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Falling in love with Mark Lee starts with absolutely hating him.
It’s more counterintuitive than Donghyuck would like to think he usually is, but he can’t help it when the boy seems to be trying to set him off.
When he’s just thirteen years old he joins SM, as one of several trainees they usher in that year, and only then is his life entirely flipped upside down. Mark Lee is there, just a bit older than him, probably a bit more mature, certainly better than him at a lot of things. He greets Donghyuck in not-quite-comfortable Korean and laughs louder than he should most of the time.
Donghyuck hates it. There has always been a part of his heart tucked deeply, safely away from his brain, hiding somewhere under his skin and his bones, that liked the blush of other boys’ faces when they laugh. He knows that the way that his throat feels heavy and painful when certain boys playfully push his shoulder isn’t normal. He knows that this is what happens when he’s around Mark Lee, and it doesn’t make him feel any more normal when Mark can clearly tell this about him, too.
They train together, with all of them, for a long time. They’re the building blocks of some project that will change the company’s legacy, some production board pieces that will put all of their names on billboards if they manage to make it big. As long as Donghyuck gets to sing, that’s all fine and dandy to him.
And it is, for a while, fine. And then the real training starts.
The kind of training that puts them before a camera and teaches them how to act, and the kind of training that tells him exactly what role he will play if he wants that name shining on a billboard somewhere far from here. That’s when it becomes unavoidable.
Mark Lee gets under his skin in those few moments.
They argue more than they ever actually talk, during that time. About dancing, about singing, about the weather, about who snores too loudly at night. If it exists, Donghyuck has berated Mark for it, and Mark has insulted Donghyuck for it right back.
The unbearable back and forth goes on for one year. But Donghyuck continues to grow closer to the others, to look up to the rest of his would-be group mates, as long as they all make it.
He laughs with Jaemin and he grows reliant on Taeyong’s soft words. He spends nights on the video game system Jeno buys, spends days singing with Dongyoung until both of their throats are giving up. The camera loves him, in his white rookie tee with his round cheeks and his bright laugh.
It’s probably the stark difference between this and the anger he carries when they argue that brings Mark to him, finally.
The first conversation, if he remembers correctly, starts with Mark throwing a bag of chips at him from the dorm room doorway.
“I saw your practice today,” Mark says, as though he’s forcing the words through his throat. “It was really good. I’m sure you’ll debut with us soon.”
It was only a few months from the start of it all, NCT U’s final preparations to launch.
“Thanks,” Donghyuck says, a bit suspicious. “Do you have something to say or—”
“I just want to know why,” Mark says suddenly. “Why everyone loves you and you just— drive me crazy, you know?”
Mark was only sixteen, then. Donghyuck realizes that now. His face was still soft and his voice was still not as tough as he wanted it to be yet, but there he was, facing the world head on.
Donghyuck, struck silent for once, just motions him in.
“Sit down,” he calls, “Play a game with me, and you’ll figure it out.”
Mark does, of course. Not long after that, NCT U makes their debut, Donghyuck’s name becomes Haechan, and though he doesn’t know it, for that brief moment, Mark Lee becomes his.
—
It doesn’t clear everything up, not nearly enough. It’s a start, though.
NCT Dream’s debut hits, and Mark is now Donghyuck’s freshly-minted Good Friend Most Of The Time. He’s also the leader of several obnoxious teenagers, and Donghyuck supposes that is why the arguing starts again.
It’s a day they’re at a photo shoot, or something along those lines, when they've gotten into it again. The other members roll their eyes, as they always do, but the bickering goes on until they’ve all had enough and left the room.
Only when they’re alone, Donghyuck hisses, “You’re getting on my damn nerves– What, you don’t wanna go yell and destress on anyone else?”
Mark doesn’t back down. It’s not his style. “That’s not what this is. This is different and you know it.”
“Different?!” Donghyuck says, standing from his seat. “What, is it different because I like you? Is that why we’re still standing here fighting? I freak you out that badly?”
Mark’s face drops. “What— that’s not— I wouldn’t act like this because of that.”
“But you knew, didn’t you?” Donghyuck grits out.
Mark looks anywhere but at him, with this miserable little frown on his face. Eventually he gets his voice back, and replies, “Even if I did. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to be close to you. It doesn’t mean that I can’t care.”
Donghyuck’s eyes drift shut. He sighs. “Not in the way I mean. I’ll be ready in a bit. Leave me alone.”
Mark’s voice is so small when he replies that Donghyuck almost thinks he made it up. Mark says softly, “It could be. In the way you mean.”
His eyes open slowly. “What?”
“Just… just give me some time,” Mark sighs. Donghyuck blinks, dumbfounded. Mark’s ears have turned a faint shade of pink, and Donghyuck realizes that he’s serious. He almost laughs.
He has all of the time in the world, if that’s all he’s asking Donghyuck for.
—
That was a long shot in the dark, Donghyuck knows now that he’s twenty five, but it found its target anyways. He never would’ve imagined Mark thought of him in that way at all, not even if his life were on the line.
Mark has a lot of love to give, he finds out, and he was foolish for thinking that it would be limited by something like that.
They kiss for the first time when Donghyuck is seventeen years old, in the dorm room when it is dark and nobody is awake to see them.
Donghyuck finds that Mark likes to laugh when he kisses, and he likes to hold tight when he laughs.
He blinks the years away. Tour after tour, album after album. At the very least, they reap the benefits of having the same dual group schedule. There are anniversaries and shared wardrobes, shared hotel rooms, shared lives. There’s meetings with managers when it becomes impossible to hide, but even those aren’t that bad when Donghyuck isn’t going through them alone.
Before he knows it, he’s twenty two, and everything is Mark. They rise with the sun for their long days, and he’s always there, waiting. On the good days, when there is laughter and singing echoing off the walls, sweaty skin, and teeth carving love into him, and those fragile words that Mark says like a mantra in every language he knows. And the bad ones, the bad ones that come more often than what should be normal; Donghyuck holds him when it becomes too much, sometimes, when Mark barely has time to breathe, let alone time to sleep.
Sometimes there are months apart, especially when the company gives Mark another group to juggle. Sometimes there are days that Donghyuck only hears his voice for a few minutes through the phone. Eventually, though, he always comes back, and Donghyuck will hold him again. Stay with me, he’ll tell him.
Mark plays guitar for him on the rare days they have to themselves. He’d been shy about his singing voice for a while, especially in front of Donghyuck, but the years take that, too.
Perhaps Donghyuck might have noticed faster if he’d kept track of the day that Mark stopped playing for him.
—
Two days before everyone else will find out, and weeks before the whole world, Donghyuck finds himself sitting alone in a barely lit practice room, staring at the city skyline through the glass.
Donghyuck wants to laugh at the people walking by the street below, for fear he’ll fall apart if he doesn’t. Instead, he whispers it out loud to nobody in particular— Mark Lee broke up with me today.
It doesn’t make it feel any more real. After all, he’d woken up beside the guy just a few hours ago. He’s pretty sure the pajama shirt he was wearing was Mark’s, too. How Mark slept next to him knowing that it was already over, he’s not sure.
But there it was, clear as day, when the morning hit: Mark sitting at the table, undereyes heavy, saying the words: I need to tell you something. Maybe he hadn’t actually slept at all.
Donghyuck hugs his knees. They’d spent a lot of hours in this practice room, and the ones just like it, wasting their youth away to the sixteen count of a song on loop. Donghyuck had somehow foolishly assumed that was what they would be doing for the rest of their lives. After all, that billboard had always been his dream. Maybe it wasn’t everybody else’s.
In two days, everyone else will find out. He’s already blown off Renjun’s concerned eyes twice today. Donghyuck isn’t supposed to know, even, but it was one of the last acts of kindness Mark could give him; time. Not forever, but just enough.
—
Two weeks before the world will know, they find out in a meeting. Not entirely by surprise, either; Mark didn’t make the decision on a whim. He’d talked with most of them about the pros and cons. Nobody seemed to think he would actually do it. Nobody seemed to think that leaving Donghyuck would be a part of it, too.
(Donghyuck didn’t either. Not until the morning when Mark had kissed his knuckles for what would probably be the last time.
“I want to love you, Hyuck, and I do,” Mark had said. “But if I keep living like this, it will kill me inside.”
That was the reason Donghyuck had accepted it. He didn’t give Mark his shirt back, but he hadn’t tried to stop him. It was the way things were meant to go when your life was on a contract.)
“What’s he going to do?” Renjun asks him, after the meeting is over.
It’s blinding to realize only right then that he has no idea.
Maybe Donghyuck will spend the next few years listening to his solo career and wondering if any of the words are for him. Maybe he’ll get a kind text on his birthday. Or maybe he will watch Mark return home, to a different country, a different world, far away from that billboard he’d dreamed of when he was thirteen. Maybe Donghyuck will sit on a tour bus years from now and stare out of the shaking glass window as the buildings pass, and wonder what mundanity is doing to the smile he’d loved.
Renjun’s arms are warm, but they do nothing to combat the numbness that comes with that silence. He doesn’t hug back.
Donghyuck just stands there, and realizes he was lucky to get what he did. He’s realized many things, this most of all:
Loving Mark Lee ends in letting him go.