Chapter Text
The apartment is so quiet now. Renjun sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the photo frame on his nightstand. His mother's smiling face frozen in time, a memory that doesn't hurt as much as it used to. It had been six months since the funeral, and the pain had dulled to a persistent ache in his chest. It reminded him of the time he had first gotten braces, and his teeth just wouldn't quite stop throbbing for days. The pain would only come back once he remembered there was a wire in his mouth.
He ran his fingers through his dark hair, feeling the weight of the day press down on him. School was school. Boring. Meaningless. The teachers drone on about subjects he didn't care about, his classmates laughed at things he didn't find funny, stressed about grades he couldn't bring himself to value. Everyone moved with a strange certainty. Everyone seems to exist in a world as actors, and he's watching everything from the same stage.
It was the structure of it all. The invisible architecture of rules that absolutely, absolutely no one questioned. The bell rings. You stand. You move. You sit. You copy. You repeat. Entire days sliced into identical segments by sound. How had everyone agreed that this was normal? That learning had to happen in 55 minute intervals? That curiosity could be scheduled between 10:15 and 11:10 a.m. and then shut off like a faucet?
Let's take the time to explain just exactly what went in his brain usually, when confronted by systems.
The cafeteria was the clearest example, it was a daily ritual so ordinary it was practically sacred. You queue. Of course you queue. What else would you do? There is no alternative, only the line, snaking between metal barriers, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, the smell of reheated food suspended in the air. He couldn't imagine another way to organize it, and that was the part that unsettled him most. How could something feel so absurd and yet so immutable?
First, you pay on your phone. Not for food, no, that would be too simple. You pay for the idea of a meal, which materializes later as a digital credit loaded onto your school card. A ghost transaction. Then, when hunger finally claws at your stomach, you scan the card between precisely 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Not 11:29. Not 2:03. If you're late, your purchased meal dissolves into nothing. It was already nothing, since you hadn't actually bought the meal itself, but now you just feel it. The money is gone. He imagined trying to explain this to someone from another planet ("Yes, we experience biological need, but only within authorized hours").
The tray waits at the end of the line, and it's a checkpoint. The rules begin, and vary from establishment to establishment: You must pick at least three items. Not two. Three. No more than one dairy-based dessert. You may have a fruit, but not two fruits, heaven forbid. You cannot exchange your fruit allocation for another dairy. The fruit slot is sacred. If you take an entrée, you cannot take soup. Why? No one knows. If Renjun wanted only soup, just soup and nothing else, there was no option for that. The system did not recognize singular desire.
The main meal was usually bad. Lukewarm pasta, limp vegetables, overcooked meat. And still, he had to pay for it in advance. He had to accept the fixed constellation of choices. The concept of paying for a meal he couldn't meaningfully choose felt like lunar dust: it existed and was very real technically, but incomprehensible when held up to the light. He'd stand there sometimes, tray in hand, staring at the compartments as if they were tiny administrative prisons. Carrots in one cell. Rice in another.
And everyone else just moved through it. Tap. Scan. Slide. Next. No one paused long enough to consider how strange it was that hunger had to be formatted, that nourishment had terms and conditions, that fruit could not be bartered for pudding. They accepted it the way people accept the sky is blue.
It seemed systems were natural phenomena instead of inventions to other people. He wondered how many other invisible frameworks he walked through each day without noticing. How many quiet absurdities structured his life. Sometimes he felt like the only one who could see the scaffolding.
𐔌 ﹒ ⋆ ıllı ⋆ 𓂃 ₊ ⊹
Renjun knows the problems, even if he doesn't want to acknowledge them. The most obvious one is that his mom is gone. The one person who made him feel seen is gone, and now he's stuck in this apartment with his stepfather, who's too busy working to even notice him most days, and his stepbrother.
His stepfather isn't a bad man. That's what makes it harder. He's the kind of guy other adults describe as solid and reliable, probably why his mom chose him. He always remembered to bring wine to dinner parties, for example. He works long hours, comes home tired, composed, and loosens his tie in the kitchen while asking him and his son about their day. There's nothing cruel in him, he just isn't Renjun's.
With his own son, he knows the right language, and the right sport reference, they have inside jokes from years Renjun wasn't there for. A casual shoulder squeeze, a ruffle of hair, a "Proud of you, nana" that lands cleanly and confidently. Renjun watches sometimes from the hallway, or takes the time to observe them at dinner time, aware of the invisible history that binds them. You can't compete with shared childhood.
With Renjun, his becomes polite. It always feels like he's interacting with a guest he wants to make comfortable but doesn't quite understand. Genuinely, it’s always "How was school?" in a neutral tone, and a nod at the answer, followed by a gentle suggestion to focus on grades, on the future, on practical things (which we have already established Renjun hates).
He tries, in his own structured way (which, again, we have already established Renjun hates). Pays for school lunches (hates, again). Keeps the lights on (lights hurt his eyes). Leaves money on the counter if Renjun mentions needing something (no complaints this time).
And Renjun gets it. He really does. The man is working himself thin with late meetings, early mornings and the stress of bills, responsibility lining his forehead in creases. He married into grief and a son who isn't his and doesn't quite know how to let him be. Renjun understands that love doesn't automatically install itself just because a ring was exchanged. He knows he can't expect this man to suddenly know how to reach him, and decode the way his mind spirals or the way silence can mean ten different things. Still, understanding doesn't cancel the ache.
There are moments when Renjun wishes his stepfather would knock on his bedroom door and sit at the edge of the bed, and just ask something, and ask why he stares at nothing for so long, and ask why he seems elsewhere even when he's sitting right there. He knows he already notices those things, because Renjun is very self aware about the image he reflects to the world.
He's a cool guy, just not for Renjun, and he hates himself a little for wanting more from someone who is already doing his best.
Everything about his stepbrother, however, seems aligned. He wakes up on time without three alarms, as his hair falls right without effort. He's good at sports, good at small talk, good at reading a room, knows how to cook, he’s organized and clean, good life hygiene.. Even when he shrugs, it looks intentional.
Perfect Jaemin.
Renjun doesn't think Jaemin tries to be that way. That could've been a bad thing but no, there's no arrogance in him. The rules of the cafeteria, the bells, the systems, blue pens over black pens, art, none of it scratches at him the way it scratches at Renjun. Jaemin is art himself.
Standing next to him, Renjun feels like a shadow cast at the wrong angle. But Jaemin has never once used that against him.
If anything, Jaemin is gentle. When Renjun skips dinner, he wordlessly leaves half his dessert on the counter. He stands a little closer in crowded spaces. If their stepfather's tone gets too sharp about grades or responsibility, Jaemin is the one who redirects the conversation. "I'll help him with it." "It's not a big deal."
He's reliable in that terrible way Renjun doesn't know how to be. When Jaemin says he'll pick him up, he actually shows up. When he promises to keep something private, it disappears into him like a locked drawer. Sometimes Renjun will sit on the edge of Jaemin's bed while he studies, but he never tells him to leave.
Perfect, perfect Jaemin.
Renjun knows he's putting him on a pedestal, and that he's smoothing over Jaemin's flaws, sanding them down until there's nothing left but shine. Maybe Jaemin gets irritated. It's logical he's tired sometimes. Renjun never asks. He prefers the version of Jaemin that feels untouchable, because he feels so safe with the constancy he is offered, it's almost mythic.
It's easier to admire him than to stand beside him as an equal.
Perfect Jaemin.
Renjun, orbiting.
𐔌 ﹒ ⋆ ıllı ⋆ 𓂃 ₊ ⊹
Grief, Renjun has decided, is not a single emotion. It's a rearrangement of reality. It shifts the weight of objects in your hands, which then makes changes in the acoustics of rooms.
To explain, after his mom died, the apartment didn't just feel emptier, because there is that too, but it felt incorrectly assembled, and someone just had to have put it back together from memory and gotten the proportions slightly wrong. The couch sits where it always has, the mugs line the cabinet shelf in the same row, but something fundamental is misaligned.
He used to think grief would be loud and emotional. Instead, it's administrative. Well, he guesses it can be very emotional, however he does notice the administrative part of it that must hit every grieving person (paperwork and phone calls, condolences in neutral tones, people saying she wouldn't want you to be sad as sadness is obviously a choice you toggle off). Life continues to demand compliance, and the system doesn't pause because your mother is gone. You still queue. You still eat. You still exist within the same narrow time slots. It's strange how ordinary everything remains.
Jaemin doesn't talk about her much. It seemed his grief moved differently. Renjun admires that about him, sometimes Jaemin will sit beside him on the floor, backs against the couch, and say nothing at all.
There are nights when Renjun tries to remember the exact sound of his mom's voice and panics when he can't. Memory is fragile. He hates that time keeps moving, it's taking stones and sanding down details without permission. He wonders if grief is partly the fear of forgetting. Loving someone could mean actively resisting erosion, so they hang out, they give phone calls, they try to be with them. Did he not love his grandmother? He should call her more often. And when that's no longer possible, is his love just taken away? Does he not love her anymore?
He wonders if grief is just love with nowhere to go. All that instinct (to text his mom when something absurd happens at school, to complain about stupid adult rules, to roll his eyes and hear her laugh on the other end) builds up with no outlet. It has no recipient. So it folds inward, becomes heavy and turns into lunar dust in his lungs. Maybe that's grief.
And maybe that's why he clings to Jaemin the way he does. Jaemin is proof that the past happened. They share that axis point, probably. Maybe it's stupid to see him as a living proof of that, and honestly a bit embarrassed even, knowing he and Jaemin didn't both come from the same mother.
Renjun thinks grief might be learning to live in a world that no longer contains the person who made it feel coherent. It's accepting that the scaffolding is visible, that you're now the only one to see it, you can see the systems, the absurdity of the world, and still have to move through them. Because you are still here.
𐔌 ﹒ ⋆ ıllı ⋆ 𓂃 ₊ ⊹
Jaemin's lamp threw a gold wash over everything, catching in the strands of Jaemin's hair and turning them almost brown instead of black. Light was strange like that. It's never really a color of its own, just wavelengths colliding with surfaces and bouncing back altered.
The bulb burned warm in the yellow-orange spectrum, and then suddenly black hair wasn't black at all up close, and it was layers of pigment swallowing most of the light and releasing only certain fragments back into the room. Change the temperature of the bulb, and you change the story.
Under white LEDs, Jaemin's hair looked ink-dark. Under this lamp, it softened, and turned almost chestnut at the edges, like the light was coaxing out a hidden version of him. Renjun thought that was almost embarrassingly beautiful.
Renjun sat near the headboard, shoulder brushing the wall, knees bent loosely in front of him. If light could alter perception, then he was simply studying the results (the way the glow traced the line of Jaemin's cheekbone, the way it pooled in the hollow beneath his collarbone where his shirt dipped slightly, the faint sheen along his jaw that made his profile look sculpted).
Jaemin was objectively good to look at. That was just a factual statement. Symmetry, clear skin, balanced proportions, anyone with working vision could acknowledge it. His lashes cast delicate shadows when he blinked. Renjun studied it, noticing how photons scatter and reflect and transform the ordinary into something almost holy.
His eyes kept drifting back as there's something hypnotic about watching Jaemin when he doesn't know he's being watched. The subtle tension in his jaw when he concentrates. The way he presses his tongue against the inside of his cheek while reading. There's a tiny mole just below his left eye, but Renjun knows exactly when the light hits it right.
Jaemin flips a page. The paper makes a soft, decisive sound and Renjun is suddenly pulled out of his observations. He noticed that outside, a car passes. The radiator clicks. The comforter has a little dip right where he is sitting and becoming acutely aware of his own breathing.
"Are you not bored?" Jaemin says, and it feels infinitely too loud for Renjun's ears, used to the silence of the room. But he couldn't say that, it'd be weird.
"Why would I be?" Renjun answers, confused. If I was, I wouldn't still be here. Why would I stay here if I was bored, knowing I could do something that doesn't bore me?
Jaemin turns his chair slowly, one foot pushing against the floor to swivel himself around. He rests his elbow on the desk and props his chin in his palm, studying Renjun now with open curiosity. "I don't know. You come here, you don't do anything, and you're still enjoying it? I'm not saying you can't, just trying to get it. I couldn't stand it a second."
Renjun shrugs, trying to look unaffected. "I like your room better."
"Is it something you can't do in your room?"
"No. That's why I like your room better."
Jaemin's mouth twitches, almost a smile. "That makes no sense."
"It does to me."
He narrows his eyes slightly. "Okay. Then what are you thinking about right now?"
Renjun's mind blanks in the worst possible way. "About?"
"Right now."
"Light," he blurts. "And how it changes things. Like your hair isn't actually that color right now. It's just the lamp helping it lie."
"My hair is being deceptive?"
"Technically, yes. It's all wavelengths and absorption. None of this is real."
Jaemin laughs softly and Renjun feels heat creep up his neck, but he forces himself to hold eye contact. "What? You asked."
Jaemin watches him for a moment before the amusement fades into something thoughtful. He leans back in his chair slightly, hands dropping into his lap. "I've also been thinking about something," he says. His foot nudges lightly against the desk leg, back and forth, back and forth. It's the only tell that this might matter.
"What?"
"I think I like guys," he says finally, then goes back to doing his homework.
Renjun's brain stutters. He stares at him.
People don't usually say things like that mid-homework, without preamble, without ceremony. Do they? Or is Renjun just naive? Maybe people do.
Maybe it's the way he's always imagined it: confessions delivered like declarations, dramatic, urgent, life-altering. But this is like a pebble dropped into water.
What is a coming out, anyway? Renjun thinks he understands it in theory. It's supposed to be a declaration, like a moment of courage or something. But what he just witnessed feels like none of those things. Was this a coming out, or was it just a statement? Is there even a difference? He guesses things like that didn't really need a label to metter but.. still. He doesn't know.
I like guys. He's known people who like guys. He has guy friends he likes, and genuinely enjoys being around. He has admired, envied, occasionally despised guys. He's had conversations about crushes and cartoons and sports. But for more than that, the language doesn't exist cleanly in his mind. How do you respond to a truth that has no vocabulary for your reaction? Compliment it? Thank it? Step back and examine it like a lab specimen?
Renjun wants to ask questions, but even framing them feels strange. Do you like me? Do you like anyone? Does this change anything? Should it change anything? The thoughts twist in his head, competing and contradicting. None of them seem polite, and all of them feel urgent. And why is he thinking about himself in relation to this? He doesn't even know why he's thinking about himself.
I like guys. It is impossible. It is ordinary. It is infinite. Renjun has no instructions for what to do. He's never been told how to react to someone who trusts you with themselves. He knew if he was the one coming out, Jaemin would know what to say. But he accepted his inferiority long ago.
"Oh," Renjun says, because language has abandoned him again.
Jaemin huffs a small breath that might be a laugh. "That's not a bad 'oh,' right?"
"No," Renjun answers quickly. "No. It's not bad."
Jaemin finally looks at him then. "I just didn't want you to hear it from someone else," Jaemin says. "Or think I didn't trust you."
"You trust me?" he asks.
Jaemin frowns slightly, like the question itself is strange. "Of course I do."
Renjun nods. The room hasn't changed. The lamp still hums. Cars still pass outside. Jaemin is still Jaemin, and he's still impossibly easy to look at. He made sure Jaemin wouldn't think he didn't want to look at him anymore. That night, when Jaemin came out, Renjun sincerely couldn't understand why that information made him happy.
𐔌 ﹒ ⋆ ıllı ⋆ 𓂃 ₊ ⊹
Renjun didn't look up when the whistle blew. The sound cut through the gym, and everyone else exhaled in relief, in laughter, in a loose post PE manner where their shoulders dropped and their voices got loud again. He stayed still for a second longer, staring at the volleyball court lines beneath his sneakers, bright blue and white against the varnished wood. They'd pinned him there.
His palms still stung faintly from the ball. He hated that sting, and the future bruises he was going to have on his wrists.
The net had stretched across the middle of the gym, and the ball had kept arcing over it so effortlessly whenever someone else touched it. He'd tried to make himself small at the back at first, but they'd called him forward anyway. "Renjun, you can come closer to the net," one of his teammates had said. "It's easier from here." They had shifted for him, creating space so he could stand closer than anyone else, as if the normal distance would have been too cruel for him and he couldn't handle it (the horrible part was he couldn't).
The first time he threw the ball, it slipped wrong from his hands. It hit the top of the net and fell straight down on their side in a dead, pathetic drop. He had felt the heat rush up his neck instantly, made his ears burn and his eyes sting. He had already been expecting groans, annoyed sighs, tiny flashes of frustration people usually tried to hide. Instead, someone on the other team had actually laughed softly and said, "It's okay, do it again."
If they had rolled their eyes, if someone had muttered under their breath, at least he could have folded himself around that. Anger he understood. Annoyance made sense.
His teammates had clapped for him when he managed to get the ball over the net on the second try. One of them had come to stand next to him, explaining how to angle his wrists, and how to step forward properly. "You're doing fine," they had said.
He had wanted to cry right there.
It felt like being wrapped in bubble wrap in front of everyone. They had all silently agreed he was the most fragile thing on the court. Somewhere deep down, he knew they meant well. Even if it wasn't pity, it had felt like it. It felt like standing under a spotlight labeled delicate.
He slipped out before anyone could talk to him more. He made it to the bathroom before his vision blurred too badly and locked himself in the farthest stall to finally let his bag slide off his shoulder.
The tears came fast and hot. He pressed the heel of his palm against his eyes, furious at himself for this too. This was the most nonsensical and dramatic he's ever felt.
𐔌 ﹒ ⋆ ıllı ⋆ 𓂃 ₊ ⊹
The bathroom door swung open just as Renjun finished splashing cold water onto his face. He was too busy staring at the sink, at the way the droplets slid down porcelain and disappeared, wishing it were that easy to rinse himself clean of the feeling.
Sneakers squeaked faintly against tile.
"Renjun?" Jaemin stopped short the second he saw him. His voice shifted instantly, confused first, then soft. "Oh. What happened?"
Renjun straightened, turning away from the mirror. His eyes were still red, he could feel it. "Nothing," he said.
Jaemin didn't buy it, apparently. He stepped closer, gym bag sliding off his shoulder, brows pinched together. His PE class was next. He was supposed to be changing, laughing with the others, complaining about warm-ups.
"Did someone say something?" Jaemin asked gently before inspecting his body. "Did you get hurt?"
"No." Renjun's jaw tightened. "It's nothing."
Jaemin hesitated, then reached out, fingers brushing Renjun's sleeve, testing glass for fractures. "Hey. It's okay if you had a bad class. You don't have to be good at volleyball. They probably weren't even thinking about it. You did fine."
The same soft, padded language he'd been drowning in for the past hour wrapped around him again, and it was suffocating.
"I said it's nothing," he snapped.
Jaemin blinked.
"I don't need you to tell me it's okay," Renjun went on. "I'm not—" He cut himself off, frustrated breath shaking. "I'm not five, Jaemin."
The silence that followed felt awful. The second the words left his mouth, guilt flooded in. He hadn't meant to sound like that. Jaemin didn't deserve that. He was just being kind. Renjun's fingers curled against the edge of the sink, he's not even making sense to himself.
"I’m sorry, I—"
Jaemin's expression didn't harden, he didn't look offended either as he sighed softly, pretty much like someone who'd just realized the problem wasn't what he first thought.
"Okay," he said after a moment. Renjun looked away and another second passed before Jaemin stepped forward decisively, grabbing Renjun's wrist. "Come on."
"What?"
"Come on."
He tugged him toward the door. Renjun resisted at first out of instinct. "Jaemin, your class—"
"Yeah," Jaemin replied simply.
The door swung open again. He kept walking, leading him down the corridor, past the lockers, past the stairs that would have taken him back toward the gym. It took Renjun a few steps to understand he wasn't heading toward the changing rooms, and a few more to understand he was heading toward the parking lot.
Jaemin finally let go of his wrist only to dig into his pocket for his keys. The familiar beep of his car unlocking echoed between the rows of parked vehicles.
"You're going to skip," he said softly.
Jaemin shrugged. "I don't feel like playing volleyball," he replied lightly.
Renjun knew better. Jaemin liked sports. He liked moving, liked competition, and definitely wasn't the type to skip. He decided he'd think about what this meant later, as he's already way too exhausted for any mental effort.
Their eyes met over the roof of the car. Renjun hesitated before moving but still slid into the passenger seat. As Jaemin started the engine, Renjun leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He still felt fragile.
The café they had went to was so quiet it made everything feel better. They were alone, so not even the sound of conversation or the hiss of an espresso machine could demand Renjun his attention. It felt far away from the gym, from whistles, the way they echoed, the sharp sting of volleyball against his skin.
Jaemin sat across from him with a slice of cheesecake, fork in hand, eating, because nothing catastrophic had happened that morning. He occasionally glanced up to make sure Renjun was still there.
Renjun hadn't touched his drink, and instead went back to his favorite activity, he just watched him.
He watched as Jaemin leaned slightly over the table. He scraped the fork gently against the plate to gather crumbs so none went to waste, before taking another bigger bite out of the cake. He noted his expression softened just before their eyes 'accidentally' met, and Renjun knew he was checking for cracks but pretending he wasn't.
Why would you do that?
Why do people help at all?
Renjun stared at the way the sunlight caught in Jaemin's hair, very different from his bedroom lamp.
Was kindness always about the other person? Or was it sometimes about the one offering it? Sometimes he felt horrible that every act of kindness was simply his own selfish behavior, easing his own discomfort at seeing someone else struggle.
But maybe that wasn't what happened at all, that was a very odd hypothesis and he doubted that was why they had done that.
Renjun didn't dislike kindness because he was ungrateful. He disliked it because kindness, in the wrong light, felt like a verdict. When someone softened their voice or adjusted their expectations, it carried an unspoken assumption that he couldn't handle the full weight of something. He guesses he just hears that assumption louder than the reassurance itself. Certain kinds of kindness weren't neutral.
Nice people also forced him into a position of debt. To be treated gently is to be seen clearly in a moment of weakness. Being seen like that creates a certain imbalance (because now you owe composure, gratitude, improvement). You owe proof that their patience wasn't wasted, but that pressure sat heavier than open criticism ever could. Criticism could be resisted and argued with, but "good" demanded acceptance. You can't reject it without looking cruel.
Kindness illuminated the exact crack he was insecure about. If he hadn't yet accepted that crack himself, then someone else's acceptance of it felt premature, and invasive.
So it wasn't kindness itself he hated. It was the version of it that arrived before belief, that assumed he needed handling. Instead of "it's okay if you fail," he'd prefer "I know you can do this." Because one preserves you as you are, and the other dares you to become more.
Jaemin swallowed another bite of cheesecake and finally spoke. "Are you going to keep staring at me like that?"
Renjun blinked, caught.
He looked down at the table. "Why did you skip?" he asked quietly.
Jaemin shrugged, but there was a small smile tugging at his mouth. "I didn't feel like going."
"That's not true."
"You looked like you were about to disappear," he said simply.
Maybe some people don't need explanations. That idea both fascinated and unsettled Renjun, because it went against everything he knew about connection.
He lived by explanations, by patterns, by the logic that could make behavior make sense. He noticed things, sure, subtle shifts in tone, the faintest hesitations, but understanding someone else fully, without their map, without their careful walkthrough was impossible.
Jaemin, he realized, had the capacity to perceive without being told, and to bridge the distance between minds without signs or proofs, and to simply see. That kind of understanding made him uneasy because it didn't fit into the framework he'd built for interacting with the world.
"I was mean," he muttered.
Jaemin tilted his head, wincing. "A little."
Guilt pricked again. "Sorry."
Jaemin waved it off. "You were upset."
That was it.