Work Text:
It’s after a company dinner that finds much of Seventeen dead to the world, in the living room. As a celebration penalty, Seungcheol had to drink till he was shit-faced on a V-APP broadcast, which – bless his liver – took 10 bottles of soju and probably a cup of Soonyoung’s Jungle Juice, a concoction of questionable, colourful liquids.
The aftermath of this is that once the leader had knocked out, the rest of them would no doubt follow. Leaving Jeonghan and Jisoo to administer supervision was, to nobody’s surprise, an idea that failed spectacularly. Even Chan was snoring against Soonyoung and Hansol, which meant that someone must have let him drink. This meant, sadly, that the only member left standing was Mingyu, who stopped drinking when his stomach started feeling funny.
Bodies are strewn all across the room, and if not for the occasional hiccup or laughter, it would look like a killing field, with Mingyu as the sole murderer. He stands in the middle of the spectacle, when the manager comes in and wrinkles his nose at the sight – twelve boys knocked out, the strobe lights still painting everyone in flashes of purple and pink and green, the karaoke machine still alive with the intro playing on repeat, and red solo cups… everywhere.
Mess.
“Hey Mingyu, you’re still alive?” their manager says from the door, not wanting to step into the clusterfuck of chaos.
“Yeah, have all the staff gone home?”
“Uh-huh. You know, it’s great that you’re still alive, but if it’s only you and me left I don’t think we can haul all of their asses back from here to the dorm. Pledis HQ is pretty far from where you guys stay.”
Mingyu pales at the thought of waking twelve distraught guys out of their alcohol-induced haze, and carrying them out of this cave back to the car, out of the car, up the stairs and into the dorm. Perhaps it’s what Minghao experiences, waking me up every morning.
“You know what,” the manager says, “I’ll just leave you rascals here till tomorrow morning, then I’ll drive over to pick you all up. Meanwhile you take care of them. Call?”
Someone grunts from the corner at that, and he guesses some of them might be shit-faced, but not completely dead. “Sure, sounds good. Sorry for all the trouble!” Mingyu replies his manager with a bow of apology, and their manager smiles tiredly, walking away in resolution and closing the door like he’s glad to wash his hands off them.
Of course he’d be glad.
Mingyu scans the not very lively crowd and his eyes land on one lean, lanky figure on the couch. His one hand’s draped over his face, and the other left dangling horizontally off the edge of the wide, leather couch.
He walks towards the guy and something from the bottom of his gut rises to squeeze at his heart. (And it’s not the alcohol.)
Come to think of it, when Minghao sleeps he looks like a baby. A baby with a killer jawline, but nonetheless the epitome of all things adorable and innocent. Which isn’t what Minghao is in real life – a thug in his own right, and neither is it what he is on stage – both heaven and sin all at the same time.
Mingyu lets out a sigh and startles himself at how close he is when the breath from the sigh reaches Minghao’s forehead and messes up his already dishevelled bangs.
Minghao groans involuntarily at this, the sound low and muffled, from the back of his throat. He has no idea what he does to... people. Not me though. I’m… I’m his best friend – nothing more, nothing less.
“You’re not cute, ugh,” Mingyu mutters, struggling to bring Minghao’s right hand down from shielding his face so that he can tuck him in, into a comfortable sleeping position. He’s failing.
Why… why is it so stiff? He isn’t dead right? This isn’t rigor mortis, what the hell is wrong with your hands, Xu MInghao?
When Mingyu pulls a little too hard, it earns him a loud, insistent “ugh,” from the guy that’s on the couch.
“You’re awake?”
Minghao moans again, his hands shifting back to the position he found him in – his head buried in his right elbow like he’s in pain and his left arm sticking out in the opposite direction. He’s saying something, but it’s muffled against the arm covering his mouth.
“Minghao, you okay? Did you drink too much?” Mingyu asks, panic suddenly setting in – and he doesn’t even care about how he sounds more concerned than he’d usually let himself be.
“D-d-d,” Minghao stutters, and Mingyu is kneeling next to him, ready to call the ambulance and set the place on fire.
“This isn’t a joke, right? What is it, say it!”
Minghao’s virtually grappling at the air to get the word out, still stuck at “D-dd-dd-d,” and Mingyu is this close to thinking Minghao’s got a seizure. He’s this close to crying, when a semblance of a smirk slowly grows from the corner of Minghao’s lips – that Mingyu doesn’t catch.
Paranoid, he climbs atop Minghao, knees at each side, hands shaking his shoulders. “Haohao, don’t fuck with me now are you-“
And then, he hears something. He doesn’t want to believe it, his face closing the distance between them as he brings his ears to Minghao’s mouth.
“What?”
“D-d-d-dd-ddd… DAB.”
Minghao’s eyes shoot open, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face.
“DAB,” Minghao says again, resolutely, into the open air, and Mingyu’s conflicted with the influx of emotions crashing into his – of relief, and of an extreme need to punch Xu Minghao’s pretty face.
Minghao lets his hands down and puts it around Mingyu’s neck, bring Mingyu’s head to his chest and ruffling his hair. “Aww, were you worried?”
“Fuck you,” Mingyu mutters into Minghao’s chest that still smells great and like the softener they use back at the dorms, with a little something of his own. There’s no menace in the words, but maybe a lot of spite, and a lot of affection.
“I was dabbin’, man. All the way. My alcohol tolerance is higher than yours, and I stopped drinking when you did. I’m more sober than you, man.”
Mingyu gets off Minghao when his ears turn red to the tip. “You spend too much time with Vernon nowadays,” he says, pushing off him and landing next to the guy who’s laughing till his eyes transform into crescents and he sounds like an obnoxious pixie.
“What, you jealous?” What a little shit, Xu Minghao.
“Nope.”
Of course he isn’t. But he lets out a sniffle and he lets his Grade A Acting Talent to overcome him, and that’s it – the tears form.
Mingyu continues to sniffles and turns his back to Minghao, hiding his face in his elbows.
“Hey man,” Minghao says, still gasping onto the tail end of his laughter, when he notices Mingyu curling up into a ball next to him and crying. “Damn, Mingyu, don’t fuck with me now, it was just a meme, we, uh , we both know how it works. Right?”
Revenge tastes sweeter than ever when he can hear the paranoia arising in Minghao’s voice, the stuttering and inability to find the right words in Korean plaguing his speech.
He sobs harder when he forces himself to think of sad things. Abused dogs in a puppy mill. Muhammad Ali dying. People who live their lives unexposed to memes. Mingyu’s surprising his own self, at this rate. Pledis is sleeping on his immense talent in the acting department.
“Why are you crying, oh my god, Mingyu, uh, what did I say now?”
“You, you don’t understand!” Mingyu barely gets the words out, his faux tears clouding his vision.
“Wait what? I usually do, just tell me,” Minghao begs, brushing Mingyu’s bangs out of his eyes.
“I know you don’t feel this way, but I… ugh, you’d never understand,” and Mingyu’s cackling on the inside as he sees Minghao’s pupils dilate frantically. This is the moment, I’ve fooled him and he’s dabbing at my tears, I’m going to say DAB soon.
“You won’t understand, Minghao, “ Mingyu goes in for the kill, “because you’re straight-ou-”
“But I’m not! I’m not straight!”
Mingyu never gets to finish his words because Minghao takes his hands out of his face and pins them to his sides, a dead serious look in his eyes, and the words die on his lips.
Mingyu is dead silent. This isn’t about dabbin’ anymore. This isn’t about petty revenge. He knows this when Minghao’s eyes flutter shut and his own head’s moving towards Minghao to bridge the gap – and suddenly, he’s scared.
The fear grips him out of nowhere; the fear that he’s going to regret this, that they’ll never go back to the Ming and Min that played around as bros, never ditched each other for hoes; that they’ll become awkward, strained – and imagining a reality without Minghao’s constant nagging, without his punches and his accented Korean rips him apart.
Mingyu turns his head to the side at the last minute, Minghao’s lips colliding onto the shell of Mingyu’s ear instead.
“Uh, haha,” Mingyu chuckles nervously, looking down, “ I was going to say you came straight outta the hood back when you were in that wushu gang, and I was scared everytime we, uh, fought.”
When he looks into Minghao’s eyes, he looks down immediately, not ready to confront the gaze of hurt, of betrayal, of pain.
“You think that’s funny?” Minghao says, his voice exasperated, devastated. Regret courses through his veins, and this time, there are no tears – they’re all used up for the wrong reasons.
I fucked up.
“Minghao, I’m sorry, I thought-”
“Yeah, be sorry,” Minghao’s trying to smile. “You can’t ever crack awesome jokes. You don’t get memes. You’re not funny, haha,” Minghao chokes out a laugh, the smile on his face strained and tired, and something in Mingyu breaks.
“What a fucking dweeb,” Minghao continues to ramble, “I knew you were a dweeb from the first time we fought. And you’d better be scared, I could fuck you up in seventeen different ways, so we gotta stop fighting and like I’m not straight but it wouldn’t fucking matter because you don’t fucking care which is great because neither do I haha, you can’t dab and you even fell for my prank! Sike, you didn’t realise that this, uh, is one whole elaborate plan? Of course you didn’t, it’s prank-ception and you even sat staring and fucking breathing down on me for a grand total of twenty minutes, doing nothing, if I were a dumb fuck I would think you’re smitten but of course I’m not that dumb-”
“Of course!” Mingyu does the fake laugh again, and Minghao does the fake laugh back. He hates whatever’s happening right now. “Of course you aren’t that dumb. We’re not that dumb.”
“Yeah, bro,” Minghao says. “If you and me happened it’d be a… disaster. Never.” He pretends to vomit and the chuckle never really sounds genuine.
“Uh huh, that’d be fucked-up.” Mingyu puts a hand up for a high-five and Minghao misses him on purpose, his hands instead going to his eyes like he’s laughed till he’s cried – but when his hands wipe at his face there's clear liquid on the back of it and great.
Mingyu would like to say he’s confused, that he’s completely puzzled, that they’re both not sober; but the fact remains that they’re awake, and aware. It’s crystal clear, honestly. He knows, and Minghao knows, but Mingyu fucked up big time and Minghao’s doing it again, diverting everything with a smile, like they always do when shit gets out of hand, when they come to close to comfort – he’s saving Mingyu’s ass, saving his own pride.
It’s the vicious cycle. It’s screwed up and the guilt rests upon Mingyu’s shoulders, heavy and prickling into his skin. He was given a chance to revert the cycle when their eyes met and their lips almost touched – but he, the certified pussy of all pussies, chickened out.
And now, they’re back to square one.
Mingyu doesn’t know how to possibly survive the rest of the night with the rest of the members hungover, and the both of them as sober as a judge. All the alcohol is gone, and there’s only a jug of water left; and Minghao’s sitting up, checking his phone at 3 am – the laughter from just now gone from the empty shell of a person.
He scrolls through his own phone, showing Minghao a vine which usually makes Minghao double over in laughter. Minghao merely reciprocrates with a half-hearted smile.
“Hey,” Mingyu says, putting his head on Minghao’s shoulder. Minghao flinches.
“What.”
“Just now, uh, I.”
“Yeah?” He thinks he hears a lilt of hope in Minghao’s voice.
“I wanted to say dab, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” Minghao replies, and he knows he’s losing his patience.
“Like, because you were wiping at my tears. Dabbing at my tears.”
“Oh. Cool. Anything else?”
“Uh, nothing.”
“That’s great. I’m going to sleep,” Minghao gets up and turns off the strobe lights, turns off the karaoke machine, and the room’s plunged into darkness, save for the light from their phones.
“Well, uh, goodnight?” Mingyu tells Minghao in the darkness, but Minghao’s eyes are already shut, faced away from Mingyu, sleeping on the floor whereas Mingyu lies on the couch.
It takes less than two minutes before Minghao's soft snores join the the symphony of sleeping sounds from the rest of the group.
Mingyu lets his hand dangle off the sofa and strokes Minghao’s soft fringe, the locks slipping through his fingers; the words slipping out his mouth, like they have before, many times.
“I’m sorry, Minghao. I’m scared. I don’t know if I hurt you but, you’re smart enough, aren’t you? You’re smart enough to know we’d never work.”
The snores are his only reply. Mingyu lets his swollen eyes close and brings his own hand back to his chest; he lets sleep overcome him and take him to a realm where the guilt can’t reach him anymore.
It’s six, and Minghao wakes up, like he always does. He’s a man of routine. A man of sticking to the cycle.
From his place on the floor, he gets up into sitting position, his chin leaning on top of the leather couch’s sitting area. Mingyu’s snoring obnoxiously, and he stares at the man who looks like a god and speaks like he always has beef with him.
“I’m sorry, Mingyu. I shouldn’t have done it – I’m the dumb one here,” he says in Mandarin. “At least you knew we’d never work – while I still clung to hope, who loved you despite knowing it’d all blow up in my face.”
“I won’t scare you again. I’ll work on it, hyung.”
Today, the cycle’s a little different. Today he doesn’t end his morning routine by threading his fingers through Mingyu’s hair and going back to bed.
Minghao leans in close and drops a brief, chaste kiss on Mingyu’s temple, smiling miserably, his features etched in determination.
“I can do it. It’s hard, but I can stop loving you.”
He doesn’t go to bed – he’s scared that his dreams might pull him back into delusion – a realm where Mingyu’s hands are around his waist and they aren’t making any more pretentious bro jokes. He wants to work on it, right here, right now.
So he drinks a glass of water from the remaining supply in the jug on the table. Promises himself to never tell Mingyu about the cavity in his chest. Wakes the rest of the members up, one by one.
(And he leaves Mingyu to the last, because he’s the hardest to wake up. He’s always oblivious, always the last to know that everyone’s gotten up to their sad reality of schedules, of performances, of feelings. But this time, it’s alright if he’s the last. It’s alright if he doesn’t know – it’s better that he never does.)