You Are My Sunshine [1/1]
“Mmm. Hello,” Jongin mumbles sleepily as Sehun’s arms wrap around him.
“Hi,” Sehun replies, his own voice free of sleep and jovial.
“Is it morning?” Jongin asks. Sehun notices his eyes are still closed and has a momentary twinge of guilt for waking him.
“No,” Sehun answers, and he feels Jongin’s chest rise and fall with a sigh. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s okay,” Jongin says. “Did you have a nightmare or something?”
“No, I just woke up and felt like cuddling,” Sehun says, and Jongin chuckles.
“Get up,” Jongin says, sounding as if he’s completely awake now.
Sehun raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“Get up,” Jongin repeats, but Sehun doesn’t move. “Get out of bed.”
“Why?” Sehun asks, his heart racing.
“It’s time to get up!”
“Get up!” Sehun’s eyes fly open and he finds Lu Han standing over him, eyes heavy with sleep and a scowl on his face. “You begged me to wake up at the crack of dawn to wake you up and here you are, sleeping as if you don’t have a damned place to go.”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Sehun says, sitting up in bed. Lu Han huffs and storms off, possibly to go back to bed himself, and Sehun glances to his left.
Disappointment rocks his body when he comes to terms with the fact that he’d only been dreaming. He wasn’t in the spacious king-sized bed he used to share with Jongin, back when things were happy and had some semblance of normalcy. And Jongin wasn’t beside him, curled into a tight ball under the blankets as was his habit. Sehun was alone, sharing an apartment with a roommate who’d grown to dislike him, in a single bed in a stuffy room. The reality of it all infuriated him.
He clenches his jaw as his eyes threaten to spill tears. He’s tired of crying over something he’d been telling everyone he’d gotten over, he’d moved on from.
He drags himself out of bed and braces himself to face the day ahead. Part of him hopes that when he lays his head back down to sleep later that night, he’ll be at peace once again.
He never knew whether or not he was overreacting when he found himself sitting on his hands in order to fight the urge to ball them into fists and use them on Soojung’s face.
Soojung and Jongin were close by nature. He’d known her much longer than he’d known Sehun, so if anyone had to get used to anyone it should have been Soojung to Sehun, but it was very much the other way around. Sehun ignores the way Soojung’s face lights up when she sees Jongin, and the way Jongin pretty much blows him off to give Soojung his full attention. He ignores the way their eyes linger for too long together, in perfect silence, until the two of them burst out laughing -- and Soojung always grabs his wrist or his hand and throws her head back when she does.
The only reason Sehun worries so much when they’re together is because, unlike in the case of Sehun, Soojung is still fair game for Jongin. Soojung didn’t know what Jongin and Sehun were anything more than friends; she didn’t even know that he liked other boys as much as he liked other girls. Soojung wasn’t unattractive by any stretch of the imagination, which made the fact that Jongin had once told Sehun that he liked girls more than he liked boys just that much more troubling. Plus, it was almost common knowledge that Soojung had had a long, unfaltering crush on Jongin, but valued their friendship more (which was just a fancy way of saying she’d given up because Jongin didn’t seem interested). Sehun was afraid that Soojung could proposition Jongin and snatch him away, and he knew it could happen because there was no way on earth that Jongin would ever admit to being with Sehun and risk his entire reputation.
Sehun knew he wasn’t as important to Jongin as Jongin’s social well-being was, but he didn’t let it deter him. He didn’t care if he’d eternally love Jongin more than Jongin could ever will himself to love Sehun, as long as he had him.
In fact, Sehun had told Jongin of this and took a blow to his confidence when Jongin simply smiled in appreciation and didn’t do anything to disprove Sehun at all. He told himself that Jongin was never good with words, simply wasn’t the mushy, lovey-dovey type, so to expect a romantic response from him was synonymous with reaching up and touching the moon.
But at the end of the day, holding his tongue proves to be far too much for Sehun. Once they’re alone, and Soojung is far gone, he lashes out at Jongin and lets him know exactly how he feels.
Sehun is shaking with angry tears when Jongin sighs and heaves himself out of the couch to wrap Sehun into a tight hug.
“I love you,” Jongin says. “I thought you knew that.”
I thought I did, too, Sehun thinks, and he would probably say it had he not been so shaken up and breathless.
“No one comes before you, no one comes after you. No one comes between you and me. I mean that,” Jongin says, and Sehun hiccups on his tears. “Soojung is and always will be my friend, but that’s all she is. That’s all she’ll ever be. I love you.”
Sehun finds himself laughing as he stands on the corner an hour after Lu Han woke him, his breath visible in the crisp December air. He continues to laugh as he pulls his scarf up over his mouth to keep warm his already wind-chapped lips.
He’s laughing because he remembers right down to the last word everything Jongin had said that night, and how he believed him and how he believed that the love they made later that night solidified Jongin’s loaded statement. He’s laughing because none of it was true, and Jongin knew that the moment that the words left his mouth.
The sun is rising over Seoul as Sehun crosses the street, hands tucked away into his warm peacoat as his feet hop over the black and white lines in the street. He’s not happy; in fact, if he wanted to, he could cry, but he’d fake it until it felt real.
A lot like Jongin used to do. A lot like Jongin used to make him do.
The dream Sehun has that day seemed like, in hindsight, a harbinger for things to come.
He dreams that he’s trapped inside his own body, unable to move or blink or even breathe on his own free will. He’s being forced to watch Jongin and Soojung go through the motions as a happy couple, from the moment they wake up -- together -- onwards.
As the dream goes on, Sehun admits to himself that they look good together. They’re both devastatingly beautiful with some of the best smiles he’s ever seen, and they look so enamored with each other, as if every time they lay eyes on each other is like the very first time. They hold hands so naturally, sneak kisses on a crowded train, feed each other food. They look like the textbook Perfect Couple and it’s breaking Sehun’s heart.
He’s dreaming, of course, but it all feels so real. His emotions in his dream are so jumbled up; he’s jealous of them, yet he’s happy they’re happy, yet he’s furious that Jongin is doing all of this in front of him. Jongin has looked at him several times throughout the dream, so he must realize he’s standing there -- maybe he does, but he’s nothing more than a stranger that seems to be following him and his girlfriend.
Maybe he does, but he’s nothing more than someone he used to love, once when he was testing the waters and fooling himself to fall in love.
The dream ends with Jongin and Soojung kissing each other into bed, articles of clothing being tossed aside as Sehun’s vision fades and he wakes up. Jongin isn’t beside him; rather, he’s standing at the door, staring at him with a indiscernible look on his face.
“We have to talk,” Jongin says.
And then the nightmare began.
Sehun had told Lu Han, when he asked why he had to inconvenience himself to rouse Sehun from his sleep the night previous, that he had to leave early to catch a train to where his grandmother lived in Seokcho to visit her for the day. He told him that his grandmother, his favorite grandmother, had been calling him incessantly and asking him when he was going to visit, so he was going to get on the earliest train to go and surprise her.
The truth was, Sehun was deeply depressed. He’d been depressed since the day Jongin told him that he didn’t, couldn’t, love him anymore, that he’d been seeing Soojung and he didn’t feel right having to sneak around.
He said it wasn’t fair to Soojung. He never said it wasn’t fair to Sehun.
That stuck with him and gnawed at him late at night when he was delirious with sleep and thinking all kinds of bizarre things. Along the way, he’d seriously considered killing himself, and started naming out all the ways he could do it until he burst into tears and realized what he was thinking and why he was thinking it.
With no one else to tell, with a roommate that detested him and parents who wouldn’t accept the fact that their son was possibly mentally ill much less gay and pining over another boy, he’d sought out help instead.
He’d spend the day sorting out his thoughts and throwing away the ones that made him hurt too much. And then he’d feel happy again.