Chapter Text
-
Seungcheol was in the sea. A grey, cold sea under a grey, cold sky. It was fresh and visceral and invigorating. Around him, silver fish darted and gleamed.
When he turned around to look at the shore, past the piled marble-jacks of the sea wall, a figure in purple dungarees waved back at him, long red hair streaming in the wind like sunshine.
-
The notification alert on the group chat had Seungcheol sitting up in bed and opening it before he’d realised he’d stopped dreaming.
Leader reflexes. Always the first to startle at anything.
And this message from Seungkwan was startling. He re-read it two or three times, fighting through the lingering drowsiness to combine the words into something that held meaning.
come to our apartment now. Everyone. I mean it.
Each repeat read landed worse. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Seungcheol stared at his phone. Rubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes. The tension began in his abdomen, reached up through his stomach and clenched blindly at every vital thing in his neck. Suddenly overwhelmed by the need to move, he reached for the same t-shirt and jeans he’d chucked on the floor when he’d undressed the night before.
Everyone get here now Seungkwan had added, when Seungcheol got to his phone again. Reading up, Seungcheol could see most of the members had noticed the first message, and started either promising to come or protesting why they couldn’t – especially Mingyu, at length – and all of them asking why. I’m not explaining in the group chat Seungkwan posted. Seungcheol could see him typing: and stop trying to call me and just get here. If you’re not around someone will tell you later. It’s not horrible, but it is urgent and I can’t explain in messages
Reflexively, mouth dry, Seungcheol opened Naver and then Google and tried ‘Seungkwan’, ‘Boo Seungkwan’, ‘Jeonghan’, ‘Yoon Jeonghan’, ‘Seventeen’ and the area where the two of them lived. Nothing.
“Cheol-ah.” Seungcheol’s hyung said gently, watching him fly distractedly around the kitchen gulping down leftover gimbap and strong coffee, and trying to get a taxi booked through the app on his phone. “I don’t technically have to go to Busan until Friday, if…”
“Oh, it’ll be fine, you catch your train.” Seungcheol reassured him automatically. It would be fine. It had to be. “I’ll let you know, thank you, but it might just be someone making a fuss about… a new bread-maker or something, honestly.”
But a bread-maker, Seungkwan might have mentioned in chat. Seungkwan was dramatic as all fuck but he wasn’t unkind, and he didn’t cry wolf. If he was over-egging something for effect, he would let it be known, enough to mean no one actually freaked out. Emojis, exclamation points – easy to do and he’d done it before, like with the great home-perm-incident of Autumn 2020.
Seungcheol’s call log showed Jeonghan as the third most recent person he’d called, two days ago, when – according to the list – they’d spoken for 39 minutes and 23 seconds. Jeonghan was the next back in the list too – he’d called Seungcheol the day before, 47 minutes and 14 seconds. Prior to that, they’d all been together for a week of filming, seeing everyone every day.
At that time, Jeonghan had been as usual, surely? They’d eaten lunch together most of the days, Jeonghan quietly stealing his choco pies whilst massaging the place in the exact middle between Seungcheol’s shoulder blades where the muscles that carried stress apparently lived. Some of the days Seungcheol had been fixing Jeonghan’s phone, because Jeonghan didn’t understand how to clean the temporary files and then complained when he couldn’t download movies. Seungcheol couldn’t remember talking about anything in particular, or even talking all that much at all; Jeonghan could build a bubble of quiet for them in the noisiest, most sensorily abrasive set. Either that, or Seungcheol just minded it less, with Jeonghan there.
Now, Jeonghan’s dial tone rang out when Seungcheol tried it.
Not that it couldn’t be Seungkwan’s problem, whatever it was. And Jeonghan might be busy dealing with it. But if so why wasn’t Jeonghan in the chat?
Why hadn’t Jeonghan called him?
-
The streets of Seoul passed in a darker grey through the tinted windows of Seungcheol’s taxi. Through the late winter rain, the city was heading into the middle of spring, and here and there you could just glimpse the shoots of green leaves or hopeful grass, even amongst the concrete.
Seungcheol caught himself picking at the stitching of the seat upholstery, and looked at his phone again instead, even though he’d just made a bargain with himself to wait until three whole minutes had passed on the driver’s radio clock before checking.
He couldn’t call Jeonghan again from the car, not when the driver could be listening, no matter what the sign on the divider window said about sound insulation and privacy. Seungcheol knew idols who’d been caught out by that.
I’m on my way he wrote in a direct message. Deleted it. Wrote it again, and sent it Jeonghan before he could second-guess any more. Deliberately not a question, so it didn’t mean anything if Jeonghan didn’t reply.
All the rest of the fifteen-minute journey he watched the message, but it stayed unread.
“Did you try calling him?” Seungcheol asked Joshua, whose taxi had drawn up at the same time as his outside the apartment block.
“Jeonghan? Yes.” Joshua was also frowning as he got out of the cab, unstyled and sleepy-eyed over his black face-mask. “Did you?”
“Yes, but it rang out. What did he say to you?”
Joshua made an unhappy humming sound. “It rang out on me too. Seungkwan DM’d me afterwards and said just to get here.”
“If all of this is because they got a kitten, I swear to God I’ll…”
“You’ll melt like the softie you are.” Joshua gave a dry laugh, and then sighed as they stepped into the lift, casting his eyes up to the heavens. He was worried too, and Seungcheol used him as a benchmark, because Seungcheol always worried about everything anyway so it wasn’t like he trusted his gut to know when to be concerned.
Maybe he ought to have a manager ready, on alert. Whatever this was could be something they’d need every possible minute to prepare a response for, he knew that. But since the HYBE acquisition, the managers had different protocols, and even the long-standing staff he wouldn’t fully trust to put what was best for Jeonghan – or Seungkwan – ahead of the bottom line. And even as he wondered it, he could feel himself reflexively reaching for his phone, force of habit suggesting that he ask Jeonghan what he thought, before the memory hit that Jeonghan for whatever reason was incommunicado.
But then, Seungcheol thought, as the lift slowly, tortuously slowly, ascended, maybe this was a new cat.
Just as he and Joshua got out on Seungkwan and Jeonghan’s floor, the door to the fire escape opened, Chan puffing into the clean, white corridor wide eyed, his mask still clenched in one hand, a shadow of stubble on his upper lip. “Eeesh! You were the ones using the lift!”
“Sorry,” Seungcheol patted Chan on the arm and Chan frowned up at him, uncomforted. Seungcheol didn’t blame him.
“Shall I?” Joshua asked, and pressed Seungkwan and Jeonghan’s bell.
Seungcheol kept his arm around Chan’s shoulders, gripping tight. He felt the weave of Chan’s jacket under his fingertips, just very slightly bobbling from wear.
With an electric buzz, the door was released from the inside. Joshua shot a look at Seungcheol and then pushed it open.
“Hello there, hyungs!” Seungkwan was calling as they entered, his voice coming through from the open living room door within, and Seungcheol tried to look, even as he automatically toed his shoes off, and then, suddenly, there he was.
Jeonghan.
Graceful limbs framed in the sunlight spilling into the corridor from the living room, the light making his hair glow like a halo. Walking towards them.
Relief kicked through Seungcheol’s chest, warm like spilt tea.
And then cold again. Up close, Jeonghan’s expression was awful. He looked confused, more than anything, the kind of confusion Seungcheol had only really seen when people came round from sedation, or after taking something they shouldn’t. Had Jeonghan… But he didn’t, he didn’t do that. Seungcheol knew that. Control had always been too important to him.
“Ask them,” Seungkwan prompted from somewhere over Jeonghan’s shoulder. “Ask them, hyung.”
Chewing his lip, Jeonghan seemed to study each of their faces. He was wearing his favourite pyjama trousers with the little ice-cream cones on, and a pink t-shirt, worn and loose enough to fall aside and show his collarbones. He was barefoot, too. Perhaps that was why he looked oddly young?
Now, Jeonghan frowned and reached out, poking Chan in the tricep. Then he lifted his hand towards Joshua’s face, before letting it fall again. Still those scary, wide eyes.
“I told you, Jeonghan-hyung,” Seungkwan said gently. “It’s not a joke. I promise you.”
Jeonghan turned his gaze to Seungcheol. It did something to Seungcheol, when Jeonghan gave him that look, always had. He always wanted to have the answer to that question, if only he could ever figure out what the question was.
“Coups-seu-yah,” Jeonghan said slowly, getting as much length as possible out of it. He frowned at Seungcheol, like he was struggling to focus his eyes. Like he wasn’t sure who he was seeing. Seungcheol wanted to reach for him, gather him up, comfort him somehow.
Jeonghan took a breath. “What year is it, Coups-seu-yah? Tell me the truth.” He frowned, completely serious. “You have to tell me the truth.”
Nonplussed, Seungcheol blinked at him. “2023?”
And with a sudden noise of aggravation, Jeonghan was looking away from him, stepping away from him, hand flailing out in dismissal, but he might as well have punched Seungcheol in the face with it. Jeonghan had never rejected him, ever, but now…
“Year of the Rabbit?” Seungcheol added quickly, like that might help, and felt his heart kick with panic in his chest. “Seriously, what the..?”
“Tell them, Jeonghan-hyung,” Seungkwan cut in patiently. “Tell them what you told me.” He too was still in pyjamas, clutching his phone in both hands before him like an amulet, his hair puffed into a dandelion.
Jeonghan looked at each of them again, staring, studying.
“We’re on Yeoseodo.” Turning, Jeonghan met Seungcheol’s eye again, his jaw set, eyes bleak. “We’re filming ‘13 Castaway Boys’. It’s January 2016. We’re on Yeoseodo.”
-
“We were on Yeoseodo, last night we were there,” Jeonghan repeated, and put his head forward into his hands. He was sitting on the sofa, and on either side of him Chan and Joshua leant in, tentatively stroking his arms and getting shaken off for their pains. From the armchair opposite, slightly bent forward to keep his hammering heart in his chest, Seungcheol watched. He didn’t dare get closer, he didn’t want to know what he’d do or say if Jeonghan rejected him again.
“But they don’t have the budget for this,” Jeonghan said, not for the first time. He looked up and around the living room, and at each of them, at Jun, Minghao, Vernon, Soonyoung and Jihoon now also arrived and all standing around in various places, looking just as helpless as Seungcheol felt. “No one has budget for this. This can’t be fake. It would be a great hidden camera, I’ll give you that, but it can’t be.”
His line of thought was evidenced all around the room – lamps knocked over, cushions thrown everywhere, the bookshelves emptied. Before their arrival, Jeonghan had clearly been looking for recording devices and whatever else had changed his tenacity hadn’t.
“It isn’t a stunt, I promise,” Joshua said now. He opened his phone. “Look, see? 2023. I can show you my photo gallery, it’s all date indexed, it…”
“No.” Jeonghan grabbed his hands, pushing them and the phone down to his lap. “No.” He took a long breath, visibly wrestling himself into composure. “No, thank you. I don’t want to see more pictures of him… of me. I get it, I just… How could this happen?”
“Do you feel ill, hyung?” Chan prompted.
“It’s been like this since he woke up,” Seungkwan clarified quietly as Chan’s interrogation got more medically detailed, dropping several family-sized bags of snacks on the living room table and opening the first one himself. Vernon came forward immediately and picked up another, taking a handful and then offering it to Minghao. Minghao sniffed and took a few, draping himself round Vernon’s back.
Seungcheol studied them. The call with Jeonghan three days ago had been in the wake of Vernon and Minghao visiting Seungcheol in his studio and quite calmly announcing that they were an item. This revelation had apparently been on Jeonghan’s instruction, because as usual Jeonghan had figured it all out without being told. Good, Jeonghan had said, sighing, when Seungcheol explained, I told them they had a week before I went to you myself. So, how are we going to manage it? No one had ever handed Jeonghan a leadership certificate, and he always denied that role, but nonetheless he just was, because he was too good at it not to be.
The one person Seungcheol needed right now, to ask how to manage this, was Jeonghan.
Through a mouthful of popcorn, Seungkwan carried on speaking, coming closer to where Seungcheol sat to keep the conversation between just the two of them: “He really thought that he and I had been, like, sedated and airlifted out of Yeoseodo together or something for a stunt. I didn’t know how to prove to him that I was telling the truth other than by calling everyone. And I couldn’t write it in the group chat, you’d have thought I was drunk, or heaven help us Mingyu would have left his phone unlocked in his dressing room for this commercial shoot, or…”
“You’ve done a good job, Kwan-ah,” Seungcheol reached up and squeezed his arm reassuringly. He didn’t think the trembling of his own fingers, or their icy-fear coldness, would make it through the fluff of Seungkwan’s cardigan. “You did the right thing, calling us.” Taking a deep breath, he tried to think practically. First things first, that was what Jeonghan always said. “Has he had any breakfast or anything?”
“Not really. I got him to drink half a coffee and I think he ate some of the M&Ms I got from his stash.”
“You know where he keeps the M&M stash?”
“Obviously,” Seungkwan sniffed. “Harmony in this household is built on truth and honour, not subterfuge.”
“And did you tell anyone? Apart from us?”
Seungkwan rolled his eyes. “Who do you think I am?”
“He doesn’t… that guy? That choreographer he was seeing?”
“Been over for, like, two months.” Seungkwan took another handful of popcorn. “Keep up, hyung. Not that he ever sees anyone for more than half a year anyhow.” Seungkwan looked sideways, pouting in disapproval. “He runs away as soon as they try and get remotely serious. I keep telling him, no one ever found a husband like that!”
Seungcheol cleared his throat. It was important that he didn’t know too much about any member’s love life, because he was managing their work, not their entire existence, just like he’d talked about in counselling. Jeonghan made it easier than some of the others – he kept his relationships discreet, and rarely talked about them, even their beginnings or endings.
“Anyway,” Seungkwan continued, rolling his eyes, “he’s locked out of his phone, and of course he can’t remember the passcode anymore, so I don’t think we’ve got much chance to tell anyone except the people who now live in his parents’ old house, assuming they’ve kept the same landline.”
“Fuck,” Seungcheol said quietly. There came the sound of the door buzzer – someone got it and in came Wonwoo, still somewhere in the jetlag cycle after his endorsement shoot, looking dazed. Chan got up, going over to explain quietly to him, and Seungcheol saw the same emotional journey play out across Wonwoo’s face too – relief, confusion, bemusement, concern.
“Seokmin’s going to have an interesting day, between the colonoscopy appointment and this,” Seungkwan commented. “And someone needs to speak to Mingyu, he’s called me,” he looked at his phone, “five times in the last hour.”
“That’s everyone else, though, now,” Seungcheol looked around the room again.
“Do you want to number off?” Jeonghan interjected, sounding sarcastic. Perhaps just making it clear that he could hear them discussing him. His voice cut through the chatter, everyone else falling silent. Seungcheol had always wondered how he managed that. “Do you even still do it?”
“How else would we keep track?” Jun pointed out.
“One,” Seungcheol said, and looked at Jeonghan.
“Two,” this Jeonghan responded after a long pause, staring up at him, his expression a weird mixture of fear and appeal and accusation.
“Three,” Joshua added, and down the list they went, all the way to the gap at number nine that should have been Mingyu.
“Ah, what the fuck is going on,” Jeonghan murmured now, after Chan’s ‘Thirteen’ had echoed through the room to the accompaniment of Vernon crunching through mini chocolate pretzels. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. He’d taught Seungcheol how to do that, at some point - Seungcheol remembered it, Jeonghan’s hand low and warm on his stomach, telling him how to work his diaphragm. “Well, at least we’re still a band. Yesterday on Yeoseodo I thought we might not get out of the week without murder, so that’s something. And I suppose we’re successful enough, if we’re still going all these years later? If we can afford to live in different places now?”
“We’re one of the most successful third generation boy groups in Korea, hyung,” Chan said happily, which made Seungcheol laugh darkly despite the horror of the situation, because, yes, that was one kind of way to put it, even if no one was ever, ever, going to be in the most successful contender’s weight class.
Soonyoung hissed though, grabbing Chan’s arm.
“Careful! Don’t tell him things that could change the future!”
“He didn’t travel through time, Hosh,” Joshua said, after a moment. “He’s just lost his memory. Somehow. Do you have any idea how?” he asked, looking back at Jeonghan. “Anything at all?”
Jeonghan raised one perfect eyebrow. “I can’t say I remember.” It was delivered with such perfect, blank acidity that Seungcheol couldn’t help chuckling. Jeonghan shot him a sideways, assessing glance and Seungcheol’s gut twisted again – had that been the response Jeonghan wanted?
“Excuse me,” Jeonghan said, and got up. It was swiftly apparent that he was going to the bathroom, and once the door was closed behind him, Seungcheol tried to ignore a feeling of disquiet at having him out of sight. Jeonghan had been pushing his fingers at his temples as if his head ached, and Seungcheol knew, now, how to massage the pressure points in his neck to relieve that, but he couldn’t see how announcing this would be anything but unsettling.
“Last night was totally normal,” Seungkwan told the room, his serious tone regaining Seungcheol’s attention. It sounded like something he’d been going over in his head. “He’d been at a schedule in the day, I think it was physiotherapy for his arm. He came in for dinner, I ordered dakgalbi for both of us, we ate it, we talked. It was random stuff – boring mostly.”
“Like what? It might be important.”
Seungkwan frowned. “I don’t know! We argued about whether we needed to replace the boiler. They’ve stopped making his favourite type of hair mousse, he was scheming to get a bulk delivery before the stocks run out and then we googled how long that stuff keeps and whether freezing would help. I showed him some Tik Toks? There was something in one of them about cleansing your life from your ex, and you know how sentimental and dumb he is, we’ve still got stuff here from Sungmin the choreographer and even Kim Jinho and he was ages ago. I told him to sort it out, and he…” Seungkwan stopped and gave a self-conscious, dignified cough, “he had some reciprocal relationship advice for me, which we don’t need to dwell on, and then he made me watch pet rat videos even though he knows I don’t like their little hands, and then we watched a recording of Amazing Saturday. I feel asleep part way through and when I woke up on the sofa he was in bed. I washed up and went to my bed too, and then this morning… this.”
“So, you weren’t talking about Yeoseodo?” Joshua confirmed. “Or anything else about being rookies, about that year? About shows we’d done, places we’d been? Did you talk about Jeju? About fishing?”
Seungkwan waved Joshua to stop. “You think I haven’t asked myself that? The answer’s no. Not that I can recall. If I said something that made him think of Yeoseodo, it certainly didn’t bring it to mind for me. I can’t even remember the last time I thought about Yeoseodo at all. Well, when did any of us?”
Seungcheol frowned.
He’d been infuriated by the experience at the time, but in retrospect it had given them exposure, and now he could even see what good content it had been. The hilarity of taking a rookie group and telling them they were going on holiday and instead, boom, you’re castaways on a tiny island halfway to Jeju-do, no money, no phones, barely any clothes. Live together and make it work. And make it funny.
When he thought of the island, he thought of being cold, first. Then of being hungry. And the panic, the edge of panic he’d skirted towards that he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t lead them through something like that. That it could actually break them, hurt the band in ways he’d never be able to repair.
Jeonghan had done so much work on that shoot. Low key stuff, in between the stunts and the carefully designed moments for competition and conflict, keeping the kids in line and cooperating, and funny on their own terms, even as the novelty wore off and they got more and more tetchy when someone ate food without sharing. All their usual managers had been removed from them along with their clean underwear, and they’d had no idea what power MBC might have had to keep things in or out of the edit. Seungcheol had made a few attempts at rallying speeches, one or two at paternalistic discipline, but Jeonghan had held it all together through sheer force of personality.
For one reason or another, everyone wanted Jeonghan to approve of them. And over the years the relationships in the band had ebbed and flowed and matured and changed and rearranged themselves, but that had always held true.
“Well, what do we do now?”
It was Jihoon who’d spoken. Seungcheol looked across to see him now standing braced against the wall, arms folded. “Think about it,” Jihoon continued, “We’re meant to be promoting again next month. There are concerts coming up. And there are…” he paused, frowning, “Two hundred and sixteen songs we’ve done that Jeonghan-hyung doesn’t know exist.”
There was a noise from the other side of the room, and Seungcheol turned to see Jeonghan, back from the bathroom and now dressed in track pants and an oversized hoodie, his hair scraped back in the simplest of ties, the hint of shadow shaved from his chin. Armoured.
“You learn things pretty quickly, hyung,” Jihoon continued, with no apparent self-consciousness – why would he have? He was talking about music. “But not that quickly, not with the fan meeting coming up.”
Seungcheol stared at him. He was right. It was the thing that Seungcheol should have thought of first. The thing that, as leader, he should have started with. But he could see the flinch that crossed Jeonghan’s face at the words, and if he’d been within shoving distance of Jihoon, he would have done.
“And there was this massive pandemic, hyung,” Jun added, leaning in, eyes wide and eager. “Like SARS but a different SARS. It’s over now. Well… It’s not, but it kind of is? But for a while it was really, really nuts.”
After a few seconds, into the silence that had fallen, came the sound of Mingyu simultaneously calling everyone in the group chat.
“Someone – Chan,” Seungcheol pointed to him, “Chan, talk to Mingyu, and keep trying to get hold of Seokmin. Everyone else, go back to wherever you were. Don’t tell anyone anything, OK? Not even the managers. Not family or partners or anyone.”
They all nodded, Soonyoung wandering over to Seungkwan for a cuddle, Vernon and Minghao moving closer together.
“Don’t you think we ought to take him to hospital?” Jihoon insisted, eyes wide as the room turned back to him. He looked earnestly around them. He meant well, Seungcheol knew that too. He knew, after all these years, how to interpret Jihoon. “Well don’t you think? What if it’s a tumour or something?”
“I am here,” Jeonghan muttered.
Seungcheol studied him. This Jeonghan who looked just like Jeonghan, but wasn’t him. Same body, same face that Seungcheol last saw less than a week ago. But his eyes belonging to someone younger, someone Seungcheol hadn’t seen in years.
“What do you want to do, then, hyung?” Jihoon prompted, after another moment.
At that, Jeonghan stood up. He stretched and he sighed.
Once more, he looked around the room, at each of them. Studying them one by one as if he was trying to figure out which one was the mafia.
“What do you think?” Jeonghan replied slowly. “I want to take a nap.”
Seungcheol wanted to applaud him. Perhaps it wasn’t much of a joke, certainly not one of his best, but it achieved the effect. Half of the laughter in the room was relief, Seungcheol was sure, and he could feel it himself, the relaxation of his shoulders, the loosening of his chest as Jeonghan was… Jeonghan. And the Jeonghan of 2016, even that young Jeonghan – this young Jeonghan – had been overwhelmed so much of the time, in ways Seungcheol had only started to understand later when they actually learnt how to talk to each other. But nonetheless he had bloomed. And here he was, doing it again.
Jeonghan had been twenty then. They both had. That seemed so young, now.
“But that might be a good idea,” Minghao said seriously. “You woke up like this, right?”
On the other side of the sofa, Seungkwan tilted his head. “Yes, I think we established that.”
Minghao rolled his eyes, with the expression Seungcheol knew meant he felt he wasn’t appreciated in his own time. “I mean, you were asleep, yes? You were awake yesterday and you were fine. And then you went to sleep and when you woke up again, this. So maybe if you go back to sleep, you’ll… reset? Maybe your wandering consciousness isn’t correctly tethered?”
“Yeah!” Vernon leant forward, looking at Minghao and then back at Jeonghan with sudden animation. “Like when your laptop says it can’t run email, like, at all, and the server is broken and nothing works, and you spend ages trying to find what’s broken, and then you restart it and it’s all fine. Yeah?” He grinned wider as Minghao gave him a look like someone enchanted by the most rhapsodic poetry, and high-fived him before taking his hand again.
“Thanks,” Jeonghan said dryly. “But yeah. Maybe?” He stretched out again. His long limbs on his skinny frame. He was thinner, Seungcheol thought, than he used to be. They always joked that he never changed, that he was a vampire identical to how he’d been at debut, but he was a little thinner, because at Yeoseodo Seungcheol had walked behind him up hill paths in the wind and the rain, and now he suddenly remembered thick thighs under tight denim, a round butt in his jeans. “Anyway, we might as well try it. Yes. Anyone not in favour of voting for me to have a snooze, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
There was another round of appreciative tittering, and Seungcheol could only marvel at him.
“OK, OK, let’s get out of the apartment so hyung can rest,” Seungkwan instructed, suddenly hovering, seizing the cue. “Thanks for coming, thanks for coming, I’ll let you know how he is later.”
Dutifully, phones were unlocked, cars ordered and people started to leave. Seungcheol watched as several of them approached Jeonghan, almost formally, like bidding farewell to the hostess on leaving a party. Jeonghan laughed at them with a gummy smile, shoving them away after only seconds of contact: “Eh! I’m fine! I’ll be fine!”
Chan, he allowed much longer. “My baby,” Jeonghan murmured at him as they parted, and then looked away, flushing a bit. Chan was pink too, but he squeezed Jeonghan’s arm again.
Chan was older, now, than this Jeonghan. Although Seungcheol never had viewed Chan as young. Jeonghan hadn’t either, Seungcheol suspected, more found it a way to deal with how intimidatingly competent Chan was at everything, which Seungcheol had never really solved.
Seungcheol lingered. He realised, watching, that Joshua was too. No one questioned it.
And then the door closed behind Soonyoung, the last of the other members to leave, and Seungcheol turned to look at Jeonghan again, aware of Joshua and Seungkwan watching.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Seungcheol prompted gently. “We don’t have to tell anyone else. We’d need to ask the managers, for the NDAs and everything. But we can. Low key.”
“Yeah,” Joshua nodded. “What if it is something they can fix? Shouldn’t we get it checked out?”
“What if it isn’t?” Jeonghan shot back. Then he held up a hand, apologetic, reeling the emotion back in, even only in front of the three of them. “Honestly, I do want to try just sleeping it off. No point creating a huge fuss over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Seungcheol was beginning, but Seungkwan spoke over him, sounding small for the first time all day.
“I’m sorry, hyung. I shouldn’t have called everyone and made a big deal of it without checking with you first. But I couldn’t think how else to prove it to you, and,” he took a big sigh, “and I was scared.”
“I was a lot for you to handle alone,” Jeonghan said reassuringly. Seungcheol pictured with sick vividness just how agitated Jeonghan must have been. Must still be. Keeping this level of composure now must be exhausting him – no wonder he had a headache. “I should have trusted you were telling me the truth.”
“Well, you don’t know me that well, yet,” Seungkwan’s smile was small and a little sad. “To you I’m a freakishly socially competent and handsome eighteen-year-old who steals chocolate. There’s a lot of stuff that happened… is still to happen, I guess, from where you’re standing.”
“You still steal chocolate, to be fair,” Joshua commented, and Seungkwan made an outraged noise as he shoved him. Jeonghan giggled, and Seungcheol caught it as he shot a quick, grateful look Joshua’s way.
Seungkwan had a point, Seungcheol thought. This Jeonghan understood them all differently from the way their current Jeonghan would. He was cycles and cycles behind on those ebbs and flows of friendship, the break-ups and make-ups of band intimacy, the ways that they’d grown closer and then, in new ways, slightly apart, as they grew up.
“It’s lunchtime,” Joshua said now. “What are you going to do until evening?” And then, when they all looked at him. “It doesn’t feel like a nap would be enough? What? Like you know more than I do about the science of this?” He looked back at Jeonghan, expression softening. “Hey, you want to go to the cinema? Then you don’t have to talk to anyone – and if it’s just the two of us we should get in fine without being spotted as long as we’re sensible.”
Jeonghan looked at him, then Seungcheol, eyebrow raised. “That’s an issue, now?”
“That can be an issue,” Seungcheol confirmed. “But Joshua’s right, we usually manage if we’re incognito, it’s not like we’re B… It’s not like we’re so famous we can’t be on the street, you know?”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Joshua repeated. “Let’s forget all about this – no pun intended, OK? Let’s just hang out and not stress you anymore. And hey, there’s another Avatar movie! It took literally all this time, but we got there. I know you liked the first one a lot, and I don’t think you’ve seen the sequel yet, so it shouldn’t be too confusing or give you any brain loops or anything.”
“I appreciate that.” Jeonghan sucked his teeth for a second. He looked around him at the apartment, the mess, the displaced photos. Photos of him, Jeonghan had said. Not photos of me. “Yeah. OK. Sure. Let’s do it.”
“Great.” Joshua opened his phone, “I’ll find the showing times and get a car sorted. Go and finish getting dressed and get ready. I’ll even buy you popcorn.”
Jeonghan nodded, smiling slightly at the joke.
“You’ll tell me if anything changes?” Seungcheol prompted Joshua, whilst Jeonghan was still changing. It was embarrassing how much he wanted to ask to come too. This Jeonghan, any Jeonghan, would probably find it hilarious. But it wasn’t wrong that the fewer of them there were, the less likely it was that they would attract attention. It had been a good idea of Joshua’s, even if Seungcheol wished he’d thought of it first. But Jeonghan of 2016 had been a lot closer to Joshua than to Seungcheol when it came to admitting vulnerability – which Seungcheol knew had been as much to do with the way he himself had treated vulnerability at the time.
“Of course,” now Joshua patted Seungcheol’s arm, then turned: “And Seungkwan-ah, perhaps if I stay here with the two of you tonight?”
“I’m staying too,” Seungcheol said, before he could second-guess if it sounded pathetic, and turned to Seungkwan as well. “I’ll sleep on the floor, whatever, I don’t care.”
Joshua folded his arms. “What about Kkuma? Isn’t your hyung out of town from today?”
Seungcheol paused, hissing.
He could ask Seungheon to stay tonight after all. Tell him that he needed to be out and once again lean on his elder brother to help him through. That would be safe, Seungheon was safe. Seungheon could give less of a crap about PLEDIS management protocol and would never tell anyone anything, even though Seungcheol knew they approached him sometimes. And Seungheon would stay if Seungcheol asked. Of course, he would. He was notionally there to look after Kkuma, after all, but really just as much in Seoul to look after Seungcheol, even if they almost never acknowledged it.
But Seungheon should arrive at this conference early, just as planned. There were three days of pre-event networking, and he deserved to be part of that. He had a life and a career too, and he’d done so much for Seungcheol already.
And Joshua and Seungkwan would be with Jeonghan. Why would he need Seungcheol there too, really? What more could Seungcheol offer?
It itched in his mind, though, the idea of leaving.
At that moment, Jeonghan emerged. Dressed in an attempt to be unnoticeable, a straightforward grey tracksuit, a face mask and a baseball cap.
“I’ll wait here until you get back, anyway,” Seungcheol told him firmly, as though Jeonghan had heard any of the preceding conversation. Jeonghan smiled at him, maybe, under the mask, although perhaps it was more bemusement, and left.
-
Mingyu’s phone call came half-way through the weird, anxious afternoon. Seungkwan had gone off to keep a volleyball-playing appointment, which was of course the right thing to do when there was nothing to be done. Seungcheol, instead, had been deep into a Google spiral on amnesia. He had not been expecting to find that it was so common, could happen for so many reasons – which seemed to include the gamut of normal human activities - and was so rarely actually diagnosed to a specific cause. There were specific causes though, and it was a pretty horrifying list.
“Hyung, are you with him?” was Mingyu’s first question. “They said he can’t get into his phone, I want to talk to him. I’ve got my lunch break now.”
“He’s at the cinema with Joshua,” Seungcheol closed the tab on tropical parasites, and then double-checked he’d had it on incognito setting. This was Seungkwan’s laptop, loaned with minimal argument – if you look up the internet history that’s on you – and complex injunctions about the battery.
Seungkwan and Jeonghan’s apartment was like that – a little fussy, usually very neat and clean, domestic and unashamed about it. Seungcheol hadn’t realised until he’d seen their apartment the first time how much both of them must have been suffering in the shared masculine squalor of the dorm. This place smelt like lavender and their preferred fabric softener, and whenever he came over, he’d appreciate it again, until his nose got used to the scent. It was what Jeonghan smelled like, if you hugged him when out and about. They had fancy cooking gadgets that mostly went unused, a little row of succulents on the kitchen countertop and a coffee table covered in actual paper magazines. It was a marked contrast to the functional black and white utility of Seungcheol’s own apartment, although Jeonghan had never seemed to mind that and probably they socialised more at Seungcheol’s than here, in the final balance. Seungkwan was a bit of a social butterfly, and tended to have people over, and sometimes Seungcheol knew Jeonghan came over to see him more to escape than for any other reason. Jeonghan was very good at talking to people, but didn’t particularly like to, and Seungcheol was more than happy to let him lie on the sofa reading, whilst Seungcheol gamed and Seungheon cooked dinner.
He still wasn’t entirely sure why, given their apparent incompatibilities, Jeonghan and Seungkwan had decided to move in together. But they were happy, and he had to remember that he didn’t know everything about Jeonghan – no one could, unless Jeonghan wanted to let them.
“OK,” Mingyu was saying, in a considering tone. “What do you want me to do?”
“Finish your schedule in Japan,” Seungcheol told him automatically, wrenched back from his thoughts. He leant forward, pinching his fingers at the bridge of his nose. “He’d want you to. He does want you to. And besides, he’s already freaked out over how different Chan and Wonwoo look now, and you probably win the growing award.”
“Ha ha,” Mingyu said sarcastically. He sounded slightly hurt.
“Of course, it would be great if you were here,” Seungcheol added quickly, and not insincerely. “But then you’d have to explain why you were cutting that shoot short, and management would get involved, and it would all… you know… And maybe he will sleep it off. Chan told you that plan, right? We’re going to leave it twenty-four hours. And you deserve to finish that shoot, you worked hard to get that endorsement.”
‘Preening’ shouldn’t be audible, but Seungcheol could detect Mingyu doing it.
“OK, hyung,” Mingyu conceded. “I’ll stay here for now.” And then, just as Seungcheol thought they were ending the conversation: “And how are you?”
“Oh, fine, you know.” Seungcheol found the seam of Seungkwan and Jeonghan’s sofa and dug his nail into it.
“You’re doing a good job. Don’t worry.”
Seungcheol bit back his cackle of laughter at either of those statements. “Thank you, Mingyu-yah.”
-
Slumped on Seungkwan and Jeonghan’s sofa, Seungcheol startled awake from a shallow sleep, a nightmare of an empty sea, a deep, dark, Mariana trench, and him all alone in it, looking and looking into the black cold.
He grabbed his phone, heart still racing. It was just after four in the afternoon. Jeonghan and Joshua weren’t even due back yet. There was a smattering of messages in the group chat, one from his hyung asking if he was OK, some work-related emails, something from his personal trainer. He answered his hyung and set everything else aside.
He was still the only one in the apartment. Stretching, he got up and made his way to the bathroom. His next stop was the coffee machine, which he stared at for a while before going to the cupboard for the freeze-dried fancy instant instead. It had been the type and length of sleep to leave him feeling groggier than when he’d started, and breaking Seungkwan’s beloved coffee machine wasn’t going to improve anyone’s day. Usually, when Seungcheol wanted to use it, Jeonghan operated it for him, and sometimes Seungcheol worked out his debt making freezer cookies from the pre-mixed dough you could buy in a tube and slice into discs like sausage. It was barely work but Jeonghan always praised him for it, breaking into the batch before they were cool and licking gooey chocolate chips from his teeth like a triumphant shark.
There were some photos on the fridge that Seungcheol had never really studied before, including one of Jeonghan in front of Tokyo Disneyland – he’d taken that trip with the choreographer he’d been dating. Seungcheol remembered overseeing some of the NDA stuff. In the photo he was grinning, doing a cute pose in front of the castle, wearing a pirate hat. A polaroid – not totally safe, but as safe as it got, because there was no negative, nothing digital to screenshot or share. This must have been what Seungkwan had meant about Jeonghan holding onto things, Seungcheol supposed.
Seungcheol realised he was picking at the edge of the print, and pulled his hand away.
The fridge door also had a shopping list on a little pad with poodles on, and a schedule for gym classes, and some affirmations in Seungkwan’s handwriting. Their magnets were big, sturdy circles, unadorned, they probably bought a pack.
Jeonghan always took well to adulthood. That had been true from the day Seungcheol first met him. Jeonghan seemed to have grasped something about how to make sensible decisions. How to take out a situation and rotate the angles of it, and find a good answer. Maybe it was not having been in dorms until his twenties, that lack of institutionalisation. Maybe it was just Yoon Jeonghan.
Pouring coffee granules into a mug freehand, Seungcheol judged he’d probably put in far too many. None of the kitchen drawers seemed to contain a spoon, so he carefully poured some out freehand again into the food waste bin. He stirred the boiling water with a chopstick from the draining board.
This was the first time maybe ever that he’d felt more in control of a situation than Jeonghan was. Or like Jeonghan wasn’t the first person he could ask for help. Ask what to do next. For the first time in ten years.
The coffee was too hot, but he blew on it, cradling the mug in his hands, adrenaline keeping them chilly.
-
Back from the cinema, clutching an unexplained giant Minions plushie, Jeonghan sat on the sofa close to Joshua, with his legs tucked up under him, and shivering slightly. Seungcheol passed him a blanket that was draped over one of the sofa arms and Jeonghan smiled up at him for a moment, closed mouth, eyes still tense.
Jeonghan’s eyes were so expressive. Seungcheol was amazed, sometimes, by the emotions you could read in them, even if Seungcheol didn’t always understand why they were there. The way he could use them, the way he could get a laugh just from the smallest change in his facial muscles. Seungcheol liked him wide-eyed best, the moments when he was so surprised and delighted that he looked like a frog.
Now, Jeonghan kept looking around the flat. Especially the ceiling corners, where the cameras would be.
“Americano, Americano, Decaf Americano, weird herbal mixture,” Seungkwan announced, walking through from the kitchen area and handing the mugs out from a little tray. He’d got back from his sports session shortly before Jeonghan and Joshua’s return, and showered and dressed already. “Hyung, this is your favourite. Or at least I hope it is? Was?”
Jeonghan sniffed his herbal tea suspiciously, but did take a sip. At the taste he made a small, pleased noise. “Joshuji,” Jeonghan began. He looked around at them, Seungkwan, then Joshua, then Seungcheol, then back to Seungkwan again. “Can I come and stay with you and Coups?” He gestured at the pictures still left on the wall. The ‘family gallery’ Seungcheol knew he and Seungkwan had taken impish delight in assembling. One or two were from the earlier days, but unsurprisingly most dated from later on – from when Seungkwan and Jeonghan had been closer. “I keep seeing him. Me. It’s…” he ran a hand over his face. “I know it’s me, but… But that makes it worse.”
“We can take them down?” Seungkwan offered, but Jeonghan winced, shaking his head.
“It’s not just the pictures. It’s his… my… his stuff. His toothbrush. His…” he cleared his throat, swallowed. “His life. That I have to have, because it’s mine, I mean…”
“It’s fucking weird for you,” Joshua summarised, and Jeonghan nodded gratefully.
“Stay at mine, then,” Joshua agreed. “Of course you can, and I know Travis won’t mind.”
Jeonghan blinked at him.
“Joshua lives with his boyfriend, Travis,” Seungcheol explained gently, trying to get the pronunciation right. He liked Travis, Travis was one of the most trusted member-partners Seungcheol had. “He’s Canadian. Teaches at SNU. He’s really nice.”
Jeonghan’s eyes were so wide Seungcheol could almost laugh. “They let you do that?”
“They have to.” Seungcheol explained, feeling a little smug despite everything. “We really are pretty successful.”
“It’s not what you’d call easy,” Joshua commented. “I think he’s literally on the payroll as a personal assistant for plausible deniability. Which! Should not even be a thing in this day and age. But it’s how it gets done.”
“We can do that sort of thing, now,” Seungcheol reassured again. “You…” he stopped. Swallowed. “Several of the members have dated people, and it’s all stayed quiet. Seokmin’s engaged to his partner, although of course he doesn’t live with her yet, and they’re going to have to be quite patient about it.”
“I see,” Jeonghan chewed his lip. Darted a glance again at each of them. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Seungcheol lives with his hyung,” Joshua told him. “He moved to Seoul a couple of years back. They have a dog, it’s cute.”
As he’d been speaking, a range of expressions had passed over Jeonghan’s face too quickly for Seungcheol to interpret. He didn’t think any of them were pity or disdain at Seungcheol’s evident single status, even if living with your family at nearly thirty didn’t really scream the rockstar dreams they’d had as rookies.
“Your hyung?” Jeonghan prompted him. “Like Seungheon? Your biological brother?”
“Yeah.” Seungcheol looked up, the thought hitting. “But he’s off to Busan from today and for the next week, so his room is free. You could absolutely stay with me, if you’d rather not be here. And then we wouldn’t have to tell Travis at all.”
Travis was the most trusted member-partner, which was not to say totally trusted.
“Mine might be better, though,” Joshua countered quickly. “It’s closer to here. You know, if you’d forgotten something and needed to pop back for it or for whatever.”
“You don’t have a spare room though,” Seungcheol pointed out.
“Well, we kind of do, it’s not like we use the second bedroom to sleep in. Travis does some of his conference calls there, but we can move him to the kitchen for that, it wouldn’t be a problem at all,” Joshua leant forward on the sofa, frowning. “I do think it would be better at mine.”
“But this makes way more sense!” Why was Joshua being so insistent about it? Except perhaps from affection for Jeonghan, and wanting to keep him close, which Seungcheol could respect and understand, but the logic of the situation was surely pretty clear.
Seungkwan, ever the MC, jumped in, speaking over whatever Joshua’s response might have been: “Well, Jeonghan-hyung? Where would you rather go?”
Jeonghan looked between them again. He gave Seungcheol another look that Seungcheol couldn’t begin to interpret.
“I’ll go with S. Coups,” Jeonghan said finally, tone light like it didn’t matter. He took another sip of his tea. “I want to meet the dog.”
-
“Let me know when you want to eat,” Seungcheol called out, sitting down on his own sofa and putting his phone and wallet on the coffee table. From the bathroom, he heard Jeonghan’s answering murmur of assent. It could almost have been a normal afternoon.
There were more messages in the chat that he’d missed during the taxi ride back from Jeonghan’s apartment to his own. Nothing specific or direct, but a flurry of interaction the way there always was when one of them was upset, when they wanted to be there for each other. Little unimportant things, shared and liked and remarked on, the digital equivalent of nudging someone’s shoulder in companionship.
Once upon a time, in this Jeonghan’s time, there wouldn’t have been any option about it. They’d lived on top of each other, crammed into the bunks that were pushed into the bedrooms side by side. There had been no privacy, barely even in the bathroom because there was no time for any of them to shower or even use the toilet alone. The kids had been living like that so long that they’d got used to it, and each other, but Seungcheol knew Joshua and Jeonghan had struggled to adjust to it even more than he had. At least he’d been in another trainee dorm and knew the score.
It made sense that Jeonghan had assumed Seungcheol and Joshua lived together, in the Great Dorm Diaspora. The lines had been more firmly drawn, once, between the age groups, and even though they’d all been friends, they’d stood on their dignity more carefully. And of course it mattered more, the difference between seventeen and eighteen, twenty and twenty one, they were threshold ages that meant specific things and at the time had seemed important, like twenty-five had seemed old, which it did not when you were twenty-seven.
There was a skittering sound of clipped claws on the laminate floor, and Seungcheol leant over to scoop Kkuma up into his lap, burying his face in her warm fur and letting her comfort him through the deep echo of worry still running through his body. “Did I wake you up, huh? Did Appa wake you up? Did you get a good sleep?”
She licked his face, then squirmed away, dropping to the floor to walk away and then turn, look impatiently at him, and then walk back up to his ankles again.
“Oh, I see, you have never been fed in your whole life. Is that how it is? Is that how it is, huh?” With a groan, he pushed himself up off the sofa again, discarding his phone on the coffee table.
“She’s cute,” Seungcheol heard Jeonghan saying, and he turned to see Jeonghan standing in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the frame, arms crossed. Nonchalant, or giving a good impression of it. “You’re cute with her.”
“Yah!” Seungcheol protested, but he couldn’t help grinning. He wanted this Jeonghan to like Kkuma. He knew that his usual Jeonghan would never, ever, have said anything negative about her, even if he thought it.
“Nice to have a pet,” Jeonghan observed, in the tone of someone who thought it was nice for people who liked pets to have them, and themselves to not. Seungcheol grinned again. Yes, that was Jeonghan.
“It’s good for me,” he agreed. He tried to think how to put it into words. Whether he should. Whether he needed to. Jeonghan – the real Jeonghan – knows about the sequence of events that led to Kkuma, so they’d never really had to talk it through. But then what explanation did a celebrity need for owning a small dog?
“I’m going to give her dinner,” Seungcheol explained. “I guess it’s kind of early for us to eat, but it’s not like we had lunch, so… shall I order something?” He could feel the restlessness from his fingers to his toes, the urge to achieve something. Fixating on ensuring Jeonghan was fed wasn’t the worst way to focus it, even if maybe it came off a little obsessive.
“You know what I like.” Jeonghan padded across the floor in his own slippers, the ones that, as Seungcheol had explained to him, he’d bought after lengthy complaints about the heating of Seungcheol’s floors and left specifically in the apartment. Going to the fridge in the open-plan kitchen that formed one end of Seungcheol’s living area, Jeonghan opened the door with an expression of mild curiosity, then made a happy noise on seeing the chocolate mousse pots. He pulled one out, tore off the foil lid and went straight in with his tongue to lick the contents without even locating a spoon. It was so characteristic that again, Seungcheol could almost have forgotten there was anything unusual going on. Jeonghan moaned at the taste: “You definitely know what I like.”
“Yeah, those are yours,” Seungcheol smiled. “Must-have for movie night.”
Jeonghan’s satisfied grin split his face like a Halloween mask. Something in the set of his shoulders relaxed. “Nice.”
Still smiling, Seungcheol got Kkuma’s food out of her own little dog-only mini-fridge (with bow magnets on it, he was whipped and he knew it and he was fine with it), carefully putting the contents of a sachet, some extra powder supplements and one vitamin pill into a bowl. By this point she was dancing around his legs, excited as any creature had ever been about anything.
“You always say I don’t need to feed her anything this complicated,” Seungcheol explained. He felt the need to, because the silence of Jeonghan not saying the teasing that had become almost ritualistic was so weird. “You say she’d just like to go out and catch a dirty rat and tear it to pieces all bloody like a wolf. You say, never forget she’s just a tiny, fluffy wolf.”
Jeonghan cackled. “That’s funny, that’s what I think about myself. I guess future me found a reason to say it.”
Seungcheol tilted his head. “You think you’re a wolf?”
“Don’t look so worried! I just mean that I’m not fluffy. I pose fluffy. I get all dolled up, don’t I, like her? Styled, cleaned, little bows in my hair. But I’ve got fangs, just like a wolf does. You can enjoy being groomed, and still have sharp teeth.”
Seungcheol stared at him. He’d known that, of course, after a fashion, both that it was true and that Jeonghan thought that way about it. He’d just never heard Jeonghan say it out loud. Jeonghan usually kept the insights on the inside, even if he saw things more clearly than most of them.
Did this Jeonghan judge him, for living with family, at this point? Does the current Jeonghan? The current Jeonghan knew the reasons why, was very supportive of the whole thing – it might even have been his suggestion, certainly he championed it. That wouldn’t necessarily mean he didn’t find it a little pathetic.
This Jeonghan, 2016 Jeonghan, didn’t know any of this was coming. Neither did 2016 Seungcheol, of course, at the time. They had been stuck in that dorm and they didn’t know if they’d ever have anything like enough money to live less than thirteen to an apartment, and whether that would be a problem. If 2016 Seungcheol had known, he’d probably have hoped to be living on his own. To be that rich but also that confident. 2016 Seungcheol had thought anxiety went away when you got older and richer, and if you ignored it enough. 2016 Seungcheol was not always helpful.
“You’re worrying,” Jeonghan said, more softly. He’d come to stand closer, the mousse pot still in one hand.
“Oh! No, not really!” Seungcheol winced. “I mean, I am, of course I am, but I was actually…” he cut himself off, shaking his head. “I was going to say a lot’s changed. Clearly, I’m not any smoother.”
“No, you never were,” Jeonghan told him, not unkindly. “Well, order me dinner, then.” He poked Seungcheol lightly in the upper arm. It was the first time they’d touched that day. Seungcheol felt one of the tight twists in his chest loosen, slightly.
“Let’s sit down. I’ll get my laptop, you can look at the menu properly. Chinese food?”
“Mmmm, oh yeah, please.” Jeonghan groaned with eagerness, and Seungcheol had to giggle again.
Laptop between them, Seungcheol brought up the menu of the place Jeonghan always claimed was his favourite.
“You usually get pork tangsuyuk, with kkanpunggi on the side that you make me order but then eat yourself,” Seungcheol commented, and then froze, wondering if that was an unsettling thing to have said. But Jeonghan’s grin had got wider again and he gave a little cackle, almost like himself.
“I’m so rude to you, aren’t I, leader-nim?”
Seungcheol laughed. When Jeonghan smiled at him like that, that impish confidence, he was always helpless to do anything but smile back.
“I’m sorry I’m worrying you. I can tell that I am,” voice gone low, Jeonghan leant a little closer. “When I last saw you, what was my yesterday, you were trying to get the kids to share the last remnants of the dried squid before someone resorted to cannibalism, and even then you didn’t look this stressed.”
“Fucking Soonyoung and the fucking dried squid.” Seungcheol ran a hand over his face. “I’d forgotten all about that. Oh, thank God I had you with me then.”
“I’m with you now,” Jeonghan murmured softly.
And leant the rest of the way in, and kissed him.
His lips were warm, and tasted of spearmint, as if he’d brushed his teeth recently. Seungcheol felt the shape of them, the gentle pressure that Jeonghan always started kisses with, so that you would push back, asking for more.
The kick of memory landed quickly, just not quickly enough.
“Wait,” Seungcheol pulled back. He was breathing too fast. He tried to edge backwards on the sofa, away.
Jeonghan was looking at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. He was stupidly beautiful, freshly kissed.
“Wait,” Seungcheol held up his hands. “Wait. See. You won’t know. You wouldn’t know. But. We don’t do that. Not anymore.”
-