they leave the building and the world settles quiet and dark around him, he thinks he could raze the city to the ground with what he has bottled inside him. He isn't like Yixing, he can't turn it into pure fuel and motive. He isn't even like Kris, who locks it down out of necessity. Lu Han understands himself well enough to know what comes out on top when he plays head versus heart. Head versus the ticking bomb inside his chest.
3
Everyone on the cusp of becoming an idol had a day when someone sat them down and said, "Is there anything you think I should know?" as if they were your new best friend. For two weeks they were pulled away one by one, the rest of them witnessing each ambush with growing trepidation. Some came back no worse for wear (Joonmyun) and others came back looking like they'd been presented to a firing squad and left for dead (Chanyeol).
When it was Lu Han's turn, the manager told him, "I need you to be honest with me. Especially when it comes to romantic history." This was a while before Lu Han had anything to do with Kris-and-Yixing. The worst charges on his short record were a Taiwanese girl with beauty school aspirations and a lot of weed, and the older brother of a friend's boyfriend who'd cast Lu Han in the role of dirty little secret. "I am being honest," Lu Han said, feeling protective. Neither of them was for sale.
"Do you remember that thing we all had to do?" he asks two years later. "Before we debuted?"
"You mean the icebreakers?" Yixing says from the kitchen. That'd been an entire other thing. Card games, basketball matches, the Talking Doraemon. Whoever held the stuffed Doraemon talked and everyone else listened. But around early January, Kris ran out of team bonding exercises. From there the only way to explore greater frontiers was to introduce alcohol and nudity. Yixing and Lu Han dominated drunken strip-charades, a winning streak that began when Lu Han did something with his hands that made Minseok lose his shit and Zitao lean forward and start to guess out of turn, Prostitu- before Yixing called out, his face completely neutral, Milking a cow.
Lu Han hangs off the arm of the couch, upside down, and feels the blood rush dizzily to his face. "No, the preemptive PR stuff."
"Oh, yeah," Yixing says. Lu Han can picture him twisting his mouth to the side. "I heard Chanyeol got decimated. They went easy on me, though."
"All your dirt was already in the public domain," Lu Han teases.
Yixing's sweatpants reappear in Lu Han's line of vision, approaching the couch. "That's not dirt, it's character. Incoming."
Lu Han says, "ah," and receives a well-aimed piece of mango. Yixing sits across from him with the rest of it, knees up, his socked feet stretching forward onto the middle cushion. Lu Han sits back up to swallow, flattening his hair into place. "They told me I was a live one. Isn't that what people say about fish?"
"They told me I was an angel. They said, thank god you're not like that Lu Han."
"You're full of shit." Lu Han grins, kicking out. Yixing grabs Lu Han's foot with one hand and takes it captive, grinning back.
"Live one means someone who stands out," he says, after a moment. His palm wraps around Lu Han's ankle, under the hem of his jeans. "Can't be predicted. Kind of a wild card."
The wild card part comes out fondly. It climbs under Lu Han's skin, reactivating systems in his brain. That's the problem with leaving a relationship open-ended. You keep looking for signs. Yixing slips the next mango slice into his mouth and Lu Han licks the back of his own teeth, automatically mirroring.
"Sounds like an asshole," he says, just as Minseok pops out from the hallway and says, "Give me five more minutes."
"I'd wait forever for you," Lu Han lilts, while Minseok flicks him off. They're going to go kick a ball around, grab food, and bring some back to share with everyone else. Lu Han's itching to get out of the dorms. He turns back to Yixing and adds, "Can I buy you anything?"
"I'm set," Yixing says. "You want the last piece?"
He offers up the mango, his skin sticky with juice. Lu Han can smell the citrus. Can taste it in his mouth, rich and sweet, Yixing's fingertips pressed up against his tongue. Desire is its own neural pathway, strengthened through repetition and practice. He holds out his palm to accept it instead. This feels like an act of self-defense.
Lu Han's face gives him away, too expressive as usual. Yixing opens his mouth, then shuts it. "Hey," he says, more subdued. "Are we okay?"
He's really trying. They're all trying. Lu Han wants to say, My head's been kind of a mess lately, and then Yixing could say, Do you wanna talk about it, or do you wanna watch Jet Li kill people? and then Lu Han could choose whatever and feel better afterwards. The words don't come out. They're stuck inside with all the Yixings that are in there too, the co-worker, the friend, the hook-up, the guy who he can't kiss without wanting to slip him a little tongue, the guy who he can't kiss. The Yixing next to him right now, occupying Lu Han's head like a ghost, unidentified.
Lu Han goes with: "Yeah, we're always okay." He owes it to Yixing to make it okay. They're supposed to pull out the best in each other, right? While Kris was the one to call it quits, the two of them came out intact. They came out so intact that Lu Han goes to bed, forgets, wakes up, and has to come to terms with the facts all over again.
The meetings predated Kris-and-Yixing by months but Lu Han thinks in some way, by then, they had already sold the possibility. Be honest was practically the same as saying, What have you signed away? Lu Han had sat in that office and couldn't help picturing two days earlier, drunken strip-charades revenge round four, Zitao insisting that the dream team had to be separated. Kris and Yixing paired up and by the first fifteen minutes were both down to their underwear and socks. "An Adonis walks among us," Jongdae said, fanning himself, and Lu Han laughed. Kris didn't hear. He was saying something to Yixing, his body twisted a negligible angle away from the rest of the group. Yixing said something back that made Kris smile, gummy and private. Lu Han didn't mean to watch, but there wasn't anything to see. They were younger then, but not that much stupider. When Kris leaned in, all he did was brush an eyelash off Yixing's cheek, and Yixing, who'd started tilting his face up, nodded and sat back, distance restored, like the two of them were already playing their own game, acting out the word sacrifice.
4
By the third week after the break up, Yixing and Kris are back to normal. Not 'sleeping together' normal, but a renegotiated status quo. When they walk next to each other, the gap has been adjusted to a painless full meter. Yixing's a professional; he knows the big picture, plays the long game. He has this kind of belief in himself that inspires trust by osmosis. So when Yixing says something like, In a few years, I think we could pull this off, how the hell is Lu Han going to say, That's a long time to keep tearing at a scab.
As for Lu Han and Kris:
Lu Han discovers Kris out of commission, spread out on the wrong side of the covers and fully dressed. He's going to hate himself if he sleeps through the night this way, so Lu Han sits on the bed, pushing Kris' legs aside to grant himself room. He observes the slope of Kris' shoulders, like an inverted hammock, the type of shape designed to cradle and hold. Shaking doesn't work well; the best method is simply to rub his arm, warm him up to the idea of being awake.
Kris comes around within a minute. His lashes stick together as he opens his eyes. "What time is it?"
Lu Han has already pulled back. So far Kris has been clear about requiring space. "Past one. I thought you'd want to wash your face."
Kris rubs the back of his neck as he sits up. "At the minimum. When'd you get back?"
"Just now. Vocal coach kept us late."
The small talk falls apart after that. Lu Han tries to find something to fill the empty air. Kris is still in the process of waking up, taking the time to work out a few kinks. The lamp highlights the length of his neck, muscles straining. Lu Han hears himself say, "Look, I hate walking on eggshells around you."
"Me too," Kris says. Some of the tension drains out of his shoulders, as if he's been hoping Lu Han'd make the first move. "It's been a weird month."
"So let's make a deal to stop being weird."
Kris cracks a smile. "I'm sorry for forcing the situation."
"You're looking out for everyone," Lu Han says. "I know it's a tough position."
It feels good, to be talking again. Not that they'd ever been in the business of heart to hearts, but they used to be able to just hang out, shoot the shit, help each other detox. A handful of times pre-debut, they'd go out after a rough week, buy a pack of cigarettes, smoke two each and toss the rest. Weakness was more tolerable shared. And it'd felt like a privilege, sharing with Kris, who seemed ten times less well-trained and untouchable with smoke in his black hair.
Kris has a similar look now, like he could really use a high apartment rooftop and a drag of nicotine. "Yixing told me you're losing weight," he says.
"Yixing's a narc," Lu Han says, but Kris doesn't bite. He breathes out heavily. "It's nothing. I just need to sleep for a week. I'm being self-absorbed."
"That doesn't sound like you."
"It's like-part of yourself really wants to be able to do something, and another part's there thinking, you can't follow through, it'll suck you dry. Does that even make sense?"
"Yeah," Kris says softly.
"But if I can figure out how to be better, like how to be the best version of myself-"
"Don't talk shit about yourself," Kris cuts in. Lu Han huffs a laugh. Kris is a good person. That's what he and Yixing always joked around about, when they weren't joking around about the size of his cock. Kris was a real life Clark Kent. Kris would swerve to avoid hitting a squirrel and end up crashing into a tree instead. Kris would personally serve up his brains during a zombie apocalypse and then ask if it tastes fine. No, wait, Yixing said, that'd be you. You're like that too. Kindness without practicality.
Lu Han doesn't know how to respond. Thankfully, Kris pulls him into a noogie, a combination of his discomfort with bona fide sentiment and his sadistic streak kicking in. Lu Han struggles for show, engulfed by Kris' sleepy body heat, merino wool, the noose of Kris' arm around his neck. It's a return to familiarity. He goes pliant as Kris rubs his knuckles against his skull. "Go wash your face, you fucking giant."
"Not if that's how you're gonna talk to me," Kris says.
"Pretty please get off me," Lu Han amends. A nervousness begins to kindle in his stomach. "Cherry on top."
It's one in the morning, between days. Recreated from memory. Kris shows mercy and stops rubbing but his hand cards through Lu Han's hair, unconsciously. His sweater smells of his woody cologne, the one that used to end up all over Lu Han's pillow. His thigh shifts under Lu Han's hand braced against it for balance. Lu Han's heart pounds dully between his ribs, and the force of it makes the inside of his chest hotter than a desert. The tenderness is really fucking with him. "Kris," he says.
Kris' thumb brushes the shell of his ear, a false sense of security, as if Lu Han could actually have this. "What?"
"You should get off."
Kris pulls back, burnt. Lu Han thinks, That was the right thing to do. But he finishes slipping out of Kris' hold and he just, he doesn't know, maybe this is his boiling point, he was never going to get away from this moment. Like he's tugging on the rope from the bottom of a well, hoping for reciprocity, that someone's still holding the other end. On instinct, or self-sabotage, he leans up and presses his mouth against the line of Kris' jaw. He isn't surprised when Kris flinches back. Isn't surprised either when a second later Kris pulls him closer by the arm and fits their mouths together.
It's such textbook backsliding, it's almost funny. When it comes down to it, Lu Han's bad at letting things go. He's proven this to himself over and over. Chasing the same girl all through high school. Going after pipe dreams with the inevitability of a targeted missile. Know your limits, his mother used to tell him. Being a teenager, prone to misconception and exaggeration, he never understood what she was trying to say. All he heard was I don't believe in you. But to her, everything was cyclical. Loss and recovery, looped into each other. You couldn't push too hard. Lu Han pushed her until she was driving him to the airport when he was 18, looking ahead at every red light, waiting there as he disappeared through security, as strong-willed as he was. He pushes himself to give more, and try harder, and hold on, and hold on, and burn himself down holding on.
He pushes Kris, twisting fingers through his hair, biting his bottom lip for the hurt little noise Kris breathes out. Kris' hand comes up to cup his cheek as he kisses back, hard but not angry. They kiss like that until Lu Han's mouth feels stung and the guilt goes away and leaves him numb enough for what's coming after.
When he breaks away, Kris' lips are shiny with spit and his expression is torn. He doesn't move yet, allowing Lu Han to decide how he want this to play out. If everything's cyclical, Lu Han is always going to end up right here. The realization sears through his throat. He can't pretend he doesn't have a limit. He recognizes it. He has to get out.
"It's okay," Kris starts, then stops himself.
"You can't ask me to wait. 'Cause I'll wait around with my hopes up for fucking ages." Lu Han looks down, leaning his forehead against Kris', and looks back up again. "I don't want to do that," he says.
It had to be Kris. There's no way Lu Han could start with Yixing, meet his gaze and say, I'm out. Tell him that wistful payoff isn't enough to live on. But Kris cut his losses first, weeks ago. He isn't in the position to feel betrayed. The acceptance is already dimly there behind his eyes, almost too charitable for Lu Han to handle. But it isn't selfish to want to learn self-preservation. It doesn't mean any of them asked for too much, for him to admit he's had enough.
"Then what now?" Kris says.
In response, Lu Han reaches for Kris' hand, still adhered to his cheek, and pulls it off.
5
The song is Faye Wong's Red Bean. Three beers in and Yixing has a cute alcohol flush going. Each chord he plays is a little out of tune, but the camera on Lu Han's phone isn't that critical. "-300 RMB that those are the wrong words," Lu Han is saying at the beginning of the video. "Can we look this up? Faye is somewhere in Hong Kong, crying-"
Yixing powers onward, continues singing utter bullshit. It's a sad older ballad that, channeled through him, sounds Top 40. Lu Han only sings along with the last few words of every other line, wound and awake and alone. The camera focuses on the arch of Yixing's fingers over the fretboard, then up to his fringe falling into his eyes, then over to Lu Han's Adam's apple, the bedroom wallpaper indistinct behind his throat. When he's buzzed, Kris fancies himself an arthouse director.
"I'm selling this to the tabloids," Kris says in the background, "and retiring to an island with all the money I make."
Yixing looks up, not into the camera but just above it, where Kris' eyes are. "You'd make more money with a dick pic."
Lu Han's pixelated face visibly lights up. "Hey-"
"Fuck you," Kris laughs, the sound of it fizzling through the audio, "don't start-"
"We could buy an archipelago with that sort of cash," Lu Han says. He tucks his cheek onto Yixing's shoulder, glancing up the slope of Yixing's neck through his lashes. "Spend the rest of our lives getting sunburnt."
"Getting all old and wrinkly." Yixing dimples at Lu Han, and the tilt of his head reveals the lamp behind him, throwing off the camera's white balance and making everyone brighter. He changes songs, singing, "Will you still love me when I'm sixty four?"
Lu Han bites Yixing's shoulder, lightly, then says, "Enough stalling, take off your pants."
"Come over here and make me," Kris says.
Lu Han finishes off the rest of his beer, wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist, and leans forward. The camera gets a view of his shirt, a world of heather gray, then drops. The next twenty seconds are of the bedroom ceiling. The distant, intimate sound of kissing. Yixing's face shows up again, a shaky close up on his ear, the locked door, his voice saying, "How do I turn it off-" Then the video ends.
Lu Han finally gets around to deleting it. He sits there in the SM building lobby, waiting for a car to come take him home, and goes through the rest of his phone too. Call it spring cleaning. It's starting to grow warmer these days, so even past midnight, he can live without a jacket. It's survivable. For now he thinks about the new choreography, his voice lessons, his parents, old friends, elephants. Not: the first bars of sunlight through the bedroom window as Kris opened his eyes and the real day began. How to face talking to Yixing. How to clear out his closet, buy new sheets, and move forward. How to be good to himself.
Their manager comes through the main door around twelve thirty, letting in a blast of crisp air. He looks around, sees Lu Han and beckons him over. "Ready to go?" he says.
"Yeah," Lu Han says, getting up. "I'm ready."