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When the van door slides closed, Seungcheol thinks this is it. This is the end. There will be no more stages. No cheering, no laughing, no music, no cameras. No bright lights or the thunderous sound of the backing track. Not ever again. The curtain has dropped. The last time he will have stood on stage as Seventeen’s S.Coups was here in Jakarta. It should feel like a death sentence but it feels like peace. All the strings that have held him up have snapped.
Jeonghan is quiet next to him, eyes closed and face sickly pale like he’s trying to hold down his lunch if he even had any. Seungcheol looks at him - the graceful slope of his cheekbone, the familiar curve of his mouth. Selfishly, he’s glad Jeonghan is here, now, so that Seungcheol knows that this is real and not a cold-sweat stress dream he’s having on a backstage sofa. He hasn’t dreamed about Jeonghan for a long time.
*
Seungcheol and Jeonghan don’t share a dorm. When the elevator dings on Seungcheol’s floor, Jeonghan steps out after him wordlessly. They haven’t spoken since the van departed from the arena, at least not beyond the gate’s that way or you want the window seat? What would there be to say?
Jeonghan catches the unvoiced question on Seungcheol’s face and his shoulder twitches up.
“It’s a big apartment,” Jeonghan says, voice hoarse and flat. He’s not wrong.
Seungcheol lets them in and watches as Jeonghan goes through the apartment. His walk is all wrong: the steps are short and halting, the slant of his back listing to one side. He’s never been very strong or solid, more like the wind through leaves than the tree itself, but he’s never been brittle before, either. Seungcheol thinks if he were to clap a hand on Jeonghan’s shoulder now, Jeonghan would shatter into a million little shards.
“Goodnight,” Jeonghan says, to no one in particular it feels, before the door to Joshua’s bedroom closes between them.
*
A staff member drives Seungcheol to a doctor like someone taking an unruly dog to the vet, careful not to mention anything about what’s happening out loud as if maybe Seungcheol might jump out of the open window and run across traffic. He gets a prescription for a medication he’s never heard of and a phone number to a therapist. He’s back at the dorm in less than two hours with a quick stop at the nearest pharmacy. Jeonghan left for his own hospital visit before Seungcheol and isn’t back until hours after him.
Seungcheol is lying on the living room sofa, surrounded by stale air and silence when the apartment door creaks open and Jeonghan enters, a plastic bag in hand identical to the one Seungcheol brought home.
“Hey, we match,” Seungcheol says, gesturing to the coffee table where his bag is half hidden under the sheet of side effects and warnings his medication came with. Apparently the tablets meant to keep him from thinking he’s going to die any second are going to make him want to kill himself instead.
“I’ll trade two of mine for one of yours,” Jeonghan promises, “Pretty sure I bought out half the pharmacy.”
He kicks off his shoes approximately towards the rack and looks at Seungcheol again like he’s only now taking in the actual situation. “Have you been lying here in silence for very long?” he asks, bewildered.
“I don’t mind it,” Seungcheol says, “It’s nice.” There’s always so much noise. All the kids running around, all the thoughts of what he’s done wrong in the past day and is going to do wrong the next day taking jabs in tandem.
“Oh,” Jeonghan says and then doesn’t say anything else. Seungcheol watches him shuffle around the living room and land heavily on the other couch perpendicular to his. It feels like watching Jeonghan is all Seungcheol has done in the past five days. He’s still sleeping in Joshua’s room and seems to have developed a sixth sense that allows him to appear in whatever room Seungcheol is in, even if it’s the middle of the night and Seungcheol is trying to drown out the afterimages of a nightmare by racing through the television channels. They haven’t talked much at all. Just existed in the silence, adjacent to each other.
Jeonghan squeezes his eyes closed and presses the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand around the bridge of his nose.
“Are you gonna throw up?” Seungcheol asks. He doesn’t think Jeonghan has until now but he looks like he did that time on the ferry, like something is churning inside him.
“No. Just dizzy,” Jeonghan whispers, eyes still clenched shut. He turns his forehead against the arm rest, like it might be able to keep him steady.
Seungcheol heaves himself up from the couch and goes to dig out a bucket from the cleaning cupboard. He brings it back to the living room and sets it carefully on the floor next to Jeonghan’s head.
“Just in case,” he mumbles and stands there for a bit, unsure. Jeonghan mutters something close to thanks.
Seungcheol could lie back down. He could go to his room and lie down there. He could continue staring at the ceiling and toying idly with the thought that tomorrow he might walk into the Pledis building and tell them he’s done for good. But Jeonghan hasn’t eaten since breakfast and neither has Seungcheol, so instead he goes to the kitchen, puts a pot of water on the stove, and starts digging through the cabinets for noodles.
*
Seungcheol has always been a vivid dreamer. The medication doesn’t help.
There’s a bear in the apartment. Then a fire. A toilet bowl full of meat sauce. Black rats coming through the windows and brushing against his ankles. His mother dead on the floor, then his father, then his sixth grade teacher, then Jihoon, Jeonghan, Joshua, Chan. Unseeing eyes and an offal smell. His hands are sticky.
He wakes up choking on a gag.
It’s stupid. He knows it is. When he was a kid, his mother used to say it scared the life out of her when Seungcheol would appear on the doorway of his parents’ bedroom after a nightmare, clutching his blanket like a little wraith. He gets out of bed anyway and pads to the closed door of Joshua’s bedroom.
Jeonghan is barely visible in the darkness, just an outline of a body and a glimpse of a pale face swallowed whole by Joshua’s bed. The door doesn’t creak. And yet somehow, before Seungcheol is done convincing himself that they are both still alive, before he can close the door again and retreat, Jeonghan coughs.
“What?”
“Nothing. Sorry. Go back to sleep. You need to sleep,” Seungcheol rasps, “Sorry.”
“Stop saying that,” Jeonghan mumbles and squirms backwards on the bed. The part of Seungcheol that stood on stage in Jakarta and thought This is the end , sees the distance grow between them and crows with satisfaction. Look, see. But Jeonghan gathers the duvet closer to himself and pats the newly made space on the bed. “Come on.”
Seungcheol lies down, stiff, trying not to move the mattress. Jeonghan throws the duvet over them both, body-warm and heavy. His face is right there in front of Seungcheol, sleep-flushed and beloved. Seungcheol doesn’t dream again.
*
The therapist is a dry-looking old woman who doesn’t have any clue who he is. She tells him that cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective method to treat anxiety but that it can only do so much and that maybe Seungcheol needs to reconsider his profession. He’s still quite young, after all. It’s not too late to get a degree. Yet.
*
Jeonghan has been doing better ever since he came home from the doctor again, this time clutching a printout of a meal plan. Overtraining and exhaustion, the doctor had decreed. Jeonghan had handed the plan to Seungcheol wordlessly and Seungcheol had nodded and the ground under his feet had felt steadier then than it had in a very long while.
It really is a pathetically simple schedule. Breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, another snack before bed. Asleep before midnight, wake up before 8 AM. No strenuous activity. After nearly a decade in the company, Seungcheol is nothing if not capable of following orders to achieve a goal.
It’s been soothing. Jeonghan claims Seungcheol enjoys bullying him when he’s in Joshua’s room, prodding Jeonghan awake at 7:55, but he always gets up eventually. He always catches whatever 14:30 snackbar Seungcheol throws at him. He sits with Seungcheol and points at the things he wants on the laptop screen when Seungcheol orders their grocery delivery, and he is easy with praise when Seungcheol decides to try his hand at making dinner, even if something ends up a little too toasty on the edges.
There are so many things out of Seungcheol’s control. The company. The fans. The market. The charts. Television broadcasters. His own brain.
But he can make sure Jeonghan eats his snacks and gets up at eight. That he can do.
*
“What if I quit?” Seungcheol asks, leaning his back against the couch, ass numb from sitting on the floor, directing the words to the fingernail he’s picking on. It’s been weeks. He hasn’t quit yet but neither has there been a day he hasn’t thought about it. He tries for nonchalance but he’s never been any good at it. Everything that has ever happened to him, everything he's ever felt, seems to stick like tar. As soon as the words come out, his breath is hitching around a dry sob. Whether it’s relief or misery, he can’t tell. He can’t tell much of anything these days.
Jeonghan is quiet for a long time, playing with the straw of the banana milk Seungcheol picked up for him on his way back from therapy. He’s propped up on the couch with three pillows he’s stolen from random bedrooms and Joshua’s duvet, exactly as Seungcheol installed him before his appointment. There’s a length of gauze around his elbow from the bloodwork he went in for earlier in the day, threatening to unravel. Seungcheol reaches over to tuck the end of it under itself. Jeonghan’s bony hand clings on to Seungcheol’s forearm, not letting go.
“Then I guess we’ll find something other than singing to do,” Jeonghan says, “Thirteen is enough people to staff a chicken place, right?”
“I’m serious,” Seungcheol says.
“Why do you think I’m not?” Jeonghan demands, his sharp fingers digging into the meat of Seungcheol’s arm, giving it a little jiggle, “Do you think you can quit and come watch a free show from the front row afterwards? Absolutely not. Maybe we can buy a farm. Herd sheep or something.”
Seungcheol lets Jeonghan press and pinch at him for a bit. He can practically hear the thought developing in his head as he kneads his arm.
“I would be sad. And probably a little angry for a while. But if you told me - if any of the kids told me that work was making them sick and miserable and that they wanted out, I’d burn down the company building the next night,” Jeonghan says finally. Seungcheol’s eyes sting.
Jeonghan lets go of his arm and the couch shifts under his weight. He scrubs at Seungcheol’s wet cheeks with the meat of his thumb. Seungcheol realises, finally, the blinding obviousness that he’s not the only one who has been keeping vigil.
*
His therapist claims that a person cannot think unless they move their eyes. That if Seungcheol has a thought that he doesn’t want to have, he can fix his eyes on a single point and the thought will disappear. Just for a while. Just so he can catch his breath.
Seungcheol picks the mole on Jeonghan’s right cheek, always visible now that they have no reason to wear makeup. The silence is deafening.
*
Their members are in Bangkok, doing HIT in an uneven formation. The fancams from the crowd are shaky and the audio warped. Seungcheol watches Jeonghan scroll through Twitter. The flick of his thumb is growing more agitated by the minute.
“This is so annoying,” Jeonghan whines, twisting his wrist so that Seungcheol can see a short, looping video of Mingyu, where his shirt gapes open just enough to show chest, “Mingyu is making a fool out of himself in public but he gets to go to Thailand? I miss them.”
Jeonghan keeps scrolling for a while. A tinny sound Seungcheol would recognise in his sleep, that would get him to crack open an eye during his own wake, bursts on, mid-beat.
“Okay, maybe I don’t miss this,” Jeonghan says, wrinkling his nose. Seungcheol laughs, spotting Jihoon jumping up and down at the edge of the stage, looking ready to collapse. The crowd follows him, exhausted bounce for exhausted bounce.
"Liar," he says.
Seungcheol watches the blurry kids on screen jumping and leaping up and down the stage. For a moment the song cuts out and all eleven of them double forwards, panting. Then the familiar trill starts anew. They all leap on their feet and run ragged but laughing down the catwalk.
Maybe he’s been thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe this isn’t the unceremonious curtain drop, the lights cutting out midway through, the audience shrugging and meandering out, interest lost. Maybe this can be the fake out in the middle of the encore. The gasp of breath before the chorus picks back up again.