you are not mine (but sometimes i pretend you wish you were)
title: you are not mine (but sometimes i pretend you wish you were)
pairing(s): sunggyu/eunji, hoya/eunji
word count: ~5.8k
a/n: after not writing a full-length fic for almost a year, something inside me wanted a challenge. i've grown so comfortable with writing sm fic that i wanted a change. thus, i struggled with both writing a non-sm pairing, and writing "canon" for the first time, and this is what the fic ended up being - a little more descriptive and introspective than my usual style. i'm still growing as a writer and i have a long way to go, so it's not my best work but i appreciate any and all comments and concrit!
“Congratulations; you’re debuting in six months.”
That is what the president’s words sound like, two sentences that should be distinctly separate but are instead rolled into one, one phrase immediately after the other with not enough time in between to breathe.
This is what it feels like, when she is introduced to A Pink and told she is one of them. No one believes it, least of all her. Chorong, the oldest and undisputed leader of the group, looks over her with a quiet disdain, but no one argues because they need a main vocalist. At this point, she is the godsend, she is the miracle that sets their debut date in place.
This is what she does, because there is not enough time to breathe, but just enough to protect herself. She alone is not strong enough to shoulder this burden, the weight of being the miracle. So she buries Hyerim deep, deep down, along with her Busan accent and her insecurities, and Eunji bows 90 degrees to greet her new groupmates.
It is a late autumn evening when some members of Infinite are gathered in the living room, watching the first few episodes of Reply 1997. It’s an uncontested ritual now; they always watched Myungsoo in his dramas - mostly to give him shit for his acting skills - so it makes sense for the habit to pick up again when Howon lands his first big role. The members are already debating about the sexuality of Howon’s character when Sunggyu finds that his eyes tend to linger a little too long on the main female lead.
“She’s cute,” he says in his defense when Howon shoots him a questioning look, one eyebrow arched.
His member snorts and crosses his arms, but otherwise doesn’t answer. He has no idea what the hell that means, but sometimes, with Howon, it’s better not to ask.
The incident is forgotten and the actress he dubs “cute” fades into the dark corners of his memory.
The banging at the apartment door is a rude awakening. Blearily, Sunggyu rubs his eyes with one hand and feels for his phone on his pillow with the other. The bright screen flashes something like 1:47 am and all he can really do at that moment, still too groggy for reality, is wonder what the hell is going on. In the minute or so it takes for him to gain his senses, the banging does not cease.
“Hyung,” Sungyeol groans from his side of the bedroom. “Make it stop.”
Infinite has a photoshoot to wake up for at 4 am and all he wants is 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep, but he is the leader and even if he wasn’t, 5 hours of dreamland is hardly reasonable in a job like theirs. He remembers the nights as a trainee when it was much, much worse. So he drags himself out of bed and across the living room to answer the door.
He stares at the offender, and she smiles back.
“Hi, sunbae-nim,” she greets with a perfect 90 degree bow, after just a moment of silence and confusion. “Is Hoya-ssi home?”
“Um.” How did this girl find their dorm? How did she even get into the building? “Sorry, who are you again?” he asks unabashedly in banmal. Even embarrassment isn’t awake yet at 2 in the morning.
“Oh.” He’d expect most people to be flustered, but instead she tucks her hair behind her ear with that smile still in place. “Hi, I’m A Pink’s Jung Eunji. I acted with Hoya-ssi in Reply 1997? I was nearby so I wanted to see if he was home.” Her use of formal speech grates on his mind; he has to stop himself from physically wincing as an automatic reflex.
Fucking hell, it’s too goddamn early in the morning.
Sunggyu rubs his eyes again and squints at her carefully, noting for the first time the puffiness under her eyes. He struggles to draw up the memory of the “cute” actress with her trademark eye-smile.
“Oh, hello,” he chuckles, switching to formal speech as well, as he should. He’s the sunbae, after all. Scratching the back of his head, he thinks of an appropriate answer to the reason why she just showed up at their dorm in the middle of the night. “Well, Infinite H actually had a schedule last night, so they’re not home yet…”
“Ah, I see,” she nods, her expression the same. Eerily, the smile doesn’t even budge, and Sunggyu thinks there is something seriously wrong with this girl. “Well, I brought some leftover sushi for him, since it’s his favorite, if you could tell him I dropped by?”
“Yeah, of course.” He takes the takeout box from her hands and bids her good night before closing the door, all but chucking the sushi into the fridge, and stumbling back into bed.
When he returns to the land of the living it’s already 4:15 and he can hear the other members eating breakfast in the living room. He trudges to the table and grabs his bowl of rice, not even stopping to greet Dongwoo and Howon, who must have just returned after he went back to sleep.
“Hyung,” Sungjong pipes up while still chewing, “who was at the door in the middle of the night? The noises woke me up.”
Dongwoo tells the maknae to shut up while eating before turning to the leader. “Someone came in the middle of the night?”
“Some girl looking for Howon,” Sunggyu brushes off as he swings open the fridge door in search of the fruit their manager brought the other day. Instead, he finds the takeout box of sushi on the top shelf. Now that he’s not half-asleep, when he grabs the box he sees that it’s from Howon’s favorite Japanese restaurant, on the other side of Seoul. Hadn’t the girl said she was nearby?
“A girl?”
“Looking for Howon?”
“She said she was Jung Eunji,” he tells Howon, who rolls his eyes and takes the takeout box offered to him.
“A Pink’s Eunji?” Woohyun brightens immediately despite the early hour. “She’s really nice, hyung. I thought you knew her! We used to live in the same apartment building as A Pink before we moved here.”
Right, he vaguely remembers something about that. They had played it up on A Pink’s reality show, calling themselves a big happy family. He wonders which fans actually believed it. Their companies are completely separate, after all, and it’s not like they could spend time together in between all their schedules.
“What did you think of her?” Howon asks, even though he usually doesn’t attempt to keep the conversation going, especially about a girl. Sunggyu frowns and tries to remember the impression she gave off, but comes up short besides inordinate amounts of enthusiasm, even for an idol.
“She smiles too much.”
His groupmate murmurs something low that sounds like agreement before their manager arrives and ushers them into the van.
The next time Infinite and A Pink have overlapping promotion cycles, A Pink’s popularity has exploded with their new single, NoNoNo. The catchy tune soon becomes a cult phenomenon as it’s played on every radio station, inside every restaurant, on every variety show. The effect that really matters is that as a result, A Pink shoots to stardom after two years of near-obscurity, becoming the beloved favorite girl group of creepy, middle-aged men all over Korea.
“Congratulations on your win, sunbae-nim,” she says when he passes her in the halls, backstage for M!Countdown. The smile is there again, the exact copy-paste of the one he saw at their door and some CF from a couple weeks back. It is so unnerving it takes him a few seconds to register what exactly she just said.
“Ah, thanks, Eunji-ssi.” They stand like that for a few moments, each looking at the other. Sunggyu wonders if she thinks he’s just as strange as he thinks she is. But after a period of silence, he assumes the conversation - if it can even be called that - is over, and he is about nod and move on when -
“Do you know where Hoya-ssi is? I’d like to see him.”
He looks her over again, this time with newer eyes. Her smile is even wider, if possible, to the point where it hurts to look at. She’s wearing a white flower in her hair to match her performance outfit and to any other person, she would look like an angel.
But there’s something very, very wrong with her. He doesn’t know why he knows so, but he does. What kind of a girl visits someone in the middle of the night?
“Hoya always liked girls that were kind of weird,” he blurts out. He’s always been a little like that, oblivious to social cues, saying the worst thing possible at the worst possible time. This time it’s no different. She stiffens and the smile falters a little, and for a second he thinks she looks normal. Human, like the rest of them.
“So you think I’m weird,” she replies, tilting her head to the side. It is not a question, but it holds the same weight as one. Her bubbly tone has faded and there’s nothing left except the words themselves, so you think I’m weird. She doesn’t even sound insulted; she just leaves the phrase hanging in the air, bare and for all the world to see if not for the smile that still graces her features. Around them, staff and coordis and managers pass by as if the two idols are having the polite small talk that they should be having, and her facial expression doesn’t let them believe anything different.
He’s always been shit at lying, so the only option left is the truth. “Yeah, you kind of are.” He shoves his hands into his pockets - thank god his stage outfit even has pockets - but his eyes do not leave hers. He refuses to waver, not when faced with her. “You’re just - you don’t really smile a lot, do you?”
She looks like him like he is a new discovery that has just materialized in front of her eyes, as if she is recognizing his worth for the first time. He shifts slightly, uncomfortable with the way her gaze settles on him, and suddenly, her ear-to-ear grin is back in place as she bows and turns to leave. “I guess I’ll just look for Hoya-ssi next time.”
Looking back, he realizes - what kind of a girl visits someone in the middle of the night? A girl who needs a friend.
“What’s your ideal type, Eunji?” Gary-hyung asks when they’re filming for Running Man’s idol episode, all crammed together on the way to the destination of their first mission. Of course, Infinite and A Pink get slotted into the same car. “Pick one of the two guys from Infinite.”
Myungsoo sits on the other side of HaHa and it seems obvious which one she’ll choose. Myungsoo has the face and the charm, which is why so many girls fall for him in the first place. Although, to be honest, he can’t really bring himself to care; Destiny promotions are still happening and Running Man filming starts way too early in the morning for him to function properly.
“Um…. Sunggyu sunbae-nim?” she tentatively responds, before nodding in affirmation. “I think he has a really great personality.”
He can’t see her face because he’s sitting in the backseat, but he knows the smile is on her face. He knows to not believe a word she says.
“Oppa will consider your confession.” The entire car bursts out into raucous laughter as he looks out the window. Of course, he plays it off because it’s variety and that’s what he excels at, but is it normal to say that someone has a great personality after they tell you you’re weird? Even he knows the puzzle pieces don’t fit quite together.
Their manager texts him an article about the so-called confession the day after the episode airs. He opens and scans it quickly as he’s getting his roots dyed again; the article doesn’t say much, but then again, there really isn’t much to say. Other than the maybe 45 seconds or so of material, Sunggyu and Eunji have never so much as carried a conversation in the public eye. Not that they really have in private, either.
“What are you looking at, hyung?” Sungjong peeks over his shoulder, bored as he waits for his turn with the hairstylist. “Is Manager-hyung mad about something again?”
“No,” he tells the maknae, before the youngest disappears to go pester someone else. He fights the urge to sigh and instead texts the manager back.
s: It doesn’t mean anything.
The stylist ambles over and checks on his roots before frowning. “Looks like the bleach needs some more time, but you need to leave soon. I’m going to ask if we can just do your hair a darker shade of brown and save us some time.”
She hurries to make the phone call so he can leave on time for his next schedule, and he stares dispassionately at his reflection in the mirror. He rather likes the light auburn he sported for Destiny, but dark brown isn’t too far off. At least it’s not the fire-engine red they chose last year. It’s not the stylist’s fault in the least, just his hair’s annoying resistance to dye and a poor set of circumstances. Some things, he has come to find, are just like that - they are not the cause of any one thing, but they just happen anyway.
His phone pings with their manager’s response.
m: You don’t get to decide what it means.
It takes him a few days to finally ask for her number, and when he does he does not ask Howon. For some reason, it feels entirely wrong to ask his member about her, even though Howon probably knows her best.
Howon is the friend she seeks out in the middle of the night. Sunggyu is the person she names as her ideal type on screen. One belongs to no one but herself, and the other is literally put on broadcast. The difference is worlds apart, two melodies too dissonant for one harmony. Even asking feels like he’s intruding into their friendship or whatever relationship they have, and he doesn’t even know how close that friendship really is. The idea of being the third wheel grinds against his mind like nails scraping against a chalkboard, so irritating that his innate reaction is to shut out all noise.
No, he does not breathe a word to Howon, because he doesn’t really know what he’d say. He’s still not sure why he wants to contact her in the first place, except that something deep inside of him is itching and it will not rest until he scratches. There is something entirely off about this girl, as if something about her has shifted two feet to the right and back again and didn’t quite fall back into place.
So instead of asking Howon, he asks Ryeowook to ask Dongwoon to ask Hayoung. He debates with himself whether or not to save her number in his contacts, mostly because he doesn’t know what she prefers to be called. Is Eunji only her stage name? Would she rather be referred to with her real name? He ponders for two seconds if he should search it online before he shakes his head and throws his phone down onto his mattress. In the end, he does not save her number, choosing to leave Ryeowook’s text message unopened in his inbox for the next few weeks as if he can ignore all the off-kilter things in the world.
Except he has never been the type to avoid, so months later, backstage for MAMA, he opens the text message and clicks on the number. His fingers hover over the screen and in the chaos of hair and makeup and costuming and lights, he swallows hard and clicks send before the regret can come crashing down in waves.
s: hi, this is sunggyu, oppa has considered your confession
It is not until after the awards ceremony and the rush of winning Best Male Group, when he’s already on the plane waiting to take off from Hong Kong and return to Seoul, that he sees the reply. It’s something like 3 in the morning and she’s awake too; in fact, she’s probably jetting off to some fan meeting at that exact moment. At least this part about her, he understands all too well.
e: so what is oppa’s answer? ㅋㅋㅋ
He looks outside his window at the dark Hong Kong night. He heard it does not snow in Hong Kong - the air is different from Korea’s winter, strangely unsettling. Of course, there is a scientific explanation for it: Hong Kong’s latitude falls south of Seoul’s. There is an explanation for everything.
s: what are you doing over the break?
The snow is falling and this café is the only one that he knows of that’s open during the holidays. Most idols spend these few precious vacation days with their families, so he somehow winds up in the same place every year, this little, empty café. Being alone is a hard-earned privilege in a profession like theirs, but ironically, the dorm feels empty when none of the members are home. He can’t stand it when the dorm is silent, when it is not filled with the crazed antics of Infinite. The seven members are not the kind of family that they always project on-camera, but they have come to a mutual understanding and respect for each other that is more than enough for him, as leader, to look back and say he is proud of all of them and how far they have come.
He is not lonely at these times, particularly - but silence, as he has come to learn, can slowly drive you insane, air thick and hot and stifling until you choke on nothing but your own thoughts. The sounds of the coffee machine and the bustling of the waitress in the back room, in comparison, is a cacophony of peace.
“Hi, sunbae-nim,” she chimes as she drops into the seat across from him. Her cheeks should be rosy from the cold wind outside but instead, they are perfectly pale like the rest of her. He thinks that this might prove his theory that she isn’t quite human at all, but then he notices the way her eyelashes are a little too long, and he frowns. The power of industrial makeup.
“I got you a coffee.” He slides the cup over to her side of the table. Black, he doesn’t add. He has no idea how he likes her coffee - if she even drinks it - but there’s something almost poetic about a cutesy girl group member drinking black coffee, and that’s what he had in mind when he ordered for her. Not that she even drinks it in the end. She thanks him with that smile of hers and leaves the cup untouched.
“It’s really cold outside, isn’t it?” A question like that shouldn’t come with a smile, but he’s not surprised that in her case, it does. It doesn’t make the situation any less uncomfortable. He doesn’t understand the purpose of being happy about something that’s not.
“You smile too fucking much.” The words tumble out on their own and he grimaces. He hadn’t meant to curse.
Her smile drops and for a moment she looks stricken before a mask of confusion forms, hiding any cracks or crevices that may have appeared at the jab. He finds that he unconsciously relaxes at the sight of a human reaction from her. “Last time,” she voices, tone once again the steely glint that had made itself known in the halls of the CJ Media building, “you said I don’t smile a lot.”
“It’s different.” He doesn’t attempt to explain. She already knows.
She props her elbow on the table and rests her chin on her hand, watching him with hooded eyes. As she leans forward, he catches her perfume - a cloyingly sweet vanilla scent. It takes all his effort not to wrinkle his nose in distaste. “Is that why you think I’m weird?”
“Part of it, yeah.”
“What’s the other part?”
His eyes trace the way her fingers are curled up against her cheek. They’re clenched too tightly to pass off as nonchalantly relaxed. “I don’t know.”
She sighs in exasperation, pulling back from the table. “Pity, I was hoping you could enlighten me.” She hits the back of her chair hard, and the chair teeters on its two back legs before safely returning to all four. Her expression does not change once as she literally goes to the edge and back.
“Do you mind if I speak informally?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer before continuing. “There’s something wrong with you that I just can’t figure out.”
“I’d love to figure it out too,” she shoots back flippantly.
“But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asks. She doesn’t reply. “Honestly, it’s annoying and I don’t want to put in the effort to try to understand.” I don’t want to try to understand someone as messed up as you, he leaves unsaid. He drops a few bills on the table, enough to cover the coffee, and leaves without the expectation that he’ll see her outside of work again. “By the way,” he calls before he steps out the door, “vanilla doesn’t suit you.”
He does not encounter her through the rest of winter and spring and he assumes she either took his words to heart, or thought fuck him and decided otherwise. Somehow, he knows it’s the latter.
He doesn’t ask Howon if he’s met her recently because he knows it’s not his business, and the one thing the members appreciate the least Is an interrogative leader. No one knows he even met with the A Pink member over the holidays, and if anything he’d like to keep it that way. He does not have the time in his schedule for a girl like her, whose issues seem to have won out over her willpower.
Until she decides otherwise. After a long night of recording, he is about to head home when his phone lights up with a notification.
e: let’s meet up.
e: bring beer.
He didn’t save her name in his phone in the end, but the texts pop up in their thread from the holidays. The messages are less of an invitation and more of a demand, with no room for excuses. He’s not exactly thrilled, but he supposes he owes her after he asked her to come to the café. He grabs a six-pack from the convenience store next to the studio, and meets her at the Han River.
“You’re late,” she tells him when he sits down next to her on the bank. Unlike last time, her makeup is scrubbed free from her face. The dark circles are set deep under her eyes and she looks like she hasn’t slept in ages.
She looks normal, for once. He wordlessly holds up the six-pack in response, cracking one open and offering it to her before she shakes her head. “The beer’s for you, I can’t drink when I’m on my meds.”
He looks at her for a long, hard moment before he shrugs and brings the can to his lips. The cheap beer is usually unappealing, but today it tastes especially bitter, like questions and regrets he cannot swallow. “So, what brings us here, two friends drinking together?” He does not stop the sarcasm from seeping into his words.
“Are we friends?” A boat goes by in the water and when the light shines on her face, he sees she is not just tired, but haggard-looking, like she has carried the weight of the world on her shoulders for much too long.
He watches the reflected light break into a dozen shapes as the water ripples, until the surface smooths out once again. “Friends like each other.”
She makes a soft noise under her breath - he thinks it might be a laugh - before humming in agreement. “I suppose we’re not friends then,” she asserts as she crosses her legs, and he notices the Adidas sandals she’s wearing on her feet, the kind that old women wear when they’re weeding their gardens. The dark blue and white-striped design clashes with her hot pink pedicure. “I don’t do well past acquaintanceship. Not my area.”
“Are you and Howon friends?” He lies down on the grass and looks up at the sky. There’s no moon tonight, just darkness, something like an omen.
“The very best.” She speaks as if carelessly, but he knows from the sound of her voice that this is one thing she believes with her entire heart. “He’s my platonic life partner, if that exists.” The tone of her voice is lilting when she says life partner, in stark contrast to the deadness he saw before, and he catches the soft wisps of music behind it, the hints of a bright melody that has not escaped her throat for a while, yearning to be free.
“The loneliness is uncomfortable,” he guesses.
“I’m not lonely,” she corrects immediately, lying down beside him. He looks over at her and she’s staring into the vast open space of nothingness, at something he himself can’t see. In that moment, with her expression sadder than ever, he thinks she could be beautiful. “It’s just nice to not be alone with yourself, sometimes. There’s a difference.” She doesn’t have to explain what she means. He already knows. “I don’t need comfort.”
This is what she says, but she doesn’t pull away when he covers her hands with his.
They don’t meet often in between all their schedules, but at least once month he finds himself buying the same cheap beer and settling next to her on the grass. It turns into somewhat of a running joke, two non-friends meeting at night while only he drinks the beer he brings, although the humor, somewhere along the line, becomes inexplicable. Not that it needs to be explained, because a joke is always best when shared between two people, but it’s like he keeps waiting and waiting for a punchline that never comes.
“We’re really fucked up,” she randomly interjects one night, so indifferently that he finds it hilarious, and the alcohol makes him laugh much longer than he should. She doesn’t join in, not even out of politeness - but when were there ever manners between them, really? - and when he finishes, they sit there content to revel in silence. Her weirdness is probably starting to rub off on him, which is maybe why he thinks he understands her a little better now.
It is winter once more when he comes back from meeting her again and to find Howon sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the lines in the wooden table, coffee mug in hand.
“Get some sleep,” he tells his member as drops his keys onto the counter. In the silence of the kitchen, he suddenly becomes very aware of the sound of the clock ticking in the living room. Tick. Tick. He has half the mind of just taking the batteries out. “We have another long day tomorrow.” Another end-of-the-year awards show, meaning another performance and hopefully, another award. By now it’s been more than 4 years and they have the drill down by muscle memory, even if they didn’t have it down by heart.
Howon smiles wanly, and the flash of similarity is striking. He puts the ceramic mug down forcefully, the loud clunk reverberating in the small space of the kitchen. There is not a sadness to his face, just a look of exhaustion, like he has seen and dealt with things that his leader can never understand. “Did she tell you we’re fighting, hyung?”
No, she didn’t. They have an unspoken agreement of sorts not to speak of Howon, and he hasn’t even mentioned to his groupmate who exactly he’s been meeting when he takes a six-pack and leaves the dorm. Her friendship with Howon and whatever she has with him are meant to exist on separate planes, not running parallel and never to intersect.
“Be careful, hyung,” Howon tells him, after he takes his silence for a negative. His eyes fly back to the table and he does not look up again. “Girls like her? They’re why storms are named after people.”
He doesn’t know what she has done to Howon, how exactly she has reduced him to this, and he feels a tinge of regret for not warning her off more harshly the first time when they met at the café. The only thing worse than a scandal breaking out is one of his members breaking down. As leader he has prepared a lot of contingencies, but he has always been able to depend on his members, especially Howon.
But because he is the leader, he is the hyung, confidence has been trained into his every action, even when unnatural. “Don’t worry,” he reassures cheerily. It sounds unconvincing, even to himself.
“Be careful,” Howon repeats again, closing his eyes in insistence. “I know Eunji. She’s a fucking mess. People like that, the worst thing they can do is destroy someone who tries to fix them.”
But spring comes and although it is the season of change, he keeps buying the same brand of alcohol and going to the same spot by the river. Today, however, she pushes the pack of beer aside and suggests a walk. “It’s a little cold, isn’t it,” she states, with no opportunity for him to disagree.
Eunji hums an old Nell song, and it’s prettier than anything he’s heard her sing on stage. “You should feature in my solo album,” he says for no particular reason, except that her voice is the kind that stretches the imagination, that soars far above the rest of them. A voice like that is wasted in a girl group that sings about first loves and crushes, he thinks. It’s much more suited for heartbreak.
“Why would I ever do that?” The accompanying laughter is carried away with the wind and she sounds deceptively small and vulnerable. He silently agrees; they are not friends, and she does not owe him anything. He doesn’t know why he brought it up in the first place. “Hey,” she tells him as she stops walking. He turns and looks to see her face, but the nearby lamp suddenly goes out and he can’t see much besides the outline of her cheekbones. “Did you ever figure out the other part?”
He searches what he can see of her face, but comes up short besides his gut instinct that something is off-balance. “No,” he replies hoarsely, because his answer is not one that can be put into words. “Do you wonder why Dispatch never catches us?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she scoffs as they resume walking. “Even if they got their hands on some pictures, we don’t really look like we’re in love, do we?”
“What does love look like, oh great actress?” She smirks at the title but does not answer until a few minutes later.
“In dramas, love is when the girl subconsciously glances at the guy when she thinks he won’t notice,” she answers definitively. He looks at her again and wonders if she has ever experienced that kind of love, but her tone is so neutral it seems impossible. He does not agree or disagree, because he is the last person to recognize or know what love is, but it sounds about right.
The next time Infinite and A Pink have overlapping promoting cycles, it’s summer and Infinite is on a winning streak with their newest single, Bad. A Pink, on the other hand, is performing poorly on the charts compared to their previous successes. He wonders if he should text her and ask how she’s doing, but their schedules are so busy that the six-pack he bought in advance sits in the fridge for longer than it probably should.
In the end, he does not have to seek her out, because A Pink makes their rounds backstage of Music Bank and greet Infinite personally in their waiting room. The entire group doesn’t look too perky, but that’s what a comeback does to you. His eyes search for hers first.
“Congratulations,” she says softly, and the smile she gives him does not stretch from ear to ear. Her eye-smile is a little less pronounced than the ones caught on screen, and he relaxes and grins back. She looks less happy and more human, which is more than he can say than last time they were in the same situation.
As she is about to leave with the rest of the group, she flashes him another smile. Then, she glances sharply at Howon and her mouth sets into the tiniest of grimaces, the type that no one notices except him, before she turns away.
Something inside of him, within seconds, shifts a little to the right and then back again, but there is a feeling that won’t settle. It does not leave when she is out the door, does not leave after they have all returned home and he stares, unseeing, at the mirror in front of him. It is a startling feeling, an old friend just old enough to be unfamiliar. Last time, he remembers, a time not so long ago, he swore he would never feel this way again.
“I’m sorry to inform you that you were not selected in this round of auditions…”
These are not the words that he hears when he is rejected. Instead, it is the quiet whisper in the back of his mind, so quiet and yet so painful, of you’re not good enough. He has risked everything for a train ticket to Seoul and now he has nothing, not even his dignity. He works three jobs every day and practices until he can’t catch his breath in his spare time, but he waits for a validation that never comes.
Every time he fails, something inside of him shifts a little to the right and back again, but everything is all wrong, and this is how he understands his heart is breaking. He doesn’t know why it’s so painful when it shouldn’t be. After all, he can’t lose something that never belonged to him in the first place.
fin.
pairing(s): sunggyu/eunji, hoya/eunji
word count: ~5.8k
a/n: after not writing a full-length fic for almost a year, something inside me wanted a challenge. i've grown so comfortable with writing sm fic that i wanted a change. thus, i struggled with both writing a non-sm pairing, and writing "canon" for the first time, and this is what the fic ended up being - a little more descriptive and introspective than my usual style. i'm still growing as a writer and i have a long way to go, so it's not my best work but i appreciate any and all comments and concrit!
“Congratulations; you’re debuting in six months.”
That is what the president’s words sound like, two sentences that should be distinctly separate but are instead rolled into one, one phrase immediately after the other with not enough time in between to breathe.
This is what it feels like, when she is introduced to A Pink and told she is one of them. No one believes it, least of all her. Chorong, the oldest and undisputed leader of the group, looks over her with a quiet disdain, but no one argues because they need a main vocalist. At this point, she is the godsend, she is the miracle that sets their debut date in place.
This is what she does, because there is not enough time to breathe, but just enough to protect herself. She alone is not strong enough to shoulder this burden, the weight of being the miracle. So she buries Hyerim deep, deep down, along with her Busan accent and her insecurities, and Eunji bows 90 degrees to greet her new groupmates.
It is a late autumn evening when some members of Infinite are gathered in the living room, watching the first few episodes of Reply 1997. It’s an uncontested ritual now; they always watched Myungsoo in his dramas - mostly to give him shit for his acting skills - so it makes sense for the habit to pick up again when Howon lands his first big role. The members are already debating about the sexuality of Howon’s character when Sunggyu finds that his eyes tend to linger a little too long on the main female lead.
“She’s cute,” he says in his defense when Howon shoots him a questioning look, one eyebrow arched.
His member snorts and crosses his arms, but otherwise doesn’t answer. He has no idea what the hell that means, but sometimes, with Howon, it’s better not to ask.
The incident is forgotten and the actress he dubs “cute” fades into the dark corners of his memory.
The banging at the apartment door is a rude awakening. Blearily, Sunggyu rubs his eyes with one hand and feels for his phone on his pillow with the other. The bright screen flashes something like 1:47 am and all he can really do at that moment, still too groggy for reality, is wonder what the hell is going on. In the minute or so it takes for him to gain his senses, the banging does not cease.
“Hyung,” Sungyeol groans from his side of the bedroom. “Make it stop.”
Infinite has a photoshoot to wake up for at 4 am and all he wants is 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep, but he is the leader and even if he wasn’t, 5 hours of dreamland is hardly reasonable in a job like theirs. He remembers the nights as a trainee when it was much, much worse. So he drags himself out of bed and across the living room to answer the door.
He stares at the offender, and she smiles back.
“Hi, sunbae-nim,” she greets with a perfect 90 degree bow, after just a moment of silence and confusion. “Is Hoya-ssi home?”
“Um.” How did this girl find their dorm? How did she even get into the building? “Sorry, who are you again?” he asks unabashedly in banmal. Even embarrassment isn’t awake yet at 2 in the morning.
“Oh.” He’d expect most people to be flustered, but instead she tucks her hair behind her ear with that smile still in place. “Hi, I’m A Pink’s Jung Eunji. I acted with Hoya-ssi in Reply 1997? I was nearby so I wanted to see if he was home.” Her use of formal speech grates on his mind; he has to stop himself from physically wincing as an automatic reflex.
Fucking hell, it’s too goddamn early in the morning.
Sunggyu rubs his eyes again and squints at her carefully, noting for the first time the puffiness under her eyes. He struggles to draw up the memory of the “cute” actress with her trademark eye-smile.
“Oh, hello,” he chuckles, switching to formal speech as well, as he should. He’s the sunbae, after all. Scratching the back of his head, he thinks of an appropriate answer to the reason why she just showed up at their dorm in the middle of the night. “Well, Infinite H actually had a schedule last night, so they’re not home yet…”
“Ah, I see,” she nods, her expression the same. Eerily, the smile doesn’t even budge, and Sunggyu thinks there is something seriously wrong with this girl. “Well, I brought some leftover sushi for him, since it’s his favorite, if you could tell him I dropped by?”
“Yeah, of course.” He takes the takeout box from her hands and bids her good night before closing the door, all but chucking the sushi into the fridge, and stumbling back into bed.
When he returns to the land of the living it’s already 4:15 and he can hear the other members eating breakfast in the living room. He trudges to the table and grabs his bowl of rice, not even stopping to greet Dongwoo and Howon, who must have just returned after he went back to sleep.
“Hyung,” Sungjong pipes up while still chewing, “who was at the door in the middle of the night? The noises woke me up.”
Dongwoo tells the maknae to shut up while eating before turning to the leader. “Someone came in the middle of the night?”
“Some girl looking for Howon,” Sunggyu brushes off as he swings open the fridge door in search of the fruit their manager brought the other day. Instead, he finds the takeout box of sushi on the top shelf. Now that he’s not half-asleep, when he grabs the box he sees that it’s from Howon’s favorite Japanese restaurant, on the other side of Seoul. Hadn’t the girl said she was nearby?
“A girl?”
“Looking for Howon?”
“She said she was Jung Eunji,” he tells Howon, who rolls his eyes and takes the takeout box offered to him.
“A Pink’s Eunji?” Woohyun brightens immediately despite the early hour. “She’s really nice, hyung. I thought you knew her! We used to live in the same apartment building as A Pink before we moved here.”
Right, he vaguely remembers something about that. They had played it up on A Pink’s reality show, calling themselves a big happy family. He wonders which fans actually believed it. Their companies are completely separate, after all, and it’s not like they could spend time together in between all their schedules.
“What did you think of her?” Howon asks, even though he usually doesn’t attempt to keep the conversation going, especially about a girl. Sunggyu frowns and tries to remember the impression she gave off, but comes up short besides inordinate amounts of enthusiasm, even for an idol.
“She smiles too much.”
His groupmate murmurs something low that sounds like agreement before their manager arrives and ushers them into the van.
The next time Infinite and A Pink have overlapping promotion cycles, A Pink’s popularity has exploded with their new single, NoNoNo. The catchy tune soon becomes a cult phenomenon as it’s played on every radio station, inside every restaurant, on every variety show. The effect that really matters is that as a result, A Pink shoots to stardom after two years of near-obscurity, becoming the beloved favorite girl group of creepy, middle-aged men all over Korea.
“Congratulations on your win, sunbae-nim,” she says when he passes her in the halls, backstage for M!Countdown. The smile is there again, the exact copy-paste of the one he saw at their door and some CF from a couple weeks back. It is so unnerving it takes him a few seconds to register what exactly she just said.
“Ah, thanks, Eunji-ssi.” They stand like that for a few moments, each looking at the other. Sunggyu wonders if she thinks he’s just as strange as he thinks she is. But after a period of silence, he assumes the conversation - if it can even be called that - is over, and he is about nod and move on when -
“Do you know where Hoya-ssi is? I’d like to see him.”
He looks her over again, this time with newer eyes. Her smile is even wider, if possible, to the point where it hurts to look at. She’s wearing a white flower in her hair to match her performance outfit and to any other person, she would look like an angel.
But there’s something very, very wrong with her. He doesn’t know why he knows so, but he does. What kind of a girl visits someone in the middle of the night?
“Hoya always liked girls that were kind of weird,” he blurts out. He’s always been a little like that, oblivious to social cues, saying the worst thing possible at the worst possible time. This time it’s no different. She stiffens and the smile falters a little, and for a second he thinks she looks normal. Human, like the rest of them.
“So you think I’m weird,” she replies, tilting her head to the side. It is not a question, but it holds the same weight as one. Her bubbly tone has faded and there’s nothing left except the words themselves, so you think I’m weird. She doesn’t even sound insulted; she just leaves the phrase hanging in the air, bare and for all the world to see if not for the smile that still graces her features. Around them, staff and coordis and managers pass by as if the two idols are having the polite small talk that they should be having, and her facial expression doesn’t let them believe anything different.
He’s always been shit at lying, so the only option left is the truth. “Yeah, you kind of are.” He shoves his hands into his pockets - thank god his stage outfit even has pockets - but his eyes do not leave hers. He refuses to waver, not when faced with her. “You’re just - you don’t really smile a lot, do you?”
She looks like him like he is a new discovery that has just materialized in front of her eyes, as if she is recognizing his worth for the first time. He shifts slightly, uncomfortable with the way her gaze settles on him, and suddenly, her ear-to-ear grin is back in place as she bows and turns to leave. “I guess I’ll just look for Hoya-ssi next time.”
Looking back, he realizes - what kind of a girl visits someone in the middle of the night? A girl who needs a friend.
“What’s your ideal type, Eunji?” Gary-hyung asks when they’re filming for Running Man’s idol episode, all crammed together on the way to the destination of their first mission. Of course, Infinite and A Pink get slotted into the same car. “Pick one of the two guys from Infinite.”
Myungsoo sits on the other side of HaHa and it seems obvious which one she’ll choose. Myungsoo has the face and the charm, which is why so many girls fall for him in the first place. Although, to be honest, he can’t really bring himself to care; Destiny promotions are still happening and Running Man filming starts way too early in the morning for him to function properly.
“Um…. Sunggyu sunbae-nim?” she tentatively responds, before nodding in affirmation. “I think he has a really great personality.”
He can’t see her face because he’s sitting in the backseat, but he knows the smile is on her face. He knows to not believe a word she says.
“Oppa will consider your confession.” The entire car bursts out into raucous laughter as he looks out the window. Of course, he plays it off because it’s variety and that’s what he excels at, but is it normal to say that someone has a great personality after they tell you you’re weird? Even he knows the puzzle pieces don’t fit quite together.
Their manager texts him an article about the so-called confession the day after the episode airs. He opens and scans it quickly as he’s getting his roots dyed again; the article doesn’t say much, but then again, there really isn’t much to say. Other than the maybe 45 seconds or so of material, Sunggyu and Eunji have never so much as carried a conversation in the public eye. Not that they really have in private, either.
“What are you looking at, hyung?” Sungjong peeks over his shoulder, bored as he waits for his turn with the hairstylist. “Is Manager-hyung mad about something again?”
“No,” he tells the maknae, before the youngest disappears to go pester someone else. He fights the urge to sigh and instead texts the manager back.
s: It doesn’t mean anything.
The stylist ambles over and checks on his roots before frowning. “Looks like the bleach needs some more time, but you need to leave soon. I’m going to ask if we can just do your hair a darker shade of brown and save us some time.”
She hurries to make the phone call so he can leave on time for his next schedule, and he stares dispassionately at his reflection in the mirror. He rather likes the light auburn he sported for Destiny, but dark brown isn’t too far off. At least it’s not the fire-engine red they chose last year. It’s not the stylist’s fault in the least, just his hair’s annoying resistance to dye and a poor set of circumstances. Some things, he has come to find, are just like that - they are not the cause of any one thing, but they just happen anyway.
His phone pings with their manager’s response.
m: You don’t get to decide what it means.
It takes him a few days to finally ask for her number, and when he does he does not ask Howon. For some reason, it feels entirely wrong to ask his member about her, even though Howon probably knows her best.
Howon is the friend she seeks out in the middle of the night. Sunggyu is the person she names as her ideal type on screen. One belongs to no one but herself, and the other is literally put on broadcast. The difference is worlds apart, two melodies too dissonant for one harmony. Even asking feels like he’s intruding into their friendship or whatever relationship they have, and he doesn’t even know how close that friendship really is. The idea of being the third wheel grinds against his mind like nails scraping against a chalkboard, so irritating that his innate reaction is to shut out all noise.
No, he does not breathe a word to Howon, because he doesn’t really know what he’d say. He’s still not sure why he wants to contact her in the first place, except that something deep inside of him is itching and it will not rest until he scratches. There is something entirely off about this girl, as if something about her has shifted two feet to the right and back again and didn’t quite fall back into place.
So instead of asking Howon, he asks Ryeowook to ask Dongwoon to ask Hayoung. He debates with himself whether or not to save her number in his contacts, mostly because he doesn’t know what she prefers to be called. Is Eunji only her stage name? Would she rather be referred to with her real name? He ponders for two seconds if he should search it online before he shakes his head and throws his phone down onto his mattress. In the end, he does not save her number, choosing to leave Ryeowook’s text message unopened in his inbox for the next few weeks as if he can ignore all the off-kilter things in the world.
Except he has never been the type to avoid, so months later, backstage for MAMA, he opens the text message and clicks on the number. His fingers hover over the screen and in the chaos of hair and makeup and costuming and lights, he swallows hard and clicks send before the regret can come crashing down in waves.
s: hi, this is sunggyu, oppa has considered your confession
It is not until after the awards ceremony and the rush of winning Best Male Group, when he’s already on the plane waiting to take off from Hong Kong and return to Seoul, that he sees the reply. It’s something like 3 in the morning and she’s awake too; in fact, she’s probably jetting off to some fan meeting at that exact moment. At least this part about her, he understands all too well.
e: so what is oppa’s answer? ㅋㅋㅋ
He looks outside his window at the dark Hong Kong night. He heard it does not snow in Hong Kong - the air is different from Korea’s winter, strangely unsettling. Of course, there is a scientific explanation for it: Hong Kong’s latitude falls south of Seoul’s. There is an explanation for everything.
s: what are you doing over the break?
The snow is falling and this café is the only one that he knows of that’s open during the holidays. Most idols spend these few precious vacation days with their families, so he somehow winds up in the same place every year, this little, empty café. Being alone is a hard-earned privilege in a profession like theirs, but ironically, the dorm feels empty when none of the members are home. He can’t stand it when the dorm is silent, when it is not filled with the crazed antics of Infinite. The seven members are not the kind of family that they always project on-camera, but they have come to a mutual understanding and respect for each other that is more than enough for him, as leader, to look back and say he is proud of all of them and how far they have come.
He is not lonely at these times, particularly - but silence, as he has come to learn, can slowly drive you insane, air thick and hot and stifling until you choke on nothing but your own thoughts. The sounds of the coffee machine and the bustling of the waitress in the back room, in comparison, is a cacophony of peace.
“Hi, sunbae-nim,” she chimes as she drops into the seat across from him. Her cheeks should be rosy from the cold wind outside but instead, they are perfectly pale like the rest of her. He thinks that this might prove his theory that she isn’t quite human at all, but then he notices the way her eyelashes are a little too long, and he frowns. The power of industrial makeup.
“I got you a coffee.” He slides the cup over to her side of the table. Black, he doesn’t add. He has no idea how he likes her coffee - if she even drinks it - but there’s something almost poetic about a cutesy girl group member drinking black coffee, and that’s what he had in mind when he ordered for her. Not that she even drinks it in the end. She thanks him with that smile of hers and leaves the cup untouched.
“It’s really cold outside, isn’t it?” A question like that shouldn’t come with a smile, but he’s not surprised that in her case, it does. It doesn’t make the situation any less uncomfortable. He doesn’t understand the purpose of being happy about something that’s not.
“You smile too fucking much.” The words tumble out on their own and he grimaces. He hadn’t meant to curse.
Her smile drops and for a moment she looks stricken before a mask of confusion forms, hiding any cracks or crevices that may have appeared at the jab. He finds that he unconsciously relaxes at the sight of a human reaction from her. “Last time,” she voices, tone once again the steely glint that had made itself known in the halls of the CJ Media building, “you said I don’t smile a lot.”
“It’s different.” He doesn’t attempt to explain. She already knows.
She props her elbow on the table and rests her chin on her hand, watching him with hooded eyes. As she leans forward, he catches her perfume - a cloyingly sweet vanilla scent. It takes all his effort not to wrinkle his nose in distaste. “Is that why you think I’m weird?”
“Part of it, yeah.”
“What’s the other part?”
His eyes trace the way her fingers are curled up against her cheek. They’re clenched too tightly to pass off as nonchalantly relaxed. “I don’t know.”
She sighs in exasperation, pulling back from the table. “Pity, I was hoping you could enlighten me.” She hits the back of her chair hard, and the chair teeters on its two back legs before safely returning to all four. Her expression does not change once as she literally goes to the edge and back.
“Do you mind if I speak informally?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer before continuing. “There’s something wrong with you that I just can’t figure out.”
“I’d love to figure it out too,” she shoots back flippantly.
“But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asks. She doesn’t reply. “Honestly, it’s annoying and I don’t want to put in the effort to try to understand.” I don’t want to try to understand someone as messed up as you, he leaves unsaid. He drops a few bills on the table, enough to cover the coffee, and leaves without the expectation that he’ll see her outside of work again. “By the way,” he calls before he steps out the door, “vanilla doesn’t suit you.”
He does not encounter her through the rest of winter and spring and he assumes she either took his words to heart, or thought fuck him and decided otherwise. Somehow, he knows it’s the latter.
He doesn’t ask Howon if he’s met her recently because he knows it’s not his business, and the one thing the members appreciate the least Is an interrogative leader. No one knows he even met with the A Pink member over the holidays, and if anything he’d like to keep it that way. He does not have the time in his schedule for a girl like her, whose issues seem to have won out over her willpower.
Until she decides otherwise. After a long night of recording, he is about to head home when his phone lights up with a notification.
e: let’s meet up.
e: bring beer.
He didn’t save her name in his phone in the end, but the texts pop up in their thread from the holidays. The messages are less of an invitation and more of a demand, with no room for excuses. He’s not exactly thrilled, but he supposes he owes her after he asked her to come to the café. He grabs a six-pack from the convenience store next to the studio, and meets her at the Han River.
“You’re late,” she tells him when he sits down next to her on the bank. Unlike last time, her makeup is scrubbed free from her face. The dark circles are set deep under her eyes and she looks like she hasn’t slept in ages.
She looks normal, for once. He wordlessly holds up the six-pack in response, cracking one open and offering it to her before she shakes her head. “The beer’s for you, I can’t drink when I’m on my meds.”
He looks at her for a long, hard moment before he shrugs and brings the can to his lips. The cheap beer is usually unappealing, but today it tastes especially bitter, like questions and regrets he cannot swallow. “So, what brings us here, two friends drinking together?” He does not stop the sarcasm from seeping into his words.
“Are we friends?” A boat goes by in the water and when the light shines on her face, he sees she is not just tired, but haggard-looking, like she has carried the weight of the world on her shoulders for much too long.
He watches the reflected light break into a dozen shapes as the water ripples, until the surface smooths out once again. “Friends like each other.”
She makes a soft noise under her breath - he thinks it might be a laugh - before humming in agreement. “I suppose we’re not friends then,” she asserts as she crosses her legs, and he notices the Adidas sandals she’s wearing on her feet, the kind that old women wear when they’re weeding their gardens. The dark blue and white-striped design clashes with her hot pink pedicure. “I don’t do well past acquaintanceship. Not my area.”
“Are you and Howon friends?” He lies down on the grass and looks up at the sky. There’s no moon tonight, just darkness, something like an omen.
“The very best.” She speaks as if carelessly, but he knows from the sound of her voice that this is one thing she believes with her entire heart. “He’s my platonic life partner, if that exists.” The tone of her voice is lilting when she says life partner, in stark contrast to the deadness he saw before, and he catches the soft wisps of music behind it, the hints of a bright melody that has not escaped her throat for a while, yearning to be free.
“The loneliness is uncomfortable,” he guesses.
“I’m not lonely,” she corrects immediately, lying down beside him. He looks over at her and she’s staring into the vast open space of nothingness, at something he himself can’t see. In that moment, with her expression sadder than ever, he thinks she could be beautiful. “It’s just nice to not be alone with yourself, sometimes. There’s a difference.” She doesn’t have to explain what she means. He already knows. “I don’t need comfort.”
This is what she says, but she doesn’t pull away when he covers her hands with his.
They don’t meet often in between all their schedules, but at least once month he finds himself buying the same cheap beer and settling next to her on the grass. It turns into somewhat of a running joke, two non-friends meeting at night while only he drinks the beer he brings, although the humor, somewhere along the line, becomes inexplicable. Not that it needs to be explained, because a joke is always best when shared between two people, but it’s like he keeps waiting and waiting for a punchline that never comes.
“We’re really fucked up,” she randomly interjects one night, so indifferently that he finds it hilarious, and the alcohol makes him laugh much longer than he should. She doesn’t join in, not even out of politeness - but when were there ever manners between them, really? - and when he finishes, they sit there content to revel in silence. Her weirdness is probably starting to rub off on him, which is maybe why he thinks he understands her a little better now.
It is winter once more when he comes back from meeting her again and to find Howon sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the lines in the wooden table, coffee mug in hand.
“Get some sleep,” he tells his member as drops his keys onto the counter. In the silence of the kitchen, he suddenly becomes very aware of the sound of the clock ticking in the living room. Tick. Tick. He has half the mind of just taking the batteries out. “We have another long day tomorrow.” Another end-of-the-year awards show, meaning another performance and hopefully, another award. By now it’s been more than 4 years and they have the drill down by muscle memory, even if they didn’t have it down by heart.
Howon smiles wanly, and the flash of similarity is striking. He puts the ceramic mug down forcefully, the loud clunk reverberating in the small space of the kitchen. There is not a sadness to his face, just a look of exhaustion, like he has seen and dealt with things that his leader can never understand. “Did she tell you we’re fighting, hyung?”
No, she didn’t. They have an unspoken agreement of sorts not to speak of Howon, and he hasn’t even mentioned to his groupmate who exactly he’s been meeting when he takes a six-pack and leaves the dorm. Her friendship with Howon and whatever she has with him are meant to exist on separate planes, not running parallel and never to intersect.
“Be careful, hyung,” Howon tells him, after he takes his silence for a negative. His eyes fly back to the table and he does not look up again. “Girls like her? They’re why storms are named after people.”
He doesn’t know what she has done to Howon, how exactly she has reduced him to this, and he feels a tinge of regret for not warning her off more harshly the first time when they met at the café. The only thing worse than a scandal breaking out is one of his members breaking down. As leader he has prepared a lot of contingencies, but he has always been able to depend on his members, especially Howon.
But because he is the leader, he is the hyung, confidence has been trained into his every action, even when unnatural. “Don’t worry,” he reassures cheerily. It sounds unconvincing, even to himself.
“Be careful,” Howon repeats again, closing his eyes in insistence. “I know Eunji. She’s a fucking mess. People like that, the worst thing they can do is destroy someone who tries to fix them.”
But spring comes and although it is the season of change, he keeps buying the same brand of alcohol and going to the same spot by the river. Today, however, she pushes the pack of beer aside and suggests a walk. “It’s a little cold, isn’t it,” she states, with no opportunity for him to disagree.
Eunji hums an old Nell song, and it’s prettier than anything he’s heard her sing on stage. “You should feature in my solo album,” he says for no particular reason, except that her voice is the kind that stretches the imagination, that soars far above the rest of them. A voice like that is wasted in a girl group that sings about first loves and crushes, he thinks. It’s much more suited for heartbreak.
“Why would I ever do that?” The accompanying laughter is carried away with the wind and she sounds deceptively small and vulnerable. He silently agrees; they are not friends, and she does not owe him anything. He doesn’t know why he brought it up in the first place. “Hey,” she tells him as she stops walking. He turns and looks to see her face, but the nearby lamp suddenly goes out and he can’t see much besides the outline of her cheekbones. “Did you ever figure out the other part?”
He searches what he can see of her face, but comes up short besides his gut instinct that something is off-balance. “No,” he replies hoarsely, because his answer is not one that can be put into words. “Do you wonder why Dispatch never catches us?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she scoffs as they resume walking. “Even if they got their hands on some pictures, we don’t really look like we’re in love, do we?”
“What does love look like, oh great actress?” She smirks at the title but does not answer until a few minutes later.
“In dramas, love is when the girl subconsciously glances at the guy when she thinks he won’t notice,” she answers definitively. He looks at her again and wonders if she has ever experienced that kind of love, but her tone is so neutral it seems impossible. He does not agree or disagree, because he is the last person to recognize or know what love is, but it sounds about right.
The next time Infinite and A Pink have overlapping promoting cycles, it’s summer and Infinite is on a winning streak with their newest single, Bad. A Pink, on the other hand, is performing poorly on the charts compared to their previous successes. He wonders if he should text her and ask how she’s doing, but their schedules are so busy that the six-pack he bought in advance sits in the fridge for longer than it probably should.
In the end, he does not have to seek her out, because A Pink makes their rounds backstage of Music Bank and greet Infinite personally in their waiting room. The entire group doesn’t look too perky, but that’s what a comeback does to you. His eyes search for hers first.
“Congratulations,” she says softly, and the smile she gives him does not stretch from ear to ear. Her eye-smile is a little less pronounced than the ones caught on screen, and he relaxes and grins back. She looks less happy and more human, which is more than he can say than last time they were in the same situation.
As she is about to leave with the rest of the group, she flashes him another smile. Then, she glances sharply at Howon and her mouth sets into the tiniest of grimaces, the type that no one notices except him, before she turns away.
Something inside of him, within seconds, shifts a little to the right and then back again, but there is a feeling that won’t settle. It does not leave when she is out the door, does not leave after they have all returned home and he stares, unseeing, at the mirror in front of him. It is a startling feeling, an old friend just old enough to be unfamiliar. Last time, he remembers, a time not so long ago, he swore he would never feel this way again.
“I’m sorry to inform you that you were not selected in this round of auditions…”
These are not the words that he hears when he is rejected. Instead, it is the quiet whisper in the back of his mind, so quiet and yet so painful, of you’re not good enough. He has risked everything for a train ticket to Seoul and now he has nothing, not even his dignity. He works three jobs every day and practices until he can’t catch his breath in his spare time, but he waits for a validation that never comes.
Every time he fails, something inside of him shifts a little to the right and back again, but everything is all wrong, and this is how he understands his heart is breaking. He doesn’t know why it’s so painful when it shouldn’t be. After all, he can’t lose something that never belonged to him in the first place.
fin.