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Yuhi doesn’t know whatever it is he has going on with Tomoya, so don’t ask him.
These days, he thinks they’re getting closer. Tomoya, as cold as he can be, has been initiating touch more often: patting his head, leaving a hand on his waist, the occasional side hug. It’s both new and familiar, and he tries not to be too eager every time it happens. It reminds him of when it was just the two of them against the world, bumbling together in an unfamiliar environment. Sometimes they walk to JYP together on the way to voice lessons. Another time, a late-night convenience store run when they were both craving ramyeon. It’s not a bad change. Perhaps filming the NEX2U episode was enlightening for both of them. He did ask for more attention, so why does it make him want to run a lap around JYP whenever they’re in contact?
Although Yuhi denies it vehemently every time, it does make him a little giddy inside, this newfound skinship. He tries not to read too much into it. For all he knows, it’s just Tomoya taking his feedback and trying to improve. With everything that hyung is thinking about, Yuhi couldn’t possibly ask to add his own complicated feelings on top of the mix of leader responsibilities and every single extracurricular activity the average human body could handle that Tomoya was juggling. Not that there were any feelings— scratch that.
Their comeback is in a few weeks, which means the onslaught of endless filming of content and hours of learning choreography and sitting through fittings. It’s a lot of excitement, but also so much work and preparation. It usually meant they’d all be drained by the end of their schedules and they wanted nothing more than to sleep once they got home.
This particular day ended much like that, with the seven members trudging through the doors of their dorm and retreating to their respective rooms to get some rest.
Well.
All of them except for one.
“Hyui-yah, are you even listening?”
He was not. “What did you say?”
Tomoya, with all his excess energy, was practically bouncing off the walls and annoying everyone in sight. His stamina was truly a mystery. Didn’t he ever get tired? He had barged in his and Seita’s shared room and kept going on and on about the most inane things.
By the time a full hour passes, Yuhi’s had enough. It was past midnight and Tomoya was showing no signs of shutting up. Seita stopped entertaining him 15 topics ago and had gone to bed, pointedly wearing a pair of headphones. Something had to be done.
“You’re so fucking restless, I bet you can’t lie still for more than 15 minutes,” Yuhi says.
The older lets out an indignant squawk. “What?! I can too!”
And that’s all it takes. It’s so easy. It’s like stealing candy from a baby. Tomoya’s diving onto his twin bed with single-minded focus, the same way he approaches everything else in life.
No way this is NEXZ’s genius leader, Yuhi thinks to himself.
So now they’re both crammed onto this tiny bed, scrolling on their phones for some blissfully silent minutes of their extremely busy lives. It feels like their trainee nights which were always full of sleepovers and endless chats and gaming. Yuhi could almost imagine that they’re normal teenagers on a sleepover, except normal teenagers don’t usually scroll through tweets upon tweets of themselves on Twitter. He’s reading a thread adoring their group’s dynamics during a NEX.zip when he hears the soft thud of no doubt a cellphone falling onto the space of the mattress next to him and Yuhi mentally fist-pumps: ‘Ha, I knew it!’
It had gotten awfully quiet for some minutes. Yuhi figured Tomoya was just burning off his adrenaline. He really was akin to a toddler right before naptime.
Strangely, this feels like a victory.
In his head, he scratches down another line on the number of wins he’s had over Tomoya in the 7 years he’s known him. It’s not a lot.
It really takes nothing short of a miracle to get their workaholic leader to take a rest once in a while. He never seems to run out of energy. If he’s not practicing, he's taking extra lessons. If it’s not extra lessons, it’s composing. If it’s not composing, it’s editing some kind of video on his laptop. And if it’s not any of those, he’s drafting up more content ideas for the group to pitch to the higher-ups. Always turning himself up to a thousand percent, be it for variety shows or for their performances. He’d do anything for that big break, to take them to the next level.
What the fans see during official appearances is just a tiny fraction of who he is. When Yuhi watches him, he knows there’s no other person in the world who was more born for the role of an idol than Tomoya. He’s like a shooting star in motion— burning bright and fiery, a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. How can a body manage all that?
He turns to look at Tomoya’s sleeping face. It’s only times like these when he is truly right back on earth with the rest of them, unconscious and finally off, a taut rubber band come loose.
He seems younger like this. No traces of worries are visible on his features, eyes fluttered closed and lips parting with every exhale. Under Yuhi’s careful inspection, he can see every single mole and beauty mark that their thick performance makeup hides, along with the bruising eyebags that count as proof of their late nights spent practicing. Tomoya’s lost all the baby fat he had in his cheeks, making way for prominent cheekbones and a defined jaw. It makes Yuhi a little sad, seeing tangible evidence that years of their youth are slowly ending. He knows he’s grown himself, shooting up in height when he used to just brush under Moya’s ear. Now they stand shoulder to shoulder, and he’s still growing, but in the end Yuki’s towering over them both, that damn beansprout.
For a second, Yuhi allows his mind to wander. To think of a life that wasn’t constantly in motion. To let himself be a regular 18-year old. To want.
He wants— what, exactly, Yuhi doesn’t know.
At first, whatever this was was just admiration for a fellow trainee who felt like a piece of home in a different country. They naturally went through everything together. But as the years went on, it spiralled into something he simply lived with, a flame in his chest constantly burning. What he feels for his bandmate is too big to name, too serious to put into words.
His eyes drop to those pillow-like lips Yu once said he wanted to cook with during their early days of debut. They’re so absurdly plump, akin to the pollack roe he’d often eaten as a child and he gets what their eldest hyung was yammering on about. It’s his charm, a shock of pink on a porcelain face, the first thing anyone would notice when they take one look at him. Yuhi wants to reach out and trace the edges of them, commit them to memory and maybe he can stop having such weird feelings. He wishes he were more like Seita, their artist, who could probably copy its likeness on his iPad with no problem. He’s just so curious about those lips. Maybe one try will free him from this awful cage he’s built himself. One try at… at what?
A sudden, unwelcome scene flashes in his mind: Beat-Boxer promotions and the Inkigayo Pepero game and a brief touch of lips, barely even lasting a second. He feels his ears beginning to heat up. He had watched the replay with the guys, groaning when their pair came up. It was just a silly game, but NEX2Ys had latched onto that video and plastered it on every single social media platform available for the world to see. A kiss, they had called it. Please. The two of them, in their competitive nature to win the whole match, accidentally bit off too much of the stick and had knocked their mouths together. They both pulled apart screaming, playing it up for the cameras as Seita attempted to distract the viewers from the chaos.
He tries to recall the way those plush lips felt against his. They were so soft— no matter how fleeting that moment was, it was permanently seared into Yuhi’s brain matter. He’s aware that Tomoya has a skincare routine he has religious devotion to, that even during their latest of schedules he makes sure to use his serums and toners and wear a lip mask to sleep. It’s no wonder the guy had flawless baby skin.
He spends an embarrassingly long time simply staring when Tomoya suddenly stirs, still out of it, panic starting to bloom on his features, and then he’s sitting up and asking, “What time is it? Shit, am I late?”
“It’s only 2 am, go back to sleep,” Yuhi replies, chuckling a little. He gives him a pat on the head, coaxing him back down. “Relax.”
“You’ll wake me up, right?”
“I will.”
A small, barely audible thanks, an arm thrown haphazardly over Yuhi’s side, and he’s back to dreaming of whatever it is boys who carry the weight of the entire world on their shoulders dream of.
His arm is a warm anchor on Yuhi’s hip. It’s almost too much to bear. See, this is exactly what he was talking about- they aren’t the type to cuddle in bed. Even that sort of affection was pushing it in their very physical group. Two months ago, he probably would’ve shoved him to the floor just to piss him off. But now Yuhi slowly eases into his hold and thinks he couldn’t ask for more than this. Tomoya’s always softer when he’s half-asleep, a fact he fully takes advantage of.
Yuhi feels like a child towards him sometimes, petulant and possessive. He was his first, damn it. He loves his members, truly, but on days like this, when he’s so tired that he can’t even bring himself to activate his logical reasoning, he secretly wishes to go back to the time when they were an irrefutable truth: TomoyaandYuhi, YuhiandTomoya. No spaces in between. Like one couldn’t be without the other. Recently, it isn’t much like that.
When was the last time they were in the same bed, just the two of them this close? Hell, Yuhi doesn’t even like other people getting on his bed, it made him feel icky. But for Tomoya, it seemed like he was always breaking his own rules. That stupid face being merely centimeters away is making the butterflies in Yuhi’s stomach throw a rave.
The moment feels suspended in glass; one wrong move could shatter it into a million pieces. His traitorous heart is roaring so loudly in his ears, it’s impressive that Tomoya still went on sleeping soundly.
‘How do Yu and Geon do this every single night?’ He wonders. ‘I think I might spontaneously combust.’ However, the difference between them is that he’s also almost 99% sure those two have something going on, save for the 1% being Geon’s tendency to flirt with every other member.
Yuhi digresses.
This whole situation is so ridiculously intimate. It’s hard to tell where he ends and where Tomoya begins. He’s hyperaware of his every movement that it’s actually making him dizzy. Yuhi tries to focus on matching the rise and fall of Tomoya’s chest instead to make as little disturbance as possible.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
It only takes three attempts for him to succeed, and they settle into a rhythm.
It’s kind of ironic, Yuhi thinks wryly, that even in his own room, his own bed, he would bend over backwards just to make sure that Tomoya was more comfortable. He’d probably stop breathing altogether if it meant for his quiet slumber.
In the safe cover of nighttime, Yuhi can be a little more honest with himself: he wants to move in closer, and finally eliminate all distance between them, once and for all. It would only take one small movement, one push forward, and then maybe he can figure out the turmoil that’s been steadily brewing within himself. The sheer weight of his wanting has been an ugly, physical thing. Some days, it claws its way out of the cavity of his chest like a rabid animal begging its owner for scraps. He wants Tomoya to pay attention to him. He wants to be around him all the time. He wants to be the one Tomoya goes to, through the good and the bad.
What would Tomoya say, if he knew just the enormity of his feelings? Would he take them seriously, take responsibility? Would he feel burdened? Worse, would he brush them off and give him a full-blown lecture on idol contracts?
Yuhi knows just how much pressure is on Tomoya, being the leader of an unconventionally foreign group that’s barely starting to make a name for themselves, still in the shadows of their superstar seniors. His commitment to the group and the company is unwavering to a fault. Tomoya can, and he will, grit his teeth and ignore his personal desires if it would get in the way of their collective success.
In a way, that kind of breathtaking dedication just makes Yuhi like him more.
But it doesn’t make the situation any less unbearable. Sometimes, he wonders if their lingering gazes on each other or casual, familiar touch means anything at all but he’s quick to squash it down in the name of professionalism or whatever the fuck.
He’d rather have him this way than not have him at all.
As his leader and member, a part of NEXZ for life. It was true when Yuhi said that he wasn’t worried about the future because he knew Tomoya would be there. No matter what happened, there was some small comfort in knowing that they’d at least be together. Maybe not exactly in the way he wants, but still. It’s something.
“Hey.”
“Ah!” Yuhi honest-to-god shrieks and immediately claps a hand over his mouth. Seita’s gonna kill him if he wakes up. He was so lost in his own head that he didn’t even notice that the subject of thoughts had roused and was now watching him.
Tomoya’s sleepy eyes are furrowed in confusion. “Why are you still awake?”
He’s looking at him so softly that some part of Yuhi aches.
“I’m sorry, I was just thinking of something.”
“Yeah, I could practically hear you from over here,” Tomoya replies. Ha! If only he knew. “You should get some sleep. We still have a busy day tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is right now, you know.”
“Shh. It doesn’t count until I wake up with the sun shining.”
Yuhi rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”
“C’mere,” Tomoya murmurs, snaking another hand behind his head. “I’m gonna use you as a pillow.” He doesn’t wait for him to react before wrapping him in an embrace. He pulls him in impossibly closer, and rests his head on the top of Yuhi’s.
Gods above, his body was flush against the older’s and now Yuhi’s trying really, really hard to conjure up the scariest thing he can imagine that would somehow be worse than the very real risk of getting a fucking boner right this second. Demonic entities haunting him for life. A cold-blooded serial killer. Being stuck in a room full of judgemental extroverts.
This could be a dream. Or a nightmare. Maybe he’s so tired from their stacked schedules that he’s started to hallucinate. A few more minutes spent aware of this closeness and he might do something drastic. He might as well accept his fate.
So he burrows himself deeper in Tomoya’s arms, his eyes falling shut as the familiar clean scent of the other’s body wash envelopes Yuhi’s senses, their synchronized breathing a lullaby to his ears. He counts sheep and horses and cows and every other animal in the Old Macdonald nursery rhyme. And when that runs out, he counts the trees he encounters on his walk home from the company.
Some time between 30 minutes and an eternity later, exhaustion overtakes him at last.
Needless to say, it’s the best night’s sleep he’s had in ages.