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“Did Renjun reject you?” Chenle asks, when Donghyuck slips into bed and dims the lights immediately.
(“Donghyuck, what are you doing here?” With the camera crew on their end all gone to bed for the night, Mark didn’t bother disguising the hostility in his voice. His face was a half-scowl, brows arched and eyes narrowed.
“I just wanted to talk to Renjun,” Donghyuck said, crossing his arms. “Is there a problem?”)
“Renjun hates me,” Donghyuck says. He wishes he could fully endorse it as a joke, maybe something an overzealous editor pitched as a concept for their love triangle, but the truth is he isn’t so sure himself.
“Are you hurt?”
(“Rules were meant to be broken, Renjun,” Donghyuck had said. He hadn’t even bothered with Mark. As long as Renjun agreed, he wasn’t above begging. “Come on, we can just switch in the morning before we start filming. Nobody has to know.”
The space where Renjun hesitated was just barely wide enough to fill dreams. He looked around again, visibly conflicted, and Donghyuck almost allowed himself this little hope, but Mark took Renjun’s hand, squeezing it in his own.
“Donghyuck, I'm a little tired,” Renjun had said softly. “We can talk more in the morning, okay? Stop bothering me for now.”)
“Why’s it have to be Mark?” Donghyuck scoffs. Under cover of darkness his words feel less taboo. Easier to let the ugly thoughts surge. “What's so special about him?” It’s a useless question, of course, because he already knows the answer to it. Mark Lee, boy genius from Canada, who walked into the training room one day with his earnest smile and won all their hearts with a simple awkward bow. But Renjun is sweet and intelligent and Donghyuck aches so badly for him, and even if Donghyuck understands, it’s so hard to let this go.
Mark has never had to try. He's everyone’s golden boy. The company’s. Dream’s. Renjun's. Donghyuck loves him dearly too, even with the envy hardened and sunken like cement in his stomach.
(“It’s just the rules,” Mark began, stepping out from behind him. He looked pretty pleased with himself for thinking of such an excuse, as if he hadn’t flaunted them just as much as they had in the past. “We matched in the rock, paper, scissors game.”)
“Who doesn’t want Mark?” Chenle murmurs. “There’s just something about him that draws you to him.”
Maybe Donghyuck would’ve let this slip ago at other times. He's had this hunch for a while. At first he’d thought it was jealousy, but Chenle has lived his entire life in the limelight, and yet the way he watches Mark is akin to a starving animal watching their prey. The despondent feeling in him has changed shape and taken on the form of something more cruel.
“You too, huh?” Donghyuck chuckles sardonically, seizing the sentence between his teeth. “What is this? The reject bin?”
“Fuck off,” Chenle says. He doesn’t deny anything though, just lets his hand clap onto his forehead and flop through his hair. He hasn’t even bothered to get under the covers--content to freeze rather than admit weakness.
There’s a stretch of silence, overtaken by the discomfort of suddenly being known to the other person. Chenle rolls over, testing different angles before he finally settles down.
“Did you at least put up a fight? Oh,” his eyes light up with a kind of self cannibalizing bloodthirst Donghyuck feels mirrored on his own face. “Did you beg?”
(“Renjun,” Donghyuck said. “Just think about it, okay? I want to stay with you. Come on, it’ll be fun.” Renjun, the truth is I like you. I want you.
“Renjun,” Donghyuck said. “Please.”)
“Yeah.”
“That’s pretty pathetic.” The sting barely registers. Donghyuck feels numb. Possessed. Like the cameras are still rolling, and this is just something the company scripted for views. A fake reality.
“I know it is,” he says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your standards, President Zhong.”
Chenle yawns lazily at the ceiling. “Not many do. Why’d you even bother? You know Renjun didn’t really want to pair with you. You should’ve just sat it out.”
“Sat it out?” Donghyuck scoffs. “What, like you do? Just sit on my ass and watch?” It’s a low blow. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t land easily.
Sure enough, Chenle snaps back. “At least I’m not pining like some sorry bitch on camera for someone who clearly doesn’t want me. I have some dignity .”
“What, and you’re not chasing after Mark every day demanding he spend time with you? It’s not like Mark is stupid, you know. He knows you’re in love with him, he’s just ignoring it on purpose because that’s the way he is.”
Because Mark is oblivious to all things he chooses not to notice. Because Mark would let Chenle do anything, give him as much attention as he needed to make him his center of orbit; anything except have his feelings reciprocated. Sometimes Donghyuck wishes he didn’t know these people so well, didn’t know their insecurities and flaws and their terrible, terrible habits just as much as he knows himself.
Chenle is silent. Donghyuck can hear his jaw working furiously, trying to generate a response, and the satisfaction that rears within him is ugly and sickening.
“You’re right,” he says, at last, deflating altogether. It’s a bitter, costly victory. There has never been a point in striking down an enemy that’s essentially a strawman of himself.
“Anyway, what’s dignity in comparison to having Renjun?” Donghyuck says, forlorn. He rolls over, face down on his pillow. The urge to fight is gone. “Just look at Mark. He doesn’t need any of that.”
“Mark,” Chenle says, wistful. Donghyuck wishes he would stop. He hates that tone all the more because he knows the exact notes of it as well as he does their comeback single. “Isn’t it enough for him to spend time with you? For him to smile at you?”
It’s not. Chenle knows this just as well as he does.
“It makes it worse.” He’s sure if somebody ever made a list of the worst things you could do as an idol, falling in love with a bandmate would be somewhere near the top. Proximity is a knife in the gut. There’s just no feasible way to remove it safely without bleeding out.
“It does. But that’s the punchline.” Chenle laughs, an ugly hiccuping noise. “You feel like you need it so badly that you would sell the entire world for it. Isn’t it so funny?”
“Hilarious.”
There’s something so frustratingly fickle about the chemical reactions that power the human heart. It’s what leads him to his next, unwanted thought: Renjun, curled up against Mark. Mark’s hand against his hip, across his back.
“Do you think they’re fucking right now?”
“Duh,” Chenle says.
“You could’ve said no.”
“Why’d you even ask?”
Donghyuck huffs. “You want to throw a pity party and fuck too?”
“You?” Chenle snorts. “And me? Not a chance.” His voice is pitched low and subdued. Unable to even muster up mockery at what Donghyuck thinks is a frankly ridiculous idea, even from his own mouth.
“You’re right,” he sighs. “We’d never work out.” They’d be a supernova, together, two stubborn, blunt, incredibly fragile people used to manipulating whatever means they had to get their own way. Neither of them would ever want to relent. They’d tear each other apart piece by piece, shred the other person between themselves.
Irony. He and Chenle are similar in all the worst possible ways. Even in this.
“Sometimes I wish it could’ve been someone else,” Donghyuck says, after a long while. He isn’t sure if Chenle is still awake. “Maybe if it were like, Jeno or Jaemin. I'm sure they’d be open to a third.”
“They’re freaks,” Chenle agrees.
Or it could’ve been you, he thinks. He tries to imagine feeling the same flutter in his chest with Chenle, like the sun smiling down upon him, and wonders why it’s so unthinkable to love someone else like he does Renjun.
---
Chenle wakes up feeling like the bitterness in his chest has gone and dried in his eyes overnight. His neck is stiff from the awkward angle he’d fallen asleep in, trying to keep as much distance between them as possible after that conversation in the dark left him feeling strange and unsettled.
Donghyuck is curled on his side, back to him. Chenle wonders briefly if he should wake him up, before he decides against it.
His reflection looks back at him as he washes his face, dejected. Tired, weary eyes. Childish, vulnerable eyes. In the mirror, Chenle scowls, before he slips his sunglasses on and the effect is lost.
The noodle pot has just boiled over. when Mark and Renjun stumble in, Mark trailing Renjun slightly. Hands in his pockets, he takes a little too long to take his shoes off at the door, staring down at the mat. Looking to see if Donghyuck’s are there.
Mark barely looks at him. He stalks around the room, pacing a wide circle around the table and moving past the camera view, as if Donghyuck will manifest from behind the TV screen, or the curtains in a game of hide and seek.
Chenle stares until even he feels demented for it. Renjun smiles as he greets him, and Chenle seizes the distraction.
“Look at this,” he says, lifting the lid over his egg tomato dish.
Renjun leans down. The collar of his jacket flattens a little and brushes mockingly over the hickey on his neck. The chopsticks in Chenle’s hand scrape angrily against the bottom of the pot.
“Yah, Renjun,” he says, gesturing at his own neck. “You should be more careful. You're going to give the editors a headache.”
“Oh.” Renjun laughs behind his hand, cheeks slightly flushed. He and Mark glance at each other from across the table, a silent, intimate thing, before Renjun smiles and tugs his collar up more securely. “I'm sorry about that,” he says to the film crew, ducking his head.
“You should be,” Chenle says, before he can stop himself. It's only when Renjun withdraws a little that he realizes his mistake, and he adds a belated eye roll, clapping the other on the shoulder. “Not all of us are getting some, you know. Some of us are cold and lonely.”
Mark chuckles too loudly. As if he’s suddenly developed an instinct for misery, he makes his way over, slipping an arm around Renjun easily. Like this, they look like such a perfect picture of domesticity that Chenle would almost feel happy for them, if he hadn’t visited the same scenario with himself and Mark over and over again in his own head. “By the way, do you know where Donghyuck is?”
Chenle feels his own laughter crawl out of his throat and sit on his tongue like a venomous spider.
“I think he’s still asleep,” he says. “He hasn't come down yet.”
“I'm going to go find him,” Mark says. With that, he turns and leaves, not a word about the noodles still boiling away merrily on the table.
“I should probably go too,” Renjun says. “I need to talk to Donghyuck about something.”
Chenle watches him follow Mark, white coat against the tinted window panes. The spring is still frosty and unwelcoming, and Renjun shivers as he steps outside. Mark catches him in his arms and pulls him closer, hand rubbing at his side. He leans down to whisper in his ear and they share a laugh behind the curtain.
There isn’t even a misguided romantic rival or an eager cameraman this time to justify the display. It’s something entirely heartfelt. Chenle turns away like he’s been burned.
He wonders when he’ll learn to lower his expectations enough that the result stops being disappointing.
Mark and Renjun return soon with Jaemin, grinning and smiling in a way that makes Chenle’s eye twitch. At least someone can be happy. Jeno follows, his pink hair fuzzy and static against his face. Jisung too, looking sleepy and unenthusiastic.
Donghyuck is the last to walk in, after they’ve all given up on waiting for him. He looks awful.
Not as awful, of course, as the way Mark sits up, a kind of perverse satisfaction framing his face. He doesn’t even have to say anything. Chenle wishes he’d let Jisung sit in the center now; being able to see Mark’s expression of triumph is a reminder that even Donghyuck is worth more of his attention.
“What’s wrong with everyone today?” Jeno says, shrugging Donghyuck off his shoulder awkwardly. He peers over at all of them curiously, hair falling into his eyes. A hysterical laugh wheezes out of Mark.
The conversation continues, stilted. Chenle stirs at his porridge, choppy and overly aggressive.
“It’s done,” he says.
“Thank you, Chenle,” Mark says. “You saved me breakfast.” It’s what Chenle’s been waiting for this whole time, but it falls short. The vague feeling of lightness Chenle had started cooking with has congealed like soggy noodles into a nasty, spiteful thing.
A joke about Mark being his son crosses his mind only as a reminder that he should. He can’t bring himself to say it though, just stares angrily at his food behind the safety of his sunglasses. “I’m glad,” he says.
Chenle had thought he’d resigned himself to picking and choosing the things he could allow himself to obsess over. The small smiles on Mark's face. The grateful looks when he takes care of him and cooks and the giggles he lets out when they play video games together.
(At least. At least, he’s smart enough to not try to pit himself against Renjun when it comes to Mark.
In many ways, Donghyuck is a precautionary tale. He's a reminder that sometimes not knowing is better, that it’s better to simply not try, to be content, rather than to be reminded so forcibly of what is unattainable.)
“Renjun,” Donghyuck says. With his hair all mussed, perfect layers of idol makeup peeled off his tired face, he looks so vulnerable. Like a kicked dog, still begging for scraps. At least with dogs, Chenle thinks, they put cones around their heads to keep them from scratching wounds open. “Is there another one of these?” He holds up the Pepsi can in his hand, but Chenle imagines if he could, he would say Renjun, is there another one of you?
“No.” The sound of the can hitting the table is a sigh of defeat. Renjun relents, pulling the entire bag of drinks lying on the floor next to him to pass one to Donghyuck.
They carry on the same muted charade. Chenle relaxes a little. Renjun brushes his arm in silent thanks for the food. Mark responds “ham and cheese” when they ask about beverages, in his stupid, obliviously endearing Mark manner. Mid-discussion about food preferences, Donghyuck reaches out.
“All I need is you,” he says. A touching sentiment, as if he hadn’t still been silently begging for Renjun to notice him. Chenle laughs, a little awkward, grasps the tips of his fingers indulgently. Maybe this is okay.
But Mark is of the mind to twist the knife further today. “Haechan and Chenle, did you guys have a good sleep?” he drawls after a round of rock, paper, scissors, as if that miserable game has reminded him of his victory. He’s looking at Donghyuck, of course, eyebrows raised. Still gloating over the fact that he has Renjun. He never glances at Chenle once. Of course he wouldn’t--why would he?
Subtlety has never been Mark’s forte. Chenle wants to swallow his chopsticks whole.
“We slept well,” Donghyuck says placidly. “Chenle gave me a hug.” Even tired and worn down, he turns the conversation around with ease, starting a mild argument over Mark’s cooking skills. Chenle interjects despite himself, half-heartedly defending Mark.
“I don’t need to be good at cooking,” Mark says. His smile is all bared teeth, like he wants to tear Donghyuck’s throat open. “You guys are so good at it.”
“Now, what would you do without me?” Donghyuck says. His voice trails purposely, an insinuation of weakness. Across from him, Mark leans over, staring back at him challengingly.
Chenle’s fists clench. Nobody else seems to want to diffuse the situation, content to sit there and pick at their food. “I’m so full,” he says. “But I still want to eat more.”
It seems to bring Donghyuck back and he responds in kind, but Mark clams up, like he’s disappointed there wasn’t actually a fight.
As they’re about to leave, Renjun stops him, arm on his shoulder. “Chenle,” he says “Are you okay?”
“Drop it, Renjun,” he says. “It's nothing.”
---
(“Do you think it’ll ever get better?” Donghyuck says. His breath fogs in the brief light of their phones, washed out against the night sky. Chenle hunches over, hands stuck in his pockets to brace against the wind.
“I don’t know,” he says. It’s the most honest he’s allowed himself to be with this in a very long time. “I want it to.”
His heart feels like a bottomless well. He thinks if he could, he would bury it here in the sand under the foam of the waves and let the sea take it. Whisper his secret into a bottle and stopper it forever.
“It’ll get easier, I think,” Donghyuck says. “At least with the comeback, there’ll be other things to worry about.”
Easier is not necessarily better. Donghyuck is an incredible wordsmith when he chooses to be. Chenle hums. He reaches out and slings an arm around Donghyuck’s shoulders, eyes turned up to the moon.
“Ah, come here.” Donghyuck pulls him closer, head resting on his shoulder. “Give me a hug. I need one.”
Chenle sighs against him. “It’ll get easier,” he repeats, and tells himself he believes it too.)