[infinite] empty sets
Title: empty sets
Rating: pg
Word count: 1270
Summary: There is Infinite and then there is Sungyeol.
empty sets
∞
When Myungsoo decides that he likes mint chocolate chip ice-cream, he wants it on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday. He might take a break on Sunday, because on Sundays they go for shaved ice instead, but no one needs to ask him what his order will be when Monday rolls around again, when it’s late and their shirts are sticking to their sweaty backs and they have hours to go before Sunggyu is satisfied. When Hoya’s convinced Hyoan-hyung that they’ll faint without the calories, when he rolls his eyes and agrees to running the errand.
Hyoan-hyung clearly doesn’t know about the emergency ramyun packets Sungjong keeps in his backpack, and Myungsoo thinks it’s better that way. It’s nice to be able to have one or two secrets.
Myungsoo likes his checkered shirts matched with solid fedoras, so he buys one for every shirt that encompasses a different spectrum of color. When he comes home with his seventh, Dongwoo asks if he’s serious, if Dongwoo could just take him shopping and show him that there is more to fashion than sticking to what you know and hoping that nothing clashes. It’s like life, Dongwoo insists.
Dongwoo’s closet is filled with infectiously bright statements. He calls it his identity in progress; Myungsoo thinks that it looks like collateral damage.
Myungsoo is L onstage but Myungsoo at home and Myungsoo in bed and Myungsoo in his head and he finds his arms prickling uncomfortably when the cameras start following him into the dorm, when the transition between the two is harder to make and the boundaries are murky and undefined. He learns to drop his conception of personal space altogether, and tries to stay quieter during off hours. Consistency is easier to maintain than the reality of dissonance.
A closed system trends towards disorder. Myungsoo thinks that he spends his days inducing changes in enthalpy. It’s not an unpleasant way to exist.
At least this way, Myungsoo finds that every day is fairly constant in form, if not in content. He’s woken up with a kick in his ribs before he’s managed to recover from the previous evening’s practice, and shuffles into the bathroom to splash some water onto his cheeks and ensure that no horrific bumps are erupting under the line of his jaw. He takes a shower with the curtain closed and the door open and tries not to imagine who is peeing three inches away, pretending he’s home under a spray with four times the power and all of the time in the world. Sometimes it helps.
He crawls out and finds a towel that doesn’t look too wet, scrubbing at the back of his neck and his cheeks and lets Hoya shift past him for his turn. The regularity is comforting in a world of constant motion where he’s not even sure if he’ll have the same hair color for two months in a row, whether he’ll be eating three meals that day, whether he’ll be allowed to sleep in the near future. And so mornings are filled with whispers and sharp touches to shoulder-blades and Sunggyu’s periodic reminders of how much time they all have left.
For its supposed unboundedness, Infinite is oddly constrained in possibilities. And Sungyeol is the anomaly, the outlier, the data point which doesn’t quite fit the curve of expectations. Sungyeol is a completely different person every morning: sometimes he’s ready hours before anyone else, he’s had his coffee and he’s staring into space, kicking at the counter underneath the sink, whistling tonelessly. But sometimes he needs to be shaken awake and dragged out of bed and shoved into the shower, Woohyun flicking at the shower curtain every so often to check if he’s still alive. Sometimes he stumbles into the car with his pillow and calls Myungsoo Myungsoo, and sometimes he’s frustrated by everyone else’s lateness and remembers to call him L when they’re in public.
“L-goon,” Sungyeol corrects. Myungsoo still isn’t sure what he’s done to deserve that.
And when they slide out of the car, made up and dressed in their stage clothes, Sungyeol will be vibrating with excitement, smiling and jumping around for the camera. Myungsoo doesn’t lean forward and grab onto his shoulder when he almost misses a stair, rubbing three hours of sleep from under his eyes and brushing tension out of his jeans. He doesn’t grab at Sungyeol’s hand when he shies away from the other performers gathering around the hallways, watching the more senior performers play favorites, evading Park Jungsoo’s piercingly piteous half-smile.
“Want to come with me? I need to fix my hair,” he says instead. Sungyeol surely knows that L’s hair has been glued in place, that each strand is as unmoving as concrete, but nods edgily and slides into Myungsoo’s shoulder. For all of Myungsoo’s fondness of personal space, the warmth is comforting. He hadn’t even known that he was nervous.
He tries not to lean back, though. There are formulas to friendship. Clarify y and you’ll always get x.
Sometimes Myungsoo can step back and watch Sungyeol find someone he knows and laugh hysterically over a joke neither of them find funny anymore, and sometimes he’ll find a camera to talk to, adjusting his bow-tie in the viewfinder and welcoming an invisible audience into their chaotic dressing room, batting at Woohyun’s intrusions and introducing each of the members seriously and fairly and in various stages of undress. But sometimes he’d have spent the previous evening shaking, he’ll have been rejected from another audition, and he’ll rip the script into small bits of confetti and only clean them up when Woohyun snarls at him.
“I was just nervous,” he says the first, fifth, and eighteenth times. Woohyun rolls his eyes and opens his mouth and that always ends badly so Myungsoo heads him off.
“Want to go out? Run around the neighborhood?”
“You should sleep,” Sunggyu calls from his room. “We have practice at six.”
Sunggyu always says that they have practice at six. Another constant. “We’ll be back soon.”
∞
Seoul at night is fresh and quiet and exists in the space between places. They run down alleys and along the Han River and see light bleed across the water, soles slapping against the pavement, and Myungsoo watches Sungyeol’s feet slide out of form, curling ever so slightly along the lateral edge of his sneaker. Sungyeol is always three strides out of his reach.
Sometimes Sungyeol realizes this and slows down and laughs and it’s wildly unpredictable and his hair will fall into his eyes and Myungsoo thinks, helplessly, that he wants to kiss Sungyeol. The thought hits him suddenly, a sucker punch to the chest, but it’s not out of the ordinary. They’ve run this path before, they’ve been exhausted and out of breath and the moon has been bright and Sungyeol has smiled and said thank you. I feel better already and given Myungsoo a half-hug for his troubles before retreating to his room. Myungsoo’s never leaned forward and touched his fingers to the sweaty sides of Sungyeol’s face and brushed his lips against the edge of Sungyeol’s mouth. He wants to.
Something aches in the vicinity of his left lung. But this is routine. This, Myungsoo can handle.
∞
a/n: thank you, reifica, for the beta. not even the set of all real numbers could adequately express the span my adoration for you.
Rating: pg
Word count: 1270
Summary: There is Infinite and then there is Sungyeol.
empty sets
∞
When Myungsoo decides that he likes mint chocolate chip ice-cream, he wants it on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday. He might take a break on Sunday, because on Sundays they go for shaved ice instead, but no one needs to ask him what his order will be when Monday rolls around again, when it’s late and their shirts are sticking to their sweaty backs and they have hours to go before Sunggyu is satisfied. When Hoya’s convinced Hyoan-hyung that they’ll faint without the calories, when he rolls his eyes and agrees to running the errand.
Hyoan-hyung clearly doesn’t know about the emergency ramyun packets Sungjong keeps in his backpack, and Myungsoo thinks it’s better that way. It’s nice to be able to have one or two secrets.
Myungsoo likes his checkered shirts matched with solid fedoras, so he buys one for every shirt that encompasses a different spectrum of color. When he comes home with his seventh, Dongwoo asks if he’s serious, if Dongwoo could just take him shopping and show him that there is more to fashion than sticking to what you know and hoping that nothing clashes. It’s like life, Dongwoo insists.
Dongwoo’s closet is filled with infectiously bright statements. He calls it his identity in progress; Myungsoo thinks that it looks like collateral damage.
Myungsoo is L onstage but Myungsoo at home and Myungsoo in bed and Myungsoo in his head and he finds his arms prickling uncomfortably when the cameras start following him into the dorm, when the transition between the two is harder to make and the boundaries are murky and undefined. He learns to drop his conception of personal space altogether, and tries to stay quieter during off hours. Consistency is easier to maintain than the reality of dissonance.
A closed system trends towards disorder. Myungsoo thinks that he spends his days inducing changes in enthalpy. It’s not an unpleasant way to exist.
At least this way, Myungsoo finds that every day is fairly constant in form, if not in content. He’s woken up with a kick in his ribs before he’s managed to recover from the previous evening’s practice, and shuffles into the bathroom to splash some water onto his cheeks and ensure that no horrific bumps are erupting under the line of his jaw. He takes a shower with the curtain closed and the door open and tries not to imagine who is peeing three inches away, pretending he’s home under a spray with four times the power and all of the time in the world. Sometimes it helps.
He crawls out and finds a towel that doesn’t look too wet, scrubbing at the back of his neck and his cheeks and lets Hoya shift past him for his turn. The regularity is comforting in a world of constant motion where he’s not even sure if he’ll have the same hair color for two months in a row, whether he’ll be eating three meals that day, whether he’ll be allowed to sleep in the near future. And so mornings are filled with whispers and sharp touches to shoulder-blades and Sunggyu’s periodic reminders of how much time they all have left.
For its supposed unboundedness, Infinite is oddly constrained in possibilities. And Sungyeol is the anomaly, the outlier, the data point which doesn’t quite fit the curve of expectations. Sungyeol is a completely different person every morning: sometimes he’s ready hours before anyone else, he’s had his coffee and he’s staring into space, kicking at the counter underneath the sink, whistling tonelessly. But sometimes he needs to be shaken awake and dragged out of bed and shoved into the shower, Woohyun flicking at the shower curtain every so often to check if he’s still alive. Sometimes he stumbles into the car with his pillow and calls Myungsoo Myungsoo, and sometimes he’s frustrated by everyone else’s lateness and remembers to call him L when they’re in public.
“L-goon,” Sungyeol corrects. Myungsoo still isn’t sure what he’s done to deserve that.
And when they slide out of the car, made up and dressed in their stage clothes, Sungyeol will be vibrating with excitement, smiling and jumping around for the camera. Myungsoo doesn’t lean forward and grab onto his shoulder when he almost misses a stair, rubbing three hours of sleep from under his eyes and brushing tension out of his jeans. He doesn’t grab at Sungyeol’s hand when he shies away from the other performers gathering around the hallways, watching the more senior performers play favorites, evading Park Jungsoo’s piercingly piteous half-smile.
“Want to come with me? I need to fix my hair,” he says instead. Sungyeol surely knows that L’s hair has been glued in place, that each strand is as unmoving as concrete, but nods edgily and slides into Myungsoo’s shoulder. For all of Myungsoo’s fondness of personal space, the warmth is comforting. He hadn’t even known that he was nervous.
He tries not to lean back, though. There are formulas to friendship. Clarify y and you’ll always get x.
Sometimes Myungsoo can step back and watch Sungyeol find someone he knows and laugh hysterically over a joke neither of them find funny anymore, and sometimes he’ll find a camera to talk to, adjusting his bow-tie in the viewfinder and welcoming an invisible audience into their chaotic dressing room, batting at Woohyun’s intrusions and introducing each of the members seriously and fairly and in various stages of undress. But sometimes he’d have spent the previous evening shaking, he’ll have been rejected from another audition, and he’ll rip the script into small bits of confetti and only clean them up when Woohyun snarls at him.
“I was just nervous,” he says the first, fifth, and eighteenth times. Woohyun rolls his eyes and opens his mouth and that always ends badly so Myungsoo heads him off.
“Want to go out? Run around the neighborhood?”
“You should sleep,” Sunggyu calls from his room. “We have practice at six.”
Sunggyu always says that they have practice at six. Another constant. “We’ll be back soon.”
∞
Seoul at night is fresh and quiet and exists in the space between places. They run down alleys and along the Han River and see light bleed across the water, soles slapping against the pavement, and Myungsoo watches Sungyeol’s feet slide out of form, curling ever so slightly along the lateral edge of his sneaker. Sungyeol is always three strides out of his reach.
Sometimes Sungyeol realizes this and slows down and laughs and it’s wildly unpredictable and his hair will fall into his eyes and Myungsoo thinks, helplessly, that he wants to kiss Sungyeol. The thought hits him suddenly, a sucker punch to the chest, but it’s not out of the ordinary. They’ve run this path before, they’ve been exhausted and out of breath and the moon has been bright and Sungyeol has smiled and said thank you. I feel better already and given Myungsoo a half-hug for his troubles before retreating to his room. Myungsoo’s never leaned forward and touched his fingers to the sweaty sides of Sungyeol’s face and brushed his lips against the edge of Sungyeol’s mouth. He wants to.
Something aches in the vicinity of his left lung. But this is routine. This, Myungsoo can handle.
∞
a/n: thank you, reifica, for the beta. not even the set of all real numbers could adequately express the span my adoration for you.