Ship/Member: Seungcheol / Gyucheol Major Tags: substance abuse, off-screen violence Additional Tags: anxiety, unreliable narrator Permission to remix: Yes
***
You wake up with blood on your face.
You think it’s snot, at first, the tickle at the edge of your nostril, a dry flaking that makes your lip twitch. Only when you go to scratch, it powders under your nails, dull russet caked under the perfect white moons the manicurist files them into once a week. Snot isn’t usual baked red-black, and it doesn’t usually dry in tracks across your cheek, down to the corner of your mouth. You can taste it in your teeth, now, faint old penny tang beneath the overwhelming sourness of stale alcohol, thick enough to make you roll to your belly and gag, so, okay.
Okay.
You wake up with blood on your face. You don’t know why.
It isn’t the first time.
*
You could be a spy. You’re self-taught, true, but you had a good teacher. Drop you into any situation, no context provided: you’ll know the story within the hour. It’s all in their faces.
Breakfast time, seven full-grown men crammed around a single table. You start to piece together a timeline off of nothing but who can meet your eyes. This is after you’ve thrown up three or four times and brushed the rotting carcass from your mouth, cleaned the blood off your face. After you’ve opened a fresh bottle to sterilize the wound in your nostril, the bigger laceration behind your ribs. At least that one’s safe inside where no one can see it bleed.
It’s a bad game, but you have to play it, so: you shovel cornflakes between numb lips and look at each of them in turn, waiting to see who holds your gaze. Jeonghan passes, but Jeonghan always passes. He’s too good at the game. Joshua keeps staring at his phone, face slack, and he’s too good, too: hard to tell if he’s avoiding you or just zoned out. Jihoon, no. Wonwoo, Soonyoung, big fat Xs. Junhui—Junhui’s not even eating. Not even moving, really. An uninhabited body propped in a chair, doll eyes aimed unseeing at the tv. If you shook him, you think he would fall apart into his separate pieces and scatter across the floor. You’d worry he wasn’t breathing, except that you lean forward to check and catch the softest trace of a flinch.
It was a bad night, then.
You stare into the slowly dissolving cornflakes and dip into the shallow pool of last night’s memories, trying to tease up the freshest one you can find. It’s a smear of faces. Seungkwan’s pinched smile swims up, stretched thin with effort. Mingyu, laughing at you. Was he laughing? Mouth open, anyway, eyes bright. There’s no sound to the memory, but you can smell him, a blend of hair products and cologne. You could pick out of every member by scent alone. That has to mean something, right? That you tried. Even in the past tense.
Was he laughing? Or was it something else?
“Where’s Mingyu?” you ask, and the whole room stops to suck in a breath.
“I’m sure he’s in his room, resting,” Jeonghan says after a beat. “Why?”
Good question. It’s nothing you can articulate, just a feeling. Less than a feeling. Seungkwan’s smile, straining at the corners before it crumpled, and Mingyu’s open mouth. Was he laughing, or yelling?
“Is he okay?” you ask Jeonghan, a swing of the knife in a black room.
The pause is much longer this time. You keep your eyes on Jeonghan so you don’t have to watch the way Jihoon tenses, the way Soonyoung empties beside him.
Jeonghan holds your eyes, searching. You want to ask him what he finds.
“He’ll be fine,” Joshua says. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “The doctor said he didn’t break anything, just go easy with the hand for a few days.”
It opens inside you like a fist. Seungkwan with tears running into his smile, Hansol’s arms around him. Mingyu in your face, not laughing, how could you think he was laughing? One hand on your shoulder, and the other pushing right through you, flinging you straight into outer space.
There’s pure white after that, alcohol or concussion or just plain shock shaking your mind clean as an etch-a-sketch.
“Oh,” you say, just one syllable, but Jeonghan’s gaze sharpens, fine enough to cut. He shouldn’t be able to hear so much. “Should I…”
“You have a schedule in an hour,” Jeonghan interrupts smoothly. “Everyone needs to be back here by noon, there’s a quick interview and then they want to film content of us in the arena before soundcheck.”
His gaze has left you, words barely for your benefit. He says it all while his thin fingers neatly segment an orange, ends with a single golden wedge trapped between his teeth.
“I’ll tell the kids,” Jihoon says, standing like he was spring-loaded, and Jeonghan nods a dismissal. Quiet figures suddenly blossom to life around the room, shoveling in last bites and wiping mouths, making polite exits. In just outside five minutes the room is empty except for you and Jeonghan.
He’s looking at you in a way that makes the growing ache behind your eyes throb acutely, slow heartbeat pulses of pain. The spoon you raise to your lips is filled with whole grain mush. You try to take the bite anyway and gag, let it crash back into the bowl, spattering milk.
“Drink some tea,” Jeonghan says, pushing the cup into your hand.
He busies himself with piling up dishes while you force down the first sip. When you recognize the dull hard taste of what he’s added to it, you drink more deeply, tipping it back, a rush of relief that makes your head swim. It’s barely enough to steady your hands, but it’ll get you through a shower and a short drive, and then someone will have what you need. Some of the staff keep pity in their pockets for you these days. Jeonghan’s the only one who makes it feel like kindness.
*
You swim through your schedule, finishing early enough to have an hour alone back at the hotel before the interview, which means you either did really well or really badly. You don’t remember anyone frowning at you, so probably it was okay.
The world flicks by faster after that. Interview, pictures, the bright blur of the band around you, their happy noise. Recording content in the arena takes forever, endless loops of the stage, daisy chaining your way up and down the stands. You keep falling behind, getting stuck in corners until someone takes you by the wrist and leads you around.
Finally, finally the lights come up, and you have reached the only part of your day where you know exactly what to do. You don’t haven’t to think: when the music starts you hit every mark, every note, the way you’ve hit them a hundred thousand times before. The relief of being outside of yourself, moving in perfect formation and knowing the one right answer every time. You let it fill you up and hollow you out, the lights and the screams and the sweat in your eyes scouring you clean. You’re good at this. Even the other members look softly at you; even Mingyu tucks himself against your side and gives you a smile that trembles into something sweet and real. You pour yourself into these moments on stage and you burn away every other hour until you’re only this, a bright shining thing made of joy.
And after, when Mingyu’s no longer against your side but tumbled underneath you, you smooth your hands over his skin and feed joy back to him, small sips from your mouth and great glowing waves when he pants your name. You brush your lips over his swollen knuckles, the thin damp skin beneath his eyes, pressing joy into the hollows of his body. It’s a special kind of alchemy, transmuting the haunted look in his eyes to thin sweet cries, and he lets you work your magic, lets you spin him into gold. He doesn’t know it’s all sleight of hand, that he’s already golden. All you did was burn away the rust you left behind.
[FILL] Who's the real you?
Major Tags: substance abuse, off-screen violence
Additional Tags: anxiety, unreliable narrator
Permission to remix: Yes
***
You wake up with blood on your face.
You think it’s snot, at first, the tickle at the edge of your nostril, a dry flaking that makes your lip twitch. Only when you go to scratch, it powders under your nails, dull russet caked under the perfect white moons the manicurist files them into once a week. Snot isn’t usual baked red-black, and it doesn’t usually dry in tracks across your cheek, down to the corner of your mouth. You can taste it in your teeth, now, faint old penny tang beneath the overwhelming sourness of stale alcohol, thick enough to make you roll to your belly and gag, so, okay.
Okay.
You wake up with blood on your face. You don’t know why.
It isn’t the first time.
*
You could be a spy. You’re self-taught, true, but you had a good teacher. Drop you into any situation, no context provided: you’ll know the story within the hour. It’s all in their faces.
Breakfast time, seven full-grown men crammed around a single table. You start to piece together a timeline off of nothing but who can meet your eyes. This is after you’ve thrown up three or four times and brushed the rotting carcass from your mouth, cleaned the blood off your face. After you’ve opened a fresh bottle to sterilize the wound in your nostril, the bigger laceration behind your ribs. At least that one’s safe inside where no one can see it bleed.
It’s a bad game, but you have to play it, so: you shovel cornflakes between numb lips and look at each of them in turn, waiting to see who holds your gaze. Jeonghan passes, but Jeonghan always passes. He’s too good at the game. Joshua keeps staring at his phone, face slack, and he’s too good, too: hard to tell if he’s avoiding you or just zoned out. Jihoon, no. Wonwoo, Soonyoung, big fat Xs. Junhui—Junhui’s not even eating. Not even moving, really. An uninhabited body propped in a chair, doll eyes aimed unseeing at the tv. If you shook him, you think he would fall apart into his separate pieces and scatter across the floor. You’d worry he wasn’t breathing, except that you lean forward to check and catch the softest trace of a flinch.
It was a bad night, then.
You stare into the slowly dissolving cornflakes and dip into the shallow pool of last night’s memories, trying to tease up the freshest one you can find. It’s a smear of faces. Seungkwan’s pinched smile swims up, stretched thin with effort. Mingyu, laughing at you. Was he laughing? Mouth open, anyway, eyes bright. There’s no sound to the memory, but you can smell him, a blend of hair products and cologne. You could pick out of every member by scent alone. That has to mean something, right? That you tried. Even in the past tense.
Was he laughing? Or was it something else?
“Where’s Mingyu?” you ask, and the whole room stops to suck in a breath.
“I’m sure he’s in his room, resting,” Jeonghan says after a beat. “Why?”
Good question. It’s nothing you can articulate, just a feeling. Less than a feeling. Seungkwan’s smile, straining at the corners before it crumpled, and Mingyu’s open mouth. Was he laughing, or yelling?
“Is he okay?” you ask Jeonghan, a swing of the knife in a black room.
The pause is much longer this time. You keep your eyes on Jeonghan so you don’t have to watch the way Jihoon tenses, the way Soonyoung empties beside him.
Jeonghan holds your eyes, searching. You want to ask him what he finds.
“He’ll be fine,” Joshua says. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “The doctor said he didn’t break anything, just go easy with the hand for a few days.”
It opens inside you like a fist. Seungkwan with tears running into his smile, Hansol’s arms around him. Mingyu in your face, not laughing, how could you think he was laughing? One hand on your shoulder, and the other pushing right through you, flinging you straight into outer space.
There’s pure white after that, alcohol or concussion or just plain shock shaking your mind clean as an etch-a-sketch.
“Oh,” you say, just one syllable, but Jeonghan’s gaze sharpens, fine enough to cut. He shouldn’t be able to hear so much. “Should I…”
“You have a schedule in an hour,” Jeonghan interrupts smoothly. “Everyone needs to be back here by noon, there’s a quick interview and then they want to film content of us in the arena before soundcheck.”
His gaze has left you, words barely for your benefit. He says it all while his thin fingers neatly segment an orange, ends with a single golden wedge trapped between his teeth.
“I’ll tell the kids,” Jihoon says, standing like he was spring-loaded, and Jeonghan nods a dismissal. Quiet figures suddenly blossom to life around the room, shoveling in last bites and wiping mouths, making polite exits. In just outside five minutes the room is empty except for you and Jeonghan.
He’s looking at you in a way that makes the growing ache behind your eyes throb acutely, slow heartbeat pulses of pain. The spoon you raise to your lips is filled with whole grain mush. You try to take the bite anyway and gag, let it crash back into the bowl, spattering milk.
“Drink some tea,” Jeonghan says, pushing the cup into your hand.
He busies himself with piling up dishes while you force down the first sip. When you recognize the dull hard taste of what he’s added to it, you drink more deeply, tipping it back, a rush of relief that makes your head swim. It’s barely enough to steady your hands, but it’ll get you through a shower and a short drive, and then someone will have what you need. Some of the staff keep pity in their pockets for you these days. Jeonghan’s the only one who makes it feel like kindness.
*
You swim through your schedule, finishing early enough to have an hour alone back at the hotel before the interview, which means you either did really well or really badly. You don’t remember anyone frowning at you, so probably it was okay.
The world flicks by faster after that. Interview, pictures, the bright blur of the band around you, their happy noise. Recording content in the arena takes forever, endless loops of the stage, daisy chaining your way up and down the stands. You keep falling behind, getting stuck in corners until someone takes you by the wrist and leads you around.
Finally, finally the lights come up, and you have reached the only part of your day where you know exactly what to do. You don’t haven’t to think: when the music starts you hit every mark, every note, the way you’ve hit them a hundred thousand times before. The relief of being outside of yourself, moving in perfect formation and knowing the one right answer every time. You let it fill you up and hollow you out, the lights and the screams and the sweat in your eyes scouring you clean. You’re good at this. Even the other members look softly at you; even Mingyu tucks himself against your side and gives you a smile that trembles into something sweet and real. You pour yourself into these moments on stage and you burn away every other hour until you’re only this, a bright shining thing made of joy.
And after, when Mingyu’s no longer against your side but tumbled underneath you, you smooth your hands over his skin and feed joy back to him, small sips from your mouth and great glowing waves when he pants your name. You brush your lips over his swollen knuckles, the thin damp skin beneath his eyes, pressing joy into the hollows of his body. It’s a special kind of alchemy, transmuting the haunted look in his eyes to thin sweet cries, and he lets you work your magic, lets you spin him into gold. He doesn’t know it’s all sleight of hand, that he’s already golden. All you did was burn away the rust you left behind.