Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

To know me is to hate me / Is to hate what I've become
It's to watch me as I'm falling / From that ladder's last rung
It's to feel bad, like a secret you can't keep in / I'm not the way I was
I'm not the way I was

But to feel it, to see it / The look in all their eyes
Is to breathe in, to be in / The good grace of that Godlight
It's to have it in your hands / The one thing you wanted all your life
It's all mine

— “Godlight,” Noah Kahan

***

Every evening, when Jisung stops working and looks out the window of his apartment, Hyunjin’s six-foot-tall face stares back at him from a billboard near Yeongdeungpo Square. Two weeks ago, when the billboard had gone up, Jisung had simply pretended not to see it. By now, it’s a fixture of Jisung’s life. It’s Jisung, his tiny home, and Hyunjin, holding a bottle of designer fragrance in one delicate hand. 

Jisung sends his last email of the day, the final draft of a girl group track with a bright, catchy chorus attached, and rubs his eyes with his knuckles. There’s a familiar tightness in his chest whenever he looks at Hyunjin. Sometimes he closes the curtains during the day, so he isn’t tempted to glance over at the window, but without the sunlight, his life feels even smaller than it is. He barely goes outside anymore. He doesn’t talk to anyone besides his family, who text and call him from Malaysia. In the past year, his world has shrunk from something enormous and limitless to something he can barely bring himself to contemplate. 

At this point, Jisung’s entire living room is essentially a recording studio, and he stays pretzeled in his desk chair while he waits for his family to call. After dark, Hyunjin is even more obtrusive than he is during the day, when the electronic brilliance of the billboard isn’t as stark a contrast against the grayscale buildings around it, and sometimes, if he stares too long, Jisung’s fingers twitch towards his phone. It would be so easy, he thinks, to call Hyunjin. To call Chan. To call any of them, besides Minho. They might even pick up. It might have been long enough by now. 

But Jisung knows, in the end, that he won’t do it. He’s caused too much damage. He’s destroyed too much to go back.

“Are you going out?” his mother asks, when Jisung joins the video chat. She’s in the living room of their family home, sitting on the couch next to Jisung’s father, and the webcam’s lens isn’t wide enough to capture both of their faces in full. Jisung looks at his own image, tiny in the top corner of the screen, and is relieved to see that it’s hard to tell how tired he is— the dark circles under his eyes can pass for shadows, the unnatural narrowness of his face for a bad camera angle. 

“I’m going out,” Jisung lies. “I’m still right in the middle of the city.”

“Good,” his mother says, in a tone that suggests she doesn’t entirely believe him. “Make sure you’re seeing your friends, okay?” She pauses, and Jisung sees her eyes flit sideways towards his father. He hears the specific intake of breath that means she’s about to talk around the thing that they don’t talk about. “I know you’re still struggling. But just because it was bad, back then — don’t let it ruin your life, Jisung-ah. It doesn’t have to be over.”

It’s the same exchange they have every time they talk — at this point, they’re just reciting their lines. Jisung’s father nods along, a concerned look on his face. Jisung’s brother, sitting at his desk in his own home, texts surreptitiously, his phone held just out of sight. 

“I won’t,” Jisung promises. “I’m doing fine. I just finished a project for work today.”

It’s only half a lie. Jisung’s learned, over the past year, to flavor what he says with fragments of truth — he tells his parents about the music he’s making, about the new entertainment agency he’s been writing songs for, and it’s just enough to keep his family from getting too worried, or from getting on a plane. He doesn’t tell them that the new entertainment agency doesn’t know his name. He doesn’t tell them that he emails his tracks when he finishes them and hasn’t written music of his own in a year. He doesn’t tell them that when he cost his bandmates their futures, he stopped being a person himself. 

“And your friends?” his mother presses. “How are they?”

It’s almost unnerving, Jisung thinks, how seamlessly his mother seemed to switch from calling the others Jisung’s members to calling them Jisung’s friends. As if they were just some boys Jisung knew in college, as opposed to the people who shared Jisung’s life for so many years that he’s forgotten how to exist without them. 

“They’re busy,” Jisung says, shrugging. Again, it isn’t a lie, or at least he doesn’t think it is. Chan and Changbin are producing on their own. Jeongin’s at university. Seungmin is acting, Hyunjin is modeling, Felix is in Australia. Jisung doesn’t know where Minho is, but it’s better that way. Thinking about Minho hurts too badly to bear. 

“We’re thinking of coming to visit in the winter,” Jisung’s father says. His voice is tentative — this isn’t the first time Jisung’s family has suggested coming back to Korea, temporarily or otherwise, and Jisung knows his father is waiting for Jisung to shoot him down again. “It’d be good for you to get out of that apartment.”

Jisung doesn’t have the energy to argue. “Yeah, maybe,” he says. “Depends what my schedule’s like.”

They all know, and they all know that they all know, that Jisung’s schedule is flexible. But it’s the closest Jisung’s come to agreeing to a visit, and no one calls him on it. 

Jisung manages another half an hour of talking before he begs off, claiming plans they all know he doesn’t have. These days, it gets dark so much earlier than he expects. Never going outside means missing the changing of the seasons, not noticing when summer slips away, and he doesn’t realize until he hangs up the call that the only light in the apartment is his computer screen and its blue electronic glow. 

It’s a quick walk downstairs to the first few floors of the officetel, but after the quiet darkness of Jisung’s apartment, the noise and the vibrancy of the lives that go on in the building around him is overwhelming. On the elevator, a man clutching a laptop stands too close to Jisung while he talks on the phone, and Jisung presses his fingers to his neck, counting his heartbeats as they quicken. On the second floor, he nearly crashes into two teenage girls leaving a nail salon, and he ducks into an empty hallway, across from a doctor’s office now closed for the day, to breathe. By the time he makes it past the security booth in the lobby and into the FamilyMart on the first floor, he’s lightheaded with the speed of his own pulse.

Jisung grabs noodles and a drink from the shelves of the FamilyMart as quickly as he can, the voices of the people around him far louder than he knows they actually are. 

No one’s watching you, he reminds himself, over and over. No one cares what you’re doing. No one knows who you are. 

But even with his face mask and his hat, even with his oversized sweatshirt and his undyed hair, he thinks he sees the cashier’s eyes linger on him a minute too long. A boy buying an armful of snacks brushes against him and he can’t tell if it’s on purpose; a middle-aged woman holds her phone up in front of her face and Jisung doesn’t know if she’s trying to get better reception or if she’s taking Jisung’s picture. He’s been out of his apartment for less than half an hour and his hands are shaking so badly he nearly drops his phone when he goes to pay. He tries to say thank you when he leaves the shop and his voice comes out cracked and strange. 

That’s how it is these days. Jisung falls asleep too late and wakes too early, unable to stop replaying the moment when Chan realized they were being disbanded over and over in his head. Packages and takeout arrive at his door when he wants them and he stretches his own money as far as it will go, reluctant to confront the complicated weight of the resentment he feels when he thinks about what his parents insist on giving him. 

Jisung heads back to the elevators that will take him up to his apartment, and stops in front of the glass doors that lead from the officetel out to the street. He knows that if his parents came to Seoul to visit, they’d find out what Jisung’s like lately— they’d find out the minute they tried to get Jisung outside. He imagines walking down the sidewalk with them, towards the subway or towards their hotel, and remembers the last time he’d tried to be in public; remembers a couple taking a selfie at the edge of a park, how the shutter sound of the cell phone camera had made his vision go black at the edges. How he’d had ended up braced against the wall of a nearby office building, hands on his knees, breathless. The world outside is a snakepit and there are too many bodies coiled around him, writhing and ready to bite. It’s easier, in the end, to stay home. 

Once back inside the safety of his apartment, Jisung drops his food on the kitchen counter and wanders around switching on lights. He imagines that each new pool of warmth is a talisman against his unknowable future, against the jaws of a life that might swallow him whole, and he tries to forget that tomorrow, he’ll have to get up and do all this again. He’s just about to get in the shower when the intercom by the door makes a chiming sound. 

Jisung frowns. He didn’t order food. His parents wouldn’t show up at his door unannounced, even if they lived in the same country; neither would his brother. His coworkers don’t even know what he looks like, or his real name. There’s no one who would be appearing like this, out of nowhere. He checks his phone, to make sure no one’s messaged him, but he doesn’t have any notifications. Baffled, he goes to the door and peers at the intercom.

There, on the tiny LCD screen, is Lee Minho. 

***

Minho’s flight from Tokyo lands at Incheon in the early evening. It takes him a long time to get off the plane and collect his bag; he has to walk slowly and even then, he limps. His knee, braced under his oversized sweatpants, is too aggravated after a day of travel to take his weight without feeling unstable, and despite the ibuprofen he took before the flight, the pain is starting to wear him down.

Once he’s outside, surrounded by in the ebb and flow of people walking up and down in front of the terminal with their suitcases, he drops onto a bench and stretches his leg out in front of him. All he has with him is the enormous suitcase he brought with him to Japan and it’s odd, to be returning to a country he’d never wanted to see again. The swarm of cars at the curb is cacophonous, a hundred engines idling at once, and Minho watches as a taxi driver leans out the window of the taxi and swears at a pedestrian for stopping in the middle of the crosswalk. He remembers sitting on an identical bench at the same airport a year ago, the same suitcase squeezed between his knees, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes to stop himself from crying. He rarely cried, back then. He rarely cries now. 

When his nose has started to go pink with cold and his knee has had enough of a break that he trusts it to get him across the street to the taxi stands, he hauls himself to his feet. He has a plan, as feeble as it is, one he’d considered carefully before leaving Japan. He can’t go home to Gimpo — he’s brought his parents enough shame already. He can’t go to Chan, or Changbin, or any of the other members — he hasn’t spoken to any of them in a year and he still feels too guilty to try. He tries to picture it, calling Chan and finding him in Seoul, and the way it makes him feel is too big to be contained by his body.

You should have let them eliminate me, he thinks to himself, and to an imaginary version of Chan. He’s leaning on his suitcase as he walks more than he’d like to admit. If I hadn’t debuted with you, none of this would’ve happened.

In the end, Minho had decided that the only person he could go to was Jisung. Jisung is the only person whose situation is even close to his own, the only person who might understand even a fraction of the raw, ugly guilt that’s left Minho limping across the street towards a life he’d thought he’d escaped. Minho doesn’t want to go to Jisung — he never wants to see Jisung again, if he’s being honest with himself, he never wants to look at Jisung and remember what Jisung had once been to him — but he doesn’t see another option that seems better. He lets his taxi driver help him heft his suitcase into the trunk of the car and ignores the look on the taxi driver’s face as Minho gingerly adjusts his right leg in front of him with his hands. He gives Jisung’s address to the taxi driver and hopes that Jisung hasn’t moved since the last time Minho saw him.

The taxi driver takes them away from the airport, weaving between the other taxis and the cars waiting at curbs to pick up passengers, and across Yeongjong Bridge towards Incheon proper. Minho watches out the window as the dark water on either side of the bridge turns to land and then as the trees lining the freeway turn into the buildings of Bucheon; by the time they reach Seoul, it’s been over half an hour, and every glimpse of the Han River leaves Minho both nostalgic and nauseous. 

The lights and billboards of Yeongdeungpo Square feel bright and oppressive when they finally come into view and the driver swears under his breath as the car in front of them comes to a sudden stop to let a group of people clamber out. He turns the taxi down a narrow side street crowded with buildings, still muttering, and pulls up in front of a familiar officetel. He looks at Minho in the rearview mirror.

“This right?” he asks. 

“This is it,” says Minho. He pays for the ride and gets out, nodding his thanks to the driver as the driver sets his suitcase on the sidewalk, and then he’s alone, standing beside his belongings on a street where he might know no one. He thumbs the edge of his phone in his pocket and wonders if he should call Jisung first, but what would he do if Jisung answered? It’s easier for Jisung to turn him away if Jisung isn’t looking at him, if he isn’t standing at Jisung’s door and demanding to take up space in Jisung’s life again. 

He wheels his suitcase into the officetel and takes the elevator to the floor Jisung used to live on. He hasn’t been here in a year, and he’s done his best in the intervening months to forget what happened the last time he was, but he remembers the way to Jisung’s apartment without having to try. Behind each door he passes, he imagines that someone’s life is unspooling before them, a hundred tiny hurts and a hundred tiny triumphs, and he wonders, as he walks, if he’s passing by the echoes of all the lives he might have lived, if he had stayed. If Jisung had let him stay.

Jisung’s apartment is as far from the elevators as it’s possible to get and by the time Minho makes it to his front door, his knee is aching again. He takes a deep breath, his heart pounding in his chest like a wild animal throwing itself at its cage, and rings the doorbell.

The faint sounds of movement from inside the apartment stop momentarily, and Minho imagines Jisung freezing and staring at the intercom. Eventually, Minho hears someone walking towards him, and then the door creaks open. 

Jisung and Minho stare at each other for a long, protracted moment. Jisung’s eyes are wide with surprise and it feels looking at a memory, at a life Minho took for granted. Jisung’s thinner than Minho remembers, his face narrower and more pinched around the edges, but he’s still Jisung, and Minho aches. Whatever Jisung did to hurt him, Minho remembers what it felt like to love him. 

Minho clears his throat. “Hey,” he says finally, glad that his voice sounds steadier than he feels. “I need to crash with you.”

Jisung says nothing. He blinks at Minho, as though trying to see if Minho will vanish when he shuts his eyes, and when Minho doesn’t go anywhere, he gapes at Minho instead. Minho tries to keep his face neutral and maintains eye contact, ignoring the way that looking into Jisung’s eyes seems to shorten the distance between the past and the present and put Minho right back where he was a year ago. It’s been long enough, he reminds himself. He’s allowed to want the answers he never got back then.

“Yeah,” Jisung says. His voice sounds croaky and he shakes his head, tries again. “Yeah, okay. Sure.” 

Jisung steps aside and lets Minho roll his suitcase inside. The apartment is tiny, only just large enough for one person to live comfortably, but the evidence of Jisung’s life is everywhere: three computer monitors arranged precariously on a desk, the same hulking padded gaming chair Jisung’s always liked to use for production, a bowl in the sink, clothes on the floor. Minho remembers, suddenly, when they’d lock themselves in Jisung’s studio at the company building, when Jisung would let Minho bend him over the desk and beg Minho to touch him. It feels like a lifetime ago. 

I don’t miss him, Minho reminds himself. I don’t want him back anymore.

“I didn’t know you were in the area,” Jisung says. Minho can tell he’s aiming for casual but he misses the mark by a mile.   

“I wasn’t,” Minho says. “I was in Japan for a year.”

“Dancing?” Jisung asks. He’s picked up a bottle of water from the kitchen counter and he’s started to methodically rip off the label. Minho recognizes the way Jisung’s hands are shaking, recognizes the first signs of panic. 

“Yeah,” Minho says. “I was teaching at a hip-hop studio for a while. And I was in an underground dance troupe.” He keeps his face as expressionless as he can. He doesn’t want Jisung to know how badly it hurts to talk about the things he can’t have anymore.

“Are you…visiting?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Minho admits. He knows Jisung is confused, knows Jisung is trying to find his footing on ground that feels like it’s moving, and if Minho didn’t still remember, with hideous clarity, the last time he and Jisung were together in this apartment, he might be more inclined to help. “But I had to leave Japan for a while. And I need somewhere to stay.”

Jisung nods, a little too frantic. “Why here?” he asks weakly. “Why not a hotel?”

“Money,” Minho says, shrugging. “I didn’t really make a lot in Japan. And I don’t have a job anymore.” 

Jisung blinks at him. “Your parents — ” he starts, before Minho cuts him off. 

“I’m their only son,” Minho says. “I can’t go crawling back to them, or ask them to pay for me to live somewhere else. Not after what I did.”

“What we did,” Jisung says, but it’s so quiet that Minho ignores it. 

“Look,” Minho says finally. His knee is throbbing and he can feel the muscles in his thigh start to tremble, the way they do when he needs to sit down. “Is it okay if I stay? You can tell me to leave. I just didn’t know where else to go.”

You’re the only one who knows what it’s like, Minho doesn’t say. You’re the only one who doesn’t have to ask questions, and you’re the only one who can’t turn me away.

“Yeah,” Jisung says. His eyes are still wide and his voice is robotic.  “You can stay.”

***

Jisung perches on the kitchen counter and watches as Minho silently starts to settle in. He digs his nails into his thigh through his sweatpants, hard enough that it hurts, but he still can’t make himself believe this is real. Minho is in his apartment, smelling like airplane and the dense smog of the city. Minho is breathing, five feet from Jisung. Minho is stretching his arms over his head and Jisung can see his stomach when his shirt rides up. If Jisung were braver, or stupider, or both, he could get to his feet and then drop to his knees, he could kiss the skin of Minho’s belly.

“There’s drinks in the fridge,” Jisung says. It comes out high-pitched and overly formal. He sounds like he’s talking to a stranger he’s putting up in his apartment, some distant cousin or a family friend. “And the bathroom’s right there, if you need to freshen up.” He pauses, shaking his head at himself, and adds, “But you already know that,”

“Thanks,” Minho says, not looking Jisung in the eye. “Sorry I’m not great company. I’m pretty wiped out.”

Jisung glances at the microwave. It’s not even eleven o’clock. A flight from Japan doesn’t even take three hours. 

“It’s pretty early still,” Jisung says. “If you want, we can — I don’t know, watch something. Talk. Eat.”

Even as he says it, he hears how lame it sounds. What could they possibly do in Jisung’s apartment, what drama could they possibly watch, when neither of them are willing to say the things that need to be said? When neither of them are ready? It would be impossible, Jisung knows, to go back to the way things were. There are things that you can find again, after you lose them, and there are things that you can’t, and the solid, certain way Jisung and Minho had loved each other is one of the things you can’t.

Minho doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he arranges his suitcase neatly in the corner of the living room before fishing out a bag of toiletries and taking it with him to the bathroom. From Jisung’s seat on the counter, he can’t see what Minho’s doing, but he hears the water turn on and splash into the basin of the sink. 

It’s a novel sensation, knowing something concrete about Minho’s life after so many months of his absence. After Minho left, there had been no guarantees. Jisung hadn’t known if Minho was happy, or healthy, or alive. Jisung hadn’t been able to imagine with any certainty what city Minho woke up in, or if he took the train to work in the morning, or who he talked to when he got home at night. Minho had become a hypothetical, a hungry place inside Jisung that swallowed Jisung inside out. 

“I think I’ll just go bed,” Minho says, over the sound of the faucet. “It’s been a long day.”

 Jisung thinks he knows what Minho’s really saying. It’s been a long year. 

Minho emerges from the bathroom, his face clean and pink, and yawns widely. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and an old t-shirt and it’s the first time it fully occurs to Jisung that Minho staying in his apartment means Minho sleeping in his apartment. 

“Wait,” Jisung says suddenly. “I don’t have a second bed.”

Minho looks around, although they both know that Jisung’s right. 

“No,” he says. “You don’t.” Minho’s eyes land on the narrow staircase up to the loft where Jisung’s mattress is and Jisung sees something strange flit across Minho’s face. Anger, maybe, at sharing a bed with Jisung? Hurt? The aftershocks of the way they had once been with each other, sharing their beds and their bodies?

“I can sleep on the floor,” Jisung offers. “Or the couch.”

Minho looks at the couch. Couch is a generous term, if Jisung’s being honest — it’s a small loveseat at best, and it’s about as long as the average five-year-old is tall. 

“You won’t fit,” Minho points out. 

“The floor, then.”

“Do you have extra sheets or blankets or something? The floor’s hard.”

Jisung thinks about this and realizes he doesn’t, in fact, have extra sheets. Or extra blankets. He shakes his head and waits for a minute, expecting Minho to offer to sleep downstairs and preparing his objections. You’re my guest, he could say. You’re tired from your flight. Please don’t make me wake up in my bed tomorrow wondering if you’re still here. 

But Minho doesn’t make the offer. His face is pinched, the way it used to get when he danced on sore muscles or not enough sleep, and he looks older than Jisung remembers. He opens his mouth and closes it again.

“I don’t mind sharing a bed if you don’t,” Minho says eventually.  “It’s fine.”

Jisung nods, and he can feel it when the reality of what Minho’s just agreed to settles over them both. The air in the room seems to curdle.

“Do you need to shower or anything?” Minho asks. “I’m done.”

Jisung peers at him. Something is off, besides the forced politeness, but he doesn’t know what it is. Minho seems reluctant to move from where he’s standing and when he finally does, crossing the apartment from the bathroom door to his suitcase, he moves stiffly, walking as though he’s in pain. 

“Are you okay?” Jisung asks, unable to stop himself. “You seem different.”

Minho’s eyes go hard and he turns his head to look at Jisung, although the rest of his face stays impassive.

“Of course I seem different,” he says. “I am different. A lot’s happened, Jisung.”

“I know,” Jisung says. He wants to push Minho on it, to get Minho to talk to him, but the old familiar guilt rises up, and keeps him quiet. If a lot’s happened to Minho, it’s Jisung’s fault. If Minho’s changed, it’s because Jisung forced him to change. 

“Like I said,” Minho says. “Long day.” The way he says it begs no more questions, and Jisung squirms where he’s sitting on the counter. He hates this. He hates that the Minho in front of him might as well be a stranger, that parts of Minho that should remain constant have not. The way Minho walks, the way he moves: Jisung used to know these things. 

On the other hand, Minho’s given him an out.

“You know what,” Jisung says. “A shower sounds good.” 

Minho stays where he is as Jisung grabs clean clothes, and remains there as Jisung shuts the bathroom door behind him. Jisung doesn’t turn on the water right away, waiting to see if he can make out any sounds of movement, but he can’t, and eventually he gives up.

The hot water makes Jisung’s skin prickle. He feels incredibly wrong-footed, the beginnings of a panic attack evident in the way his heart is racing and his hands are trembling, and he sits down under the shower spray, resting his forehead on his knees. 

There’s something, he’s certain, that he’s missing. Jisung’s knows that Minho wouldn’t be here, in Seoul or in Jisung’s life, if something weren’t extremely wrong. But at the same time, Jisung also has no idea what to do about it. He doesn’t know how to bring it up. Minho isn’t someone whose life he gets to share anymore; he has no right to ask Minho for scraps of it. The Minho in Jisung’s apartment, older and wearier and worlds more distant, is a different person from the Minho that Jisung knew, and they exist to each other now as reminders, as vessels for the people they were. The Minho that Jisung loved is gone, and it’s Jisung’s fault that he is. The man getting ready to sleep in Jisung’s loft is a placeholder, the dog-eared page of a book. Look, says the echo of Jisung’s Minho. There was something here you wanted to remember. 

The lights in the kitchen are out when Jisung’s done showering and he picks his way over to the stairs in the dark, t-shirt sticking to his damp skin. In the loft, Minho’s already in bed, the covers pulled up to his chin, and Jisung takes a moment to look at him, quiet and uninterrupted. He wonders if Minho still talks in his sleep. 

Jisung isn’t even close to tired but he climbs into bed all the same. Minho’s positioned himself as close to the edge of the mattress as he can and Jisung follows suit, leaving several feet of space between them. Minho stays very, very still as Jisung switches off the lamp in the corner of the loft and plugs in his phone to charge.

Once Jisung’s in bed, it’s painfully clear that Minho’s awake. His breathing is too shallow and too even and his body is taut as a highwire — one wrong move from either of them and the fragile balance they’ve struck will be gone. Minho asleep is warm and soothing; this wakefulness is the opposite. It’s sharp, and it hurts.

Jisung curls up on his side, forcing himself to close his eyes, and tries not think about what it had been like before. The way Minho would press his lips to Jisung’s neck and shoulders if Jisung woke in the night; the way Jisung would wake Minho with his mouth some mornings, Minho’s eyes dark and filled with something like awe. The easy way they had touched each other, back then, a familiarity born from years of intimacy: Jisung had known how Minho liked to be kissed, how to twist his wrist under the covers, how to bring Minho off in the dark.   

You’re beautiful, Hannie, Minho had told him, the first time they’d shared a bed with intent. You’re so beautiful, and Jisung had felt as though his body was too small for him, as though something in his world had shifted and recentered itself around Minho. 

Jisung has no idea how long he lies there, trying to will himself to sleep. It’s the same bed he sleeps in every night, the same room filled with the same shifting light from the window downstairs, but it all feels alien now. 

Next to him, the mattress moves as Minho shifts. Jisung glances over and sees that Minho has rolled over to lie on his other side, so he’s facing Jisung, and time seems to dilate, each second taking longer than the one before it, until Minho finally speaks.

“Why did you end it, back then?” Minho asks. 

Jisung feels like his heart’s skipped a beat. He’s dizzy with how fast his body reacts.

“It wasn’t,” Jisung starts. “I didn’t — I didn’t mean —  it wasn’t like that. For me.”

“Then what was it like, Jisung?” asks Minho. “What was it like for you? We were right here. We were right downstairs, and you told me it was over.”

“I was scared,” Jisung says. “I loved you so fucking much and it already cost us everything. I was too scared to…to keep going.”

“Exactly,” Minho says. His voice is shaky and wet. “It already cost us everything. It cost us our careers. It cost all of us our careers. We’d already lost everything, so what I don’t understand is why you’d just throw me away too.”

“I was scared,” Jisung repeats, when what he means is something entirely different. “I felt guilty.” 

“So did I,” Minho says. “I was the hyung. It was my responsibility to take care of you, of everyone, and I failed. I felt just as guilty as you did.”

Jisung squeezes his eyes shut, trying to block out all the things he doesn’t want to remember, and he feels tears leak out. When was the last time he cried? He doesn’t remember. 

“Was I just a reminder?” Minho goes on. “You didn’t want to look at me, because I reminded you of what we didn’t get to have anymore? Was that it?” This time his voice does break, and Jisung rolls over to look at him. His face is screwed up, as though he’s angry at himself for whatever he’s feeling, and Jisung wants to hold him. He wants to hold him as much as he’s ever wanted anything. 

“No,” says Jisung. “No, that wasn’t it, I swear.” 

“Then what?” Minho asks. “What was it? You were the only thing I had left. I needed you.” 

Jisung almost says it. He almost tells Minho the thing he hasn’t told anyone: that he can’t leave the house without panicking, that he can’t go outside, that he isn’t a person anymore. That he’d never wanted Minho, who’d always seen the best in him, to see him like that. That he couldn’t drag Minho with him into his microscopic world and his microscopic life, that he couldn’t force Minho to shrink the same way he himself had shrunk.

But in the end, Minho speaks first, and Jisung loses his nerve. Minho’s quieter now, his eyes closed as though he’s in pain, and he has one arm crossed over his chest. His hand is clenched in a fist.   

“Was it because you didn’t want me?” he asks. “I always — did I push you into something you didn’t want, back then? I just always thought that maybe I’d taken advantage of you. Like, I was older, and I was gay, and I made you be with me, and you hadn’t even wanted it and then we got caught and we got outed and it all fell apart and maybe I’d done that to you. All by myself.” 

“Hyung,” Jisung says, and before he can stop himself, he reaches out for Minho and pulls Minho roughly into his arms. It’s sudden and uncomfortable, Jisung’s bottom arm folded awkwardly against Minho’s chest and Minho’s chin digging into Jisung’s shoulder, but neither of them let go. It’s been so long since anyone’s touched Jisung and he clings to Minho as though if he holds on tightly enough, they’ll go back to who they used to be. Jisung holds on to Minho until his folded arm starts going numb, until the silence in the room starts to feel heavy, until it starts getting weird. He doesn’t want to stop holding on.

“Sorry,” says Minho eventually, pulling back. Jisung finds Minho’s eyes with his own and tries to hold Minho’s gaze, but Minho’s retreating into himself, slipping away. He looks embarrassed now, as though he can’t believe what he’s just done, and Jisung’s angry at himself for not knowing how to convince Minho that it’s okay. That he’d needed it just as much as Minho. 

“I wanted you,” Jisung says, as Minho curls back up a foot away from Jisung. Jisung tries to keep a hand on Minho’s arm, because now that he’s been touched he doesn’t know how to give it up again, but Minho pulls his arm back too. “I always did.”

Minho nods. “Okay,” he says. He sounds unusually flat.

Jisung remembers, because he’s never been able to stop remembering, the moment they knew they’d been caught. His phone exploding with messages, too many and too early in the morning; Chan, sitting at a table in a conference room with puffy eyes and a horrible blankness on his face; Chan, looking at Jisung and Minho as though he’d never seen them before in his life. 

“How long?” Chan had said, and Jisung has never been able to stop picturing how Chan had buried his face in his hands when Minho had answered, “Two years.”

“I didn’t know,” Chan had said — to Minho, to Jisung, to the room, to himself. “You never told us. You never said.”

Two years of wanting and barely having, of kissing in the dark and fucking when the dorm was empty, of going on dates and never touching except to pose for a vlog or a selfie. Two years, and it all fell apart in an hour. The company couldn’t risk the scandal of allowing two gay idols to remain in the group, and the group couldn’t weather the loss of two members; it was cleaner, the executives said, to disband and move on. An hour, and Jisung and Minho were standing outside the building where they used to work, looking at the people they used to work with and knowing that they’d ruined it for all of them. 

“So what does all that mean, in the end?” Minho asks, just as Jisung’s about to fall asleep for real. “It wasn’t because you didn’t want me, or because I didn’t want you, or because I reminded you of anything. You just got scared, and we just gave up?”

“I guess so,” Jisung says. “It just — we didn’t work out.” 

“And that was good enough for you? Letting it go like that?”

Jisung stays silent for a moment and watches the glow of the city coming in through the window dim as several of the apartments in the building across the street turn out their lights.  

“It wasn’t good enough for me,” Jisung says, quietly. “I just didn’t see any other way it could go.”

Minho doesn’t say anything more and Jisung doesn’t force him to, but Jisung knows, as Minho’s breathing slowly evens out into sleep, that Minho was never the one who gave up.

***

Minho has always been more social than Jisung. When they’d lived in the dorm, he’d been the one to coax Jisung out of his room during breaks. He’d taken Jisung to the Han river or to Namsan tower, to a restaurant in a different part of Seoul; he’d brought Jisung back to Gimpo and introduced Jisung to his friends from home. Even in Japan, when he’d been alone, Minho had avoided the tiny room he’d rented as much as possible — even though his old life had been lost to him, his new one begged exploration.

But as shy and reserved as Jisung had been before, it’s nothing compared to what Jisung’s like now. By the second full day of their uneasy coexistence, Minho’s starting to feel claustrophobic. Jisung still hasn’t gone much of anywhere — a few quick trips out for groceries, which Minho’s begged off of to avoid using his leg in front of Jisung, and not much else — and Minho assumes Jisung must have a deadline coming up, because all he’s really done is work. 

“What are you working on?” Minho asks finally, sitting on the loveseat with his leg stretched out in front of him. “You seem busy.”

Jisung, who’s just put his headphones down on the desk and stretched his arms so high over his head that his back audibly cracks in three places, looks at Minho with something like alarm.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I just work a lot. Is that bad? I didn’t mean to, like, be a bad host.”

Minho peers at Jisung. He can almost hear Jisung’s anxiety kicking in, roaring to life like a jet engine.

“I’m the one that turned up uninvited at your apartment,” Minho points out. “I was just curious what you’re making.”  

Jisung looks away. “It’s not mine,” he says, voice flat. “I’m contracting for a company. Writing songs for idol groups.”

Minho nods and breathes through a sudden rush of shame. Jisung’s making music. Jisung’s doing what he’s always been best at and all Minho is doing is taking up space that Jisung never asked him to occupy, because he has no idea what else to do. Minho hasn’t told anyone why he left Japan — he’s hardly told anyone he was there at all — but it feels to Minho like somehow Jisung knows anyway, and Minho wonders how long he can go on lurking in Jisung’s world like this. Eventually, he’ll have to confront the wreckage of his life, and the thought of it makes him sick to his stomach. 

“That’s cool,” Minho says. “That’s cool, Jisung-ah.” Minho means it to be a soothing thing, the way he says Jisung’s name, but Jisung flinches when he hears it. 

“Sorry,” Minho says, so softly that he’s not sure Jisung hears him. “Sorry.”

Minho knows, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, that something’s wrong with Jisung. He knows that Jisung when he’s happy is not this reclusive, not so completely withdrawn; the only times Minho’s ever seen Jisung like this were times when it was bad, when Jisung was so awash in his anxiety that trying to reach him was like crossing an ocean. But what Minho doesn’t know, and what he’s desperate to know, is if he himself has made Jisung unhappy.

“I’m gonna go for a walk,” Minho says, which is not true. His knee has started to feel slightly more stable, in the past few days, and his strategy of simply avoiding any activity that makes the pain worse seems to be helping. He keeps hoping that if he rests it, it’ll heal, although he knows that he’s lying to himself — that had been what he’d hoped for in Japan, too, but after a few days of feeling better, he’d always gone back to his brace and his tylenol and trying not to walk too far. Torn ACLs don’t get better on their own. 

Jisung hums his acknowledgement and puts his headphones back on. In the hallway outside Jisung’s apartment, Minho uses the wall to lower himself down to the floor and, once seated, pulls out his phone. He calls the only person he can think of. 

“You have got to be shitting me,” says Seungmin, on the other end of the line. 

“Hi to you too,” says Minho mulishly, although he supposes he deserves this.

“Huh,” says Seungmin. “Not really the start I imagined.”

“What?”

“I mean, I haven’t heard from you in a year. I was hoping for something more dramatic. Oh, Seungmin, you won’t believe it, I’ve finally escaped my captors and returned to Korea from the Arctic Circle where I’ve been held prisoner. Oh, Seungmin, I’ve regained my memories after a year-long bought of total amnesia. You know. Something like that.”

“I wasn’t in the Arctic,” Minho says, unable to think of anything better and unable to form the word sorry. “I was in Japan.”

“Definitely more practical,” says Seungmin. “Less snow.”

There’s a long pause. Minho can hear Seungmin’s steady breathing and wishes that it were as uneven as his own. 

“I should have called,” he says eventually. “I meant to, at first. I just — ” He trails off. 

“Why did you call?” Seungmin says, when it’s clear Minho isn’t going to finish his sentence. “More importantly, why did you call me?”

Minho’s hand is sweaty on his phone. “Because,” he says. “I knew you wouldn’t lecture me, or freak out, or hang up and tell everyone I came back. I knew you’d just let me be.”

Seungmin sighs and waits, patiently, for Minho to continue. 

“And I need to know about Jisung,” Minho admits. 

There’s a long pause. Finally, Seungmin takes an audible breath and says, “And what makes you think I know anything more about Jisung than you do?

“I mean,” says Minho, perplexed. “You haven’t been in a different country?”

“I might as well have been,” Seungmin says. “I haven’t heard from him in a year.”

Minho has nothing to say to this. He pulls the phone away from his face to stare at it, as though doing so will somehow make everything clearer, before putting it back to his ear. 

“What?” he says finally. “How?”

“It’s not hard to fall out of touch, Lee Know,” Seungmin says, and hearing Seungmin call him that nearly takes the air out of Minho’s lungs. That’s not who he is anymore. That’s not who he gets to be.

“But,” Minho manages. “But we all — why did you stop seeing him? Or talking to him?”

“We stopped seeing you,” Seungmin points out. “We stopped talking to you.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it? We called Jisung over and over, just like we called you. We tried not to let him slip away, but he did. Both of you did. You can’t force someone to talk to you if they don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Do the rest of you — ?” Minho finds himself gripping his phone so tightly that the sweat from his palms is making it slippery. He doesn’t know which answer would make him feel better — yes, the rest of his former bandmates are still close, they still have each other in a way Minho doesn’t get to have them anymore, or no, they’ve lost touch with each other too, and Minho ruined even more lives than his and Jisung’s. 

“Yeah,” Seungmin says. “We do. And you and Jisung would’ve been welcome, at any time. You know that.”

Would have been. Minho would have been welcome. Meaning, maybe, that Minho is not welcome now.

Seungmin lets Minho stay silent for at least a full minute before clearing his throat. 

“I can let you go,” he says softly. “I assume you’re with him.”

“Kind of,” Minho says. “I’m at his apartment, but he’s barely himself. He won’t talk to me.”

“He won’t talk, period,” Seungmin says. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.” He pauses and adds, “The person you think of as Jisung is gone, to some extent, I think. He changed, just like we all changed. You have to figure out who he is now.”

“Yeah.” Minho’s voice is thick suddenly, too wet and too throaty. The old version of Jisung hadn’t loved him enough to keep him; there’s no reason to think the new version would either. “I know. Thanks, Seungmin-ah.”

“Come see me sometime, hyung,” Seungmin says, before he hangs up. “None of us went anywhere.”

***

Jisung learns quickly that Minho doesn’t seem to want to do anything, and it shocks him. He remembers Minho wanting to do everything, and often all at once — a meal followed by a play followed by an arcade followed by drinks, motion and people and noise until Jisung’s entire brain threatened to shut down. Now, Minho barely gets off the loveseat. When he does move, he moves stiffly, and it hasn’t escaped Jisung’s notice that Minho won’t go up or down stairs when Jisung’s watching. Minho climbs to the loft for bed while Jisung showers and descends before Jisung wakes up; he won’t walk with Jisung to the lower floors of the building. He orders food on his phone and does his best to keep his face blank.

It’s odd, Jisung thinks, how normal and how wrong it feels to have Minho in his bed again. Minho’s smell, the way he breathes in his sleep, the little noises he makes when he dreams: these are familiar things, reassuring so long as Jisung doesn’t think about why he lost them in the first place. But Minho doesn’t talk to Jisung anymore. Something is clearly wrong, but he won’t tell Jisung what it is — instead, they make small talk, and go out of their way not to touch. Jisung hasn’t touched Minho since he hugged him in bed, and Jisung has no reason to think Minho wants him to. 

Jisung knows that they can’t go on like this, staying in the same tiny apartment and avoiding all the things that need to be said, but Jisung can’t bring himself to do anything that might drive Minho away, either. Uneasy days in one another’s company are better, Jisung thinks, than nothing, and so he stays silent. He doesn’t ask Minho why he’s there and he doesn’t ask Minho when he plans to leave. He doesn’t bring up the past and he doesn’t bring up the future, and each day arrives like a question.

Finally, Jisung can’t take it anymore. He waits for Minho to get in the shower and turn on the water and then tucks himself into the farthest corner of the loft and gets out his phone. It’s been a year since he’s called Chan and he has to take several slow, deep breaths to stop his hands from shaking as he pulls up Chan’s contact. He’d meant to cut himself off permanently from his old life and it feels surreal to be breaking that promise. 

“Hey, hyung,” Jisung says, as soon as Chan picks up. Maybe, if he just pretends everything’s normal, they won’t have to talk about why Jisung hasn’t called in so long.

Chan, however, is Chan.

“Hannie,” he says, almost reverently, so gentle that he sounds like he’s trying not to scare away a skittish animal. “Oh, my god. Hi.” 

Don’t call me that, Jisung almost says. Don’t call me that anymore . 

“Sorry for calling,” Jisung says instead. “I just had a question.”

He can hear Chan’s silent disbelief as clearly as if Chan were yelling in his ear. 

“Jisung,” Chan says slowly. “I haven’t heard from you in a year.”

“I know,” Jisung says. 

“How are you? Where are you? Are you okay?” Chan stops himself and takes a deep breath, and Jisung can hear a door open and close and the other voices in the background fade. He guesses that Chan has gone somewhere more private. 

“Sorry,” Chan says. “That was a lot. I just — are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Jisung lies. “Everything’s fine.”

“Okay,” Chan says. Jisung can picture him, eyes wide and on the balls of his feet, nearly vibrating with the need to reach out and fix things, to hug Jisung and give him what he needs. “Okay. Are you sure, though? It’s been so long.”

“Yeah,” Jisung says. “I just got busy, you know? And I didn’t want to, you know — get in the way of what you’re doing.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Chan says, before Jisung can even finish speaking. “You wouldn’t have been in the way. We missed you, Jisungie. I missed you.”

Jisung nods, throat too tight to speak, before realizing that Chan can’t see him. 

“Yeah,” he says again, because it’s all he can manage. “Yeah, hyung.”

“So what’s up?” Chan says hesitantly. “Are you, like…around?”

“I’m in Seoul,” Jisung admits. “But that’s not why I called.” He pauses to breathe again. Minho’s still showering. He takes long showers these days, as though even in the shower he moves slowly. “Have you heard from Minho-hyung lately?” 

Chan goes silent. 

“No,” he says finally, in a very careful tone of voice. It’s the tone of voice he uses when he thinks he might break something, when he thinks someone around him is fragile. “I haven’t spoken to him since, ah…since it ended. I don’t think any of us have.”

“I heard he was in Japan,” Jisung says. He’s not sure why he doesn’t just tell Chan that Minho’s back, but he can’t stop himself thinking that maybe Minho doesn’t want Chan to know. Minho’s presence in his apartment is the only private thing Jisung’s shared with anyone in a year, and it feels like a sort of intimacy, something delicate and in need of protection. Jisung can’t bring himself to give it up. 

“Oh?” asks Chan. He sounds like he’s trying not to come across as curious as he actually is. “Do you know why?”

“Dancing,” Jisung says. “I, uh — I was just wondering if you knew more than that.” 

Like why he can’t seem to walk properly, Jisung doesn’t say. Like why he won’t talk to me. 

(He knows why Minho won’t talk to him, though. He knows better than anyone, and he knows it’s his own fault.)

“I don’t,” Chan says. “I wish I did.” He pauses, and adds, “I’d hoped you’d stayed together. After.”

“We didn’t,” Jisung says, quietly. “It didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry,” Chan says, sincerely. “I wanted it to work out.”

“Me too,” Jisung says. His throat aches again, a physical tightness that makes it hard to swallow, makes him feel like he’s getting sick. “I did too.”

It’s the first time he’s said it out loud, to anyone. He never lets himself acknowledge the grief he felt when he lost the group, and then felt tenfold when he lost Minho. He never lets himself admit that he’s still in love with Minho, that he never fell out of love in the first place — that every day he’s spent alone has made it that much clearer that the hurt isn’t going away. If he doesn’t acknowledge any of it, he tells himself, then he can’t drown in it. He can’t be washed away in its tide. 

Downstairs, he hears the bathroom door open, and hears Minho shuffle into the kitchen. He realizes the water must have turned off when he wasn’t paying attention.

“Hyung, I’m so sorry,” he says, quietly, into the phone. “I have to go.”

“Hannie,” Chan says. “Hey, no, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but you don’t have to hang up.”

“It’s not that,” Jisung whispers, as he hangs up. “I’ll call you later.”

But it’s a lie, and they both know it.

***

Minho knows, objectively, that it’s a bad idea to go for a walk without telling anyone where he’s going or that he’s injured. He knows there are a hundred things that could go wrong. But the past few days of rest mean that he can get away without wearing his knee brace, and he can’t bring himself to stay in Jisung’s apartment without leaving for another day. He’d hoped, when he’d first gone to Japan, that being away would relax Jisung’s hold on his heart. He’d hoped that he might no longer wake up dizzy with dreams of someone who didn’t want him anymore. 

But the past week with Jisung has just made it even more obvious that Minho never fell out of love. Jisung’s breathing at night, the smell of his shampoo lingering in the bathroom in the morning and the way he sounds when he says Minho’s name — all of it hurts. 

We can’t do this anymore, Jisung had said, a year ago, and Minho can still hear it. He can still hear the car that drove past outside when Jisung finished speaking. He can still hear the hitch in Jisung’s voice, see Jisung’s hand twitch at his side as he stopped himself from reaching out and touching Minho’s arm. It’s all so hideously fresh, even after so much time, and yet Minho can’t stop himself wanting Jisung back. He can’t stop himself wanting to kiss Jisung, to hold Jisung down and fuck him; he can’t stop wanting it and he can’t stop hating himself for wanting it.

Jisung’s still wrapped up in work when Minho sets out and he nods absently at Minho when Minho calls out to tell him he’s leaving. 

“Be careful,” Jisung says, sounding like Minho’s mother. Minho just hums at him and, on his way out the door, takes a drink of water from the kitchen sink and uses it to swallow a painkiller.

Since the dance practice that damaged his knee, Minho’s learned that if he stays ahead of the pain curve, it’s easier to tell himself that everything’s normal. The ibuprofen takes just enough of the edge off that he can think of the injury as simple — a strained muscle that just needs rest, a tired joint that just needs support — even though he knows, deep down, that it isn’t. His knee won’t get better on its own. But at the same time, it feels good to be outside, unencumbered by his brace. It feels good to pretend, just for an hour, that his career isn’t over and that he’s still the person he used to be: a dancer, an idol, a son worth being proud of. Han Jisung’s boyfriend.

Without necessarily planning to, Minho wanders in the direction of Yeongdeungpo Park. He walks more slowly than he’d like to, each step deliberate and cautious, but even as hyper fixated as he is on every twinge of pain, he feels surprisingly okay. It’s like going for a walk after working out the day before: he’s sore, but he can move. 

Yeongdeungpo Park is calming at night, even in the middle of Seoul. The trees grow in straight lines, the walkways are neat and predictable, the hedges and flowers are trimmed and tidy; it’s easy to find a path and stick to it. Minho sets off around the edge, the quiet dimness of the park on one side and the ebbing chaos of the city on the other, and lets himself remember when he’d gone on walks like this as a trainee, and then later as an idol. It had cleared his head, being out alone with no one to answer to, and when he grew tired he’d sit and watch the people around him: office workers trickling out of their buildings and into their cars or towards their trains, couples hurrying home in the darkness pressed tight to one another’s sides. Sometimes, when he managed to convince Jisung to come with him, he’d ache with the desire to walk like that together, in a world where they weren’t famous and there were no concerns of exposure. 

Now, Minho supposes, they are in that world, or some strange version of it — they could walk through this park pressed tightly together and it wouldn’t matter if anyone saw them. Minho got what he wanted and in the process lost everything else.

Mino’s so absorbed in his thoughts that he forgets to be careful. He turns inwards, towards the center of the park, and the path he’s chosen transitions from pavement to dirt; he takes a step forward and realizes, just as his foot hits the ground, that the ground isn’t as even as it looks. His knee gives out beneath him.

Time slows down, just a little bit, as he freezes in place and tries to decide what to do. His thigh is shaking with the effort of keeping his knee immobile and as much of his weight as possible on the other leg, and even the benches on either side of the pathway seem very, very far away. He grits his teeth and limps over to the closest one, his knee buckling with every step, before lowering himself to sitting. Any torque to the joint is excruciating.

It’s properly dark now, the park lit only by streetlamps and the phone screens of passers-by, and Minho considers his options. Walking back to Jisung’s apartment is out of the question. He’ll be lucky if he can make it out of the park. The easiest thing, he supposes, would be to call a taxi, but he’ll need help just getting out of the cab and into the building. He thinks about his knee brace, buried in his suitcase, and for the first time since getting back from Japan, thinks that he might start crying. 

Eventually, Minho pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket and pulls up his KakaoTalk thread with Jisung. He hasn’t looked at it in a year. 

yeah we can talk, is the second-to-last message in the thread. 

i love you, hannie, is the last one. 

He remembers sending them both. Remembers how Jisung had closed himself off, before the end; how he’d become untouchable, like a thing covered over with glass.

Hey, he sends now. Sorry to bother you. Can you come pick me up? 

Then he waits. His knee seems to hurt to the rhythm of his heartbeat, the pain building and receding with his pulse, and he tries to breathe through it. Tries to tell himself that pain is a sensation, and that he can be the master of it. Jisung will come, because Jisung is Jisung, and Jisung will help him into a car, and then help him indoors. The rest he can figure out from there.

His phone buzzes.

what? says Jisung. where?

Yeongdeungpo Park, he types back, and then sends his coordinates. 

Jisung starts typing and then stops three times before his response comes in. 

okay, his message says. hang on.

***

okay, Jisung types. hang on.

His phone makes a little chiming sound as the message sends, and then he stares at the screen, frozen. His chest starts to ache and his heart feels fluttery and unstable, as though one beat does not guarantee the next. 

He can’t go pick up Minho. He can’t. How is he supposed to get to Yeongdeungpo Park, when he can’t even leave his building? There’s no way he can walk all the way there without panicking. He’s not sure he could make it a block without panicking. He considers a taxi instead, where at least he’s protected from the crowds on the street — that might be better. Only one other person to deal with. 

Jisung pulls on a jacket and shoves his feet into his sneakers, and practices the breathing exercises he learned from a company-sponsored therapist three years ago all the way down to the ground floor of the building. Inhale for a count of five. Hold for a count of five. Let it all go. He has to do this. He can’t leave Minho, the person he’s longed for the most over the last few horrible months, alone and in trouble, needing help. He already left Minho once. He refuses to do it again.

It’s only when he’s downstairs, standing in front of the doors to the street with a baseball cap jammed as low on his head as possible, that it occurs to him to wonder why Minho needs Jisung to come pick him up at all. Is Minho drunk? He hadn’t texted like he was drunk. If he were in some kind of serious trouble, surely he’d have called the police — if he’d been mugged or assaulted, if someone had hurt him, there’s no way he’d be calling Jisung. Uncharitably, Jisung wonders if Minho’s testing him — if Minho’s figured out that Jisung never goes outside and is trying to test his theory — but Jisung knows Minho better than that. Whatever’s happened between them, Minho would never fuck with him that way. 

“Sorry,” says a middle-aged woman, bumping into Jisung with her bag of shopping on her way out of the building, and Jisung realizes he’s blocking part of the exit. He gives the woman an awkward little half-bow of apology and follows her through the now-open door before he can think himself out of it. 

The roar of sound is immediate. Jisung knows, objectively, that it isn’t actually any louder than it used to be in Seoul, but he isn’t accustomed to it anymore, and the noise is a physical thing. He takes a few steps and pauses, then takes a few more. No one is paying any attention to him. A girl on her phone promises her boyfriend she’ll be home soon and sidesteps Jisung without so much as a glance; a father picks up his crying toddler and grimaces when the child’s shoe leaves a print on his suit jacket. Everyone is wrapped up in their own lives, in the dramatics of their own days, and Jisung is invisible. He takes a slow, deep breath. He can do this.

In an effort to make sure there are only people on one side of him, Jisung stays close to the buildings as he makes his way along the sidewalk. He keeps his head down, and his baseball cap down, and his hand tight around his phone in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He watches the ground, letting other people move to avoid him and keeping an eye on their shadows on the concrete, and he makes it a block. He stops at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn.

He can’t believe he isn’t panicking. He doesn’t feel great — his palms and his forehead are sweating and if he held his hands out, he knows they’d be shaking — but he’s breathing. His chest is only a little bit tight. He knows he’s headed towards Minho, towards someone who needs him, and that knowledge seems to give him something to cling to. Jisung knows that Minho is only texting him because he’s avoiding all their other friends, but even that gives Jisung hope — no one but the two of them can imagine what their lives have become. 

And then someone takes a picture. 

It’s just a girl, purple polaroid camera clutched in her hand, taking a picture of her friend, but the clicking sound it makes when she snaps the photo is enough. Jisung’s heart rate spikes as though he’s just had a shot of adrenaline and he goes cold from the inside out. His ribs contract around his organs and squeeze the air from his lungs, his chest hurts so badly that he grabs at it on instinct, as though there’s a wound he can press on. His vision blurs at the edges, narrowing to only what is directly in front of him, and the ground seems too far away. Legs shaking, Jisung leans back against the pole of the traffic light and braces himself with his hands on his knees.

He doesn’t know if anyone’s watching him, although he’s certain that someone must be — he wasn’t alone waiting to cross the street. He doesn’t know if the girl with the camera has noticed that the man next to her is suddenly clutching his chest like he’s having a heart attack. He doesn’t know how to get home, or what to do, or how to breathe.

Hannie, says Minho’s voice, in the back of his head. Look at me. You’re okay.

It’s a remembered version of Minho, Jisung knows — a younger version, less exhausted and more hopeful — but Jisung can still hear him as though it were real. Back then it had been a ritual: Minho’s hand on Jisung’s back before a show or a fan sign, his head ducked down to look Jisung in the eyes, never speaking in more than a whisper. I see you , Jisung had understood him to mean. I’ve got you. It’s not a memory Jisung usually allows himself to think about, but he allows himself now. It feels good to hurt himself with it. It hurts to remember the private kind of intimacy that comes with being acknowledged in the middle of a crowd, and the hurt is an aching place inside of him. He presses on it until the world around him sharpens and stills.

The light turns and the people around him surge forward, leaving Jisung where he is. Everything is still too vivid — the mismatched rhythms of so many footsteps, the engines of cars, the wailing of an ambulance siren in the distance — and Jisung’s hands are shaking badly, but he manages to extricate his phone from his pocket and unlock it.

i’m really sorry, he texts Minho, forcing his eyes to focus on the screen. i can’t make it. are you okay? should i call you a taxi?

Minho reads the message almost immediately but takes a full minute to respond. 

I’m fine, he types. I can call my own taxi.

The guilt winds itself around Jisung’s legs like a dog. You’re leaving him, it says. You’re leaving him again, when he needs you.

But what help, Jisung reasons, could he possibly be? Jisung can’t do anything for Minho that a taxi driver couldn’t, and in fact they might have had to call a taxi anyway because Jisung doesn’t have a car. 

This thought sets off fresh anxiety, and fresh alarm bells. What had Jisung been thinking, going to pick Minho up on foot? Minho hadn’t been lost, and Minho clearly has a working phone — he could’ve walked home himself. What had Minho expected? What had he needed from Jisung that he couldn’t get on his own?

Perversely, these worries seem to soothe the panic, and Jisung finds himself calm enough to push himself off the traffic light pole and orient himself back towards his apartment. He’s lightheaded and tired and he knows he’s going to crash as soon as he gets home. Panic is so much more exhausting than Jisung thinks it has any right to be.

He pulls his phone out again while he walks, partly for something to hold on to and partly because he can’t stop thinking about Minho. He owes Minho a favor, he thinks. Maybe he owes Minho the truth.

i’m sorry, Jisung sends again. i can explain. 

There’s no answer. Minho hasn’t even read the text. 

please just let me know you’re okay, Jisung tries. i need to know you’re okay.

He knows he sounds possessive, as though he thinks he deserves an explanation, but by the time he makes it home with no notifications and a horrible pit in his stomach, he’s far too desperate to care.

*** 

Minho waits on the bench in the growing cold for forty-five minutes before Seungmin finally arrives. Seungmin’s got his phone out, navigating his way to the coordinates Minho sent him, and he breaks into a jog as soon as he catches sight of Minho. Minho refuses to wish he were Jisung.

“You,” says Seungmin mildly, a little out of breath, “are an idiot. What were you thinking?”

“I told you, I needed to get out of the apartment,” Minho says, defensively, although he knows Seungmin isn’t wrong. 

“Okay, sure,” Seungmin says. “But you went by yourself, at night, on foot? Do you not even have a knee brace?”

“I have one,” Minho says. “It’s at Jisung’s.”

“Well, good,” says Seungmin. “We wouldn’t want it to be someplace useful, like on your knee.” 

Minho shuts his eyes briefly, as though he can block out everything that’s happening. “Look,” he says. “I was feeling a lot better. I didn’t think I needed it.”

“You tore your ACL,” Seungmin points out. “You need it until your ACL is fixed.”

Minho has nothing to say to this. He looks at the ground instead. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. Those words could mean too much, on their own, so he adds,  “For making you come all the way out here.”

Seungmin shrugs. “It’s fine. I’m not working tomorrow.”

“I would’ve called a taxi,” Minho says, “but I don’t think I could actually walk all the way to the street by myself.”

“Can you even stand up?” asks Seungmin, looking down at Minho with an analytical sort of expression.

Minho almost says yes. He starts to stand up, intent on proving his independence, but his knee buckles almost instantly, and he sits back down. 

“Not really.”

“Okay,” says Seungmin. “I guess — okay. Like this.” He bends down and gets his arm around Minho’s waist on Minho’s injured side. Minho puts his own arm over Seungmin’s shoulders, and Seungmin levers them both up to standing.

“We’re just going to get to the edge of the park like this,” says Seungmin, “and then I’ll bring the car around.” He’s supporting a lot more of Minho’s weight than Minho would have expected, and Minho wonders if he’s been working out.

“The car?” 

“Hyunjin’s car, actually,” Seungmin says. “I just told him I had to run an errand.”

“How do you have Hyunjin’s car?” 

“We’re roommates,” says Seungmin. “The rest of us didn’t stop speaking.” He doesn’t sugarcoat it, which Minho appreciates. Seungmin knows that Minho knows that Minho pushed them all away, and he makes it clear what he thinks of that. It’s easier like this, Minho thinks. He doesn’t have to wonder what Seungmin’s feeling. He doesn’t have to pretend he didn’t do what he did. 

“And just so you know,” Seungmin adds, “if I have a parking ticket when I get back to my car, you’re paying the fine.”

Seungmin leaves Minho leaning against the fence at the edge of the park and pulls up in Hyunjin’s car a few minutes later. He leaves it running, emergency lights flashing, while he helps Minho half-limp, half-hop over to the passenger door and settle himself inside. 

“What’s the address?” Seungmin asks, hands on the wheel.

“The address?”

“Jisung’s address. You’re the only one who knows where he lives.”

Minho’s stomach twists unpleasantly and he feels like he might be sick. He leans his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes. 

Seungmin, apparently misreading the situation, says, “I’m not accusing you. We just — he never spoke to us again, after he got that place. I only know about it because Channie-hyung called his parents.”

“It’s not that,” Minho says. “I’m not mad. Or surprised. I just don’t know if I can look at him right now.”

Seungmin cocks his head. The emergency lights are still on and the way the pavement in front of the car turns a shiny, iridescent red each time they flash makes Minho think of an ambulance, wailing its way to someone in pain.  

“You’ve been with him for days,” Seungmin points out. “What changed?”

“He said he’d come get me,” Minho says, quietly. “And he didn’t.” His feelings are hurt and he’s ashamed that they’re hurt, because it’s his own fault. He hadn’t told Jisung what was wrong. He hadn’t made it clear what he needed.

And even if you had, says a treacherous voice in the back of his head, he still might not have come. He’s never cared enough to stay.  

“Okay,” says Seungmin softly. He puts the car in drive and they make their way along the narrow side street bordering the park in silence. 

“How’d you hurt your knee?” Seungmin asks, as he turns onto the main road and heads towards the river. “You didn’t mention that on the phone.” He keeps his eyes forward and he keeps his voice light, giving Minho space to play it off if he wants to. Minho finds he doesn’t want to.

“Dancing,” Minho says. “After I left Korea, I went to Japan, and I didn’t know what else to do so I joined a dance troupe and taught to pay the bills.” Minho shrugs unnecessarily, as though by acting casual he can avoid feeling the things he feels whenever he thinks about his knee. “And a few weeks ago I was practicing a routine with a ton of jumping and turning, and I landed wrong.” He takes a breath, and forces himself to slow down, and finishes, “There was this shitty popping sound, and I knew it was over.”

“Knew what was over?”

“My career,” Minho says. “Or what was left of it. You saw me back there. I can barely walk. I’ll ice it and brace it and rest, and that buys me a few days, but If I step wrong or twist wrong or whatever, I’m in agony and I’m out of commission again. The cycle just keeps going. I can’t dance like that.”

It hurts to talk about it. It hurts so much more than he knows how to process. Dancing was the one thing, the singular remaining thing, that he had left, after his life in Seoul fell apart, and now that’s been taken from him too. He doesn’t tell Seungmin what he’d been like in Japan — how he had avoided eating, avoided sleeping, pushed himself in practice until he was lightheaded and shaking — because it’s too close to an acknowledgement that he, in his refusal to examine the hungry hollow thing in his chest, is to blame for his own misery.

“Your career isn’t necessarily over just because you fucked up your knee,” Seungmin points out. He’s speaking in a slow, measured way, as though he’s navigating something treacherous. “You can get it fixed.”

“With surgery,” says Minho. “Even if I get surgery, there’s no guarantee it’ll be good enough to dance on again.”

“Sure,” says Seungmin. “But if you do nothing, there’s absolutely a guarantee it won’t be.”

In reality, Minho knows that he hasn’t gotten surgery because he doesn’t want to acknowledge that what’s happened is real. He doesn’t want to have to take it so seriously. He wants to pretend, for a little while longer, that he’s just got a sore muscle, and it’ll feel better in a few days if he rests it. He doesn’t want anything to do with what his world has become. He wants to go back to when he was himself, and Jisung was Jisung, and even if part of his life was a secret, it was a golden, precious thing. 

“Have you told anyone?” Seungmin asks, after several long moments of silence. They’re on the overpass crossing the river now, the headlights of the passing cars and the signs at the tops of the skyscrapers setting the world aglow with the unreality of night, and Minho feels untethered. He could be anywhere in the world, in any city on any road in any car imaginable, and he would feel the same way he feels now: aching with loneliness, scraped clean and left empty by the memory of a heart entangled with his.

“No,” says Minho. “I just — left. I emailed the people in the dance troupe I was with and said I had to go back to Korea for personal reasons, and then I just packed my bags.”

“That seems to be a habit with you.”

Minho stares at Seungmin, guilt and anger rising up inside him in equal measure.

“What else was I supposed to do?” he says finally. “Hang around with no purpose, in everyone’s way, just to remind myself of how much I’d fucked up? I couldn’t have stayed.”

“You could have,” Seungmin says quietly. “You could have stayed.” They both know that they’re not talking about Japan.

“Seungmin,” Minho says. “Think about — think about what had just happened. You know what the industry is like. Could you have stuck around, if it were you? If the most private thing about you were public and everyone hated you for it?”

Seungmin says nothing. “And Jisung really doesn’t know?” he asks eventually. “About your knee?”

Minho shakes his head. 

“Aish,” Seungmin says. “The atmosphere in that apartment must be really phenomenal. You just showed up with no warning, didn’t tell him why, and then you just — what?  You guys hang out there all day?”

“He works,” says Minho. “And I just…take up space.”

“Have you talked?”

“I asked him why he left me,” Minho says. “And we hugged. And it’s been — better, I guess, since then. A little less awkward. But we haven’t mentioned it again.”

This seems to give Seungmin pause. His eyes widen and he glances over at Minho in surprise. 

“He left you?”

“He broke up with me, yeah. I guess I technically left, since it was his apartment we were staying in.” He watches Seungmin for a moment before adding, “Is that surprising?”

“Honestly,” says Seungmin, “I always thought you’d left him.”

Minho doesn’t know what to make of this. He supposes outwardly, it must have seemed like Jisung needed Minho more than Minho needed Jisung, even if that hadn’t actually been true. Maybe Minho had seemed crueler than Jisung. Maybe Minho had seemed less likely to be in love.

“I wouldn’t have,” Minho says, surprising even himself. He sounds croaky, like someone who’s forgotten how to speak. “I never would’ve left him.”

They cross the river and Seungmin turns towards Hongdae.

“I think I know that,” Seungmin says. “I think I know that now.”

***

Several blocks from the center of Hongdae, Seungmin turns up a narrow residential street and parks outside a brick gate leading to a small house. The house is squashed between several low-rise apartment buildings and the street is clean and tightly packed, cars neatly tucked into spaces just barely big enough to hold them. The branches of a willowy tree grow out over the wall of the courtyard in front of the house, shading the asphalt below.

“You live here?” Minho asks, gaping. “This can’t be cheap.”

“It’s not,” Seungmin says, helping Minho out of the car and unlocking the gate. “But I’m not the only one paying for it.”  

And I have a career, he doesn’t add and Minho thinks instead. Hyunjin has a career. Both of us matter still.

The tiny courtyard beyond is cluttered, potted plants and hanging laundry taking up all the available space, and Minho is reminded overwhelmingly of his parents’ house in Gimpo. He would give almost anything, he thinks, to go home.

“That’s my room,” says Seungmin, once they’re inside, gesturing with the arm not supporting Minho to a door on the far side of the house. “You can sleep in there.”

“I can’t take your room,” Minho says. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“You’re welcome to the couch if you want it,” says Seungmin, “but Hyunjin will see you first thing in the morning when he gets up.” 

Minho weighs his options. He knows he’ll have to see Hyunjin eventually, unless he plans to sneak back to Jisung’s unnoticed on a knee that won’t hold his weight, but he’d rather do it on his own terms. He doesn’t want to be woken by Hyunjin screaming, or crying, or yelling. If he has to face the people he abandoned, he’d rather do it after he’s fully woken up.

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll take your room.”

“We should have gone back to Jisung’s to get your knee brace,” Seungmin complains, as he navigates Minho around the several pairs of shoes left messily by the front door and through the main living space. The house is well-loved and comfortable; the pillows on the sofa are squashed as though someone’s been curled against them, a laptop sits closed and askew on the coffee table, a bowl and chopsticks are stacked next to the sink in the small galley kitchen. It makes Minho think, unexpectedly, about Jisung’s apartment, and about the evidence of the life Jisung’s lived without him.

“Hyunjin’s room’s up there,” Seungmin says, pointing up the stairs to a door at the top of them. “He’s out tonight, so he won’t be back till late. His bathroom’s up there, but mine’s down here, so you don’t have to get up the stairs on your knee.”

Minho tries not to let Seungmin see how much something so simple has touched him, and he wonders how long it’s been since he let someone else take care of him. 

“Thanks,” he says, looking at the floor. He gives Seungmin’s shoulder a quick squeeze, hoping to communicate with touch what he can’t with words, and Seungmin’s grip tightens momentarily on his waist in silent reply. 

“Here we go.” Seungmin pushes his bedroom door open, and helps Minho over to the bed. Minho sits down with overwhelming relief. “Wait here, I’m gonna get some water and a painkiller.”

Seungmin’s room is tidy, his bed neatly made and his clothes hung in a line on a clothes rack, and it’s quiet and dark and private. Minho lets out an enormous, full-body breath. He hasn’t been alone, really alone, in days, and the thought of sleeping here, in a bed he isn’t sharing with a boy he’s still in love with, is an overwhelming relief. 

Seungmin reappears with a glass of water and an ibuprofen cupped in his hand. He sets them down on the bedside table and deposits a bowl of kimchi fried rice next to the glass. 

“We had leftovers,” Seungmin says. “Is it still your favorite?”

“It is,” Minho says, cupping the bowl in his hands. “Thanks.”

Seungmin nods, and backs out of the room again. “I’ll leave you be,” he says. “Let you sleep.” 

It’s not very late, all things considered, but Minho finds himself exhausted anyway. He’s tired to his bones. He eats the bowl of rice almost without tasting it, because he knows he needs to get something in his system even if he doesn’t want to, and then lies down on Seungmin’s bed, tugging the blanket up over himself and apologizing silently for getting his dirty street clothes on Seungmin’s sheets. There’s nothing he can do about anything, now. All he can do is sleep. He’ll talk to Seungmin in the morning, and they’ll figure out what to do about Jisung.

But when Minho wakes up the next morning and limps out of Seungmin’s bedroom, he’s greeted not by Seungmin, but by Chan. Chan’s sitting on the couch in the living room, a mug of tea clutched in his hands, and he’s bouncing his leg incessantly and chewing his lip to shreds. 

Chan looks up when Minho comes in and Minho is far too tired and far too injured to disappear back into the bedroom without being seen. He grimaces at the expression on Chan’s face, a mixture of horror and anger and love. 

“Hi,” Minho says eventually. “Mind if I sit? My knee’s killing me.”

He does his best to keep his voice even and casual, like he’d seen Chan last week instead of last year, and avoids looking Chan in the eye again. If he acts unflappable, maybe he’ll become unflappable. If he pretends to be the person he used to be — Lee Know, irascible and camera-ready, well-defended against the onslaught of the world — maybe it’ll be enough to change him back to who he was.

“Hi?” says Chan, sounding indignant. “That’s it?” He scoots over and reaches a hand out to help Minho sit down anyway, although Minho doesn’t accept the help, and Minho can see already the ways in which Chan hasn’t changed: the worry lines on his forehead, the need to take care of his friends.

“What do you want me to say?” Minho asks, as though it’s Chan who’s being unreasonable and not him. He adjusts himself on the couch until he’s as comfortable as he’s going to get and breathes out through his nose until the pain quiets to a dull roar. 

“I don’t even know how to answer that,” Chan says. He sounds tired, and he sounds hurt. “Say anything.”

“I hurt my knee,” Minho says. “Seungmin came and picked me up from the park after Jisung said he couldn’t.”

“Yeah, Seungmin told me all about that this morning,” says Chan. “Jesus, Minho. We haven’t — I haven’t — I mean, none of us have heard from you in a year. Do you know what that’s like? I don’t even — fuck. We’ve been so fucking worried.” 

Chan’s stuttering, as though there are too many things he wants to say at once, and Minho wonders if worried was really the word Chan wanted to use. Furious , Minho thinks, might have been more appropriate. Hurt, maybe. Worried seems like an understatement, and Minho’s reminded why he hadn’t wanted to do this, why he hadn’t wanted to see them again. It feels like something solid inside himself has started to give way, a road washed out by the rain, and he wishes he were someone like Felix: someone who could bury his face in the crook of Chan’s neck and cry until he ran out of tears. 

“I know,” Minho says finally. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

It’s inadequate and they both know it, and Minho’s about to try to say something else when the front door opens and Seungmin comes in, carrying a bag full of buns.

“You’re up,” says Seungmin mildly, looking at Minho. “Sleep okay?”

Minho glares at him. “I thought you said you weren’t going to tell anyone.”

“I said that the first time you called me,” Seungmin says. “Not the second time.”

“The first time?” Chan asks. “What first time?”

No one has anything to say to that. They all stare at each other for several moments, eyes flicking back and forth in a silent living room stalemate, until Seungmin sets the buns down on the coffee table and drops into the chair across from where Chan and Minho are seated on the sofa. He looks tired, all of a sudden, and Minho’s not sure if he’s looked tired all this time and Minho just never noticed. Maybe Minho was too wrapped up in his own problems to see it.

“He called me a few day ago,” Seungmin says. “To ask about Jisung.”

“Hang on,” says Chan. “Jisung called me. To ask about Minho.”

Minho doesn’t know what to think about this. He remembers a time when Jisung went to him before anyone else and he wonders just how off he’s actually seemed.

“Seungmin said Jisung hasn’t talked to any of you in a year,” Minho points out. “But he called you?”

“It wasn’t like I was expecting it,” says Chan. “He was worried about you.”

Minho’s stomach does a guilty little flip. 

“Anyway,” Chan presses on, looking at Seungmin. “Back to the part where Minho called you and you didn’t tell me.”

Seungmin bites his lip. 

“He’s an adult,” he says, finally. “I thought he deserved his privacy, even if I didn’t like it.”

“Thank you — ” Minho starts, but Seungmin interrupts him. 

“Except,” Seungmin continues, starting to look irritated, “you didn’t tell me you were hurt, when you called me before. I never said I wouldn’t tell anyone this time.”

“I’m fine,” Minho says, reflexively, although he understands how pointless it is. He’s sitting on Seungmin’s couch, too injured to so much as walk out the front door on his own, after making Seungmin drive across Seoul to come rescue him from his own idiocy. He might as well be drowning and insisting, while inhaling water, that everything’s okay.

“You’re not fine!” 

Both Chan and Minho gape at Seungmin. Minho doesn’t remember the last time he heard Seungmin snap like that — he’s harder to goad into anger than someone like Jisung, or Changbin, or Hyunjin. He’s usually so much steadier than this, so consistently unshakeable, and Minho wonders how much damage he’s done that he’s just never seen.

“Sorry,” Seungmin says, after a pause. “Sorry. But you’re not fine, and you know it, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend like you are. You can’t keep using me as a way to keep this a secret.” He stops again and presses the heel of his hand to his forehead. “You need help, and it’s like you think I’ll just never mention that because you think I don’t care abut you.”

“Seungmin-ah,” Chan says, somewhere between a caution and a comfort, but Minho shakes his head. 

“No,” he says. “He’s — it’s fine.”

He’s right, Minho wants to say, because Seungmin is right. He does need help. 

“I know you’ve had a hard time,” says Chan, diplomatically. He reaches a hand towards Minho, as though he wants to rest it on Minho’s leg or shoulder, but seems to change his mind halfway there and changes course midair. He grabs a fistfull of the fabric of his own jeans instead and squeezes, clearly uncomfortable. 

Minho forces himself to look up, and meet his gaze. Seungmin’s taking obvious deep breaths and he’s staring fixedly at the ceiling, his eyes wet and too bright.

“But I’m the reason all of you had a hard time too,” Minho forces himself to say. “It’s my fault.” He turns towards Seungmin and adds, “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t care about me anymore. 

“Of course I care,” Seungmin says. He’s doesn’t tip his head back downwards, as though by keeping it upturned he can keep any rogue tears in his eyes where they belong. “Of course I fucking care.”

“We don’t blame you,” says Chan softly. “You or Jisung.”

“We never told you, though. Either of us. We should have told you.”

“You should have,” Chan agrees, “but it was an impossible situation. We all know that. We always knew the two of you — that it was different, between you.”

Minho thinks about Jisung, and how it had been back then. Kissing Jisung in the morning before anyone else was awake, their bodies pressed together in the relative privacy of Minho’s curtained-in bottom bunk; going out for meals on their days off, Jisung resisting Minho’s efforts to pay the bill before eventually giving in because food was how Minho said I love you. He remembers how Jisung’s hands had felt, running over the bare skin of his chest and thighs, and it’s so vivid that Minho can almost pretend he’s going home to it, that Jisung will touch him like that again.

“I know,” he says. “But we still ruined all your lives.” 

“Does my life look ruined?” Seungmin asks, before Chan can say anything else. “Does it look that bad to you? We’re all figuring it out, and we all still have each other, except for you and Jisung. Felix calls us from Australia, all the time. You’re the one who decided that if things couldn’t stay the same then they were over.”

Minho looks at Chan out of the corner of his eye when Felix’s name comes up, and doesn’t miss the way Chan winces, almost too small to see. Minho wonders how long he’s been grieving that loss, and how long he’ll keep on grieving it; even if Chan’s never admitted it, Minho knows what it looks like to be in love with someone you won’t let yourself have, and what it looks like to ache for someone who isn’t around to see it.

“If you want your life to be ruined,” Seungmin goes on, “then fine. That’s your choice. But you don’t get to say that you ruined ours.” 

“He’s right,” says Chan softly. “Losing the group doesn’t have to mean losing each other.”

“But it’s still my fault,” Minho says. He wants to believe them, so badly, but he feels like he’s lying to himself. His actions had consequences, and that’s the problem. He caused damage, and they seem far too willing to forgive him for something for which he can’t forgive himself. 

Chan sinks back into the couch and closes his eyes for a minute. 

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it was,” he says. “It won’t change anything.” He pauses, and looks at Minho. “And you need to go to a doctor,” he continues. “You can’t just pretend you’re okay and hope everything gets better on its own.”

It’s a turning point, Minho knows. He can close himself off even further, he can insist he’s fine, and they’ll back down. They’ll be disappointed, and they’ll be frustrated, but they’ll back down. 

Or, he reminds himself, you can let them help you. 

The quiet in the room is horribly loud, and Minho is horribly scared.

“I know,” Minho says, eventually. “I know I do. I just don’t know how to start.”

Chan lets out a breath and he slumps back into the cushions like a puppet with all its strings cut. 

“First,” he says, “you let us take care of you.”

***

By noon the day after he doesn’t go pick up Minho from the park, Jisung’s a wreck. He hasn’t slept for more than an hour at a time since he got back from his attempt at walking to the park and he’s subsisted primarily on anxiety and the canned coffee he keeps in the back of the fridge. He can’t focus well enough to get any work done, he can’t work up the nerve to call Minho, and he’s taken to pacing his apartment in frantic, endless circles when his phone vibrates with an incoming call. 

He pounces, heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, and feels his whole body go cold when he sees that it isn’t Minho calling. It’s Chan.

“Hey, hyung,” he says, when he answers. He tries to sound calm, even though he seems to be watching at least three catastrophic scenarios play out in high definition in his head about what horrible thing could have happened to Minho that would result in Chan calling him. Maybe Minho’s in the hospital. Maybe he wants Chan to come get his things from Jisung’s so he never has to see Jisung again. Maybe he went missing on his walk and no one can find him. Jisung’s stomach hurts with worry.

“Do you know where I’ve been this morning?” Chan asks. His voice is even but Jisung’s known him long enough to know that something’s wrong.

“The hospital?” Jisung blurts out, unable to stop himself. “The morgue?”

There’s a long pause. In the background, Jisung hears a door open and close, keys jangle as they’re set down somewhere, and a voice that sounds like Changbin’s saying I’m home . It occurs to Jisung that he could be there too, wherever it is that they are. His home could be a shared place. He could wake up every day to the sound of Chan banging around in the kitchen, making coffee, and Changbin shoving things in his backpack for a day at the studio. The life he lives is something he’s done to himself. 

“What?” asks Chan. “No, of course not — why would I be at the morgue?”

“I just thought — Minho never came home.”

“And you assumed he was dead?”

“I didn’t know one way or the other! He won’t answer my texts!”

“He’s read them, though.”

This hadn’t occurred to Jisung. Of course Minho’s read them. The messages show that they’ve been read. Minho’s obviously not dead. 

“Wait,” says Jisung. “How do you know he’s read them?”

“Because I just saw him,” Chan says. “He’s at Seungmin’s apartment. He’s gonna stay there tonight, too — he says he’ll be back at your place tomorrow.”

Breathing is suddenly harder to do. Jisung’s chest is tight and his hands have started shaking, although he doesn’t remember when. He grips the phone more tightly. 

“Why?” Jisung asks. “Why, is he okay?” 

“No, he’s not,” Chan says. He sound exasperated now. “His knee was way too fucked up to be out on his own last night.”

Jisung’s mind feels like radio static. “His knee?” 

“Yeah,” Chan says, although Jisung can almost hear the confusion that must be evident on his face. “You knew, right? He told you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” says Jisung, as the entirety of the last few days recontextualizes itself. Minho has remained seated for the majority of the time he’s been at Jisung’s apartment. He’s never climbed the stairs to the loft when Jisung was watching — he’s always just materialized in bed, face a little pinched. He’s never come to get groceries with Jisung. When he walks, he walks stiffly. 

“He’s going to the hospital tomorrow,” Chan says, “so we’ll know more then. But it sounds like he tore his ACL in Japan.”

“That’s why he came back,” Jisung says, sounding robotic. “He couldn’t dance anymore.” 

Without meaning to, Jisung knows that he’d been harboring the awful, treacherous hope that Minho had returned to Korea for him, and it hurts more than he expected to realize he’d been wrong. Jisung had been a landing pad, a temporary stop on a journey somewhere else, and he feels his heartbeat insistent in his throat.

“Basically, yeah,” says Chan. 

“Then why — he should’ve gone to the hospital weeks ago,” says Jisung. “He should’ve gotten help.”

“I think he just didn’t want it to be real,” Chan says, softly. 

Jisung gets that. He does. He doesn’t want his life to be real, either, but at the same time, he can’t help feeling that Minho’s life is worth so much more than his own. Minho deserves compassion that he himself does not.

“But he should’ve told me,” Jisung presses on, starting to feel hysterical and unable to calm himself down. “He should’ve — I don’t know, not gone out on his own. Something. Anything.”

Some of the desperation must come through in his voice, because Chan interrupts him. 

“Hang on,” Chan says. “Give me your address. Let me come over, with Changbin. Let’s — let’s talk about this in person, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jisung says, fighting off his second panic attack in as many days. “Yeah, please.” 

By the time he’s texted Chan the address and given Chan and Changbin enough time to make it over, he’s still not feeling that much calmer, but sitting with his head between his knees has at least made breathing easier. He gets up from his desk chair to let them in when they arrive and tries not to pay too much attention to the looks on their faces as they take in the mess of Jisung’s apartment: Minho’s suitcase open and overflowing in one corner of the living room; Jisung’s socks and hoodie draped over the stairs up to the loft; the remnants of the junk food Jisung’s been subsisting on scattered across the kitchen. Jisung imagines that the air itself smells musty, sour and stale with his own sweat and his own anxiety.

“I like being able to picture where you live,” Chan says. He’s wandered into the middle of the living room and is looking at the production equipment on Jisung’s desk with curiosity. 

“It never really occurred to me that you’d want to picture it,” Jisung says, honestly. Chan doesn’t say anything to this, but Jisung can see the muscles in his jaw tighten.

“It’s nice,” Changbin says, to lighten the mood. “It must be good to have your own space.”

“I guess so,” says Jisung. Mostly it just feels empty. He misses waking up to an apartment full of voices, full of people who knew him and loved him and would crawl into bed with him when he needed it, giving to him what strength they could with wordless, unquestioning generosity. 

Changbin steps around Chan and sits down on the loveseat, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He gives Jisung an expectant look and waits until Jisung joins him. 

“So Minho didn’t tell you anything?” Changbin asks. “At all?”

“He didn’t even tell me why he was back in Korea,” Jisung says. 

“You didn’t ask?” Chan sounds incredulous, as though he can’t imagine just letting someone stay in his home without knowing why they were there, and Jisung doesn’t know how to explain himself. He doesn’t know how to tell Chan that if he had to, he would get on his knees and beg Minho for the scraps from his table. 

“I missed him,” he says finally. “I didn’t want to scare him away.”

“Yeah,” Chan says. “I get that.”

He probably does, Jisung thinks, and just barely stops himself asking after Felix. He knows, or at least suspects, how much Chan must miss him.   

“What happened, yesterday?” Jisung asks instead. He knows he should ask Minho, not Chan, and he doesn’t know if he actually wants to hear whatever answer Chan’s about to give him, but he knows also that he has to hear it anyway. He can’t keep imagining the worst case scenario. 

“I mean, we weren’t there,” says Chan. “But from what I heard, it sounds like he went for a walk in Yeongdeungpo Park without his knee brace and his knee gave out.”

“That’s far,” Jisung says. “Yeongdeungpo Park, I mean. That’s a long way to go on an injury.”

“Yeah,” Chan agrees. “He was way too far away to walk back and I guess he was too far away from the park entrance to get to a taxi on his own.”

“So he texted me.” Jisung hears the hollowness in his own voice and his head pounds like a drum. You left him. You left him. You left him. 

Changbin shifts uncomfortably on the loveseat next to Jisung and Jisung suddenly feels lightheaded. The panic he fought back when he was on the phone with Chan starts to creep back in and he hunches forward, struggling for air. He knows he isn’t dying — the tightness in his chest is familiar, the constricting of his vision and the overwhelming vertigo as known to him as old friends — but it feels like he might be anyway. He presses on his sternum with the heel of his hand and shuts his eyes.     

“Whoa,” says Chan. Jisung feels him kneel down in front of the loveseat, feels his hand land on Jisung’s knee. “Are you — ” He trails off, like he isn’t sure how to do this anymore, like he isn’t sure what to say.

“He’s having a panic attack,” says Changbin, calmly. Jisung remembers how carefully Changbin has always watched him, how attentive Changbin has always been when Jisung’s needed him, and Jisung lets Changbin take over. 

“Hey,” says Changbin, scooting closer to Jisung and putting his arm around Jisung’s shoulders. “Breathe with me, okay?” He takes Jisung’s hand and puts it on his own chest, so Jisung can feel the rhythm of Changbin’s breathing without having to open his eyes. Changbin takes several slow, exaggerated breaths, and Jisung does his best to match them.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Changbin asks, when Jisung’s stopped shaking. Jisung lets himself slump into Changbin’s side a little bit, so Changbin’s supporting his weight, and it surprises him how good it feels, just to be touched. Just to be held like this. 

“I tried to go get him,” Jisung manages, still trying to breathe instead of gasp. “Yesterday. I told him I would.”

“Yeah, we heard,” says Changbin, still so gentle. “What happened?”

“I tried,” Jisung says again. “I made it a block.”

Jisung feels Changbin tense with worry where their bodies are pressed together. He glances up and sees a familiar kind of pain flit across Chan’s face too, and he’s reminded of when his anxiety was so bad he had to take a break from the group. He remembers how worried Chan had been then, and how much it had hurt him that he was hurting the others. 

“A block?” Chan asks, when Jisung doesn’t elaborate. “What d’you mean?”

“I had a fucking panic attack,” Jisung says. “I couldn’t get farther than a block away from my building without losing it.”

Changbin tugs Jisung a little closer to him, as though he’s comforting himself as well as Jisung. 

“Has that happened before?” he asks. 

Breathing becomes harder again. He’d almost forgotten, after the overwhelming relief of being seen, that he still hadn’t told anyone — that even now, he is only partially seeable, because the ugliest part he’s kept hidden.

He pulls away from Changbin, so he’s sitting up a little bit straighter. The air in the apartment is oddly charged, as though everyone’s waiting for something but on one knows what they’re all waiting for. 

“It always happens,” Jisung says eventually, trying to sound stronger than he feels. “I mean, it always happened when I still bothered trying to go out. I don’t try anymore.”

“And by go out,” Changbin says, very slowly, “you mean — ”

“I mean when leave the apartment,” Jisung says. “I mean when I leave the building. I can’t be outside, I can’t be around people. It’s too much. When I try, it gets so bad it feels like I’m gonna die.” It all comes out in one breath and he leans forward after he’s done talking, resting his elbows on his knees. 

“For how long?” Chan asks. He sounds stricken. 

“A year,” Jisung says. He looks at his feet instead of Chan, because he knows Chan will blame himself for all of it, and the thought of someone else carrying the guilt he’s carried for so long makes the guilt itself even heavier. 

“A year,” Chan repeats. “You mean — has it been since…?”

“Yeah. Since we left the group.” Jisung closes his eyes, and steels himself. “Since I left Minho.”

The silence that follows is enormous. 

“Well, Minho didn’t tell us that part,” Changbin says, eventually. 

“Neither did Seungmin,” Chan adds. 

“Everyone always assumes it was him,” Jisung says, as the constant tide of his sadness overtakes the panic. Its rhythm is as predictable as the changing of the seasons, or the setting of the sun — it always comes back round eventually, the longing he feels for the person he gave up. He wants Minho back so badly that he doesn’t remember what it felt like to fall asleep without trying to imagine what Minho might be doing, to wake up without the ghost of Minho in his bed.  

“But it wasn’t,” Changbin says softly. 

“No,” says Jisung, throat tightening with tears. “It wasn’t.”

“You were trying to protect him,” Chan says, staying on the floor but scooting closer to the loveseat. He doesn’t say it like a question. 

“I didn’t want him to have to live like this,” Jisung chokes out. “I already couldn’t — I couldn’t go anywhere, and I knew it would get worse, and I knew he’d stay with me if I let him. He’s always done that, he’s always just met me where I am — he’d pretend he didn’t want to do something that I knew he wanted to do because I didn’t want to, he’d stay in with me, he’d never push me or make me feel bad, and I just couldn’t. He deserved better than that. He still does.”

“But that should have been his choice,” Changbin says, with no anger in his voice. “He loved you. He always did — we all knew that, even if we didn’t know everything.” He pauses and adds, “And you deserved better than you gave yourself.”

“Does he know all this?” Chan asks. “Does he know why you ended it?”

Jisung shakes his head, and pulls his knees up on the couch in front of him so he can hug them to his chest. 

“I thought it’d be easier for him this way,” he says. “A clean break.”

“Did you?” asks Changbin, a little too knowing. 

Jisung considers this. After the news about their relationship had broken and he and Minho had left the band, they’d become one another’s world. Jisung had found the apartment and he and Minho had retreated there, shutting the world out and clinging, as best they could, to the things they loved most about each other. They ignored everyone’s calls together, even when it came out that Stray Kids had been disbanded. They’d ignored their parents, their friends, everything except the moonlight as it streamed through the windows at night and the way their names sounded on one another’s lips. Jisung had known then, just as he knows now, that it would never have been easier on Minho to lose everything without knowing why. 

“No,” Jisung admits. “I just hated myself. I thought — I dunno. It felt better to let him hate me than to let him pity me.” 

You punished yourself, he reminds himself. And then you punished him. 

“Oh,” says Changbin. “Oh, Jisung.” He suddenly sounds worried again and Jisung isn’t sure why until he realizes that he, Jisung, is crying. Jisung presses his forehead against the tops of his knees and feels the sobs shake through him like an earthquake, like some natural disaster over which he has no control. Everything around him — the polyester fabric of the couch, the warmth of Chan’s hand on his shin, the feeling of Changbin’s lips pressed to his shoulder — is so incredibly far away that it might as well be beyond the horizon line, too distant for the eye to see.

“It’s okay,” Changbin whispers, leaning against Jisung and letting his nose get squashed against Jisung’s upper arm. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“I’m not okay, though,” Jisung says, through tears. 

“I know,” says Changbin. “But you will be.”

***

Hyunjin’s standing next to the car waiting for him when Minho emerges from the hospital the next day. Fall is edging towards winter and there’s a chill in the air even during the day, the noon sun thin and bright as it reflects off the pavement of the parking lot. Minho thinks he might have preferred Seungmin, but Seungmin had promised to meet with his manager that morning and so Hyunjin had volunteered to drop Minho off and pick him up instead. 

“You should have let me come meet you inside,” says Hyunjin, as Minho approaches. Minho knows he’s going slowly on his crutches, which the hospital gave him along with a better knee brace than the one he bought in a convenience store in Japan, but he shakes his head at Hyunjin anyway. 

“I can do some things on my own,” says Minho, drily. “Allow me my pride.”

Hyunjin had done his best to come inside with Minho earlier, too — Minho suspects he would have stayed in the waiting room for Minho’s entire appointment if Minho had let him — but Minho’s still embarrassed at having needed to be picked up from the park. There was a time when it was his job to care for the others — to cook for them, check on them if they were sick, teach them choreography. He isn’t good at now letting them care for him. 

“What did they say?” Hyunjin asks, opening the passenger door. He takes Minho’s crutches and lays them out on the backseat once Minho’s sat down in the front.

“It’s torn,” Minho says. He reaches for the water bottle Hyunjin’s not-so-subtly left in the center console and uses it to swallow a dose of the painkillers he just picked up at the hospital pharmacy. They’re stronger than what he’s been taking and he’s almost ashamed at how relieved he is at the prospect of not being in pain.

“All the way?” asks Hyunjin.

“Yep.”

He tries to stay calm about it. After a physical exam, an x-ray, and an MRI, a very matter-of-fact doctor had explained that not only was the ACL torn, the cartilage in his knee was damaged, and if he wanted to get back to dancing or really to get back to normal functionality at all, he’d need the ligaments reconstructed. 

“It’s a common procedure,” the doctor had reassured him, in response to whatever expression he’d seen on Minho’s face. “You’ll need physical therapy, but you should be able to get back to where you were before.”

In some ways, the fact that it’s a common surgery makes Minho feel even worse. He’s damaged himself in a way hundreds of thousands of other people have damaged themselves. His life has come to a screeching halt for a mundane, unremarkable reason.

“Okay,” says Hyunjin. “Okay. That means surgery, right?”

Minho nods. He’d found Hyunjin that morning, sitting in the living room with medical websites pulled up on his laptop, and had done his best to resist the sudden urge to vomit as Hyunjin had explained the varying treatments for a torn ACL. Minho hadn’t told Hyunjin that he’d been reading the exact same webpages for weeks, because he’d known that Hyunjin was trying to make things okay for himself as much as he was for Minho. 

Now, Hyunjin sits in the driver’s seat and grips the wheel without starting the engine. He stares out the front window with his eyes wide.

“Do you want to go home?” he asks, although Minho can see how his face screws up a little bit at the word home . Neither of them know what it means anymore. 

“Do you want to go get a coffee or something first?” Minho asks, almost surprising himself. “Before you take me back to Jisung’s?” He’s restless and agitated, too long spent indoors and unmoving, and now that it’s useless to try to hide his injury, he might as well take advantage of it. He suspects, too, that Hyunjin has more to say than he’s said so far, and the years-old need to give Hyunjin what he wants hasn’t gone away at all.

“Yeah,” Hyunjin says. “Yeah, I do.” He pauses, gnawing on his lip, and adds, “You want to go back to Jisung’s?”

“I mean,” Minho says, “I don’t have any clothes or anything at your place, for one.” He’s wearing a pair of sweatpants belonging to Seungmin and a t-shirt belonging to Hyunjin. The warm, boyish scent of Hyunjin’s skin is still clinging to the cotton of the t-shirt, and Minho can smell it every time he moves. “But even if I did,” Minho continues, “I think — Jisung and I need to talk. I need to see him in person.”

“Okay,” says Hyunjin again, pulling out of the parking lot. He navigates onto the main road that runs parallel to the hospital and they drive in silence along it. Hyunjin hums occasionally, although Minho’s not sure if he realizes he’s doing it, and Minho lets himself pretend, for a moment, that his life and Hyunjin’s are still as intertwined as they’d been before. That it’s normal to be side by side in a car together, on their way to a streetside café; that when they get to where they’re going, Hyunjin will tell Minho about his latest campaign, and complain about Seungmin with too much love in his voice to be convincing, and steal Minho’s pastry from his plate because he knows Minho would never tell him no. It’s a nice picture. Minho wishes it were real.

“This okay?” Hyunjin asks eventually. “I used to come here a lot.” He’s turned down a side street and pulled up in front of a small café Minho’s never heard of before. 

“It’s fine,” Minho says, as Hyunjin inches the car into the only available parking space. He looks out the window at the street, which is bustling with pedestrians coming into and out of pharmacies and noodle shops and one lone hamburger joint, and can’t picture Hyunjin spending his time there. 

“What — I mean, why here?” he asks, on Hyunjin’s third attempt at adjusting his parking job. 

“Chan’s wrist,” he says, peering at his side-view mirror. “He got surgery on it, when — well. When he didn’t have to worry about performing anymore. We’d come here for coffee after his appointments sometimes.”  

Minho doesn’t know what to say. What else has he missed, in the year he’s been gone? Which other tiny intimacies, which other struggles and victories and agonies, have passed him by? If he were to find a way back into Chan’s life, would he fit, and if he didn’t, would it be his own fault?

Hyunjin, finally close enough to the curb for his own satisfaction, switches off the engine and gets out of the car, hurrying around to the other side so he can hand Minho his crutches. He walks slowly, glued to Minho’s side, and holds the café door open for him; once inside, even though the café is tiny, he helps Minho into a chair and won’t let Minho pay for their drinks. Minho knows he should be grateful — Hyunjin is trying so hard to make him comfortable, to take care of Minho the way Minho used to take care of Hyunjin — but mostly it just feels wrong. He doesn’t like being babied, even though he knows that’s not what Hyunjin’s doing.

“Here you go,” Hyunjin says. He sets an iced americano down on the table in front of Minho, along with a straw. Minho finds himself oddly touched that Hyunjin doesn’t question if Minho’s tastes are the same as they used to be. 

“Thanks,” Minho says. He sticks his straw into his drink and stirs it around until the clinking off the ice against the glass becomes too annoying. Finally, he makes himself look up at Hyunjin. “How’ve you been?” he asks. 

Hyunjin’s eyes go wide with surprise. 

“What?” he asks. 

“Sorry,” Minho says, “I just — I wanted to know how you’ve been.”

“No, I know,” Hyunjin says. He keeps looking at Minho, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing, and Minho feels wildly wrongfooted. He’d thought Hyunjin might tell him about a shoot he’s done recently, or what it’s like to live with Seungmin. Anything, really, to make them feel less like strangers to each other. 

“Your face is on a billboard outside Jisung’s window,” Minho offers. “It’s a fragrance ad, I think. You get all lit up at night, like you’re keeping an eye on what we’re doing.”

What we’re doing, he thinks, like he and Jisung are sharing a home. Like the nights they spend together are more profound than two people stuck in an apartment and trying to forget the past. 

Apparently, it’s the wrong thing to say. Hyunjin’s eyes somehow get even wider and he looks like he’s been punched in the stomach. 

“I’m sorry, hyung,” says Hyunjin, suddenly.

“For what?” Minho asks, genuinely confused. “All you’ve done today is help me.”

“I knew,” Hyunjin says, too fast. “I knew about you and Jisung.” 

Minho, who’s just taken a sip of his coffee, nearly chokes. “What?”

“For a year,” Hyunjin goes on. “Everyone was gone for the weekend except you and me and Jisung, and I couldn’t sleep so I went out for a walk.” He pauses to take a breath. “When I got back, I walked past your door, and I heard — I heard you. Both of you.”

“When you say heard…” Minho lets it trail off, hoping that maybe Hyunjin doesn’t mean what Minho’s fairly sure he means. 

“Yeah,” Hyunjin says. “So I knew it wasn’t platonic. I knew you were sleeping together.”

Minho pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m so sorry, Hyunjin-ah,” he says. “I’m so sorry you had — ”

But Hyunjin interrupts him. 

“No, that’s not what I’m trying — I don’t need you to apologize,” he says. “I’m trying to say that I’m sorry. I just kept thinking, this whole last year, that maybe if I’d told you that I knew — maybe if I’d helped you keep it a secret, things would’ve been different. Things wouldn’t have ended up the way they did.”

Hyunjin’s voice rises as he talks, slowly growing louder and a little more desperate, and Minho looks around quickly to make sure no one’s listening to them. No one is. 

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Minho says. “It would’ve — I mean, there was no way it would’ve worked. We would’ve gotten found out eventually.”

He doesn’t like to acknowledge that it never would have lasted. He’s always wondered instead how long he and Jisung could’ve gone on the way they did, how long they could’ve kept it a secret, and it’s always been a painful thing to think about, because it forces him to imagine a world in which they never got caught. A world in which nothing ever ended and nothing ever hurt, and he could still kiss Jisung in the dark at night, slow and quiet and deep. A world in which Jisung had been wrong to leave him, because there was so much more that they could have been.

But this time, he imagines Hyunjin, too, living with the weight of a lie that never should have been his, and he knows that he’s avoiding the truth. He and Jisung never could have told anyone. They would have spent however many more weeks or months or years sneaking around, borrowing time and love and comfort from a future they’d never get to have, and then they would’ve grown to resent it. Someone was always going to get hurt.

“But maybe — ” Hyunjin says, and Minho shakes his head. 

“No,” he says. “It wasn’t on you.”

“You’re not mad that I knew?” Hyunjin asks. His eyes are damp now and his lip is starting to tremble, and Minho wants, more than anything, to take Hyunjin’s guilt from him. 

“I’m honestly surprised no one else figured it out,” he says, trying to sound calm and steady. “I don’t think we were all that subtle.”

“I think everyone suspected,” Hyunjin says, “but it was just easier to pretend it wasn’t happening. We just — we all pretended it wasn’t happening.” 

And then, without warning, Hyunjin’s crying. He presses the back of his wrist to his eyes to catch his tears and his shoulders give a little shake, like he’s hiccuping or trying not to sob. 

“I let you leave,” Hyunjin says, thickly. “I shouldn’t have. I should’ve tried to break down the door every day until you came back.”

“Hey,” Minho says, awkwardly scooting his chair closer to Hyunjin’s with only one good leg to support him. “Oh, hey, Hyunjin-ah. Honey. It’s okay.”

“I know it wasn’t my responsibility,” Hyunjin says, like he’s repeating what someone else has said to him. “I know I couldn’t have made you do anything. But I just keep thinking that maybe if I’d called one more time, or texted one more time, or just figured out where you lived — ”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Minho says. “I’d made up my mind. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I know,” Hyunjin says again. “But I — ”

He dissolves into silent tears. Minho reaches over to put his arm around Hyunjin’s shoulders, keenly aware of how much shorter he is than Hyunjin, and Hyunjin turns his head to bury his face in Minho’s shoulder. For all the teasing, for all the times Minho’s threatened to put Hyunjin in an air fryer, Hyunjin’s never loved anyone halfway. 

“Hyunjin-ah,” Minho says, “it isn’t your fault. You’re here now. We’re both here now. ” 

It’s been so long since he held someone like this, someone’s heart in his hands, and as he lets Hyunjin cry into his shoulder, getting his t-shirt damp, something clicks into place. Someone needs him. Hyunjin is asking Minho to care for him, in the way he might have done when they were younger. 

Minho takes a sip of his coffee and runs his fingers through the ends of Hyunjin’s hair. For a few minutes, he thinks, sitting in this café in Seoul, the memory of his old life has shifted and moved aside to make a place for him.

***

Minho’s text rouses Jisung from an unsatisfactory afternoon half-nap. 

Hi, it says. I’ll be back at the apartment in twenty minutes.

Jisung rolls off the mattress in the loft and makes his way down the stairs, his skin overheated and his stomach unsettled. He knows, from brushing his teeth in front of the mirror that morning, that he looks strung out — there are deep, purplish circles under his eyes and his chin and jaw are dotted with stubble. His face is still puffy from crying in front of Chan and Changbin the day before, and then from crying again after they’d left.

It’s fine, he tells himself, over and over, as he paces back and forth from the front door to the window. It doesn’t matter what he looks like. Minho has seen him in full makeup, on a stage in front of thousands of people, and Minho has seen him vomit in the bathroom after too much soju — there’s no embarrassing himself in front of Minho. 

And, he reminds himself, as he stares out the window at Hyunjin’s oversized face on the billboard, he isn’t trying to win Minho over or get Minho back. Minho doesn’t need to think he looks good or want to kiss him. He’s trying to apologize, and to get Minho healthy.

The sound of the code being punched into the front door makes Jisung jump. He gives Hyunjin’s billboard one last look, almost wishing Hyunjin were actually here so he didn’t have to have this conversation alone, and takes as deep a breath as he can. His heart is beating so fast he thinks he might throw up. 

“Hi, hyung,” Jisung says, when the door opens. 

“Hi,” says Minho. He’s on crutches, which Jisung supposes he should have expected, but the sight of it still makes Jisung nauseous with guilt. He should have noticed. He should have seen .

“Don’t,” Minho says, looking at Jisung looking at him. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

“That’s not what I was doing,” says Jisung. “I just — I didn’t know.” 

“I know you didn’t,” says Minho, crossing the room slowly and settling himself down on the loveseat. “I didn’t tell you.”

“You were acting weird, though. You weren’t going anywhere. You just kind of — stayed there.” Jisung gestures to where Minho’s sitting and takes an aborted step towards him, meaning to sit down next to him and then instantly thinking better of it. 

“Likewise,” says Minho. His voice is very flat and very cold and the look he’s giving Jisung is one Jisung’s seen a thousand times before, although never when Minho was looking at him. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t come get you,” Jisung blurts out, rather than explain why he too had been acting weird. “I should’ve — if I’d know you were hurt, I wouldn’t have…you know. Done what I did.”

“Bailed?” asks Minho. 

“Yeah,” Jisung says. “Bailed.”

Minho gives him an uncomfortably curious look. 

“Why didn’t you come?” he asks, eventually.

“Something came up,” says Jisung. He perches on the edge of his desk and chews on a hangnail, leaving his finger red and covered in spit.  

“Something came up?” Minho repeats. “What came up?”

“Nothing!” Jisung says, and then realizes that doesn’t help his case. “I mean, nothing important. I mean — I mean I’m sorry! I feel awful about it. I’ve been sick to my stomach thinking about it, and wondering if you were okay, and knowing you weren’t okay and that it was my fault.” He stops for a minute, heart in his throat, and adds, “Knowing I left you.”

Minho tips his head sideways. “Jisung-ah,” he says slowly. “If you’d known I was hurt, what would have been different?”

“I would’ve come!” Jisung says. “I wouldn’t have panicked, and I would’ve made myself come!” 

As soon as he says it, he realizes what he’s done. He looks at Minho, whose expression has sharpened into something precise and determined, and then stares fixedly at the floor. 

“Jisung-ah,” Minho says again. “What aren’t you telling me? I know there’s something you’re not telling me. It’s the same thing you haven’t been telling me this whole time.”

“Someone took a picture,” Jisung says. “When I was walking to the park.”

“A picture of you?”

“No, not of me. A girl was just taking a picture of her friend, but I heard it, and I just kept thinking, What if I’m in that picture? What if someone can see me and I don’t know, what if someone’s watching me and trying to hurt me, what if — ” He trails off. He glances up again, and Minho looks gutted. 

“Jisung-ah,” Minho says, slowly. “Is it — are you still — the photos?”

Jisung remembers the photos. He remembers them splashed across the top of every celebrity gossip site, attached to every social media post. They’d been blurry, taken from a car parked across the street from the one they’d borrowed from Minho’s dad, but even blurry they’d been clear enough: Jisung’s eyes closed, Minho’s hand cradling Jisung’s jaw, their lips just about to touch.

“I still think about them too,” Minho offers. “I’ve gone over it my head so many times. Trying to figure out which car it was, and how the fuck we didn’t notice it was happening.”

The winding road they’d walked on their way up Bugaksan, the gathering dark on their way back down; the Korean restaurant they’d passed in a building designed to look like a hanok, the way the stone of Changuimun Gate had glowed in the setting sun. Night had fallen when they’d gotten back the car, which they’d parked underneath a tree, and they’d been wearing hats and masks. The ground had been covered in reddening leaves and once inside the car, Jisung hadn’t been able to keep his hands to himself. He’d been so sure no one could see them. So sure no one would know who they were.

“Yeah,” Jisung says. “Me too.”

Jisung never found out who’d taken the pictures, or who’d first posted them online: a reporter, maybe, trying to get clicks with a scandalous story, or a saesang, who’d been following them all day. He hadn’t known, while Minho was kissing him, that someone was taking a photograph that would end both their careers. He’d trembled, when Minho had pulled away. Let’s go home , Minho had said. 

“I can’t believe we were that careless,” Minho says now. It’s familiar territory. They’ve had this conversation before. 

“It would’ve come out eventually,” Jisung says, robotically. “Someway or other.”

Minho looks unbearably sad. “I know,” he says, which surprises Jisung. Usually he denies it. “I was…I was saying the same thing to Hyunjin earlier.” 

“I just,” Jisung starts. He swallows, and tries again. “I just — it’s too hard to be outside anymore. When that girl took the picture, I just kept thinking, it’s happening again. It’s all happening again.”

Because yes, it’s the photos, but it’s so much more than that. It’s every sunset and every moonrise he should have seen while on a walk with Minho, side by side in the dusk; it’s every meal he should have shared in a dorm that isn’t his anymore; it’s every day he should’ve spent with the people he never should’ve given up. 

“Jisung-ah,” Minho says again. He clears his throat and Jisung knows, from the sound of it, that he’s close to tears. “Jisung-ah, the worst thing already happened.” 

“I know it did,” Jisung says, a hot, impotent anger spreading outwards from the center of his chest. “I know it did, and I think about it every fucking day. I think about — we were supposed to have time! We were supposed to have so much more fucking time.” 

I think about you, Jisung almost says. I’ve never stopped. 

Minho moves like he’s about to stand up and then stops himself, face twisting up in pain when he puts weight on his knee. He stares at Jisung with something raw and unwieldy in his eyes.

“Time?” he says. His voice has deepened with emotion and Jisung’s body responds to it the way it always has, with a jolt of desire that Jisung’s never been able to control. “ Time ? You left me . You took all that time and you wasted it! You threw it away!” 

“It was already gone!” Jisung says. “It was gone the minute someone posted those pictures!”

“No it wasn’t!” Minho’s almost yelling now. “You and I — we still could’ve had a chance!”

Jisung takes a deep, steadying breath. There isn’t much he can give Minho at this point, but at least he can give him the truth.

“Before,” he says, “when I told you that I ended things because we wouldn’t work out.”

“Yeah,” says Minho, quieter now but sounding shaky. “I remember.”

“I lied.” Jisung crosses the room and sits down on the loveseat next to Minho. He can’t stand being so far away from him, not when he’s so close. “I lied, because I couldn’t let you stay.”

Minho turns to him. They’re barely a foot apart. 

“Why?” he asks. 

“My anxiety is so bad,” Jisung says, “that I can’t go outside. I knew it was getting worse, even back then. What was I supposed to do? You’ve always been so social and so outgoing and so — I don’t know, so fucking alive. I could barely leave the house, hyung! Was I supposed to drag you into that too? Was I supposed to make you stay with someone who couldn’t even fucking function?”

Minho gapes at him. Part of Jisung waits for pity, for Minho to feel sorry for him, but Minho’s face remains sharp and unyielding. 

“That should have been my choice,” Minho says, finally. “I loved you, Jisung. I knew you. I’ve always known you get anxious. It wasn’t your decision to make, that I couldn’t handle that!” 

“This isn’t the same!” Jisung says. His leg starts bouncing and he can’t get it to stop. He presses down on his thigh with his palm. “This isn’t getting anxious. This is — it’s bad! Don’t you get that? I can’t leave this apartment! You were hurt in a park and I couldn’t come and get you without having a fucking panic attack!” 

“Maybe it would’ve been different, though!” Minho says. “If I’d been here all along, maybe I could’ve helped. Maybe it didn’t have to get this bad.”

Jisung presses the heels of his hands over his eyes and takes a shaky breath. He doesn’t know how to get Minho to understand what he’s saying, and he isn’t sure he wants to. Part of him, a deep-seated and cowardly part, wants Minho to keep fighting for him. He wants to Minho to keep insisting, if not in so many words, that he loves him. 

“But you would’ve stayed,” Jisung says. “You would’ve stayed even if it was hurting you, and I didn’t want that guilt.”

“I would’ve stayed?” Minho says, incredulously. “Of course I would’ve stayed! I never would have left, not after everything!”

“That’s the problem!” Jisung says. “You should have left me!” 

They stare at each other, both breathing unsteadily. It would be so easy, Jisung thinks, to sling a leg over Minho’s hips right now, to sink down onto his lap. He wants Minho back so badly. He watches Minho’s face, watches anger flare into something hotter and more dangerous, and knows, in his gut, that Minho wants it too. He leans forward. 

It’s like they’re magnetized together. Minho matches Jisung’s movement, tilts his head when Jisung does, and this close, Jisung can see his pulse fluttering beneath the thin skin of his throat. Minho’s breath is warm against Jisung’s lips and Jisung remembers, so vividly and so intimately, what Minho tastes like. The way Minho used to dig his fingertips into the muscle of Jisung’s jaw when he cupped Jisung’s face to kiss him, how Minho used to whimper and pull Jisung closer when Jisung tugged on his hair: it feels like a lifetime ago and, at the same time, if Jisung closes his eyes, they might have only just stopped kissing each other. They might have only just pulled apart, breathless and in awe. 

“Hyung,” Jisung says. “Hyung, can I — ”

All Jisung wants is to pin Minho down and take him apart. He wants a leg between Minho’s thighs, he wants his mouth on Minho’s cock and he wants to hear Minho beg him for more. He wants to go back to a time when he knew Minho’s body better than he ever knew his own. 

Do you want me to get on my knees? he almost says. Do you want me to ask you that way? 

Minho doesn’t move, or answer. His closes his eyes and shudders, like he’s bracing himself to do something he doesn’t want to do. 

“No,” he says finally. He pulls away, sharply and unexpectedly, and it’s a kick to Jisung’s stomach, a knife between his ribs. He’d been so close. 

“Anything,” Jisung says, before he can stop himself. “Hyung, I’ll do anything.”

Minho sits back and leans his head against the wall behind the loveseat. His eyes are still closed. He’s breathing too fast. 

“Jisung,” Minho says. “Jisung, we can’t. I can’t.”

Jisung has nothing to say to this. He imagines dropping down to the floor in front of Minho, pressing his forehead to the ground. Scraps, he thinks. I will take whatever you give me. 

“You can’t ask me for this,” Minho presses on. “Not after everything. Don’t do this to me.”

“I wasn’t trying — ” Jisung starts, but he knows there’s no point. I wasn’t trying to ask you to fix me. I wasn’t doing it for comfort.

Minho opens his eyes and looks at Jisung with an expression on his face that Jisung’s never seen. 

“We were supposed to have time,” he says, simply. 

Jisung stands up on shaky legs, not trusting himself to speak. It’s not dark yet. If he were to look out the window, the sun would still be partway above the horizon. The lights of the city haven’t yet set the hills in the distance aglow. But Jisung nods anyway, and turns towards the stairs to the loft. Minho doesn’t stop him.