Work Text:
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself
There’s a light under Jongho’s door when Hongjoong gets back from the studio, the only sign of any life in the dorm. Wooyoung must be out. He knocks on it as he passes, and it opens under his hand.
He’s not expecting Jongho to have someone in his room – in his bed, under him – and in the seconds it takes Hongjoong’s brain to process what he’s seeing, Yeosang and Jongho scramble to put distance between them.
Hongjong’s never gotten a vibe off either of them. If they were, he thinks wildly, he would know.
“I thought I locked the door,” Jongho says. He gets to his feet, shirtless, filling the space behind him with his shoulders. “Give us a minute, hyung.”
The door closes in Hongjoong’s face, and the lock turns. Staring at the smooth surface, he feels like he’s hallucinating; in a moment, he’ll wake up in a moment and find himself still in the studio, slumped at his desk or curled up on the couch.
He would really like to pretend he didn’t see anything. He’s exhausted. He needs to go to bed and get some sleep before the early morning schedule he’d been about to remind Jongho about.
Instead, Hongjoong turns down the hall and walks into the kitchen instead of towards his own room. They’re out of coffee, out of even the bottled stuff. Pouring something stronger is appealing, but he can’t afford to show up in the morning bleary-eyed and puffy-faced. It’s going to have to be water for all of them.
He’s filling glasses at the sink when he hears the creak of Jongho’s bedroom door, then the sound of the front door opening and closing.
“Yeosang’s gone home,” Jongho says, appearing in the doorway. He’s wearing a shirt this time.
Hongjoong puts the extra glass into the sink. “I’ll catch up with him later.”
“You won’t need to.”
Jongho takes the glass of water Hongjoong nudges towards him and follows him into the living room. The lighting overhead seems too bright for this hour of the night. He sits when Hongjoong does, and waits for him to speak.
“So what the fuck was that,” Hongjoong says. He’s too tired and irritated for subtlety. He doesn’t want to do this tonight: doesn’t want to plunge his hands into the tangled entrails of other people’s emotions.
Jongho shrugs. “You know what it was.”
His hunch into the couch isn’t even defensive. It’s just closed off. The last time Hongjoong had to give this particular talk, San and Wooyoung had still been teenagers. Neither of them would have slipped away and left the other to take the brunt of it. Neither of them were calm about it.
“What were you doing?” Hongjoong asks, letting the tiredness spill into his voice. “I didn’t think — You’ve always — I thought you were straight.”
It comes out like an accusation. Jongho says, “When did you know, hyung? That you weren’t.”
It’s his own guts he’s going to have to plunge into, if this is the conversation Jongho wants to have. Hongjoong doesn’t talk about this with his members. They know — he knows they all know. He’s never said much, though. He doesn’t talk about it. He takes a sip of water.
“I was always following my brother in life, just a few steps behind him, but then I didn’t follow him in having crushes on girls in my class, kissing them, any of that.”
Jongho nods. “So you always kind of knew.”
That’s not quite right. “Knowing you’re different isn’t the same thing as knowing what you are. That took — takes — longer.”
“I never felt any different,” Jongho says; shrugs. “I always had crushes on girls. Girlfriends.”
“So what the fuck did I walk in on?”
“Do you know when I lost my virginity, hyung?”
“No.” Please don’t tell me, Hongjoong almost adds. One of the many things he appreciates about Jongho is that Jongho has never rushed back home to tell everyone when he made it with a girl, unlike some people (Mingi).
Hongjoong lives with him, so he knows Jongho dates; but Jongho doesn’t give details, and only rarely brings girls back. He’s never been someone Hongjoong has to worry about like that. He keeps it tight.
Yunho’s never given him problems, either; he’s discreet, and he never overshares anything intimate. He’s been with his girlfriend forever and respects her too much to go into detail, though he’ll talk at great length about cute things she’s said or done lately, his cheeks flushed.
Yeosang — Yeosang has always been quiet. Maybe too quiet.
Jongho takes his own sip of water, which is why Hongjoong got out the glasses in the first place. This kind of conversation is less excruciating if you have something to play with, something else to focus on.
“A few months after debut. Kang Yeosang was the first person to touch my dick.”
It feels like the door is falling open under Hongjoong’s hand again: he’s getting information in layers, arriving at discrete intervals spaced in fractions of a second. Jongho’s in bed. He’s got someone with him. The person in his bed is Yeosang. Yeosang’s hands are curled around Jongho’s hips. Jongho is kissing his neck.
Yeosang touched my dick after debut, Jongho is saying, but this has been going on for nearly six years is what he means.
“That can’t be right,” Hongjoong says. Jongho’s had girlfriends between now and debut. “Come on. This is serious. It’s too serious to fuck around with. Whatever you were doing with Yeosang — unless it’s serious, I need you to stop.”
Jongho takes another sip of water. His lower lip is slightly pushed out, the way it gets when he’s sulking or thinking, less pronounced than when he’s just pretending to be annoyed, miming it for an audience.
“Did you ask Wooyoung and San that back when they got together?”
“I did, actually.” Hongjoong sighs, a mix of annoyance and weariness. “Do you really want that speech? Do you need me to talk about the risk of getting caught by someone other than me, or one of the members?
”Let’s say you’re more careful than you were tonight and getting caught never becomes an issue. Putting all of that to the side: what if things go badly between you? What if you can’t work together well in future? You have to ask yourself, is what you’re doing worth the risk to all of us? Is it more important than the members, than everything else?”
Giving that talk to Wooyoung and San isn’t a good memory. They’d been so young. They’d so clearly wanted to say yes, that what they felt was more important than anything, but they couldn’t do it. He’d made them measure their first big love against their biggest dream, then made them say it wasn’t important in comparison.
“How did that work out for you?”
Hongjoong snorts. “Well, they’re still together. But they took me seriously. They took what I said seriously. They were broken up for a while. You don’t remember how miserable they were?”
He’d felt like an asshole for dropping the hammer on them, but it had been the only way he knew how to handle that kind of situation at nineteen: by himself, without bringing it to the managers. San and Wooyoung, separately and together, are a huge pain in Hongjoong’s ass and a constant problem, but he doesn’t regret giving in back then when they came to him after weeks of tragic looks and palpable misery, holding hands again.
“I remember,” Jongho says. He puts the glass down. “What about Seonghwa?”
“What about Seonghwa?”
A huff of breath. “Did you give him one of these talks? What did he say?”
-
It had been worse than sitting debut-age San and Wooyoung down, because they at least knew they’d been caught, that they shouldn’t have been hooking up, that Hongjoong had a right as their leader to talk to them about it. But Seonghwa had been nineteen, Hongjoong’s same-age friend, older than him.
He’d been painfully sweet, though, in a way that made Hongjoong worry about him, worry that he was too soft for all this: too soft to be an idol, to spend so much time facing a crowd off-stage as well as on-stage, too likely to give too much of himself away, to give himself away.
That Seonghwa, not-too-long-debuted Seonghwa, had been so happy when Hongjoong had finished up in the studio early enough to drive back to the Gimpo dorm, ducking his head over his smile and fussing with his hair, brushing it out of his eyes, tucking it behind his ears before realising his long bangs were just a little too short to stay in place.
“We need to talk,” Hongjoong had said. It had been awkward taking a seat on Seonghwa’s bunk, intimate: but they couldn’t have this talk in the living room with everyone running in and out and making late-night ramyun in the kitchen. “You’re not in trouble. It’s just — now we’re idols, we all need to be careful.
“I know you know that,” he added, when Seonghwa had looked confused. It was something they’d known before they even began training, what it meant to be an idol if you were lucky, if you made it, if people learned your face and your name and started to care about what you did. It meant watching yourself in public, all the time, as if other people were watching you, even if they weren’t, just in case.
It meant no smoking, no littering, no bad hair days; no dancing at a club in Hongdae with your friends. It meant treating everyone with kindness and politeness, even people who grabbed your arm in airports or chased you down the street or lurked outside the company building. You couldn’t have a bad day, a bad interaction.
“Have I done something?” Seonghwa asked, his voice very soft.
-
“That’s not your business,” Hongjoong says.
Jongho shrugs. “I don't think what I do sometimes with Yeosang is your business. If you haven't noticed in six years, you don't need to worry about it.”
“You haven’t been doing it for six years.”
“No, not consecutively.”
This isn’t the worst version of the talk Hongjoong’s ever given; it’s not San and Wooyoung with the baby fat still softening their cheeks, and it’s not the way Seonghwa froze like a paused video as Hongjoong tried to explain that he knew, so as the leader he needed Seonghwa to be especially careful, okay?
The heart-stricken look on his face, like Hongjoong had come up to him smiling and then stabbed him in the stomach, instead of just taking him through the party line, the rules he’d laid out for himself: be extremely fucking careful and remember that you're putting the group at risk every time you act on it, so be sure it's worth it.
Hongjoong’s known Jongho too long to really worry that there will be a problem. He’s irritated: at their carelessness, at being blindsided, at the fact that this has apparently been going on, not consecutively, whatever that means, for years. But he’s not terrified the way he was when he found about San and Wooyoung: of what damage their secret could do to them all, for them. Jongho isn’t giving him any fuel for his anxiety or his annoyance, nothing to make them flare into life. The high drama of his previous experiences doesn’t fit here, with the water glasses and the too-bright lights and Jongho’s closed-off coolness.
“Do you need to talk about it?” he asks finally. “About — Yeosang, or —“
“Thanks, hyung, but I’m good.”
“Six years is a long time. Nearly as long as San and Wooyoung.”
Hongjoong can’t remember noticing anything around that time except for them, the openly besotted way they looked at each other, the little touches, the big ones. He remembers being worried that Yeosang might feel left out, that he was a little quieter.
Jongho’s brows lift, like he’s imparting some kind of message. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“You don’t need to worry, hyung. We’re not going to run off and get couple tattoos.”
Hongjoong hums. “Not that I would ever find out, if you did. The stylists aren’t going to put you in shorts.”
Jongho smiled briefly.
“Too afraid.”
“That’s right.”
“We need to go to bed,” Hongjoong says. “A car’s coming for us in a few hours. Wooyoung’s with San?”
Of course he is. They clink their water glasses together and split up. Jongho’s door closes again. Hongjoong gets ready for bed and tries to tell himself that this isn’t a problem, that if it is he’s handled it, though he has a feeling he’s been handled instead. That this isn’t something he can do anything about, so it isn’t something he should worry about.
He hasn’t thought about talking to Seonghwa in years. The subject had closed between them like a healing scar, fading and smoothing as time went by. It’s invisible now, indistinguishable from the flesh.
Seonghwa will be asleep in his dorm, in his small bedroom, and down the hall from him Mingi will be passed out in loose exhaustion, and Wooyoung and San will be sleeping, too, the way they do, turned towards each other like facing pages in a book. They have the same early schedule. He shouldn’t disturb them.
Seonghwa-yah, he writes. You up?
He adds a gif of a cat prodding someone awake, to draw a line under the silliness of the question. It makes the kids laugh, especially Wooyoung, his accidental gif habit. It’s a grandpa thing, Wooyoung says. It makes Hongjoong seem older than dirt —
Yes? Seonghwa sends back. Hongjoong calls him, before he can doubt the impulse.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Seonghwa says, his voice sleepy over the phone. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Hongjoong says. “No, nothing serious. I’m kind of — I don’t know. I walked in on Yeosang and Jongho.”
A confused noise. “Doing what?”
“I walked in on them,” Hongjoong stresses. He can’t hear the usual huff of surprise Seonghwa makes sometimes over the phone: just silence. “Did you know?”
“Me? No,” Seonghwa says, sounding a beat behind. “I didn’t. I didn’t think —”
“Me neither. Jongho — I think it’s just Yeosang for him. I don’t know, he didn’t really want to talk about it. I think he’s still mostly straight? I don’t know.”
Seonghwa doesn’t say anything.
“I didn’t talk to Yeosang yet. I don’t know if I should. I think he might die if I bring it up? It’s just — it’s weird, right?” Hongjoong says. He’s rambling a little, trying to figure out what he was feeling, Seonghwa breathing softly through the speaker as an accompaniment.
They never talked that much when they shared a bedroom, but this is something they do now. It’s easier to talk to Seonghwa when he’s not there, when Hongjoong can’t see him or be seen. “If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have — it’s hard to even imagine them together. Not that they are together. I don’t think they are? Jongho said it’s just a thing they’ve been doing sometimes — since debut, which is what I really don’t understand. I never saw it.”
Seonghwa says, “So you talked to Jongho?”
“He wasn’t really listening.”
“Was he upset?”
“About what?”
“Getting caught. Getting talked to. I don’t know. What did you say to him?”
“Can’t you guess?”
A soft noise. “‘Don’t do it, it’s not worth the risk? Nothing is worth it, compared to Ateez’?”
Hongjoong frowns. “That’s not what I said. Not to Wooyoung and San. Or to you.”
A small huff of breath. “What do you think you said?”
“Don’t do it,” Hongjoong says, “unless it is worth it. Unless it really means something.”
Seonghwa doesn’t speak for a few minutes. The inhalation and exhalation of his breathing comes regularly, meditatively, like he’s trying to decide whether or not to say something. Hongjoong can imagine him, not that far away, in his single bed, his hair a dark rumple and his silk pyjamas open at the collarbone. Maybe the phone’s on his pillow, next to his face; maybe it’s in his hand, or resting on his chest. Finally:
”Is there a difference?”
“Isn’t there?”
“Not if you’re the person that’s not worth the risk,” Seonghwa says.
“What?”
“—It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.”
“Seonghwa-yah,” Hongjoong says. “That wasn’t what I was saying back then.”
“I think that’s actually worse,” Seonghwa says quietly. “If you didn’t – if you didn’t even want to. If it was just me.”
Hongjoong closes his eyes. This isn’t the conversation he thought he was going to have tonight.
None of the conversations he’s had tonight have been expected: they’ve opened like sudden splits in the smooth surface of reality, the sudden collapse of solid ground into yawning sinkholes: like the slow work of years coming undone, time running backwards. Invisible scars opening again like hungry mouths as collagen dissolves, skin splitting.
“I was just,” he says, and tries to figure out how to say it, or whether what he’s saying is even true. Did he suspect back then that Seonghwa had feelings for him, had he been trying to head him off? “I was just trying to look out for you. I wasn’t talking about anything else.”
“Was it just me?”
“No,” Hongjoong says. It’s only the darkness that has pulled this truth out of him, and Seonghwa’s own bravery.
“Thank you,” Seonghwa says. “It helps to know it wasn’t all in my head.” Another pause; then another push forward into the unspoken. “Would you ever have acted on it? Or would it never have been worth the risk to you?”
“I don’t know. Probably not,” Hongjoong admits. “I was so young, I was so afraid. I wouldn’t have, but that doesn’t mean — it doesn’t mean anything about how much I felt.”
They’ve both been using the past tense. Seonghwa started it, and Hongjoong has matched it, but it’s not something that’s over for him, not something he’s closed the book on. It’s something that’s never healed or gone away. It’s a constant, as much a part of himself now as the nail polish he always refreshes whenever it starts to wear away.
Or maybe it’s more like one of his tattoos: something he doesn’t even need to maintain, something that’s sunk so deeply under his skin that it will be with him until he dies, even if the lines turn blue, even if they soften and blur with time. There’s no pain to it any longer, the pleasurable ache of the tenderness he feels for Seonghwa: the warmth of being his friend, of being close with him, of being able to take care of him in certain small ways.
“I don’t know if it’s good that we’re talking about this now,” Seonghwa says thoughtfully. “We should have talked a long time ago. It hurts to know that we could have had something more. Every time I thought, maybe, I’d also think, but if he feels it too, if he wants me back at all, he’s measured that desire against the risk and decided it’s not worth it, I’m not worth it. Hasn’t it really been like that?”
“No,” Hongjoong says. “I never – I’ve never thought of you as someone I could have.”
Seonghwa makes a sound into the phone, somewhere between a laugh and something more painful. “Haven’t I been obvious?”
“Seonghwa-yah,” Hongjoong says. He closes his eyes. “Don’t go to sleep yet, okay?”
He shoves his feet into a pair of sneakers at the front door. They’re not his, but both Wooyoung and Jongho have bigger feet than him, so that doesn’t present any kind of obstacle. Either one of them will complain, loudly, when they see that he hasn’t bothered to unlace them, just crushed the backs beneath his heels, but if they’re truly ruined, he’ll replace them, which will satisfy Wooyoung. Jongho cares less about shoes than Wooyoung does, but he’ll make a bigger problem of it even after the wrong’s been made right; Hongjoong will deal with that later if he has to.
The other apartment isn’t far; it’s the same building. Hongjoong knows their door code by heart, but he’s quiet about it. He doesn’t want to wake the others up.
Seonghwa is sitting up in bed when Hongjoong opens the door to his bedroom, like he didn’t want to be caught lying down but wasn’t sure whether or not to get up. He’s not wearing the black pyjamas Hongjoong was picturing, but a grey pair in the same style. The soft lighting behind his headboard has been turned on, a halo of golden warmth flaring behind him, touching his throat, his shoulders, the sides of his face, and turning the grey silk silver.
He looks at Hongjoong, his eyes very wide and dark. After a moment, he huffs out a breath, like he knows if he waits for Hongjoong to speak first, he’ll be waiting forever. “You don’t have anything to say?”
“You said haven’t I been obvious,” Hongjoong says, closing the door. He must look so stupid, in his sweats and his bare feet, the stolen shoes abandoned at the front door, his hair wild from running his hands through it the way he does when he’s stressed. “Not wasn’t I obvious.”
“Is there a difference?”
“One of them is finished, over with. One of them’s not. I know it was a long time ago, and I hurt you back then, and we’ve been friends a long time now. I’m glad I’m your friend. But — is it finished, the way you felt about me then?”
“I tried to finish it,” Seonghwa says. “I tried for a long time.” He looks down. “I was too frightened to even look at a man for so long after that, did you know that? I thought I’d been hiding it well, until you told me I wasn’t. I tried to hide it better, after that, since I couldn’t stop being like I was. I tried to stop feeling like that about you.”
Hongjoong had wanted Seonghwa to hide himself better, to protect his heart more. He’d told himself he didn’t see that heart in Seonghwa’s big eyes back then, in his soft face and his awkward, slightly-sideways smile, and now he doesn’t know if Seonghwa still wants him. He can’t be certain, he can’t read him as clearly any more.
“No,” Seonghwa says finally. “It’s not finished. Does that make a difference to you?”
“It’s not finished for me, either.” Hongjoong swallows. “I’m not so young anymore, or so scared. You would be — you are worth it.”
“Joong-ah,” Seonghwa says. His hand opens, and Hongjoong comes forward like he’s been given permission.
He hesitates beside the bed, and Seonghwa grabs his arm and pulls him down. An awkward shuffle over his legs later, and he’s lying between Seonghwa and the wall in the guttering of Seonghwa’s single bed, the blankets between them.
Seonghwa looks at him, then slides down until his head is on the pillow too. This close, his features overwhelm his face: he’s all eyes, nose, mouth.
Hongjoong touches his cheek with the tip of his finger, almost curiously. He moves it down the side of Seonghwa’s face, prods an imaginary dimple, drags it along the curve of his jaw. Seonghwa’s lips part, a sea anemone opening rather than closing at a touch. They’re soft against the pad of Hongjoong’s finger.
“Joong-ah,” Seonghwa whispers.
There have been times when the way Hongjoong wants him has been rough, desperate; and times when it’s like this instead, the softest thing in the world, something that slides over his face against his will whenever he looks at Seonghwa.
He’s tried so hard not to look at him too much.
It’s a soft kiss, when he finally takes Seonghwa’s top lip between his. They trade the kiss back and forth: it’s a series of kisses, of partings and pressing-forwards, and also one long, slow kiss that doesn’t quite finish before it’s started again, neither of them willing to let it go.
“Your face is chilly,” Seonghwa says against his mouth. “Your hands, too.”
“And my feet,” Hongjoong says, flexing his toes, which makes Seonghwa stop kissing him, sit up and start fussing, tugging at the sheets and coverlet until Hongjoong can wriggle into the pocket of warmth created by his body.
It’s intimate, if a little too literal; Hongjoong’s come in out of the cold at last, like all he ever had to do was cross the space between their dorms and ask. They’re pressed together by the lack of space all the way down: hip against hip, elbow against elbow, shoulders touching.
He puts his hand on Seonghwa’s jaw and kisses him again. Seonghwa kisses him back, then pulls away with a plaintive sound.
“My alarm goes off in four hours.”
Hongjoong makes a plaintive sound of his own. He can feel the truth of it in his body, the way he wants to turn into Seonghwa’s warmth and close his eyes. He doesn’t fight it, pushing his face — his cold nose — into the curve of Seonghwa’s throat and throwing his arm over him.
Seonghwa whispers, “Will you be here when I wake up?”
The staff won’t know, or care. Jongho will wake up alone in their apartment and thump on Hongjoong’s door if he’s feeling kind, or leave him to their manager if he doesn’t. Hongjoong has a chance of slipping out without the others seeing him if he leaves early enough, but it’s going to be like this now. They may as well get used to it.
He wants Seonghwa to get used to it.
“Yeah,” he says.