[infinite] melting points, quarks, and the equation of disintegration
Title: melting points, quarks, and the equation of disintegration
Rating: r
Word count: 2620
Summary: The world ends. And Woohyun, for once, decides to pay for Sunggyu’s coffee.
melting points, quarks, and the equation of disintegration
Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
lewis carroll, "alice in wonderland"
∞
It’s cold in the cafe. Seoul has been cold for months, though, ever since a light dusting of nuclear ash in the troposphere completely destroyed the environment’s ability to regulate temperature, so Woohyun isn’t particularly surprised. He tilts back in his chair, balancing precariously on its back legs, and peers out the ice-encrusted window-pane. He is surprised that Sunggyu is late.
The alleyway outside is empty, pavements brimming with trampled, discolored snow. Woohyun has always liked the snow, but the kind that you wake up to one morning, the kind that looks untouched and perfect, the kind that melts away after a few days so that the lasting image of its shine is bright behind closed eyelids, so there’s something to dream about. This is neither of those, this is the story of everything that happens afterwards, and Woohyun is a bit sick of those stories.
After all, Woohyun used to dream of being an idol. And, as it goes, he was, for a few short weeks, and then the world destroyed itself and everything ended.
He curls down the top of his mitten and checks his watch. Sunggyu is exactly twenty-three minutes late. Sunggyu is never late. Sunggyu believes (or believed) in spending every second in the practice room, in the studio, in his own head, planning the trajectory of their lives and stepping forward into the future.
If we don’t practice, we’ll be nothing, he always said. If we aren’t the best, there’s no point.
The funny thing is, Woohyun thinks, being the best doesn’t really matter when you can wake up one day, still sore and exhausted, and find that no one cares anymore. It came as a shock when he walked outside to find their doorstep empty of fans and presents. It shouldn’t have. They all got a bit too complacent. In the end, being an idol means one day having to gather the fortitude to watch it all fall apart, to be seventeen in a body that’s thirty, to be tired with swollen joints and deficiencies that a multi-vitamin can’t fix.
Being a idol means recognizing that there are limits, that nothing tends to infinity.
But they all figured that out eventually.
∞
Their world ends on a Wednesday. It’s a fairly mundane and expected consequence of South Korea turning itself inside out after a few military skirmishes gone wrong, and no one really selling albums anymore anyway. So Lee Joongyeop terminates their contracts, cancels all of their scheduled appearances at the TV stations which have yet to face a reality of a world without digital broadcasting, and wishes them the best of luck in the future. He leaves them with the dorm key, though, since no one’s in the market for real estate, and he doesn’t dislike them enough to toss them out on a whim. Myungsoo thanks him, Hoya upends a table, and Sunggyu stalks out of the room. The others cling to reality in various states of shock and horror. This is their everything, after all.
When Sunggyu doesn’t reappear, they trickle out of the room and head for home semi-paralyzed in indecision. Woohyun doesn’t have a plan either, so he slips into the office bathroom, climbs on top of the toilet adjacent to the only locked stall, and edges himself over the divider, dropping down when Sunggyu notices and backs into the corner, subtly wiping the blood off his fists and onto his shirt.
Sunggyu is supposed to know what to do. But Sunggyu looks shocked and confused and--
“Fuck,” Sunggyu says a bit helplessly, voice shaky. “You could have broken something.”
“Yeah.” Woohyun moves a few steps forward and slides a hand up Sunggyu’s arm. Woohyun feels the curve of newly-won muscle harden under his fingers. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
“I never worry about you, Woohyun.”
Woohyun hears something else entirely, which was possibly the point, and steps in, past the invisible line in the air that they’d long since drawn in the space between their bodies, deciding that reality and fame was a bit more important than a silly thing like mutual attraction. He regrets it now.
Or he doesn’t, he’s not sure, but it doesn’t quite matter in a world devoid of music.
Woohyun’s not sure if he’s numb, if the de facto destruction of his future hasn’t yet sunk in, but for a second, now, there is just space and Sunggyu and a moment of uncertainty. He leans in in in and brushes his lips against Sunggyu’s and jerks backwards when Sunggyu pushes back hard, biting kisses into Woohyun’s mouth, the starch of Woohyun’s hairspray grinding into the stall’s door.
It feels good, it feels hot and uncomfortable and very different, and Woohyun curls fingers into Sunggyu’s shirt and lets himself go.
“Yes,” Sunggyu says much later, in answer to a question Woohyun didn’t even know he’d asked, hands twisted in Woohyun’s own. “Yes.”
∞
Stasis does not last for very long. Stasis never does.
Sungjong leaves almost immediately, and Sungyeol skulks around the dorm for a while, tetchy and sharp and fiddling with all of their useless electronics during the long gaps in time between waking up and eating and sleeping. Hoya disappears one afternoon and comes back with a huge cart of yarn and knitting needles.
Sunggyu stops pawing at their dwindling supply of crackers. “What are those for?”
“We’ll all be cold when winter comes around and no one has power.”
Sungyeol stares. “Are you crazy? Why the fuck would I stay here? I have somewhere to go back to.”
“Don’t leave. Not yet, Sungyeol. Wait until I’m done,” Hoya says firmly. “Wait.”
Woohyun watches Sunggyu crunch the last few biscuits between his fingers. He’s not sure why Sunggyu is surprised. They were a group held together only by the thin threads of potential.
∞
It doesn’t take Hoya very long to finish the first two pairs of mittens. Sungyeol takes one for himself, one (allegedly) for Sungjong, and leaves with everything he ever brought to Seoul, everything he ever brought to Infinite. He leaves while Myungsoo is out looking to replenish their supply of peanut butter and bread, and until he returns, Woohyun is convinced that Sungyeol took Myungsoo as well. It would make sense. Myungsoo’s smile was his.
Woohyun thinks that he would take Sunggyu, if he had to.
Hoya knits even more quickly once they’re whittled down to five, and no one is surprised that Myungsoo apologizes three days later and dredges out a shabby suitcase, packing up his fedoras and checkered shirts and leaving everything else behind. Woohyun hugs him before he leaves, Sunggyu whispers snippets of useless advice into his ear, and Myungsoo grins before bowing one final time and shutting the door behind him.
“Green or red,” Hoya asks Dongwoo that evening, toying with a spoonful of peanut butter.
Woohyun tries to swallow. It’s hard; their drinking water is rationed. “Both.”
∞
He’s an hour and thirty-two minutes late when Woohyun trades the jar of peanut butter he brought from their dorm for a cup of coffee. The girl behind the counter is surprised that he would spring for such a lousy deal, but she doesn’t know that Woohyun hasn’t had a hot drink in days, that every part of his body feels unfathomably cold.
Heat seeps through the styrofoam cup. Woohyun leans back in the chair and hums the first four bars of an incomplete love song again and again and again.
∞
Hoya leaves the last two pairs of mittens in the hall, and thanks Sunggyu solemnly, hand tight on Dongwoo’s shoulder.
“I’ll take him home,” he says.
Sunggyu shuffles awkwardly, socks toeing the wooden floor, spine slouched. “What are you going to do now?”
“Make things. Everyone will need to stay warm.” Hoya shrugs. “It’s something. We all have to do something.”
A tight nod, a few last hugs, and Sunggyu is saying goodbye all over again, thanking them for their participation, like it’s been one long photoshoot and they’ve all done their jobs well and it’s time to go their separate ways. Woohyun wonders if this is how it ends, if mutual cooperation was all that was keeping them together.
There are no cell towers. There is no Internet. Goodbye is forever.
Woohyun collapses into bed later, and it all hits him at once. “I have nothing,” he says to the ceiling, and then into Sunggyu’s chest, and then into Sunggyu’s mouth, hand, skin. “I have nothing but you, now.”
Sunggyu arches backwards and keens and Woohyun loses control and there is nothing but the present. When it’s done, when Sunggyu is sliding a cool compress between their stomachs, when his body is loose and muscles are languid, Woohyun stares at the ceiling and wonders if the world always ends in new beginnings.
∞
Woohyun spreads out his fingers on the table. The girl offers him another cup of coffee, and he accepts with a grin. She doesn’t know who he is. He wants to tell her everything.
Sunggyu is two hours and forty minutes late. Woohyun kicks at the suitcase by his feet and wonders if time means anything to Sunggyu anymore.
∞
When winter sweeps into the city, Sunggyu dismantles the bunk-beds and starts building small fires in the foyer. Sometimes they fall asleep with sheets between their bodies and the world, and sometimes Woohyun will slide against Sunggyu, naked and cold, and Sunggyu will press heat into all of the smallest places. Sometimes Woohyun curls into Sunggyu’s body and wonders if he just traded possibility A for possibility B, if all forks in the road lead to happy endings after all.
Woohyun loves singing, but he loves being happy just a bit more, and loves being adored most of all. Sunggyu never uses those words, not like their thousands of screaming fans with placards and banners and signs, but when he palms Woohyun through his sweatpants or traces graphs into his chest with his fingernails and tongue, Woohyun finds that his interpretation is all that really matters, that somehow silence is as valuable as the curves of hangeul. Sunggyu wakes up and presses sour kisses into the sides of Woohyun’s torso and Woohyun’s eyes roll back lazily and they snipe at each other with words and kisses and bites and Woohyun pushes carelessly at the shoulder Sunggyu injured the other day and demands that he brush his fucking teeth before they go any further.
It’s easy to stop saying anything. It’s even easier to pretend that nothing’s changed, that they have been Sunggyu and Woohyun forever, that hyung is just a synonym of sarang. It’s easy to stop watching Sunggyu’s eyes and look at his mouth and forget all of the stories he used to read into the stiffness of Sunggyu’s back and his perpetual exhaustion. It’s easy to be simple, to believe in simplicity.
The world spins further into darkness and the days grow monochromatic and Sunggyu stops smiling nearly as much, but Woohyun always manages to find something to put together for dinner, something to say about tomorrow, something to hold together the artifice of time.
“There is always tomorrow,” he mouths around Sunggyu, digging fingers into the softness of Sunggyu’s thighs.
There is nothing for me without you. “I guess not.”
∞
Three hours exactly.
“There’s only so much coffee you can drink,” Woohyun tells her. “But thank you.”
∞
Woohyun thinks he understands when he catches Sunggyu tracing the outline of one of their posters, fingers stopped around the microphone in the drawing, head bowed. He pretends he doesn’t see the clenched fist, the bitten lip, the burn of desire in Sunggyu’s eyes, and fucks him even harder later that evening, even more unrelentingly, oddly dissociated from the physical sparks exploding along his spine. He’s on his knees and Sunggyu is on his back, writhing, and Woohyun wonders if he’s just delaying the inevitable, if sex is not actually an expression of satisfaction, if Woohyun is just filling a gap that grows wider by the second.
“You have people waiting for you,” Sunggyu says one evening. “I don’t know why you’re still here.”
Sunggyu’s family hasn’t spoken to him since he dropped out of school to try his luck in Seoul’s underground indie scene.
Woohyun’s mother misses him, Woohyun’s sure.
Sungyeol couldn’t stuff Myungsoo into a suitcase, though, and Woohyun knows that Sunggyu weighs much more. That Sunggyu would never fit, if only because of his ego. That Woohyun could never give him enough to make up for all that Seoul has taken.
“No reason.” And: “what would you do, if you weren’t here?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
They finish the last of the bread, mouths dry. Sunggyu starts to whisle. It’s another song they were never able to release--the haunting melody of Paradise, one of Sunggyu’s favorites.
Woohyun doesn’t sing anymore. He’d never been that crazy about music anyway. Sunggyu sings tonelessly in the shower, into his pillow, into the silence that sometimes seems unending.
One day, it snows. One day, Sunggyu rolls over in bed and refuses to get out and Woohyun has to drag him into the bathroom to wash up.
“The snow is pretty cool looking. Let’s go out.”
“There is no fucking point,” Sunggyu says colorlessly. “There’s nothing for us out there.”
Woohyun thinks of days filled with nows instead of tomorrows and the heat of Sunggyu’s mouth and stays quiet. He remembers the ache of practice and the exhaustion of promotion, but it doesn’t feel all that different to the daily struggles in a post-apocalyptic reality. Woohyun isn’t sure where to draw the line when no one is watching and telling him what to do, but he is fairly sure that Sunggyu is going about it all the wrong way.
“We could burn that poster, you know. It’d be better than your CDs.”
“Shut up.”
Sunggyu goes back to bed, Woohyun eats dinner alone, and the days get shorter.
∞
“Who are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know,” Woohyun says. “I thought I did, but I’m not sure anymore.”
“Is she pretty?”
He smiles. “Am I pretty?”
∞
And then Woohyun wakes up and there is nothing to smile about. Sunggyu has disappeared sometime during the night, but his clothes are still there. They will probably always be there, purple pants rotting away in the hope that tomorrow there will be another for stage for him to take by storm. There is someone sitting in the foyer, someone who looks like Sunggyu but with dull, tarnished edges, all his impurities oxidizing, rusting and flaking away.
This is not a fork in the road. This is one path with many pit stops and many slopes that look like they level off at infinity, but really stop somewhere else, somewhere entirely different. And just like that, Woohyun remembers that he’d always had a model’s face, that someone is always looking for a little bit of perfection, that Woohyun will always have a future. That he does not know that boy in the corner, that maybe he never has. That Woohyun and Sunggyu want the same things from singing but different things from life and this is where the curve begins to level off.
It is not exactly what he wants, and it is not exactly the even sheen of unbroken snow behind his eyelids, but reality never is.
∞
"Leave with me."
"The power might come back on. We'll need to have all of this. We--"
"Sunggyu. Hyung. It's over. Everything's over." Except this. Except us. "Please."
There is nothing left in the quiet of their dormitory but the sharp edges of reality. Woohyun leans in in in and nothing leans back.
∞
Sunggyu is four hours and fifty-two minutes late when Woohyun gives up. He leaves a note on the table because Woohyun still believes in dreams, but he leaves his mittens there too. He doesn’t have room for things like that in his half-empty suitcase. Not when the walk home will be very, very long.
At the very least, he figures that it’s enough to buy Sunggyu a cup of coffee. The girl agrees.
∞
note 사랑 (sarang) means "a love" or "a loved one" in Korean.
a/n: this story is for reifica, a girl as amazing as a theory of everything. thank you for the beta job, for being you, and for being such a close friend. i owe you a huge chunk of my heart, and have only this as a downpayment.
Rating: r
Word count: 2620
Summary: The world ends. And Woohyun, for once, decides to pay for Sunggyu’s coffee.
melting points, quarks, and the equation of disintegration
Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
lewis carroll, "alice in wonderland"
∞
It’s cold in the cafe. Seoul has been cold for months, though, ever since a light dusting of nuclear ash in the troposphere completely destroyed the environment’s ability to regulate temperature, so Woohyun isn’t particularly surprised. He tilts back in his chair, balancing precariously on its back legs, and peers out the ice-encrusted window-pane. He is surprised that Sunggyu is late.
The alleyway outside is empty, pavements brimming with trampled, discolored snow. Woohyun has always liked the snow, but the kind that you wake up to one morning, the kind that looks untouched and perfect, the kind that melts away after a few days so that the lasting image of its shine is bright behind closed eyelids, so there’s something to dream about. This is neither of those, this is the story of everything that happens afterwards, and Woohyun is a bit sick of those stories.
After all, Woohyun used to dream of being an idol. And, as it goes, he was, for a few short weeks, and then the world destroyed itself and everything ended.
He curls down the top of his mitten and checks his watch. Sunggyu is exactly twenty-three minutes late. Sunggyu is never late. Sunggyu believes (or believed) in spending every second in the practice room, in the studio, in his own head, planning the trajectory of their lives and stepping forward into the future.
If we don’t practice, we’ll be nothing, he always said. If we aren’t the best, there’s no point.
The funny thing is, Woohyun thinks, being the best doesn’t really matter when you can wake up one day, still sore and exhausted, and find that no one cares anymore. It came as a shock when he walked outside to find their doorstep empty of fans and presents. It shouldn’t have. They all got a bit too complacent. In the end, being an idol means one day having to gather the fortitude to watch it all fall apart, to be seventeen in a body that’s thirty, to be tired with swollen joints and deficiencies that a multi-vitamin can’t fix.
Being a idol means recognizing that there are limits, that nothing tends to infinity.
But they all figured that out eventually.
∞
Their world ends on a Wednesday. It’s a fairly mundane and expected consequence of South Korea turning itself inside out after a few military skirmishes gone wrong, and no one really selling albums anymore anyway. So Lee Joongyeop terminates their contracts, cancels all of their scheduled appearances at the TV stations which have yet to face a reality of a world without digital broadcasting, and wishes them the best of luck in the future. He leaves them with the dorm key, though, since no one’s in the market for real estate, and he doesn’t dislike them enough to toss them out on a whim. Myungsoo thanks him, Hoya upends a table, and Sunggyu stalks out of the room. The others cling to reality in various states of shock and horror. This is their everything, after all.
When Sunggyu doesn’t reappear, they trickle out of the room and head for home semi-paralyzed in indecision. Woohyun doesn’t have a plan either, so he slips into the office bathroom, climbs on top of the toilet adjacent to the only locked stall, and edges himself over the divider, dropping down when Sunggyu notices and backs into the corner, subtly wiping the blood off his fists and onto his shirt.
Sunggyu is supposed to know what to do. But Sunggyu looks shocked and confused and--
“Fuck,” Sunggyu says a bit helplessly, voice shaky. “You could have broken something.”
“Yeah.” Woohyun moves a few steps forward and slides a hand up Sunggyu’s arm. Woohyun feels the curve of newly-won muscle harden under his fingers. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
“I never worry about you, Woohyun.”
Woohyun hears something else entirely, which was possibly the point, and steps in, past the invisible line in the air that they’d long since drawn in the space between their bodies, deciding that reality and fame was a bit more important than a silly thing like mutual attraction. He regrets it now.
Or he doesn’t, he’s not sure, but it doesn’t quite matter in a world devoid of music.
Woohyun’s not sure if he’s numb, if the de facto destruction of his future hasn’t yet sunk in, but for a second, now, there is just space and Sunggyu and a moment of uncertainty. He leans in in in and brushes his lips against Sunggyu’s and jerks backwards when Sunggyu pushes back hard, biting kisses into Woohyun’s mouth, the starch of Woohyun’s hairspray grinding into the stall’s door.
It feels good, it feels hot and uncomfortable and very different, and Woohyun curls fingers into Sunggyu’s shirt and lets himself go.
“Yes,” Sunggyu says much later, in answer to a question Woohyun didn’t even know he’d asked, hands twisted in Woohyun’s own. “Yes.”
∞
Stasis does not last for very long. Stasis never does.
Sungjong leaves almost immediately, and Sungyeol skulks around the dorm for a while, tetchy and sharp and fiddling with all of their useless electronics during the long gaps in time between waking up and eating and sleeping. Hoya disappears one afternoon and comes back with a huge cart of yarn and knitting needles.
Sunggyu stops pawing at their dwindling supply of crackers. “What are those for?”
“We’ll all be cold when winter comes around and no one has power.”
Sungyeol stares. “Are you crazy? Why the fuck would I stay here? I have somewhere to go back to.”
“Don’t leave. Not yet, Sungyeol. Wait until I’m done,” Hoya says firmly. “Wait.”
Woohyun watches Sunggyu crunch the last few biscuits between his fingers. He’s not sure why Sunggyu is surprised. They were a group held together only by the thin threads of potential.
∞
It doesn’t take Hoya very long to finish the first two pairs of mittens. Sungyeol takes one for himself, one (allegedly) for Sungjong, and leaves with everything he ever brought to Seoul, everything he ever brought to Infinite. He leaves while Myungsoo is out looking to replenish their supply of peanut butter and bread, and until he returns, Woohyun is convinced that Sungyeol took Myungsoo as well. It would make sense. Myungsoo’s smile was his.
Woohyun thinks that he would take Sunggyu, if he had to.
Hoya knits even more quickly once they’re whittled down to five, and no one is surprised that Myungsoo apologizes three days later and dredges out a shabby suitcase, packing up his fedoras and checkered shirts and leaving everything else behind. Woohyun hugs him before he leaves, Sunggyu whispers snippets of useless advice into his ear, and Myungsoo grins before bowing one final time and shutting the door behind him.
“Green or red,” Hoya asks Dongwoo that evening, toying with a spoonful of peanut butter.
Woohyun tries to swallow. It’s hard; their drinking water is rationed. “Both.”
∞
He’s an hour and thirty-two minutes late when Woohyun trades the jar of peanut butter he brought from their dorm for a cup of coffee. The girl behind the counter is surprised that he would spring for such a lousy deal, but she doesn’t know that Woohyun hasn’t had a hot drink in days, that every part of his body feels unfathomably cold.
Heat seeps through the styrofoam cup. Woohyun leans back in the chair and hums the first four bars of an incomplete love song again and again and again.
∞
Hoya leaves the last two pairs of mittens in the hall, and thanks Sunggyu solemnly, hand tight on Dongwoo’s shoulder.
“I’ll take him home,” he says.
Sunggyu shuffles awkwardly, socks toeing the wooden floor, spine slouched. “What are you going to do now?”
“Make things. Everyone will need to stay warm.” Hoya shrugs. “It’s something. We all have to do something.”
A tight nod, a few last hugs, and Sunggyu is saying goodbye all over again, thanking them for their participation, like it’s been one long photoshoot and they’ve all done their jobs well and it’s time to go their separate ways. Woohyun wonders if this is how it ends, if mutual cooperation was all that was keeping them together.
There are no cell towers. There is no Internet. Goodbye is forever.
Woohyun collapses into bed later, and it all hits him at once. “I have nothing,” he says to the ceiling, and then into Sunggyu’s chest, and then into Sunggyu’s mouth, hand, skin. “I have nothing but you, now.”
Sunggyu arches backwards and keens and Woohyun loses control and there is nothing but the present. When it’s done, when Sunggyu is sliding a cool compress between their stomachs, when his body is loose and muscles are languid, Woohyun stares at the ceiling and wonders if the world always ends in new beginnings.
∞
Woohyun spreads out his fingers on the table. The girl offers him another cup of coffee, and he accepts with a grin. She doesn’t know who he is. He wants to tell her everything.
Sunggyu is two hours and forty minutes late. Woohyun kicks at the suitcase by his feet and wonders if time means anything to Sunggyu anymore.
∞
When winter sweeps into the city, Sunggyu dismantles the bunk-beds and starts building small fires in the foyer. Sometimes they fall asleep with sheets between their bodies and the world, and sometimes Woohyun will slide against Sunggyu, naked and cold, and Sunggyu will press heat into all of the smallest places. Sometimes Woohyun curls into Sunggyu’s body and wonders if he just traded possibility A for possibility B, if all forks in the road lead to happy endings after all.
Woohyun loves singing, but he loves being happy just a bit more, and loves being adored most of all. Sunggyu never uses those words, not like their thousands of screaming fans with placards and banners and signs, but when he palms Woohyun through his sweatpants or traces graphs into his chest with his fingernails and tongue, Woohyun finds that his interpretation is all that really matters, that somehow silence is as valuable as the curves of hangeul. Sunggyu wakes up and presses sour kisses into the sides of Woohyun’s torso and Woohyun’s eyes roll back lazily and they snipe at each other with words and kisses and bites and Woohyun pushes carelessly at the shoulder Sunggyu injured the other day and demands that he brush his fucking teeth before they go any further.
It’s easy to stop saying anything. It’s even easier to pretend that nothing’s changed, that they have been Sunggyu and Woohyun forever, that hyung is just a synonym of sarang. It’s easy to stop watching Sunggyu’s eyes and look at his mouth and forget all of the stories he used to read into the stiffness of Sunggyu’s back and his perpetual exhaustion. It’s easy to be simple, to believe in simplicity.
The world spins further into darkness and the days grow monochromatic and Sunggyu stops smiling nearly as much, but Woohyun always manages to find something to put together for dinner, something to say about tomorrow, something to hold together the artifice of time.
“There is always tomorrow,” he mouths around Sunggyu, digging fingers into the softness of Sunggyu’s thighs.
There is nothing for me without you. “I guess not.”
∞
Three hours exactly.
“There’s only so much coffee you can drink,” Woohyun tells her. “But thank you.”
∞
Woohyun thinks he understands when he catches Sunggyu tracing the outline of one of their posters, fingers stopped around the microphone in the drawing, head bowed. He pretends he doesn’t see the clenched fist, the bitten lip, the burn of desire in Sunggyu’s eyes, and fucks him even harder later that evening, even more unrelentingly, oddly dissociated from the physical sparks exploding along his spine. He’s on his knees and Sunggyu is on his back, writhing, and Woohyun wonders if he’s just delaying the inevitable, if sex is not actually an expression of satisfaction, if Woohyun is just filling a gap that grows wider by the second.
“You have people waiting for you,” Sunggyu says one evening. “I don’t know why you’re still here.”
Sunggyu’s family hasn’t spoken to him since he dropped out of school to try his luck in Seoul’s underground indie scene.
Woohyun’s mother misses him, Woohyun’s sure.
Sungyeol couldn’t stuff Myungsoo into a suitcase, though, and Woohyun knows that Sunggyu weighs much more. That Sunggyu would never fit, if only because of his ego. That Woohyun could never give him enough to make up for all that Seoul has taken.
“No reason.” And: “what would you do, if you weren’t here?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
They finish the last of the bread, mouths dry. Sunggyu starts to whisle. It’s another song they were never able to release--the haunting melody of Paradise, one of Sunggyu’s favorites.
Woohyun doesn’t sing anymore. He’d never been that crazy about music anyway. Sunggyu sings tonelessly in the shower, into his pillow, into the silence that sometimes seems unending.
One day, it snows. One day, Sunggyu rolls over in bed and refuses to get out and Woohyun has to drag him into the bathroom to wash up.
“The snow is pretty cool looking. Let’s go out.”
“There is no fucking point,” Sunggyu says colorlessly. “There’s nothing for us out there.”
Woohyun thinks of days filled with nows instead of tomorrows and the heat of Sunggyu’s mouth and stays quiet. He remembers the ache of practice and the exhaustion of promotion, but it doesn’t feel all that different to the daily struggles in a post-apocalyptic reality. Woohyun isn’t sure where to draw the line when no one is watching and telling him what to do, but he is fairly sure that Sunggyu is going about it all the wrong way.
“We could burn that poster, you know. It’d be better than your CDs.”
“Shut up.”
Sunggyu goes back to bed, Woohyun eats dinner alone, and the days get shorter.
∞
“Who are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know,” Woohyun says. “I thought I did, but I’m not sure anymore.”
“Is she pretty?”
He smiles. “Am I pretty?”
∞
And then Woohyun wakes up and there is nothing to smile about. Sunggyu has disappeared sometime during the night, but his clothes are still there. They will probably always be there, purple pants rotting away in the hope that tomorrow there will be another for stage for him to take by storm. There is someone sitting in the foyer, someone who looks like Sunggyu but with dull, tarnished edges, all his impurities oxidizing, rusting and flaking away.
This is not a fork in the road. This is one path with many pit stops and many slopes that look like they level off at infinity, but really stop somewhere else, somewhere entirely different. And just like that, Woohyun remembers that he’d always had a model’s face, that someone is always looking for a little bit of perfection, that Woohyun will always have a future. That he does not know that boy in the corner, that maybe he never has. That Woohyun and Sunggyu want the same things from singing but different things from life and this is where the curve begins to level off.
It is not exactly what he wants, and it is not exactly the even sheen of unbroken snow behind his eyelids, but reality never is.
∞
"Leave with me."
"The power might come back on. We'll need to have all of this. We--"
"Sunggyu. Hyung. It's over. Everything's over." Except this. Except us. "Please."
There is nothing left in the quiet of their dormitory but the sharp edges of reality. Woohyun leans in in in and nothing leans back.
∞
Sunggyu is four hours and fifty-two minutes late when Woohyun gives up. He leaves a note on the table because Woohyun still believes in dreams, but he leaves his mittens there too. He doesn’t have room for things like that in his half-empty suitcase. Not when the walk home will be very, very long.
At the very least, he figures that it’s enough to buy Sunggyu a cup of coffee. The girl agrees.
∞
note 사랑 (sarang) means "a love" or "a loved one" in Korean.
a/n: this story is for reifica, a girl as amazing as a theory of everything. thank you for the beta job, for being you, and for being such a close friend. i owe you a huge chunk of my heart, and have only this as a downpayment.