Footnotes (YongSeo, JongHwa)

[warmboys]

Footnotes
Yonghwa-centric (/Seohyun, /Jonghyun)
~1600 words
PG-13

for levels, help_japan ♥ thanks so much.

It takes three trips from the car to the building, up the elevator, round the corner, and back, three trips to unload the life they built in thirteen months. He sets down the last, unlabeled box, haphazardly packed with Avatar figurines, a frowny-face pillow, packets of tissues they collected in Japan, eagerly examining the advertisements on the back (“’Meeting’ Café! Free for ladies only!” Seohyun dictated aloud, clearly puzzled. Yonghwa reassured her, “You don’t want to know.”). The apartment is dark but for the light under Jonghyun’s door. He’s probably listening to music with his eyes closed, Yonghwa thinks, kicking off his shoes and lining them up neatly by the door. He feels like an old man, suddenly, and that stack of boxes is tall enough to make a tower.

“Whoa. It’s like you got married all over again.”

Jungshin is standing in his slippers and pajamas, rubbing one eye and blearily staring at the tower through the other.

“Help me move this to the living room,” Yonghwa says.

On a good day Jungshin’s a bit like a well-trained watchdog, or Yonghwa’s personal bouncer.

In the shower Yonghwa closes his eyes for a minute but it turns into five, then twenty, and in his mind his bed is starting to look like the light at the end of the tunnel that you’re always approaching but never actually reach. Just for tonight I’ll sleep with my hair wet, he thinks, slurring even his thoughts, just before his head hits the arm of the couch.

He dreams of being smothered and wakes up breathing hard against a scratchy wool blanket. The seam is coming undone at one of the edges; there is thread in his mouth. Jonghyun’s favorite souvenir from a Japanese 100-yen shop, he remembers groggily. When he turns onto his side he sees half of a sad face frowning back at him. He doesn’t remember taking out that pillow the night before-

“Thanks,” Yonghwa says after breakfast. The magnae are doing the dishes: Jungshin washing, Minhyuk drying.

“You seemed tired,” Jonghyun says, wolfing down his scrambled eggs, ketchup rimming his mouth. “But I didn’t feel like carrying you into the bedroom.”

“I weigh less than you now.”

“I remember when you--”

“Oh, c’mon,” Yonghwa groans, remembering too. “That was an accident! I didn’t sit on you on purpose. Minhyuk pulled out the chair from under-“

Jonghyun clutches at his chest. “I couldn’t breathe right for a week after that.”

“Sometimes he still gets nightmares,” Jungshin says over his shoulder. “I hear him crying through the wall.”

“It’s true,” Minhyuk says somberly.

“You two keep your eyes on the sink,” Yonghwa orders, but it’s too late because the magnae are on a revolt today.

Jonghyun is laughing so hard pieces of egg are flying out of his mouth and onto Yonghwa’s face. It is absolutely disgusting.

They almost never get days off now. His jawline hasn’t been this sharp in a year-approximately since he met Seohyun. Their fanclub membership’s gone through the roof. “It’s because of your diet, hyung,” Jungshin says in the dressing room. “Girls these days are really perverted.”

“No one’s as perverted as you,” Yonghwa says.

“Want me to introduce you to my friend? She’s really into skinny guys and she’s super perv-“

Minhyuk turns away from his mirror to nudge Jungshin in the side. Jungshin looks momentarily offended until he gets it, and then he closes his mouth. “Sorry.”

“What are you sorry about? Oh.” Yonghwa pauses. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like we really broke up.”

“Yeah, you’d have to be in a relationship in the first place for that to happen,” Jungshin says.

“Can I break up with all of you?” Jonghyun says, in a bad mood because he’s been trying to fall asleep on the couch for the past twenty minutes. The cushions around here are apparently not soundproof.

Yonghwa looks at him and then the others. “I think,” he says slowly, “we should sit on him.”

“Okay,” Minhyuk and Jungshin say automatically.

Not having time to sleep means not having time to think, and as a result the closest to it he gets comes in the form of semi-lucid daydreams-ten-minute snatches of sleep in the van on the way to practice, and once he dozes off on the toilet only to wake up wondering why he’s got such a clear view of his own junk. But the dreams are vivid and startling and even if he doesn’t remember everything afterwards he remembers how he felt in them. The strange nostalgia and wistful longing stay with him even after his head knocks against the car window, after he’s wiped his butt.

In a moment of weakness, he dials a number that he probably shouldn’t.

“So you called to whine about another girl,” Shinhye says. Her voice sounds thick and hoarse, like she’s been sleeping.

“Sorry,” Yonghwa says. “I’m not even thinking about it but she keeps-showing up-“

“In your dreams.”

“Yeah.”

He hears her take a breath. “What do you want me to say?”

He stops to think about it and realizes he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he called her or what he was expecting to hear. Maybe he thought that as a girl she would have answers. Girls often do. They have a wisdom that boys can only grudgingly acknowledge for their own stark lack of it.

“Anything I could say to you, you already know, whether you’ve admitted it to yourself or not. Either way, I think it makes more sense that you hear it from yourself-don’t you?” Shinhye yawns. “And by the way, it’s 2:18 and I’m talking to you under the covers right now.”

“Did you read that study about how cell phone radiation can be dangerous if you hold it too close to your body?”

He can hear her smirking. “Uh-since when have you started paying attention to that kind of thing-or, just, reading?”

“Since-“ he starts, but sees too late it’s a trap. “Oh, shut up. Why are you so mean to me?”

“Go to sleep, pabo,” she says lightly before hanging up.

In reality, Jonghyun is more like a dog than Jungshin. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s always around, putting pillows under your head or covering you with scratchy blankets smelling of mothballs. For all his bashful-looking smiles (but they actually weren’t; he was just smiling) Yonghwa is unable to forget that of the four of them, Jonghyun probably understands heartbreak the best, as if it were carved on the back of his hand, plain for everyday viewing. Jonghyun loves harder than Yonghwa knows how-and it isn’t easy for Yonghwa to admit this, because he thinks he knows pretty well already. Maybe not. The strangest people will surprise you-steal your glasses so that the world you thought you knew suddenly blurs like a shittily taken photo.

“Hey.” Jonghyun leans against his doorway, holding his guitar. “Wanna jam?”

Yonghwa doesn’t look up from the computer. “Wait a sec.”

Jonghyun sits down on the bed and strums the opening to something familiar while he waits. It’s “Run Devil Run.”

“My hair’s getting long.”

“Yeah?” Yonghwa finishes typing the last few characters of his email before turning to give Jonghyun a once-over. “Yeah, it is.”

“Maybe I’ll cut it.”

“Not gonna grow it out?”

“Haven’t made up my mind.”

“Hm.” Yonghwa climbs onto the bed, and for a while they lie side by side without saying anything. Yonghwa counts the paint chips on the ceiling and thinks about whether he and Seohyun have ever been able to do this-lie there next to each other without speaking. Like words were just accessories.

As if on cue, Jonghyun breaks the silence. “Can I be honest?”

Yonghwa nods his head without turning to look at him.

“A part of me’s relieved that it’s over.”

“Between me and Seohyun.”

“Yeah,” Jonghyun says. “Are you going to punch me?”

“Not yet. Why are you relieved?”

“I don’t know. It was fun to see you two going on dates and stuff. We talked a lot about you guys,” Jonghyun says. “Minhyuk, Jungshin, and me. I mean, that was all really fun. And funny.”

“I know you did,” Yonghwa says. “Every time the cameras came over you all acted like little girls.”

Jonghyun laughs, and then he’s quiet again. “It’s nice to have you here again.”

Yonghwa coughs. “What do you mean? I never left.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jonghyun says quickly. “I know. I mean, doing stuff as a band. I don’t know what I’m talking about. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Yonghwa says, but it’s part lie. He thinks he does-he might. When all the nostalgia and missing-her subside, he’ll feel the same way Jonghyun does. Because isn’t that how it goes? The people that come and go, the ones that stay. The band, that’s a keeper. Jonghyun, et cetera.

Another minute goes by in silence.

“Your ceiling is weird,” Jonghyun observes. “Is it supposed to have that many cracks in it?”

“You see them too, right? I don’t know, but they freak me out sometimes.”

“I’m freaked out right now.”

They pass out, trading one stupid topic of conversation for another until words give way to shallow breathing, the murmur of two sort of-in-sync heartbeats. Their feet dangle off the bed. Jonghyun curls his toes and hums Aerosmith in his sleep. The sweetest dream will never do. When Yonghwa opens his eyes, it’s only 5 AM and they’re mysteriously holding hands. But the cold feet balance out the warm hands, so he doesn’t think about letting go.