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intoloopin-archive · 7 months ago

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A CHAPTER: THE SHARP AND THE BLUNT (PART 2/2).

tws: dubious consent (Haruki is still very weird and forward about initiating sex! and sometimes that gets Toxic). alcohol abuse and alcoholism. semi-smut (the driest, most unsexy and robotic blowjob in the world is given). insinuation and one very direct discussion of sexual trauma, abuse by a past partner, abuse of workplace power and stalking. a little hint of body dysmorphia (Hanjae's inner voice is often not very kind about how he looks). internalized homophobia, and a hint of biphobia in between the lines. queer pessimism (it gets a bit Hurtful). as always: if I missed anything, please tell me. starring: Lee Hanjae. Fukunaga Haruki. featuring: Dylan Hwang / Hwang Chihoon. their fellow LOOPiN members (old OT10, no Gyujin, still stuck with a bit of Beomseok). Uhm Junghwa (new manager extraordinarie). the ghost of Choi Sangwon. a brief mention of Night Child / NTCD. timeline: early to the end of mid 2022 | quick flash forward to september 2023 (additional context under the cut). word count: 14,138 words. author's note: lil delay because life has to be life, sometimes, and because the hotel scene from May 26th was way more challenging to get right in tone than i originally expected (it's one of the ones to watch out for), but here we are!!!! the Hanruki end. things get much more heavy, morally grey and blantly sad in this final part, so really, mind the tags, skip if you must. and: music rec moment two. stay safe out there, everyone!

March 13th, 2022.

Hanjae doesn’t shower, or change clothes, or gets to sleep on the couch. He lays on it and spends the whole night awake, on his phone, and on his Nintendo Switch after that, back on his phone. He catches the sun rising through the window’s curtain and maybe he sleeps, briefly.

Was it even real?, he wonders when he finds himself with his eyes wide and restless, staring up at the ceiling; Did it even happen?

He pokes and pokes at the one painful spot over his shoulder, the marking of Haruki’s teeth, and gets consumed by shame at the confirmation that yes, it was real; yes, it did happen.

When Junghwa steps into their apartment to wake everyone up in the morning, Hanjae’s sitting on the couch, breathing into his hands. He still looks like a mess. Hair, clothes, face – a mess.

She gives him a crumbling look, half pity, half exhaustion, and laughs humorless. “Out of everyone, I didn’t expect you to misbehave, Lee Hanjae.”

Hanjae peeks up at her through his clammy fingers. He feels a genuine and terrifying urge to throw up on her shoes and buy her new ones immediately after.

“12 AM to 8 PM for you,” Junghwa tells him, with a sigh. She walks more into the house, close enough to lay a merciful hand on the crown of his head – pat, pat, pat. “Just this one time.”

Haruki hours, he thinks, dazed, because that’s what everyone calls it, because he’s the one stuck with the alternative schedule the most: fails to wake up for practice often, gets shoved at the company until late at night. He’ll probably get the same sentence today. He and Hanjae might have to train alone, together, for hours. His stomach takes another queasy turn.

Hanjae watches the world move around him, for once out of the routine; after hearing his fate, Taesong takes a minute out of washing his face to force Hanjae to gulp down ibuprofen while Haegon shoves a pillow at him. Junghwa goes upstairs to knock on Haruki’s door, phone against her ear as she calls him, and then comes down in record speed, by herself.

She asks everyone, “Shall we go?”

“Can I get Haruki hours, please?” Seungsoo begs from where he’s resting his head against the wall, eyes closed, sipping Gatorade.

Junghwa doesn’t look at him as she firmly says, “No.”

“But I’m dying,” Seungsoo whines. “I’m fucking dying. I can’t work. I’m gonna drop dead, dead.”

Minwoo shoves him angrily out of the way to open the front door, tells him, “Then drop dead, Seungsoo. Drop dead.”

It takes a while for the house to fall back into quiet, after everyone’s gone. Hanjae swears he hears the sound of everything amplified now, gonging inside his head. Maybe it’s the hangover – it’s probably the hangover, but he hasn’t had enough of those to figure all of their symptoms out.

He sleeps again, a miracle, wakes up again, and there’s the faint smell of something being stir fried coming from the kitchen, slowly drowning the whole room.

“I’m making tofu,” Haruki says when Hanjae sits up to check. He’s a slouched thing behind the stove, yet he’s flashing him a grin. “You want some?”

He looks, from a distant inspection – normal, regular, like Haruki always does in the morning: a little wan, with his voice a little deep. They’ve kissed, they’ve made out, and he’s absolutely normal, proposing to make Hanjae breakfast-lunch.

Hanjae says a meek ‘yes’ to tofu, and Haruki tells him, “Five minutes.”

It’s enough time for Hanjae to go brush his teeth, and hyperventilate in privacy: every corner of their bathroom makes him think back to Sunyoung’s, and to being on the floor– being kissed on the floor– being kissed by Haruki on the floor until he wasn’t.

He goes back to the couch, a stiff walk. Haruki comes to sit with him, holding a single bowl of food with two runny eggs on top, and Hanjae jumps back up and three feet away. He bumps his heel bone on the coffee table, and the pain is a shock up his entire leg; serves him well, serves him right.

“I want to apologize for yesterday or earlier today at night,” Hanjae says in a single breath, his voice coming out rough around the edges. His arms are set like wood on his sides, tight, fisted.

In front of him, Haruki’s face goes through a journey: startled, then confused, then amused, smiling. He takes a big bite of food. “Oh, you mean the bathroom? That’s what you mean?” He asks, covering his chewing mouth with a hand, and Hanjae nods once. “Pfff, no need. It’s not your fault a girl had to pee.”

“That’s not what I meant, not, not what I’m apologizing for.”

“So what are you apologizing for?” Haruki asks him, tilting his head, dark hair falling like a cloak over his eyes. He wrinkles his nose. “Didn’t I kiss you? I’m sure I kissed you. I’m sure you kissed me back.”

“Hyung,” Hanjae says, helplessly, and has to turn his face to the side, closing his eyes briefly. “Still, everything– We were drunk, and everything, it wasn’t… appropriate. To happen.”

Haruki has stopped chewing when Hanjae looks back at him, has gone full body still for a moment. When he gulps the food down, it looks like it’s a painful thing for him to do.

“Appropriate,” he repeats, looking down at his own feet, like it’s an odd word, an annoying one. “Just sit down, Hanjae. Sit back down. We’re not done yet.”

“We’re not… What?”

Haruki abandons the bowl and chopsticks, puts them roughly on the table, then motions to the vague spot on his side – come here. Hanjae doesn’t move. He still has some word stuck under his tongue he has to work out.

Haruki doesn’t take his paralyzes at all. He clicks his tongue, walks up and close and puts both hands on Hanjae’s shoulders, maneuvers him and sits him back down not that gently on the couch. He tucks himself close to him, sideways, a bent knee almost on his lap, and stays there.

He eyes Hanjae openly then, a brand new thing. Haruki’s seen him, could have gotten sick of seeing him with how much it happens every day, but now Hanjae knows with certainty that he’s never been evaluated by him, or taken into this much consideration up until this very moment.

He hooks Hanjae’s ear lobe between two fingers and pulls, taps at the hoop earring. “I thought you would be a bad kisser,” Haruki says. “But you’re not.”

Granted, Hanjae wouldn’t call their kiss a good kiss. Both their mouths tasted bitter, he remembers now, and their teeth clunked against each other like two cogs being put in an unfit machine. It happened so quick– everything, so quick.

“Thanks,” he says nonetheless, and again, “Thank– Thank you.”

Haruki laughs at him, wispy, a single ‘ha’, and the air around them grows more tense. Haruki pushes himself close until he's full on Hanjae’s lap, a similar position to some hours ago. Hanjae turns his face a little away, to the side; sets his eyes on a wall, right where a painting Haegon made when he was eight years old hangs, framed.

The cushion of the living room couch smells like an amalgamation of all of them, he notices. There’s a stain on it where Chihoon had once spilled fancy carbonara – a meal everyone saved the whole month to have on their third debut anniversary. Seungsoo had offered him three bucks to lick it clean. The video of Dylan concluding the bet is a blurry 1 minute thing O.z had recorded, still somewhere far down Hanjae’s gallery.

“Hanjae,” Haruki says now, and taps at his nose. “You’re too tense. You’re zooming out. Get out of your head.”

“It’s just–” Hanjae mutters, and can’t stop – just can’t stop: “Here? Wouldn’t it be bad? If someone walks in, if they forgot something and want to come back, and I heard, I think I heard that, isn’t there a camera here, a camera Seo CEO looks through–”

“There’s no camera. Not a single one anywhere. I would know,” Haruki looks right into his eyes to reassure him, or tries to; Hanjae can’t sustain it much. His hands are a constant goosebump on their trail on the back of Hanjae’s neck, up and up and suddenly down, up again. “Do you want to take this to your room?”

But it’s not Hanjae’s room, singular. It’s impossible to look anywhere and not see one of Seungsoo’s too colorful caps, or Minwoo’s notes, scrambled and frantic, the only indication he’s yet to fully move into the studio.

This is LOOPiN’s home, collective. They’re coworkers sharing space at their core, and it’s– It’s all just–

Hanjae makes a whimpering sound, involuntary, not an answer to anything, and with that Haruki’s off him, a sudden rise up and turn around. He walks away with a loud sigh and Hanjae thinks, disappointment and relief an ocean in his stomach, It’s done. It’s over.

It’s not; Haruki just goes to open the fridge’s door, takes something out, pours it somewhere, comes back to the couch with it. He stands it for Hanjae to take – a red plastic cup filled to the brim with some leftover wine.

“One complaint,” Haruki tells him, and goes back to where he was; a stable weight on Hanjae’s lap, both arms hooked around his neck. “One sip.”

“It’s– It’s morning, hyung.”

“No. No ‘hyung’. Stop that,” he says, and Hanjae can’t figure out, either by hearing it or looking him in the face, if Haruki’s being serious or not. He’s still smiling. “I don’t like it.”

“So what,” Hanjae asks, and sinks deeper into the couch when Haruki makes to push himself closer, “Do you like, then? About me if, or this, or–”

It’s all he can get out before Haruki puts a hand over his mouth, firm.

“I’ll blow you,” he says bluntly, and puts his hand away. Another paper thin smile. “Will that shut you up?”

Around a gulp, Hanjae nods, manages to let out a shaky, “Ok–ay.”

Permission granted, it takes a moment for anything to even happen. Haruki grabs the cup out of Hanjae’s hand quickly and downs it, almost fully drains it. He takes a deep and loud breath when he gives it back, eyes closed through it, before he begins to go down on him.

When Haruki kneels in between his legs, Hanjae tries to put a hand on top of his head, a timid and gentle fondling, but Haruki bats it away, says, “Just stay still.”

And Hanjae stays still. He looks up at the ceiling – eggshell white, the same as all the walls, with the faint darkening in a corner where there once was a leak. The kitchen sink hasn’t been closed all the way, and he can hear the drip, drip, drip of the water falling on dirty tableware under the sound of his loose belt being unbuckled, his zipper working open, the downing of his jeans.

What a waste, he thinks, over and over, tells himself that’s all he must think now; what a grandiose waste.

The blowjob’s a not so quick, but fully methodic thing. Hanjae taps Haruki on the shoulder when he’s finally near coming, says so around a pant. And then comes, Haruki swallows, that’s it – that’s the full scope of it, Hanjae has decided. Privately, he calls it efficient instead of emotionless, or confusing, or unsettling.

He zips himself back up as Haruki wipes his mouth and goes to collect the pot, the chopsticks. Hanjae catches him by the wrist before he slips away, asks, “You?”

Haruki laughs – Hanjae’s never seen him laugh so much so quickly, or in such a high pitch. He says, leaning forward, “Me? Me what? What are you even going to do? You look like you’re about to have a panic attack, Hanjae.”

Hanjae’s grip on him goes loose. Haruki breaks free of it and puts his hand on his pocket, rubs it in for a second like he’s trying to get it clean. Or maybe Hanjae’s just seeing things with his blurry hangover vision, his clear hangover discomfort.

“Right,” he mutters, and feels like he’s coming down from somewhere. His hold on the cup had faltered through their whole endeavor, and the spilled wine made a new damp on the couch’s arm. A story. He locks eyes with it.

“Don’t worry about me,” Haruki’s saying, back turned to him, halfway across the room already. The pot of leftover tofu clanks where he drops it, careless. “I’ll just shower.”

“You’re sure…?” Hanjae asks.

“Uh-huh.”

“Really?”

“Really. Now stop talking, alright? It’s not going to make me put my mouth on you a second time.”

Hanjae blinks once, and then too many times to even count. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “I’m– Okay.”

Haruki flees the scene before he notices, goes upstairs; comes back down and looks around for a long beat as if he’s forgotten where he is, where he’s headed.

He goes to the bathroom and closes the door loudly, then soon opens it again, peeks his torso out. He’s got a towel thrown over his shoulder and a smile that’s blinding when he says, looking back at Hanjae: “But next time. Make it up to me next time.”

April 14th, 2022.

‘Next time’, in industry lingo, as Hanjae has learned over the years, is the vaguest time scheduling there is. So Haruki said ‘But next time. Make it up to me next time’, and a day later LOOPiN released the final teasers for the ‘Punch’ EP, and things got hectic – music shows, variety content, a fanmeet, a fansign.

And then Seungsoo made everything come to a halt by jumping Kwon Dongwook and half of NTCD at Rewind K-Pop Fest on the 8th, getting them all thrown out of the event four hours earlier.

They missed the SHINee tribute they were set to be on. Hanjae even got handed Key’s bandana and the same blue shorts he used in the dance scenes in the ‘View’ MV, taken directly out of SM Entertainment’s archive. He had just stepped out of a makeup chair when he got the news, and was made to sit back down immediately to dismantle the whole look.

“Pussy didn’t even fight back,” Seungsoo grumbled, in their kitchen: icing his face where it hit a pole after Code pushed him off Hyunbin’s neck. He wouldn’t stop talking about Dongwook – it had been five hours, and everything that came out of his mouth was soon followed by ‘Kwon Dongwook that bastard’ this, ‘Kwon Dongwook that fucker’ that. “He made me look like an asshole.”

Hanjae ignored him. All he wanted was to drink a glass of water in silence and not look a single person in the eye that wasn’t Mijoo, his guitar instructor, in six hours time.

“You made yourself look like an asshole,” Taesong corrected him, pointing a spatula around from behind the aisle, and he sounded and looked angry in a way Hanjae hadn’t seen him in years. “You made all of us look like assholes, and now Minwoo’s going to kill you. He’s going to kill you because I’ll allow him to kill you. I will help him kill you. You deserve to be assassinated.”

“You deserve to be assassinated, you snake! You’re talking with Joseph Song, Taeng! Night Child’s Joseph Song, behind my back, about him, about me! Fuck you!”

Taesong dropped the spatula, put both hands on his hips, and looked up at the ceiling: his ‘Lord, give me strength’ pose. “I don’t talk with Joseph Song about Dongwook, or about you, Seungsoo. All we do is exchange schedule information to know when we all might meet, to try to keep peace between us and them because you’re all insane. All you, insane.”

“I’m not insane!” Seungsoo said, rising up from his chair, and Hanjae escaped the kitchen then, didn’t want to hear his bullshit claim to be functional.

He spent half an hour tuning and running his fingers over his electric guitar’s strings, and did the same with Dylan’s old acoustic one, and pressed random notes on Zhiming’s keyboard in their improvised music space, which was just a vacant corner in Heagon and Beomseok’s room.

On his phone, he got one message, and had to read it once and twice and a third time even, just to figure out what to say:

[haruhyung]: are you free ?

Hanjae sent, fingers flying over the keyboard:

[You]: Guitar pravtice with Mijoo nim sun

[You]: *practice

[You]: **soon

And shortly after, an afterthought:

[You]: Sorry

On his screen Haruki typed, deleted, typed again – the speech bubble looked like a glitch. Somewhere down on the first floor someone snorted, loud and mean, and Hanjae shuddered.

After five minutes, Haruki sent:

[haruhyung]: ok .

More texts came after those, spaced out between days or just hours, sometimes full sentences or just direct question marks, one time with a photo attached in the morning. Hanjae didn’t see it right away, went back to check during lunch break and found nothing but a short trail of deleted messages.

It’s all the interaction they have behind the scenes lately. No more idle talk in the practice room, no more shared space in the house, just ‘free?’ and ‘no’ and ‘sorry’ and ‘ok.’

Now: a live session for the english version of ‘You Can’t Hold My Heart’ that they managed to film in one single take. Jooheon PD promises to treat them to something for it, and everyone’s saying suggestions on top of suggestions at the speed of light. Hanjae’s trying to gather up courage to ask for hot pot again, preparing for the complaining it’ll cause, when his phone dings.

[haruhyung]: ditch with me .

[haruhyung]: discreetly .

Hanjae takes a wild look across the studio until he finds Haruki: set against a wall in a corner, waiting to be looked at, tapping one foot on the ground. After what feels like a minute of unstable eye contact, but couldn’t be more than a second or so, Haruki ducks his head down and goes back to typing.

[haruhyng]: im really not going to ask again .

It takes little to no excuse to ditch dinner – barbecue, they have decided, and Hanjae’s trying to cut off red meat, doesn’t want to go somewhere so crowded after seeing so many people all day, he says, and Haruki interveins to ask Jooheon if he can pay their cab home. No one asks why he’s not going; no one was expecting Haruki to want to go.

They don’t take the free cab home. They’re instead back at Deh’s apartment complex, taking the stairs quietly.

“I’ll be coming three times a week to feed her cats this month,” Haruki says, unlocking and holding the door open for Hanjae so he can step inside. “She’s traveling out of town.”

“Hm,” is Hanjae’s shaky answer.

The inside of Deh’s apartment looks very much like what he would assume it would: neat, colorful, synthetic fur coats everywhere – really, everywhere.

While Haruki gathers up the cats, two small and loud things, Hanjae sits down on the printed loveseat and makes direct eye contact with a wigged mannequin head next to the TV, plastic lips shiny with lipstick.

When Haruki comes back to the living room, duties all done, he opens the big window on the far left and sits on the cushioned frame, one elegant leg over the other.

He says, with a cig materialized between his teeth somehow, “Deh’s got a lighter on the second drawer– Second drawer, Hanjae– Yeah, that one, the green one. Come here. Bring it over.”

Hanjae brings it over, and Haruki tilts his head up, points to his cigarette, still hanging from his mouth. Hanjae lights it up for him after a couple of clumsy tries, and flees – bolts away with the lighter at the center of his fisted palm, goes to sit back on the couch, grows uncomfortable, slides down to the floor.

Haruki watches him move with an enerved smile on his face. “How funny,” he says, dryly, and then no one says a thing. He smokes, and Hanjae can’t stand the smell, coffs into his hand once. He sees Haruki move even closer to the window, peeking outside.

“So,” Hanjae tries, when it all turns into too much – the smoke, the quiet. He’s tracing a pattern with his finger on the carpet; a circle on top of a circle on top of a circle. “Do you– You come by often? To see her?”

Haruki makes a choking sound. His eyes are very narrow when he looks at Hanjae. “What are you trying to ask?”

Hanjae forces a shrug that he knows falls very flat.

“Deh’s a woman, Hanjae,” Haruki says after a beat, with a strong emphasis on ‘woman’, and Hanjae turns bright red and hot on his face, immediately responds with ‘Yes, I know’ – would rather shoot his own foot than insinuate she’s not. “And I’m not interested in women, so no, I don’t see her.”

“But you– You never told,” Hanjae stammers, and Haruki tilts his head at him, frown easing. “You never told any of us you’re not straight.”

“None of you ever just asked me,” Haruki counters, and there’s a little humor in him, somewhere – a bit of pride at that, maybe, until he recalls, “Except for Zhiming once, but he doesn’t count. Zhiming somehow always knows. Side effects of having a gay mom, I guess.”

“Did you know before? Before your… Your whole relationship, with– was your relationship what made you…” Hanjae stops talking. Haruki’s eyebrows have darted up and they stay up, waiting, challenging; ‘go on, finish the sentence’.

Hanjae sheepishly goes back to the mannequin head. It has a pink rhinestone hot glued on its nose, mimicking a piercing.

“Alright,” Haruki says, giving in. He rearranges himself on the window, puts his two feet steady on the floor, manspreading. “This again– Alright. You get three questions. Just three. Then we’ll never talk about it again, so be wise. If it’s something stupid I won’t answer.”

Hanjae accepts this, tonguing his cheek while he thinks. He has a billion questions, too many, all build up in these two months, but they’ve all escaped him somehow. He settles for an hesitant, “‘This again?’”

“I know you know Chihoon’s aware. And now Jiahang is, too,” Haruki says, and Hanjae patiently waits for more information. A whole minute goes by and Haruki, smoke coming in and out of his mouth, doesn’t offer him anything else.

“Since when?”

“Dylan? L.A. After the beach with you, he caught the… aftermath,” he grims, humorless. “And J.J knows since last week, after the festival. The day you ditched me for guitar practice with Mijoo nim.”

“That’s not,” Hanjae offers, alternating between looking at him and not looking at him; peeking instead at the shape he made on the green carpet, there still. “Not what I meant.”

“Of course not,” Haruki agrees, and his smile turns tiny, tinier, up until it no longer exists.

He takes a big drag of the cigarette, the last one; tosses the bug right out of the window without putting the flame out. Behind him, the world looks pink, green, warm yellow. It’s the sort of spring that makes you feel like it’ll never leave you.

“Look, Hanjae, you don��t want to know everything. Not very pretty, with him being married and a dad and my boss and all. Bottom line is he casted me, he made me into a trainee, and that might have saved my life. I understood the way he looked at me and decided to just– let him have it. So I asked him out, kind of. He said yes, kind of. Next thing I knew, it had been going on for years.”

“Years?” Hanjae lets out, a little scandalized, too blunt, and Haruki gives him a look – ‘last question’. He rushes to amend it with, “Why?”

Haruki, with a hint of afternoon sun contouring his falling face, says, “I don’t know. I don’t know why,” and it’s the one thing Hanjae didn’t want to hear.

He wished for: because he loved me, or because it made me happy. But he knew it wouldn’t be that, felt it like a hollow in his stomach. From that day in the rain, he knew.

“I have a question for you, now. Just one,” Haruki says, turning his face back inside. Hanjae hums, letting him go on. “Are you dragging it out on purpose? Fucking me, I mean. Are you trying to make it some grand thing?”

Hanjae takes a beat to respond because he knows he should. He thinks about it deeply, eyes stuck in a corner, and shakes his head ‘no’. It’s the truth; he’s not trying to turn it into a grand thing – he understands now, with a tang of sadness, that he can’t make any of it special.

“Good,” Haruki says, and nods too. “You shouldn’t. I know marketing wants everyone to think I’m some sex god, but I’m not. I’m really not. You should just get me out of your system already. Quick and nice. It’s not like there’s a point in waiting, or… courting. We’re never going to date, Hanjae. You know that.”

“Yes. I know.”

“So…?” Haruki looks around, to all the space, and Hanjae does too. There’s very little of it, it’s a little room, but still, it looks so lived in. It looks like a place that’s loved.

Hanjae lowers his head down, eyes his small circle, fading. “Would Deh mind?” He asks, a whisper.

“Hanjae, she won’t know. No one will know,” Haruki says, and he’s grown annoyed now, shifty in his seat. “No one cares to know. No one gives that much of a fuck, or– It’s fine. It’s really fine.”

“I just– the thing is–,” Hanjae stutters, and tries to push through even when Haruki makes a discontent noise. “I never planned to do anything about it, or act– really act on liking you. This,” he motions to the drift between them, the awkward air: this, “Is not just me thinking you’re attractive, or– I really respect you, hyung, as my bandmate, as my colleague. If anything, what I always wanted was just for you to trust me with who you are, someday, because I think you’re– I just want us to be closer. Any way goes. That’s what I feel.”

He takes a peek up, over his own bangs, and sees Haruki’s eyes flickering. He widens his stance, knees more apart, and his voice sounds very low when he says, “You can grow real close to me now.”

Hanjae sighs at him, because he can’t help it. He tries to think of words, better words. Tries to build some sort of bridge out of them.

“Is it a good time?” It’s what he asks. “It’s been– It’s been a really long week, and you just… Aren’t you tired? I’m tired. You look like you’re tired.”

Haruki’s face clouds, gets taken over by something very cold. “I am tired. I’m tired of you rejecting me.”

“I’m not. I’m not rejecting you. I just don’t want to feel like I’m making a mistake. I don’t want to make a mistake, and I think, neither do you, right? Again?” Hanjae asks, and immediately regrets it when he catches the effect of the word ‘again’. It makes Haruki close his legs shut, makes his jaw tense. Hanjae says, quicker, “I’ve lost a team one time, hyung, by being impulsive – and it looked like this, it felt just like this.”

The silence that gets in between them is loud, almost sticky. Hanjae fights an inner battle to not fill it up with, ‘Please let’s talk, can you talk to me, really talk to me, just talk to me, and tell me what is it that you actually want.’

In a room away, the cats scratch a door, begging to be let out, and Haruki’s new phone goes off – a familiar ringtone, a lack of surprise or urge to pick up Hanjae’s seen before.

Haruki rests his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. His chest visibly rises and falls when he breathes. “Ah, this is funny,” he says. “So not today, then, but soon? When I look better, not tired, is that it?”

“If you still want to.”

“If I still want to…” Haruki repeats, like he’s testing out the words, like he wants to figure out how they sound all together. And then rising up, out of the window, splinting behind the couch, behind Hanjae, “Okay. Alright, okay. If that’s what it takes– It’s on.”

“It’s… on?”

Over his shoulder, Hanjae catches the hint of a big grin being thrown at him. “It’s on.”

April 29th to May 6th, 2022.

After Deh’s apartment and the sex that didn’t, Haruki turns into someone else for a week.

It’s impossible to not take immediate notice; when Hanjae and Dylan sit down on Friday to play Fifa at night he catches the whole thing, even though he’s not a fan of sports, or video games, or hanging out. Hanjae scores two goals and Haruki cheers him on, in an enthusiasm that makes it seem like he’s winning the real World Cup.

When he excuses himself to use the bathroom, Hanjae and Chihoon share a quick, tense glance.

‘What’s happening?’, Dylan mouths, putting the game on pause, and Hanjae mouths back, ‘I don’t know’, pressing for it to go on.

Later, they order takeout food for everyone, and Haruki doesn’t drink anything with his pizza except for a Sprite Zero. He gathers up everyone’s scattered plates after dinner and takes them to the kitchen, where Hanjae has just begun to do the dishes.

He circles him around the room, then leans on the counter, close, says, “Hanhan, what did you do with my KidSuper jacket? I can’t find it anywhere. Come help me look when you’re done with that. I’m in the laundry room, come help me, don’t forget to help me look, yeah?”

It’s an excuse. There’s no KidSuper jacket that needs to be found in the laundry room. Hanjae goes in, Haruki closes the door shut and immediately kisses him against it, suddenly.

They break apart, and Haruki taps Hanjae’s chin up, making Hanjae’s hang open mouth fall shut. He breathes into his face, mutters, “Cute– You look cute surprised,” and leaves – just leaves, vaporizes in thin air.

Six entire days of this: playing cat and mouse at odd hours, being shoved and kissed by Haruki somewhere, catching no sleep, having anxiety all night, wondering if anyone saw it, if anyone has catched on to this whole… energy.

“You look like a zombie,” Haruki tells him, once – a direct whisper into his ear, with the slightest press of teeth. “Is it because of me? Are you not sleeping well because of me?”

It all comes to a halt on Friday, just as suddenly as it began, because Haruki snaps over something in the afternoon, and he won’t tell anyone what it is.

He locks Dylan out earlier than he’s ever done it, skips dinner, ignores calls; gets fully trashed somewhere between midnight and 4AM, alone. Beomseok had bought fancy imported dry sake for his older brother, a wedding gift he was keeping in the dorms, and the whole thing’s gone, drained.

Beomseok made a big commotion about it, went on to bang on his room door until the entire house was awake at 6 in the morning on a day off, soured everyone’s moods, split them into two: people pissed off at him and people pissed off at Haruki for pissing him off.

It’s tense through the whole day, with no one seeing eye to eye quite right, and when schedule breaks go this south Hanjae knows to expect an empty house after the sun sets.

Soon enough: at 6PM a voice message from Jiahang on their group chat, saying, ‘I’m going clubbing! I’m going clubbing and everyone can come with me! I refuse to not have a nice night tonight, I refuse it!’

Hanjae’s the first one to answer him, off the shower:

[You]: Pass

[jayjayjiji]: 🍅🍅🍅🖕🙄🖕🍅🍅🍅

Hanjae’s midway through sliding his shirt over his head when Haruki barges in without knocking. He stands there, arms up and tangled with the fabric, in his pajama bottoms, short hair wet. Haruki’s a figure that flops on his bed, face and stomach first.

He’s the only one who didn’t get a haircut for ‘Punch’. The hair stylist had run a hand through his hair, moved Haruki’s bangs one side and the other, said, like a joke, “But he’s perfect! He looks perfect already, Junghwa, what do you want me to do?!” It’s a wild thing now, at the back.

“I will sleep with you,” he announces, voice coming off hoarse and loud; drunk again, but mildly.

Hanjae, fully clothed, says, “Seungsoo–”

“Going out. Not a problem. And Minwoo, he is out.”

Hanjae takes small strides to get the burst open door shut. He takes a long peek at the two sides of the corridor: empty.

Behind him, he hears Haruki grumble, “These days, they’ve been so time waste. A waste. Why are you not caring?”

“What do you mean?” Hanjae asks, and comes back near, not too much. He’s still standing up in the crack diving his bed from Minwoo and Seunsgoo’s bunk one.

“I’m trying,” Haruki stresses. “To appeal to you. With my all, to get you to. Start something. You never do. Do something,” he commands at Hanjae, less angry, just agitated. “I am right here, so just– anything.”

Hanjae sits down on the edge of the bed, then. A calculated descent over the sheets.

“But hyung,” He stutters, and Haruki grunts something incomprehensible under his breath. It doesn’t sound like korean, it doesn’t sound like japanese, it doesn’t sound like anything. “Haruki, there’s people at home. No one’s left yet, we don’t know– Don’t know if everyone will.”

“So what? You were all always– So what?”

Hanjae hesitates, worrying his mouth. He takes one of his hands and slowly places it on Haruki’s hair, trying to somewhat pet it, but Haruki isn’t satisfied with that, and turns his face to the side, looks at him with a strong frown. Hanjae puts his hand back where it first laid on his lap, goes back to picking at the hem of his shirt.

And then Haruki reaches out a hand himself, and places it on Hanjae’s exposed knee, squeezes, sinks nails on it. Hanjae pushes himself further back, startled, and the hand follows, leaving a scratch; he almost falls off the bed trying to sneak away from it, and the hand stills, lifeless, not that far away.

“It is like,” Haruki says, and stops for a moment, gulps spit and something else down. “Like when you touch me is all so nothing. Like you do not… You do not really want me. Like you are not trying to make me remember. How can I remember. That you want me. I can not know if you are, just… Not leaving something behind. Like haunting.”

“Haunting?”

Haruki stops moving completely. “I really miss the way, really…” a breath. “The way you looked at me before.”

“And how,” Hanjae prompts, leaning closer, eager to hear it, “How did I look at you before?”

Haruki ignores him. “It is gone,” he laments, and Haruki actively looks like he’s grieving the death of it, whatever it might be. “You have not even fucked me yet, and– gone.”

It’s a quiet, long minute. Hanjae sees Haruki’s eyes go glossy in real time, catches the whole process up until Haruki turns his face away, presses it on the mattress again, hides it.

Haruki pushes his upper body up with his elbows, covers his face with his hands, inhales. Looks at Hanjae again, his eyes peeking through his fingers, dark.

“Ah, you are so nice, Hanjae. Very, very nice, you,” he says, voice still. He stands an arm out, matches every single word with an absent tap on Hanjae’s shoulder. “And all worried, all in your head. It is so annoying. So weird how you–” And he doesn’t say; doesn’t tell Hanjae what’s weird about him.

The hand on his shoulder goes up, scoops his jaw for a tiny moment, then yanks him forward by the back of his neck – Hanjae has to put a knee on the bed frame to not fully stumble. It’s a grip locking him in place, now, as Haruki drags his face near.

“Pick a fucking date. Pick a date,” Haruki tells him, and his voice almost doesn’t sound like his own; is a pure growl. “I am tired. Tired.”

He leaves the same way he came: a door meeting the lock loudly.

Before going to bed, Hanjae selects another shirt to sleep on, a clean one, red like blood in the water.

May 26th, 2022.

“I think I just– Hyung, I think it all comes down to the fact that I don’t understand what you’re asking, because you’re not– you’re not asking. We’re not communicating.”

Haruki’s long pace back and forth in the hotel room comes to a halt. He’s only in underwear under the bath robe he’s got on, black and with an embroidered logo on the chest and back – they both were, up until Hanjae put his shorts back on.

It didn’t take long for Hanjae to pick a date for them to officially have sex: the pre-Camp Camp filming days are the calmest, with the ease of certain success making everyone better to work with, smoothing all the nerves, and a day before they start shooting LOOPiN always have the liberty to do whatever they want. Most staff are too busy setting up cameras around the park, testing the traps, and putting the winning team barracks up to keep them all in check.

Hanjae brought it up to Haruki a couple of days before they traveled to Jeollabuk over their stale text messages, and promptly got an ‘yes’ and nothing further; Haruki kept his distance like a bride on a wedding day over the weeks, barely a blur on the corner of Hanjae’s vision.

So here they are, a day away from being shoved in a park to pretend it’s a jungle. Hanjae walked around with a condom in his short’s pocket since morning and he’s been trying to look forward to it, trying to rationalize the hollow in his stomach as positive anxiety.

By mid afternoon, everyone was leaving the hotel – absolutely everyone. Hanjae couldn’t put a finger on it, but he felt like Haruki had something to do with it. They were sorted into their dorm roommate arrangements by Junghwa, all in the same corridor, both of their rooms at the extreme ends. Hanjae waited for his text to come over Haruki and Dylan’s suite, then made his way in a quiet and dragged on zig-zag – tapped a little song on a vase with a single flower on the hallway table just to bite time.

Dylan was still there when he got in, angrily tying his hiking shoes, and he refused to look at them as he made his way out. He stopped at the door, turned, looked like he was about to say something.

Haruki went to shove him off the room with a tight, “No, Chihoon, I don’t want to hear you, not today, no one wants to hear you, leave, get out.”

Things happened at a weird pace from there. They made out for a long minute, came close to fully undressing then froze awkwardly in the middle of Haruki’s bed, paused it.

“What do you want to do?” Hanjae asked from where he was set on top of him.

“Whatever you want,” Haruki answered, absently tugging at one of Hanjae’s red ears.

So he tried to work with whatever, since he didn’t know what he wanted – he tried to remember some guilty ridden fantasy of his which Haruki had starred in and use that as a guide, but the search came out blank. Hanjae wasn’t getting them anymore, funnily enough, ever since he had been kissed by him a second time.

But no matter what he tried, be it a kiss on the neck or a firm hold on his tight, Haruki barely made a sound, barely seemed to engage and, the most defeating of all, he wouldn’t get hard. It took Hanjae a long moment to notice, too long, and he did so by accident; went to push him by the waist closer but his hand slipped down, and he noticed how limp he felt under his underwear.

That wouldn't do; he asked Haruki again he wanted him to do, what he shouldn’t do, and under the scrutiny Haruki only blurted out dismissively, “Stop, no one fucks to get comfortable, anyway”, and Hanjae’s hand fell from his shoulders.

He said, “What?” and Haruki, “What what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean by what?” Haruki asked, an uneasy sound, and Hanjae could almost feel him growing cold under him, losing body heat, so he stepped away.

That was a whole hour ago. They’ve been trying to recover, but the mood has gone sour. Hanjae has put his shorts back on a couple minutes after his boner fully died and Haruki seemed to take that as a personal offense, hence the walking.

Hanjae reiterates: “I just can’t know if you like anything if you don’t tell me or… respond. Physically.”

Haruki rubs a hand over his face. He’s annoyed but he’s trying to mask it, says like a tease, “What’s with the language? Did you do research?”

Hanjae sighs. He’s tired of hearing this tone on him. He’s tired of one too many things at once, a Russian doll of exhaustion. A block; the everyday chaos of work, another; the weight of lying to everyone, the effort of keeping it up, and the core one: Haruki not wanting him, pretending to do so, going about it like a chore, like something he must cross off a list.

“What am I doing wrong?” Hanjae asks. “Can you tell me?”

“No, not– You’re not doing things wrong, it just doesn’t happen, okay?” Haruki lets out. “I don’t really get hard, or anything.”

Hanjae processes the phrase word by word. “You mean, you mean never? Or–”

“Not never, just not always. Not a lot.”

“Hyung. Shouldn’t you get that checked?”

“‘Get that checked’,” Haruki parrots, half heartedly, and then quieter, to himself, “I need a fucking drink. ‘Should have sneaked something, should have– Got something.”

Seeing him stuck in place, an unpleased thing, Hanjae can’t help but think back to his snaggletooth days, the pre-rhinoplasty times, that one White Day in seventh grade where his deskmate pity gave him half a chocolate, and wonders if he’s lying, if he’s making something up to make him feel better, if he noticed that Hanjae’s not feeling great, nowhere close to nice.

He’s been hiding his right hand under the cover, trying to not let Haruki hold it, not that he’s tried to do that yet, nor does it seem like he’ll want to.

“We can just not do anything,” Hanjae reminds him. It’s his fourth time saying it, and it gets the exact same reaction out of Haruki each time: an annoyed huff, a roll of eyes. “Not have sex, if it’s not what you want. If I’m not– Not attractive to you.”

“You are, you are. Very attractive,” Haruki says. “Happy?”

“And if I am,” Hanjae prompts. “It’s okay, right? You think it’s okay?”

Haruki’s mouth hangs semi open, his eyes semi shut, when he shoots him a look. “What? I– What?” It’s almost a hiss.

“Can you just tell me why?” Hanjae presses. It’s the right wrong question; it sends Haruki back to pacing, his back turned to him. “Why do you want us to have sex?”

“You want this to happen,” Haruki tells him. “You always wanted it to happen, everyone knows, you made this happen, with all– everything.”

“And you want it too?”

“That’s such a stupid question! Am I not here? Didn’t I tell you to be here?”

“You’re not just,” Hanjae takes in air, sharp through his teeth. “Looking and understanding and– letting me have it, like–”

He can’t fully say it, Haruki doesn’t allow him, shuts it down with a sharp, “Are you my therapist? You’re my therapist now? Fuck off, shut up, be quiet for just a fucking a minute, will you?”

Hanjae withers. From a place inside him, he recalls, he had hoped. He had cultivated hope the size of a grain of sand that maybe, just maybe, the hesitation ment care – that perhaps Haruki liked him, and didn’t know what to do about it, how to go about it. A nice piece of fiction to cling to. But no. It’s clear now: no.

“I really don’t want to pressure you,” Hanjae says, and tries to make his voice louder as the phrase goes on, less miserable, but fails at it.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, Hanjae, I understand korean, I understand what you’re saying, I’m not fucking stupid–”

“I didn’t say– I didn’t say you are,” Hanjae tries to reason, but all the sound gets drowned out; there’s only Haruki talking quickly, loudly.

“–So you can stop repeating all these good phrases now, these made up phrases. No one speaks like that. In the real world, no one says that–”

“I mean it.”

“–You’re not pressuring me, Hanjae, trust me, you can’t do that, no one– There’s no pressure, or urgency, or anything. I don’t feel any of that coming from you, so,” Haruki flashes him a smile, thin, ironic, sharp. It looks like something that would be carved out with a pocket knife somewhere.

“Then why,” Hanjae breaths. “Why don’t we end this here? Can we end this here?”

“Again?” Haruki asks, with a laugh. It’s a mean sounding one. “Are you serious?”

“No,” Hanjae says, and swallows. “All of it.”

He almost regrets saying it, given how hard Haruki’s face crumbles. It takes a full minute for him to recover, and Hanjae watches him try to piece an expression back together until he can no longer look.

“Bullshit,” he hears Haruki say, and then again, “Bullshit. C’mon, just. Give me a minute, alright?”

He moves very close, very soon, back on the bed. Their knees are touching again, and they both feel icy.

Haruki says, “I can do better, I promise,” and there’s a hint of a plea there. Hanjae hates to catch it.

“Haruki, it’s okay. It’s okay–”

“No, just, if you just,” His hands hover over Hanjae’s chest, unfocused, trying to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. “I can do this, I can, really, if you just try to be more horrible, if you– if you force me, then–” and Haruki shuts his mouth very tight, looks down at the tangle of sheets between them, about to fall off the mattress.

Hanjae at him once and again, forces his eyes to stay open even though. He takes hold of both of Haruki’s wrists feather light, puts them away from him, pushes them to be on Haruki’s own chest. They fall limply on his sides once he lets go.

“Haruki,” Hanjae begins to say, and then stops, has no idea how to proceed. He puts his hands on his forehead, digging. He presses the heel of them over his eyes, hard. “I’m not… I’m not going to do that to you. I don’t want to do that, so can we not? Please? Can we not?”

He takes his hands off his face to try to look him in the eyes, to tell him with them to: I’m not doing that.

Haruki stags up, seems to tense from the heel off his feet to the top of his head. “This is so– awful, awful. What is it, your face is– It looks so–”

Hanjae takes notice of his frown, his quirked down mouth, his eyes – watery, blinking. It’s a sad face, an about-to-burst-into-tears face.

“I can’t stand this, I’m not– Not going to stand here, and be looked at like–” Haruki swallows dry, goes back into motion; picks his shirt back up from the floor, puts it on in a hurry. “I’m going to the pool. I’ll be in the pool, away from you. The whole trip, away from you.”

He stops abruptly at the door, a shaky hand on the handle. Haruki says without looking back at him, exasperated, “You’re gonna let me walk out? I’m leaving, I’m walking out.”

Hanjae says nothing, and experiences what might be the heaviest silence of his life. He feels it from within, taking the form of a bone crushing pressure.

Haruki is even quiet when he leaves, making the door fall shut with almost no sound; a complete dissonance.

June 2nd and 3rd, 2022.

Hanjae lays down, once he’s alone. He spends the rest of the day checking the door, checking his phone – a wild expectation followed by nothing, nothing, except for a tense engulfment of sleep.

Summer comes and Hanjae sees more rain clouds then he sees of just Haruki. It’s voluntary and it isn’t; they’re both avoiding each other.

But promotions are not done, yet, so it’s not as intense as it could be. Just yesterday they got sorted out to film a Heart To Heart episode, and had to scrap it midway because it was heavy, horrible, quiet. Their prompt was: Beach, and they couldn’t hold even a one minute conversation about it.

He got an email from Seo CEO in the morning: ‘Let’s all keep a serene work environment free of misunderstandings and intrigue’, he wrote, underlined and in bold.

Hanjae presses the cold bottle of energy drink against his face, the back of his neck – pure sweat after filming another music show performance. He’s by the vending machine, catching some air, seeing Idols come and go, staff hushing from one side to the other. Some of them bow their heads at him, and Hanjae greets them back with an enthusiasm he knows falls short.

There’s a small commotion in front of their dressing room when he gets there, and he could spot it from a distance. A girl group or at very least a group of around twelve girls, Beomseok and Seungsoo supporting their exposed arms on the doorframe when they talk to them, smiles warm and easy, so he knows exactly what it's all about.

Haruki’s the odd one out, in the middle of them, the center of all attention. He’s always been popular in the hallways, no stranger to little pieces of paper sneaked into his cafeteria orders, someone coming up to him and asking if they can take a selfie, if he’s got a minute – he’s known for dismissing all requests politely.

Hanjae tries to walk by them meekly, without touching anyone, just muttering polite ‘Excuse me’s until he’s allowed through; he isn’t allowed through. Haruki’s got one warm over his shoulder before he can get even a foot inside, before he can even process how, locking him in a clumsy armlock, turning him around, pushing him close.

“And what about him?” He asks the girls, and he’s close enough to press his cheek against Hanjae’s; they’re the exact same height, and their bones fall perfectly aligned. Someone laughs about it, someone woos. “What do we think of him?”

A girl, the closest to them, wearing the sparkliest makeup Hanjae’s ever seen says, joking, “Oh, him? Hmmmmmm, let’s see…”

At his back, Hanjae feels a lingering over and soon can hear Dylan say, a sharp whisper, “Haruki, stop that. Stop.”

Haruki ignores him. His hold on Hanjae’s neck gets tighter, turns into an one armed hug. “Hanjae’s very very shy, but he’s also very very nice. A proper gentleman.”

“Really?” Another girl asks – long curled hair, jet black, dimples showing. “I thought all gentlemen had gone extinct.”

“Noona, so did I! But not Hanjae. He’s proper old school.”

“If that’s true, then he’s cute,” she says, and comes boldly forward to pinch Hanjae’s cheek. Haruki watches her do so with an enthusiastic nod of approval, and Hanjae can feel his sharp sideways grin form in real time. “It makes him the cutest out of all of you.”

“It’s all true, trust me, trust me. He is the cutest out of all of us, yes. Can you believe he’s single? I think it’s so sad, how single he is, how alone he is all the time, always too lonely. We should solve that, no?”

The girl smiles back at him – amused, having fun, flirting with Hanjae, with Haruki, with the two of them at once in front of everyone when she says, “We really should.”

Around them, everyone’s gone into a frenzy over the situation. Seungsoo is slapping Haruki on his free shoulder, screeching ‘You’re so crazy today, Haruki, what’s gotten into you, you crazy man!’, and Hanjae can’t tell if he’s breathing. Then he can feel his lungs moving and nothing else. There’s a small turmoil under them, right where his heart should be, an agitation – fight or flight, and he fails both. He freezes, throat tight and dry.

And then: the enerved click of Junghwa’s heeled shoes, her voice loud when she says, exasperated, “No, no no no, out, out, out! All of you girls out of here right now, what is this?! Where are your managers?!”

The girls scatter in a hurry, all waving goodbye and giggling. Seungsoo puts his hand on his heart and makes a show out of sighing, looking sad, makes a couple of them laugh louder.

Door shut, Junghwa slaps him and Beomseok naked arms with her papers, half joking, half actually slapping them. “I leave for five minutes! Five minutes! What is wrong with you men!”

“We were filming Tiktoks! Innocent little Tiktoks!” Seungsoo says, but he’s laughing, proudly taking his beating. Beomseok simply steps out of her reach, shrugging.

Junghwa stags when she’s in front of Haruki, papers down. She looks for a long moment at his face, searching for something and Hanjae knows what it is: a sign of winter coming earlier.

She’s gentle with him in a different, more impersonal way. He’s the only one out of all of them Junghwa doesn’t call by the first name; she doesn’t use ‘kid’ or ‘boy’ or ‘son’ either.

‘Fukunaga-ssi’ is what she says now, asking if they can have a word in private, and Haruki complies, follows her out, mute.

Hanjae slides his earphones in and tries to not watch them – doesn’t want to look him in the eyes, and thinks he means it forever, feels like it’s a vow being made.

Everyone’s getting more or less undressed by the time he looks up again, falling back into their usual clothes, and the small glimpses of everyone’s torsos at the corner of his eyes are depressing, being back an old discomfort. He sinks into his seat, blinks something off his eyes, looks at the floor. Counts to ten, scratches at his marked hand.

Jiahang comes to sit by his side, gingerly tapping his face with a makeup wipe, a question on his frowned brow, a deep concern. He’s wearing one of Minwoo’s ancient black hoodies, the one with the falling apart NASA logo that fits him too short at the arms.

Hanjae has no idea why his mouth tastes so sour, seeing it; why the next breath he takes through his nose is so sharp.

Junghwa and Haruki come back soon enough, and he and Hanjae are the only ones left to change. She hurries everyone else out, says, “Boys, grab your things– and make sure you have all your things, please– Yes, Kim Haegon, I am talking directly to you, kiddo.”

In a blink there’s only a fan in a corner, making noise, and Haruki in pristine white performance clothes in front of Hanjae, wearing an overshirt with a cascade of thin chains on the back.

“We’re alone,” he says, suddenly, while staring at the floor. “If you want to you can–”

Hanjae stands quickly up, puts a wall and a door between them, turns the lock shut in the small bathroom attached to the room. He’s only sharing space with a shitter and a sink, a little mirror, and he doesn’t want to see even an inch of himself in it.

When he steps out, jeans and an white shirt, Haruki’s gone. His stage jacket lies abandoned on the floor, a tear on the shoulder, a loose chain on the opposite side of the room.

Hanjae staggers at the door, and sees himself walking back to pick it up without thinking. He’s very cautious when he folds it, very gentle when he tucks it under one arm.

[...]

On the ride home Hanjae lingers on the backseat, blearing some song loud enough to not think – pure instrumental, a booming bass.

When they stop in front of the dorm, he stays planted where he is; unties his seatbelt and then thinks better of it, clicks it back shut.

“I’ll go to the company,” he tells no one, just says it out loud, and no one bothers to object. He rides with Junghwa to the New Wave building, even quieter, almost one with the silence.

He doesn’t give her a chance to speak to him when they park, just hops off and goes straight through the reception to practice room #A2, the one with a bunch of old instruments tucked into the lockers, mostly hand-me-downs, some of them broke beyond repair.

He’s aiming for the one drum kit that’s probably around the same age Hanjae is, nothing fancy: it was some staff's son's, someone else’s teenage dream, and he said Hanjae could have it – it’s what his kid would want. It has million pieces of old stickers glued on it and Hanjae never felt like fully peeling them out.

His mind gets lost in the long choreography of setting it up piece by piece. When he finally sits behind the seat, his hands move on their own, just making noise.

And then he finds his way into a rock song through muscle memory. By the end of it, Haruki is a long silhouette in the corner of his eyes, dressed from head to toe in funeral black, and Hanjae almost loses the hold he has on his sticks.

Hanjae’s sweatier than before, breathing slightly through his mouth, still upset with him.

Haruki has a very firm walk when he comes deeper into the room. He stands a paper out in front of Hanjae, his face turned away.

“Phone number,” he explains, waving it even closer to Hanjae like a treat, a gift. “From the girl, earlier. The one that liked you.”

Hanjae lowers his drumsticks as he stares at it, letting his hands fall to his tights. He has no idea what his face is doing, but he knows that if he says I don’t want it, that won’t be all that he’ll say. He might cry; he might fail himself and cry from exhaustion, maybe. Probably something worse, uglier.

“It’s better if you start seeing someone, now. Really seeing someone. This whole thing, it’s so much bullshit. It’s bullshit, Hanjae, it’s like you said. So let’s end this here, like you asked,” Haruki says, and when Hanjae doesn’t move to take up his offer he shoves it in his pocket, walks away, goes to one of the side bars. He puts an extended leg there, a perfect stretch, as he keeps up, carrying an echo: “We’re not compatible, anyway. There was never anything really happening.”

Hanjae’s acting before he knows it. He puts the sticks on their case, tries to get the zipper shut with a hard push that doesn’t do anything. He tries again, harder, and the dent gets stuck on fabric, almost breaks.

“So don’t get sad, Hanhan,” Haruki concludes, turning around, crossing his arms in front of his chest, and his posture is perfect, fully straightened out – a wall again. “It’ll make me upset.”

Hanjae looks at him, as straight in the eyes as he can from a distance – keeps looking even when Haruki dips his chin down, offering only the top of his head.

“It was fun for a day, right? You had one fun day, got your dick sucked,” he says, and he sounds like he’s smiling, like he’s trying to make it sound light, to paint it as something funny. Trying to be intimate, a bit they did. “I don’t mind that we never really– It’s not important to me. I didn’t even want to have sex with you, so– who cares?”

Hanjae closes his eyes tight shut, tries to take a steading inhale. He hears Haruki say, as if from underwater, “But I did want to like you. That week, with all the kissing, all that– I tried to like you. ‘Just didn’t work. Didn’t work.”

“You tried,” Hanjae says, a breath. “You tried to like me.”

From the opposite corner of the room, Haruki puts his face back into view, and the smile he has grows more forced, more visibly sad. It reminds Hanjae of a chalk line drawn on a black board, crooked.

“I told you.”

“What? What did you tell me?”

“Hanjae,” Haruki warns him. “Let’s not make it awkward. I understand you had your ideas, all these expectations–”

“I didn’t. I didn’t have any expectations I didn’t tell you. Everything– I told you. I tried to be honest. At Deh noona’s. That was really all I had to say.”

“Sure,” Haruki says, with a tiny laugh, the hint of a sneer.

‘Sure’. Hanjae’s up from the seat, can’t no longer sit down, can’t barely stand being here.

Haruki keeps eying him like he’s expecting Hanjae to walk straight out of the door, and grows startled when he doesn’t, when he walks near him instead, at half an arm’s distance.

“Why do you think I didn’t mean it? That I was lying?” Hanjae asks the shrunken figure of him. “What sort of person do you think I am? What sort of person do you think being interested in you makes me?”

He’s close enough to see how tightly Haruki’s jaw sets when he looks away, at a nothing point on the far left. His hair falls on his eyes, a curtain. “What sort of question–”

“Every time,” Hanjae speaks over him, and it hurts to do so, because Haruki reacts badly to it, flinching. But someone has to say it; he has to say it, he can’t keep on not saying it. “Every time I wanted to talk to you, hyung, just talk to you, to make sure you were enjoying anything in any way, you looked at me like I disgusted you, like you hated me. Do you hate me? Why? What’s so wrong about all the things, all the things I've done? What’s not correct? I tried being close, and it didn't work. I tried to give you space, and it didn’t work. I still don’t understand, so can you tell me? Can you make it clear to me now?”

Hanjae’s out of air, when he closes his mouth shut. The whole room – sucked out of air.

Very quietly, Haruki says, “I asked for one thing, one thing, and you didn’t do the one thing–”

“You just said– You said you didn’t want to have sex with me. Then why? Why ask? Just because you could? You just asked because you could?”

“Stop,” Haruki tells him, voice rigid. His arms have unfolded and are now holding on to the side bar with all they have. “Stop with the whole why, why, why, just drop it. I’m not saying. Not saying.”

“You can say. I want to listen. I want the answer,” Hanjae says. “I still– I want to be your friend, now. I want you well. To think you’re not– To think you’re hurting, it’s painful. It’s painful.”

“Oh, you’re in pain– You’re in pain, you,” Haruki spits, and laughs, and sniffs, all at once. “Give me a fucking break! Go care about people that care about you, Hanjae, this is so pathetic, everything you always say is– Quit wasting your time with all of this, when you can get a nice girl, someone nice like you and have a nice, normal thing that’s not– Not this. You can choose to not have this, so I don’t understand, I don’t understand why– And you, you won’t understand why, so fuck off, just fuck off! That’s what I want, what I always wanted! For you to fuck off.”

It’s said like an ultimatum, and it sounds harsh enough for Hanjae to feel it more on his chest than on his ears. He tries to take another look at his face, to match the tone to an expression, but can’t – Haruki won’t let him, and Hanaje won’t insist. It’s not his place to insist, and it’s been made clear now.

He leaves him alone, carrying himself very tightly out the door, out the corridor, out the entryway.

Out on the outside world, it’s already close to being night, and Hanjae takes in the stale air, looking up. He sits on the New Wave front steps despite himself, and the concrete’s warmth is a faint discomfort about to leave him.

The drum was still set there, in the room. Hanjae had wanted it, and promised to care for it, and still: left it there. He’ll have to go back for it, be back and fix it, put it back in place.

He should clean it first, and the floor, maybe the mirrors – not all, just some of them, the ones that look worse. Everything that looks bad, everything not quite right.

When he walks back into the practice room, there’s no sound, no lights on, and Haruki is no longer anywhere to be found.

The drum set is back on the case, compact inside the locker, exactly where it should be, exactly what it should be – as if it had never been touched at all.

[…]

Food tastes bland during dinner, and Hanjae doesn’t have it in him to pretend to have an appetite for Taesong’s sake.

He's been testing out recipes lately. He wants to impress his mother in law because he knows he wants to marry Yunhee, now. Not even two years together and he knows he wants to be with her forever, is sure that it’s mutual, it’s certain they’re in love.

He wants to show it to everyone; he gets to show it to everyone.

“Are you okay, Hanjae?” Taesong asks, over and over again – at the dinner table, on the couch during a drama commercial break, while they’re sharing space in front of the bathroom sink, brushing their teeth.

And each time Hanjae answers “Yes”, a tight “Yes”, and none of them sounds convincing enough, not even one of them he can get right.

Later, in his room: Seungsoo out, Minwoo out, and Hanjae all alone. Typical. Routine. Things as they’ve always been; as they’ve never stopped being, not even once. Haruki’s voice rings on his head when he lays it on the pillow: so alone, all the time, so sad, all lonely.

He checks the time on his phone: 8:03PM. Too early. Hanjae drops it, closes his eyes for a long time, checks it again: 8:16PM, and the pop up notification of receiving two messages from Dylan six minutes ago.

[dylari]: r things w/ haruki done?

[dylari]: plz answer quick

[You]: What do you mean?

[dylari]: idk how else to read this

Chihoon sends him a cropped screenshot showing a single lengthy Kakao message. ‘i don t know whyy is so hard’, the first line reads, ‘f or anyone ti just on ce do what i avsk and n ot sometind ellse like hsnaje he is sp–’

Hanjae stops reading it. He enters his phone’s gallery and deletes it, goes back to the chat and Dylan’s text now shows up as a blurry gray square, only says ‘media not found’.

[You]: Did he send you this?

[dylari]: yeah

[dylari]: our chat is his diary ig

[dylari]: when talking irl gets hard he blows my phone

[dylari]: i thought you knew

[You]: I didnt know

[You]: Sorry to hear you have to deal with that

There’s a long pause from Dylan’s side. When he resumes typing, Hanjae has long deleted both messages, regretted them – is sitting up on the bed with a hand on his face, a hard press, and regretting that too.

[dylari]: dude i dont mind knowing

[dylari]: look dont worry hanjae this is fine

[dylari]: im his roomie im on it i can take care of this

[dylari]: ill keep an eye on him now

[dylari]: im sure you tried your best your own way so thank you

[dylari]: telling you that now because he wont say it even if he wants to say it he wont so let me do that for you

[dylari]: good job

[dylari]: go breath

Hanjae falls asleep with his phone held tight, tight to his chest: 11:49 PM. He dreams of it ringing, ringing, ringing, and not being surprised, just being afraid.

[...]

It’s way past 1AM when Hanjae’s mattress sinks to the weight of Haruki sitting at the far end corner, some few inches away from his feet.

He had heard him unlock the door and come in, Seungsoo with him, making the most amount of noise – slurring more than singing some old pop ballad.

Minwoo had jumped awake out of bed, angry; threw a pillow at them, and then a shoe, told them both to fuck off, and disappeared.

Seungsoo began snoring as soon as his body hit the bed, loudly, which only happens when he’s exhausted; they must have danced all night, must have club hopped all night, trying to be too shifty to get caught.

Haruki stayed for a long moment in the middle of the room after tucking him in, silent. And then he sat there, in Hanjae’s bed, not moving, not breathing, Hanjae even thought, until he took a long inhale through his nose just now.

Hanjae won’t look; he can’t look at him. He promised he wouldn’t.

“I’m gonna leave you alone, now,” Haruki tells him – tells him directly, because Hanjae can almost make out the shape of his stare on his back, right at the shoulder. He bit very close to there once and meant nothing by it, thought nothing of it. “You’ll never have to talk to me when we are away from a camera, Hanjae. I promise. You’re gonna look around and I’m not gonna be there. Not an inch of me. I’m not gonna be there.”

He sounds so clear when he says it – slow, but still sober in a way Hanjae doesn’t hear from him much. He keeps on looking ahead into the dark, a hand gripping this pillow; his eyes won’t close.

Haruki swallows, resumes: “The thing is, you’re too nice, Hanjae, so, so nice, you’ve been so nice, so it’s not– It’s not you, it’s not. It’s me. I can’t– I can’t have that. Doesn’t work. I know it, for a long time. So with you, I was just… Lying. To you, not to me. I know that’s wrong, and I know what’s wrong and I just, still– I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Hanjae, I’m sorry, I shouldn't have– I’m sorry. I’ll stop. I’ll stop, I promise, I’ll stop. I’ll stop everything, everything, so don’t cry, alright? Why are you crying? Don’t do that– Over me? Don’t do that. I’m sorry. Don’t cry, Hanjae, don’t cry, please, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, I– I didn’t want to make you cry. I didn’t want–”

September 26th, 2023.

He can see Haruki clearly now, the stark shape of him. He’s still wearing the outfit intended for the airport – a sleeveless designer shirt, blue overcoat, and a wine purple trouser with an abstract David Bowie painted on the right leg.

Hanjae observes him from a small distance, catching his breath. He had run there, trying the piece the way back together from memory, growing a little desperate everytime he turned left and it wasn’t the right left; every time he saw an abandoned lot and it wasn’t the right lot.

But he was the one to find him in the end, sitting right on the floor, tense but not so small. He has a moment now to think of the right thing to say.

Hanjae wants to go with the essential: your sister’s at home, she’s looking for you, she wants to know you’re well. As does everyone; as does everything.

He opens his mouth: can’t make it. Opens his mouth again and takes another breath, a hissy breath, through the teeth.

Hanjae isn’t looking at the ground, this time, as he walks forward; he steps over a twig and it breaks loudly in half, disrupts his equilibrium lightly, and Haruki takes a slow look behind his shoulders. Their eyes meet then – and Haruki’s have grown tiny on his face, swollen. They quickly look down, at himself, to the ground.

“Someone found my spot,” he says hoarsely, with a single laugh. He picks one of the bottle pieces on the floor near him, raw glass, and throws it down the hill. It doesn’t make a sound. Hanjae keeps waiting for the glass to break and make a sound, and doesn’t hear it, never hears it. “They got rid of all my chairs– that sucks. That just sucks.”

It’s been a long, long year – 2023, that is. The oddest one yet, their busiest. Hanjae’s half an actor now, goes to TV and gives magazine interviews alone now, and Haruki models often, editorials and campaigns and a whole outdoor, once.

Hanjae squats near him, some inches behind; he’s still scared of how big the drop is. He waits, and waits, and waits more.

Haruki leans a bit on his back, tells him, “You can see his house from here. That's why I liked it, it’s why I came.”

Hanjae squints, looks ahead, trying to spot it even though he has no idea what to look for. He’s never been to Choi Sangwon’s. He knows some of the others have, back when they were Boy Of The Week trainees. Their reports were mixed: he had a big pitbull, a bathroom wall painted in a horrible shade of red, and all the carpets somehow smelled like they were brand new, like no one ever stepped on them.

Haruki laughs, meek, and points ahead; right at the only house with no light coming from the windows, empty.

“That one,” he says. “I had a key copy, front and back door. I had a floor mattress, mine. I got clothes there, still– mostly underwear, sleep clothes. And my favorite necklace pin, family heirloom, in a drawer, there.”

Hanjae gulps something acid down his throat. “I see,” he says. “I– I see it.”

Haruki turns his whole face at him, suddenly. Looks sad, and tries to not appear sad, smiles. All white teeth. “Are you happy, Hanhan? Like, ever? Are you well, most of the time? Is your girlfriend nice to you, lately? You’re so busy now. With your dramas and all. I hope she understands. I hope she’s watching them, that she likes to see you on them.”

“I’m well, hyung. I’m– Yoora and I, we–,” Hanjae swallows again, dry. The raw truth is: happiness creeps up on him and it’s a battle to let it linger, when he looks around himself. He tries to start over, tries to sound firmer. “And you?”

“Pfff. What do you think? I know you saw the whole,” Haruki makes a hand motion – mimics an explosion, a disaster. “I heard you. Through everything. And thank you, by the way, for not bringing an army with you. For not acting like I’m a princess– Like I’m a runaway princess.”

Hanjae nods, uses that to say ‘you’re welcome’, and doesn’t mean it much. He should have brought an army with him. Or just his sister maybe, whom Haruki adores; avoids but adores.

Hanjae clears his throat, says, “Furumi’s at home. She wants to see you– talk to you.”

Haruki lets out an airy laugh. “Right. The baby.”

“You asked,” Hanjae reminds him.

“I know,” Haruki says, and turns his face upfront; looks at the drop, looks at the house. “I know I asked.”

“Hyung,” Hanjae says. “Can you tell me what happened?”

He sees Haruki run a hand over his face, up his hair, leave it there. He soothes himself before he speaks, a whole damn breaking sort of thing;

“It was so– I was checking on what Monica sent me to wear at the airport, and when I saw Bowie my first thought somehow was, did my boyfriend get a funeral? He was afraid of that. Of dying without a ceremony. His only real fear, I think, the only fear I figured out,” Haruki trails off, for a moment; seems to dive deep into a memory, takes a moment more. He comes back with a sneer. “Why the fuck Bowie? He didn’t like old music, didn’t like rock. Nothing connects– it’s just two dead people, that’s all, that’s it. And Chihoon was right there, right behind me, but for a moment– For a moment, it didn’t look like it was him. It looked like, from this one angle– Fuck, I can’t even say his full name, now. My first boyfriend, a name I can’t say. How sad. How very sad…”

He sounds like he’s giving Hanjae a cue to laugh. Hanjae doesn’t, wouldn’t be able to remember how to do so even if he tried.

Haruki says, “The thing is– The thing is, he made himself my life and then he died. He chose to die, picked a date and a place to die, and I can’t grieve, I shouldn’t want to grieve because it would be insane to feel– When I know he didn’t love me. He didn’t even fucking like me, treated that fucking dog better– Liked the dog better. It could kill me off, and he would say it was my fault. Everything about me made him so angry, all the time, all the time so angry when we were in private. My age, my face, my name, my accent. Everything. And everyone knows now. They all know, because I had to say– Because I can’t get a hold of it, lately. It’s always very cold in the winter, I always felt it, but now it’s the whole year. I feel very– very sad, cold, all year.”

“But they want this so bad, Hanjae,” Haruki tells him, quieter, holding in tears. “All of them. It’s not like you and me. We just landed here. To dance. To act. They live and breathe this thing, this Idol group thing, and it hit me then– It hit me that I can’t be like them, our members. That’s why I panicked, that’s why I couldn’t go to Fashion Week, why I had to come back here. I can’t do it like everyone else does it because it’s never been the same, my career– I don’t think I deserve these things. I didn’t even want them. I was in college, I came here to be in college. I wanted to dance, just dance, like my grandmother did– I wanted to do something for her memory, I wanted to be something she would be proud of, something anyone– anyone would look at and be proud of, and now no one fucking talks to me, anymore, my family doesn’t talk to me. I don’t know my mom’s new phone number– he didn’t even let me keep my mom’s new phone number. ‘Said I didn’t need it, said it didn’t matter.”

“I wish, back then–” Hanjae says, barely feeling his tongue moving. “That I did more. Anything.”

“You really wish that, don’t you? You mean it,” Haruki sounds like he’s marveling at it, that is a truly remarkable thing that Hanjae has said something and meant it. “You’re the nicest guy I’ve ever been with, Hanjae, really. The coolest, too. While I’m the worst one, right? Worst person you’ve ever been with. By miles. You can’t– Never again. No one like me. Never again.”

“Not like him again,” Hanjae tells him. “For you, not like him again.”

Haruki shows him an even sadder face, more wobbly, and shrugs. Just shrugs, looks away.

“I think no one,” he says, with a firm nod. “No one is better. It feels fitting to let that die, too. If I can’t get it right.”

“That’s not true,” Hanjae says, more with his clenched teeth than with his voice. “Not true. It’s not– Not better.”

“Oh, you don’t think so?” Haruki asks, and it’s just words. Just words being said to fill in silence, to cover up a strong sniff.

Hanjae can feel it again; the sharp line of disconnection rising, cutting the air in half, and he still doesn’t know how to stop it. He doesn’t know how to reach him.

He tries; he has to try. Hanjae licks his lips, forces some sound out of his throat: “You know– Haruki, you know, that all of us, everyone, will listen to anything you have to say. All the time.”

“I know that? Do I? And anything? That’s big. That’s really big. You shouldn’t let anyone say anything– no one should have to listen to just anything. Look at Chihoon now, Jiahang now. What good did knowing everything do?”

Hanjae’s at loss of words again, breathing around a lump on the middle of his throat. He’s too bad at this, too tired to think – just off a long action shoot. He still has his outside mask shoved into his jeans back pocket.

Somewhere in the distance, he can hear a dog haul; a coded hymn to the moon, maybe. Something about wanting life to stay still, wait a little longer. And then silence, a defeating one. A shuffling coming from Haruki in front of him.

“Can you, we– Ah, it’s so,” Haruki begins to say, shaking his head. “Can you hug me? If it’s not too hard or– bad for you. Just one time.”

Hanjae’s up on his feet before he’s even done talking. He stands his hand out, a timid invitation, and Haruki takes it, allowing Hanjae to help him up.

Haruki lays his forehead on his shoulder and stays there, being hugged, fully still until he takes a big shuddering breath. His arms stay glued to his sides, limp.

“I’ve never really– I never did just this,” he tells Hanjae; a shaky whisper, an old time secret. “It’s never been just this, before.”

Hanjae turns his face to the side and away so he can suck in air, so he can close his eyes shut, for a moment. He can’t think too much about it now. He taps at Haruki’s shoulder blades warmly, like a dad or a coach would – pat, pat, pat.

It gets an airy laugh out of him, a long and disbelieved one. “Bro hug!” Haruki exclaims when he steps away, whipping at his running nose, “You just gave me a bro hug. It’s really over now. We’re never going to fuck now. All that, over. What are we, if we’re bro hugging?”

“We’re a team. We’re friends,” Hanjae says, and thinks; you said so right here, once.

Haruki’s face makes too many things at once, hearing it. He looks down at himself again, accessing all the damage done to Monica Imano’s design. Bowie’s face has turned red with dust, and it looks even more smudged.

“VIANFINO is going to fire me,” he concludes with a dry chuckle. “They told me one more slip– the sponsoring, over.”

Hanjae bats an idle leaf off his shoulder and for once Haruki doesn’t flinch out of reach. He tries to give him a truthful close mouthed smile.

“Leave it to me– Leave them all with me,” Hanjae says, and leaves his hand there, a firm hold on him. “I’ll wash them.”

#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ writing .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ haruki .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ hanjae .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ dylan .#fictional idol community #fake kpop group #kpop fanfic #kpop au #kpop oc #(maybe the Hanruki sex scene was the friends we made along the way?)

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intoloopin-archive · 8 months ago

Text

A CHAPTER: THE SHARP AND THE BLUNT (PART 1/2).

tw(s): panic attack. dubious consent (haruki is very weird and forward about initiating sex!). alcohol abuse & alcoholism. semi-smut? (there is making out). miscommunication (a warning because I personally think it's constant and frustrating). insinuation and direct discussions of sexual trauma, abuse by a past partner, abuse of workplace power and stalking. internalized homophobia (in part one, a hint). If I missed anything, please tell me! starring: Lee Hanjae. Fukunaga Haruki. featuring: Dylan Hwang / Hwang Chihoon. Their fellow LOOPiN members (old OT10, no Gyujin, a lot of Beomseok). Delilah Franco. Oh Sunyoung. Choi Sangwon. Blonde Bob Piss Girl (a serious character).

timeline: quick flashback to 2018 | early to the end of mid 2022.

word count: 13,405 words. author's notes: welcome everyone to hanruki fuckery part 1 a.k.a the most frustrating and life draining four months in Hanjae's whole entire life a.k.a big sadness, the piece split into two. this one is over 23K long, and was originally intended to be read in one go but! It Got Too Big. The conclusion will be coming out later this week! prepare for a Haruki all in par with the one in the prologue, which falls in between this mess on the timeline. this is a work of a whole month, but it's also a work of two years: a whole central plot, planned and done. title's from this song! give it a listen once you get trought the bigger picture, maybe, for catharsis purposes. stay safe! remember you deserve to be safe, always!

November 12, 2018.

Hanjae had vowed not to cry anymore when he got this job – in the same vehement way he had promised at twelve that he would no longer make a sound if he wailed after school, face buried under piles and piles of unfinished homework, to medium success, just the right amount of it to call it success.

He could still tear up once in a while, if things got though, and that was it; a clause added after his first exhausting week as a trainee. The number escalated to once every two business days after he was shoved to debut on LOOPiN, out of all the upcoming boy groups there were.

There was a story taunting the New Wave Music corridors back then. Someone did something unspeakable to someone else, and it caused an expulsion, followed by the immediate need for a new rapper, a new dancer. And there was Hanjae; a BBC trainee for three months, far removed from the Boy Of The Week gossip, who couldn’t exactly sing but had great enunciation, and had been dancing before he was even walking…

He cried now, openly, defeated. It had been an awful day for LOOPiN 2on1.

Their short lived promotions had played out like a sunset: a big golden start – so much press, so much momentum, so many views on the ‘Baby Don’t Stop’ dance practice video, where he and Haruki were using plain shirts and even plainer jeans – quickly diluting into the darkest of times – the controversies, LOOPiN first ones, and exclusively about them.

A resurrected Facebook photo of Hanjae on his graduation with a bandage around his hand, matched with the lingering traces of his poorly removed tattoo there painted him as a school delinquent; Haruki’s drop out stories reintroduced him as the big drunken failure of KArts’s international program.

They were going to stop going to music shows, the company had decided that day, and Sangwon told them on the drive back that they had just done their last one. They had gone up on stage as a duo for the last last time.

With a strong sniff, Hanjae unburied his face from in between his knees and looked at his hand, at the faint shape of a badly drawn rose on his skin. His dad had been adamant about getting it out the moment he took a look at it, still involved in protective plastic. He used the little money off his college safe to arrange a laser session that Hanjae skipped. A year later, Hanjae managed to schedule another one with the partial sponsor of MBN, the company he was stuck on before BBC. He had to do it in a shady place, at a bigger cost: bad skin scarring.

His mom had been relieved to see it fade even more nonetheless, up until the black tattoo turned into something that almost looked like a peculiar and old scar, if you didn’t give it a second glance; and no one was ever giving Hanjae a second glance.

“Let that be a lesson,” she told him, nose turned up and away from him. “Don’t jump head on into things again, Lee Hanjae. That’s no way to live. Watch yourself, watch your company. You’re not a kid anymore. Do you have no goals? Do you want nothing for yourself? Are you that selfish? Can’t you think, for once, about something that isn’t–”

Haruki was the one who found him, sitting on the floor, small and tense against the laundry machine, waiting for everyone’s clothes to be cleaned – the member’s, Sangwon’s, the cleaning auntie's aprons she had forgotten on top of the dinner table last week. Cleaning was always his scapegoat way of attending to something, even if very small.

Maybe if the company decided to drop him, he thought, Hanjae could still be around as the dorm’s janitor.

“So you’re not from Seoul,” Haruki said, leaning against the door frame with an air of mischief around him, something light on his step despite it all.

It was a statement, not an ask, because he knew this. It was one of the few trivia points they had exchanged during pauses on music shows or water breaks in between choreography practice – ‘What’s your age? What’s your blood type? How many siblings? Oh, none? You’re so lucky, Hanjae, so lucky. All siblings are demons. You aren’t missing a thing.’

Hanjae didn’t even startle; Haruki often popped up at places like that, picking up conversations from days, weeks ago like they were merely put on pause.

Without uttering a word and barely looking up, he still nodded his head no.

Haruki nodded back, a pacifying smile showing up on his face, said, “Cool. Great. How about I show you a place?”

‘The place’, he informed Hanjae, was not all that nice, or clean, and he really shouldn’t wear nice shoes or nice clothes tonight, but at least it wasn’t far, at least they had permission.

“Who’s permission?” Hanjae asked, taking the pile of clothes to the dryer, smoothing wrinkles off them just for something to do.

Haruki waved manager Choi’s front keys in his hand, and Sangwon’s horrendous keychains clanked against each other: a green pine tree and a colorful ball. “The one that matters. What do you say, uh? You’re in? Can I count you in?”

He could count Hanjae in.

[...]

They stopped by a convenience store on the way, some couple of blocks down the dorm, and by then night had already conquered all of Seoul. Inside, the middle aged lady behind the counter rushed to give Haruki a hug, a paper bag and a discount.

“He’s a street cat I found,” she leaned in to explain when she caught Hanjae anxiously looking at him going straight to the back of the store, near the freezers, near the alcohol, with the ease of someone who could do so with his eyes shut. “He’s a good foreign friend.”

“I’m not!” Haruki shouted back, but he was grinning. “Are you not watching the news?”

The noona playfully rolled her eyes, joked back, “What news? You’re not on the news!”

She hushed Hanjae to go catch up with him with an enerved wave, told him to take a look around. “It’s on the house,” she winked. “You’re both so skinny, and you must be working hard, so just take something tasty and leave quickly.”

Trailing a couple feet behind Haruki on the aisle, Hanjae picked up a package of noodles and a modest four-set of Terra cans to accompany his endless Heineken bottles, light green on light green. While Hanjae bagged everything with caution, Haruki slipped a red won note on the balcony when the owner stopped paying attention to them, and off they went again.

Haruki made them walk ten more minutes to the left, and the left, the left again, coming to an abrupt stop in front of an abandoned lot, pure dirt and weeds, the sort that seemed to have turned into an open dump for the neighborhood. It looked no different or less disgusting than the million of others around less central Jungnang; it didn’t look like it could be a spot.

Yet Haruki kept braving straight through the grass without stopping, guiding Hanjae behind him to only step where he was stepping, to keep his eyes glued to the floor and watch out for broken glass. He settled when they were deep into the lot, mere feet away from a big hill. There was a clean view of an uneven street if you looked down, he said, filled with houses that were almost all pretty. Hanjae chose to just trust Haruki’s word on that; he couldn’t dare to come close enough to the drop to peek and see.

Haruki standed the bag of drinks for him to hold, and Hanjae had to do so with both hands. From a spot behind them, he pushed two retriable chairs out of a bulk set against a moldy tree, the metal in them corrupted by rust on the edges, and set them up, sat down, tapped at the other seat with his foot in invitation.

Hanjae took a long and anxious moment to comply. Under him, the chair dangled sideways even if he stayed very, very still.

With the convenience bag back in his domain, Haruki cracked three beers open, and handed Hanjae one, kept the other two: one in each hand, a Heineken and a Terra.

“Never had this one. I heard they’re the same thing,” he said, taking a sip from each and frowning, analyzing them. Hanjae stayed quiet.

He had only drank with his dad and uncles one time, at last year’s Chuseok, and hadn’t been much of a fan of anything. Still, he took a sip of beer.

Haruki at least had grace enough to let him swallow and contain a grimace before asking, with a strange edge to it, “So are you? A bully. A problem child. Part of a gang.”

“No,” Hanjae said, too quickly, too eager. He cleared his throat. “I’m really not, hyung, no.”

“How did it get there, then?” Haruki's look was razor sharp on Hanjae’s once tattooed hand, hard enough to make him freeze. “And why did you remove it? Just to be a trainee?”

Hanjae opened his mouth, but only to take a shaky breath in, swallow a bit more of bitter alcohol. In front of his fleeting eyes, Haruki eased just as quickly as he had hardened.

“Hanjae, we’re teammates now,” he told him. “I showed you my good spot. You can’t give me one word sentences anymore. You can’t lie.”

Hanjae considered this, and considered him from the corner of his eyes. Haruki was the LOOPiN member that Hanjae had come to know best, mostly because they didn’t have a choice, but still, he made an effort, he talked to him; he didn’t let Hanjae fall adrift. And he could have easily turned into an island: from the moment he had been transferred to New Wave, he had been an outsider, a last minute solution to a problem no one would explain to him – who left? Why? Was he worse than them? Was he better?

“You’re better,” Haruki had said, when Hanjae brought it up, late at night while they had dinner alone, in the practice room, sweating and panting – a week until their debut happened. He was the only one who had bothered to tell him so. He sounded like he meant it, too. Hanjae remembers catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror over his shoulder, hair bright brown and unfamiliar, thinking even for a fleeting moment: I’m doing enough.

It was fair for him to be the first to know – the first for Hanjae to disappoint.

“I got it removed before,” he heard himself say. It was a secret, so it came out like one: whispered, slow. “Before I wanted to train. I got it with friends– my dance crew friends. It was our logo, or at least, it was going to be, one day. But I… I did a bad thing, and it stopped making sense. It didn’t fit. I didn’t fit, so. It had to go.”

The vagueness did nothing but pique Haruki’s interest. He seated more properly, then less properly; ended up putting his feet on the seat of the chair, slouching with his head supported on his knee, the exact body language of, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me.’

“My friend– my best friend, from childhood, our team captain. He used to have a girlfriend. A girl from our class, a dancer too, someone he had been in love with forever. Later she became part of the group, and we got close, we turned into friends, and then not. Not quite that. They broke up and one hour later we got together, on the same day. We got caught. It was a mess. Everyone thought it was a shitty thing to do, that it was cheating, cheating on everyone. But I just wanted her to be my girlfriend, back then– Back then, I wanted a girlfriend more than I wanted anything...”

Hanjae felt it coming, again: the desire to recoil a bit more on himself in shame. How pathetic he had been, then; how miserable, how sad, how lonely.

He took a timid peek to the side, ready to see an irk of dismay on Haruki’s face, some justified disgust, and was surprised to not see any of that. Haruki had grown passionate and invested in the whole story, something new in his eyes, a third bottle halfway drained in his hand.

He moved his chin up, as if saying, ‘Go on’, but Hanjae couldn’t. He drained the rest of the beer.

Haruki clicked his tongue like that wouldn’t do. He shoved his chair a few inches closer so he could grab at Hanjae's arm and said, all at once, “We can not– Hanjae, look, listen, we can not be blamed for all the things, the crazy things we do when love…!” He didn't finish the sentence, just amended it into another one: “You were a teenager, you both were, and very, very brave. Very brave to tell her and date her and keep dating her even if. They were just– bad friends. Just bad friends.”

They weren’t bad friends, Hanjae knew; they weren’t the ones in the wrong. But it hurted to say it out loud, to admit what he knew was still true: how easily he burned bridges for attention, for affection, so he never did. He just knew – looked at his reflection on surfaces and knew.

He rolled and rolled the tap of the Terra until it fell off, into the can. “Did you really quit college, hyung?” Was what he asked the wind.

Haruki shifted on his seat; Hanjae could only tell because of the way it creaked. “More like college quit me,” he said, with a sad huff of air that might have been a laugh, and dropped Hanjae’s arm, drank from his bottle too.

Sadness fell over them like a veil from then on. The Terras ended and Haruki didn’t mind sharing all the other stuff he had, and the longer it went on the less shy Hanjae felt about asking. At some point Haruki said, “I guess we really fucked up, uh – with 2on1,” and Hanjae, whipping a foam mustache off his face, “Minwoo’s not talking to me,” and Haruki, almost falling over with laugher, “Oh, my, I bet not! Ha. I bet not…”, and turned reticent, fell quiet.

His eyes, Hanjae had noticed, kept darting to a spot ahead in between conversation, beyond the drop of the hill, dazed. He violently shook his head sideways everytime he caught himself drifting too far away, and ran a hand over his face, rubbing at it in a way that made Hanjae look at him in worry.

Haruki found it hilarious each time. “What is it,” he eventually said, slower than normal, harder to understand, “With you, your face?”

He got up from his chair, a sudden move that sent it falling to the floor, a loud squeak, and walked even closer.

In front of Hanjae, right in front of him, he leaned forward until he got both his hands on his face, and said, pushing the corners of his mouth up, “The mood is so– Bad! So bad! Smile! Big smile! C’mon, give me a big smile!”

There had been dirt on Haruki’s hand, and Hanjae could vaguely taste it, with how close to his lips he was pressing. He still wore his inner braces back then; he kept cutting his tongue on the same spot, never healing, never telling, and he could feel the inside of his cheeks pressing onto that sharp place, about to be pierced through.

For a moment, they stayed quiet, looking at each other head on. Hanjae was not smiling. His heart had picked up a quick pace inside his chest, was drumming – Haruki was so close, and he was so beautiful, a true magazine type beauty, all symmetry, and Hanjae knew this, but not with this much conviction, not with so much emotion.

“Ah, you know what? I like you. I decided. I do like you, now…” Haruki said, and then he grinned, bringing his face even nearer. He took a breath and Hanjae felt it on his own nose, and didn’t know what to do about it; his mind, for a moment, went static. “Nothing will happen to you, friend. I promise it. ‘Will not let it.”

Hanjae’s held breath was a painful thing to let out of his chest. “Was something– Was something going to…?”

Haruki huffed a laugh and gave his cheeks two playful taps, said, with a new found determination, “Handsome guy. Do not get sad. I will fix this for you,” and let Hanjae’s face go.

He straightened his back up and swayed slightly to the side, running a hand over his hair, fixing his bangs back into place. Haruki told him, “Late. No booze. Night over”, and extended that same hand for Hanjae to take – Hanjae who still felt like his face had gone numb, blood rushing to it.

He took the hand, and they made their way back to the dorm that way, hanging close; Like magnets, Hanjae remembers thinking, idly, and then not idly at all. Haruki’s hands were leaving behind a pressure everywhere they touched, a heat that Hanjae couldn’t shake off – he just couldn’t shake it off.

Later, when Hanjae layed in bed, sheet drawn over his entire body, he could still feel it. When he woke up the morning after, nauseated but still in the group, still safe, he could still feel it.

If he closes his eyes now, right now, he can still feel it – the sad sort of burn of a premonition misread.

January 13, 2022.

Los Angeles is sunny in a way Haegon would love to see and pretend to hate – a saddening thought Hanjae had since they landed, and that comes back to haunt him while he looks at the city passing by on the van’s window, sidewalks all golden.

Haegon’s not a loud person in his eyes, but his absence is a loud thing, pouring the life out of everyone, mostly because of the way it had been forced on them.

It had been a horrifying way to open the year: having to come forward right on the first day of 2022 to the press, headlining Haegon’s mugging and the accident, his follow up hiatus and excuse out of their ‘We Do’ promotions in the USA. And then there was having to deal with Haegon in private, angry and disappointed, not wanting to take his pain medicine, shoving his room’s door in everyone's faces, dismissing every checkup attempt with an annoyed, “It’s just a minor concussion, what the Hell! I’m not fucking dying! Get the fuck off me, I’m fine, get off, just fuck off already to the States without me! Go on! Just– just leave me already!”

They’re driving out of some media company studio around the center of Los Angeles, where they filmed two twenty minute videos in a roll, more embarrassing games than actual interviews, and Hanjae has already spent all of his ability to mend English words together.

It could have been more fun, one of their staff said, but they had to pass on the puppy interview format because of Taesong’s allergies, and Jiahang’s been dead set on pretending to be sad about it during the entire ride back to the hotel; crocodile tears and all.

Hanjae has to deal with him from the last seat on the far opposite side of the van, resting his fried blonde head against his shoulder, sighing loudly, because Dylan is also not here to amuse him – he took a bus home to Santa Monica and will stay home until they leave in two days time.

Hanjae doesn’t like provoking Taesong, doesn’t like to spoil Jiahang, but that means very little in the grand escape of the group, that goes about poking fun of Taeng like it’s a sport, that’s stuck in a position where they really can’t say no to J.J, who owns company shares; he shoots the meek figure of Taesong an apologetic look as Jiahang’s act carries on, trying to tell him: ‘I’m not a part of this, I just don’t know how to stop it.’

Thankfully, the hotel isn’t that far away, and it’s a quick torture – up until things takes a turn for the worse.

As they park and start to step out, Beomseok’s long arm blocks the door before he and Jiahang can put a single leg outside of the car.

“Stop,” he tells J.J, harsh enough to make Hanjae stumble a step back. Beomseok points a finger right at Jiahang’s face, and inch from touching his nose, says, “Stop being a fucking problem. Stop.”

It makes Jiahang livid, turns his ears bright red. He takes long stomps to the elevator, and Hanjae has to jog to keep up with him – Jiahang really has the longest legs Hanjae has ever seen on a person.

“He’s got such a stick up his ass!” He keeps on saying, barging into the room they’re both sharing with Dylan and Zhiming – angrily tossing his bag into his ‘cheap dollar store bed with the cheap dollar store sheets’ that made him go into a very similar rant last night. “He thinks he’s the only one who cares about Gon, the only one who can bother. He’s so wrong. I’m fucking worried too! I’m calling him too! I miss him! I’m more of a friend to him than that weirdo is. He’s so weird. He thinks he owns Haegon and everyone and everything, just because he’s older, just because he trained for like, one billion years! Like it’s my fault Starship thought he was too ugly to join NO.MERCY!”

“You were being annoying, Jiahang,” O.z deadpans from the corner he’s tucked in, without looking up from his manhwa.

Jiahang grunts louder. “Yeah, that was the point. Taesong knows I’m just joking around! Everyone knows!”

Zhiming lowers the comic from his face, flipping a page. His eyes have deep dark circles behind his thick glasses, marks that never go away. “Unnecessary.”

Jiahang rolls his eyes, putting his hair up on an ugly bun. He turns his back to Zhiming’s bed and mouths at Hanjae, mocking, ‘Unnecessary’.

Hanjae shrugs at him, and that annoys J.J too. He angrily puts on a movie on the tiny TV, gets a hold of his bed’s pillow and wraps himself around it, mumbling something under his breath still. The tags on the streaming app read comedy, musical. He chews on a poor nail while humming along the first song, and Hanjae tries to humor him with a tiny, “Is that Ariana Grande sunbaenim?”

It doesn’t work. Jiahang shoves his face into his pillow and says, miserable and muffled, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t hang around with you, you’re so lame. I miss Dylan so much.”

“He invited you to go with him,” Hanjae says, helplessly. “You said you didn’t want to.”

“Of course I didn’t want to! I would have to sleep on the floor. In a bag, on the floor. And I don’t think his grandma would like me – I don’t think anyone in his family would like me,” he turns his face around, off the pillow. Hanjae can hear clearly when he says, “He needs time alone with them. For the anxieties.”

“The anxieties?” Hanjae asks him, very slowly.

Jiahang presses his mouth shut tight, straights himself up again. He undoes his ponytail, tosses his long, long hair from one side to the other, behind his ears.

He takes a quick look at Zhiming, and Hanjae does too, and they go by uncaught; O.z’s got his big headphones in now, eyes glued to his comic book.

Jiahang is still careful to whisper, “The rest of you don’t get what it's like, when you’re away from your home every day, when you know all the people you’re going to see aren’t all the ones you know – when you got family that’s like, old, and you know that time’s passing. You’re losing days with them. It gets scary, after a while. Dylan’s grandad will be 82 this year, hyung – that’s a terrifying number, that’s a maybe. That’s the anxiety. Mine, his– Zhiming’s, too. Foreign member anxiety.”

Hanjae nods, sharp. Jiahang makes a face at him, brighter – smiles, says like a tease, “Not Haruki’s, though. Haruki doesn’t miss Japan at all, if that’s what you’re wondering. He’s not anxious about that.”

Hanjae blinks. Opens his mouth, closes it, blinks again. “I wasn’t going to ask–”

“Sure thing. Suuuuure,” J.J says slyly, and goes back to watching TV, and Hanjae does too. Gulps, keeps looking at the movie, tries to pay attention.

Jiahang put on korean subtitles for him, yet he keeps talking – explaining everything. It’s a nice enough movie, he says. Good songs, nice enough movie.

They’re reaching the end of it, seeing every main character gather in a protest around town, when Haruki barges into their room.

“Are any of you not gonna rot inside this hotel?” He asks, loudly, quickly. “Is anyone going to do anything? Catch some sun?”

“Hanjae’s supposed to be going out,” Zhiming tells him. He’s also watching the movie now, has Jiahang by his side, explaining to him what he missed.

“Oh?” Haruki says, and looks around the room, eyes a little clouded, until they land on Hanjae. He smiles, and it stretches across his face quick and big, like he’s actually glad to see him, like the effect is instantaneous. Hanjae can’t for the life of him look at it head on. “Perfect. That’s just perfect, I’m going with you, Hanhan, just wait for me to get changed!”

“Okay,” Hanjae says, and hops off the bed too quickly, sits back down. “I– Waiting.”

Immediately after Haruki leaves Jiahang gives him a long look over Zhiming’s shoulder, and Hanjae pretends not to see it.

“You’re too easy,” he says, with a disapproving nod of his head, and Hanjae pretends he doesn’t hear it, pretends it doesn’t sting.

It’s humiliating, being reminded that people know – that they look at him and know, and he’s reminded of it constantly.

“Hanjae’s sad, sad bisexual awakening,” was how Jiahang put it, sing-a-song in the studio, while making this very single they’re promoting now. “Worse, worse than Minwoo’s– Is that a verse? Can we put that on a song, on the album?”

Minwoo said, for the two of them, “Fuck you.”

And there that one time, the one he remembers clearly, when Seo CEO said he wanted to sit down to watch them practicing ‘Love Me Right’ before the big release, and Taesong pushed Hanjae aside, told him, “Hanjae, you– if you need to check the choreo, please look at the instruction video. Don’t look at Haruki like that, there’s no need to look like you–”

There had to be a separation, he realized; he had to get it under control.

So Hanjae made friends with the people Haruki seemed to not stand, which sometimes meant everyone, but mostly meant J.J and Beomseok – two extremes of very opposite lines. He’s built a line of separation, wrapped himself up in Haruki repellent, and he tries to live by it.

It’s a frail line, a shitty line, and it comes crashing down all the time, with the little moments; single minutes where things feel kind between them, different. A bottle of water and a perfectly folded towel passed to him backstage, a group conversation where Haruki eventually says, like clockwork, “And you, Hanjae? What do you think?”; no one else says that. There’s this lingering nearness coming from him, like there's always something Haruki wants to say or do but can’t, something he wants to check.

It makes Hanjae wonder – makes him come back to that one friendly night, hang on to it. The way Haruki had been so near, his exact tone of voice when he said that he liked him, considered him a friend, thought he was handsome, was going to fix whatever was wrong.

[...]

“So what are we doing?” Haruki asks when they step onto the sidewalk.

“Just filming my Loop Log,” Hanjae responds. “Deadline’s tonight.”

“Shit, that,” Haruki groans, taking his cap off to push hair out of his eyes, putting it on again. “I forgot all about that. ‘Haven’t filmed mine either. ‘Think I lost my camera.”

“I can help you look,” Hanjae offers. “When we get home.”

“Well, thank you,” Haruki says, and steps closer, slides an arm over Hanjae’s shoulder, tells him, “For now, I guess we’ll just have to stick tight. LOOPiN 2on1, reunited in L.A…!”

At Hanjae’s timid request, Chihoon made him a list of what he should get to ‘live his best tourist life’, what the fans might want to see him try: pancakes, bacon and eggs, ice cream, anything in the menu that looks like it could have come off a cartoon, any ‘house specials’.

They go into the nearest place listed with the camera on hand, and have to explain with their Frankenstein English that they want to make a vlog, can they make a vlog? They can, a waiter says, but only in a specific area; they get taken there.

Hanjae orders the house special, and it's a crazy looking Banana Split. Haruki settles for waffles, and they decide to start filming when the food arrives.

Any chance of small talk between them goes fully stall when Hanjae asks, right at their waiter steps away, as the opening topic: “Have you talked to Haegon?”

Haruki’s dangling hand on the table stills. He smiles weird, notices it looks weird, drops it: “Ah, no. No…” and goes silent, makes Hanjae go silent too.

The food comes, they start filming. Hanjae’s meticulously trying to extract a tiny piece of strawberry from a block of ice cream, all while only looking through the camera’s lens, when Haruki’s phone jumps to life, ringing.

He takes it out of his pocket, places it screen flat on the table without looking at the receiver once, mutes it with one hand, adds a mountain of maple syrup to his food with the other.

“Not important,” Haruki reassures Hanjae when he catches him looking at the buzzing phone, an inch away from falling off the edge. He forks the food and stands his hand across the table, says, with his Idol voice, “Wanna try?”

It’s good sweet food, all of it. The camera goes back and forth between them, hand to hand. Haruki makes him pretend they’re shooting a commercial, at some point, makes him do a different pose with every bite, and Hanjae tries to not lose control of his face with all the wooing, all the praise.

It’s fanservice, and Haruki’s good at it. It makes for good content. Everything: good.

Outside, bill paid, they take shelter from the sun and check the recording; thirty raw minutes of footage.

“Hanjae,” Haruki says, looking up after skimming the video, solemn. Hanjae leans a bit forward, eyes a little wide.“The Log will turn out very boring if this is all we do.”

It is, indeed, not the best vlog Hanjae’s ever made. Not that he’s ever been any good at them, or at anything on the media side of the job outside of music covers or choreography making. He’s seen the views on his solo variety content, Sangwon walked him through them all last month, said: nothing special.

They barely talked in 30 minutes – Hanjae didn't initiate a single conversation with him.

Quickly, Haruki’s eyes narrow as he scans the area around them, and Hanjae tries to keep up. He looks for a long moment at the barracks of food, at a man selling balloons, and finally lands far ahead, on a group of kids running on the sand. The leading one trips on air and falls face first on the ground, immediately wails, and they let out matching startled, horrified laughs.

Haruki jogs until he’s in front of him, and turns to walk backwards, closer to where the sidewalk gives into the beach.

“You wanna do that?” He arches a perfect eyebrow. “Run around on the beach with me. Like we’re in a movie.”

Hanjae steps on a stone, lands his other feet on the ground wrong. “I– No.”

“No? Well, I’m doing it! It’s what the vlog’s missing! Trust me, if we do this, it’ll fix everything,” he says, and before Hanjae can even think of what to reply, turns around and starts running on the sand, straight ahead.

Haruki’s already bent over near the ocean when Hanjae catches up with him, folding his jeans until they stop at his knees, barefoot. He insists: “Let’s go, let’s do it, you’re already here, it’s going to be fun, the fans will like it, let’s do it, let’s do it!”

With a resigned sigh, Hanjae unties his sneakers.

Haruki approaches a family nearby and asks for a beach chair, gets a yes. They place the camera cautiously on it, set it with a big zoom ahead. Haruki leaves his phone there, too, with a careless toss, and Hanjae can hear it announcing another call as he steps away, trailing exactly behind him – footprint over footprint, back near the ocean and then on the ocean.

“I thought– Hyung, I thought we were going to just walk,” Hanjae says, stopping. The salt water is a chill foam around his foot.

“Yeah,” Haruki flashes him a smile over his shoulder. He’s about to be knees deep, is taking his Hawaiian shirt off, Hanjae realizes now, with a flush. “We’re walking. Into the water.”

Hanjae catches the shirt when he throws it over his shoulder, looks at it, up at him. He takes a step closer. “Manager Choi’s– Haruki, he’s going to complain!”

“Fuck him!” Haruki tells him with a laugh. He says, with meaning: “Fuck him, fuck New Wave, let them complain, I’m going for a dive and no one can stop me!”

And then he dives, swims, disappears under the water for a long moment. Hanjae stays planted where he is, at a loss of words. When Haruki reemerges, pushing a curtain off black hair off his eyes, and walks back splashing water at him. By the time they’re side by side again, it looks like Hanjae took a dive, too.

“Are you…” He starts to say, eyeing Haruki worryingly, but then the family from before calls back to them, says they’re leaving, they need the chair back, and Haruki claps him on the shoulder, smiles widely, races him to reach them.

“Look,” Haruki says when they’re checking the footage, back on the sidewalk, showing Hanjae a clip: the two of them, a little blurry, walking. “We even got your good smile.”

“My good smile?” Hanjae echoes.

“Not to imply you have a bad one, because you don’t have a bad one,” Haruki says, and bumps their shoulders together. He has just put his shirt back on, is wearing it unbuttoned. “You just have one that’s relaxed, easy. A rare one.”

“Hm,” Hanjae responds, looking away, rolling a rock under his feet.

The walk back to the hotel is calm, windy. The sky’s cotton candy pink and it all looks like a movie, Hanjae thinks. He looks down, and their hands are loose, hanging close, like it would be in a movie.

The end credits roll when they get in the hotel’s lobby, and find Sangwon there – just right there. He catches sight of them immediately, like an alert dog; a quick jump off his seat, a stall near.

He seems to consider them like an equation, frowning: he takes in their wet hair, the wet clothes, the leftover traces of sand, solves it, fumes.

“Do you have any idea,” he says, and he’s struggling to look at the two of them, to not just gawk at Haruki – to not bare his teeth to Haruki only. “Any idea, you two, of how irresponsible this whole stunt was? You’re out on a foreign land. You know no one – no one. When I– The company, if the company calls, you pick your phone. It’s how it works. Pick your phone, immediately.”

Hanjae checks his own phone, a quick glance: no calls.

“Choi-nim,” he says, not looking directly at him, because he lost the ability over the years. Sangwon’s gaze now makes him incredibly anxious. He takes the camera out of where its hanging around his neck, stands it. “I notified– On the calendar, I added– We were just filming–”

“No need to explain, Hanjae,” Haruki interrupts, and puts a hand on Hanjae’s shoulder, steps in front of him, puts himself between him and Sangwon. “Go up. You did nothing wrong. It’s okay. Hyung’s going to solve this with the manager.” He turns straight to Choi-nim and bows, so pristine, so polite: “I take full responsibility for today. It was all me. I’m really sorry if I caused you stress.”

Sangwon considers him for a long moment, taking in the bend of his elbows, like he’s trying to measure his sincerity – there’s almost none of it, Hanjae can tell. He sighs, and then he adjusts his shirt, picks at the cufflinks of his uniform, breaths – his nostrils taking over his entire face.

“You’re dismissed,” Sangwon tells Hanjae, icely, with a corner of the eye glance.

“Sir, I–”

“Dismissed.”

“Go on,” Haruki encourages him, giving Hanjae’s shoulder a firm tap. And then he runs a hand over Hanjae’s hair, messes it up until his wet bangs are glued to his forehead, which he’s never done before; not with him, not with anyone, as far as Hanjae’s aware.

Hesitantly, Hanjae steps away, goes to take the elevator. He keeps looking at them over his shoulder, watching them trail away with growing uneasiness. Haruki keeps looking back at him until he can’t: Sangwon gets the door of the hotel open, shoves him by the shoulder out.

Up in his hotel room, Hanjae showers for a long time. There’s sand on a spot on his elbow where Haruki gave him a tap, and it takes him a while to notice.

He comes off the shower and goes straight to laying down. Zhiming, who had been awake when he came in, is also in his bed now, fully still.

He turns over once, and then again, goes back on his side. “Zhiming hyung?” Hanjae whispers. “You’re awake?”

When Zhiming finally responds, it’s with a minimal grunt, a tiny quick of his socked foot. “What.”

“Do you,” Hanjae chews on the words, “Do you think I have a good smile?”

A pause, a loud sigh. “You’re an Idol. You should hope so.”

“Okay. Okay, so what about– What about me do you think, what looks bad?”

Slowly, very slowly, Zhiming raises his upper body on his elbows. His air is a mess, recently dyed from gray to black too quickly. Without his glasses, he’s forced to squint at Hanjae, even this close, with their beds separated by a very narrow space.

“What the fuck are you even talking about?”

Hanjae takes in a sharp breath, and nods – puts a hand over his eyes, nods again. Stupid, so stupid.

“Nothing,” He says. “Nothing, just– Forget it. I’m sorry, just– Sorry.”

Zhiming goes back to laying down with a loud ‘oof’. He says, a crude whisper, “Don’t go out alone with him if it’ll make you come back like that.”

And with that Hanjae decides he must sleep, immediately, and end this day already.

It was just a day, he tells himself, rubbing at the scarred spot on his hand; a flower in eternal bloom, once. Just one good day. Drop it, forget it, erase it.

February 15, 2022.

“C’mon, you guys, c’moooon! On a scale of one to ten–”

“Na Seungsoo,” Minwoo’s voice rings out like a warning; an elastic pulled far above its limit, about to snap back into place, hard. “Shut your goddamn mouth.”

“She’s right there,” Haegon adds, equally as ultraged. “Are you dumb? Do you want to die?”

“Light up, you two. We’re just talking hypotheticals. I’m not actually gonna fuck our mananger,” Seungsoo says, crossing his arms, raising his chin high – his posture the embodiment of a practical joke about to take action. “That would be desperate and unprofessional, and I am none of these things.”

“You’re extremely unprofessional,” Jiahang laughs at him, a little mean – all his laughs have something a little mean about them, Hanjae can’t help but notice, when Seungsoo’s involved. “And extremely desperate. You just fucked our sound assistant. We no longer have a sound assistant, because you fucked her.”

“So did Jimin!”

“A fluke,” Zhiming defends himself. “Not happening again.”

“It’s never a fluke with you, Seungsoo. You’re such a man whore. A man whore for staff. Even Sangwon could have pulled you when he was around if he had a pair of tits,” Haegon notes, and Seungsoo gasps, mutters, scandalized, ‘You bastard!’, raises a fist up as if he’s going to hit him, and everyone’s laughing. Hanjae contributes with a grimace. “You’re that gross, you’re really that disgusting, all it would take–”

Behind them, Dylan begins to violently choke on a bite out of his granola bar, hard enough for the whole photo studio to freeze.

Taesong stands up immediately to check on him, and so does Jungwha, their three day old manager, Choi Sangwon’s definitive substitute and the topic of Seungsoo’s most recent infatuation: she rushes forward to aid alongside an assistant, a cup of water materialized out of thin air on her hand, like a trained lifeguard.

It’s too early for any of them to get a good read on her, but Hanjae has working eyes, so he will admit Junghwa is good looking in a mature sort of way, a bit above the ‘K-Pop staff adequate’. She’s not far from Seungsoo’s type, given the fact that he pretty much doesn’t have one. Hanjae has seen him flirt with Seo CEO’s third ex-wife, the second ex-wife, all of Minwoo’s half sisters and, in a disastrous attempt, Dylan’s mom. ("She's just so young, Chihoon! I thought she was your cousin!"

"I don't have a single cousin and you know that! You went for my mom, you animal, the least you can do is own it!")

“Holy shit, Chihoon,” Seungsoo says, tapping him on the back with one hand, fanning him with the other. “You’re alright?”

“My bad– False alarm, guys, my bad–!”, Dylan mutters, still coughing, watery eyes quick in their attempt to scan the room for something, someone.

Hanjae follows their frantic trail until they land on the quiet figure of Haruki by the coffee machine, his back to them, shoulders rigid and on display – wearing the same suit outfit Hanjae has been put on, his in a shade more close to purple than blue.

It fits Haruki splendidly, as must things do.

“Alright, boys, hey, boys!” Jungwha calls out when Dylan’s lungs go back to normal, clapping her hands one loud time. “Break’s over! It’s the real deal, now! So let’s try to have a good day at work today! Fighting!”

They’re set to scatter in trios and duos, the old unit formations, except for Haegon, who’s still on hiatus, still has stitches all over the crown of his head. He only made it because Haruki insisted, and he’s always insisting, lately: “How can we do well without our cheerleader,” he told Haegon in the morning, “Our cute, adorable cheerleader, my very favorite little brother–!”

“Hi,” Hanjae mutters, tapping Haruki gently in the shoulder. Haruki jumps, catching his breath, and Hanjae drops his hand, shoves it behind his own back. “Ah, sorry, if I– I was just going to say we should–”

But Haruki is turning and splinting in front of him before all the words are out, growing out of earshot, out of hold, entering a hallway on the left.

Hanjae, embarrassed, follows.

They’re supposed to go to room 4, but Haruki walks right past it. Hanjae calls back to him from the door, says, “Hyung, that’s not the–”, and then his voice falters, dies out.

Haruki’s already quick pace has grown even quicker, and he’s now running towards the door at the end of the corridor, the one with a red sign written ‘TERRACE’ over it – really running, to the point his body almost slams against the metal when he stops. The door handle makes a loud noise as he tries to push it open, can’t make it, tries again, harder – manages to step out with a strong shove. Hanjae goes after him, frowning, worried.

Outside, the terrace is a gray space, almost the same tone as the sky – rain’s a strong promise on the horizon, a reasonable fear.

Haruki’s standing right at the center. He tries to take in a big and loud gulp of air, can’t, makes a choking sound, lets out a hiss. Hanjae can feel the acute panic coming off him like electricity, gluing itself to his very own skin. He reminds himself to breathe.

Haruki stands an arm out and that’s the distance between them, that’s the nearest he’ll let Hanjae get.

“What’s– What’s happening, what’s wrong, what–?”

“Just,” he’s trembling bad. “Leave, I need– Leave.”

“Now?” Hanjae asks, and he’s making himself bite down on the trail of: ‘But the shoot’, ‘But the gig’, ‘But the job’ so hard, he’s actually got his teeth sinking on his lip.

Haruki nods, sharp and final, and Hanjae feels himself nodding back, frenetic. “Okay, stay– stay here, okay, you’ll leave– we’re leaving, just stay here.”

Hanjae walks back into the building with his head very low, tries to not walk too quickly to bring attention to himself, feels like he’s falling; feels like the whole world is looking at him. He holds his breath while sneaking back into the room they’re using as a closet, picks his and Haruki’s things like a thief: pushing everything into their bags without folding, eyes anxiously looking behind his back, flinching at every outside noise coming through the door.

Haruki’s phone is the last thing he grabs. He only becomes aware of it because it starts ringing. He looks at the screen, a quick run of his eyes. The contact name reads: ‘Don’t Answer Don’t Answer Don’t Answer.’

On the roof, Haruki’s sitting on the floor, resting his forehead against the wall. The back half of an air conditioner hangs close to him, and the leftover water pools near his feet, turning the hem of his pants dark.

They put on the yellow raincoats, plastic hood all the way up, and make a clumsy escape out the studio; Hanjae babbles something at the receptionist about there being equipment in the van, and the woman gives them a distracted ‘go ahead’ nod, an empty courtesy smile.

They walk without a plan, enter on the first bus that stops close: Haruki on the lead, completely reticent, Hanjae only following. There’s still a trail of glitter going down his neck, shiny with sweat, red from stress, Hanjae notices when they sit down. He’s still crying, still whipping at his runny nose with the expensive fabric of his shirt.

Hanjae looks down at his own clothes, the suit vest with no shirt under, a design piece New Wave doesn’t own – he’s wearing eyeliner, a strong smokey eye. They look expensive, and to an outsider, probably peculiar, weird. They don’t even have masks on…

Maybe, Hanjae hopes, trying to hold on to any trail of optimism possible, they could pass as very dedicated cover dancers, maybe–

The sound of Hanjae’s phone ringing makes them both jump in their seats. Haruki comes out of his state of anxious inertia to put a hand on his knee, pressing on it to get his attention. He says, through his teeth, “Do not– Hanjae, do not.”

Hanjae lets the phone ring out. He looks at the receiver: Uhm Junghwa (Manager).

Haruki’s peeking at it too. “Off,” he says, and it’s off.

It’s raining when they step out of the bus. They get maybe five feet down the sidewalk when a phone rings again – this time, Haruki’s. He comes to a sudden halt, and Hanjae bumps into his back and gets a close view of how, in an act of blind rage, he throws it hard on the floor.

“Fuck!” Haruki says, and steps on it once, twice, cracks the screen then the whole device in half. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Hanjae looks at him, wide eyed, mouth hanging open, and watches him pace around, a tense moment, until he loses all steam, goes sit by the closest wall.

Haruki stays for a long time there, one hand gripping the fence, the other pressing over his face, being rained on. Cautiously, Hanjae slides his raincoat off, squats down, close to him, and stands it over both their heads. Rain drips directly into his shoulder, makes a cold path down his neck.

“I hope your–,” a hiccup, a sniff, a faint and unconvincing attempt from Haruki of laughing them both off, “your fantasy’s still– still up.”

“My…?”

“Can you not,” Haruki says, a hiss, “Not look.”

Hanjae complies, doesn’t look. Behind them, a car runs close to the sidewalk, splashes a wave of rainwater on their backs.

“Sasaeng?” Hanjae tries, “Is it a sasaeng, or…”

Haruki lets out a bitter snort. “Imja,” he says, and it makes more sense that he means ‘owner’ rather than ‘marriage partner’; Hanjae can’t hear anything else, can’t connect anything else to something he knows and decode it.

His throat has gone dry, sandy. He clears it, and still, his voice comes off clipped. “Your…? Ah. Ah, I didn’t know– Didn’t know you have someone you were–”

“You know him,” Haruki says. “For years. You– you’ve known him. He gave you your job– Made your job happen.”

It takes a long moment for it to click, for the shape of manager Choi to come to Hanjae’s mind. Haruki’s looking at him like he’s expecting Hanjae to do something horrible: mouth set for a fight, eyes so red they look like they’ve been painted over.

“Hyung,” Hanjae breathes. His voice is an even quieter thing, afraid. “Do you mean– Are you being serious?”

“Am I! Am I serious?!”

He’s up again, quick – Hanjae loses his equilibrium and falls back on the street. Haruki doesn’t wait for him to get up to resume stomping.

It takes two street turns for Hanjae to understand they’re detouring from the dorms.

They sit on another bus stop bench, hop on another bus. A quiet and tense drive, this one. Haruki’s no longer crying, just grinding his teeth.

They go to the front gates of a tiny building, their final destination, and Haruki tells the security guard an apartment number, wais to be buzzed in. He does soon, and Hanjae, yet to be told to leave, goes up with him on the stairs.

Delilah gets the door he bangs on, and Hanjae’s stuck blinking at the sight of her, who shouldn’t still be in Korea. Haruki barges into her place like a hurricane: shoes still on, pushing her a little back, closer to the wall.

They both stare at the spot he occupied on the corridor a second ago, a held breath.

She recovers much quicker than he does. Deh tucks a long lock of her caramel hair behind her ear, greets him with an awkward, “Hanjae, hi. Hi...”, and Hanjae gets overwhelmed by too many things at once; how glad he is to see her, the shame of how they had parted. Her sad face when she told everyone she couldn’t stand to work with them anymore.

“You’re back.”

“I am! I am back!” Deh says. “How could I not! Europe’s too gray for me. The food’s too bad, and...” She sucks air through her teeth, takes an anxious look behind her, back inside. “... And all that.”

Hanjae shakes his head, agrees – agrees to all that even though he has no idea what all that is. There’s a pool of spit on his mouth, and he has to concentrate on gulping it down, has to try more than once.

“Hanjae, baby, look– I’ll send him on his way later. Maybe tonight. Or tomorrow morning. Just…” She trials off. “Please don’t tell the others we met, okay? I don’t want Seungsoo looking for me or asking around. I don’t want to see him again, ever.”

Fair, Hanjae thinks. After everything, fair.

Deh flashes him a final grim before closing the door, still awkward, and it doesn’t last. She drops it for a split second, fully drops it, looks instead concerned, anxious.

Hanjae waits a moment, then moves before he knows it. He presses his ear against the shut door, closes his eyes and hopes to catch anything. A creek of wood. A vacuum cleaner being turned off. The sound of someone channel surfing. Deh saying what might be, “Haruki, what do you want me to do? I can’t know, love. I can’t know if you don’t tell me.”

Another sound drowns everything, nearer. Someone from the apartment on the left starts to unlock their door, it’s about to walk out, and it leaves Hanjae panicking, it makes him jog all the way out of the building, nonstop.

He makes the inverse way back home, alone. His own phone is a hot thing in his back pocket. When he gets to the dorm, Chihoon is the first person he bumps into, planted right beside the shoe rack. Hanjae’s seen him in this set of clothes, short shorts and a knockoff Pokemon shirt, more than he’s seen his own dad’s face these last few years.

Dylan grabs at Hanjae when he notices it’s him, pushes him back out quickly. He puts a finger in front of his mouth – quiet.

“I’ve given you some cover,” he whispers. They’re circling the house, Hanjae realizes, going to the backyard. “Said you were not feeling well. It won’t fly with Minwoo or Taesong, so think of something. And you're not gonna get paid this month, because of the clothes. Neither of you will.” He looks around, eyes sharp in a way Hanjae didn’t think they could be. “Where is he?”

“Deh’s,” Hanjae blurts out, and remembers he promised not to speak of her, grows meek.

He’s tired, deep in the bones tired, from all the walking, all the running. The socks inside his sneakers are still wet, his fingers have gone cold.

“Good,” Dylan says, remarkably unsurprised. “That’s good enough.”

There’s a moment of silence between them. In Hanjae’s head, a pinned image every time he blinks: Haruki’s eyes, red like a bruise.

“Chihoon hyung, I think– I think there’s something wrong with–”

Dylan’s grip on his arm is steady, but no longer comforting when he says, “Hanjae, listen, yes. Yes. Something’s wrong. Too many things–” He shakes his head, clicks his tongue once, and again. “No need for you to worry about it, because there’s nothing you can really do, okay? It’s been too long, now. The time for anyone to really do anything, over.”

He looks like he doesn’t want to be saying it, like all those words taste bitter, bad.

“So just keep being nice,” Dylan concludes, and his voice breaks at the end. “Be nice with him right now, alright? And patient, and normal, just like always, and…”

Dylan doesn’t say what else. He looks down, and Hanjae follows. Near their feet, a trail of black nicotine ash and tiny bits of paper; someone’s worry, someone’s wait.Kind, maybe, Hanjae concludes on his own. Maybe kind was what he was going to say.

March 12th & a Bit Of 13th, 2022.

Sunyoung immediately strikes Hanjae as someone who’s never held a small house party before, and it’s a bit painful to see her try.

She greets them at the door, a little overdressed: Chanel earrings, Chanel bag. “Is that everyone?”, she asks, craning her neck to peek behind them, and when they mumble ‘yes’ she visibly withers.

Taesong steps in front of them to give her a gift – a flower vase so yellow Zhiming had to look away from it, rubbing at his eyes.

She stares at it for a minute, frowns hard, then composes herself, says, “Ah! Thank you so much, oppa! This is so– Yeah, thanks! But you didn’t have to! Gon, baby! I said they didn’t have to!”

“I told you they don’t listen to me,” Haegon mutters. There’s a dark cloud over his face and Sunyoung seems to not mind it. She squeezes his arm when he passes her by, smiles at him prettily.

She checks the corridor one more time, and for a moment Hanjae thinks she looks sad; that she looks angry.

The party is a housewarming party for the brand new double storey apartment in Nine One Hannam she’s sharing with her BombShell leader Yoorim, who strongly opposed herself to throwing anything. Hanjae catches a glimpse of her looking displeased and bothered behind the kitchen aisle, and bows his head a little – she rolls her eyes, turns her back on him, disappears behind a small group of people.

Beomseok refused to come, decided to take the afternoon to go grocery shopping, the night to visit family he can’t take Haegon to see; the side that calls him a parasite. It had been a clear jab, right at Haegon’s face. Even Minwoo thought it was insensitive, and his response to the invite had been nothing but a disgusted face that spelled out ‘no’.

Hanjae watches him move through the living room, greeting some people. Haegon’s been here yesterday, and the day before that, and if Hanjae’s not cautious, he’ll stay over despite their early shooting tomorrow.

“That old man put you on babysitting duty, eh, Hanhan?” Seungsoo leans in to whisper to him, somehow with a drink in hand – white wine. The smell of his cologne is already stuck to the collar of Hanjae’s bottom up by osmosis.

“He’s just concerned. It makes sense to be concerned.”

On their first day back from L.A, Haegon had announced over dinner that he now had a girlfriend: they met last week, and had been dating for three days. The situation had driven Beomseok crazy. Haegon asked if him if wanted to meet her every day for two weeks straight, and he said: no. He eventually got around to meet her and said with even more conviction: no, break up, now.

It’s an age gap, even if very small, but she’s about five years his industry senior, he told Hanjae. And Sunyoung’s from YG Entertainment, the face of too many brands. She’s going to eat him alive, spit him out, leave him heartbroken and Beomseok is going to have to deal with it, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with it.

“She can just like him. People can just like him,” Taesong tried to intervene, high pitched, and Beomseok cutted him off right away, said, “No. No, there’s something– Be serious, Taesong. No.”

The front door dings again, and it takes a long minute for Haegon to untangle his arms from Sunyoung’s waist and let her go get it. Hanjae watches her walk across the house, a firm walk of a supermodel, of someone important, and gets embarrassed with how bad he is at this, how obvious.

Another glimpse her way, and the person with their two feet planted on the ‘welcome home’ carpet is Haruki. He also said he wouldn’t come but gave no excuse, yet: here, dressed nicely. He’s got the same convenience store from years ago under one arm, the one from a memory.

They talk, talk, talk, and he still won’t leave the entrance. Haruki makes her laugh, the most genuine thing Hanjae’s seen Sunyoung do all night. He sees her look at him, look around, then lean closer again: point upstairs and give Haruki a thumbs up as he finally makes his way in, into the stairs and out of sight.

Sunyoung’s back on the couch, to Haegon, and Hanjae makes himself look. They’re fine, they appear very fine, holding hands, he doesn’t have to watch them all night, there’s no need to watch them at all, and–

Hanjae goes up the stairs, which he knows it’s technically off limits. He tries to not let his eyes wander to the photos on the walls, the books on the shelves tucked next to an award behind protective glass, a big shiny plaque framed above it.

There’s only one door with light peeking through, right at the end of the corridor. He taps at it three times, and waits. Another three taps, slightly stronger.

“Occupied,” a voice says from the inside – a tone he knows. “All night.”

Hanjae can’t think of what to say: can’t think of anything at all, for a second. He gives the door another hopeful tap, waits more, and he lets out a sigh of relief when it creeks open. He goes in, closes it quietly behind him, and looks down.

The room’s a bathroom, straight out of a home decoration magazine, all black and white. Haruki seems to be setting up an improv bar on the floor, in the big space between the bathtub and the sink. There’s a bottle of something Hanjae can’t read, blue and half empty, tucked in between his legs like a treasure.

“Ah, you,” he waves at Hanjae’s vague direction, not looking up. “Hello, you. I’m just– Don’t mind the mess. Someone made me something once. ‘Trying to put it together.”

Hanjae hums. He can’t make his hand ease its grip on the doorknob.

It’s been weeks since they abandoned the shoot, and since then Haruki’s been avoiding him constantly. Looks at him from across rooms and seems pained, constantly, and Hanjae hasn’t had the heart to come near.

“What is happening?” Haruki asks, suddenly, and tries to land a smile. He blinks a lot and then not enough looking up at Hanjae. “Down. Down there.”

“Nothing much.”

“How is he?”

“Haegon?” Hanjae asks, and Haruki nods at him loosely, mouths the name without making a sound: ‘Haegon’. “He– Uh, he seems alright.”

“Great couple, yes or no? For our maknae, is she great?”

“I– I don’t know.”

Disappointment flashes vividly through Haruki’s face, and it lands on a sad shagrin. “You don’t know,” he says, to himself, and goes back to emptying his bag with a slouch to his shoulders.

‘Be normal’, Dylan had said that day, his only instructions: ‘Be nice.’

Hanjae lets go of the door and goes to sit in front of him, legs crossed like his are. “What’s it supposed to taste like? The drink.”

There’s no humor in Haruki when he says, “Acid.”

He offers a thermo bottle to Hanjae filled with the failed replica. Hanjae takes a tiny sip and can’t swallow it, feels like his tongue is on fire, and it makes Haruki huff a laugh. “More disgusting than that.”

He makes more combinations that demand more tasting, and Hanjae at times struggles, at times doesn’t – Haruki empties a Soju bottle and refills it with Somaek, calls it ‘Hanjae’s palette cleanser’. He also makes Hanjae go downstairs to grab things they don’t have: more cups, ice and fruit juice, if Sunyoung has any, which she does – too many options.

Hanjae comes back from the trip and sets all his findings at Haruki’s feet, then feels weird about it, exposed about it, and pushes some of it closer to himself.

The bottle opener, they notice a minute later, has disappeared. Hanjae thinks he took it with him to the kitchen and abandoned it on the counter. Worry not, Haruki says; worry not!, because he knows how to open them with his front teeth. It’s a hidden skill, a secret talent.

Haruki asks him to hold a bottle close to his face so he can prove it, and Hanjae does so, but it’s a frail grip, not good. Haruki puts a hand over his to make it steadier, makes it worse. Another hand, a shove closer until their knees are touching. Hanjae adds his free hand into the pile, the lonely hand, and Haruki looks straight at him – looks like he’s saying, ‘Bet?’

It takes a second, really. A pop and the lid comes off in the company of an enormous foam eruption. Haruki gets both his hands away, does a smiley flourish: ‘ta-da!’

“But you shook it! Too much, you–!’ He laughs, and can’t stop laughing. Hanjae’s still holding the bottle and tries to hand it to him, but Haruki shakes his head ‘no’. “For you. It is for you.”

It’s bland beer, he takes notice when he drinks it, but somehow it tastes sweeter.

From the corner of his eyes he catches a glimpse of metal in a corner, and it’s Haruki’s new phone, exiled.

Hanjae is surprised to hear himself ask him, “Are the calls– the calls still coming? The ones from–”

“Always,” Haruki responds, eerily nonchalant. “Always will.”

“It’s not over, then? You still–”

“It is. It is over. It is over the way it can be over.”

“What wouldhe,” Hanjae closes his eyes, reiterates, “If it’s over, what would he still want with you?”

“What do you think,” Haruki asks, staring fixedly at the alcohol going from one bottle to the other. A bit of it it’s running straight to the floor. “What do you think people want with me?”

It’s said– weird. Something in his uncaring tone makes a lump of sadness form in Hanjae’s throat.

“Hyung, you know that, if you everneed to talk to anyone about anything. Me and the guys, we all– We all listen. We would listen.”

“Anything?” Haruki pretends to be impressed. “Big. That is big.”

“Seriously. I’m being serious.”

Haruki looks up at him. Even more alcohol spills to the floor.

“Okay. Okay, anything. Anything…” he hums, dropping the bottles, mimicking being in thought with an obnoxious pout. His mouth is now a purple dot, and his eyes a shiny brown daze...

Hanjae often catches himself wondering if he just knows. If he looks into a mirror and just knows that he’s beautiful in a way that looks hand drawn, that looks meticulously planned: a subject of equal envy and admiration. If Sangwon ever told him that, and if so, how many times, had it come close to enough, had he used the right words to say it, did Haruki believe him when he said it, or if he didn’t – what did it make him feel? What exactly did he make him feel?

Hanjae always thought he was so mean, so bitter. He can’t remember ever hearing him say anything nice to anyone about anything.

Hanjae’s staring, he’s realized, and his eyes hurt. He makes them look down to where Haruki’s got a firm hold around the slim of a bottleneck, tapping a weird rhythm into it, impossible to decipher. He has long fingers with hard skin on them, which isn’t something you would expect. He used to paint, used to do calligraphy; used to go to a prestigious arts academy during high school, all boys.

Hanjae’s still starring, and he’s too close to drunk to properly command himself to stop. He hears Haruki huffs an unheard laugh, suddenly, short and maybe frustrated, maybe not that, and Hanjae’s head snaps up to his face to meet it.

He’s being stared at, too – is being analyzed, too.

“I thought of something. Something I want to say, a thing,” Haruki announces. The grin on his face suddenly looks very, very sharp, like there’s something tugging the corners of his mouth up. “I will whisper to you. On your ear. ‘Gimme your ear and I will tell.”

And with that he comes forward, a sudden and ungracious movement, and doesn’t stop when they’re front to front, an inch apart. He climbs Hanjae up – actually climbs him up, his legs around the middle of his body, cageing him in.

Haruki grims again and it’s lazily, in slow motion. He puts a hand on Hanjae’s chin, tips it high, says, “Not your ear.”

He turns his head to the side. His nose rovers near Hanjae’s head, and Hanjae tries to escape it in reflex, but they’re all too slow, drowned in alcohol.

Into his ear, lips touching skin, Haruki says, “I know you like me. For a very long time. Since that one time. Ever since we went out, we got drunk, that one time.”

“Sorry,” Hanjae mutters, hushed.

“‘Sorry’,” Haruki laughs again, like that’s the funniest word there is, like it’s the meanest. It rings so loud, it has an echo. “Now you sorry?”

Hanjae sinks more into the floor, almost laying down, and Haruki follows, saying, “Are you going away? This close? I am this close, and you going away?”

They’re kissing before Hanjae fully processes how, and it’s a weird kiss at a weird angle; Haruki won’t bend his body all the way down, and Hanjae has to keep craning his neck to meet him midway, his elbows pressing against the tiles, hurting.

He feels a hand slide up his shirt almost immediately, and Hanjae understands, with drunken horror, that he’s being undressed – quickly.

“Ah, wait–” He says, and then can’t get out anything else: Haruki shoved a thumb inside his mouth, in between his teeth, as he goes for the spot where Hanjae’s shoulder and neck meet.

“You smell like home here,” he says, a goosebump. He buries his face there, opens his mouth above it, bites and sucks hard enough to make Hanjae jump – for him to know it’ll leave a pinkish mark, evidence–

It’s exactly then and there that someone bursts in through the door, says a curse loudly, startles the two of them slightly apart, knocks the air out of their lungs.

“Close your eyes! I need to pee right now, right now, close your eyes!”

It’s a tall woman, this one – Hanjae sees her quick rush to the toilet and closes his eyes tight shut.

“If any of you try to act funny and take a single peek, I’ll fucking castrate you both– Hey! Hey, you, back on the floor, don’t come near, I’m fucking serious, I’ll kill you, you fucking–!”

The door clicks shut, and it takes Hanjae a moment to take in the lack of heat above and around him, to correlate the two: Haruki’s gone, walked out, left him.

From the side, he hears an instrident, “Can you at least cover your fucking boner, dude?!”

Hanjae rolls to his side, facing the opposite wall to where the toilet is; he pushes his knuckles into his shut eyes, for good measure. He waits for the girl to finish peeing, and tries not to have an anxiety attack or a heart attack or a nerve attack about everything that happened in the last ten minutes: Haruki on top of him, Haruki no longer on top of him, having to hear a stranger peeing.

“I’m done,” she announces, and he turns back to the same position as before.

There’s little dots of light in his vision, dancing. The girl’s using the sink now, and she has a blonde bob, so blonde and so short. It follows the shape of her mouth and up, even shorter at the back.

“Not a word from you, ever,” she warns, drying her hands on her skirt, pushing it down more, back in place. She gives him a pointed glare that makes Hanjae look down at the state he’s in, at his busted open shirt, a single button in the middle holding it all together. “Not a word from me. Now get the fuck out, please. People need to use the bathroom.”

And she gets going too, without closing the door all the way. The hum of the party downstairs carries over.

Hanjae inhales, looking at the bright ceiling light. His fingers have gone pruney where they were holding him.

[…]

Eventually Hanjae has to get out of the suite, and do a walk of shame back to the housewarming party. He takes down with him all the glass and cups he can manage, not a lot of them, goes straight to the kitchen sink, and begins to wash them, it’s done with them, goes for all of Sunyoung and Yoorim’s dishes.

Around him, the kitchen has emptied out – on the front the living room, mostly emptied out, too, except for little clicks. He spots J.J right in the center of the one installed in the couch, gesticulating enthusiastically, telling someone some story until they make eye contact. He stops, excuses himself, rushes near.

Up close, Jiahang looks at him, up and down, bug eyed, and Hanjae understands he didn’t do a good job of piecing himself back together.

He got a glimpse of his face in the mirror before walking out: lips glossy, bangs far apart and sticking up, somehow, not all the buttons of his shirt tucked in the right cases.

“Hanjae, oh my God. Dylan, Dylan, look!” He calls out, and Hanjae sees Chihoon appear on his left, face slightly dazed. “Oh my God, Dylan! Hanjae!”

“You fucking animal!” Seungsoo, coming out of nowhere, slaps him on the chest hard. “Who? Who who who who?”

They’re all too close, too soon, and Hanjae can’t look anyone in the eyes for too long– he just can’t.

He catches a glimpse of Blonde Bob Piss Girl in a corner, looking bored, on her phone, and stares at her for a moment too long. Everyone follows, looks at her too, and his bandmates erupt into enthusiastic ‘Eeeeeeh!’s. Someone, proprably Seungsoo still, raises his soupy arm up so he can be given high fives, and Hanjae doesn’t know what to do – to let the lie linger or to kill it. What can he even say? What can he say if not that–

Hanjae finds himself grabbing Dylan’s sleeve and tugging at it, leaving behind a damp. He feels like a little kid that broke something, suddenly – overwhelmingly so. “Where ‘d Haruki go?”

“Dude, I didn’t see him. You sure?” Chihoon asks, and Hanjae’s not; he’s not sure.

“Whaaaaat? Haruki came? Haruki’s here?”

“Great. Another one to hunt down. We’re never gonna leave this fucking place in time,” Jiahang whines. “Yoorim noona’s going to delete my number.”

Hanjae asks all of them at once, “We’re leaving?”

“Yeah, you didn’t hear? Sunyoung and Haegon ditched,” Seungsoo says, and Hanjae’s stomach drops. “It’s her house and they ditched, disappeared, poof! Yoorim’s pissed, told everyone to leave. And Taeng’s freaking out! Someone broke his little vase, someone spilled something on him. I think he’s gonna snap. We need to get that freak home.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, Hanjae,” Seungsoo laughs. “Old man was right, after all… Shit.”

[...]

They do a small search around the apartment, the balcony, and conclude: no Haruki anywhere, so they group everyone they have to leave, go wait to be picked up on the sidewalk in front of the Nine One Hannam gates.

“You just dreamed him up, Hanhan! Wouldn’t be the first time,” Seungsoo jokes. It’s a bad joke. O.z shoves him in the chest hard about it, tells him, “Quiet.”

Hanjae looks straight ahead, not at them. In front of him J.J keeps bouncing on the wheel of his feet, saying, ‘I’m going in the front, I’m passenger seat, forget it, it’s me me me me,’ even though no one’s putting up a fight about it.

Minwoo pulls up soon enough on the curve in one of the two black company vans, and downs the window just to give them all an open scowl, then a frown. “I’m only seeing seven of you.”

J.J circles the car to get to the front door, struggles a little to get it open. “Hyung, you’re not gonna believe.”

“I don’t wanna hear it, Jiahang.”

“Shut up, you do. You really really really really do. You were–,” and then he becomes aware of the slouched figure of Hanjae trailing behind him, turns and frowns. “What did I just say!”

“No, I’m…” Hanjae looks at Minwoo looking at him, one eyebrow raised, says, “Sorry.”

Minwoo pinches at his nose, hard. “Just get in the goddamn car, Hanjae, Jesus Christ.”

Hanjae thinks, out of everyone who has a driver’s license, Minwoo drives the shittiest. He needs glasses, he never wears them, he grumbles curses at every slow driver and every rush driver and every driver, in general.

On the way home, he stops the van only once, by popular demand. Taesong steps out to vomit, and spends the rest of the ride jittery about it, cracking his knuckles even when they make no sound.

“We’re so fucked,” Chihoon says when they park inside the dorm’s garage, rubbing his eyes. “It’s 3AM. We’re so fucked.”

While everyone rushes to their rooms to piece pajamas together and form a long row to shower, Hanjae’s elbow to elbow with Dylan, going up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as they can.

He and Haruki have, by far, the best room in the whole house: spacious, with a nice window. It used to be Haruki and Sangwon’s up until he got fired – some excuse about rooming with the manager to learn Korean quicker, about making sure Haruki wouldn’t sneak beer into his room. It makes Hanjae sick now, seeing it, standing so close to it.

Dylan tries the handle once, and the door doesn’t budge, only makes a stubborn click – locked.

Hanjae dries his hand on his jeans, still wet, somehow, asks him, “Is he– He’s in there? Or…?”

Chihoon rests his head against the mahogany and sort of sighs, sort of laughs. “Yeah, definitely home. He’s the only one with the key to lock me out. Classic. Just classic.”

“Get my bed,” Hanjae says – implores. “Use mine, you can– mine, I’ll couch.”

“You’ll couch?” Chihoon looks at him with the trembling smile of someone who’s about to laugh. It falls off his face quickly when he takes in the guilt Hanjae knows he’s wearing openly on his face.

“Hyung, I–” It’s out of his mouth before Hanjae even knows it. “Tonight, something – Something has happened, and I think, think I should– say.”

Dylan’s giving him an analytical once over, and he stops at his moving hands, on his marked neck, looks at the door again – locked.

“Hanjae,” he says his name like it’s an insult, and for a moment Hanjae feels like it really is – his name, an insult.

He crumbles. “I’m sorry, so, so sorry, we just– I didn’t mean to– It was just, just a kiss, I think, and I– I–”

“You kissed him?! ‘You think’? What does that mean? What do you mean ‘you think’?!”

Hanjae looks around and then down, behind him. “Dylan…” he manages, airy, and doesn’t know what he wants the rest of the phrase to be, where he’s trying to take it.

Chihoon’s mouth hangs open, a painful disbelief, and then slowly shuts.

“You know what,” he says harshly, but not angrily – he sounds more disappointed than anything, more tired than anything. “I don’t want to know. Not now. I’ll know, just– Not now. But fucking Hell, Hanjae, you. You just had to, didn’t you? You saw an opportunity and you just had to.”

Hanjae’s breath catches. Dylan is a figure in his eyes, growing blurry.

“I’m taking your bed,” he announces. ”Eveytime he kicks me out from this day on, I’m sleeping on your bed.”

He storms off, his bare feet on the floor a sound until it isn’t anymore.

Hanjae knocks on the door, a small tap. Nothing.

He thinks of saying it again: sorry. But no one’s around to hear it, no one’s around to accept it. There’s no point.

#fictional idol community #fake kpop group #kpop au #kpop fanfic #kpop oc #&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ writing .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ haruki .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ hanjae .#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ dylan .

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