Ship/Member: gyuhan, jeonghan pov Major Tags: N/A Additional Tags: the mortifying ordeal of being known, unresolved tension that goes unresolved, idolverse Permission to remix: Please ask
***
Jeonghan knows how it goes. Verse, chorus, verse. Falling in love, falling out of love, being alone. Repeat. He knows how this works. But still– still, he can’t help but wonder, what if– what if love could be more than that? What if love could be forever? What if love could be boundless like the open ocean, like the sea, wild and unrestrained, never ceasing?
And if he had that love, would he even know what to do with it? How do you hold water in your hands? How do you love the ocean without becoming a part of it, without killing yourself in the process?
Jeonghan is watching Mingyu across the restaurant table. He’s laughing at something Seokmin said. He’s plating food for everyone who asks, and opening bottles that are handed to him, and he’s all smiles, and he’s… so full of love. Unapologetically, without reservation, Mingyu loves everybody. And everyone loves Mingyu.
Mingyu is just that kind of person, Jeonghan supposes. You can’t help but love him.
Mingyu’s love is warm and soft, it’s kind, it doesn’t ask for things in return. Jeonghan’s love is a snowstorm that’ll trap you in your house and leave you to die. He’s not sure he knows how to love something without killing it.
“Everything alright, hyung?” Mingyu asks, his voice cutting through the static of Jeonghan’s mind. He’s looking at him now, eyes brown and warm.
“I’m alright,” Jeonghan replies, voice just loud enough that Mingyu will hear him.
But no one else hears it, because they’re not trying to hear it– Mingyu is trying. Mingyu is looking at Jeonghan intently, but he seems to get that Jeonghan isn’t going to tell him anything right now, so he leaves it alone.
Jeonghan almost wants Mingyu to keep prying, just to see what would happen. What would happen if Jeonghan let Mingyu cut him open here, at the group dinner, in front of everyone? If Jeonghan spilled his guts onto the table, blood and insides, every ugly thought he’s had while they’ve been sitting here? Would any of them want to look at him, or would they look away? Pretend it isn’t there, that he’s just had a little too much to drink?
Mingyu wouldn’t, some small voice in the back of Jeonghan’s head says. Mingyu would look.
But would he still love Jeonghan, even with the mess, with the blood on his hands?
Mingyu slips away again, sucked into conversation with Seungkwan. Jeonghan sits in his corner, and he doesn’t say anything until Joshua nudges his foot under the table.
“Jeonghan,” he says. “Jeonghan?”
“Mhm?” Jeonghan hums, shaking himself back to life. He picks up the chopsticks and starts pushing his food back and forth on the plate. “What is it?”
“Are you tired?”
Jeonghan blinks at him, then sighs, biting his tongue. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, tired.”
Joshua nods, silent understanding passing between them. He keeps his foot pressed against Jeonghan’s calf for the rest of the meal.
Is this also love? Here is the proof you’re still here; I am touching the back of your leg.
They get back to the hotel around midnight, some more tipsy than others. Jeonghan slips away to his room, curling up in his bed. For once, he sort of wishes they still had roommates on tour. He wishes someone was there with him, in the dark. That he could at least hear someone else breathing.
He thinks back to sharing a hotel room with Mingyu, and he doesn’t know why Mingyu is the person he thinks of first– but he is, and he’s there, in the back of Jeonghan’s mind. His breaths are slow and steady, and he shuffles around sometimes, in the darkness. He makes soft noises when he dreams.
Jeonghan doesn’t know how or why he remembers all this, but the information lies ready for him in the back of his mind the second he thinks back to it. He wishes Mingyu was there. He’d kill just to watch as he’s sleeping.
Why, though? Why would he want that? This question rolls around in his head like a smooth marble, the answer hiding in its center. He can’t crack it. He can’t even catch the marble.
...
The next day’s concert goes well. It always goes well. Jeonghan knows how that works too; verse, chorus, verse. Dance, sing, repeat. Listen to the people screaming, singing, the people who love you. Revel in it. Drink it like it’s poison and you’re Romeo.
He knows that love is different, the one between idol and fan. It’s love, but it’s not boundless, and it’s not to be taken for granted– although no love should be taken for granted. But that kind of innocent and trusting love especially, Jeonghan thinks. They’ll never really know Jeonghan, who he is at his core, what’s in the center of that marble; they’ll know what he shows them. He doesn’t want them to see his guts or any of the other ugly things inside his chest.
Want, the size of a fist. Want, want, want. There’s a reason your heart is the size of your first. If you love someone, is it a gift or a death sentence?
...
Seventeen are back in South Korea. They’re back at their dorms, and it’s nice not to be alone. Jeonghan likes lying half asleep in his bed listening to the sound of bickering in the living room, or to laughter, depending on the day.
That’s love too.
At some point Jeonghan ends up in Mingyu and Wonwoo’s dorm– he’s there to steal back a beanie Mingyu had nabbed from him on tour. Wonwoo is away, eating dinner with Soonyoung.
Mingyu catches Jeonghan, but he lets Jeonghan take the beanie back anyway, because he’s Mingyu, so of course he does. But he does make Jeonghan stay for dinner. Not that he minds. It’s nice.
Mingu gives Jeonghan the other half of his egg. This is love too.
They’re a few drinks in when Jeonghan finally broaches the subject that had been hanging in the back of his mind, and he does it carefully, as he does with all things pertaining to the heart, to his core. He knows Mingyu will listen, but it’s still scary.
Jeonghan wants to tell someone, and he also wants to take back everything he’s ever told anyone– he wants to be unknowable. If no one knows him well enough to love him, they won’t know him well enough to stop either.
“Mingyu,” he says. “I’m not sure how you do it.”
“Do what?” Mingyu asks. He’s leaning back against the couch, sitting cross legged on the floor.
“Love,” Jeonghan replies. “You’re so full of it, you know? You’re so full of love. You make it look so easy. It’s almost like you’re not afraid of anything I do.”
‘I do.’ A slip of the tongue that Jeonghan catches a second too late. But Mingyu doesn’t react to it beyond a thoughtful nod.
“Well, love is the point, isn’t it?” Mingyu says.
“What?”
“Love’s the point,” Mingyu repeats. “Of everything. At least that’s what I think. Life wouldn’t be that fun without love, so I try to give out a little love, whenever I can.”
“But how?” Jeonghan says. “How? What if people don’t want it?”
“Everyone wants love.”
“Not everyone.”
“Not you, you mean?”
Jeonghan flinches slightly, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I want love,” he says. “But I… what if someone takes it away?”
“You can’t take love away,” Mingyu says. “Once you give it to someone, it’s not yours anymore. I gave you half of my egg. You’ve eaten it. That love is in you now.”
“But it’s gone,” Jeonghan says. “If that was your love, I wouldn’t have eaten it. I would’ve kept it.”
“What if it started to smell?”
“I’d still keep it. It’s still love.”
“So it wouldn’t matter what I thought, would it? Or what anyone else thought? It’d still be love to you?”
“I guess,” Jeonghan says. “I guess so. But what if the other person– what if they eat the egg? Or throw it away?”
“I think I’m losing you in the metaphor, hyung.”
“What if you love someone and they don’t care, or they don’t want your love, they don’t think it’s good? What if my love isn’t good? What if it’s just– just a rotten egg?”
Mingyu looks at him for a long time in silence before he speaks again. “Then you keep loving them. You keep loving them, because they can’t take that away from you either,” he pauses. He’s still looking at Jeonghan. “You love them until they realize they deserve it.”
“... Deserve it?”
“Isn’t that the core of it?” Mingyu asks. “Not being sure if you deserve love, or to love– isn’t that what you mean?”
Jeonghan gnaws on the inside of his cheek, and he feels see through. Paper thin. Mingyu’s cracking the marble in his head open like an egg against a countertop.
“I think it’s more about want,” Jeonghan says at length.
“Aren’t they the same?”
“Sometimes,” Jeonghan says. “But not always. Love is… I love the members. They’re my friends, family, whatever’s closer than that– but I don’t… I don’t want them. They don’t want me.”
Mingyu hesitates for a moment again, “are you sure?”
“What?”
“Are you sure they don’t want you?”
Jeonghan blinks back at Mingyu, who’s surveying him steadily, although his ears have gone red. His palms are pressed flat against the hardwood floor, his knuckles white, like he’s trying to dig his fingers into the wood.
“I guess not,” Jeonghan says, very quietly.
He’s suddenly aware of the silence around them, that it’s just the two of them and no one else. Jeonghan is alone in a room with his want, and with Mingyu, and–
And they’re the same thing, he realizes. This is what he wants.
Loving Mingyu is so easy he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it; that he’s been doing it for years. He wants to share this revelation with Mingyu, this ground shattering information, that it's love, of course it's love, but it’s also want– it’s want so bad that it hurts, and if he wants something, he can’t have it. Jeonghan knows this.
So he doesn’t say it. Mingyu doesn’t say anything either.
They sit in the living room, only a few feet apart, but Jeonghan can’t touch Mingyu. Mingyu can’t touch Jeonghan. They both know this. But if Jeonghan just inched his hand forwards a bit, he could grab Mingyu’s pinky with his own.
There’s a heat growing in between them, tension, something unspoken.
How long can you want something without asking for it? If you wish long enough to stop wanting it, does the want go away? Jeonghan supposes he’ll find out.
Mingyu leans over, and Jeonghan thinks for one crazy moment that he’s going to kiss him, but he grabs a bottle of water from the other side of the table. Jeonghan’s eyes follow him the whole way. He watches as Mingyu opens the water bottle and brings it to his lips, watches him swallow it, watches him lick his lips afterwards. Jeonghan feels like he’s going to die.
He feels impatient all of a sudden. He doesn’t want to wait to find out, he wants to know now– if it’s true, if it’s real. And at the same time Jeonghan doesn’t want to know, he thinks it might be better if he never finds out. There would be consequences, dire ones.
Think of something you want, something you can’t have. Put yourself in a room with it. How would you stop your soul from reaching out and touching it?
Jeonghan offers to do the dishes. Mingyu says he’ll dry them. They stand next to each other at the kitchen sink, heat against heat.
Are they really not going to talk about it, Jeonghan wonders? Is Mingyu just going to leave it there? It seems unlike Mingyu to do that, but then he thinks– it’s very like Jeonghan. It’s like himself to leave it there, unsaid, unfinished. If you can’t be sure what something is, how could anyone judge it? Isn’t it better to not know? To keep adding to his collection of marbles?
This one is pink. Its core is soft and gooey, sticky like honey.
Mingyu smells like honey.
And Mingyu is loving Jeonghan, in his way– by not prying, not asking for more than Jeonghan can give him. He’s loving him in his way, and Jeonghan; Jeonghan loves Mingyu in his way. By keeping him at arm's length.
[FILL] you said love fills you up
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: the mortifying ordeal of being known, unresolved tension that goes unresolved, idolverse
Permission to remix: Please ask
***
Jeonghan knows how it goes. Verse, chorus, verse. Falling in love, falling out of love, being alone. Repeat. He knows how this works. But still– still, he can’t help but wonder, what if– what if love could be more than that? What if love could be forever? What if love could be boundless like the open ocean, like the sea, wild and unrestrained, never ceasing?
And if he had that love, would he even know what to do with it? How do you hold water in your hands? How do you love the ocean without becoming a part of it, without killing yourself in the process?
Jeonghan is watching Mingyu across the restaurant table. He’s laughing at something Seokmin said. He’s plating food for everyone who asks, and opening bottles that are handed to him, and he’s all smiles, and he’s… so full of love. Unapologetically, without reservation, Mingyu loves everybody. And everyone loves Mingyu.
Mingyu is just that kind of person, Jeonghan supposes. You can’t help but love him.
Mingyu’s love is warm and soft, it’s kind, it doesn’t ask for things in return. Jeonghan’s love is a snowstorm that’ll trap you in your house and leave you to die. He’s not sure he knows how to love something without killing it.
“Everything alright, hyung?” Mingyu asks, his voice cutting through the static of Jeonghan’s mind. He’s looking at him now, eyes brown and warm.
“I’m alright,” Jeonghan replies, voice just loud enough that Mingyu will hear him.
But no one else hears it, because they’re not trying to hear it– Mingyu is trying. Mingyu is looking at Jeonghan intently, but he seems to get that Jeonghan isn’t going to tell him anything right now, so he leaves it alone.
Jeonghan almost wants Mingyu to keep prying, just to see what would happen. What would happen if Jeonghan let Mingyu cut him open here, at the group dinner, in front of everyone? If Jeonghan spilled his guts onto the table, blood and insides, every ugly thought he’s had while they’ve been sitting here? Would any of them want to look at him, or would they look away? Pretend it isn’t there, that he’s just had a little too much to drink?
Mingyu wouldn’t, some small voice in the back of Jeonghan’s head says. Mingyu would look.
But would he still love Jeonghan, even with the mess, with the blood on his hands?
Mingyu slips away again, sucked into conversation with Seungkwan. Jeonghan sits in his corner, and he doesn’t say anything until Joshua nudges his foot under the table.
“Jeonghan,” he says. “Jeonghan?”
“Mhm?” Jeonghan hums, shaking himself back to life. He picks up the chopsticks and starts pushing his food back and forth on the plate. “What is it?”
“Are you tired?”
Jeonghan blinks at him, then sighs, biting his tongue. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, tired.”
Joshua nods, silent understanding passing between them. He keeps his foot pressed against Jeonghan’s calf for the rest of the meal.
Is this also love? Here is the proof you’re still here; I am touching the back of your leg.
They get back to the hotel around midnight, some more tipsy than others. Jeonghan slips away to his room, curling up in his bed. For once, he sort of wishes they still had roommates on tour. He wishes someone was there with him, in the dark. That he could at least hear someone else breathing.
He thinks back to sharing a hotel room with Mingyu, and he doesn’t know why Mingyu is the person he thinks of first– but he is, and he’s there, in the back of Jeonghan’s mind. His breaths are slow and steady, and he shuffles around sometimes, in the darkness. He makes soft noises when he dreams.
Jeonghan doesn’t know how or why he remembers all this, but the information lies ready for him in the back of his mind the second he thinks back to it. He wishes Mingyu was there. He’d kill just to watch as he’s sleeping.
Why, though? Why would he want that? This question rolls around in his head like a smooth marble, the answer hiding in its center. He can’t crack it. He can’t even catch the marble.
...
The next day’s concert goes well. It always goes well. Jeonghan knows how that works too; verse, chorus, verse. Dance, sing, repeat. Listen to the people screaming, singing, the people who love you. Revel in it. Drink it like it’s poison and you’re Romeo.
He knows that love is different, the one between idol and fan. It’s love, but it’s not boundless, and it’s not to be taken for granted– although no love should be taken for granted. But that kind of innocent and trusting love especially, Jeonghan thinks. They’ll never really know Jeonghan, who he is at his core, what’s in the center of that marble; they’ll know what he shows them. He doesn’t want them to see his guts or any of the other ugly things inside his chest.
Want, the size of a fist. Want, want, want. There’s a reason your heart is the size of your first. If you love someone, is it a gift or a death sentence?
...
Seventeen are back in South Korea. They’re back at their dorms, and it’s nice not to be alone. Jeonghan likes lying half asleep in his bed listening to the sound of bickering in the living room, or to laughter, depending on the day.
That’s love too.
At some point Jeonghan ends up in Mingyu and Wonwoo’s dorm– he’s there to steal back a beanie Mingyu had nabbed from him on tour. Wonwoo is away, eating dinner with Soonyoung.
Mingyu catches Jeonghan, but he lets Jeonghan take the beanie back anyway, because he’s Mingyu, so of course he does. But he does make Jeonghan stay for dinner. Not that he minds. It’s nice.
Mingu gives Jeonghan the other half of his egg. This is love too.
They’re a few drinks in when Jeonghan finally broaches the subject that had been hanging in the back of his mind, and he does it carefully, as he does with all things pertaining to the heart, to his core. He knows Mingyu will listen, but it’s still scary.
Jeonghan wants to tell someone, and he also wants to take back everything he’s ever told anyone– he wants to be unknowable. If no one knows him well enough to love him, they won’t know him well enough to stop either.
“Mingyu,” he says. “I’m not sure how you do it.”
“Do what?” Mingyu asks. He’s leaning back against the couch, sitting cross legged on the floor.
“Love,” Jeonghan replies. “You’re so full of it, you know? You’re so full of love. You make it look so easy. It’s almost like you’re not afraid of anything I do.”
‘I do.’ A slip of the tongue that Jeonghan catches a second too late. But Mingyu doesn’t react to it beyond a thoughtful nod.
“Well, love is the point, isn’t it?” Mingyu says.
“What?”
“Love’s the point,” Mingyu repeats. “Of everything. At least that’s what I think. Life wouldn’t be that fun without love, so I try to give out a little love, whenever I can.”
“But how?” Jeonghan says. “How? What if people don’t want it?”
“Everyone wants love.”
“Not everyone.”
“Not you, you mean?”
Jeonghan flinches slightly, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I want love,” he says. “But I… what if someone takes it away?”
“You can’t take love away,” Mingyu says. “Once you give it to someone, it’s not yours anymore. I gave you half of my egg. You’ve eaten it. That love is in you now.”
“But it’s gone,” Jeonghan says. “If that was your love, I wouldn’t have eaten it. I would’ve kept it.”
“What if it started to smell?”
“I’d still keep it. It’s still love.”
“So it wouldn’t matter what I thought, would it? Or what anyone else thought? It’d still be love to you?”
“I guess,” Jeonghan says. “I guess so. But what if the other person– what if they eat the egg? Or throw it away?”
“I think I’m losing you in the metaphor, hyung.”
“What if you love someone and they don’t care, or they don’t want your love, they don’t think it’s good? What if my love isn’t good? What if it’s just– just a rotten egg?”
Mingyu looks at him for a long time in silence before he speaks again. “Then you keep loving them. You keep loving them, because they can’t take that away from you either,” he pauses. He’s still looking at Jeonghan. “You love them until they realize they deserve it.”
“... Deserve it?”
“Isn’t that the core of it?” Mingyu asks. “Not being sure if you deserve love, or to love– isn’t that what you mean?”
Jeonghan gnaws on the inside of his cheek, and he feels see through. Paper thin. Mingyu’s cracking the marble in his head open like an egg against a countertop.
“I think it’s more about want,” Jeonghan says at length.
“Aren’t they the same?”
“Sometimes,” Jeonghan says. “But not always. Love is… I love the members. They’re my friends, family, whatever’s closer than that– but I don’t… I don’t want them. They don’t want me.”
Mingyu hesitates for a moment again, “are you sure?”
“What?”
“Are you sure they don’t want you?”
Jeonghan blinks back at Mingyu, who’s surveying him steadily, although his ears have gone red. His palms are pressed flat against the hardwood floor, his knuckles white, like he’s trying to dig his fingers into the wood.
“I guess not,” Jeonghan says, very quietly.
He’s suddenly aware of the silence around them, that it’s just the two of them and no one else. Jeonghan is alone in a room with his want, and with Mingyu, and–
And they’re the same thing, he realizes. This is what he wants.
Loving Mingyu is so easy he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it; that he’s been doing it for years. He wants to share this revelation with Mingyu, this ground shattering information, that it's love, of course it's love, but it’s also want– it’s want so bad that it hurts, and if he wants something, he can’t have it. Jeonghan knows this.
So he doesn’t say it. Mingyu doesn’t say anything either.
They sit in the living room, only a few feet apart, but Jeonghan can’t touch Mingyu. Mingyu can’t touch Jeonghan. They both know this. But if Jeonghan just inched his hand forwards a bit, he could grab Mingyu’s pinky with his own.
There’s a heat growing in between them, tension, something unspoken.
How long can you want something without asking for it? If you wish long enough to stop wanting it, does the want go away? Jeonghan supposes he’ll find out.
Mingyu leans over, and Jeonghan thinks for one crazy moment that he’s going to kiss him, but he grabs a bottle of water from the other side of the table. Jeonghan’s eyes follow him the whole way. He watches as Mingyu opens the water bottle and brings it to his lips, watches him swallow it, watches him lick his lips afterwards. Jeonghan feels like he’s going to die.
He feels impatient all of a sudden. He doesn’t want to wait to find out, he wants to know now– if it’s true, if it’s real. And at the same time Jeonghan doesn’t want to know, he thinks it might be better if he never finds out. There would be consequences, dire ones.
Think of something you want, something you can’t have. Put yourself in a room with it. How would you stop your soul from reaching out and touching it?
Jeonghan offers to do the dishes. Mingyu says he’ll dry them. They stand next to each other at the kitchen sink, heat against heat.
Are they really not going to talk about it, Jeonghan wonders? Is Mingyu just going to leave it there? It seems unlike Mingyu to do that, but then he thinks– it’s very like Jeonghan. It’s like himself to leave it there, unsaid, unfinished. If you can’t be sure what something is, how could anyone judge it? Isn’t it better to not know? To keep adding to his collection of marbles?
This one is pink. Its core is soft and gooey, sticky like honey.
Mingyu smells like honey.
And Mingyu is loving Jeonghan, in his way– by not prying, not asking for more than Jeonghan can give him. He’s loving him in his way, and Jeonghan; Jeonghan loves Mingyu in his way. By keeping him at arm's length.