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Some days, Seungcheol fucks.
He comes back from the afterparties reeking of Cuervo and spliffs—red marks already blooming at the edge of his collar, fabric pulled out of shape by demanding hands—and knocks into Jeonghan’s bunk on his way up to his own, knobby knees bruised and hands half-numb, giving up halfway and passing out on the floor.
Jeonghan finds him there in the mornings, slings his sweat-stale body into his own sheets, leaves Gatorade and acetaminophen and doesn’t ask the names. He doesn’t need to ask anything else, he already knows.
Other days, Seungcheol picks fights.
He comes back from god-knows-where, knuckles bloodied and eyes half-black, and Jeonghan sighs and opens the first-aid kit from where he has yet to put it away, and he wipes at Seungcheol’s hands with antiseptic while Seungcheol stares off at nothing and everything all at once.
Jeonghan leaves Neosporin and acetaminophen and doesn’t ask because he doesn’t want to know.
- -
One day, you are 14 and invincible. And then you are grown up, too fast. Still too young to be stretched this thin, worn frayed at the edges, ground to dust.
These days, Seungcheol’s not sure if he’s chasing the end of 27 or if it’s chasing him. He says he wants to make it through. He’s not sure he believes it.
Perhaps this is where he ends and his legacy begins. Perhaps it’s better that way.
- -
“God, I love you,” Seungcheol slurs to the ceiling of the bus from his place on the floor, shoulders filling the width of the aisle. Jeonghan looks down from where he’s perched on the kitchen bench, legs tucked under himself from the lack of floor space. He frowns. Seungcheol’s eyes may be open but he’s a million miles away, pupils blown wide, pretty chestnut irises swallowed by the same thing that eats him up inside.
Jeonghan unfolds a leg and kicks lightly at Seungcheol’s arm. “I love you too, Cheolie.”
“No, like… you can’t even imagine how much I love you.” Seungcheol’s hand darts out to grab at Jeonghan’s ankle, but he still doesn’t turn his head. “I can’t even imagine how much I love you,” the wonderment in his voice like revelation, elation, salvation.
“That’s nice,” Jeonghan answers. It doesn’t matter. Seungcheol won’t remember this in the morning when he comes down, when he’s no longer wherever he goes when he’s trying to get away from everywhere he is, when he’s once again flinging himself out of Jeonghan’s arms and into some other man’s bunk, himself for another hit.
“Don’t ever leave me, Hannie. You can’t leave me.” The hand tightens. His eyes don’t move.
“Never, Cheolie,” Jeonghan agrees, but he shakes his leg free and tucks it back under himself like a reflex.
Jeonghan turns back to his book, but he’s lost his place.
- -
You used to know exactly what you wanted and now you drift aimlessly carried by expectation and momentum and day after day passes in a haze and you wonder when you stopped wanting anything at all.
Seungcheol thinks of bungee jumping on their day off in Kentucky. He never would have gone but Joshua had dared him and if there was one thing Seungcheol couldn't do it was back down from a challenge.
He thinks of the falling; of the breath punched out of him when his anxieties tell him that he's not going to stop, that he's going to hit the ground. He thinks about how that didn't scare him as much as he thought it should.
He thinks of the jolt of the cord finally catching just as his fingertips brush the surface of the water; the ice of the spray and the realization hitting him all at once, and the rebound like a rewind like maybe he could go back to before all of this started, like maybe he could fix it all if he could just be caught.
- -
They are sitting in the kitchen.
They are often sitting in the kitchen, in large part because the front half of the bus is mostly kitchen and there is hardly elsewhere to sit.
Jihoon is on the BSS bus helping the kids sort out some composition they’ve been working on for the better part of tour, and Mingyu is off in his boyfriend’s van keeping vigil on the long drive to Indiana, so they are alone, the two of them in the kitchen and their driver in the cab carting their whole lives around on ten wheels.
This time Seungcheol has a book, though his eyes watch only the streetlights as they speed past, the flickering mirrored in his eyes spelling out some morse code message that Jeonghan cannot hope to decode.
“It’s incorrigible,” Seungcheol grouses, draping himself over the armrest of the bus’s excuse for a couch and melting the rest of the way onto it.
Jeonghan only raises an eyebrow from his seat at the table, a spoonful of cornflakes paused inches from his mouth. “What is?”
Seungcheol makes a frustrated little noise, part whine, part grunt, and part explanation, stuffing himself further into the cushions. “Existing.”
The crunching of cornflakes echoes in the emptiness.
- -
You are driving 3000 miles across cornfields and wasteland and you are watching the ground eat the sky. And as the horizon rushes to meet you, you can’t help but think that there’s something in how shattered glass sparkles like starlight on the highway.
Seungcheol still gets growing pains. There are still days that he wants to set fire to everything he’s built, just to see if it burns down, just to let the flames lick his fingertips and see if he still feels their bite. He has spent his whole life dismantling safety nets. When he falls, he knows there will be nothing to catch him on the way down.
- -
Seungcheol is on stage and he is on fire.
They are playing some too-hot stage in some too-hot state—he’d lost track of the miles somewhere in Texas, shortly after he’d lost track of the days—and the crowd is as loud as it has ever been. Jeonghan’s bass thumps in his head and Jihoon’s drums rattle his bones and his voice pours out of him like it has nowhere else to go. Perhaps it doesn’t.
It is late July and Seungcheol is on the edge of 28 and he is on the edge of the biggest stage they’ve ever played and then he is jumping and then he is flying and then he is falling.
The edges of his vision glitter like stars, like the ones he’s chasing, like that shattered glass refracting worlds in the flash of passing headlights, and he is falling and he is falling and then with a jolt they are catching him and his vision sparks and whites-out and fades to black.
- -
When Seungcheol comes to, he’s on the floor of the bus. Again. He’s been spending a lot of time down here lately. This time, Jeonghan is lying next to him, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the too-narrow aisle, arms crossed over his chest like a corpse.
He turns when he realizes Seungcheol is awake, just a tip of the head so that Seungcheol can see his eyes. They refract worlds.
“You passed out stage diving. Medic said it was heat exhaustion.” He sits up and reaches for something on the table above his head and a Gatorade appears on Seungcheol’s chest. Seungcheol grabs for it, Jeonghan’s hand caught between his own and the bottle.
“That’s kind of hardcore,” Seungcheol points out.
Jeonghan just snorts. “Actually, it’s pretty pathetic. Wait ‘til you see the videos of them crowdsurfing your limp body to security. But I bet we’re gonna be on all the tour-end vlogs so thanks for the free press at least.”
Jeonghan’s words are derisive, but Jeonghan’s words rarely aren’t. Jeonghan’s smile, however, is soft—and the huff of his breath is relieved, and his hand is still clasped under Seungcheol’s, condensation from the bottle pooling down their fingers.
And when Jeonghan offers him the other and hauls him upright, Seungcheol thinks that perhaps the falling is alright. After all, he’s not going to hit the ground. After all, you have to fall to fall back together again.