Mending at the seams
Mending at the seams
pg
donghae/eunhyuk
2792
Maybe Donghae thinks too much and maybe Eunhyuk stitches them back together.
Mending at the seams
Lately, Donghae thinks Hyukjae really means it when he says they are just colleagues. When he acquires that pseudo serious tone in his voice and insists they’re not even best friends, not even just friends, and it makes Donghae want to punch him or kick him or steal all his socks.
Everyone always laughs it off because Hyukjae is hilarious while Donghae acts the part of being mock angry except that he really is, angry, but it’s all just one big joke and everyone laughs until their teeth hurt.
The anger, or maybe it’s hurt and calling it anger is just easier, stems from that how can you not be friends with someone who locked himself up in a practice room with you and danced until you were two identically sweaty masses slumped against the mirror. Someone you tripped along empty football lots with and held the faucet hose over your head for you to wash the dirt off your face before you got home, and kept your feet warm when the a/c in the trainee dorm was acting like a snow machine, and made you feel like you were the most important person in the world to them even if you were just sixteen and had no idea how to describe that feeling or what it even meant.
Someone who squeezed your hand tightly right before your first performance and stayed up late writing and rewriting choreography steps on recycled paper and stole your underwear, okay maybe that had more to do with loneliness, but mainly because they missed you from an ocean away. Someone who cried when it all got to be too much to let you know that it’s okay if you want to cry, they’ll be someone to wipe your tears with the sleeve of his jacket and your snots with the end of your shirt.
It comes from Hyukjae never denying Sungmin’s friendship, or Junsu’s, because even though Donghae was the one who got their last, he was still there. Maybe he tittered around Yunho and Heechul hyung and Kibum ah a lot, but he waved that friendship flag in Hyukjae’s face and Hyukjae waved it back. Maybe he treated everyone with too friendly smiles and soul squeezed hugs, but he always sought Hyukjae out the most and it was different the way he smiled at Hyukjae and squeezed Hyukjae’s soul, and Hyukjae always smiled back and never squeezed back. Or almost always.
Maybe it really is just hurt.
Hyukjae is always working. Nothing odd, it’s what an adult does. Five days a week, eight to six.
Hyukjae goes at it six, sometimes seven, days a week, infinite hours of the day, manages to somehow wrangle in an extra forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds into the clock, enough to shower, eat and solve that whole dynamic time warping issue. He’s like a junior Eeteuk in training with his animatedly overly peppy mc voice and ‘isn’t that amazing, Leeteuk-hyung? They’re probably the most flexible men that ever lived’. Followed by ‘it really is Eunhyuk-ah. But I bet you and I are too’. Then they proceed to lock arms and do some abnormal stretching disembodiment with Hukjae half in the air and they topple on to the floor while the entire audience bursts out laughing and Eunhyuk sprawled half on top of Leeteuk so it looks like they’re kissing.
Sungmin cackles in laughter, his half open mouth with popcorn kernels stuck to his teeth.
Donghae jams another fistful of popcorn from the bowl on his lap in his mouth, blankly staring at the screen until the monkey who can spit fire comes on and Kang HoDong screeches in terror.
“Yah. What’s up with you lately? You look like shit.”
Donghae yawns over the crackling line of the connection. “I’m fine,” he says and rubs his face with his palm trying to work out the crease in his cheek the blankets left last night.
“I’m serious,” Hyukjae insists and Donghae can hear the concern among Leeteuk’s snoring and the car wheels going over the bumps in the road. “I can see your eye bags all the way from Korea.”
Snorting, Donghae stretches his skin and stares at his reflection. “I was born with eye bags. I have the baby pictures to prove it.” He laughs at his own joke and leaves his face be because hotel blankets will always be scratchy, will always leave indents in his skin. Plus the make-up noona (should he refer to them as make-up noonas even if they’re in China?) looks ready to smack his hand away if he keeps messing up his make-up.
Eunhyuk makes a sound, of assessment or disbelief, and sighs into the phone.
“Are you okay?” Donghae asks, breathing in relief when the eyeliner is only moved to put it back in its place and not in his eye.
“I don’t know,” Hyukjae says after a moment and Donghae finally sits up giving the make-up(not noona, artist, torturer) the angle she’s been trying to tilt his head at for past minute.
Hyukjae says in a rush of air, “I’m always tired and I. I feel like. I don’t even know and I mis,”
Hyukjae’s voice is drowned out by a deeper one and the car stops. Donghae can tell because Eunhyuk’s seat belt stops smacking against the window.
“Hey, Donghae? I have to go. We’re at the studio. But uhh, call me if you get lonely or whatever. Not when I’m sleeping though, or I’ll kill you the minute you get home.” Then he hangs up.
Donghae puts the phone down and the make up(let’s just call her lady) raises her hands up to the ceiling, imploring.
He’s so distracted for the most of the filming, he doesn’t even notice Zhoumi’s voice cracking during Blue Tomorrow until he sees Kyuhyun crouching on the floor and shaking in repressed laughter and Donghae wonders if he’s having an epileptic seizure.
It’s not home, but at least it’s all of them, most of them, together. Donghae isn’t sure what all implies anymore, if it’s a broader sense of being that they always will be or if physical presence is required.
The city is loud and noisy but so is every city they’ve ever been in and the crowd is an amplified airwave of sound weaving through space and screaming into Donghae’s conscious.
That I don’t know still bothers him so he makes sure to sit next to Hyukjae in the van back to the hotel and pokes him in the side so Hyukjae will look at him, smudges of kohl still darkening his eyes and catching flicks from streetlights in his eyes.
“Hey. Why are you frowning? We just got a standing ovation.”
“We always get a standing ovation. They’re already standing.”
Donghae waves him off with an flippant hand gesture. “That’s the rock pit. Every single person was standing at the end.”
Hyukjae huffs his cheeks and, gripping the seat between them with a clenched fist, says, “They always do that. Cut it out with the dumb commentary.”
Donghae sighs and lets it be, tries dozing off against the leather of the head rest and convince his body that sleep walking all the way to his hotel room is possible.
He’s got a good hang on it halfway though the lobby with Siwon steering him so he doesn’t trip any elderly people, when Hyukjae grabs the back of Donghae’s shirt and stops him. He gestures for the elevator to go up without them and Donghae watches Yesung’s face disappear through sliding doors.
“I’m sorry,” Hyukjae says, the end of Donghae’s shirt still wrapped in his fingers. He absentmindedly pulls and stares down at his shoes. “About earlier. I was, I am, upset and was taking it out on you. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Donghae hadn’t been expected an apology. Not because it’s unlike Hyukjae, but because it really hadn’t bothered him. People get cranky and mad under stress, and Donghae just expected for them to act like nothing until one of them reached out to shove on the shoulder or laugh at some dumb joke and everything would be fine.
If Hyukjae is apologizing, it means he wants to talk about it.
They sit on the ugly carpeted floor near the elevators which is stupid, fangirls are always prowling, but Donghae doesn’t care and he doesn’t want to go up to his room and an empty bed yet.
“I miss him,” Hyukjae admits, legs gathered in the crook of his arms and his chin digging a hole into his knee. “I miss not knowing what to say to him. Understanding him. It’s like he’s speaking Japanese all the time now and it’s no longer about the sights or the food or the girls,and I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Donghae doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know what to say about life long friendships in crisis and feeling like losing the person who learned how to walk and talk and run and dance and tell really lame jokes and be everyone’s favorite target to make fun of right there with you, every unsure step of the way. I don’t understand you, Donghae thinks but that would be the worst thing to say. So he just sits there, staring at his reflection colored silver, his hair looking like it did when they debuted.
“And then, all this stuff with Hankyung hyung and this whole year.” Hyukjae trails off picking at a loose thread in his jeans.
He picks and picks at it the way Donghae picks at Hyujae’s brain, trying to decipher what Hyujae’s frown really means and what he’s trying to say when Hyukjae rests his head on Donghae’s shoulder or skims his fingers lightly beneath his t-shirt when they sleep together, or what anything Hyukjae does or says means.
Hyukjae is practically ripping his jeans apart with blunt nails and jerky fingers and it kind of dawns on Donghae, not like some epiphany or revelation, more like piecing a puzzle together with the loose string of his favorite pair of jeans teared to the seams, that he’s been so preoccupied with himself and HyukjaeandDonghae, he hasn’t really been thinking about Hyukjae.
“He knows,” Donghae says. He grabs Eunhyuk’s hand away from his pant, feeling the fabric in between their fingers. “All that stuff you can’t say. He knows, okay? You’re not alone. Everyone is going through a lot so you’re not alone. Not even for a second.”
Hyukjae’s hand relaxes in his. His whole body unwinds from all that pressure, Donghae senses it seeping between their hands and dripping onto the carpet and feels unbearably relieved that he still understands Hyukjae better than he thinks he does. But maybe it isn’t Donghae who understands, he thinks as he hauls Hyukjae up and pushes him into the elevator and laughs as he goes squawking against a wall. Maybe it’s pieces of thread still tying them, sometimes a little looser than he’d like, together.
Donghae sleeps in his own bed for the first time in weeks. The sheets are soft like silk on his skin and the room is perfectly toasty it’s not long before he’s dozing off the second his head meets the pillow.
He’s halfway to dream land with sheep krumping over fences, when the door opens. It’s probably Leeteuk, who else would it be, so Donghae keeps counting as one of the sheep pulls a really sick back handspring.
Then his bed dips, the covers are lifted and Donghae can’t believe Leeteuk is so out of it he can’t tell which bed doesn’t have a body already in it. He moans in displeasure and whines, “Hyuuung. Not again. This isn’t your bed. Get out.”
“You and Leeteuk share a bed?”
“Hyukjae?” Donghae squints in the darkness but he can’t see anything. Hyukjae is getting comfortable on his pillow, pressing up behind Donghae and tangling their feet together.
Donghae yelps. Hyukjae’s feet are icicles and he shifts trying to move away.
“Is your a/c broken?” He asks sticking himself to the wall as Hyukjae’s toes bump against his ankles.
“No.”
“So,” Donghae prompts because Hyukjae never crawls into bed with him, always the other way around and only to get a couple extra minutes of sleep and it’s been a while since Donghae got an extra minute or second of sleep.
“What’s the reason for you hogging my bed?” he asks and tries to kick Hyukjae.
Hyukjae throws a leg over Donghae’s, the toenail of his other foot lightly scratching the arch of Donghae’s. Donghae squirms and laughs until Hyukjae says,
“Does there have to be a reason?” into his hair.
Donghae turns around facing him now and tries to make out Hyukjae’s face in the dark and can’t find a reason to explain why Hyukjae takes up most of the bed when he’s skinnier than Donghae.
Maybe there doesn’t have to be.
“Where’s Eeteuk?” he asks after a while of just laying there quietly and getting reused to the warmth coming off someone else.
“In my room. He didn’t want us keeping him up all night.”
Donghae gawks and sputters and Hyukjae howls in laughter.
“By us talking all night, you perv!”
“Shut up! I’m not a perv. You’re the big perv.”
Hyukjae laughs and laughs singing ‘Donghae is a perv. Donghae is a peeeeerv,’ and only stops when he almost falls off the bed, gapsing for breath and begging for mercy.
“What happened to your hand?” Donghae says as he pulls Hyukjae back up, feeling the band-aids wrapped around Hyukjae’s index and ring finger.
Hyukjae doesn’t answer, mumbling a small nothing, and feigning sleep. Donghae threatens to shove off the bed again and Hyukjae says,
“Sorry about your jeans. I did the best I could.”
Confused, Donghae just stares until Hyukjae sighs and points towards Donghae’s desk. Donghae tramples all over Hyukjae in his haste, yanking the blankets off the bed, his hands feel around the dark and grab.
“These are my jeans.”
“Yeah. Ahh,” Hyukjae hisses when Donghae turns the lamp on, filling the room in a harsh pool of yellow.
“These are my jeans,” Donghae repeats dumbly, picking at the thread work of a shade darker than the rest of the color.
“We get it. Be careful,” Hyukjae warns grabbing them from Donghae’s hands and holding them out of further harms way. “My blood and tears are in those.”
Donghae grabs the jeans back and is about to say, yeah right, how much did you pay to get these fixed, when he sees it. Faint and barely there, a spot of red.
“When did you,”
“I know how to sew, okay? Big deal. Some men bake. Some keep scrapbooks. Some,” here he looks at Donghae pointedly, “cry at the moon. Besides, I wasn’t going to buy you new jeans. Now can you shut up about it so we can sleep?”
Donghae smothers a laugh into his hands and nods, tossing his jeans back on the desk and lying down. Hyukjae huffs something under his breath, turns off the light making the room pitch black expect for the bit of light slipping inconspicuously through the blinds.
The bed creaks as they shift, trying to find a place so they fit without knees poking or elbows stabbing, and they end with legs their legs loosely threaded together, Hyukjae’s feet considerably warmer.
“Hey, Hyukjae?”
“What?”
Donghae lets the breath right before he speaks hang in the space between them, creating a build up just to see Hyukjae lose his patience. He doesn’t so Donghae says, almost jokingly,
“You know you’re my best friend right?”
“What are we, five?” Hyukjae says, inching closer pulling the thread just a little tighter.
Donghae presses his face into his pillow guessing he’s not going to hear anything else but just this, just Hyukjae being here, says more than enough.
He stills when he feels the soft plastic of band-aids on the back of his arm, brushing the skin there.
“You know you’re mine too, right?” Hyukjae’s voice is light, a bit flat but with a tone of tightness underlying beneath that makes Donghae smile.
“I know.” He does. It’s just nice to hear it sometimes.
Maybe Donghae lets Hyukjae hog most of the bed and the pillow, but halfway through the night he wrangles all the sheets so Hyukjae is left shivering in the cold. Maybe tomorrow morning Donghae will climb on Hyukjae’s back and squeeze his spinal chord along with his soul, and maybe he’ll yell and protest and whine, but he’ll be all soft sighs and resigned limbs when Donghae presses his nose into the back of his neck and falls asleep on top of him until someone thinks to check in on Donghae and throw cold water on their heads. Maybe Hyukjae will always get mad when Donghae steals his clothes but feel no qualms about taking Donghae’s favorite jeans and ripping them apart but always, always, stitching them back together.
Maybe it isn’t about maybes at all. Maybe it’s all about strings and loose threads.
Fin
*Sort of inspired by this video in which Eunhyuk plays hard to get and kind of explains Eunhae in a nutshell if you think about it.
*Written at 4 am so it's a marvel this is coherent.
*I'm offering fic for help_japan. My thread is here.
*Lastly, this is kind of different from my usual style I think. Also, Eunhae bffry ftw y/y?
pg
donghae/eunhyuk
2792
Maybe Donghae thinks too much and maybe Eunhyuk stitches them back together.
Mending at the seams
Lately, Donghae thinks Hyukjae really means it when he says they are just colleagues. When he acquires that pseudo serious tone in his voice and insists they’re not even best friends, not even just friends, and it makes Donghae want to punch him or kick him or steal all his socks.
Everyone always laughs it off because Hyukjae is hilarious while Donghae acts the part of being mock angry except that he really is, angry, but it’s all just one big joke and everyone laughs until their teeth hurt.
The anger, or maybe it’s hurt and calling it anger is just easier, stems from that how can you not be friends with someone who locked himself up in a practice room with you and danced until you were two identically sweaty masses slumped against the mirror. Someone you tripped along empty football lots with and held the faucet hose over your head for you to wash the dirt off your face before you got home, and kept your feet warm when the a/c in the trainee dorm was acting like a snow machine, and made you feel like you were the most important person in the world to them even if you were just sixteen and had no idea how to describe that feeling or what it even meant.
Someone who squeezed your hand tightly right before your first performance and stayed up late writing and rewriting choreography steps on recycled paper and stole your underwear, okay maybe that had more to do with loneliness, but mainly because they missed you from an ocean away. Someone who cried when it all got to be too much to let you know that it’s okay if you want to cry, they’ll be someone to wipe your tears with the sleeve of his jacket and your snots with the end of your shirt.
It comes from Hyukjae never denying Sungmin’s friendship, or Junsu’s, because even though Donghae was the one who got their last, he was still there. Maybe he tittered around Yunho and Heechul hyung and Kibum ah a lot, but he waved that friendship flag in Hyukjae’s face and Hyukjae waved it back. Maybe he treated everyone with too friendly smiles and soul squeezed hugs, but he always sought Hyukjae out the most and it was different the way he smiled at Hyukjae and squeezed Hyukjae’s soul, and Hyukjae always smiled back and never squeezed back. Or almost always.
Maybe it really is just hurt.
Hyukjae is always working. Nothing odd, it’s what an adult does. Five days a week, eight to six.
Hyukjae goes at it six, sometimes seven, days a week, infinite hours of the day, manages to somehow wrangle in an extra forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds into the clock, enough to shower, eat and solve that whole dynamic time warping issue. He’s like a junior Eeteuk in training with his animatedly overly peppy mc voice and ‘isn’t that amazing, Leeteuk-hyung? They’re probably the most flexible men that ever lived’. Followed by ‘it really is Eunhyuk-ah. But I bet you and I are too’. Then they proceed to lock arms and do some abnormal stretching disembodiment with Hukjae half in the air and they topple on to the floor while the entire audience bursts out laughing and Eunhyuk sprawled half on top of Leeteuk so it looks like they’re kissing.
Sungmin cackles in laughter, his half open mouth with popcorn kernels stuck to his teeth.
Donghae jams another fistful of popcorn from the bowl on his lap in his mouth, blankly staring at the screen until the monkey who can spit fire comes on and Kang HoDong screeches in terror.
“Yah. What’s up with you lately? You look like shit.”
Donghae yawns over the crackling line of the connection. “I’m fine,” he says and rubs his face with his palm trying to work out the crease in his cheek the blankets left last night.
“I’m serious,” Hyukjae insists and Donghae can hear the concern among Leeteuk’s snoring and the car wheels going over the bumps in the road. “I can see your eye bags all the way from Korea.”
Snorting, Donghae stretches his skin and stares at his reflection. “I was born with eye bags. I have the baby pictures to prove it.” He laughs at his own joke and leaves his face be because hotel blankets will always be scratchy, will always leave indents in his skin. Plus the make-up noona (should he refer to them as make-up noonas even if they’re in China?) looks ready to smack his hand away if he keeps messing up his make-up.
Eunhyuk makes a sound, of assessment or disbelief, and sighs into the phone.
“Are you okay?” Donghae asks, breathing in relief when the eyeliner is only moved to put it back in its place and not in his eye.
“I don’t know,” Hyukjae says after a moment and Donghae finally sits up giving the make-up(not noona, artist, torturer) the angle she’s been trying to tilt his head at for past minute.
Hyukjae says in a rush of air, “I’m always tired and I. I feel like. I don’t even know and I mis,”
Hyukjae’s voice is drowned out by a deeper one and the car stops. Donghae can tell because Eunhyuk’s seat belt stops smacking against the window.
“Hey, Donghae? I have to go. We’re at the studio. But uhh, call me if you get lonely or whatever. Not when I’m sleeping though, or I’ll kill you the minute you get home.” Then he hangs up.
Donghae puts the phone down and the make up(let’s just call her lady) raises her hands up to the ceiling, imploring.
He’s so distracted for the most of the filming, he doesn’t even notice Zhoumi’s voice cracking during Blue Tomorrow until he sees Kyuhyun crouching on the floor and shaking in repressed laughter and Donghae wonders if he’s having an epileptic seizure.
It’s not home, but at least it’s all of them, most of them, together. Donghae isn’t sure what all implies anymore, if it’s a broader sense of being that they always will be or if physical presence is required.
The city is loud and noisy but so is every city they’ve ever been in and the crowd is an amplified airwave of sound weaving through space and screaming into Donghae’s conscious.
That I don’t know still bothers him so he makes sure to sit next to Hyukjae in the van back to the hotel and pokes him in the side so Hyukjae will look at him, smudges of kohl still darkening his eyes and catching flicks from streetlights in his eyes.
“Hey. Why are you frowning? We just got a standing ovation.”
“We always get a standing ovation. They’re already standing.”
Donghae waves him off with an flippant hand gesture. “That’s the rock pit. Every single person was standing at the end.”
Hyukjae huffs his cheeks and, gripping the seat between them with a clenched fist, says, “They always do that. Cut it out with the dumb commentary.”
Donghae sighs and lets it be, tries dozing off against the leather of the head rest and convince his body that sleep walking all the way to his hotel room is possible.
He’s got a good hang on it halfway though the lobby with Siwon steering him so he doesn’t trip any elderly people, when Hyukjae grabs the back of Donghae’s shirt and stops him. He gestures for the elevator to go up without them and Donghae watches Yesung’s face disappear through sliding doors.
“I’m sorry,” Hyukjae says, the end of Donghae’s shirt still wrapped in his fingers. He absentmindedly pulls and stares down at his shoes. “About earlier. I was, I am, upset and was taking it out on you. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Donghae hadn’t been expected an apology. Not because it’s unlike Hyukjae, but because it really hadn’t bothered him. People get cranky and mad under stress, and Donghae just expected for them to act like nothing until one of them reached out to shove on the shoulder or laugh at some dumb joke and everything would be fine.
If Hyukjae is apologizing, it means he wants to talk about it.
They sit on the ugly carpeted floor near the elevators which is stupid, fangirls are always prowling, but Donghae doesn’t care and he doesn’t want to go up to his room and an empty bed yet.
“I miss him,” Hyukjae admits, legs gathered in the crook of his arms and his chin digging a hole into his knee. “I miss not knowing what to say to him. Understanding him. It’s like he’s speaking Japanese all the time now and it’s no longer about the sights or the food or the girls,and I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Donghae doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know what to say about life long friendships in crisis and feeling like losing the person who learned how to walk and talk and run and dance and tell really lame jokes and be everyone’s favorite target to make fun of right there with you, every unsure step of the way. I don’t understand you, Donghae thinks but that would be the worst thing to say. So he just sits there, staring at his reflection colored silver, his hair looking like it did when they debuted.
“And then, all this stuff with Hankyung hyung and this whole year.” Hyukjae trails off picking at a loose thread in his jeans.
He picks and picks at it the way Donghae picks at Hyujae’s brain, trying to decipher what Hyujae’s frown really means and what he’s trying to say when Hyukjae rests his head on Donghae’s shoulder or skims his fingers lightly beneath his t-shirt when they sleep together, or what anything Hyukjae does or says means.
Hyukjae is practically ripping his jeans apart with blunt nails and jerky fingers and it kind of dawns on Donghae, not like some epiphany or revelation, more like piecing a puzzle together with the loose string of his favorite pair of jeans teared to the seams, that he’s been so preoccupied with himself and HyukjaeandDonghae, he hasn’t really been thinking about Hyukjae.
“He knows,” Donghae says. He grabs Eunhyuk’s hand away from his pant, feeling the fabric in between their fingers. “All that stuff you can’t say. He knows, okay? You’re not alone. Everyone is going through a lot so you’re not alone. Not even for a second.”
Hyukjae’s hand relaxes in his. His whole body unwinds from all that pressure, Donghae senses it seeping between their hands and dripping onto the carpet and feels unbearably relieved that he still understands Hyukjae better than he thinks he does. But maybe it isn’t Donghae who understands, he thinks as he hauls Hyukjae up and pushes him into the elevator and laughs as he goes squawking against a wall. Maybe it’s pieces of thread still tying them, sometimes a little looser than he’d like, together.
Donghae sleeps in his own bed for the first time in weeks. The sheets are soft like silk on his skin and the room is perfectly toasty it’s not long before he’s dozing off the second his head meets the pillow.
He’s halfway to dream land with sheep krumping over fences, when the door opens. It’s probably Leeteuk, who else would it be, so Donghae keeps counting as one of the sheep pulls a really sick back handspring.
Then his bed dips, the covers are lifted and Donghae can’t believe Leeteuk is so out of it he can’t tell which bed doesn’t have a body already in it. He moans in displeasure and whines, “Hyuuung. Not again. This isn’t your bed. Get out.”
“You and Leeteuk share a bed?”
“Hyukjae?” Donghae squints in the darkness but he can’t see anything. Hyukjae is getting comfortable on his pillow, pressing up behind Donghae and tangling their feet together.
Donghae yelps. Hyukjae’s feet are icicles and he shifts trying to move away.
“Is your a/c broken?” He asks sticking himself to the wall as Hyukjae’s toes bump against his ankles.
“No.”
“So,” Donghae prompts because Hyukjae never crawls into bed with him, always the other way around and only to get a couple extra minutes of sleep and it’s been a while since Donghae got an extra minute or second of sleep.
“What’s the reason for you hogging my bed?” he asks and tries to kick Hyukjae.
Hyukjae throws a leg over Donghae’s, the toenail of his other foot lightly scratching the arch of Donghae’s. Donghae squirms and laughs until Hyukjae says,
“Does there have to be a reason?” into his hair.
Donghae turns around facing him now and tries to make out Hyukjae’s face in the dark and can’t find a reason to explain why Hyukjae takes up most of the bed when he’s skinnier than Donghae.
Maybe there doesn’t have to be.
“Where’s Eeteuk?” he asks after a while of just laying there quietly and getting reused to the warmth coming off someone else.
“In my room. He didn’t want us keeping him up all night.”
Donghae gawks and sputters and Hyukjae howls in laughter.
“By us talking all night, you perv!”
“Shut up! I’m not a perv. You’re the big perv.”
Hyukjae laughs and laughs singing ‘Donghae is a perv. Donghae is a peeeeerv,’ and only stops when he almost falls off the bed, gapsing for breath and begging for mercy.
“What happened to your hand?” Donghae says as he pulls Hyukjae back up, feeling the band-aids wrapped around Hyukjae’s index and ring finger.
Hyukjae doesn’t answer, mumbling a small nothing, and feigning sleep. Donghae threatens to shove off the bed again and Hyukjae says,
“Sorry about your jeans. I did the best I could.”
Confused, Donghae just stares until Hyukjae sighs and points towards Donghae’s desk. Donghae tramples all over Hyukjae in his haste, yanking the blankets off the bed, his hands feel around the dark and grab.
“These are my jeans.”
“Yeah. Ahh,” Hyukjae hisses when Donghae turns the lamp on, filling the room in a harsh pool of yellow.
“These are my jeans,” Donghae repeats dumbly, picking at the thread work of a shade darker than the rest of the color.
“We get it. Be careful,” Hyukjae warns grabbing them from Donghae’s hands and holding them out of further harms way. “My blood and tears are in those.”
Donghae grabs the jeans back and is about to say, yeah right, how much did you pay to get these fixed, when he sees it. Faint and barely there, a spot of red.
“When did you,”
“I know how to sew, okay? Big deal. Some men bake. Some keep scrapbooks. Some,” here he looks at Donghae pointedly, “cry at the moon. Besides, I wasn’t going to buy you new jeans. Now can you shut up about it so we can sleep?”
Donghae smothers a laugh into his hands and nods, tossing his jeans back on the desk and lying down. Hyukjae huffs something under his breath, turns off the light making the room pitch black expect for the bit of light slipping inconspicuously through the blinds.
The bed creaks as they shift, trying to find a place so they fit without knees poking or elbows stabbing, and they end with legs their legs loosely threaded together, Hyukjae’s feet considerably warmer.
“Hey, Hyukjae?”
“What?”
Donghae lets the breath right before he speaks hang in the space between them, creating a build up just to see Hyukjae lose his patience. He doesn’t so Donghae says, almost jokingly,
“You know you’re my best friend right?”
“What are we, five?” Hyukjae says, inching closer pulling the thread just a little tighter.
Donghae presses his face into his pillow guessing he’s not going to hear anything else but just this, just Hyukjae being here, says more than enough.
He stills when he feels the soft plastic of band-aids on the back of his arm, brushing the skin there.
“You know you’re mine too, right?” Hyukjae’s voice is light, a bit flat but with a tone of tightness underlying beneath that makes Donghae smile.
“I know.” He does. It’s just nice to hear it sometimes.
Maybe Donghae lets Hyukjae hog most of the bed and the pillow, but halfway through the night he wrangles all the sheets so Hyukjae is left shivering in the cold. Maybe tomorrow morning Donghae will climb on Hyukjae’s back and squeeze his spinal chord along with his soul, and maybe he’ll yell and protest and whine, but he’ll be all soft sighs and resigned limbs when Donghae presses his nose into the back of his neck and falls asleep on top of him until someone thinks to check in on Donghae and throw cold water on their heads. Maybe Hyukjae will always get mad when Donghae steals his clothes but feel no qualms about taking Donghae’s favorite jeans and ripping them apart but always, always, stitching them back together.
Maybe it isn’t about maybes at all. Maybe it’s all about strings and loose threads.
Fin
*Sort of inspired by this video in which Eunhyuk plays hard to get and kind of explains Eunhae in a nutshell if you think about it.
*Written at 4 am so it's a marvel this is coherent.
*I'm offering fic for help_japan. My thread is here.
*Lastly, this is kind of different from my usual style I think. Also, Eunhae bffry ftw y/y?