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Haechan—Donghyuck, too—has been here hundreds of times.
The slipperiness of the stage, shiny new under his worn-out sneakers, bright-color tape marks all over the black floor, looking down into the gray cement that will be filled with fans later. The heat of the spotlights, too bright and pointing at him as he tries his best to avoid the halo of light. The big high-quality screens behind him, the cameras catching his every minute, the mic taped to his cheek leaving him no chance to make a mistake. It is all too familiar.
And at the end of the runway-like leg that grows from the middle of the main stage, Mark.
Cap on, phone in hand as he laughs at something Chenle whispers away from his turned-off mic. Haechan can almost hear it, even from the other side of the stage.
Almost every concert Haechan has ever performed, it has been with Mark by his side—whatever the group, whatever the country.
While sitting down on a stool with pain going from the tip of his toes to the high of his knee, while dancing until breathing gets too difficult and he’s left to grasp Mark’s shoulder in hopes it’s enough to ground him, help him. Every one, everywhere, except for eleven shows.
And even then, when Mark had to be the one to sit back, miss on Haechan’s—Donghyuck’s, too—concerts for a change, Haechan still had Mark beside him. Backstage, with his heart pounding hard behind his chest, getting to his ears and resonating through his ribs, but with him.
Waiting for him, too, back at the dorms, as planes took off and time zones changed, with his phone tight in his hand, ready for a late-night call, a text, a something.
Donghyuck doesn’t think too much about those few concerts, tear-full and blue, but he watches Chenle throw himself on top of Mark, whose glasses, rounded and skinny-gold, threaten to fall from the impact; and he can’t help it. How he had made it, back then, he doesn’t know. Donghyuck isn’t sure he could do it, again, if asked right now.
Not sure he’d know how to breathe if Mark isn’t around to count from ten to one under the structure of the stage, as they wait, to help calm Haechan’s brain.
Somewhere behind him, a staff member tells them the soundcheck is over, to go rest before the show. Haechan catches Jaemin smile small into Jisung’s shoulder, droopy and dizzy; Jeno walks by Mark and Chenle, tapping Chenle’s lower back, a tiny little thing that almost passes them all by. Donghyuck’s eyes, too used to hide-and-seek, manage to see it—the way Jeno’s fingers close around the fabric of Chenle’s hoodie, how Chenle looks up from Mark’s chest with shine in his eyes.
Mark noticed too. Eyes trained to where Jeno’s hand laid for few seconds, then up to where he knows Donghyuck is.
Their eyes meet. Donghyuck—Haechan, too—smiles big, not too keen on hidden love. Mark tilts his head and smiles right back.
They never share hotel rooms, amidst it all.
Maybe it’s a habit they can’t kill, from when they had memorized each other’s weak spots for all the wrong reasons. All their flaws laid open on their wrists, as they took in what they could get, to know where to shoot next time. And then shooting.
Taeyong had requested for them to be put in separate dorms, once, when they were even shorter and less careful with the venom growing like mold inside their spent bodies. Like that, it was only natural for them to be in different hotel rooms whenever they would travel away from home.
And even when it all shifted right, when Donghyuck started reaching for Mark when it was dark, and Mark let himself be taken, when they pulled their fingers away from the trigger, to interlock pinkies under tables and behind backs, they never asked for it to be changed. Maybe it’s a reminder that so many things are and will never be the same, but this one can. This silly one, not even important, can.
Or maybe it’s a lucky charm, though Donghyuck would argue not a lot of good can come with them being away from each other. Mark would laugh and mess up his bangs—Donghyuck always forgets his words when Mark’s fingers grasp his hair.
Them not sharing a room doesn’t mean they don’t spend time together, though. Not that they were used to following rules written down on paper for them, anyway.
The bathroom door is wide open, fog escaping through it like smoke to a fire, hot and humid. Donghyuck, stolen basketball shorts and throat closed up with nerves, sits down on the floor right between milky thighs and redden knees. He throws the towel in his hand behind him, with no real strength, just so Mark can grab it from him. Mark squeezes Donghyuck with his thighs, closing them up against Donghyuck’s shoulders, and Donghyuck sneaks his left hand to the back of his knee, to squeeze back.
Habits neither can kill, probably.
“Better?” Mark mumble-asks, laying the towel on top of Donghyuck’s wet hair.
Donghyuck hadn’t said anything, about the ball of anxiety pressing down on his belly since the day had started, determined to make his heartbeat falter and his hands tremble around his mic. Still, Mark found his way to Donghyuck’s room as soon as they arrived from the venue, and it took less than a minute for him to realize.
Mark had hidden his head in the place Donghyuck’s shoulder and neck meet, seeking his pulse with his lips, a hand slipping past cascades of fabric to get to the skin that covers, just slightly, Donghyuck’s bloody heart. Pumping like crazy, then stopping to breathe for a second too long, a pit-pat that makes Mark get away from him and take his hand out from the collar of Donghyuck's shirt, to grab his chin and force him to lock eyes.
“What’s up, baby?” Mark had asked, starry eyed, his thumb making way to press against Donghyuck’s lower lip, bitten-raw. Like he didn’t really need an answer.
Donghyuck’s—Haechan’s, mostly—eyes are more used to lying than Mark’s are, always spelling his emotions for him, a habit Donghyuck never quite learned to mimic. Too unsure, Donghyuck had just closed them, eyelashes falling against his cheek as he tilted his head back to bump to a stop on top of Mark’s shoulder. A sigh. No words.
Mark’s hand, reaching down to Donghyuck’s neck, had put pressure on his Adam’s apple, sweet and worried fingers tracing down all of Donghyuck’s weak spots, to hide inside his shirt again. A kiss where a mole rests, quiet, another hand, flat against his stomach. Donghyuck’s fingers had tugged at Mark’s hair, feeling him chuckle into his skin, making Donghyuck gasp.
“I’ll run you a bath, pretty boy.” Mark had muttered, biting down the back of Donghyuck’s clothes, to leave no traces of love on him.
And Donghyuck had complained, a tiny whine escaping his lips even if he tried his best to suppress it, but as Mark had unfolded his limbs from Donghyuck to leave, all the tenseness had returned to his body. The strain of his muscles, the tears pooled on his eyelids, acid-sting, the sleeplessness that follows him around, the concerts he missed because his heart has always failed him, all his life.
Then Mark’s hand had grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him towards the bathroom, and Donghyuck had forgotten how to feel torn-apart.
So here they are—Mark carefully rubs Donghyuck’s scalp with the towel, drying off his dark-brown hair slowly, thighs still tensed on both sides of Donghyuck’s head.
“A bit,” Donghyuck finally answers, throwing his head back to look at the boy in his hotel bed. “Thank you.” He then whispers, making Mark halt his every move. They both smile at each other, the way they only do behind closed doors, nowhere close the way they smile across crowds, or standing in the middle of a stage.
Less teeth, less performance—more of this tiny little thing that tints their cheeks, scrunches up their noses, makes Mark roll his eyes as he tilts down to kiss Donghyuck on the crease the smile forms between his eyebrows. The same thing that makes Jeno stretch out to get to Chenle in the middle of practice, so similar to the one that takes Jaemin out of his bed at midnight to call Renjun, just to hear his voice.
“We should eat something before the concert.” Mark suggests, back to drying Donghyuck’s hair.
And maybe it’s Mark’s fingers scratching him through the towel, maybe it’s his naked thighs so close to Donghyuck’s mouth, sinful, maybe it’s the kiss he didn’t give Donghyuck just now, stopping at his forehead like the menace he is, maybe it’s his hand around his neck, less than half an hour ago, as he laughed against the hot of Donghyuck’s skin. Maybe it’s just a lucky charm—Donghyuck gets up from the floor and climbs into Mark’s lap.
“We should.” He breathes out.
Mark, more the performer than Donghyuck’s boy, arches up an eyebrow and rests a fake-shy palm on top of Donghyuck’s calf, not nearly close enough to where Donghyuck wants him. Donghyuck’s hands, grown to be more slender than Mark’s but also a bit bigger, drag Mark forward. Makes him crash into his lips.
The first time Donghyuck had kissed Mark, back when they were still short of being teenagers, it had been a quick peck—an innocent thing, barely more than a second long. The first time Mark had kissed Donghyuck, it had been different. A gun pressed into the open of Donghyuck’s thorax, pointing at the center of his chest like a promise, threatening to be set off if Donghyuck pulled away.
Teeth and spit, and for the first time Donghyuck had felt like he was safer inside Mark’s arms, trapped and tight, than whenever he’d stand in front of thousands of people.
Mark never stopped kissing him like he was about to die.
Donghyuck fits his hand around Mark’s nape, bringing him closer than possible, and Mark hums in between their mouths. It’s slower than back then, practice making perfect like in every other aspects of their lives—spend enough afternoons rehearsing that one dance and eventually it’d be difficult to erase it from your mind, spend enough nights sneaking past sleeping people in order to make out on the rooftop and eventually you won’t need to open your eyes to find the other’s lips.
Donghyuck’s wet hair dampens his shirt as he tilts his head forward, deeper into Mark. Shivers run through Donghyuck’s body, a hand moving up from the waist of his shorts to his lower back, unforgiving, a sigh falling into the distance between Mark and Donghyuck when Mark pushes back.
Always-sincere eyes, Mark looks up at Donghyuck—Haechan, too—with a kind of love that gives Donghyuck motion sickness, turmoil inside his stomach as he looks away. Mark pushes him against his chest with the hand on his back, and Donghyuck can almost feel the cold metal of the mouth of a gun, pointed at his ever-failing heart.
“C’mon, talk to me, Hyuck.” Mark’s other hand interlocks with Donghyuck’s, resting on Mark’s chest since he sat on his thighs.
Donghyuck hadn’t said a thing back when Mark first entered the room, about the panic attack building up inside his trachea, boiling and always-there, ready to be triggered at any moment. A time bomb trapped in Donghyuck’s body like a reminder, of all that could ever go wrong—all that has already gone wrong, taken him away from his people.
Mark had noticed, anyway—spend enough evenings crying into someone’s shoulder, spilling your guts at his feet, and watch them pick up the patterns of your bad days like one picks grapes out of a cluster, biting down into the sour of them with ease. It’s been long since Donghyuck had had to say something for Mark to realize it’s happening.
Not that Donghyuck—Haechan, either—is one to talk, anyway.
When Donghyuck looks back at Mark, Mark squeezes his hand, once, twice, thrice. It makes Donghyuck smile.
“Can we not right now?” Donghyuck murmurs, small, hidden. “Please.”
Mark lays back into the bed, drags Donghyuck down with him. Fingers off the trigger, hands soft as he kisses him, sneaking past sleepy limbs in order to get to anywhere blood travels. To feel Donghyuck breathing and fine.
Donghyuck has always kissed Mark to feel alive.
Behind a hotel room door, like so many times, like they are meant to always: a laugh, a whisper, flesh in between greedy fingers and gripping nails, a towel on the floor and a shirt up to the collarbone, a sigh, bleeding-out hearts staining white pristine sheets.
“We’ll get tired—we—” Mark tries to mutter out, as Donghyuck grinds harder against him, looking down at Mark with parted lips and heart hanging from his tongue, heavy and fast. “We can’t—”
Donghyuck huffs, stops abruptly, tilts back his head. Water drip-drops, getting to Mark’s hands, crunched-up into Donghyuck’s shirt with force. Then Donghyuck laughs, tiny, bringing Mark close by his hair, hiding him inside his chest, like to replace his heart with his boy.
“So, the absolutely fully capable thing was a lie all this time?” Donghyuck jokes. A surprised cry leaving his lips as Mark groans and lifts him up by the thighs, throwing him against the soft mattress.
If the people outside, past the hallway and tucked into their own rooms, hear anything, they don’t say. Donghyuck isn’t sure he cares.
Under the structure of the stage, a minute before show time: ten, nine, eight, you can do it, six, five, four, you’ve got me, two, one.
Donghyuck feels like puking, all his weak spots bright-red in the dark. For all the right reasons this time, though.
Donghyuck—Haechan, too—always finds his way to Mark, no matter what.
The people roar as Chenle belts the chorus of Like We Just Met, crowd singing along to his every word. Haechan bids goodbye to no one in particular, as confetti falls to the floor beneath their feet, and he can’t quite hear the people with his in-ear pressing down on his ears insistently, but he feels as if someone creeps up behind him.
The tip of Mark’s fingers linger on his back for what feels like less than a second, just enough so no cameras are quick to capture it, but still there—a reminder, a habit they never even thought of killing. Mark keeps on walking, closer to the edge of the stage as he raises his hands in the air, a wave for the people on the tallest end of the venue, one for the people right at eye level, a last one for the people below him.
Haechan grips his mic strong, pushes it close to his lips as his cue to sing arrives. It’s been so long since he has been doing this, traveling and rehearsing and performing, day after day of piling up tired bones over tired bones, folding his skin over itself so it stops aching, and still. Still, he looks at Mark and knows he could have never done it if it wasn’t because of him.
His presence, looming over him like only angels were meant to.
Haechan turns to the other side of the stage, lyrics morphing into one another as they creep past his lips with practiced ease. Winking to a camera when his eyes finally manage to focus, blowing a kiss to a raised hand like it even made sense, smiling to Jisung’s shiny eyes as he crosses paths with him.
Jeno, somewhere on his left, lifts a confetti piece that had fallen on top of Chenle’s hair. Haechan watches it all on the big screen next to him, and so do the rest of the thousand people that stand before them.
He wonders when had love become such a delicate thing for them, when was it that they stopped showing it all so openly to stick to these things, subtle and small and confusing for anyone that has never come remotely close to meeting them. A confetti falling to the floor from Jeno’s hand, the white fabric of Haechan’s shirt pulled apart by expert fingers in the time it takes one to blink—if there even was a time when they didn’t know how to hide then hope no one seeks.
Jaemin lays an arm around Haechan’s shoulder, sweaty, and watches with pride all phones pointing towards them. Donghyuck’s stomach, sensitive, flips once in an uncomfortable way, as he sees yet doesn’t hear all people surrounding them go a bit crazy.
Jaemin just laughs beside him, and Haechan follows suit, Donghyuck left behind inside the hotel room, on top of his boy, with hands around his waist and lips on his moles.
As the song comes to an end, all of them singing in unison, they approach each other. A line of people Haechan has made a home of.
A wave for the people watching them from up in the highest end, one for the ones as tall as them, a final one for the chin-ups. Haechan’s heart has always failed him, all his life.
When he was just a kid, as it skipped a beat for every smile his best friend gifted his way. When he grew up just a few inches into the teenager he hated to be, when it did nothing as he held his first girlfriend’s hand. When he was eighteen, as it stopped completely when Mark grabbed him by the neck, put a bullet straight into his chest and kissed him for days. Just a few years ago, when it made him land into hospital after hospital, watching his people through screens.
And right now, as it somersaults at the mere touch of Mark’s hand around his with so many people around to see.
Haechan has always been against hiding, hated it right to its core, and cared little about it most days. He is still just the boy who is so in love with his friend he’d do anything to keep him, though.
Spend enough mornings getting scolded about toning things down, being discrete, being taught to spot cameras anywhere he goes—eventually, all you learn is hide-and-seek.
A game they have been playing for years, how to show without revealing, counting down from ten to one with their eyes closed to the world, as they turned their back to each other and still knowing if they turned around, the other would be there, just arm-length from them.
They all bow to the crowd, as the song fades into nothingness. More confetti falls from high up, one landing right on top of Mark’s styled-back hair. He lets it rest there.
Haechan still can’t hear the screams, a forest fire made a heart, belly tight with anxiety. A ticking bomb, a bullet stuck to his throat— ten, nine, eight, I did it, six, five, four, I have him, two, one.
Mark lets go of his hand, as they walk back into the darkness of the backstage.
On top of the world: Haech— Donghyuck takes Mark’s hand again and squeezes it. Once, twice, thrice.